Women and Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature

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Women & Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature

omen & Laughter in

Medieval Comic Literature

Lisa Perfetti

The University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor

Copyright 䉷 by the University of Michigan 2003 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America 嘷 ⬁ Printed on acid-free paper 2006 2005 2004 2003

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Perfetti, Lisa Renée. Women and laughter in medieval comic literature / Lisa Perfetti. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-472-11321-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Women in literature. 2. Literature, Medieval—History and criticism. I. Title. PN682.W6P47 2003 809⬘.93352042⬘0902—dc21

3. Comedy.

2003047328

I dedicate this book to the memory of my grandmother, Oma Hager Perfetti, who told some of her best jokes after the men had left the room.

Preface

likely question in the mind of some readers of this book is how anything can be known about the laughter of women who lived more than five centuries ago. Scholars interested in medieval women have long been frustrated by the difficulty of researching women’s lives given that the majority of texts we have about them are written by men. The difficulty of studying women’s laughter is compounded by the fact that what texts we do have are part of an elite written culture and can only hint at the kinds of oral interactions that would have taken place between the man and woman of the street. Given the choice between abandoning the prospect of learning more about medieval women’s laughter because of little evidence, or taking up the challenge of working with male-authored texts and accepting the speculative nature of any conclusions, I have chosen the latter, and for two principal reasons. The first is that, as a teacher of college students, I have found that one of the most effective ways to interest students in the Middle Ages is through its humor. Because relationships between men and women are so often the subject of medieval comedy, questions about what women and men would have laughed at inevitably surface in classroom discussion. This book has been shaped by these discussions, and I hope that it may provide other teachers with some avenues for responding to the probing questions of their most inquisitive students. I would add that the kinds of strategies I offer for reading women’s laughter in fictional texts are similar to those that historians and literary scholars must employ when faced with the various challenges of reconstructing the culture of the past. Cultural historians, for example, read conduct literature not just for what it tells us about medieval norms for behavior, but also for what it reveals about the kinds of behavior in which medieval people were engaging often enough

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P R E FA CE

to cause some authors to worry about censuring it. The strategy of “reading between the lines” is an imperfect one, but indispensable for any scholar attempting to understand the complexities of a culture that has left few written records. I have also taken on the challenge of writing about women’s laughter in the Middle Ages because a sense of humor has historically been one of the most important assets for women in facing numerous challenges in their private and public lives. Laughter is both a defense mechanism and a weapon of attack, essential to groups struggling to be taken seriously by the rest of society. But it is perhaps women, more than any other group, who have had the most complicated relationship with humor in Western culture. People of every religion, nationality, ethnicity, class, and occupation have at some time found themselves the butt of an offensive joke and told to lighten up because “it’s just a joke.” But it is women who have been told that their refusal to laugh at jokes made at their expense shows that they don’t have a sense of humor at all. So a woman has to assert her right not to laugh at offensive jokes but simultaneously prove that she is capable of laughter or risk being seen as a humorless spoilsport: a balancing act requiring a quick wit. This is why I recommend to many of my female friends, colleagues, and students Regina Barreca’s marvelous book They Used to Call Me Snow White . . . But I Drifted: Women’s Strategic Use of Humor. Having already written several scholarly volumes on women’s humor, Barreca offers this book as a kind of how-to manual for women from all walks of life, from high school girls to college students, to corporate executives, to housewives and mothers. The constraints of my material have meant that my book is not focused solely on women’s strategic use of laughter, for I have had to account for why male authors created the laughter of their female characters as well as to explain why men also found this literature amusing. But I do think it is important for us as scholars and teachers of the past to imagine the important place laughter held for women and to reflect on where that laughter has led. I hope that teachers and scholars of humor in other historical periods will find in the medieval heroines of my book worthy companions for the other witty women who grace their syllabuses or take center stage in their research. With this goal in mind, I have taken special care to make the medieval material accessible to nonmedievalists, providing background on various traditions that medievalists generally take for granted. I have also tried to make the study as inclusive as possible, choosing texts from diverse linguis-

Preface ix

tic traditions and a range of literary genres so that scholars in English or in language and literature departments, as well as comparatists, will find the material of interest. My choice to include Arabic material was made in great part in the belief that more comparative work needs to be done with European and Arabic traditions, which are strikingly similar in some respects and whose differences help to illuminate the particularities of each. Yet each work is chosen also for the specific perspective it offers to the study of medieval women’s laughter. The perspectives overlap from chapter to chapter, but a specific question is the focus in each text. It goes without saying that I have not exhausted the sources that could potentially enrich the findings of the book; documents from female religious houses, joke books (mostly belonging to the early modern period), and trial proceedings are all potential sources that I hope others will have the opportunity to investigate.

Acknowledgments

would like to express my gratitude to the many friends and colleagues who have assisted me in the writing of this book. Friends at Muhlenberg College have helped make the material more clear for the nonmedievalist reader: John Hibbitts, Patrice DiQuinzio, Barri Gold, Susan Leggett, Marjorie Hass, and Alec Marsh. Other friends across the country who have provided their insight are Bill Roberson, Tine Reimers, and Brenda Risch. I would also like to thank my mentors in the Ph.D. program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Duke University who helped me when this book was in its earlier dissertation phase: Don Kennedy, Ed Montgomery, Sahar Amer, Julio Cortés, and especially Jane Burns and Ann Marie Rasmussen, whose insightful perspectives on how to read for women’s laughter in male-authored texts were fundamental in the development of this project. I owe special thanks to Bonnie Krueger and Deborah Hovland for their very helpful suggestions on chapter 5, on the French farce. I am also deeply grateful to my anonymous readers at the University of Michigan Press whose suggestions have greatly benefited this book, and my editor, Collin Ganio, who supported the project throughout its journey to publication. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Charles Perfetti and Carol Perfetti, to whom I owe in great measure my sense of humor. Without their laughter this book would never have been written. Material in chapter 6 on the Thousand and One Nights appeared in a different version in Exemplaria 10, no. 2 (1998): 207– 41, and I am thankful to Pegasus Press for the permission to reprint. Parts of chapter 5 on the representation of women’s housework were presented at the Thirty-fourth International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 2000.

Contents Introduction 1

“Myn entente nys but for to pleye” The Game of Antifeminism and the Wife of Bath’s Invitation to Laughter

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126

“My wife will be mistress” The Loquacious Farce Wife and Laughter in the House

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99

“With them she had her playful game” The Performance of Gender and Genre in Ulrich von Lichtenstein’s Frauendienst

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63

“A bowrd about bed” Women’s Community of Laughter and the Woes of Marriage in Dunbar’s The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo

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29

“Such tales were not to be told among ladies” Women’s Wit and the Problem of Modesty in Boccaccio’s Decameron

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168

“No, this is not its name” Anatomy of the Joke Women Teach Men in the Thousand and One Nights

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Conclusion

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A PPENDIXES

Appendix A: Arabic Transliterations Appendix B: Arabic Text for Chapter 6

251 253

Bibliography

255

Index

275

Introduction

She never will be coy, but will speak well-considered words, soft and rather low-pitched, uttered with a pleasant face and without excessive motion of the hands or body, nor facial grimaces. She will avoid excessive or uncalled-for laughter. . . . Her humor also will be discreet.1

ith this advice, Christine de Pizan warns her women readers that too much laughter and joking are unbecoming to the well-bred medieval lady. Her advice is not an isolated warning, for it was echoed in varying forms in an extensive body of conduct literature written (most often by men) in French, Occitan, English, Italian, German, Scots, and Arabic from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries. Despite this wealth of texts discouraging laughter, a rich body of medieval literature represents women laughing and joking exuberantly and openly. The unruly laughter of these heroines invites us to consider women’s relationship to humor in the Middle Ages. What made medieval women laugh? What kinds of jokes did they tell? What functions did their laughter serve? How was their laughter portrayed by the largely male authors of medieval comic texts, and to what end? In the past two decades, feminist approaches to literary and cultural studies have recognized the value of studying women’s relationship to 1. The Treasury of the City of Ladies, 92. The original text reads: “Prudence et Sobrece apprendront a la dame a avoir parler ordonné et sage eloquence, non pas mignote mais rassise, coye et assez basse, a beaulz traiz, sans faire mouvemens des mains, du corps, ne grimaces du visage; la gardera de trop rire, et non sans cause. . . . et en ses joyeusetéz lui commandera a garder toute mesure et honnesteté” (Livre des Trois Vertus, 45). Christine later reiterates these warnings in her model letter of how a governess should counsel her former mistress should she disregard her wise teachings after leaving her care (140; 179).

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humor. Several studies on women and laughter have been written on literature from the Renaissance to the present, and a series has been devoted to the study of humor and gender.2 This pairing of laughter and feminism has been a recent one in academe, since for centuries studies of humor took a distinctly masculine perspective, and in the popular imagination (of men, at least), women simply had no sense of humor.3 Feminists now point out that the humorless woman is a figure created by men when women have refused to laugh at jokes made at their expense. By asking what women find amusing and what kinds of jokes they tell, we learn much about how they negotiate the limitations they face in a culture largely dominated by men. By examining jokes that men make about women, we discover attitudes toward the place of women in that culture. Because we have scant evidence of texts written by medieval women, for the Middle Ages it has of course been easier to investigate the latter question, and thus little work has been undertaken to discover how humor might have been used and enjoyed by medieval women.4 It has in fact generally been assumed that medieval comic literature as a whole was hostile to women, the label antifeminist or misogynous being affixed to entire genres such as the fabliaux. Much comic literature of the Middle Ages unquestionably does reaffirm misogyny, which is scarcely surprising since many works of fiction meant to amuse were authored by the univer2. See the four volumes in the series published by Gordon and Breach, Studies in Humor and Gender, particularly the first, Gail Finney’s collection Look Who’s Laughing (1994). On American women’s humor, see Walker, A Very Serious Thing (1988) and the collections by Barreca, Last Laughs, They Used to Call Me Snow White but I Drifted, and New Perspectives on Women and Comedy (1988, 1991, 1992) and Sochen, Women’s Comic Visions (1991). On British literature, see Little, Comedy and the Woman Writer (1983); Carlson, Women and Comedy (1991); Barreca, Untamed and Unabashed (1994); and Gray, Women and Laughter (1994). On Shakespeare, see Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men (1982). On Restoration comedy, see Gill, Interpreting Ladies (1994). Also see Rowe, The Unruly Woman (1994), which covers a wide range of examples from literature, television, and cinema. 3. For a discussion of the masculine perspective on humor, see June Sochen’s introduction to Women’s Comic Visions. It could be added that feminism itself has been perceived as humorless (and laughable). One common joke runs, “How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Answer: That’s not funny!” Along similar lines, a cartoon shows a man in a bookstore requesting assistance from the female employee. She yells, “What do you mean ‘humor section’? This is a feminist bookstore!” 4. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, for example, note that the voices of women in comic literature are “faked” (A Cultural History of Humour from Antiquity to the Present Day, 5).

Introduction 3

sity clerks who inherited and disseminated a tradition of antifeminist texts extending back to the church fathers and classical authors such as Ovid. These clerks compiled collections of misogynous miscellany, often containing humorous exempla, which were then used by preachers in their sermons to their congregations.5 Literature of entertainment was thus part of a clerical culture in which satirizing women was part of a man’s intellectual training. When we look closely at these male-authored texts, however, we find that clichés about woman’s talkativeness, excessive libido, and deceitfulness are played with, reversed to charge men with the same faults, or reconfigured in ways that make trouble with an easy antifeminist essentialism. It is my contention that reading between the lines of the laughter of these fictional women not only allows us to discover the uses male authors made of their unruly heroines; it also alerts us to the possible ways that debates about feminine and masculine reflected and elicited the responses of medieval women. Furthermore, it helps us to imagine women’s laughter, in particular, as part of this larger discussion. Because actual instances of laughter or joking (whether women’s or men’s) are rare in the historical record, the nature of this exploration is of course speculative. What I offer in this book is a collection of readings that take a second look at comic texts from a range of genres, framing them within discussions of medieval and contemporary views of humor that draw from anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and medicine. Each text features a female character who laughs and makes jokes about men or uses her wit to joust verbally with men. Laughter is thus a term I use to encompass both the appreciation and the making of humor. The theoretical ground to be covered before undertaking readings of individual texts is considerable. First, I explore medieval attitudes toward women’s laughter in medical and philosophical treatises and religious and didactic literature. I then discuss the figure of the unruly “woman on top” in medieval literature in the context of models that theorize misrule in life and literature. Finally, I outline my approach to reading for women’s laughter in literary texts, tracing the multiple layers of interpretation made possible by the complex interplay between the author/narrator, character, and audience. 5. For example, see the exempla in Berlioz, Le Rire du prédicateur. Exempla on women, both negative and positive, are found in pp. 119– 41.

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Woman’s Laughing Body Although references to laughter and joking can commonly be found embedded in a variety of texts in the Middle Ages, it was rarely a topic given extensive treatment by itself. In about 1560, Laurent Joubert, the first European to write a full treatise on the subject, prefaced his own study by noting, “The subject of laughter is so vast and deep that few philosophers have attempted it, and none has won the prize of treating it properly.”6 Such neglect may have been due to an uneasiness, if not outright hostility, concerning levity within the clerical milieu that produced most texts of the Middle Ages. Monastic rules often forbade laughter because it was thought to show pride or to interfere with prayerful contemplation; some writers also claimed that because Jesus was never known to laugh, it should be avoided. Other writers, however, recognized the futility of trying to ban that uniquely human proclivity, even arguing that laughter could be useful, giving the mind renewed energy to return to more serious matters or making didactic messages more palatable.7 Medieval thinkers also distinguished between good laughter, which was to be found in the joy one takes in God or his works, and bad laughter, the ignorant and derisive laughter in which one abandons proper Christian humility.8 Where medieval thinkers most often agreed was that one should laugh in moderation, reflecting the broader concern with mesura, the avoiding of excess.9 Both men and women were urged to be moderate in their behavior, but it was women in particular who were thought to be prone to excess, for they were believed to be subject to the sway of their unruly bodily passions, 6. Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, 11. Joubert translated his Latin version into French in 1579. 7. On these mixed attitudes within the church and their effect on comic authors, see Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages; and Suchomski, “Delectatio” und “Utilitas.” 8. On the distinction between good and bad laughter, see Le Goff, “Laughter in the Middle Ages.” Distinctions were also made in a nonreligious context. According to the widely known thirteenth-century Mensa Philosophica, Macrobius discouraged raillery that is insulting, but noted that discreet (presumably affectionate) raillery was acceptable (113– 14). 9. See, for example, Clement of Alexandria, Paedogogia, bk. 2, chap. 5, p. 135; John of Salisbury, Policraticus, bk. 1, 38. In the Arab world, laughter was less problematic because of Muhammad’s reputation for having a fine wit, as opposed to the unlaughing Christ often mentioned by European clergy, but Arab writers, too, cautioned against excessive jesting. See Kishtainy, Arab Political Humor, 37; and the medieval treatise by al-T¯ıfa¯ch¯ı, Les Délices des coeurs, 19.

Introduction 5

and thus less able to control their behavior. Women were in fact often associated with the body itself, whereas men represented the rational head that would govern the irrational female body, furthermore considered defective because excessively moist and lacking the heat of the male.10 Such views of woman’s biological otherness had implications for how her laughter was viewed within medieval culture, for laughter was thought to be fundamentally attached to the operations of the body, specifically its balance of the four humors (hence the two associated meanings of the word humor). According to medical thinkers like Galen, whereas black bile was associated with melancholy, the blood was associated with joy. The Arab physicians Ibn al-Matran and Ishaq Ibn Umran located laughter in the spleen or liver because these organs purified the blood, and good blood caused joy. Pliny, later followed by Isidore of Seville, also cited this purifying function to identify the spleen as the seat of laughter. Joubert, a physician at the famed Ecole de Médecine in Montpellier (where Fran¸cois Rabelais studied), also believed that laughter was more common in those with good blood, leading him to conclude that the seat of laughter was the heart, and also that women (with their abundance of moist blood) were more prone to laughter than men: “women generally laugh more often and more easily than men, and fat people more than skinny people. For fat people and women engender much good blood, from which comes much oil, if one takes care of oneself, in peace and tranquility of mind.”11 A woman’s body also predisposes her to laughter because her fluids are subject to constant shifting. Joubert argues that both tears and laughter are more common in women, children, and fat people, but less likely in men, who are wiser: “Now the soft, such as women and children, are not only less conscious and less wise, but are also easily moved by every occasion, be it sad or happy.”12 Joubert’s contrast of emotionally unstable women (who 10. Medical treatises on reproduction, following Aristotle, viewed the female as the passive matter upon which the male impressed the active form or spirit. On the influence of Aristotle on medieval theories of conception, see Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages, 24– 26. 11. Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, 104– 5. It is interesting to note that while Joubert focuses on moisture and softness when discussing women’s likelihood to laugh, he emphasizes heat when explaining why children (more hot because of their youth) are more likely to laugh than adults, whose heat has been depleted. Woman’s greater coldness does not appear to override her abundant moisture and softness. 12. Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, 103. The French original reads, “Or les mous, comme fames & anfans, ne sont pas seulemant peu aisés & moins sages, ains aussi sont emeus fort aisement de toute occasion, soit elle triste, ou joyeuse” (258).

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presumably laugh and cry more often) with wise men emphasizes the emotional, irrational character of women, since their emotions, governed by the humors, shift constantly. La Contenance des Fames, a thirteenth-century didactic poem, satirizes woman’s laughter as a symptom of her shifting moods: “Now sings, now thinks, now laughs, now cries; / Her mood will change, just blink your eyes!”13 This notion of mutability was also connected to the belief, espoused by some medical writers, that a woman’s uterus could wander around the body, which caused her to be fickle and moody.14 Etymologically, extreme or excessive laughter is connected to the womb, the word hysterical (as in hysterical laughter) deriving from the Greek hyster (womb). Medieval medicine links woman’s laughter to her unstable body, whose excessive, shifting fluids and wandering uterus make her less able to control any inappropriate impulse to laugh. The condemnation of laughter in monastic circles in fact stems partly from the concern that it made the body a more vulnerable doorway to sin. The good Christian should use the filters of the eyes, ears, and mouth to prevent any evil from entering the body. Laughter interfered with these “barriers,” and was therefore to be avoided.15 It is not surprising that women, allegedly less able to control their bodies, were associated with the sinful implications of laughter. The laughing person whose bodily defenses are weak is furthermore associated with foolishness and inferior intellectual ability. Joubert notes that a person laughs if his brain, the seat of reason, consents to it by allowing it as proper or appropriate. But the brute emotion coming from the heart (the seat of laughter) is often too rebellious to obey reason. This is connected to Joubert’s belief that men, particularly those who study a lot, are less likely to laugh than women because study depletes the blood, a notion that implicitly allies women with foolishness (and scholars with melancholy!).16 Joubert’s contemporary, Erasmus, in his Praise of Folly, embodied the voice of folly in a woman, and paintings and sculptures in 13. Fiero, Pfeffer, and Allain, Three Medieval Views of Women: “Or chante, or pense, or rit, or pleure; / Moult mue son cuer en pou de heure!” (ll. 109– 10). See also Chaucer, who describes fickle Lady Fortune in the Book of the Duchess, “She ys fals, and ever laughynge / With oon eye, and that other wepynge” (ll. 631– 32). 14. See, for example, Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, 14– 15. 15. Le Goff, “Laughter in the Middle Ages,” 45– 46. See also the discussion of laughter as a lack of control over the body in Verberckmoes, Laughter, Jestbooks, and Society in the Spanish Netherlands, 2– 5 and elsewhere. 16. Verberckmoes, Laughter, Jestbooks, and Society, 60– 61, notes that melancholy becomes a “trendy” disease in the sixteenth century when it is discovered that study depletes the warmth and moisture of the body.

Introduction 7

the Middle Ages represent wise virgins as smiling whereas the foolish ones snigger.17 Centuries earlier, Clement of Alexandria warned against joking or laughing with women, for “Laughter can easily give rise to misunderstandings, particularly among boys and women.”18 All three authors link women to children because of their presumed inferior rational faculties. At the same time, woman’s foolish laughter can endear her to men. In the Praise of Folly, woman is described as “a stupid animal, God wot, and a giddy one, yet funny and sweet—so that in domestic familiarity her folly [stulticia] might leaven the lumpishness [tristiciam] of the male temperament.”19 Joubert, too, invokes the pleasure that women’s laughter offers men. In dedicating his treatise to his female patron, Marguerite de Navarre, he explains that laughter is most apparent in the face. Therefore, it is in women, whose faces are more beautiful than men’s, that laughter is more fitting. A wife’s beautiful laughing face is a particular boon to her husband, “who, finding recreation in her company and acquaintance, diminishes and erases with it the injuries received in his toils and labors, gently relaxing the tension of his mind. This is why God created woman, the companion of man, prettier, lovelier, placing in her the careful desire to preserve her beauty so as to be more desirable with it.”20 Like Erasmus, Joubert sees woman’s laughing disposition as a source of pleasure to men. Whereas he toils, engaged in serious affairs, she is there to refresh him, restoring him for his labors, a function that echoes the justifications for laughter spelled out in medieval recreative theories. A woman’s subtle humor, in harmony with her beauty, make her desirably feminine, like Chaucer’s Duchess, who can “laughe and pleye so womanly.”21 That such humor is coded positively when oriented toward the pleasure of men is suggested by the conduct manuals that urge women to adapt themselves to the disposition of their husbands, to be gay when he is gay and 17. Le Goff, “Laughter in the Middle Ages,” 49. 18. Clement of Alexandria, Paedogogia, bk. 2, chap. 5, p. 136. 19. Erasmus, In Praise of Folly, 21. The original reads: “nempe vti mulierem adiungeret, animal videlicet stultum quidem illud atque ineptum, verum ridiculum et suaue, quo conuictu domestico virilis ingenii tristiciam sua stulticia condiret atque edulcaret” (ll. 331– 34). It should be noted that although Erasmus is likely echoing popular notions of women’s natural silliness, his use of Dame Folly is positively charged, an example of “carnival laughter” cited by Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 14. 20. Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, 9. Christine de Pizan also talks about the importance of a cheerful countenance because a husband works all day long (Treasury, 187). 21. Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess, l. 850.

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sad when he is sad.22 Women’s laughter is welcomed by men if it enhances the pleasure she gives him, but discouraged if it diminishes such pleasure, an implication contained in Joubert’s caution to women to avoid excessive laughter lest she disfigure the naturally feminine beauty of her pleasing face with “such opening of the mouth, from which come many wrinkles in the face.”23 Joubert’s concern over the disfiguring effect of laughter is common to many discussions of women in medieval texts. Centuries before Joubert, Jean de Meun’s old bawd, la Vieille, proclaims that the woman who wants to attract suitors should laugh with her mouth closed: A woman ne’er should laugh with open mouth; Her lips must cover and conceal her teeth; For if too wide a gulf appears, it looks As though her face were slit—it’s no fair sight— And if she have not even, well-shaped teeth, But ugly, crooked ones, she’ll be less prized Should she let them appear in laugh or smile.24 22. Examples of such conduct literature include Garin lo Brun’s Ensenhamen, the anonymous Dodici avvertimenti, and Anne of France’s “enseignements” to her daughter, synopses of which may be found in Hentsch, De la littérature didactique du moyen aˆ ge s’adressant spécialement aux femmes. The notion also makes its way into popular literature, such as the farce where a cobbler brags of the malleability of his new wife, who cries when he cries, and laughs when he does: “Si je vueil plourer, elle pleure, / Rire et plourer tout a` une heure, / Je fais d’elle ce que je veulx” (Cohen, Recueil de farces fran¸caises inédites du XVe siècle, XXXIII, vv. 114– 16). 23. Treatise on Laughter, 55. The French reads, “De ce discours nous pouvons antandre, pourquoy on avertit les jeunes filhes, de ne rire follatremant, les menassant qu’elles an seront plutot vielhes. C’est pour autant que le Ris dissolute & trop continué, cause une laide mine de telle ouverture de bouche, d’où se sont mains plis au visage” (116). 24. The Romance of the Rose, 279. The original text of Le roman de la rose reads: Fame doit rire a bouche close Car ce n’est mie bele chose Quant el rit a goule estendue, Trop semble estre large et fendue. Et s’el n’a denz bien ordenés Mes [tres] laiz et sans ordre nés, Se les moustroit par sa risee Mains en porroit estre prisee. (vv. 13359– 66) The word rire could suggest either laughing or smiling since the distinction between the two only came about gradually in the later Middle Ages with the increasing use of the specific word sourire for smiling (Ménard, Le Rire et le sourire dans le roman courtois en France au Moyen ˆ Age, 31).

Introduction 9

Jean de Meun, like Joubert, brings attention specifically to the unseemly opening of the mouth (“Trop semble estre large et fendue”).25 As E. Jane Burns has suggested, La Vieille’s concern about the “slit” created when women open their lips too widely in laughter implicitly relates to the association made in the Middle Ages between the woman’s facial and genital mouths. Noting that the Old French fendue (split or broken open) is related to the noun, fendace, the term used to refer to female genitalia, Burns says, “La Vieille suggests pointedly that to laugh with a gaping mouth means in some sense to split apart the lower body and open the lower, genital mouth as well. Neither gesture becomes the elegantly attired and properly attractive medieval lady.”26 This linking of the two female orifices is commonly found in French fabliaux and farces, perhaps nowhere dramatized so succinctly as in the fabliau of the “Knight who could make cunts talk.”27 The association is also evident in the fact that the Old French langue could refer both to the clitoris and the tongue, a double entendre exploited by a medieval joke that asks why women talk more than men. The answer: they have two tongues.28 This confounding of facial and genital mouths, a likely offshoot of the ancient IndoEuropean motif of the vagina dentata, is also found in Arab texts of the period, where men are warned that a woman with a large mouth also has a large vagina, and should therefore be avoided.29 Controlling women’s laughter is thus related to the control of their sexuality, which helps to explain why in many medieval conduct manuals advice to women not to laugh with their mouths wide open is found alongside instructions to restrict their bodily movements, to keep their legs 25. Jean de Meun’s source is Ovid’s Ars amatoria, bk. 3, ll. 281– 90. Later, in around 1280, the anonymous Clef d’amors, a loose translation of Ovid, goes so far as to instruct women who have a horrible laugh to pretend not to be amused even when everyone else is laughing (ll. 2525– 52). Another imitation of Ovid is Francesco da Barberino (1264– 1348), Del Reggimento e costume di Donna (synopsis in Hentsch, De la littérature didactique, 104– 19). 26. Burns, Bodytalk, 204. 27. “Le Chevalier qui fist les cons parler,” Noomen and Van den Boogaard, Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux, 3:158. 28. “Demande: Pourquoy est ce que les femmes parlent plus que les hommes? Response: ˆ Pource qu’elles ont deulx langues” (Roy, Devinettes fran¸caises du Moyen Age, no. 568, p. 171). Roy explains the double entendre in a note. 29. A¨ıt Sabbah, La Femme dans l’inconscient musulman, 48. See al-Nafza¯w¯ı’s Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight, which describes God’s giving woman’s pudenda a mouth, tongue, and lips (3).

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closed. Because a woman’s value resided above all in her chastity, the central, albeit not exclusive, concern of conduct literature for women was the control of the body. Philippe of Navarre observed that whereas men must demonstrate that they are courtly, generous, courageous, and wise, a woman’s sole object of concern was to be chaste.30 Contemporary anthropological studies echo the association between sexual modesty and restraint in laughter, for in a variety of different cultures, spanning South America, Greece, India, and the Middle East, “norms of modesty cause women who laugh freely and openly in public to be viewed as loose, sexually promiscuous, and lacking in self-discipline.”31 Drawing on these studies, Regina Barreca has shown how this simultaneous restriction of sexuality and laughter continues to operate in the portrayal of women in American culture as well, creating a good girl/bad girl dichotomy. Bad girls tell jokes, laugh loudly, and don’t cross their legs. Good girls smile appreciatively at the jokes of their boyfriends or husbands, but they do not tell jokes of their own. They keep their mouths—and their legs—discreetly closed.32 The fear that exuberant laughter and joking might compromise a young woman’s reputation was particularly keen among the nobility. Anne of France, the daughter of King Louis XI, advised her daughter upon her marriage: Avoid making silly faces and turning your head here and there, no matter how private a place where you are. And don’t look around loosely or precociously. Do not laugh too much, regardless of the reason, for it is very unbefitting to noble girls in particular, who must always behave more seriously, gracefully and with more dignity than others. You also shouldn’t speak too much or stridently like many foolish coquettes. . . . For because of this they are often judged foolish and unchaste; one philosopher says that you can ascertain a woman’s chastity based on her eyes and her tongue. . . . Also refrain from running, jumping, and frolicking.33 30. Philippe de Navarre, Les quatre aˆ ges de l’homme, sec. 31, p. 20. Philippe’s specific term is “ele est prode fame de son cors.” 31. Apte, Humor and Laughter, 75. 32. Barreca, Snow White, 6. 33. “[V]ous gardez, quelque privaulté ou` vous soiez, de faire nulles lourdes contenances, tant de branler ou virer la teste ç a` ne là, comme d’avoir les yeulx agus, légiers, ne espars. Aussi de beaucop ne trop rire, quelque cause qu’il y ait; car il est très mal séant, mesmement a` filles

Introduction 11

It is worth noting that women, since they are frequently the ones responsible for educating their daughters or other women in their care, are often as conservative as men in discouraging young women from laughter, particularly in the case of the upper classes.34 Women such as Christine and Anne understand that both class and gender place constraints upon their daughters’ behavior, and that failure to conform to such expectations might result in a lack of desirable offers of marriage. Such a danger is clearly dramatized in the Knight of the Tour Landry’s book of counsel to his daughters (ca. 1371), in which he recounts how in his youth he flirted with a woman who responded to his joking with witticisms of her own. This woman of loose behavior (“très grant legière manière”) was later criticized for it, and he was therefore glad that he had not pursued his acquaintance with her. The message of this anecdote is made clear in the knight’s caution to his daughters that they should “be good-mannered, humble, and solid in behavior and manners, not too chatty, and respond courteously and not be too hard to rein in nor unmanageable, and not look around in a loose way.”35 The knight’s desire that his daughters not be “too hard to rein in” also links laughter to disobedience, and the frequent instructions to girls and young women not to laugh would seem to indicate that the practice existed enough among young medieval women to need some reining in. An anecdote told by the elderly Parisian author of the Ménagier de Paris (1394) to his young wife illustrates this very point. In a section on wifely obedience, he recounts a story in which men wager with each other that whichever of them could get his wife to count to three without arguing, nobles, lesquelles, en toutes choses, doivent avoir manières plus pesantes, doulces, et asseurées que les autres; de parler aussi beaucop, n’avoir langaige trop afilé comme plusieurs folles coquardes. . . . Car, a` ce, sont elles souvent jugées folles et non castes de leur corps; et dit un philosophe, que aux yeulx et a` la langue est e´ vidamment congneue la chasteté d’une femme. . . . Gardez vous aussi de courir ne saillir, d’aucun pincer ne bouter” (Les Enseignements d’Anne de France a` sa fille Suzanne, 43– 45). Translation is mine. 34. The distinction between the “vulgar” amusement of the uneducated versus the more refined amusement of the educated extends as far back as Aristotle. See Bremmer, “Jokes, Jokers, and Jokebooks in Ancient Greek Culture,” 30. On the increasing association of vulgar humor with lower classes in the sixteenth century, see Verberckmoes, who looks at the Dutch pictorial tradition that depicts those considered uncivilized, such as Africans, as laughing (Laughter, Jestbooks, and Society, 41– 45 and 58– 79). 35. “[E]stre de doulces manières, humbles et fermes d’estat et de manières, poy emparlées, et respondre courtoisement et n’estre pas trop enresnées, ne surseillies, ne regarder trop legierement” (Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry, 29). Translation is my own.

12


contradicting, or mocking would win dinner. Those whose wives make sarcastic retorts lose the bet.36 Historically, such derisive laughter has been censured in women because it has been viewed as incompatible with the passivity expected of them. Even when jokes are made at their expense, girls are urged to turn the other cheek, to shrug it off with a smile, whereas boys have been expected to render tit for tat.37 It is precisely laughter’s potential to resist the construction of women as passive that has led some feminists to embrace it. Perhaps the most notable example is Hélène Cixous, who recounts a tale in which a king seeks to test the expertise of his general by challenging him to turn his 180 wives into good soldiers. The women, rather than obeying the general, continue laughing until the general threatens to cut off their heads. Cixous comments, “It’s a question of submitting feminine disorder, its laughter, its inability to take the drumbeats seriously, to the threat of decapitation.”38 The women’s disorder is signaled not by a verbal response, but by their laughter, as though to refuse to speak the men’s language. Threatened with beheading, the women are forced to abandon their laughter and brought under the general’s control.

The Multivalent Figure of the “Woman on Top” That the laughter of the unruly woman of medieval literature is so often not reined in is a testament to the complexity of this highly charged figure, which has generated considerable debate among scholars. Is the woman who bosses her husband, tricks him, and manages to stay “on top” a subversive invitation to destabilize the rule of men over women sanctioned by medieval church writing? Or does the figure in fact function conservatively as a warning to men not to let their wives get the better of them? 36. Ménagier de Paris, 81. 37. The aggression in laughter has commonly been explained as a vestige of the primitive instinct to bare teeth when faced with enemies. See the introduction by Keith-Spiegel to The Psychology of Humor, ed. Goldstein and McGhee, 5– 6. The link between laughter and aggression sheds light on Verberckmoes’s observation that in the sixteenth century, whereas men were urged to reply when someone made a joke at their expense, women were advised only to smile (Laughter, Jestbooks, and Society, 79). 38. Cixous, “Castration and Decapitation,” 43. The message that feminists should use their own laughter to assert themselves when faced with misogynistic remarks is shared by many contemporary studies on women’s humor. See Rowe, Unruly Woman, 11– 12; Barreca, Snow White, 37.

Introduction 13

This debate on the “woman on top” topos is nowhere more evident than in the scholarship on the short rhymed comic tales called fabliaux. Early scholars of the genre, who tended to see the fabliaux as realistic reflections of everyday urban life, asserted that the tales reflected medieval society’s hatred of women.39 Scholars now recognize the danger of viewing fabliaux as documents describing actual social conditions in the Middle Ages, but there is nonetheless significant disagreement as to what such literary portrayals of feminine misrule might mean. While some argue that fabliaux are meant to condemn women because they portray them as deceitful, libidinous, and quarrelsome, others assert that fabliaux show admiration for the woman on top, who impresses us with her ingenuity, making the man, usually her husband, look ridiculous.40 This debate is part of the much larger discussion concerning the function of images of misrule, known in literary studies primarily through Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnival. Bakhtin argued that in a remote preclass society comic and serious were accorded equal status, but with an emerging class consciousness, comic forms were suppressed by the official sphere of feudal hierarchy so that laughter became an integral part of the “unofficial” sphere of folk culture.41 This folk culture of laughter could be seen in the ritual festivals of inversion during the carnival celebrations of Mardi Gras or the feast of fools associated with the Church, verbal compositions and spectacles such as parodic poems and mystery plays, and “marketplace speech.” Bakhtin imagined a medieval society divided in two: a solemn “official” culture represented by church and state and a merry popular culture of the oppressed. The official sphere sanctioned ritual spectacles of misrule only in order to give it temporary vent lest it get out of hand and threaten social stability. Bakhtin’s loose definition of folk humor, which includes everything from fabliaux to mystery plays to parodies of liturgy, leads him to some inconsistencies in his claim about who is served by such laughter. He consistently allies laughter with liberation and freedom, but this liberation is alternately described as a victory over the authoritarianism of the ruling class and as a more cosmic defeat of the “mystic terror of 39. Bédier, Les Fabliaux, 319– 25. See also Neff ’s categories of misogynous topoi in La Satire des femmes dans la poésie lyrique fran¸caise du Moyen Age. 40. For a good illustration of the positions in this debate, see Johnson, “Women on Top”; and Lacy, “Fabliau Women” or his later Reading Fabliaux. 41. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. Although Bakhtin discusses the history of laughter’s evolution repeatedly throughout his study, it is most concisely elaborated at pp. 73– 97.

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God,” “the awe inspired by the forces of nature,” and “death and punishment after death” (90– 91). It would seem that the “hierarchs and learned theologians” of the official sphere can be brought down a peg by the laughter of those over whom they have power, but that they share with the people the kind of laughter that liberates from greater cosmic forces.42 Although Bakhtin clearly asserts that carnival laughter is temporary and limited, the implications of this temporary license are not clear. On the one hand, he acknowledges that “[t]he consciousness of freedom could be only limited and utopian,” (95; emphasis added) but on the other, argues that “[t]he very brevity of this freedom increased its fantastic nature and utopian radicalism” (89). Does Bakhtin mean by radicalism that carnival laughter can effect change in the social fabric? Or, because it is utopian, is the desire for such change merely an unfulfilled wish, limited to the “fantastic” realm of the imagination? Anthropologists, in their studies of rituals of reversal in a variety of cultures, have tried to answer such questions. Victor Turner, for example, analyzed rituals of status reversal in Africa and India, and explained their function as the easing of tensions between different social groups in order to preserve harmony for the whole community.43 The anthropologist Max Gluckman in fact asserted that such rituals are effective only in societies that have a stable and unchallenged social order, not in societies that are prone to shifts in status. According to his reading, although distinctions in status are played with a few times a year and allowed to be released in a sort of “steam-valve,” ultimately everyone accepts and complies with these distinctions.44 As French clerics explained in 1444 in their defense of the practice of carnival: “We do these things in jest and not in earnest, as the ancient custom is, so that once a year the foolishness innate in us can come out and evaporate. Don’t wine skins and barrels burst very often if the air-hole is not opened from time to time? We too are old barrels.”45 Images of status reversal in medieval culture would thus be likened to a kind of release valve, allowing for a temporary vent of the pressures created by status boundaries. The implication is that women are allowed to rule in images of 42. On the laughter of high-status groups, see pp. 13, 82– 83, and 95. As Martha Bayless has noted, Bakhtin also underestimated the function of humor, specifically parody, in reaffirming religious values (Parody in the Middle Ages, 196– 208). 43. Turner, The Ritual Process, particularly the chapter on “Liminality and Communitas.” 44. Gluckman, Custom and Conflict in Africa, esp. 130. 45. Quoted in Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 202.

Introduction 15

reversal because in daily life they are expected to stay in their place. Moreover, the laughter produced by the image of a woman beating her husband or cuckolding him before his very eyes is often directed at the husband, who has received his due by letting her violate the natural order. Laughter is thus, in Bergson’s terms, a correction of aberrant behavior: although it is the man who is ridiculed, the figure of the unruly woman is used to reassert social norms.46 Others, however, have asserted that rituals of misrule could destabilize the status quo. Anthropologists have observed, for example, that misrule during specific rituals is often done by those members of a society who are the most unruly throughout the year.47 Moreover, unruliness is not confined to specific, sanctioned rituals. The historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, in his study of one carnival festival in 1580, has shown how carnival rituals could overflow out of the actual ritual period and lead to social change.48 The historian Natalie Davis shares Le Roy Ladurie’s view of the potential for social resistance in carnival rituals, applying it specifically to the topos of the woman on top. In her discussion of carnival rites in which husbands said to be beaten by their wives were paraded through the streets and mocked, she argues that although the message was sent that henpecked husbands would be punished by the community through ridicule, a possible side effect created by the ritual was that it “invited the unruly woman to keep up the fight.”49 In distinguishing between intent and effect, Davis’s explanation suggests how men and women alike could take pleasure from the image.50 Given the extensive debate on images of misrule, it would seem that they can be either subversive or conservative depending on the specific context in which they are used. Yet examining images of misrule enables us to locate and understand the crucial dividing lines or “hot spots” of a 46. Bergson, Le Rire: “Le rire est, avant tout, une correction. Fait pour humilier, il doit donner a` la personne qui en est objet une impression pénible” (150). On the ridicule of male figures as it relates to “antifeminism,” see Goldberg, “Sexual Humor in Misogynist Medieval Exempla.” 47. See the essays in the volume edited by Barbara A. Babcock, The Reversible World. 48. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans, 191. 49. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 140. 50. The notion of mixed pleasures created by the unruly woman topos has also been applied to the visual arts. Diane H. Russell postulates that prints such as Phyllis Riding Aristotle (ca. 1500) may have been interpreted differently by each gender (Eva/Ave, 150). See also Smith, The Power of Women.

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culture. In his study of Balinese cockfighting, Clifford Geertz argued against Gluckman’s “functionalist” explanation of images of reversal serving to bolster existing hierarchies, asserting instead that they are a form of “deep play” that serves as “a metasocial commentary upon the whole matter of assorting human beings into fixed hierarchical ranks and then organizing the major part of collective existence around that assortment. Its function, if you want to call it that, is interpretive: it is a Balinese reading of Balinese experience; a story they tell themselves about themselves.”51 I find this formulation useful, for it enables us to get around the impasse relating to the subversive versus conservative debate: whether or not the woman on top subverts male/female hierarchies, the laughter generated by her unruliness does bring attention to the “story medieval people tell themselves about themselves.” This in fact appears to be Kathryn Gravdal’s operating assumption in her work on how medieval parody plays out shifting paradigms of class: “Medieval culture expresses and defines itself in these comic texts. In literary parody, medieval society stages its own tensions, rehearses its own dilemmas, and plays with its own worst fears.”52 The staging of their own tensions may have been pleasurable to medieval audiences because it enabled them to, in the words of one anthropologist, “abstract and comprehend cultural crises by casting them in the form of ludic antitheses.”53 The pleasure comes not so much from promoting or contesting existing hierarchies as it does from being able to stand back at a distance and see how they operate. In this detachment, the seemingly pervasive and controlling social forms are shown to be mechanisms that could be otherwise. This seems to be the point of Bakhtin’s statement that carnival laughter, which is always ambivalent, “frees human consciousness, thought, and imagination for new potentialities.”54 Even Bergson, who 51. Geertz, “Deep Play,” 26. 52. Gravdal, Vilain et Courtois, 146. 53. Sutton-Smith, “Play as Adaptive Potentiation.” See also Sutton-Smith’s later discussion of how this explanation is a way to reconcile competing theories of play as prophylactic (allowing for irreverent reversals of social norms) and preparatory (leading to integration into socially sanctioned forms of behavior): “Towards an Anthropology of Play,” 232– 37. The anthropologist Mary Douglas also sees the joke as a social activity that frees the mind for imagining other social relations. She notes that while it is a temporary attack on classification and hierarchy, it nonetheless “implies that anything is possible” (“Jokes,” 107– 8). Similarly, Robert Williams calls the comic mode a zone of “exploration of values, judgments, and emotions” (Comic Practice/Comic Response, 80– 83). 54. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 49.

Introduction 17

emphasizes the conservative function of laughter, notes that it often has more to do with human flexibility, the ingenuity to adapt to circumstances, than with the enforcement of prevailing values.55 A clever woman who takes advantage of circumstances to get the best of her dull-witted husband earns our appreciative laughter, whereas her husband receives only our scorn. Although we cannot recover the actual responses of medieval people to comic rituals or texts, we can view the comic moment as a metasocial indicator pointing to the codes that mark the alternating flow between subversion and compliance. We can then ask how women’s laughter shows the forces at work in the story that medieval people tell themselves about themselves, a story that alternately contests and enforces social and cultural boundaries. That so much medieval comic literature—fabliaux, farce, debate poetry, novella—centers on the battle between the sexes suggests that gender was a central part of the tensions, dilemmas, and worst fears of medieval culture. The female characters who challenge the subordination of women are not, of course, a mirror reflection of actual women, but neither do they have no relation to the construction of gendered identities of people in the Middle Ages. Although medieval writers asserted that there was a biological basis for gender difference, it was also thought that individuals, through self discipline, could shape what nature had given them; through prayer and proper behavior, they could correct deficiencies inherited from nature.56 Beginning with the thirteenth century, courtesy manuals and other didactic works obsessively rehearsed different kinds of behavior for men and women, which suggests a consciousness that male and female were not automatically given in nature, but must be demonstrated or performed by the individual.57 In comic texts, laughter highlights the performance of masculine and feminine as though to distance, through play, the pressures such performances place on men and women alike. This preoccupation with the performances of male and female characters makes sense in light of Judith Butler’s influential theory of gender as 55. Bergson, Le Rire: “Un vice souple serait moins facile a` ridiculiser qu’une vertu inflexible. C’est la raideur qui est suspecte a` la société” (105). 56. Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, 205– 6. 57. Krueger, Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance, 158 and elsewhere. Simon Gaunt argues that the fabliaux show “a desire to negotiate and renegotiate what masculinity and femininity are” (Gender and Genre, 288). See also Robert Allen’s similar argument regarding the rise of burlesque in America (Horrible Prettiness, 27).

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performance. Butler has argued that one does not assume a ready-made gender existing prior to subjectivity; rather, gender is produced by innumerable “reiterations” or “citations” of a model of gender that itself exists nowhere.58 This does not mean that an individual chooses a gender identity to perform at will. The citations of gender are enmeshed in cultural forms that we generally learn unconsciously. However, gender is something continually in the process of becoming since it demands repeated performances for its existence. The comic, as a mode that continually plays on the difference between appearance and reality, with its clever masters of disguise always ready to deceive the unobservant, is thus a fitting vehicle for highlighting the performative aspect of gender. It is also worth noting that Butler’s theory suggests the appropriateness of studying literature in order to understand a culture’s gender system. Because literature itself participates in the process of citation, it is not detachable from historical reality, and thus the tendency to oppose historical fact to literary fiction is a false dichotomy.

Reading Women’s Laughter: The Comic Transaction To fully understand the figure of the woman on top and her laughter, it is not enough to ask what the author meant, for as the ambivalence of images of misrule illustrates, the power of the figure is woven within the fabric of medieval culture itself. Even to understand what an author means, we are obligated to look at an array of complex relationships. As Quintilian noted, in order to evaluate the intent behind a jest, “we must first consider who speaks, in what cause, before whom, against whom, and to what effect.”59 Quintilian’s attention to the different parties in a jesting moment is articulated even more distinctly in the twentieth century by Ernest Dupréel, who argued for developing a “sociology of laughter,” because it is precisely group dynamics, and not the subject matter itself, that constitute the nature of laughter.60 The importance of the interaction between parties in a joke is evident in the fact that many cultures have “joking relationships” that specify members of a kinship group that may joke with each other; the 58. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 15. 59. “Primum itaque considerandum est, et quis et in qua causa, et apud quem et in quem et quid dicat” (The “Institutio Oratoria” of Quintilian, 6.3.28). 60. Dupréel, “Le Problème sociologique du rire,” 31.

Introduction 19

same words spoken with someone who is not in a joking relationship with the speaker could be perceived as inappropriate or insulting.61 In medieval texts, too, there are clearly social relationships and contexts that shape the interpretation of comic moments. My approach is to view the words spoken by female characters as part of a “comic transaction” between the different parties of a comic situation, whose relationship to each other one must examine in order to uncover its meanings.62 In each text I consider how the female character’s laughter engages with medieval discourse on gender; how the narrator portrays the female character and invites readers, as men and women, to judge her; how the reader’s perspective, based on marital and social status, daily work and leisure activities, and knowledge of other texts, might bear on his or her interpretation. One of the most well known theorists of humor, Freud, has already presented a model of a joking transaction in which gender figures prominently. In the only section of Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious to discuss women, Freud explains that the man whose sexual desire for a woman is thwarted (because of her resistance or some other obstacle) tells a joke to another man in order to channel his unfulfilled desire into a different kind of pleasure, the pleasure of comic production. Such a joke, says Freud, calls for three people: “in addition to the one who makes the joke, there must be a second who is taken as the object of the hostile or sexual aggressiveness, and a third in whom the joke’s aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled.”63 In this paradigm, the woman functions as the comic butt of the exchange between the two men who laugh at her expense. In medieval literature, one often sees the same sort of bond formed between narrator and audience. What Freud’s model cannot account for, however, are literary texts in which the female character is both speaker and spoken, both the target of her male author’s laughter and the author of her own joke. 61. The literature on joking relationships is extensive. One of the best-known essays is Radcliffe-Brown, “On Joking Relationships.” 62. I take the term “comic transaction” from James English, Comic Transactions. English explains in his very useful introduction that formalist or cognitive approaches to humor ultimately fail, for they do not take into account the multiple social, cultural and interpersonal contexts in which a specific comic transaction occurs. 63. Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 100. It should be noted that class is important in Freud’s discussion. In lower classes, he claims, men talk smut in the woman’s presence (the barmaid). In “civilized” circles, men mask smut in a joke and “save up this kind of entertainment, which originally presupposed the presence of the woman who was feeling ashamed, till they are ‘alone together’” (99). In either case, the woman, whether physically present or not, is the object of exchange between the men.

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Women Laughing, Men Writing Ascertaining an author’s view of women through his female characters is a particularly problematic undertaking, for by the end of the Middle Ages, the very topic of women had become a rhetorical exercise through which the budding scholar at the medieval university, which was restricted to men, could prove himself. With the methodology of the disputatio, students were taught to argue both pro and contra, and authors could be found praising and blaming women in a single treatise; women were thus, in Howard Bloch’s words, a “vehicle to be used for thinking.”64 Comic texts in fact convey their authors’ delight in the reshuffling or reshaping of well-worn misogynous motifs, so that the topic of women is only an incidental vehicle in a larger discursive game between men. Even works claiming to be defenses on behalf of women may themselves be humorously undermining a feminist argument.65 Moreover, male authors often used the laughter of female characters as a vehicle for engaging with some other social or cultural question not directly related to women. The witty retorts of the shepherdess to the wooing of the passing knight in the pastourelle, for example, clearly served to reinforce class boundaries as well as to have fun with the idealizing pretensions of the courtly lyric.66 Her voice, the creation of the male author, ridicules the pat clichés and overly stylized conventions of the literary culture in which the author himself participates. At the same time, the female character “authors” her own text, and her words can flow beyond the bounds intended by the author. The female characters I examine do not simply talk back; they critique specific clichés, using their laughter to respond to what men say about women, ridiculing its inconsistencies, biases, even contradictions. Both spoken and speaking, mocked and mocking, female characters produce a doubled discourse that invites us to read through various layers. They often reiterate antifeminist clichés, thus seeming to assent to and perpetuate them; however, such clichés can change their valence when they come from the mouth of a 64. R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, 90– 91, argues that the seemingly opposite images of Woman as Eve and Mary are in fact a result of a single impulse in clerical culture to erase individual women by abstracting them into essentializing polar opposites. 65. Karen Pratt, “Analogy or Logic?” 6, notes that the figure of Lady Leësce in Jean LeFèvre’s Livre de Leësce, an apparent spokeswoman for women, uses arguments in a way that may in fact humorously undermine her defense. 66. On the seemingly “realistic” voices of the shepherdess and other female figures, see Ferrante, “Male Fantasy and Female Reality.”

Introduction 21

character inhabiting a female body. We can hear the female character’s words, or “bodytalk” as Jane Burns has termed it, as an ironic critique of misogyny, so that her voice, even when presumably created by a male author, can be heard to question conventional conceptions of “female sexuality, wifely obedience, courtly love, and adultery so often used to define and delimit femininity in the French Middle Ages.”67 Comic heroines often alert us to the contradictions that inhere in the construction of femininity in medieval discourse by pushing antifeminist clichés to their limits or showing how assumptions about women contradict each other. The laughter of medieval heroines is most striking in its unmasking of the fundamental structure underlying medieval concepts of gender difference: the binary pairs of male/reason/head versus female/passion/body. Products of this structuring principle, female fictional characters never completely escape an association with the sexualized body, but through their clever wit (in its multiple forms of retort, repartee, wordplay, jokes) they often make us aware of the very operation of binary thinking that erases real women in the abstracted opposites of Eve/Mary. Their laughter points to a paradoxical absence of women in discourse putatively about women. That women’s laughter could be a response to the absence of women in the Western discursive tradition is evoked in Hélène Cixous’s well-known essay “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Seeing men’s fear and loathing of the Medusa as a symbol of their failure to see the female as anything other than a castrated male, Cixous counters, “You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.”68 Through her laughing Medusa, Cixous critiques a discourse in which the feminine exists only to bolster the masculine, and envisions writing that would be able to “shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the ‘truth’ with laughter.”69 Whereas the “truth” (of patriarchal discourse) has traditionally pushed women to the margins, metaphorized them out of existence, Cixous suggests that laughter breaks up this truth, offering a new kind of space, an array of imaginative possibilities that allow us to think around the images of women fixed in the cultural imaginary that we have inherited, an idea evoked in Cixous’s description of women as “a moving, limitlessly changing ensemble,” “an 67. Burns, Bodytalk, 15. 68. Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa,” 885; “Le Rire de la méduse,” 47. 69. Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa,” 888. In the original French: “à mettre en pièces les bâtis des institutions, a` faire sauter la loi en l’air, a` tordre la ‘vérité’ de rire” (49).

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immense astral space.”70 This notion of space is echoed in Cixous’s description of “[l]aughter that breaks out, overflows, a humor no one would expect to find in women—which is nonetheless surely their greatest strength because it’s a humor that sees man much further away than he has ever been seen.”71 Like anthropological views of play as a distancing giving a society a kind of freedom to comprehend its structures, Cixous describes laughter as a way to see beyond apparent “truth,” to give voice to a kind of desire that is otherwise impossible to articulate, or in Luce Irigaray’s words, “untranslatable, unrepresentable, irrecuperable.”72 While medieval authors were unlikely to have used their female characters to the ends advocated by contemporary French feminists, they may well have used them to play with the discursive traditions they had inherited. Reading for woman’s laughter as a marker pointing to this space, we are able to understand more fully the cultural tensions articulated in the author’s use of his female character.

Who’s Laughing and Why? The Medieval Audience In considering the laughter of medieval literature, we need, above all, to imagine how the space opened by the comic moment invited the active participation of the medieval audience, both men and women. Let us consider a scene from a French farce in which women’s response to literature is actually the focus. In this farce, a traveling bookseller tries to sell books to two women, continually proposing titles that they find insulting, some of which we know actually existed, like the Cent nouvelles nouvelles or the Roman de la Rose.73 When the women ask him what kind of pleasing stories he has, he offers them a farce about “women with big asses.” When they ask for stories about saints, he offers instead stories about cuckolded 70. Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa,” 889. The French terms are “ensemble mouvant et changeant” and “immense space astral” (“Rire,” 50). 71. Cixous, “Castration and Decapitation,” 55. 72. Irigaray, This Sex, 163. I view the articulation of laughter as “space” or “elsewhere” as analogous to Teresa de Lauretis’ use of the space-off in film theory, “the space not visible in the frame but inferable from what the frame makes visible,” to describe the movement in gender between the represented space of hegemonic discourses and the “elsewhere” of those discourses (Technologies of Gender, 26). See Burns, Bodytalk, 4– 6, on the helpfulness of this concept for reading the speech of medieval heroines. 73. The full title is La Farce Joyeusse a` troys personnages, c’est ascavoir deulx femes et un vendeur de livres (Picot and Nyrop, Nouveau recueil, 140– 53). Translations are my own.

Introduction 23

husbands. The women reply over and over “Fy! ostés! cela est infaict” [Fie on you, shame, that’s disgusting!], showing their disapproval of his lewd suggestions. Concluding that there is no use reasoning with the man, for he is “worth nothing but badmouthing,” they grab him by the hair and force him to the ground. The women explicitly charge the bookseller’s texts with dishonoring their sex: “Que maudict soyt y qui l’a faicte / Ainsy au desonneur des dames!” [May he who made them to the shame of ladies be cursed!] (vv. 138– 39). While the farce pokes fun at women’s failure to find popular texts humorous, the women’s objection to material they claim is injurious to women echoes the actual charges of defamation Christine de Pizan made against Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose, and could thus be said to reflect the wider debate in late medieval culture concerning antifeminist themes in literature and the response of women readers.74 The question of what it might mean to read as a woman has in fact been a contentious one in contemporary literary and cultural studies. Can we even speak of “the woman reader?” Does a woman have specific experiences unavailable to the male reader, or can a man choose to read from the perspective of a woman (a perspective about which he feels he has sufficient knowledge)?75 To assert that a woman reads as a woman is to assume that she reads with a conscious awareness that she belongs to that class called “women.”76 Would it be anachronistic to say that medieval women read consciously as women? It is important to recognize that medieval texts do not let their readers forget they are gendered. Female characters claim to speak on behalf of all women or directly speak to fellow women in 74. See Helen Solterer’s discussion of Christine in chapter 6 of The Master and Minerva as well as her discussion of how the fictional female respondent figure, although created by a male author, could later enable women such as Christine to articulate a response to the defamation of women (especially 148). 75. This debate is perhaps best articulated in the collection of essays edited by Jardine and Smith, Men in Feminism. On the one hand, Jonathan Culler has argued that experience is a construct and therefore not a natural phenomenon that would directly produce a woman’s reading. Men, like women, can read “as” women insofar as they take on the role of woman reader they construct. Robert Scholes has taken Culler to task for denying the important role in reading played by women’s lived experiences that differ from those of men, and argues that women read “like” women at least in part as a result of a body of experiences that they carry with them (208– 18). For a critique of the false dichotomy of essentialist versus nonessentialist characterizations of reading positions, see Fuss, “Reading as a Feminist,” in Essentially Speaking, 23– 37. 76. For studies on the role of gender in reading, see Flynn and Schweickart, Gender and Reading. On women as spectators, see Doane’s discussion of Freud’s joking triangle, “Film and the Masquerade,” and Tania Modleski’s response: “Rape versus Mans/laughter.”

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the audience. Moreover, narrators explicitly address their readers as men and women, making clear that they expect women to respond differently than men. In their apologies to women readers or patrons, medieval narrators in fact frequently anticipate that women will respond negatively to their statements about women, which suggests that women could actively resist misogynistic fiction rather than always passively assenting to it.77 Medieval texts thus create gendered positions for their readers; to argue for gender as an important factor in reader interpretation is not to impose a contemporary concept on a medieval context. Christine de Pizan is of course the most celebrated example of a medieval woman who was aware of her status as a woman reader and the legitimacy it lent her objections to literature she claimed was injurious: “And it is precisely because I am a woman that I can speak better in this matter than one who has not had the experience, since he speaks only by conjecture and by chance.”78 Although the problematic question of what exactly the “experience” of a woman is would not be taken up until centuries later, Christine’s description suggests that some medieval women were aware that their life experiences meant that they would read a text differently than men would. Christine indicated that she shared the same perspective as other women because of their common experience and claimed to have written her Book of the City of Ladies based on her discussions with women of all classes.79 Medieval women were in fact commonly thought to comprise a class of their own, as is clear in the so-called estates literature in which discussions of men are organized according to three main estates (clergy, knights, laborers), whereas women are treated elsewhere, making them a “fourth estate” unto themselves.80 77. See in particular Krueger, Women Readers, 6. On apologies to women, also see Utley, The Crooked Rib, 26– 27; and Mann, “Apologies to Women,” who notes that one function of such apologies is to generate readers’ involvement. 78. Baird and Kane, La Querelle de la Rose, 53. 79. In Book of the City of Ladies, Christine mentions the “princesses, great ladies, women of the middle and lower classes, who had graciously told me of their most private and intimate thoughts” (I.1.1, p. 4). See June Hall McCash’s overview of women as cultural patrons in the Middle Ages, in which she notes an increasing “gender awareness” among women beginning in the fourteenth century, concomitant with the production of works praising women sponsored by them (Cultural Patronage, 27– 31). 80. Shahar, The Fourth Estate, 1– 4. Even in Jean de Condé’s “Estas dou monde,” which makes more room for growing middle classes that do not fit the three estates model, he nonetheless leaves women in one group at the end. This is also true of the Arab world, where women were discussed in chapters by themselves, whereas discussions of men were organized according to occupation.

Introduction 25

This is not to say that differences between women were unimportant. Despite Christine’s claim that she speaks for all women, in her Treasury of the City of Ladies she directs her advice to her readers according to their social class as well as marital status. As psychologists have shown in contemporary studies, the factors of class, ethnic group, religion, age, and gender all bear on a person’s reaction to humor.81 Works like the Canterbury Tales and the Decameron—in which characters themselves tell stories and respond to those of others—demonstrate that medieval authors were keenly aware of, and perhaps anxious about, the different perspectives brought to the reading experience. Moreover, because of the different, sometimes competing, factors bearing on the interpretation of a text, and because the comic often invites us to take the side of the character who demonstrates ingenuity and flexibility, men may in fact “root for” the female character, and enjoy the comic downfall of her husband, who has earned their scorn, and women may similarly cheer on the male character who brings down a woman who overestimates her own cleverness. Moreover, reading positions are not fixed, and as recent studies in film theory suggest, spectators can feel an affinity alternately with heroes and villains as the narrative unfolds.82 The points I want to stress are that medieval authors created gendered positions for their readers and that although gender may have caused men and women to interpret a comic text differently, they could both respond with laughter. When a woman outwits her husband, a man in the audience can laugh because he judges himself to be superior to the man who has let a woman usurp his authority or because he recognizes that his own fears about his masculine role are not his alone. Women, observing what the heroine gets away with, release, through their laughter, the frustrations built up by the limitations they experience but cannot express so directly.83 Although my emphasis is on women’s potential readings because these have been given little attention in studies of medieval literature, I assume 81. One such study is La Fave, “Humor Judgments as a Function of Reference Groups and Identification Classes.” 82. See, for example, Clover, “Her Body, Himself.” Diana Fuss similarly makes the point that readers may occupy several reading positions at the same time, positions that may be contradictory (Essentially Speaking, 32– 35). 83. This example describes both the “superiority theory,” of laughter, in which the laugher feels a “sudden glory” (in Hobbes’s terms) at his own superiority, and the “relief theory,” where laughter allows the release of desires that are repressed because of various social taboos. See the chapters on these theories in Morreall, Taking Laughter Seriously.

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the reading positions constructed for men to be equally vexed, and an integral part of the layering of meaning created by the laughter of the female character.84 By emphasizing the varied interactions in the comic transaction between author/narrator, character, and audience, I examine women’s laughter within an intricate web of cultural and textual strands. My project is not to discover a women’s humor that would be essentially different from masculine humor, for differences in humor production by men and women have more to do with social context and socialization than with any innate psychobiological differences.85 In the following chapters, I examine the multiple pleasures offered by medieval women’s laughter in a range of texts chosen both for their geographical and chronological diversity and for the specific questions each raises about this complex web of relationships. Chapter 1 explores how the Wife of Bath playfully participates in the “game” of antifeminist discourse. While showing her as a pawn in Chaucer’s game, I will also argue that reading for her playfulness enables us to interpret her “defense” of women as a response to the ludic impulses behind clerical antifeminism. Chapter 2 looks at how the laughter of the unmarried noblewomen in Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century Decameron is shaped by the presence of the men in their company and how the laughter of Boccaccio’s own female readers was shaped by the simultaneously flattering and salacious pose of his narrator. It also shows how women’s cultivation of wit is presented not only as a means to enable them to play flirtatious games pleasurable both to them and to their male companions, but also as a way to circumvent restrictions placed on them as women. Chapter 84. A recent trend in studies of masculinity or men in the Middle Ages (paralleling the rise in “men’s studies” or “gender studies” programs in American universities) reflects a growing feeling that to study women without studying men is to further objectify them by treating women alone as gendered. See Lees, Medieval Masculinities. The risk, of course, is that the specificity of women’s marginalization may be erased into the larger category of gender. I discuss men’s readings alongside those of women to explain how a male-authored text could please both genders. 85. For an excellent critique of the notion of “woman’s humor,” see Finney’s introduction to Look Who’s Laughing. Also see McGhee, “The Role of Laughter and Humor in Growing Up Female,” which finds that there is no demonstrable difference between boys and girls until the age of six, when boys initiate more of the joking, but the more physically active girls who have resisted norms of feminine passivity are the same girls more likely to engage in joking. Apte similarly notes in his discussion of anthropological studies that differences between males and females come from the constraints that models of feminine comportment put on the use of humor, which “prevent women from fully using their talents” (Humor and Laughter, 69).

Introduction 27

3 contrasts the more modest public laughter of Boccaccio’s unmarried ladies with the private bawdy laughter of Dunbar’s wives and widow in their women-only community. It also examines how the presence of an eavesdropping narrator invites the early sixteenth-century Scottish audience to interpret the women’s laughter according to their own gender. Chapter 4 explores how the noblewoman of Ulrich von Lichtenstein’s Frauendienst (ca. 1250) uses her wit not only to ridicule her persistent suitor but also to unmask the whole genre of the courtly love lyric as a genre claiming to serve women while actually reducing them to silence. The narrator’s multiple and shifting personae, along with the male hero’s cross-dressing, illuminate the performative aspect of gender as well as point to important issues of class and status in thirteenth-century Styria. In chapter 5, we listen to the wives of two fifteenth- or sixteenth-century French farces reconfigure the topos of feminine loquacity to reveal the logical inconsistencies entailed by competing clichés about women. The wives in these farces, in leveling complaints against their lazy husbands and even forcing them to do the housework, also bring attention to the value of women’s work. Chapter 6, on the Thousand and One Nights, explores women’s laughter in the Arabo-Islamic literary tradition, which has specific characteristics distinguishing it from the European material. Yet readers unfamiliar with the Arabic corpus will recognize many of its preoccupations, such as the association of women with corporeality and the belief that women are naturally libidinous and deceitful. The Nights also introduces a new angle in investigating women’s laughter: a female narrator, Shahrazad, who reshapes clichés about feminine guile, inviting us to see wit as an asset that can be used for women’s pleasure but also for constructive social purposes. The joking of three sisters from Baghdad, embedded within Shahrazad’s own story, similarly challenges a tradition whereby women’s wit is merely a valuable commodity for men’s pleasure. Using their wit to expand men’s vision of women as unruly corporeality to be feared, they teach their male guest how to make jokes, and suggest how an initially exclusionary principle of laughter can be opened up to include the outsider. By assembling this diverse chorus of women’s laughter, I want to demonstrate that medieval comic literature, often labeled misogynous, could in fact offer pleasures to both women and men. More importantly, these female heroines with their various forms of laughter, from the playful, yet barbed witticisms of the Wife of Bath to the salacious jokes of the

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Baghdad ladies, will help us to imagine the kinds of things that made medieval women laugh and to consider how their laughter might have engaged with their experiences as women in a culture dominated by men. Male authors used their female characters for their own purposes, but by reading for women’s laughter, listening closely to how its special textual and cultural space points to the gaps and contradictions in the discourse on femininity, we will be able to hear medieval women, so often considered laughable in medieval literature, talking back to this tradition with laughter of their own.

1

“Myn entente nys but for to pleye” The Game of Antifeminism and the Wife of Bath’s Invitation to Laughter

But yet I praye to al this compaignye, If that I speke after my fantasye, As taketh not agrief of that I seye, For myn entente nys but for to pleye. (III.189–92)1

haucer’s Wife of Bath is undoubtedly the most famous unruly woman of medieval literature, and she has generated more debate among literary scholars than any other medieval fictional character, a debate that has focused above all on questions of gender. While some argue for viewing her as a kind of feminist avant la lettre because she so thoroughly attacks the antifeminist corpus, others insist that she is an embodiment of all the misogynous clichés of Chaucer’s time.2 Much of the discussion on this question has centered around the intentions of the author. Could Chaucer 1. All quotations are from The Riverside Chaucer. 2. In an anthology of medieval texts defending or blaming women, the editors chose to place the Wife’s prologue between the two sections, for the text does both and serves “as a kind of interface” between the two traditions (Blamires, Pratt, and Marx, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended, 198– 222). For a complete annotated bibliography on the Wife of Bath, see Beidler and Biebel, Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Prologue” and “Tale.” For an overview of the debate on the Wife of Bath and a helpful bibliography, see Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender, 27– 28.

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himself have been a sort of feminist who had a sympathy and respect for women uncharacteristic of men of his time? Or did he mean the garrulous and libidinous Wife to serve as a satirical example of the reasons men must be on guard against women? Was the Wife, in effect, the victim of a joke at her own expense, a joke between Chaucer and his male readers? It is not difficult to imagine that medieval readers might have found the Wife laughable, yet her declaration that her intent is only to play, announced early on in her prologue, invites us to consider the precise nature of the laughter she generates. Much attention has been given to how her “woman’s voice” belongs to Chaucer’s larger preoccupation with the “social contest,” but little has been done to place her contesting voice within his interest in laughter and play.3 Examining how the Wife’s laughter and playfulness intersect with Chaucer’s own use of these elements throughout the Canterbury Tales will help us to understand the complexity of Chaucer’s use of his female character as well as to consider what the Wife tells us about the possible uses of playfulness by women in medieval culture. The word pleye as used in the Canterbury Tales, like our modern word play, encompasses several meanings. In addition to signifying the playing of a musical instrument, playing or acting a part, and flirting, it can also mean to amuse oneself and to jest or be playful.4 It is these last two meanings that are most relevant to the Wife’s declaration. As early as the General Prologue the Wife’s laughter and joviality are highlighted: “In felaweshipe wel koude she laughe and carpe. / Of remedies of love she knew per chaunce, / For she koude of that art the olde daunce” (474– 76). This portrait is ambivalent, for the statement that she can “carpe,” or find fault and complain, links her laughter with the stereotype of the quarrelsome woman. Her laughter is also linked to her sexuality since she knows the arts of sex (“the olde daunce”), is dressed in scarlet clothing, has a red face, and is “gat-tothed,” which in medieval culture signified a large sexual appetite. All of these characteristics combine to create a portrait of the 3. On the contesting social voices in Chaucer, see Strohm, Social Chaucer, which explores “a struggle between hegemony and counterhegemony, of texts as places crowded with many voices representing many centers of social authority” (xiii); and Knapp, Chaucer and the Social Contest. The Wife’s “sense of humor” has gained the affection of many readers over the years, but it has not been examined in any sustained way. 4. From the glossary to The Riverside Chaucer, 1277. Also see Tatlock and Kennedy’s Concordance.

“Myn entente nys but for to pleye” 31

“bad girl” whose excessive female sexuality is linked to wide-mouthed laughter and joking.5 The Wife’s laughter is coded as feminine in its carnality, but it is also connected to the Canterbury Tales’ larger preoccupation with communal play. Her carping is done in “felaweshipe,” part of a convivial and friendly exchange. Her disposition puts her in line with the Host’s invocation to the pilgrims as they set out for Canterbury that they shall tell stories and “pleye,” since “confort ne myrthe is noon / To ride by the weye doumb as a stoon.” He further pledges to “maken yow disport” and “doon yow som confort” (I.771– 76). The Wife’s ability to laugh and play, described early in the General Prologue, thus aligns her with the festive context established for the storytelling game. As Glending Olson has shown, this literature as game or play topos of the Canterbury Tales should be understood in the context of medieval theories of recreation whereby play is justified as a useful means of refreshing the mind, a temporary release ultimately allowing a return to seriousness and work. When Chaucer reminds his readers before the Miller’s Tale that “men shal nat maken ernest of game” (I.3186), he is essentially taking up the second half of the Horatian formula justifying poetry for profit or pleasure (prodesse aut delectare), announcing the goal of such fiction as recreative rather than instructive, thus distinguishing it from his other fictions, but in itself useful for the appropriate space of the journey to Canterbury. This temporary space of play is illustrated in the structure of Chaucer’s work, for while mirth rules over the course of the pilgrimage, and the Host castigates pilgrims for breaking the festive tone set at the beginning, both pilgrims and Host alike ultimately assent to the return to seriousness enjoined by the Parson as the journey to Canterbury reaches its final goal. Play may be enjoyed for the delight it brings, but it is ultimately justified by the ethical context provided by the recreative theory.6 5. Priscilla Martin, Chaucer’s Women, 38, notes the contrast between the Wife’s loud laughter and the coy smile of the Prioress. Her observation mirrors Barreca’s claim that while smiles have traditionally been viewed as becoming feminine accoutrements, laughs have not (Snow White, 6). 6. It is this ethical context that Olson argues distinguishes medieval theories of play from Johan Huizinga’s landmark study on the play element in culture in Homo Ludens. Whereas Huizinga emphasizes that play is an end in itself, Olson reminds readers that while the reason for fiction’s popularity may well be the innately human need for play that it fulfilled, medieval theories insisted on the specificity of the final cause of the activity (Literature as Recreation, 102). Olson similarly notes the parallels between the recreative theory and

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But Olson also notes that Chaucer does more than simply reiterate the well-worn notion of recreative literature as solace, since he will ultimately “subject the theory of recreation, so comfortably announced and endorsed in the appropriately merry circumstances of after-dinner confabulatio, to the strains of human tension, to dramatize the difference between idea and motive.”7 It is in the context of this human tension that the other important meaning of pleye comes to bear. Pilgrims hide behind the excuse of play as a communal activity in their personally motivated jests or insults at the expense of others, usually those of competing social orders.8 Despite the storytellers’ claims that their stories or comments should not be taken in earnest, their listeners do take offense, and Chaucer dramatizes, through these exchanges, the risks entailed by using jest as a vehicle for expressing earnest intent. When the Wife begs her audience to “taketh nat agrief ” what she has to say because her intent is only to play, she is serving notice that some of her listeners are not going to like what they are about to hear. That she delivers her protofeminist defense under the cover of play only renders more ambiguous the earnestness of her message. Indeed, Olson comments that for the Wife, “the line between private motives and public entertainment becomes deliberately difficult to draw” (159). How does the Wife take the stage and use the storytelling contest to promote her “private motives?” How do the competing meanings of play—festive, convivial, amusement of the public versus (tendentious) jesting of the private—complicate the Wife’s message relating to one woman’s life story and the larger story of antifeminism into which she weaves it? And for what reason does Chaucer allow his Wife to play such a game? theories of “festive” carnival, such as Bakhtin’s study of Rabelais or C. L. Barber’s work on Shakespeare, while reminding us that such theories lack the ethical justification so explicitly and self-consciously explored by Chaucer (161– 62). See also Ernst Curtius’s essay, “Jest and Earnest in Medieval Literature,” in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 417– 35, which traces examples demonstrating a medieval acceptance of the mixing of jest and earnest, even within ostensibly serious works. 7. Literature as Recreation, 158– 59. 8. Carl Lindahl, Earnest Games, 85, notes that in Chaucer’s London verbal insults could be prosecuted as public crimes against society. The pilgrims in the Tales, he argues, reflect this context in the great care they take to use rhetorical strategies borrowed from folk culture to avoid charges of defamation. He points out that the majority of insults in Chaucer’s London, and within the Tales themselves, are between different members of trades that had intense rivalries, such as Miller vs. Reeve, Host vs. Cook, Manciple vs. Cook, Friar vs. Summoner, Host vs. Pardoner, Wife of Bath vs. Clerk and Friar.


Antifeminism as Game Toward the end of her prologue, the Wife recounts how her fifth husband, the clerk Jankyn, would read to her nightly from a compendium of antifeminist texts, a book of “wikked wyves.” Seeing that he would not desist from his readings, the Wife ripped three pages out of the book. In retaliation, Jankyn boxed her on the ear, causing her to become partially deaf. This scene stages how the antifeminist tradition accessible to the clerical elite educated in Latin could make its way to an uneducated woman’s ears. The harm that the intrusion of clerical antifeminism into the domestic sphere could do to women is described more explicitly by Christine de Pizan. In a letter to Pierre Col about the Roman de la Rose, Christine says that she has heard about a highly educated and respected man who, whenever he was angry with his wife, would “go and find the book and read it to his wife; then he would become violent and strike her and say such horrible things as ‘These are the kinds of tricks you pull on me. This good, wise man Master Jean de Meun knew well what women are capable of.’”9 The fact that Jankyn is a clerk at Oxford is significant. It was the university-trained clerks who inherited, reworked, and transmitted misogyny to society at large, for their writings were collected and used as the source not only for preachers but for individual men who commissioned collections such as Jankyn’s book of wicked wives.10 Numerous illustrations in the margins of medieval manuscripts depict jousts between clerks and women, attesting to the prevalence of this notion of women and clerks as traditional enemies (fig. 1). Perhaps the most interesting, but often overlooked, detail relating to Chaucer’s scene is that Jankyn laughs while reading his collection: “He hadde a book that gladly, nyght and day, / For his desport he wolde rede alway; / He cleped it Valerie and Theofraste, / At which book he lough alwey ful faste” (669– 72). Jankyn reads the book not only to lecture his unruly wife but also for his own “desport.” Clerical antifeminism appears here like a kind of joke passed from man to man. Indeed, a text that evokes 9. Baird and Kane, La Querelle de la Rose, 136. Carolyn Dinshaw has also noted the connection between the scene recounted by Christine and the encounter between the Wife and Jankyn (Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 130). 10. In his study of how sermons made their way into literature, G. R. Owst notes that of all parts of the Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath’s Prologue shows the greatest debt of literature to the pulpit (Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 389).

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Fig. 1. A friar jousting with a woman, suggesting an opposition between women and the clerical establishment that produced antifeminist tracts. Other illuminations (in this manuscript and elsewhere) show women jousting with knights in the battle of love. From a Picard manuscript of Lancelot du Lac (ca. 1280) (Beinecke MS 229, folio 100v). (Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven.)

this male coterie of humor is Richard De Bury’s The Love of Books (Philobiblon), written in England in around 1344. De Bury imagines books talking about women who enviously curse them because the clerks who buy books could be spending their money on hats and furs for their lady friends instead. The books note the irony of women’s cursing of clerk’s books, for it is what they say about women, rather than their cost, to which women should object: “And with good reason, if she could see what lies within our hearts, if she had attended our private deliberations, if she had read the book of Theophrastus or Valerius, or if she had only listened with comprehending ears to the twenty-fifth chapter of Ecclesiasticus.”11 11. Translation is by Blamires, Pratt, and Marx, Woman Defamed, 1. The original reads, “et quidem merito, si videret intrinseca cordis nostri, si nostris privatis interfuisset consiliis, si Theophrasti vel Valerii perlegisset volumen, vel saltem capitulum Ecclesiastici auribus intellectus audisset” (42– 44).


The joke is on women since because they do not know Latin, they do not have the “comprehending ears” that would allow them to understand antifeminist discourse. The reference to Theophrastus and Valerius in De Bury’s anecdote recalls the Wife’s description of Jankyn’s book: “He cleped it Valerie and Theofraste.” However, in Chaucer’s scene, the distinction between Latin and the vernacular, the written and the oral, is elided, for the Wife is both witness to and victim of the allegedly private joke between men, since Jankyn reads to her from the book and laughs openly in front of her.12 The scene then invites the question: if antifeminism is a joke between men, how can women respond to it? The Wife’s earlier warning that her listeners should not take offense at her words because they are offered under the guise of “pleye” should alert us to the fact that she is ready to play the game, rendering tit for tat. But even more important, the Wife makes clear that the playing field is unequal since women have not written a history of their own: For trusteth wel, it is an impossible That any clerk wol speke good of wyves, But if it be of hooly seintes lyves, Ne of noon oother womman never the mo. Who peyntede the leon, tel me who? By God, if wommen hadde writen stories, As clerkes han withinne hire oratories, They wolde han writen of men moore wikkednesse Than al the mark of Adam may redresse. (688– 96) In asking who painted the lion, the Wife is alluding to a fable in which a lion and a man look at a portrait that shows a man killing a lion. If the man appears to be the stronger, it is simply because it is a man who painted the portrait and who thus controls the story about men and lions. By implication, the Wife is suggesting that women, denied access to the 12. A similar example of the split between male Latin and female vernacular in Chaucer is in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, where the rooster Chauntecleer comments to his favorite hen, Pertelote: “For al so siker as In principio, / Mulier est hominis confusio— / Madame, the sentence of this Latyn is, / ‘Womman is mannes joye and al his blis’” (VII.3163– 66). The male fowl’s comic mistranslation both points to the gap between the Latin and its transmission to the vernacular and suggests the equation of two opposite views of woman, as man’s ruin and his happiness.

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clerks’ “oratories,” have not been able to write a history of their own and thus to respond on equal footing to men’s defamation of women.13 Furthermore, by noting that clerks only speak highly of saints but not of any other women, the Wife attacks the tradition that allows no place for the majority of women like herself who are not saints. In the Wife’s use of the term “mark of Adam” we get a glimpse of how the Wife’s own response will work, for with it she has slyly returned the charge made against women as the mark of Eve. More than defending women against clerk’s attacks through logical refutation, she attacks the clerical establishment itself, characterizing their writing as nothing but the jealous raving of impotent clerks: “The clerk, whan he is oold, and may noght do / Of Venus werkes worth his olde sho, / Thanne sit he doun, and writ in his dotage / That wommen kan nat kepe hir mariage!” (707– 10). While the Wife views the clerks’ waning sexual powers as the motivation for their misogyny, Christine de Pizan later identifies the (hyper)sexuality of clerks: “And all those clerks, who said so much against them [women], were, more than other men, maddened by lust, not for a single woman only but for thousands of them.”14 In addition to showing that women have not had equal access to the playing field, the Wife demonstrates how the rules of the game are always skewed against women. Women are consistently defined as excess, occupying opposite ends of a spectrum: Thou seist to me it is a greet meschief To wedde a povre womman, for costage; And if that she be riche, of heigh parage, Thanne seistow that it is a tormentrie To soffre hire pride and hire malencolie. And if that she be fair, thou verray knave, Thou seyst that every holour wol hire have. (248– 54) 13. Sheila Delany argues that the Wife’s appeal to the fable should not be taken seriously, for she naively “speaks as if lions could or some day might paint: that is her basic misreading” (“Strategies of Silence in the Wife of Bath’s Recital,” 53). Delany makes a compelling case that the essential alterity (bestiality) of lions undermines the logic underpinning the Wife’s use of the fable, but I think Chaucer’s readers could nonetheless take seriously the Wife’s observation of the unequal power relations between the sexes. 14. Baird and Kane, Querrelle de la Rose, 36.


The Wife here declares that men don’t play fair. They criticize poor women because they are costly to maintain; but rich women are also castigated because they are prideful and sullen. Men criticize ugly women because they try to seduce every man they can and because no one wants to have what other men do not want. But men criticize attractive women because they cannot remain chaste. Ranting against the extent to which all women are somehow considered problematic, the Wife declares, “Thus goth al to the devel, by thy tale” (262). Any trait ascribed to women—whether beauty or ugliness, wealth or poverty—will be used to define women as negativity. Chaucer’s use of this motif is not new: it appears in earlier sources such as the Romance of the Rose and Jerome’s Against Jovinian. What Chaucer does add to the tradition, however, is to stage a direct confrontation in which a woman attacks the very premise upon which discourse on women has been based.

The Wife of Bath’s Mimicry: Deflating Masculine Pretensions The implication of the Wife of Bath’s critique is that it is impossible for women to respond to antifeminism without implicating themselves further in it since any action they perform will be coded as deficient in some way. “Hooly seintes lives,” for example, are disparagingly dismissed by the Wife as inaccessible to the majority of women and perhaps (as contemporary feminists might point out) more in the interests of men than of women since they praise feminine abnegation and self-sacrifice. Indeed, the male pilgrims react positively to such tales of “saintly” women, the Host responding enthusiastically to the Man of Law’s tale of Custance, and the Clerk using his own tale of the self-sacrificing Griselda to “quite” the Wife of Bath. So if trying to argue for women’s positive qualities is a no-win proposition if all women “go to the devil,” what discursive position remains for women to speak on their own behalf? This question of feminine subjectivity has been posed most notably by the French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. Irigaray argues that because the Western metaphysical tradition figures women as absence or nonrepresentability, the language they speak is not their own. The only way they can claim a subject position without

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speaking “as men” is to embrace stereotypes of femininity, but in an exaggerated, playful way that disrupts or short-circuits patriarchal discourse: To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself—inasmuch as she is on the side of the “perceptible,” of “matter”—to “ideas,” in particular to ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, but so as to make “visible,” by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible: the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in language.15 This special kind of playing with mimesis, which readers of Irigaray generally call mimicry, is the playfully exaggerative appropriation of a pose in order to undercut it. Might we be invited to read the Wife of Bath as doing more than incarnating feminine unruliness, instead performing it? To view her in this way requires us not so much to look at what she says as to imagine how she says it. As Mae West’s famous quip runs, “It isn’t what you do; it’s how you do it.” With her exaggerated hip wiggling and seductive glances, Mae West wasn’t so much being feminine as she was mimicking “feminine” codes of behavior.16 It is also significant that Irigaray regards laughter as one of the distinctive ways women can get around being reduced to an essentially passive feminine role. She states that women’s laughter, like their gestures, is an example of a “feminine syntax” that “resists or subsists ‘beyond.’”17 By “beyond” Irigaray seems to mean the kind of move made possible by mimicry, a playful repetition of the feminine, but which is not reduced to it because it is itself a comment about the feminine as a performance, thus a view from beyond or elsewhere, which recalls Cixous’s notion of women’s laughter as an “immense astral space.” The Wife’s professed playfulness and her proclivity for laughter, in the context of Irigaray’s analysis, make it possible to see in the Wife’s unruly performance an ironic comment on the essentialist discourse on women. 15. This Sex Which Is Not One, 76; emphasis added. Irigaray’s terms are “mimésis” and “répétition ludique” (Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un, 74). 16. See the discussion of Mae West in Burns, Bodytalk, xiii– xvi; and Pamela Robertson’s discussion of Mae West’s “feminist camp” in Guilty Pleasures, 23– 53. 17. This Sex, 134; “ce qui résiste ou subsite au-delà” (Ce sexe, 132). See also This Sex, 163, where Irigaray suggests, “Perhaps woman, and the sexual relation, transcend it [the phallic] ‘first’ in laughter?”


One putatively feminine role the Wife embraces is that of the naive woman who understands only at a superficial level. She begins her prologue by declaring, “Experience, though noon auctoritee / Were in this world, is right ynogh for me / To speke of wo that is in mariage.” Within the traditional medieval distinction between personal experience and written authority, this statement establishes the Wife as a stereotypical female reader who is unable to do more than understand the surface meaning of a text.18 As scholars have pointed out, the Wife demonstrates such intellectual deficiency either by omitting other scriptural passages that speak counter to her claims or citing passages out of context, twisting them to fit her purpose.19 The medieval audience (especially the well-educated men among Chaucer’s readers) is thus invited to laugh at the Wife, a silly woman who is unable to read for the deeper significance of God’s words. Strictly speaking, however, the Wife’s declaration that experience is “right ynogh” for her asserts not that she does not recognize that there is a difference between authoritative and experiential interpretations, but that she is happy to make do with the experiential role allotted to her. The Wife’s deliberate and continual reminders that she doesn’t understand the Scripture she quotes in fact begin to sound like an exaggeration of the trope of feminine (mis)reading. For example, when she quotes Jesus’ chastising of the Samaritan woman that the man she has is not her husband, the Wife says, “What that he mente therby, I kan nat seyn,” but proceeds to cite a different scriptural passage: “But wel I woot, expres, withoute lye, / God bad us for to wexe and multiplye; / That gentil text kan I wel understonde” (20, 27– 29). Whereas with the first declaration the Wife announces her insufficient exegetical skills, with the second she implies her willingness to choose to understand when it fits her purpose. It should also be added that if the Wife is reading Scripture self-servingly, “she is but mimicking the methods of those late glossators whom Henri de Lubac describes as ‘pulverizing’ the text (suppressing parts of passages, distorting and rearranging texts) to fit their schemes.”20 If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, the Wife seems 18. See Noakes, “On the Superficiality of Women.” On the Wife of Bath as an aural reader, see Schibanoff, “Taking the Gold Out of Egypt.” 19. See for example, David Reid, “Crocodilian Humor,” which notes that the Wife “gives the letter a gross and ludicrous interpretation” (80). On the Wife’s “selective” reading, see Delany, “Strategies of Silence.” 20. Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 124. Priscilla Martin similarly argues that the Wife does not substitute her own experience for authority, but rather questions the narrow interpretation by authorities such as Jerome (Chaucer’s Women, 217).

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to say: since women have only been dealt a limited set of cards, they should learn to use them in any way possible to win the game. If we listen to her in this way, we see her taking pleasure in playing this role because she knows her outrageousness will provoke her male listeners. Consider, for example, what happens when the Wife quotes Paul in order to confirm her assertion that wives should control their husbands: “I have the power durynge al my lyf Upon his propre body, and noght he. Right thus the Apostel tolde it unto me, And bad oure housbondes for to love us weel. Al this sentence me liketh every deel”— Up stirte the Pardoner, and that anon; “Now, dame,” quod he, “by God and by Seint John! Ye been a noble prechour in this cas. I was aboute to wedde a wyf; allas!” (158– 66) In her statement, “Al this sentence me liketh every deel,” the Wife brings attention to her self-serving reading, boasting of it even, as though laughing at her own brazenness. The reaction of the Pardoner, who sees the Wife’s boasts as emblematic of all that men have to fear from women, helps to stage the provocational aspect of the Wife’s prologue. Indeed, it is a few lines later that the Wife makes her declaration that she is just playing; it is the Pardoner’s indignant reaction to her speech that leads her to package her tendentious jibes against men and marriage as play. Thomas Van has in fact seen the Wife’s prologue as a calculated performance meant to irritate her captive audience: The Wife is aware of the ready answers systematic theology has for her questions, and she is aware that the clergy and intelligentsia in the audience are aware that she is aware. This makes her feigned pluralism and obtuseness all the more irritating to those who have to listen to it, and she knows that too. She is deliberately parodying the charges against her and her sex: “You’ve always told me I’m stupid; well here I am, being stupid again.”21 21. Van, “False Texts and Disappearing Women in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” 180.


Van’s description of the Wife’s “feigned obtuseness” is essentially an example of mimicry, a calculated and ironic performing of the feminine role. The limitation on this reading, however, is also illustrated in Van’s description, for we cannot assert that the Wife of Bath, a fictional creation, “knows” anything, even less that she is “deliberately parodying” anything. To hear her doing so requires that we choose to hear her words as spoken by a woman (her “bodytalk,” to borrow Burns’s term) rather than as written by her male author. Even when we do read her words consciously aware that they are written by Chaucer, we can nonetheless imagine the male author himself having fun with the logical implications of certain assumptions underlying medieval antifeminism. In one such example, the Wife uses the cliché of the superior rationality of men against them by arguing that if men are the more rational creatures (as they claim everywhere in texts preached to women), they should better be able to bear the caprices of their wives and should give in to them: “Oon of us two moste bowen, doutelees, / And sith a man is moore resonable / Than womman is, ye moste been suffrable” (440– 42). Again, the Wife’s strategy (as designed by Chaucer) is to reappropriate clerical clichés instead of contesting them. Rather than trying to argue that women are smart, she appears to accept women’s weakness of intellect only to turn this apparent weakness to their advantage. Chaucer is obviously playing his own game with logic, but in the process, he lends his words to a female character who demonstrates that despite her overt embracing of female corporeality and experience, her mind is as sharp as that of any man. The connection between jesting and mental acuity was well recognized throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Joubert, for example, noted that “lampoons, jeering, and mockery” are to be encouraged because they “sharpen the mind.”22 That wit could be particularly useful to women is suggested by Christine de Pizan’s praise of her own wit against her male adversaries in the quarrel over the Roman de la Rose. In response to men who dismiss her objections to the work because she is a mere woman, Christine retorts: “Please remember that the small point of a knife can pierce a bulging, swollen sack.”23 Christine challenges assumptions about 22. Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, 17. It should be noted that in the context of the passage, it is evident that Joubert is thinking of joking as valuable primarily to men, who need to demonstrate the arts of civil conversation. 23. Translation is Thelma Fenster’s (25), which I prefer to the translation in Baird and Kane (63), which omits the word “swollen” (enfle): “Veulles toy reduire a memoire que une

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women’s “inferiority” (their emotional rather than rational response), bringing attention to the piercing quality of her own wit, which can expose supposed male authority as empty air. This deflationary power of wit is similarly evoked in Freud’s assertion that the joke (Witz) “is able to open our eyes to the fact that [a] solemnly accepted piece of wisdom is itself not much better than a piece of nonsense.”24 The Wife of Bath’s wit similarly serves to expose antifeminist discourse as a “piece of nonsense.” Rather than present an earnest defense of women, the Wife favors sarcasm and irony, through which she can ridicule men’s pretensions to teaching, glossing, and preaching by exposing their self-serving motives. Whereas the Wife has been accused of being a self-serving misreader, many of her sarcastic comments serve to show that it is in fact men who use the authoritative tradition for their own purposes, the implication of her pointed question, “Who peynted the lion?” Such rhetorical questions are indeed typical of her sarcastic voice that interrogates her adversaries while insinuating her own response. Christine de Pizan also leveled rhetorical questions against her male adversaries. Ridiculing the hypocrisy of Jean de Meun’s defenders who argue that the poet’s use of words for the genitalia are natural and therefore not obscene, she asks, “But you, who argue in so many ways that they should be named by their name and that Jean de Meun’s Reason spoke truly, I ask you sincerely—you who are his special disciple, as you say—why don’t you name them openly in your writing without tiptoeing around the matter?”25 Such rhetorical questions put the adversaries’ methods on trial. It is not the content of the message so much as the motive behind the message that is criticized. For example, the Wife mocks the pontificating of men’s sermons against their wives, admonishing one of her older husbands, “Thou comest hoom as dronken as a mous, / And prechest on thy bench, with yvel preef!” (246– 47). In showing her husband’s pompous preaching to be hypocritical, she challenges the validity of anything he might say. This recall’s Christine’s deflation of Jean de Meun’s “erudition” through her

petite pointe de ganivet ou cotelet peut percier un grant sac plain et enfle de materielles choses” (Hicks, Le Débat sur le “Roman de la Rose,” 25). For a full discussion of Christine’s use of wit against her adversaries, see Fenster, “Did Christine Have a Sense of Humor?” 24. Freud, Jokes, 57. 25. The translation is by Fenster, “Did Christine Have a Sense of Humor?” 26. The passage may also be found in Baird and Kane, La Querelle, 123; for the original French, see Hicks, Débat, 123.


ironic praise of his great and difficult adventures: “Quel lonc procés! Quel difficile chose! / Et sc¨ıences et cleres et obscures / Y mist il la, et de grans aventures!” [Oh what a long affair! How difficult! The erudition clear and murky both that he put there, with those great escapades!] (ll. 390– 92).26 Such ironic praise exposes the great author’s writing as overblown. Similarly, the Wife brags to her audience how she would talk back to one of her first husbands: “After thy text, ne after thy rubriche, / I wol nat wirche as muchel as a gnat” (346– 47). In referring explicitly to the text and heading of the medieval manuscript (“thy text,” “thy rubriche”), the Wife reduces to gnat size not just her husband’s lecturing, but written authorities as a whole. A similar deflation occurs when the Wife characterizes Jankyn’s quotations of his books as “proverbes” and “olde sawe” (660). She has in effect likened Jankyn’s appeal to centuries of male authorities to keep his wife in line to the spouting of old wives’ tales. With her wit, the Wife not only disregards the teaching of her husbands, but undermines it by showing it to be hypocritical and pretentious.27 I would like to pause here to consider a common reading of the Wife of Bath that may appear somewhat analogous to my own, but differs in an important respect. Many have seen carnivalesque impulses in the Canterbury Tales, the Wife being a particularly clear example, representing the licensed disorder of the unofficial world in contrast to the official world of the authorities, such as the Clerk. Whereas the Wife represents the material realm with her large hips, scarlet clothes, loud speech and laughter, the Clerk is gaunt, poorly dressed, silent, and somber. The two figures look remarkably like the two figures of Carnival and Lent shown battling in visual representations of the period.28 By extension, the Wife’s literal, aural 26. Epistre au Dieu d’Amours (translation is Fenster’s [32]); Baird and Kane, La Querelle, 37. 27. Others have observed the deflating power of the Wife’s wit. Priscilla Martin suggests that her laughing and joking represent “the dreaded female ‘tee hee’ at male pretension” (Chaucer’s Women, 219). Alan Spearman has argued (“How He Symplicius Gallus”) that the Wife’s failure to accurately use the names of her written sources can be seen as a calculated satire on men’s foolishness, suggesting, for example, that in using the name “Symplicius” to refer to “Sulpicius,” the husband who left his wife discussed by Walter Map and Valerius, the Wife is not simply making a mistake, but deliberately playing on the word simple in its meaning of uneducated, ignorant, and foolish. 28. For the association of the Clerk with Lent and the Wife with Carnival, see Jon Cook, “Carnival and The Canterbury Tales,” especially 179– 89. This distinction between the lean, unlaughing scholar and the fat, laughing woman recalls Laurent Joubert’s observation that scholars are less likely to laugh because studying weakens the blood, whereas women and the foolish have more moisture, which is conducive to laughter (see the introduction).

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experiential use of the text is meant to contrast with the Clerk’s allegorical, written, authoritative glossing. Indeed, Bakhtin argues that in carnival rituals women generally represent the material bodily principle and are positively charged: Womanhood is shown in contrast to the limitations of her partner (husband, lover, or suitor); she is a foil to his avarice, jealousy, stupidity, hypocrisy, bigotry, sterile senility, false heroism, and abstract idealism. The woman of Gallic tradition is the bodily grave of man. She represents in person the undoing of pretentiousness, of all that is finished, completed, and exhausted. She is the inexhaustible vessel of conception, which dooms all that is old and terminated.29 Bakhtin’s description reminds us both of the Wife’s bodily energy and her voice that mocks masculine pretension. However, the notion of the carnivalesque does not adequately account for the Wife’s playful manipulation of her own speech. Whereas Bakhtin aligns women with pure carnality (however positive) and opposes her to masculine reason (however negative), the Wife’s critique of authoritative discourse undermines this neat dichotomy. The Wife does embrace the bodily principle by boasting of her sexual appetites. But she does more than this, for she embraces her carnality in such a way that it ironically critiques and destabilizes the discourse that claims to distinguish between female corporeality and male rationality.30

Wit and Women’s Wisdom: Pragmatic Play The Wife’s witty attacks bring us to the etymology of the word wit. In Middle English, the word meant knowledge, wisdom, or understanding. It was only sometime during the sixteenth century that we have attested examples of the word being used in the way we now understand it—to make cleverly humorous remarks. The Wife herself uses the word to refer to a special kind of innate women’s knowledge: “For al swich wit is yeven 29. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 240. 30. See Sarah Kay’s argument, based primarily on an analysis of Jean de Meun’s Rose, that “changing attitudes towards the problem of knowledge between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries trouble the equations between femininity and carnality, and between masculinity and the mind or spirit, which are extensively invoked in classical and patristic writing to justify the subordination of women to men” (“Women’s Body of Knowledge,” 211).


us in oure byrthe; / Deceite, wepyng, spynnyng God hath yive / To wommen kyndely, whil that they may lyve” (400– 402). The practicality of the Wife’s “know-how” (to deceive) is explained a few lines later when she tells her audience how she would get the best of her husbands by using her “wit.” But given the Wife’s characterization as a laughing woman who herself announces her “intent to play,” the connection between knowledge, understanding, cleverness, and the ability to amuse is already implied. In her text, a “wise” woman is one who knows how to view the world with a sense of humor, from “beyond,” playfully putting it to her own uses. Such strategic wit of course was one of the traits most often coded as feminine in the Middle Ages. In sermons of the time, preachers reminded their parishioners, “Who was strenger than Sampson, wyser than Salamon, holyer than David? And it thei were al overcomen by the queyntise and whiles of women.”31 The medieval topos of women’s wiles being passed from mother or godmother to daughter is clear in the Wife’s remark that she learned how to lie from her mother: “I folwed ay my dames loore, / As wel of this as of othere thynges moore” (583– 84). Here, the clever tricks of women are represented as a special knowledge that older women teach younger women, and so the Wife of Bath likely appeared to many of Chaucer’s readers as yet another cautionary example of how men should beware women. The Wife makes no apologies for her wiles, rather boasting that they are a particular form of women’s wisdom. Describing the various strategies she used to play on her husbands fears and emotions, she declares: Now herkneth hou I baar me proprely, Ye wise wyves, that kan understonde. Thus shulde ye speke and bere hem wrong on honde, For half so boldely kan ther no man Swere and lyen, as a womman kan. (224– 28) This bold declaration shows the Wife to fit the medieval type of the sinner loving the sin, meant to implicate her even deeper in the satirical portrait made of her. Another way to hear her declaration, however, is as a mimicking of the cliché. Since, as the Wife has said, women are condemned no 31. Owst, Literature and Pulpit, 385.

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matter what they do, they might as well use their allegedly feminine skills to their advantage. When the Wife discusses her relationship with her first three older husbands, she admits that she pretended that her husbands had said bad things about women in order to make them feel guilty and therefore give her what she wanted: “Lordynges, right thus, as ye have understonde, / Baar I stifly myne olde housbondes on honde / That thus they seyden in hir dronkenesse; / And al was fals, but that I took witnesse / On Janekyn, and on my nece also” (379– 83). This confession shows her unabashed manipulation of her husbands, but it also contains certain implications: if the Wife’s calculated lie was effective in getting her husbands to atone for their nasty comments about women, it was precisely because they evidently could imagine making those sorts of statements. The Wife’s lies work because, as the Wife knows, husbands would not be surprised to be told they were saying such things about women since, as the scene with Jankyn and that recounted by Christine de Pizan suggest, husbands often repeated antifeminist platitudes to malign their wives. The Wife has thus repackaged antifeminist rhetoric as a whole to use against specific men and has actually done so by impersonating male voices.32 She has taken control of the dominant discourse on women and put it to her own uses, beating men at their own game, which makes her “a pragmatic, worldly entrepreneur.”33 It should be noted that such pragmatic deception, when used for proper ends, was not always censured by the medieval clerical establishment. Some medieval preachers in fact advocated that women use their wiles when open confrontation with their husbands proved ineffective for settling household troubles. A late-thirteenth-century compilation of Latin sermons by Peregrinus addresses the issue of wives whose husbands are unjust and unreasonable. In one charming parable, the text suggests that women emulate the female squirrel. After both male and female squirrel have hoarded their stock of nuts for the winter, the male sometimes ungratefully bars the female from entrance and hogs the nuts for himself. The female squirrel must then dig a little hole from underneath the tree roots so she can gain access to the nuts from below. Peregrinus advises women in his audience likewise to sneak behind their husbands should their husbands behave unfairly, but he forbids them “to make large holes,” to go too 32. This point has been made by Susan Crane, who, along with Dinshaw, explicitly connects the Wife to Irigaray’s concept of mimicry (Gender and Romance in the “Canterbury Tales,” 116). 33. Knapp, Chaucer and the Social Contest, 118.


far in their stratagems. The anecdote of the squirrel reflects the wider emphasis in medieval sermons concerning marriage on “pragmatism and experience” and “reciprocity and mutuality.”34 Wives can use trickery pragmatically when the husband has failed in his duty to allow mutual and reciprocal considerations to form the basis of the marriage bond. The selfserving Wife is obviously not using her special wisdom for the sake of greater marital harmony, but like the female squirrel, she is faced with males who are not entirely model husbands either. The first three were far older than she was, and apparently prone to drunkenness, the fourth was a lecher, and the fifth, Jankyn, a misogynist with a hot temper. Although most medieval readers probably felt that the holes she made were too large by far, many may have recognized that some devious digging was justified. Moreover, the squirrel analogy could be applied not just to domestic disputes, but also to the public realm of discourse, for the Wife’s extensive quotation of antifeminist texts describes not the specific circumstances of individual husbands, but an entire masculine discourse that claims that all women go to the devil. The Wife is thus pragmatic in that she makes do with the conditions she has inherited, attempting, through playful mimicry, to control the discourse meant to define her. The notion of comedy as psychological control is indeed a useful way to view the Wife, for since she has little control over the antifeminist tradition disseminated by clerical culture, she can seek relief from its harm by controlling it, and her masculine audience, through her laughter.35 I have already suggested the extent to which the Wife can be seen to goad her male audience in her mimicking of tropes of feminine misreading. Her address to other “wise wyves” might also be heard as part of her performance. Since part of the fear surrounding women’s deceitfulness is that it is a trait handed down from one woman to the next, the Wife could 34. Schnell, “The Discourse on Marriage in the Middle Ages,” 773– 74. Some medieval preachers also used clichés of female garrulity for pragmatic ends, urging women to use their persuasive powers of speech to lead their husbands to righteousness if they were not fulfilling their moral obligations as Christians. See Farmer, “Persuasive Voices.” 35. On the notion of comedy as control, see Kendrick, Chaucerian Play. In an analysis indebted to Bakhtin’s theory of carnival and to Olson’s study of literature as recreation in the Middle Ages, Kendrick argues that the Canterbury Tales served as a kind of therapy to lessen fears engendered by fourteenth-century calamities such as plague, famine, war, and social unrest by providing the sense of control that could be gained from play. Surprisingly, Kendrick does not include gender in this list, and her brief discussion of the Wife centers on her tale and not at all on her prologue (126 and elsewhere).

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be seen to be waving this fear in the faces of her male listeners. There are only two other women in the Wife’s audience on the way to Canterbury: the Prioress and the Nun. It is other men such as the Host, the Clerk, the Friar, and the Pardoner who respond to her, not these women. Her appeals to women appear, in this light, as a further goading, an extravagant flourish on her performance as unruly woman. What of Chaucer’s readers? Although information on Chaucer’s medieval readers is limited, there is a general consensus that the tales were known at the court of Richard II, at which women would have been present.36 It is possible that the tales might also have made their way to women outside of the court, a possibility evoked in poems by Skelton in which bourgeois women know of the Wife of Bath and even view her as their spokeswoman. Moreover, invocations to women readers within the Canterbury Tales suggest that Chaucer expected that his tales would be read or heard by women. In the envoy to the Clerk’s Tale, in which Griselda patiently endures her husband’s humiliating tests of her fidelity, the Clerk asks the “archewyves” (or quintessential women) to ignore the example of Griselda and to defend themselves with their “crabbed eloquence” and not let their husbands dominate them (IV.1195– 1204), an allusion to the Wife of Bath’s own verbal art. This professed interest in women’s responses is both an indication of Chaucer’s awareness of women’s potential rejection of the message concerning Griselda’s submissive patience and a playful, double-edged response to women’s own readings. On the one hand, by urging women to follow the example of the Wife of Bath, the Clerk seems to be placing himself on women’s side, urging them not to let men abuse them: “Ne suffreth nat that men yow doon offense.” Indeed, he voices considerable sympathy for Griselda as she endures the harsh treatment by her husband, which he at several points characterizes as excessive. On the other hand, by repeatedly appealing to clichés of feminine garrulity, he effectively hints that women are incapable of following Griselda’s example, and we can imagine Chaucer’s anticipating the stir the Clerk’s words would create among the women in his audience. To their ears, the ironic praise of the Wife may have sounded like a backhanded insult, or at least a playful tease meant to provoke them. Although women’s actual responses to Chaucer’s Wife are lacking, 36. See the four articles in “Chaucer’s Audience: A Symposium” in the Chaucer Review 18, no. 2 (1983).


there is evidence that men thought she could potentially set a bad example for their own wives. In John Lydgate’s “Mumming at Hertford,” six wives argue that they should have sovereignty over their husbands, citing the authority of the Wife of Bath, who “Cane shewe statutes moo than six or seven” (l.169). John Skelton was also concerned about women’s use of the Wife of Bath’s example. In “Phyllyp Sparowe,” the female narrator, Jane Scrope, summarizes the importance of the Wife as a lesson on women’s authority over their husbands: And of the Wyfe of Bath, That worketh moch scath Whan her tale is tolde Amonge huyswyves bolde, How she controlde Her husbandes as she wolde, And them to despyse In the homylyest wyse, Brynge other wyves in thought Their husbandes to set at nought.37 A female authority who can turn obedient housewives into unruly ones, the Wife represents the danger of a fictional female character to unsettle the status quo. Yet the laughter invited by the Wife’s prologue does not necessarily separate along gender lines. The Wife’s first three husbands are themselves a traditional butt of medieval humor: feeble old husbands too weak to pay their “debt” in the marital bed. This would make Chaucer’s medieval readers unlikely to feel outrage when the Wife tricks them. Laurent Joubert, following Aristotle, emphasized that it was necessary that one not feel pity in order to laugh: “if at first we laugh, unaware of the injury, finally, struck with compassion upon learning of it, we stop laughing entirely and say with repentance: this is no laughing matter.”38 Men can laugh along with the Wife precisely because they have no compassion for her husbands, not only because of the husbands’ advanced age, but more importantly, because they are so easily manipulated. The side we are 37. John Skelton, The Complete English Poems, ed. John Scattergood. 38. Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, 20. In Aristotle’s Poetics: “For the laughable is a sort of fault and deformity that is painless and not deadly” (49a31).

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invited to take in comedy is often not right over wrong, but cleverness over stupidity. The Wife of Bath, whatever her vices, wins us over because we admire her cleverness and rhetorical dexterity, traits likely to have been admired among medieval audiences as well.39 As a confirmation of medieval stereotypes of rampant feminine unruliness, she is satire, but because we can hear her manipulation of such stereotypes as clever play, she can also appear as the one in control of the comedy, the one offering up “solace” for her listeners. It is because the Wife is both jester and jest that her prologue is so variously interpreted.40 I would now like to propose that this dual nature helps us to understand more fully the various interpretive layers of her tale as well.

Who Gets the Last Laugh? The Wife of Bath’s Tale As most readers have noticed, the lesson of the Wife’s tale parallels the theme of the story of her own life: women’s quest for mastery over their husbands. In her tale, a romance set in “th’olde dayes of the Kyng Arthour,” a knight who has raped a woman receives his punishment from the queen: rather than put him to death, the queen grants him one year in which to find the answer to the question, “what thyng is it that wommen moost desiren.” After nearly a year of asking the question only to receive a bewildering number of contradictory answers, the knight comes upon an ugly old woman who offers to give him the answer on the condition that he give her anything she wants. The knight accepts. When the knight tells the queen the answer—women most desire to have sovereignty over their husbands and their lovers—his answer is judged correct by all the women in the kingdom. The old woman now claims her price: he must marry her. However, the knight, horrified at his fate, is granted a choice on his wedding night: either he can have his wife ugly but faithful or beautiful but unfaithful. He leaves the decision with her and, in doing so, she 39. Lindahl, Earnest Games, argues that in medieval culture, like other oral cultures where the spoken word has considerable power, “the ability to deliver insults that are subtle and clever is regarded as an art as well as a survival skill” (96), and furthermore notes that all the characters in the Canterbury Tales, like citizens of Chaucer’s own London, have to appeal to the crowd in order to win favor (108). 40. Reid, “Crocodilian Humor,” 79, notes that the Wife “manages to be as much jester as jest,” but he neglects the Wife’s playfulness, ultimately arguing that Chaucer intended for readers to condemn her.


magically transforms so that he will have her both beautiful and faithful. The man learns, as did the Wife’s own husband, Jankyn, that domestic mastery, no matter what the authorities say, is best left in the hands of wives.41 While there is general agreement that the tale is a fitting one because its message of female sovereignty accords with the Wife’s own view, it has been less clear why she chooses to tell a romance, not a genre one would expect from the bourgeois Wife. Indeed, it is probable that the tale originally intended for the Wife was a fabliau now generally attributed to the Shipman, in which a woman deceives her husband, profiting both sexually and financially. Why did Chaucer change his mind? What possibilities are offered by the romance that are not by the fabliau? One possibility is that the romance she tells is meant to bring attention to the genre itself. By foregrounding the unchivalric nature of the putative hero, the knightrapist, and by substituting feminine power for masculine power, Chaucer, through the Wife, is also in some sense pointing to the subservient roles of women in traditional romance and then reversing them.42 But I would like to suggest that the Wife’s choice of a romance is also part of her intent to play and that it is her performance of the tale, rather than the content alone, to which we should pay close attention. Perhaps the lesson of the tale is not as obvious as it seems. Let us examine closely the way the Wife concludes her tale. Once the knight has given over the power to his new wife, she announces the benefit of this submission for her husband: “For, by my trouthe, I wol be to yow bothe— / This is to seyn, ye, bothe fair and good” (1240– 41). Although the wife now has sovereignty in the relationship, she does not invoke the image of the woman “on top” but rather now becomes the ideal wife, for from then on “she obeyed hym in every thyng / That myghte doon hym plesance or likyng” (1255– 56). This ending parallels closely the outcome of the fight between the Wife and her own husband, Jankyn. After Jankyn has “given her the bridle,” she says, “After that day we hadden never debaat. / God helpe me so, I was to hym as kynde / As any wyf from Denmark unto Ynde, / And also trewe, and so was he to me” (822– 25). 41. The primary authoritative source on men’s rule over their wives, used in subsequent texts of the antifeminist literary tradition, comes from the New Testament: “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is head of the church” (Eph. 5:22– 23). 42. On the Wife’s choice of a romance, see Kendrick, Chaucerian Play, 124.

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The ultimate lesson of the Wife’s prologue and tale seems to be that if men can learn initially to allow their wives to have power, a sort of natural equilibrium will be restored in which a woman’s desires will be in harmony with those of her husband. From this perspective, it appears that what the Wife truly wants is not mastery but equality.43 Given the Wife’s exposé of men’s tyranny over their wives and her own tenacious recalcitrance, this image of marital harmony and domestic parity looks suspiciously neat: it sounds too good to be true. But perhaps that is precisely the point. Indeed, immediately following her rosy portrait of married bliss of the knight and lady she concludes with a flourish that is not so sweet: And thus they lyve unto hir lyves ende In parfit joye; and Jhesu Crist us sende Housbondes meeke, yonge, and fressh abedde, And grace t’overbyde hem that we wedde; And eek I praye Jhesu shorte hir lyves That noght wol be governed by hir wyves; And olde and angry nygardes of dispence, God sende hem soone verray pestilence! (1257– 64) With her curse on domineering and stingy husbands, the wife reverts to the voice of the unruly woman, repeating that the desire that matters is women’s, whether material or sexual. There is thus a gap between the message in which the two lived happily ever after in mutual obedience and desire, and the Wife’s afterword, in which the supremacy of feminine desire and domination is bombastically reinstated. The Wife’s reversion to her first voice, erupting in midline, comically interrupts the controlled voice that claims that the couple lives “in parfit joye.” But how might we interpret this gap? How does it shape our interpretation of the moral of her story about the wisdom of old women? One possible reading is that the Wife has unwittingly undone the lesson of her own tale. Trying to teach men to obey women by holding out the promise 43. This point has been made by Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 125. Also see Schnell’s “Discourse on Marriage in the Middle Ages,” which argues for the necessity of distinguishing between discourses on women and discourses on marriage, the latter of which emphasizes the importance of compromise by both husbands and wives and targets the unreasonableness of both genders.


of pure bliss, the Wife can’t help herself, and reverts to her natural feminine unruliness; in doing so, she demonstrates to her male listeners that such bliss can only be illusory given women’s innate desire to dominate. The Wife has made herself the comic object of her own speech. But the curse could also be viewed as itself a kind of joke she plays on her male audience. Ensnaring her male listeners, the Wife has coyly offered a vision of male bliss obtained from ultimately pliant and faithful wives, only to deliver a one-two punch in which she reasserts the typically unruly female demand of the submission of husbands. This ending that gives and takes away in fact echoes other tales told in the Canterbury Tales and thus is evidently a procedure Chaucer enjoyed having his pilgrims do.44 As the Clerk asks women to ignore the message of his own tale with his humorous envoy, the Wife similarly undoes her own message with her bombastic curse. Her curse, in my reading, far from showing her to be reverting to a putatively natural unruliness, shows her to be playing on the trope of female unruliness itself. There are two observations to make if we interpret the Wife’s curse in this way. First, we might consider the Wife’s playful shift in register as itself the lesson of the tale, the abrupt change in voice allowing her to contrast the fantasy world of romance and its happy ending with the actual limitations that make such a world impossible. In her tale, the errant knight is swayed by the old woman’s arguments and allows her to decide for the both of them. By implication, the tale asserts that men can learn from women in a way that works to the advantage of both sexes. The otherworldly setting of Arthurian romance precisely underscores the idealistic aspect of this vision in which female wisdom wins out over male ignorance. The advocating of feminine stratagems, suggested in the bulk of the Wife’s prologue, might well be a more pragmatic solution than wishing that men would listen to women. With a laugh, the Wife once again asserts her strategic embrace of the stereotypical role of feminine misrule assigned to her. Second, the Wife’s curse could be read as part of the Wife’s outrageous and provocative performance. Seeming at first to offer men a utopian vision of marital bliss, the Wife allows her own persona of the unruly woman to have the last laugh, and knows that this will get a rise out of her 44. Kendrick notes that in the Canterbury Tales it is common to find comments at the end of tales undoing their message (Chaucerian Play, 118).

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captive audience, who now see that they have been tricked.45 Her tale, like her prologue, is ultimately about control, and her laughter is what enables her to step beyond the position defined for her by the male authorities. Does the Wife’s parting curse mean that readers should discount the apparently serious lesson about marital cooperation implicit in her tale? Does her joky persona compromise her challenge to authority preached in her prologue? Certainly a risk of trying to make a serious argument with a playful voice is that the seriousness of the argument will be missed. This is the implication of a comment made by one of the brothers in the Pardoner’s Tale: “Bretheren, takk kep what that I seye; / My wit is greet, though that I bourde and pleye” (VI.777– 78). The conjunction “though that” establishes a clear opposition between “wit” or wisdom on the one hand and jokes or play on the other. In the Middle Ages, curses were one of the forms of marketplace humor and could be used to show familiarity between individuals.46 The Wife’s use of invective might then be seen as part of her “festive” mode of interacting with her fellow pilgrims.47 The Friar’s and Pardoner’s interruptions of her speech could similarly be seen as a festive rendering of tit for tat. The Friar, although not explicitly characterized as playful in the General Prologue, is described as “wantowne” (pleasure seeking, jovial) and “merye” (208), and the Pardoner, although not noted to be playful, is certainly an arch performer. When the Pardoner interrupts the Wife early on in her prologue, saying, “I was about to wedde a wyf; allas!” perhaps he, too, can be heard to be playing the role allotted to him, just as the Wife’s subsequent admonishment to him to shut up and her warning— “thou shalt drynken of another tonne, / Er that I go, shal savoure wors than ale” (170– 71)—could be heard as playfully abusive market speech. Seen in this light, the interruptions of the two men and the Wife’s own sharp retorts make the Wife’s performance look more like game than earnest, more bent on entertaining her audience than on instructing them. However, the distinction between game and earnest in the Canterbury Tales is hardly so neat. The Wife’s rival, the Clerk, asks his audience to 45. I read the Wife’s curse very differently from Hansen, who believes that the Wife, in trying to injure her addressee with her words, shows her “naive faith in language” (Fictions of Gender, 39). 46. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 16– 17. 47. This point has been made by Andreas, “The Rhetoric of Chaucerian Comedy,” 58. Andreas notes in particular the folk tradition of the “flyting,” a kind of playfully invective poetry common among Chaucer’s successors.


ignore the message of his own tale, yet it is unlikely that medieval readers took earnestly his slyly playful request that women emulate the “crabbed eloquence” of the Wife rather than Griselda’s patience. Such a request seems, rather, to be a calculated stifling of any objections that would be offered by women such as the Wife of Bath. His play, in other words, is a masterful control of his audience in that it anticipates and forestalls interpretations that might resist the orthodoxy of his tale of exemplary female virtue or his exegetical gloss on it. While he has played at being women’s friend, he has ultimately managed to smoothly counter the Wife’s unruly appeal by reassuring the men in his audience that whether unruly like the Wife or exemplary like Griselda, women can be silenced in the interests of male dominance.48 It might be objected that such a sophisticated mastery of his audience could be attributed to the Clerk because he is presented in the General Prologue as a serious man who would “gladly learn and gladly teach,” whereas the Wife’s teaching, as we have seen, appears as a perverse parody of a serious clerical exemplum, a mock sermon in effect. It might also be argued that the Clerk’s envoy is distinctly separated from the rest of the text (the scribal heading of “Lenvoy de Chaucer” leading some to think it Chaucer’s independent composition) and thus demarcates the line between serious and play, whereas the Wife’s separation between her curse and her tale is less distinct. The Clerk’s move may be executed with more sophistication, as one would expect of his training in rhetoric, but the Wife’s earlier declaration that her intent is to play should put us on the lookout for her game, executed though it may be in her more suitably oral mode. Her curse, like the Clerk’s envoy, despite its attempt to undo its message through play, ultimately asks us to return to the truth of this message, an invitation justified in the context of medieval culture generally, where play is seen to have a measure of truth behind it. A medieval proverb asserts, “En burdant dit hom veir” (In joking there is truth).49 It is furthermore justified in the context of the Canterbury Tales’ preoccupation with the truth behind jests. For example, when the Host teases the celibate Monk about his wasted virility, he adds, “But be nat wrooth, my lord, though that I pleye. / Ful ofte in game a sooth I have herd seye!” (VII.1963– 64). The Host both notes that, despite his jesting, he has 48. On the Clerk’s strategy of preemptively silencing the voices of any women like the Wife of Bath, see Hansen, Fictions of Gender, 205. 49. Proverbes fran¸cais antérieurs au XVe Siècle, ed. Joseph Morawski, 23 (proverb 633).

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spoken some “sooth” and asks that such truth, so spoken, not anger his target. Similarly, after the Host has disparaged the Cook’s unsavory business practices, he nonetheless asks him not to be angry, for “A man may seye ful sooth in game and pley.” The Cook retorts that a jest that hits too close to the truth should be considered a bad jest: “But ‘sooth pley, quaad pley,’ as the Flemyng seith” (I.4354– 57). Play may announce itself as merely a bit of fun, but it often covers up anger and aggression, a dissimulation condemned by the Parson, who prefers honest anger plainly expressed: “The goode Ire is by jalousie of goodnesse, thurgh which a man is wrooth with wikkednesse and agayns wikkednesse; and therefore seith a wys man that Ire is bet than pley” (X.538). In a later passage in his discussion of anger, he describes play as a kind of double-talk: “Now comth the synne of double tonge, swiche as speken faire byforn folk and wikkedly bihynde, or elles they maken semblant as though they speeke of good entencioun, or elles in game and pley, and yet they speke of wikked entente” (X.643; emphasis added). The Parson’s comment, coming as it does at the end of the Canterbury Tales, would seem to deliver with final authority the idea that it is better to just say what one means, with forthright indignation, than to use sleight of tongue. However, the Parson, who disdains verse in favor of prose, is characterized as hostile to humor in general, towing the line of conservative clergy whereby jokers are full of sin, “for they maken folk to laughe at hire japerie as folk doon at the gawdes of an ape. Swich japeres deffendeth Seint Paul” (X.650).50 If Chaucer has the somber Parson deliver a view so hostile to play, it is because, through the Pardoner’s preaching, he is bringing the temporary space of his festive fiction to an end. To return to Olson’s point discussed earlier, Chaucer uses his fiction to explore the tension between play as a public activity engaged in for mutual solace and a vehicle for expressing individual grievances. The pilgrims are expected to put aside any direct attacks on their adversaries and to use only fiction to respond to fictive injuries made by other pilgrims, for, as Kendrick notes, “the player who gets angry is a spoilsport and succeeds only in making his own fall into a reality.”51 The only fitting way to “quite” one’s opponent is to answer in kind, with a tale that disguises the “truth” under the guise of fiction. 50. This is a paraphrase of Eph. 5:4. 51. Kendrick, Chaucerian Play, 60.


In what sense might the Wife’s performance reflect this convention? One problem with answering this question is that it is hard to ascertain Chaucer’s final plan for the arrangement of his tales. When the Wife was originally assigned what is now the Shipman’s Tale, Chaucer probably had her interrupt the Host’s request to the Parson to offer a “predicacioun” to the company, but in the shape taken by the manuscript tradition, her prologue does not overtly package her tale as a response to another teller (as the Reeve answers the Miller, for example). The content of her prologue could be seen as a response to the Man of Law’s saint’s life/romance of Custance (the tale that precedes the Wife’s in most manuscripts) and its assertion that “Wommen are born to thraldom and penance, / And to been under mannes governance” (II.286– 87). Regardless of the links between the Wife and other pilgrims that Chaucer had in mind, the arguments in her prologue suggest that she is not responding to a “fictive injury” at all, but rather to the real injury of antifeminism that has shaped her life and that of all women. This real injury, however, is indeed related to “fiction,” if by fiction we mean writing about women, the books of “wikked wives” read by Jankyn for his own amusement. We have come back to my earlier question about how a woman might respond to antifeminism. In the context of Kendrick’s argument about the proper response to fictive injuries, we can ask: As the butt of the joke of antifeminist satire, how does she respond without being a spoilsport yet escape being fully complicitous with that satire’s representation of her as one of that class of “wyves”? Kendrick notes that in the Canterbury Tales the butt of the joke achieves one of two things by channeling his or her anger in a fiction: to show “either that ‘the shoe does not fit,’ that he does not perceive himself in or identify with the fabliau’s scapegoat, but instead with the winners; or that he does identify with the scapegoat, but only partially, for ‘he’ comprises more than one self, and his superior self, invulnerable, is capable of laughing along with everyone else at the inferior self mocked in the fabliau’s fiction.”52 Kendrick suggests that the Merchant may be an example of the latter since the Merchant’s tale of a cuckolded husband is a way of asserting his self-esteem, or “putting himself on top” in Kendrick’s words, by telling a joke on himself. When we read the Wife’s prologue and tale as a response to the antifeminist satire enjoyed by men such as Jankyn, her performance of feminine unruliness looks like a way of “putting herself 52. Ibid.

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on top” by telling a sort of joke on herself. This does not mean that the Wife has merely reduced herself to a joke, for by showing her understanding of the terms of the game, she demonstrates that she can manipulate them. In packaging her ranting against male authority as play, the resulting tension is that she appears both as a woman with a serious bone to pick and as a joker intent on amusing her audience by playing her allotted role. Would Chaucer want us to read the Wife as playful jester in the way I have been suggesting, and if so, why? To argue, as I have done, that Chaucer deliberately created a witty female spokesperson for women, endowing her with the power of play, is not to assert that he did so in order to champion women. The Wife’s discourse is used by men within the Canterbury Tales as a cautionary reminder of the woes of marriage, and Chaucer himself joked about the Wife of Bath in a poem to his friend Bukton, teasing him about his impending marriage.53 But given that Chaucer’s own play with the “earnest and game” topos parallels that of the Wife, it is likely that Chaucer uses her in a way that is more complex than a mere cautionary example against female riot. If Chaucer seems so fond of his laughing Wife, it is more because of what she allows him to get away with than for what she says on behalf of women. Chaucer uses his Wife as a kind of feminine disguise that permits him to “talk back” to important literary traditions to which he belongs. Just as men in the later Middle Ages would don female clothing both as a practical disguise and as a symbolic license for their protest against oppressive civic authorities, the Wife is used by Chaucer to respond to a tradition against which his own literary contribution must be measured and judged.54 Chaucer is thus not so much a 53. “The Wyf of Bathe I pray yow that ye rede / Of this matere that we have on honde. / God graunte yow your lyf frely to lede / In fredam, for ful hard is to be bonde” (Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton, p. 656, ll. 29– 32). Similarly, in the Merchant’s Tale, Justinus, counseling his brother against marriage, reminds him of the dangers of marrying: “The Wyf of Bathe, if ye han understonde, / Of mariage, which we have on honde, / Declared hath ful wel in litel space” (III.1685– 87). 54. Crane, Gender and Romance, 130. Crane argues that the Wife of Bath is Chaucer himself, taking on the transvestite persona as a sanctioned way to disrupt the literary conventions while “taking shelter behind the identity of the less responsible and rational gender,” referring to Natalie Davis’s work on the “woman on top” (in Society and Culture, 149– 50). Crane also sees the loathly lady’s shape-shifting ability (between beautiful young lady and old hag) as an example of how both roles are masquerades that highlight the performative aspect of both poles of femininity (88). Elsewhere, Crane suggests that the episode in which the Wife destroys Jankyn’s book echoes an episode during the uprising of 1381 in which one Margaret Starre, participating with other rebels in burning books from the Cambridge library, shouted, “Away with the knowledge of clerks, away with it.” Crane notes that the uprising “was


sympathetic feminist arguing on behalf of women as he is a male author using his female character to play his own part in a masculine culture, which as De Bury’s anecdote of the talking books suggests and as Jankyn’s chuckling over his book explicitly stages, is a game played between men. Yet Chaucer is also keenly aware that he is using women in this way. When the Wife asks, “Been ther none othere maner resemblances / That ye may likne youre parables to, / But if a sely wyf be oon of tho?” (368– 70), her rhetorical question brings attention to a crisis of representation in which Woman has no meaning since she is only a “vehicle to be used for thinking,” to return to Howard Bloch’s words. Rather than showing that Chaucer is attempting to take sides pro or contra women, it suggests his interest in the discursive methods involved in debating questions such as these.55 While not necessarily disagreeing with the negative pronouncements on women made by those such as Walter Map, he may nonetheless be keenly aware of the precarious logic underlying many of those arguments and aware of the resistance to them that could be voiced by readers, including his own. The framing of the storytelling contest within the outer frame of the pilgrimage in fact stages reactions to the individual tales, bringing our attention to the often contentious nature of literary interpretation itself.56 As the prevalence of the game/play topos illustrates, Chaucer inextricably bound up with anticlerical sentiment” (“The Writing Lesson of 1381,” 215). Martin also explicitly connects Chaucer to the Wife: “Of the pilgrims she is closest to Chaucer. Like her creator, she criticizes through comedy, she weighs authority against experience and experience against authority, she is aware of the sexuality in textuality and she jokily subverts the conventions of male authorship” (Chaucer’s Women, 217). 55. See Jill Mann’s discussion of the Nun’s Priest’s absurd apology to women readers for the misogynous words of the cock Chauntecleer: “Passe over, for I seyde it in my game. . . . Thise been the cokkes wordes, and nat myne; I kan noon harm of no womman divyne” (VII.3262, 3266). As Mann observes, the words are in fact the priest’s, not the cock’s, so that the putative apology “is revealed as merely a mechanical piece of rhetoric, an evasion of authorial responsibility, equivalent to the evasion of masculine responsibility in the antifeminist comments themselves, which try to pin the blame for the fox’s actions on the hen” (“Apologies to Women,” 30). Such an absurd apology, claims Mann, shows Chaucer’s awareness of the devious rhetorical moves made by male authors. 56. On this point, see Olson, Literature as Recreation, 162. Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion, claims that one of the effects of the rebellion of 1381 was to engender an acute awareness in English authors of the potential of their words reaching audiences far beyond the elite circles for which they were intended. Noting in particular the awareness shown by the Nun’s Priest of potential objections by the varied members of the pilgrimage group, each with their own class, professional, and gender interests, Justice argues that the Canterbury Tales differs notably from Chaucer’s previous fictions in that it demonstrates Chaucer’s anxiety about relations of power as they pertain to control of discourse and about the limited control that he could have over his own readers.

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uses play to equivocate, exempting himself from the responsibility he leaves to readers. This is the strategy that, according to Elaine Tuttle Hansen, makes Chaucer most resemble his Clerk, who, like Chaucer, uses his female character (Griselda) in a game played between men. Noting that Chaucer speaks through his characters in a way that plays on the proximity and distance between himself and his narrator, she argues that through the Clerk, Chaucer “creates the possibility of writing about his own limitations and biases with a penetrating self-scrutiny and an ironic self-reflexivity, and hence at the same time implying that he has in some sense escaped these limits and can be caught only in the equivocal act of writing and the liberating gesture of humor.”57 What I find particularly intriguing about Hansen’s remark is that it returns us to the notion that characters in the Canterbury Tales use their playful fictions to show their awareness of their limitations, by telling a joke on themselves. But whereas Hansen sees a similarity only between the Clerk and Chaucer, viewing the Wife as an unwitting victim of Chaucer’s own joke, it seems to me that the Wife is useful to Chaucer precisely because she allows him to show his awareness of his implication in a tradition of male authorship, an awareness that enables himself to step beyond it to “put himself on top.” He gives his Wife a voice that critiques the tradition to which he belongs, but simultaneously shows he is still in control, demonstrating that he can play that role, too. More importantly, the mastery he demonstrates through his feminine disguise does not foreclose the possibility of women’s participation in this literary game. In many courts throughout Europe playful linguistic sparring between the sexes was a kind of recreation in which women participated, both receiving and returning barbed witticisms. Given this cultural context, we should imagine women readers of Chaucer’s work able to get the jokes of the sly male narrators without necessarily being silenced or offended by them. Nicola McDonald has argued, for example, that Chaucer expected women readers of the Legend of Good Women to catch, and laugh at, the kind of banter performed by the narrator, who, after expounding at length the examples of men who have deceived women, urges women in the audience: “Be war, ye wemen, of youre subtyl fo, /. . . /And trusteth, as in love, no man but me” (2559– 61). Most readers see this 57. Hansen, Fictions of Gender, 206– 7.


comment as ironic, since the poet-narrator has, with a wink, implicitly aligned himself with the “bad men” of the legends he has just recounted rather than with the inscribed female readers he claims to champion. But McDonald also notes that this type of humor does not, of necessity, exclude women. Unless a chorus of knowing female laughter is imagined in reply, the joke, I think, misses its mark. Indeed, if we don’t imagine an audience comprised of both men and women, both equally “in the know,” then much of the poem, and especially the narrator’s banter, just doesn’t work. The tastes, literary or otherwise, of aristocratic, fourteenthcentury women are emerging only slowly, yet there is nothing to suggest that the Legend’s blend of compliment and comedy would have offended them.58 The notion of women and men “in the know” is useful for imagining Chaucer’s playful relationship with readers of the Canterbury Tales, on whom he counted to play the game along with him. It also reinforces this notion of giving and taking away, which we have seen in both the Wife and the Clerk. In this context, the Wife of Bath could be seen as part of Chaucer’s game with his female readers. He gives them a woman who speaks on their behalf, who spars with her adversaries, but he takes her away, too, by having her speak against herself. Such a game may help to show that a seeming defense of women is undercut by Chaucer’s irony, but does not mean that women could not “get” and laugh at his game, particularly since Chaucer also shows in his character of the Wife that he is fully aware of the biases of the tradition from which he speaks. I have argued for the many ways in which the Wife’s use of play coincides with Chaucer’s own. This does not mean, however, that the Wife is nothing but play. If Chaucer’s creation of his fictional Wife was not motivated out of a desire to defend women, the effect of her performance is nonetheless to bring attention to the discursive methods used to define an authoritative tradition and the logical inconsistencies they entail, thereby blurring the lines between masculine and feminine, authority and experience.59 Whatever Chaucer’s view of women, what he has dramatized is the 58. McDonald, “Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women,” 24. 59. See the similar observations by Hahn, “Teaching the Resistant Woman,” 434; and Crane, Gender and Romance, 131.

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notion of antifeminism as a game, one that he is very self-consciously engaged in playing. His Wife, moreover, stages a woman’s potential response to this game, inviting women, like her denied access to debate at the medieval university, to respond with laughter in a world where men would not always listen to the words of a wise old woman. Whereas De Bury’s books can laugh at women because of their ignorance of a tradition forged by a coterie of male authors, the problem Chaucer’s preoccupation with his Wife evokes is that the terrain of women and laughter has shifted into a realm far more public, in which women, although not dealt the same deck of cards as men, are determined to join in the game.

2

“Such tales were not to be told among ladies” Women’s Wit and the Problem of Modesty in Boccaccio’s Decameron

La novella da Dioneo raccontata prima con un poco di vergogna punse i cuori delle donne ascoltanti e con onesto rossore nel loro viso apparito ne diede segno; e poi quella, l’una l’altra guardando, appena del rider potendosi abstenere, soghignando ascoltarono. Ma venuta di questa la fine, poi che lui con alquante dolci parolette ebber morso, volendo mostrare che simili novelle non fossero tra donne da raccontare. (I.5, 89–90) [At first, the story told by Dioneo pricked the hearts of the ladies who were listening with a bit of embarrassment, which was made evident by the modest blushes on their faces; but then, as they looked at each other, they could hardly keep from laughing, and they smiled as they listened. As soon as the story came to an end, they reprimanded Dioneo with a few gentle remarks in order to show him that such tales were not to be told among ladies.] (42)1

occaccio’s Decameron (begun around 1350), perhaps more than any other medieval or Renaissance literary work, is specifically concerned with women’s laughter, for his female storytellers laugh at the stories told throughout the work and tell humorous stories of their own. But whereas the Wife of Bath 1. I quote from the English translation by Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella and the Italian text edited by Vittore Branca. Where page references are given together, the first is the Italian, the second the English.

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mocks norms of feminine decorum and plays the role of rampant female unruliness, Boccaccio’s female storytellers skirt with more difficulty the line between proper feminine modesty and unruly laughter. Their blushes and their reprimand to the male storyteller to remember that they are ladies show how difficult it could be for medieval women of the bourgeoisie or nobility to laugh without compromising their modesty. Rather than suggesting that ladies eschew laughter and wit, however, Boccaccio demonstrates an unusually keen interest in exploring the extent to which women might use them to their advantage. Many of the stories extol the virtues of women’s wit, which is in fact often used to challenge assumptions about feminine modesty. Furthermore, the flirtatious sparring between the members of the brigata proposes that women’s laughter may also bring pleasure to men. The Decameron is especially helpful in exploring medieval attitudes toward women’s laughter because it was explicitly written, according to Boccaccio’s preface to the work, for the pleasure of women. His claim invites us to ask how a male author might amuse women as well as what motive he might have for doing so. The Decameron is also helpful because its framework structure dramatizes the various ways in which medieval men and women might have responded to comic tales in which gender figured prominently. By examining differences between the male and female storytellers’ responses to the stories, we are able to infer some possible ways in which gender influenced the response to comic literature among actual readers of Boccaccio’s time.

Boccaccio and His Women Readers: Ladies’ Man Boccaccio’s concern with women’s laughter is reflected in the five structural levels or “frames” of the work: the world of the narrator Boccaccio, the world of Boccaccio’s readers, the world of the plague, the world of the ten storytellers (or the brigata), and the world represented within the stories told by the storytellers.2 In all of these frames, Boccaccio both refers explicitly to women’s laughter and demonstrates interest in women as readers. He addresses his work to ladies in love and has seven women among the brigata of storytellers who laugh at each others’ stories. Although these inscribed 2. See Potter, Five Frames for the “Decameron.”

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readers include men as well as women, in ninety of the stories the brigata narrators address their stories to “dear ladies” or “valorous ladies,” and in the conclusion to the tales we are often told the ladies’ reactions, which reinforces throughout the work the impression that Boccaccio is particularly interested in women as readers. Whether or not Boccaccio truly intended the Decameron principally for women readers is harder to determine.3 In the introduction to Day IV, it is clear in his address to his potential critics that he had in mind these male readers as well. Women were most likely among his readers since many copies of the work were owned by the most eminent merchant families of Florence.4 In a letter of 1360, a man demands that his copy, borrowed for quite some time by the addressee’s wife, be returned to him immediately.5 In addition to an audience of the well-to-do mercantile class in Florence and elsewhere, it is likely that the work enjoyed popularity in the court society of Naples, where women were actively reading.6 Finally, the tales were also told in the public squares in front of an eager populace.7 It thus appears that the Decameron was known to Italian women from various social strata, although many women, particularly those who heard rather than read the collection, perhaps only knew parts of it.8 Women who did read the Decameron encountered a work that explicitly invited them to read as women, for Boccaccio dedicates it to them and takes consistent care to craft the fictive “dearest and fairest ladies” that he imagines as the readers of his work. Boccaccio’s interest in laughter can be understood to stem partly from the plague that raged throughout Florence in 1348 and led to the loss of as much as three-quarters of the city’s population. Boccaccio’s claim that his gift of laughter could heal the melancholy brought on by the plague echoes medical treatises of the time that advocate fleeing plague-ridden towns to seek refuge where one can engage in songs and entertainment, 3. Janet Levarie Smarr provides a helpful summary of the various explanations given for Boccaccio’s addressing the work to women (Boccaccio and Fiammetta, 169– 74). 4. Branca, Boccaccio, 199. 5. Ibid., 197. 6. Smarr, Boccaccio and Fiammetta, 267 n. 8. 7. Branca, Boccaccio, 201. 8. See also Smarr, “Boccaccio and Renaissance Women,” 279– 97, for a discussion of the female readership of the Decameron in the sixteenth century. Smarr argues that the Decameron was a source of inspiration for women writers, notably for Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron.

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thus relieving one’s mind of unpleasant and potentially harmful thoughts.9 The Decameron dramatizes such contemporary therapeutic theories of literature for pleasure by having the members of the brigata heal themselves through delightful stories. Another therapeutic justification for the Decameron concerns lovesickness, since melancholy arising from unrequited or unfulfilled romantic passion was in the Middle Ages also considered a kind of medical condition. Whereas men could be healed from their affliction by having sexual relations (preferably with the object of their passion), such a remedy could not be honorably prescribed for women, a disparity that can be seen within the Decameron tales.10 Men could also engage in various distractions such as hunting, riding, or attending to business, which would remove any painful thought (noioso pensiero), whereas women were more often confined to the home, an inequality Boccaccio claims he wants to remedy, offering up his stories as medicine for women in love, a kind of sequel to Ovid’s Remedia amoris, aiming to help women avoid the dangers of love, whereas Ovid intended to help men. Such literary medicine is not extended to all women, only to those whose love causes them to languish in idleness, since to those women who are not in love he leaves “l’ago e ’l fuso e l’arcolaio” (8) [the needle, spindle, and wool winder, 3].11 By claiming to help lovelorn and leisured women, Boccaccio voices particular concern for their health and happiness. However, Boccaccio’s claim of wanting to cure lovesick women is also intricately woven into his own pose as victim of love. In the pages preceding his address to women in love, he announces that, now free from the bonds of love, he nonetheless has suffered and is in need of more compassion than any other man. Although claiming to blame not the cruelty of the lady but rather his own “poco regulato appetito” [unrestrained desire], 9. See Mazzotta, The World at Play in Boccaccio’s “Decameron,” 32; and Olson, Literature as Recreation, 165– 82. Olson notes that laughter as a treatment for various ailments has been prescribed by modern physicians as well (197). 10. Zago, “Women, Medicine, and the Law in Boccaccio’s Decameron,” 65– 67. 11. Victoria Kirkham notes that this passage echoes closely Ovid’s Heroides (XIX) (The Sign of Reason in Boccaccio’s Fiction, 118– 19). Also see Calabrese, “Men and Sex,” which argues that despite Boccaccio’s claim that he is writing to remedy women’s lovesickness, the Decameron is actually more focused on showing how men are “vulnerable, fragile, and subject to female power” (65). Calabrese’s reading at several points complements my own reading of the Decameron in pointing out how Boccaccio plays with seemingly discrete binaries such as reason versus passion or modesty versus immodesty.


he dons the comic mask of the helpless victim of female charms. At the same time, he portrays himself as a bit of a ladies’ man. At the beginning of Day IV, he claims he cannot be blamed for loving beautiful women, “perché il porro abbia il capo bianco, che la coda sia verde” (467) [for though the leek may have a white top, its roots can still be green, 248]. The comparison of himself to a leek with green leaves but a white top (a white-haired man nonetheless endowed with sexual vigor) is later echoed by an old physician in one of the tales told (I.10). In the tale, a group of women make fun of the doctor, but he replies that he has often observed ladies eating leeks, and that, contrary to common sense, they leave the delicious bulb in their hands while they eat the bitter leaves. He then asks how he is to know whether they might not make the same mistake when it comes to choosing their lovers, and therefore choose him and discard younger men. The narrator, Pampinea, openly condemns the women’s laughter as foolishness, for they erroneously believe “that the extremely delightful passion of love should dwell only in the foolish minds of the young and nowhere else” (119; 57). As though on Boccaccio’s behalf, Pampinea warns women not to make fun of old men in love. Boccaccio’s pose as ladies’ man is even more clear in the double entendres he uses to refer to his authorship. At the very end of the work, he apologizes to those ladies who have found him to have an evil tongue or language (lingua can mean either), but assures them that his tongue/ language is top quality: “mi disse una mia vicina che io l’aveva la migliore e la piu´ dolce del mundo” (1261) [I was told by a lady, a neighbour of mine, that I had the finest and sweetest tongue in the world]. Similarly, he responds to those women who think he has put too many jests and other light matter in his work, by assuring them that he is a “weighty” writer: Io confesso d’esser pesato e molte volte de’ miei d´ı essere stato; e per cio, ` parlando a quelle che pesato non m’hanno, affermo che io non son grave, anzi son io s´ı lieve, che io sto a galla nell’acqua; e considerato che le prediche fatte da’ frati per rimorder delle lor colpe gli uomini, il piu` oggi piene di motti e di ciance e di scede, estimai che quegli medesimi non stesser male nelle mie novelle, scritte per cacciar la malinconia delle femine. (1260) [I confess that I do have weight and to have been weighed many a time in my day. And so, speaking to those ladies who have not

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weighed me, let me assure them that I am not heavy at all—on the contrary, I am so light that I float on water; when you consider that the sermons delivered by friars to reproach men for their sins are, for the most part, full of nonsense, jokes, and foolishness, I felt that these same things would not be out of place in my stories, which are, after all, written to drive away a lady’s melancholy.] (688) Boccaccio’s seeming apology to ladies who have found his work objectionable thus becomes sexual innuendo. Mazzotta, in discussing the double entendre of the words “lieve” and “pesato”—which refer on the surface to rhetorical terms of level of style but in context also imply sexual intercourse—argues that a fundamental mechanism of Boccaccio’s comedy is “one that mixes body and language, or more precisely, focuses on what can be called the body’s language.”12 Boccaccio’s location of his comedy in his own body establishes a crucial dynamic between himself and his female readers. While claiming to use his comedy to refresh the spirits of his otiose lady readers by bringing them literary pleasure, Boccaccio insinuates that they provide him with a pleasure of his own.

When Modesty and Laughter Collide The portrayal of the fictional women within the Decameron is as ambivalent as his attitude toward his women readers. The seven ladies are between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight, “savia ciascuna e di sangue nobile e bella di forma e ornata di costumi e di leggiadra onestà” (29) [all were intelligent and of noble birth and beautiful to look at, well-mannered and gracefully modest, 12]. Although they are all older than the common age of marriage for women of their time (fourteen to seventeen) none of the young ladies is married. The older age may be significant, since the women are also portrayed as judicious, and capable of governing their behavior, qualities that immature young girls would likely not possess. Significantly, it is a woman, Pampinea, who proposes the project of leaving the city and who initiates the storytelling structure, and scholars traditionally have proposed that she represents the virtue of prudence, with the other ladies of the brigata completing the catalog of the seven virtues.13 The praise for the women’s fine 12. Mazzotta, World at Play, 160. 13. See Kirkham, “An Allegorically Tempered Decameron,” in Sign of Reason, 131– 71.


qualities is rendered somewhat ambivalent, however, when Boccaccio worries that his readers might find the ladies’ behavior suspect, particularly since they have listened to or told many of the stories. He assigns them pseudonyms, claiming that he wants to protect their anonymity because standards of his day are stricter than those during the plague, and he does not want anyone to diminish with their indecent talk the dignity or good reputation (onestà) of these worthy ladies (30; 13). With his excuse of extenuating circumstances, Boccaccio insists that the ladies are morally upright, yet in doing so he draws attention to those aspects of their behavior that might be judged improper. When Boccaccio notes that the standards for feminine decorum were looser during the time of the plague, he explicitly connects women’s modesty with their laughter. In his lengthy description of the many forms of social breakdown during the plague, he observes that women, no matter how well bred and virtuous, were obliged to bare their bodies to male servants if their female servants had died, and proposes that this situation explains why women after the plague may be less chaste (undoubtedly a wink to his male audience at the expense of their female contemporaries). Boccaccio then notes that whereas in death men usually count on women to take care of the bodies and perform mourning respectfully, the emotional strains of the plague were more likely to lead to laughter: e pochissimi erano coloro a’ quali i pietosi pianti e l’amare lagrime de’ suoi congiunti fossero concedute, anzi in luogo di quelle s’usavano per li piu´ risa e motti e festeggiar compagnevole; la quale usanza le donne, in gran parte postposta la donnesca pietà, per salute di loro avevano ottimamenta appresa. (23– 24) [Very few were granted the piteous laments and bitter tears of their relatives; on the contrary, most relatives were somewhere else, laughing, joking, and amusing themselves; even the women learned this practice too well, having put aside, for the most part, their womanly compassion for their own safety.] (10) Boccaccio’s statement that women had learned the art of laughter only once freed from the “feminine concern” with more serious matters suggests the degree to which laughter was normally considered incompatible with feminine decorum. In Del Reggimento e costumi di Donna, a well-known conduct

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book of the early fourteenth century by Francesco da Barberino, women are reminded not to laugh with their mouths wide open, for it would have the unseemly result of revealing their teeth. Like other medieval conduct books, the Reggimento echoes a simultaneous concern with women’s sexuality and their laughter. Of particular interest in the context of the Decameron is that Barberino explicitly asserts that control of laughter is more relevant to women of the nobility, whereas women of lesser rank could have more freedom: “E porrà ben piu` ridere guicare / E piu` d’attorno onestamente andare / Ed anco in balli e canti / Piu` allegrezza menare.”14 The notion that peasant girls can go about town amusing themselves freely reminds us of Boccaccio’s earlier dedication of his work to women who did not have such freedom. Having established the special exception of the plague as justification, Boccaccio gives his ladies free rein to laugh. They laugh at many different kinds of stories: tales of rogues who masquerade as saints (I.1), tales of women who deceive their husbands (Day VII), tales of abbots who get away with sleeping with girls they have secreted in the monastery (I.4), and tales of men who fall into toilets (II.5). After many stories, Boccaccio notes that the ladies laugh very heartily or many times. Their laughter is assumed to have become so obvious to readers that the narrator comments, after Lauretta’s tale on Day VIII, “There is no need to ask how certain parts of the Queen’s story made the ladies laugh: there was not one among them who did not have tears in her eyes at least a dozen times from too much laughter” (544) [Quanto la novella della reina in diversi luoghi facesse le donne ridere, non e` da domandare: niuna ve ne era a cui per soperchio riso non fossero dodici volte le lagrime venute in su gli occhi, 1008]. The laughter of Boccaccio’s ladies, exuberant and loud, contrasts with the image of the barely smiling lady of conduct manuals. It is only when the stories are of a sexual nature that the ladies’ laughter is shown to conflict with norms of feminine comportment. In such cases, they attempt to hide their laughter or blush because such tales are not to be told in the company of ladies. For example, after Filostrato’s tale about the gardener who sneaks into the abbey and has sex with all the nuns (III.1), the narrator informs us that parts of the story had made the ladies laugh, while others had caused them to blush. Although Boccaccio notes these 14. A summary of the text is located in Hentsch, De la littérature didactique, 106– 8.


blushing reactions, he is careful to point out that the women enjoy the sexual humor. In reaction to Dioneo’s tale (V.10) about a woman whose husband prefers the unnatural “dry path” (anal intercourse with men) to the natural “wet path” (heterosexual intercourse), leading her to take a lover, the narrator remarks that “if the ladies’ laughter seemed restrained, it was more out of modesty than lack of amusement” (376) [meno per vergogna dalle donne risa che per poco diletto, 706]. The ladies are amused, but their modesty (vergogna) forces them to restrain their laughter. It is this conflict between sexual humor and women’s modesty that so seems to preoccupy Boccaccio throughout the Decameron. As Regina Barreca has remarked in her study of contemporary American humor, sexual humor has traditionally placed women in a bind. They cannot laugh at a sexual joke, for to do so is to admit that they understand the joke and that, therefore, they know more about sex than they should. She uses as her primary example the television game show The Dating Game (specifically in its earlier years) in which young women ask a series of questions to the several male suitors who can end up winning a date with her if she likes their answers. Barreca notes the awkward moment for the female contestant when men answer her question with sexual innuendo: If she laughed, she was doomed, because her laughter would give away a terrible secret about her: that she got the joke. That she knew what he was talking about. . . . It was in his script to make the dirty joke, and it was in her script only to smile. The girl couldn’t laugh, because Good Girls just didn’t “get it”—“it” being, almost inevitably, the not-so-hidden sexual meaning in male humor.15 While Boccaccio’s ladies do laugh rather than smile, Boccaccio’s repeated references to their blushes serve to show precisely the bind in which sexual humor places women, particularly unmarried women who presumably have not yet had sexual experiences.16 Such modesty in the face of sexual language was expected of women in the Middle Ages. According to Hostiensis, cardinal bishop of the thirteenth 15. Barreca, Snow White, 2– 3. 16. Apte notes that in many cultures unmarried women are discouraged from telling jokes, but postmenopausal women are accorded more license to laugh and joke (Humor and Laughter, 75– 81).

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century, women typically blushed at the mention of sex and would use euphemisms for sexual terms.17 The scandal that a woman using blunt sexual language would provoke is dramatized clearly in Le Ménagier de Paris, a conduct book written in about 1394 by an elderly Parisian for his young wife. The husband warns his wife about vulgar speech and explicitly cautions against using it in order to be amusing: Et certes, femmes ne doivent parler de nulle laidure, non mye seulement de con, de cul ne de autres secretz membres de nature, car c’est deshonneste chose a femme d’en parler. Je oy une foiz raconter d’une jeune preudefemme qui estoit assise en une presse de ses autres amis et amyes. Et par adventure elle dist par esbatement aux autres: “Vous me pressés si fort que bien la moictié de mon con me ride.” Et jasoit ce qu’elle l’eust dit par jeu et entre ses amis, cuidant faire la galoise, toutesvoyes les autres sages preudefemmes ses parentes l’en blasmerent a part. Item, telles femmes gouliardeuses dient aucunes foiz de femme qu’elle est putain ribaulde, et par ce disant il semble qu’elles sachent qu’est putain ou ribaulde, et preudefemmes ne scevent que ce est de ce. (129) [And certainly women shouldn’t speak of anything vulgar, certainly not about cunt, ass, or other private parts, for it is unseemly for women to talk of these things. I once heard of a virtuous young lady who was seated in a crowd of male and female friends. And by chance she said teasingly to the others: “You are crowding me so much that at least half of my cunt is wrinkled.” And although she said it in fun and among her friends, thinking she was gallant, nevertheless, in private the other wise young ladies blamed her parents. Such ribald women sometimes say of a woman that she is a bawdy whore, and it seems that they know what “whore” or “bawdy” means; but honorable women don’t know anything about it.]18 The young woman, in trying to be “gallant” or witty, has demonstrated that she is a “bad girl,” particularly since she speaks about her “con” in 17. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, 426– 27. 18. The translation is by Tania Bayard, A Medieval Home Companion (93– 94). Because Bayard’s translation omits about half of the original text, future translations of Le Ménagier are my own.


front of men. Even in jest, women must not use explicit sexual language. Moreover, the author asserts that even criticisms of such behavior are dangerous, for if a woman should reprimand the ribald woman by calling her “a bawdy whore,” she only demonstrates her own lack of innocence by revealing that she knows what these things mean. To be a lady, in this model, is to lack the knowledge of sex that using sexual language would betray. This pressure to maintain the appearance of innocence is especially keen when there is mixed company. In the Decameron, this is suggested when Filostrato, in recounting his tale about the two lovers who are caught together by the girl’s father (V.4), describes the girl whose “left hand was grasping that thing which you ladies are ashamed to mention in the company of gentlemen” (339) [con la sinistra mano presolo per quella cosa che voi tra gli uomini piu´ vi vergognate di nominare, 636]. In other words, ladies are not ashamed to mention the name of the man’s “cosa” when men are not around. Christine de Pizan cautions that girls should behave modestly especially in front of men, even when at home: “Young women should never be bold, skittish, or ribald, especially in the presence of any men whatsoever, whether clerks in the household, servingmen, or retainers attached to the family.”19 In this light, the blushes of the seven ladies of the brigata can be understood to show their concern about behaving properly in the company of their male companions. Yet such displays of decorum were apparently a source of much amusement to medieval men, because they could ultimately be construed as a performance of modesty rather than a true innocence of sexual matters. This is suggested in the fabliau “De la damoisele” about a young girl who can not tolerate hearing the word “foutre” (fuck) without feeling ill.20 As the tale makes clear, it is the term, not the act, that makes the girl ill, for she willingly engages in the act once her suitor cleverly devises euphemisms to describe and orchestrate it. By implication, the tale suggests that women’s objections to sexual matters are merely an act they perform to craft the modest appearance required of them. Such a lesson might similarly be gleaned from Dioneo’s tale of the innocent young Alibech, who is instructed by the clever hermit Rustico how to “put the Devil back in Hell” (III.10). 19. Treasury, 203. 20. Noomen and Van den Boogaard, Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux, 6:57– 90.

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Boccaccio himself takes a certain pleasure in the situation in which he has placed his own female readers. He does fret that women might say that he has made them listen to things that are not proper for virtuous ladies to say or hear (685) and indeed told a friend not to let the women in his house read his “trifles” [nugas], which might suggest sincere concern on his part.21 The subtitle of the Decameron, “Prencipe Galeotto” of course invokes Canto V of Dante’s Inferno, where through the example of Francesca’s tragic adulterous love for Paolo, sparked as the couple reads the story of Lancelot, romances of adulterous love are blamed for corrupting the minds of their readers. Boccaccio’s choice of this subtitle playfully invites readers to consider the Decameron as a “go-between” corrupting their own minds. This use of the literature as corruption trope is largely ironic, however, for within the Decameron, Boccaccio shifts the burden of responsibility onto his readers, warning them to mind their own reading rather than blaming the texts themselves.22 He argues that only a “prude” [spigolistra donna] would object to the few “little words here and there” because such women are “le quali piu´ le parole pesan che’ fatti e piu´ d’apparer s’ingegnan che d’esser buone” (1255) [ladies of the type who weigh words more than deeds and who strive more to seem good than to be so, 685]. With this passage, Boccaccio interrogates both the relationship between things and the words used to signify them and the question of appearing innocent without actually being so. The suggestion that words themselves cannot do harm is a common argument by Boccaccio’s time, having been made famous by Jean de Meun’s assertion in the Roman de la Rose (through the voice of Reason) that the words “testicles” (coilles) and “relics” (reliques) were neither good nor bad in themselves and that each word could, in fact, have been used in the place of the other (7109– 15). Boccaccio argues along similar lines that it is no more improper for him to have written naughty words than for men and women to say such words as “‘foro’ et ‘caviglia’ e ‘mortaio’ e ‘pestello’ e ‘salsiccia’ e ‘mortadello’” (1255) [“hole,” “peg,” “mortar,” “pestle,” “wiener,” and “fat sausage,” 685]. Whereas Jean argues that words in themselves cannot be improper since they are signifiers only arbitrarily attached to what they signify, Boccaccio goes a step further by 21. Smarr, Boccaccio and Fiammetta, 169. 22. See Noakes, “The Double Misreading of Paolo and Francesca,” for a stimulating discussion of how Dante uses the Paolo and Francesca episode to warn about the dangers of misreading rather than the dangers of literature itself.


showing that plays on words, another level of linguistic displacement away from what is signified, are improper only when the mind of the reader or listener willfully construes such a meaning. Consequently, Boccaccio argues that it is up to his lady readers to keep a pure mind, since his tales may either be harmful or useful depending on the listener: Niuna corrotta mente intese mai sanamente parola: e cos´ı come le oneste a quella non giovano, cos´ı quelle che tanto oneste non sono la ben disposta non posson contaminare, se non come il loto i solari raggi o le terrene brutture le bellezze del cielo. (1257) [A corrupt mind never understands a word in a healthy way! And just as fitting words are of no use to a corrupt mind, so a healthy mind cannot be contaminated by words which are not so proper, any more than mud can dirty the rays of the sun or earthly filth can mar the beauties of the skies.] (686) Such a claim is of course equivocal, for Boccaccio lets himself off the hook for anything readers might find offensive, a strategy later imitated by Chaucer in his invocations to his readers to exercise their judgment in distinguishing game from play. He has in effect blamed women for construing sexual meaning on his own literary work, a mere collection of words. The woman who objects to sexual humor simultaneously condemns herself for having understood it and makes herself appear a kind of narrowminded spoilsport or “prude,” much to the delight of male readers, who are free from such a dilemma.23 Christine de Pizan complained of the sexual language in the Roman de la Rose, asking of what value was a work that could not be read before ladies without making them blush. Gontier Col replied jocosely that if ladies blush, it is because of their own guilty consciences.24 Col’s response, well fifty years after the Decameron, suggests 23. Jill Mann, “Apologies to Women,” 5, has observed that Boccaccio’s interest in sexual language demonstrates, like Freud’s model of the joke, “linguistic displacement,” where talking about sex is more titillating than doing it. She furthermore argues that in his alleged apology to women readers, Boccaccio “uses the question of female delicacy or prudery to increase the reader’s enjoyment of linguistic displacement; it seems improbable that it was seriously prompted by concern for his women readers.” 24. Hicks, Débat, 56 and 103. Christine’s statement reads, “Et pour Dieu! que fait a louer lecture qui n’osera estre leue ne ramenteue en propre forme a la table des roynes, des

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how consistently men blamed women for not appreciating the humor that many men so clearly enjoyed. By implicating women in their own objections to sexual humor, Boccaccio places his female readers in a position that compromises their modesty. While claiming to be writing for women’s pleasure, he derives pleasure from literary sexual innuendo, like Freud’s joker who displaces sexual desire onto the language of the joke. Such a conclusion appears even stronger if one remembers Boccaccio’s male readers, who parallel the position of the male recipient of the sexual joke in Freud’s triangular model. Yet within the storytelling frame of the Decameron, unlike in Freud’s model, the women actually appear to enjoy sexual humor, for although they blush and show concern for their modesty, they generally laugh along with the men. After the tale of Alibech (III.10) the ladies of the brigata laugh, and within the frame of the story itself, the story’s popularity with women is emphasized, for it “was told and retold by one woman to another all over the city until it actually became a popular proverb” (239). Here a dirty story circulates within a commerce of joking between a whole community of women. The only time when laughter is restricted to the men of the brigata is after a tale in which a man learns to tame his unruly wife by beating her (IX.9). While the tale makes the men laugh, it causes some murmuring among the ladies, who appear not to have enjoyed it. Such resistance could have been noted after tales of cuckoldry and other sexual mischief; the fact that it was not suggests that whereas the women object to wife beating, they do not object to sexual transgressions. In one sense, this willing participation in sexual humor could be viewed as an example of the questionable behavior Boccaccio had highlighted before the men and women leave Florence. In his comment that he has “sometimes made ladies say things, and more often listen to things, which are not very proper for virtuous ladies to say or hear” (685), Boccaccio does seem concerned about the propriety of his ladies, although by noting that they have more often listened to rather than told the tales, he appears to be making an important distinction.25 princesses et des vaillans presentes fames, a qui convendroit couvrir la face de honte rougie! Quel bien donques y puet on glosser?” 25. The view that listening to salacious material was not as objectionable as actually speaking it is found in Aquinas’s remark that “talking and listening are very different, for a man properly listens to things he could not properly say” Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 4, sec. 851.


More importantly, it is simplistic to focus only on the sexual content of the humor without looking at the relationship between teller and recipient. The male storyteller most associated with sexual jesting is Dioneo, and his relationship with the seven ladies parallels in several important respects the relationship between Boccaccio and his lady readers. Significantly, all of his tales, except the very last tale about Griselda, are comic, and most are sexual in nature. But Dioneo wins the hearts of the women primarily because, like Boccaccio, he declares his intention to use the healing power of laughter to combat the sorrows of the plague: Donne, il vostro senno piu´ che il nostro avvedimento ci ha qui guidati; io non so quello che de’ vostri pensieri voi v’intendete di fare: li miei lasciai io dentro dalla porta della città allora che io con voi poco fa me ne usci’ fuori: e per cio` o voi a sollazzare e a ridere e a cantare con meco insieme vi disponete (tanto, dico, quanto alla vostra dignità s’appartiene), o voi mi licenziate che io per li miei pensier mi ritorni e steami nella città tribolata. (42) [Ladies, more than our preparations, it was your intelligence that guided us here. I do not know what you intend to do with your troubled thoughts, but I left mine inside the city walls when I passed through them in your company a little while ago; and so you must either make up your minds to enjoy yourselves and laugh and sing with me (as much, let me say, as your dignity permits), or you must give me leave to return to my worries and to remain in our troubled city.] (18) In extending his invitation, Dioneo shows that he knows that women want to laugh, but that their dignity (being in mixed company) might make them reluctant. His understanding of their delicate position and his appreciation of their good judgment (“senno”) coupled with his desire to amuse them, wins him the respect of the women. For example, Pampinea grants him the privilege of telling a tale on any subject he pleases (whereas the others are constrained by the theme of the day) because he is “a jovial and entertaining fellow” suggesting that she recognizes that his motive is to bring them cheer.26 According to medieval ethical justifications of play, made clear in the Canterbury Tales, Dioneo’s jesting can be understood as 26. On Dioneo’s privilege, see Grimaldi, Il privilegio di Dioneo.

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justifiable because it is founded in proper intent: mutual solace rather than individually motivated anger or ill will. The women’s warm response to Dioneo’s understanding of their desire to laugh contrasts with their displeasure when Filostrato sets the theme of love that ends unhappily (a theme chosen because he himself suffers from his love for one of them). Filostrato’s self-serving use of the storytelling framework is not surprisingly connected to the sin of wrath, as Victoria Kirkham has shown.27 Fiammetta announces that she will respect Filostrato’s wishes, but that it seems inappropriate since their goal in leaving Florence was to leave behind sorrow. Filostrato’s preference for sad stories and his own personal anger in fact directly contradict advice of the plague treatises, which advocate spurning sad thoughts in favor of cheerful ones.28 Pampinea rebels more openly, deciding to tell a comic story to please the group rather than to indulge the selfish desires of the king (IV.2). When it is Dioneo’s turn to tell his story at the end of the day, he announces his intention to tell a somewhat happier story, since he himself has been saddened by the previous ones, and Boccaccio remarks that the ladies laughed so much that they recovered from the melancholy caused by the previous stories. The next day, when it is his turn to tell a story, Filostrato apologizes to the ladies for having set the melancholy theme and makes amends by telling a story to make them laugh. Fiammetta acknowledges that since he has made them laugh, they can no longer hold his previous transgression against him; Filostrato is thus reformed and brought back into harmony with the group. Laughter is thus shown as a way to heal divisions within the community, specifically those caused by enmity between sexes due to unrequited love. It is significant that Boccaccio’s long defense of having written the 27. Sign of Reason, 140– 44. Kirkham assigns to Dioneo the soul’s faculty of concupiscence and to Panfilo the superior faculty of reason. While I find this plausible, I think that in interpreting Panfilo as the superior force of reason that must harness the destructive forces of wrath (Filostrato) and lust (Dioneo), Kirkham downplays the positive function played by Dioneo because she does not view it within the recreative theory of pleasure as a kind of healing. As ruler of Day X, and the storyteller who reminds the brigata of the necessity to return to their civic obligations, Panfilo does indeed guide the company back into the real world, but Dioneo, too, has his fitting place within the recreative frame of the storytelling. As Smarr notes, although he may represent the principle of carnal pleasure and comic delight, “Dioneo clearly knows what he is doing and is not so simple as he pretends” (Boccaccio and Fiammetta, 191). 28. Olson, Literature as Recreation, discusses plague tracts (171– 73) and the specific application to Filostrato (207– 8).


work to please ladies begins under the reign of the melancholy Filostrato, whose violation of the ludic agreement becomes all the more clear in the context of Boccaccio’s advocating using his comic art to bring pleasure, echoed by Dioneo. In contrast to Dioneo’s respect for the ritual space of solace, Filostrato’s selfishness threatens to rupture the community the storytellers have established as a remedy for physical and social destruction of the city.29 The contrast between Dioneo and Filostrato should thus be understood within the wider context of the justification of laughter both as therapeutic to the individual and as a way to instill mutual solace and communal cohesion. This justification of laughter as ensuring communitas is common not only in the Middle Ages, but also in antiquity, the Renaissance, and contemporary African cultures as well.30 Dioneo’s interest in using humor for the well-being of the group is consistent with his lack of malicious intent in telling his sexual jokes. In fact, the general goodwill the women bear him becomes clear in the one passage where it does appear that Dioneo is deliberately trying to goad his female companions. At the end of the fifth day, when it is his turn to sing a song, he offers a series of ribald songs, including “Monna Aldruda, lift up your tail, for I bring you good tidings,” “Raise your skirts, Monna Lapa,” and “Monna Simona, fill up your cask, it isn’t the month of October.”31 Queen Fiammetta, although suggesting he sing more fitting songs, laughs at his first few suggestions; it is only after he has persisted in his licentious litany that she tells him to “stop being funny and sing us a pretty song; if you don’t you’ll find out how angry I can get” (378) [lascia stare il molteggiare e dinne una bella; e se no, tu potresti provare come io mi so 29. On the ritual separation between the ordered and structured Decameron world and the chaotic, socially fragmented world of the plague, see Joseph Falvo, who argues that Boccaccio’s description of the ravages of the plague “disguises an even more terrible threat, the violence that destroys individual and social relationships” and that Boccaccio uses his storytellers to reaffirm the value of community (“Ritual and Ceremony in Boccaccio’s Decameron,” 148– 49). 30. On communal joking in antiquity, see Bremmer, “Jokes, Jokers, and Jokebooks.” On laughter as a way to build “communitas” in African societies, see Turner, The Ritual Process. Laughter, says Turner, “represents fellowship and good company,” as in the ritual where before being installed as a chief, a chief-to-be is commanded “not to be selfish, but to laugh with the people” (101). 31. The songs are, respectively, “Monna Aldruda, levate la coda, Ché buone novelle vi reco,” “Alzatevi i panni, monna Lapa,” “Monna Simona imbotta imbotta, E’ non e` del mese d’ottobre” (707– 8). Branca notes that these were popular songs of the period. Significantly, Dioneo’s bawdy singing ushers out the first half of the Decameron, thereby standing in the very center of the work.

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adirare, 708]. On one level, this passage may be an example of the work’s larger preoccupation with moderation, Dioneo’s needing to be reined in when his merrymaking impulse goes too far.32 In light of medieval views of properly motivated jest, however, it may also suggest that Dioneo has forgotten the proper goal of merrymaking. The fact that Fiammetta at first laughs at Dioneo’s molteggiare, but then promises to get angry, seems to suggest that it is not the songs themselves that anger her, but Dioneo’s intent to see how far he can push the women before they will react. This passage invites us to consider whether Christine de Pizan’s indignant response to Jean de Meun’s use of sexual language is motivated not by prudery, but rather by the intent behind that form of masculine joking, calculated to keep women outsiders by laughing at their expense. That Dioneo generally is mindful of the women’s need to preserve their modesty suggests why the women respond so enthusiastically to his tales. To view the ladies’ enjoyment of sexual humor as evidence of Boccaccio’s misogyny is to neglect the communal and recreative context justifying laughter.33 Without denying that masculine mastery is present in the voices both of Boccaccio and Dioneo or that there are misogynous statements made within the Decameron, I am arguing that the gender dynamics between male author and female readers are complicated by the communal function of laughter that frames the work. If Boccaccio appears to derive pleasure from causing ladies to blush (both among the brigata and among his readers), he also goes to some length to show the ways in which women themselves can justifiably laugh. Rather than presenting them as fully passive victims of undesired male humor, he recognizes the constraints feminine modesty places upon them, bringing into focus the question of the relationship between proper thoughts and appropriate behavior. It is important to remember that the men and the women of the Decameron, because of their noble birth and education, are assumed to be better able to resist sinful behavior than simple rustics, and indeed the extent to which they resist the temptations posed by salacious stories only 32. Smarr in fact notes that in his singing Dioneo follows the principle of nine-plus-one; the first nine bawdy songs are followed by the more appropriate tenth, just as the tenth day of the Decameron contrasts in its seriousness with the preceding nine (Boccaccio and Fiammetta, 180). 33. Mihoko Suzuki, “Gender, Power, and the Female Reader,” 236, asserts that Boccaccio “seduces” his female readers into accepting misogyny by having his ladies laugh at the tales.


serves to further illustrate their virtue.34 As Panfilo reminds the company at the close of the work, whereas those who have “weaker minds” might be corrupted, they have been able to listen to amusing tales that might stimulate carnal desire without behaving improperly: “continua onestà, continua concordia, continua fraternal dimestichezza mi ci e` paruta vedere e sentire; il che senza dubbio in onore e servigio di voi e di me m’è carissimo” (1250) [Constant decorum, constant harmony, and constant fraternal friendship are, in fact, what I have seen and felt here—something which, of course, pleases me, for it redounds to both your honor and merit and mine, 682]. Panfilo emphasizes not only the communal enterprise of their temporary storytelling but also the importance of the mind in guiding behavior, which separates those who might laugh justifiably from those, whether the dissolute or prudes, who cannot distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate laughter. The brigata ladies, in the context of the ritual space of communal and therapeutic laughter, justifiably take pleasure in words while remaining chaste in behavior. This emphasis on the discerning power of the mind becomes even more central to the Decameron’s exploration of the power of women to use humor as well as to appreciate it, a power that complicates still further the relationship between laughter and modesty.

Women’s Wit and Women’s Wiles At the end of Day I, Pampinea explicitly proclaims her view that women have lost the ability to make witty remarks: “oggi poche o niuna donna rimasa ci sia la quale o ne ’ntenda alcun leggiadro o a quello, se pur lo ’ntendesse, sappia rispondere: general vergogna e` di noi e di tutte quelle che vivono” (116) [these days few if any women understand a single witty remark or, if they do understand, know how to reply to one—a source of universal shame for us all and for every woman alive today, 55]. Important here is the notion that women should respond rather than being merely passive onlookers to witty conversations, for wit is essential in demonstrating that women are not mere beautiful bodies, passive objects. 34. In Ennobling Love, C. Stephen Jaeger argues that overcoming sexual temptation attested to one’s noble character, and that in the Decameron, the virtue of the ladies and men comes not “from rejecting the matter of vice, but from living in it virtuously—at least appearing to do so” (139).

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She criticizes women who, rather than speaking with cleverness, adorn and paint themselves out of vanity, and is horrified that she too, is guilty by association since she is a woman: Io mi vergogno di dirlo, per cio` che contro all’altre non posso dire che io contro a me non dica: queste cos´ı fregiate, cos´ı dipinte, cos´ı screziate o come statue di marmo mutole e insensibili stanno o s´ı rispondono, se sono addomandate, che molto sarebbe meglio l’aver taciuto; e fannosi a credere che da purità d’animo proceda il non saper tralle donne e co’ valenti uomini favellare, e alla lor milensaggine hanno posto nome onestà, quasi niuna donna onesta sia se non colei che con la fante o con la lavandaia o con la sua fornaia favella: il che se la natura avesse voluto, come elle si fanno a credere, per altro modo loro avrebbe limitato il cinguettare. (117) [I am ashamed to say this, since I cannot speak against others without speaking against myself, but these overdressed, painted, gaudy women either stand around like mute and insensitive marble statues or, if they reply when spoken to, it would be much better for them to remain silent; and they deceive themselves in believing that their inability to converse with ladies and with worthy gentlemen comes from their purity of soul, calling their stupidity modesty, as if the only modest women were those who speak only to their maid, their washerwoman, or their cook—if this had been Nature’s intent, as they would have us believe, she would have found some other means to limit their chattering.] (56) Pampinea’s reference to mute statues recalls other medieval writers who urge women not to make the mistake of falling completely silent for fear of being perceived as too talkative. Anne of France, for example, cautioned her daughter to avoid being too taciturn, for such women “ressemblent a ydolles et ymaiges painctes.”35 More importantly, Pampinea explains that women are often reluctant to be witty when conversing with gentlemen because they fear they will be perceived as immodest, a view of course confirmed by medieval conduct books. In her lecture, Pampinea essentially argues that modesty and wit need not be seen as mutually exclusive, submit35. Les Enseignements d’Anne de France, 68.


ting to critique the customary binary division between modest ignorance and immodest knowledge. The challenge to the apparent contradiction between wit and modesty could also be viewed within the larger context of attitudes toward women’s learning as damaging to their femininity. Although women of learning in fourteenth-century Italy were sometimes praised, they were more often viewed as aberrations of nature, unfeminine, and thus it was generally thought that there was no need for women to be highly educated, as Barberino’s Del Reggimento e costumi di Donna attests.36 Women who did achieve such education were considered masculine, suggested by Boccaccio’s marveling at the “manly” learning of the woman who sponsored his De claribus mulieribus, in fact noting the appropriateness of her name, Andrea (from the Greek andres [men]).37 The discussion of women’s wit in the Decameron participates in the larger concern with how women could remain feminine while cultivating their intellect. Pampinea’s declaration that women’s wit is not in contradiction with their modesty (and her castigation of women who pass their stupidity off as modesty) takes a step toward challenging the common binary opposition between female corporeality and male intellect. It is also important to note that when Pampinea comments that she cannot speak against women without speaking against herself, she raises the issue of group identity. She uses wit as a woman, urging other women to do so as well. When Filomena later becomes queen of Day II, she at first blushes “per vergogna arrossata veggendosi coronata del regno e ricordandosi delle parole poco avanti dette da Pampinea, accio` che milensa non paresse ripreso l’ardire” (123) [a little out of modesty, but then, recalling the words just spoken by Pampinea and not wishing to appear foolish, she renewed her courage, 58]. Remembering that modesty can work against women, Filomena in fact repeats and reinforces Pampinea’s lesson by echoing almost word for word her complaint about dull-witted women in the preface to her tale of Day VI (717; 382). Thus, Pampinea’s words serve to 36. “Ma pur nel dubio dobiamo pigliar / La piu` sichura; e or m’acordo in questo / Ch’esso fatichi a imprendere altre cose / E quello lasci stare!” (42). In Hentsch, De la littérature didactique, 106. 37. See Pamela Benson’s argument that Boccaccio’s view of women in the De claris mulieribus is ambivalent, for he sometimes views women’s capacity (or incapacity) as natural, at other times as due to social conditions (The Invention of the Renaissance Woman, 2– 24). For a discussion of the various ways in which educated women were considered sexually aberrant, see King, “Book-Lined Cells,” 78.

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educate the other ladies, and potentially women readers of the Decameron as well, to follow her example. Whereas Pampinea’s story is cautionary, about a woman who is the victim of wit because she doesn’t know how to use it, Filomena’s story takes a witty woman as heroine. Like other stories in the Decameron, it stages how women can use their wit to correct individual men or the legal system as a whole. In her story, a noblewoman named Madonna Oretta becomes physically ill because the knight who is accompanying her is mangling his story, despite his claim that it would make her journey as pleasant as a nice trot on a horse. Rather than telling him bluntly that he is a terrible storyteller, she says to him, “Messer, questo vostro cavallo ha troppo duro trotto, per che io vi priego che vi piaccia di pormi a piè” (719) [Sir, this horse of yours has too rough a trot, so I beg you, please, to set me down, 383]. The knight, rather than being offended, “inteso il motto e quello in festa e in gabbo preso, mise mano in altre novelle e quella cominciata aveva e mal seguita senza finita lascio` stare” [understood her witty remark, and taking it cheerfully and in a joking spirit, he began to talk of other things, putting aside the story he had begun and continued to tell so badly]. This story, which is structurally privileged as the first story of the second half of the work, and the first story of the day devoted to motti, is important to the theme of women and laughter in the Decameron because it refers explicitly to the activity of telling stories. It is a woman who makes the witty remark that establishes the principle that storytelling must be done with art and skill. Filomena shows that women can use wit strategically to criticize what displeases them, for Madonna Oretta is able to stop the knight’s nauseating narrative not through a direct rebuke, but through displacement onto the analogy of the jerky trot of his story. Another tale that illustrates this technique is Fiammetta’s story of a marchioness who rebuffs the advances of the king of France, who visits her while her husband is away. While the king flirts with her, her clever reply makes him stop his attempts at jesting with her, “for he feared her retorts” (44) [temendo delle sue resposte, 94]. In both of these examples, women are shown to be able to use their wit, the way in which they manipulate language, in order to respond to a situation that is unpleasant to them. Rather than remaining mute like marble statues, they respond. The ability to craft a well-timed and measured response is shown to be advantageous to women in general, and not just individual women. This is evident in Filostrato’s later tale of a woman


who, through her witty reply to a magistrate, managed to escape death for adultery (VI.7). Madonna Filippa points out that laws condemning women but not men for adultery are unequal, and therefore unjust laws, a view that is in fact explicitly shared by Filostrato as he begins his story. Furthermore, Madonna Filippa notes that since the law was written by men, and no women were consulted, it should quite rightly be called a bad law. Like the Wife of Bath’s question, “Who painted the lion?” Madonna Filippa questions the validity of laws written by men for their own profit and does so by using her wit. Setting up her clever coup de grâce, she requests that the judge ask her husband whether she had ever denied him her body. When the husband admits that she never has, she argues that as long as she satisfies the demands of her husband, she should have the right to dispose of her “surplus” [quel che gli avanza] as she sees fit: “debbolo io gittare a’ cani? non e` egli molto meglio servirne un gentile uomo che piu´ che sé m’ama, che lasciarlo perdere o guastare?” (748) [Should I throw it to the dogs? Is it not much better to give it to a gentleman who loves me more than himself, rather than let it go to waste or spoil? 398]. Those present at her trial laugh heartily, but proclaim that she is right. Not only is Madonna Filippa pardoned, but the statute is modified to apply only to women who commit adultery for money. The woman has achieved a victory against a legal establishment hostile to women through her use of a witty reply. It is in fact because of Madonna Filippa’s use of a humorous justification for her adultery—the cliché of the “surplus”—that she is able to show the deficiencies of the double standard of the law. Her defense is in one sense a “misreading,” since she implies that the marriage sacrament solely concerns the conjugal “debt” that each spouse owes the other. However, given that she is clearly in a loveless marriage, probably one not of her choosing, and given that her love for her lover is described as pure and true, her argument gains more force. It is by provoking the laughter of the assembled townspeople at the ingenuity of her creative defense that she is more easily able to win them over to her side. Indeed, Quintilian remarked that wit could win over an audience, especially a judge who can be made either to wake up or to relax through the use of humor.38 The text in fact notes that the crowd is impressed that she has spoken well; her eloquence is clearly an asset that has helped her to make her case. Cicero’s remark that 38. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 6.3.1.

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a witty orator “by a jest or laugh often dispels distasteful suggestions not easily weakened by reasonings” in fact holds particular application to women faced with sexual innuendoes or other such “distasteful suggestions.”39 Both the marchioness and Madonna Oretta are able to criticize their male companions in an oblique way that avoids attacking them directly. Madonna Filippa’s clever retort about her “surplus” gains her the support of the townspeople, which further authorizes the judge, mindful of maintaining his authority in the community, to grant her victory. The use of a witticism to talk back, to render tit for tat, is openly admired by Laurent Joubert, who notes that among the different forms of humor, “I find the funniest the ability to render tit for tat, and for a taunt, to come back with a clever reply.”40 Not only do the heroines benefit from their wit, both the men and women of the brigata warmly applaud it as an appropriate and necessary strategy for women to use. The notion of wit as a necessary strategy for women to use given the unequal social conditions in which they live, is furthermore connected to the issue of women’s wiles. Just as the Wife of Bath suggests that women’s wit is a special kind of knowledge given to women, many of the stories in the Decameron similarly justify women’s deception as a necessary strategy to equalize unfair social conditions. In Day VII in particular, whose theme is wives who play tricks on their husbands, many of the stories justify women’s adultery because of their husband’s arrogance, jealousy, or stupidity. These tales echo the thematic preoccupation of the French fabliaux on which they are often based, but are usually more explicit about justifying the women’s wily behavior. In Neifile’s tale (VII.8), a woman deceives her husband by slipping out to meet her lover and placing in her bed another woman, whose tresses the husband cuts off, a rewriting of the Old French fabliau “Les tresces.” The end of the fabliau condemns the trickery of women: “Par cest fabliau poez savoir / Que cil ne fait mie savoir / Qui croit fame de riens qu’avaigne” [By this fabliau you can understand that he who believes his wife about whatever happens is not at all wise, 262– 64].41 39. Cicero, De Oratore, bk. 2, sec. 236, pp. 373– 74. The Latin (facing page) reads, “odiosasque res saepe, quas argumentis dilui non facile est, ioco risuque dissolvit.” 40. Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, 24. 41. Noomen and Van den Boogaard, Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux, vol. 6. The text I have quoted is taken from manuscript X. Manuscript D warns men not to let their wives go out at night (ll. 427– 34). It should be noted that fabliaux do not always condemn women, and, in fact, frequently appear to approve of their deceptions.


In Boccaccio’s version, however, Neifile does not condemn the woman, but rather concludes that her cleverness (sagacità) enabled her to get out of a difficult situation and never again have to fear her jealous husband, who has overzealously guarded her. In another story, told by Dioneo, a woman’s adultery is approved because her husband is too old to satisfy his young bride. Laurent Joubert specifically commented on the lack of compassion we feel for the cuckolded men in the Decameron. He admired “the stories of Boccaccio, of which those telling of the infidelities that wives perpetrate on their husbands we find most conducive to laughter, because it seems unfitting, without inspiring compassion, that a man be thus deceived.”42 Men are not supposed to be betrayed by their wives, but they deserve to become the objects of our laughter when their own shortcomings are at fault. The women’s wiles are applauded because they are used to react to mitigating circumstances.43 It is important to note that the men of the brigata openly advocate women’s cultivation of their talents. Before his tale about a woman who takes a lover because her husband is homosexual (V.10), Dioneo assures his listeners that although its subject matter is unseemly, his goal is to dispel their melancholy, and that furthermore, the women should “pluck the roses but leave the thorns where they are” [cogliete le rose e lasciate le spine stare]. He explains his metaphor: “il che farete lasciando il cattivo uomo con la mala ventura stare con la sua disonestà, e liete riderete degli amorosi inganni della sua donna” (693) [you may do this by leaving the wicked man to his misfortune and dishonorable behavior, while you laugh merrily at the amorous deceptions of his wife, 369]. Whereas the man’s behavior (the thorns) is described as dishonorable, the wife’s deception merits the women’s merry laughter (the rose). Later, Filostrato is even more explicit about the value of stories of women’s trickery: Carissime donne mie, elle son tante le beffe che gli uomini vi fanno, e spezialmente i mariti, che, quando alcuna volta avviene che donna 42. Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, 24. 43. In “Man’s Flesh and Woman’s Spirit in the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales,” N. S. Thompson argues that in the Decameron, whereas men’s transgressions are shown to be destructive to society, motivated by selfishness and greed, women’s transgressions are largely “reactive,” due to mitigating circumstances, such as the abuse by a husband or unjust society. On the social context underpinning literary representations of women’s sexual transgressions, also see Martines, Strong Words, 199– 221.

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niuna alcuna al marito ne faccia, voi non dovreste solamente esser contente che cio` fosse avvenuto o di risaperlo o d’udirlo dire a alcuno, ma il dovreste voi medesime andar dicendo per tutto, accio` che per gli uomini si conosca che, se essi sanno, e le donne d’altra parte anche sanno: il che altro che utile esser non vi puo, ` per cio` che, quando alcun sa che altri sappia, egli non si mette troppo leggiermente a volerlo ingannare. (798) [My very dear ladies, the tricks men play on you are so numerous, and especially those that husbands play, that when a woman on occasion does as much to her husband, you should not only rejoice over it and be happy that you heard it talked about, but you should also go around telling it to everyone yourself, so that men may come to learn that women, for their part, know just as much about these things as they do. This cannot be anything but useful to you, for when someone knows that others know about such matters, he will not easily wish to deceive you.] (422) Filostrato revises the cliché of feminine deceitfulness in several interesting ways. First, he argues that men are more likely to play tricks on women, and therefore, women are no more deceitful by nature than men are.44 Christine de Pizan would later point out the absurdity of the obsessive condemnation of women’s tricks given the evidence that it is more often men that deceive women. In her Epistre au dieu d’Amours, Christine sarcastically characterizes the whole allegorical plot in which the male lover tries to conquer the rose as a series of elaborate ruses, frauds, and schemes on behalf of the male hero, all simply to trick a virgin (“Pour decevoir sans plus une pucelle— / S’en est la fin, par fraude et par cautelle!” ll. 345– 46). In addition to mocking the overblown “aventures” of the allegory and highlighting male trickery, Christine also criticizes men’s assertions of women’s easy virtue. If women could be had so easily, she asks, why is so much trickery needed to deceive them? Christine uses her biting sarcasm to uncover men’s hypocritical trickery, but whereas she defends women by emphasizing their superior moral sensibility, Filostrato argues that trickery is a weapon essential to women’s survival since men so often try to deceive 44. In the Rose, La Vieille argues that since men deceive women by being unfaithful, women should do the same to men (ll. 13265– 72). See also Ovid’s Art of Love, bk. 3, ll. 31– 32.


them: they should fight fire with fire. If women actively tell stories glorifying women’s trickery, men might desist from trying to seduce women, assuming them to be gullible.45 In this sense, advocating women’s use of clever replies is fully in service of conservative medieval sexual norms, for it urges women to use their wit to ward off challenges to their chastity. The praise of women’s wiles thus circles back to the question of feminine modesty, for Filostrato suggests that women are ironically more likely to fall prey to men when they try to hide their sexual knowledge. He argues that it would be useful for women to tell fabliaux “so that men may come to learn that women, for their part, know just as much about these things as they do.” Here, the emphasis is not on pursuing sexual gratification but on demonstrating knowledge. Filostrato shifts the locus of concern from women’s bodies to their heads, from sex and corporeality to knowledge and intelligence. In this light, Filostrato’s praise of the utility of fabliaux helps us to see that fabliaux could offer pleasure to women because they are about women’s wit, and not just about sex.46 Filostrato’s praise of trickery as useful leads to the larger question of the utility of Boccaccio’s work for women readers. Robert Hollander has argued that Boccaccio takes the classic Horatian formula of delight and instruction (or in Boccaccio’s words in the Proem, “diletto . . . e utile consiglio”) and subverts it in the service of his satirical portrait of human behavior. Whereas the Horatian formula assumes that utility is of a moral kind, such as to improve human behavior, Hollander shows that most 45. See Smarr’s discussion of the French writer Helisenne (Marguerite Briet), whose Angoysses (1538) was influenced by Boccaccio’s Elegia. Helisenne portrays men deceiving women with their words and boasting untruthfully about their success with women (“Boccaccio and Renaissance Women,” 284– 86). 46. It is because of this emphasis on wit demonstrating knowledge that I disagree with Potter’s claim, “Women’s rights in the Decameron are limited to the right to give in to their physical nature, and their ‘intelligence’ is almost always inspired by and put at the service of their sexuality (“Woman in the Decameron,” 96). It is also interesting to note, as does Valeria Finucci in “Jokes on Women,” 72, that although Castiglione later incorporated some of Boccaccio’s tales in his discussion of jesting in the Renaissance Italian court, he chose none of those told by women or in which women play tricks or use witticisms. Castiglione’s more conservative attitude toward women’s laughter is linked to his assertion that women are not fitting objects of jesting both because of the harm to their honor and because they are “defenseless,” lacking the skills of wit to defend themselves in jesting situations. See the discussion of this point in Holcomb, Mirth Making, 119– 20. One wonders whether Castiglione’s exclusion of women in his book on courtly conversation is a conscious and deliberate rejection of the Decameron’s suggestion that women are able to jest on equal terms with men.

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occurrences of the word utile or utilità are detached from any moral sense, referring more often to individual profit, whether it be based on money, power, or sexual pleasure: in this sense, pleasure itself is profit. Furthermore, those who win out in the tales are more often those who are clever (having the power of ingegno) rather than those who are morally right. Boccaccio’s use of the formula is therefore ironic, meant to throw readers back again to the question not of conventional morality, but of the importance of intellectual discernment, which is certainly clear in the above discussion on Boccaccio’s advice to women readers. Whereas Boccaccio’s great predecessor Dante is interested in offering useful examples of good and bad behavior for his readers to follow or avoid, Boccaccio “wants to enable us to think more clearly about our human nature” and to “reflect upon the follies of the herd.”47 Given this context, a possible way to read Boccaccio’s claim that women will find both pleasure and profit in his tales is to see it as an invitation to readers, whether women or men, to question the usefulness of conventional expectations about how women are to behave. When Emilia is the first to tell a tale on Dioneo’s prescribed theme of women who trick their husbands, she is embarrassed at being put in this delicate situation, but tries to get out of it by couching her tale in terms of its practical usefulness to the other women in the group: E ingegnerommi, carissime donne, di dir cosa che vi possa essere utile nell’avvenire, per cio` che, se cos´ı son l’altre come io paurose e massimamente della fantasima . . . a quella cacciar via quando da voi venisse, notando bene la mia novella, potrete una santa e buona orazione e molto a cio` valevole apparare. (789– 90; emphasis added) [And I shall attempt, dearest ladies, to speak about something which may be useful to you in the future, for if other women are like myself, they are easily frightened, especially of ghosts . . . but if ever you run into a ghost you will be able to drive it away, for by listening carefully to my story, you will learn a fine and holy prayer made precisely for this purpose.] (417– 18; emphasis added) 47. The full essay is “Utilità,” in Hollander, Boccaccio’s Dante and the Shaping Force of Satire, 85 and 86. Hollander notes his disagreement with Kirkham, who views Boccaccio’s morality as more conventional (Sign of Reason, 73).


Emilia’s tale, however, is not about a woman who is frightened by a ghost, but a woman who cheats on her husband. When the woman’s husband unexpectedly arrives at their country house and her lover also shows up, knocking at the door and waking her husband, she quickly invents a lie about how he is the ghost who has been scaring her for the past few nights. The “prayer” she uses to chase him away is in fact a warning to her lover to leave the premises because of her husband’s unexpected arrival. Later, the lady and her lover frequently laugh hilariously over this ruse. Emilia concludes her tale by telling the other women to learn these incantations by heart, “for they may come in handy in the future” (421) [e potravvi ancor giovare, 797]. Emilia has played a trick on her listeners, pretending to be preaching a tale of usefulness, but all the members of the brigata respond “with roars of laughter” and praise the prayer as “useful and holy” (422) [per buona e per santa, 798]. By using the trope of usefulness, Emilia has shown that she can play at innocence while demonstrating her knowledge. Even in the final tale of the Decameron, on a day largely devoted to telling serious tales of magnanimity and Christian charity, Boccaccio’s ironic treatment of the literature as moral instruction trope has the last word. After his tale of Griselda’s incredible self-sacrifice, Dioneo subverts the message of women’s humble submission to men and condemns Count Gualtieri’s harsh treatment of Griselda, remarking that it would have served him right if Griselda had instead been the kind of woman who would seek another man who could “warm her wool” and give her a nice dress. As the last tale of the collection, it appears to privilege feminine submission as worthy of emulation, but Dioneo’s comment, like the Clerk’s comment on the tale in the Canterbury Tales, playfully suggests that such a model should be rejected in favor of the behavior of the resourceful fabliau women of Day VII. It is highly unlikely that Boccaccio advocates women emulating the trickery of adulterous wives, however justified, rather than the patience and humility of Griselda. What this playful move does, however, is to warn readers against facile moralizing and reading too literally.48 The fact that the ladies are described as arguing with each other over how to interpret the Griselda tale in fact suggests Boccaccio’s interest in differences in interpretation, and readers are reminded of their own role in the process of making meaning. 48. This point has been made by Smarr, Boccaccio and Fiammetta, 192.

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Verbal Jousting and the Game of Love The question of the reader’s interpretation brings us to the relationships between the men and women of the brigata. It is interesting to note that overt statements of the cliché about woman as the body to be ruled by the man’s head are actually voiced by the female members of the brigata. Emilia, for example, prefaces her tale of wife beating (IX.9), the only tale that causes the men to laugh but not the women, by arguing that women’s natural softness is evidence of their need to be governed by men. Furthermore, when Pampinea first proposes that the women escape Florence, Filomena cautions that women are suspicious, quarrelsome, and fickle, thereby needing male governance, and Elissa seconds her opinion, urging them to find suitable male companions to escort them. Such overtly misogynous remarks are never voiced by the three men. Are the women’s comments meant ironically? Or is Boccaccio simply trying to spout antifeminist ideas more subtly and ironically by placing them in the mouth of the fair sex? It is difficult to ascertain Boccaccio’s own views in this passage, but it is clear that in not having the male storytellers voice such statements, Boccaccio is maintaining an ambiance of courteous play between men and women, in which name-calling or direct accusations would be inappropriate. Lauretta’s refusal at the end of Day VII to take revenge on Dioneo by reversing his topic of women who play tricks on their husbands to that of men who play tricks on their wives is an example of such civility, for she does not wish to belong “to that breed of snapping curs who immediately turn round and retaliate.” Rather, antagonism between the sexes is channeled through jesting, and more often than not is mixed with flirtatious teasing. At the beginning of the Decameron, we are told that each of the three men loves one of the seven ladies, only one of which (Neifile) is specified. The women are aware of their suitors’ feelings and are very careful not to encourage or invite any behavior that would compromise their reputation. But they do engage in repartee that allows them to be flirtatious without being immodest, to be assertive without being forward. This is best illustrated in a battle of wits at the end of Day III. Upon ending her reign as queen, and after Dioneo’s salacious tale of Alibech, Neifile crowns Filostrato, the first man to reign, saying, “Tosto ci avedremo se i’ lupo saprà meglio guidar le pecore che le pecore abbiano i lupi guidati (451) [Soon we shall see if the wolves know how to guide the


sheep better than the sheep have guided the wolves, 239]. Filostrato laughs at her remark, but counters, “Se mi fosse stato creduto, i lupi avrebbono alle pecore insegnato rimettere il diavolo in inferno non peggio che Rustico facesse a Alibech; e per cio` non ne chiamate lupi, dove voi state pecore non siete” [If you had listened to me, the wolves would have taught the sheep to put the Devil back into Hell no worse than Rustico did with Alibech; you shouldn’t call us wolves, for you have not acted like sheep]. Filostrato implies that the women are not meek like sheep, and perhaps not sexually innocent either. Furthermore, he uses the example of the Alibech tale to make an even more clear innuendo: He would have liked to teach Neifile about sex. Neifile indeed proves she is not a passive sheep, for she counters by invoking the earlier story about the gardener Masetto, who is used as a sexual object by a whole convent of nuns (III.1): “Odi, Filostrato: voi avreste, volendo a noi insegnare, potuto apparar senno come apparo` Masetto da Lamporecchio dalle monache e riaver la favella a tale ora che l’ossa senza maestro avrebbono apparato a sufolare” (451) [Listen, Filostrato, if you ever hoped to teach us anything, first you would need to be taught some sense, just as Masetto of Lamporecchio was taught by the nuns, and not regain the use of your speech until your bones rattled like a skeleton’s. (240)]. Rather than being taken aback by his innuendo, Neifile outdoes him by suggesting that he needs to be taught a lesson. Her lesson is double-edged. She first hints that his sexual knowledge is so skimpy that he needs to take lessons from nuns. She also implies that Filostrato has nothing to teach her that she does not already know, thereby undermining the cliché that virtuous women know nothing of sex. In doing so, she ironically echoes Filostrato’s own claim that women should demonstrate their knowledge of sexual matters so as not to be seen as easily deceived by men’s seductive words. Most importantly, she has made these points through her own wit, and by oblique reference to fiction rather than through direct comment, similar to the Canterbury pilgrims’ use of their own stories to return offenses made against them. Whereas conduct manuals advise women to pretend that they know nothing of such matters, Neifile shows that she is a force to be reckoned with because she is in full possession of knowledge that would allow her to resist men’s advances. By implication, she has overturned the paradigm of male mastery and female tutelage by informing him that women are not men’s pupils, eagerly awaiting their instruction. Neifile’s

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witty retort is so effective that she literally silences him, causing him to desist from his lecture: “Filostrato, conoscendo che falci si trovavan non meno che egli avesse strali, lasciato stare il motteggiare a darsi al governo del regno commesso comincio” ` [Recognizing that the ladies’ sickles were as sharp as his arrows, Filostrato set aside his jesting and began to govern the kingdom entrusted to him]. Women, according to the lesson of the exchange, are able to use the “sickles” of their wit as effectively as men, and these sickles can in effect be used to teach men that women are not gullible, easy prey for men’s seductive fictions. This mixture of assertiveness and flirtation may be what has led scholars to disagree on what this exchange says about relations between genders. One the one hand, Neifile’s comment has been seen as a “harsh rebuttal to Filostrato’s snide reference to the anything but meek nature of women.”49 Others have argued that this sparring involving the tales of Day III has been used by Boccaccio “to identify the sheep as wolves, to equate the women with the men in terms of their highly developed sensuality,” which suggests that his intended readers are not virtuous ladies, but both men and women with base sexual inclinations.50 Neither interpretation of the sheep/wolf theme, however, adequately addresses the jocose tone of the section and the overall rapport between the members of the brigata throughout the work, where jesting can combine flirtation and rebuke.51 The mixed tone of this exchange in fact recalls a common pastime of the upper classes throughout medieval Europe: games of verbal repartee such as the demandes d’amour, or riddles and questions pertaining to love. The demandes could be so charged with sexual innuendo that they could lead to amorous liaisons between the contestants. An example is the account in 1468 of the meeting between Count Gaston IV of Foix and Etiennette de Besan¸con, married to a bourgeois. After exchanging “questions joyeuses et amoureuses” and “plusieurs requestes, offres et aultres plaisans bourdes” Etiennette is reported to have left her husband and 49. Iovino, “The Decameron and the Corbaccio,” 144. 50. Brownlee, “Wolves and Sheep,” 265. 51. A brief passage early in the work anticipates the playfulness to come. When Pampinea first invites the men to join them in leaving the city, “in a spirit of chaste and brotherly affection” [con puro e fratellevole animo], they at first believe she is mocking them: “I giovani si credettero primieramente essere beffati” (40). The men apparently think the women are aware of their affections and thus assume that they are teasing them rather than offering a serious invitation.


children to join the count.52 The sexually charged nature of these exchanges is also suggested in a collection called the Adevineaux Amoureux, in which a knight and lady exchange demandes. In relating the demandes, the narrator anticipates the potential objections of his female readers, asking them to forgive him for anything they find dishonest or shameful (“deshonneste et vergoingneuse”), playfully urging them, as Chaucer earlier did, to turn the leaf and find something more to their liking.53 The exchanges are witty, but sexually charged, and one can well understand the Knight of the Tower’s advice to his daughters not to engage in repartee, lest it lead to more serious consequences. Jokes between men and women could also be tendentious rather than flirtatious, and a woman uninterested in the flirtatious advances of her male interlocutor could cool his ardor with a well-timed reply. The narrator of the Adevineaux Amoureux recounts one evening when he was invited to play at “venditions,” in which one person offers to sell something. The other person asks how much, upon which the asker then explains the “sale.” In one example, the lady of the house, whom the narrator notes suffers from the malady of jealousy, attempts to “sell” him something, and addresses him as “Sire Grison,” or “old grey-headed man.” Realizing the mockery conveyed by this address, the narrator responds with a vendition that makes clear that he rejects her advances and puts her in her place. At the end, he remarks that his pleasure of the evening was spoiled because he was humiliated, having been spurned and made the butt of a joke (“repudié et rebouté”). The aggressiveness of the woman’s joke is evident in the narrator’s comment that he is surprised that she was the one who began when he 52. This exchange is discussed by Bruno Roy, Une Culture de l’équivoque, 94. See also Verberckmoes, Laughter, Jestbooks, and Society, 34. See also Richard Green’s argument, in “Le Roi Qui Ne Ment and Aristocratic Courtship,” that the game of the Roi Qui Ne Ment was partly a kind of quiz for the players to demonstrate their knowledge, but more importantly, a stylized flirtation that was part of aristocratic courtship of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. 53. Hassel, Amorous Games, 200– 201. There are two printed editions in the R e´ serve of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, both thought to be dated 1479. There is also a manuscript of about 1470 (Chantilly Musée Condé ms. 654 [1572]) that also contains the ´ Evangiles des quenouilles (discussed in the next chapter). The racy riddles are not told by the knight and lady, but rather reported to be of the kind the collector used to hear in his youth on long winter nights in mixed company of “matrones et filles es assembleez” (227). An example is no. 277, which asks to name a beautiful and stiff tool (ostil) that is sometimes bent and sometimes straight. The answer: a bow (un arc a main) (pages 81 and 228). Other sexual riddles include 349 and 356.

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thought that he would begin the selling, noting that it was apparently the custom of the women in this house to go first.54 The banter between Boccaccio’s women and men is charged in the way that these evenings were. Somewhat flirtatious, at times aggressive, they spar with each other with words that channel sexual tension into play. On the verbal level, they imitate the medieval pictorial tradition in which knights and ladies, dressed in battle, engage in jousts for love.55 Women’s wit (their sickles) are arms they can use either to engage in flirtation or to deflect unwanted advances or insinuations. Indeed, the phonological similarity between our English jest and joust, although the terms are etymologically unrelated, is evocative of the close relationship between verbal and physical sparring. One of the lessons that emerges from the Decameron is that both men and women should use wit for the justifiable purposes of mutual solace or individual defense but not to disparage others without provocation. For example, Pampinea’s story of the women who laugh at an old man who is in love with them is used to show that laughter should not be used to harm a suitor who has not done any harm himself (I.10). Such a lesson is also at the heart of a tale by Jean de Condé, a minstrel at the court of Count William II of Hanault. The Sentier batu stages another medieval pastime similar to the demande d’amour called Le roi qui ne ment, where designated kings or queens ask questions of their fellow participants. In this fabliau, the “queen” uses the occasion to belittle the sexual prowess of a suitor she has spurned. He quites her by answering that he disdains a path that is well worn (sentier batu), thus implying that many men before him have trod the path to her sexual favors. Glending Olson reminds us that the tale fits into the larger ethical preoccupations with jesting in the Middle Ages: The tale is interesting principally for its close connection with a society pastime that can be documented elsewhere; it suggests how easily conversational play can turn into literary narrative. And as well, it reveals the special status of gab: jesting, a legitimate facet of 54. This vendition is included in both the manuscript and the printed versions of the Adevineaux Amoureux (249). Succeeding venditions include both eloquent requests for love and stinging rejections. 55. The Luttrell Psalter (c. 1300), for example, shows ladies throwing flowers from a castle while knights below, armed with their swords, try to storm the castle. For this and other images, see Randall, Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts, plates 96 and 706– 10.


secular life, becomes dangerous when it is misused in the attempt to cause “anui” rather than to relieve it. Game ought not be earnest.56 Indeed, the notion of kings and queens in the pastime recalls Boccaccio’s use of queens and kings for each of the ten days of narrative, and his Filocolo in fact makes overt use of the game, suggesting the possible influence of this pastime on Boccaccio’s vision of how men and women can jest and joust with each other for mutual solace. To argue for Boccaccio’s interest in women’s laughter and wit is not necessarily to claim that he intended to promote a more friendly view of women. In some passages, Boccaccio characterizes women as the weaker sex, more fickle and subject to their physical passions. Even while claiming to write for women’s pleasure and well-being, his various narrative poses at times create a leering and patronizing authorial voice. The Corbaccio, written not long after the Decameron, is a reworking of antimarriage satire, replete with the expected misogyny of his time. The fact that Boccaccio wrote works both (putatively) praising women (De claribus mulieribus) and blaming women (Corbaccio), as well as the ambivalent attitude toward women within the Decameron itself, makes it unlikely “that we will ever be able to locate Boccaccio definitively at any point on a spectrum from philogyny to misogyny.”57 Like many men before and after him, Boccaccio enjoyed playing that most masculine of scholarly games, in which authors demonstrate that they can master both sides of the debate. The more positive attitudes toward women that emerge from the Decameron can be attributed, at least in part, to the greater context of Boccaccio’s interest in exploring the healing power of laughter, whether as solace for the social chaos brought on by the plague or the melancholy caused by love. Whatever Boccaccio’s own feelings about women’s sexuality or intelligence, his work examines how norms of feminine modesty and women’s laughter can be at odds. He allows his women to laugh at sexually explicit tales, but in having them blush, shows the pressures that women face in order to remain ladies. Dioneo’s evident pleasure in making the ladies laugh, as well as their own pleasure in laughing, creates a ludic atmosphere in which the sexual tensions of both the men and the women are present, but channeled through the civilized play of joking. Unlike Freud’s model 56. Olson, Literature as Recreation, 143. 57. Psaki, “Boccaccio and Female Sexuality,” 127.

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of joking, in which only the man channels his desires, the Decameron shows that women, too, can use joking as a way to say indirectly what they cannot say openly. The ladies’ “sickles” show both that women have a sense of humor and that this sense of humor can be used to their advantage. Boccaccio, like Dioneo, makes sexual innuendoes to the women who listen to his tales but seems to enjoy making women laugh and not simply laughing at women. More importantly, the work directly engages issues involved in women’s interpretation of comic literature. Women are urged to use their judgment to distinguish between proper jest and incitement to immoral behavior. They are furthermore shown that cultivating an ability to respond to a man’s verbal seduction with a well-timed witticism can do more to affirm their respectability than mute ignorance. Most of all, since women are encouraged to respond to sexual humor tit for tat, rather than mutely sit back and take it on the one hand or respond indignantly (and risk being perceived as a spoilsport) on the other, the greatest insight we gain from studying this work is to see that women could actively participate in the humor of medieval texts because their wit was the tool that allowed them to engage in the game.

3

“A bowrd about bed” Women’s Community of Laughter and the Woes of Marriage in Dunbar’s The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo

Than all thai leuch apon loft with latis full mery And raucht the cop round about, full off riche wynis, And raleit lang or thai wald rest, with ryatus speche. (ll. 147–49)1 [They all laughed loudly with the merriest behavior, and passed the cup round and round, full of rich wines, and for a long time they went on jesting with a riot of conversation.]

n William Dunbar’s Tretis, two married women and a widow gather together in the enclosure of a garden to complain about men and marriage, finding comfort in the exchange of shared woes. Whereas Boccaccio’s ladies restrain their laughter and blush because they are in mixed company, these women give free rein to their laughter because they are in a women-only group in a garden they believe to be sheltered from the eyes and ears of men. The poem is recounted not from their perspective, however, but from that of the male narrator who, having happened upon them while out for a moonlight stroll, eavesdrops on their merrymaking. Spying upon them from behind a 1. The Poems of William Dunbar. Translations have been taken from A. D. Hope, A Midsummer Eve’s Dream: Variations on a Theme by William Dunbar. The date of the poem is uncertain. There are two extant copies of the poem, a print dated around 1507, and a manuscript, the Maitland Folio, compiled between 1570 and 1586.

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hedge, he recounts the scene, concluding his account in a way that invites his audience to judge the women: e auditoris most honorable, that eris has gevin Onto this vncouth aventur quhilk airly me happinnit, Of thir thre wanton wiffis that I haif writtin heir, Quhilk wald e waill to our wif, gif e suld wed one? (527– 30) [You most distinguished auditors, who have given ear to this extraordinary adventure of the three wanton women I here have written down and that happened to me early one morning, which of them would you choose as your wife, if you had to wed one?] The narrator’s question to his “distinguished auditors” as to which of the women they would marry implies a male audience. Dunbar was a Scottish court poet, the recipient of a royal pension from James IV, and a priest pledged to celibacy and ordained in around 1504. The audience for his poem was most likely a mixed audience of men and women at the court. Some scholars have even proposed that Dunbar had in mind a predominantly female audience, particularly given that the queen of Scotland, the English Margaret Tudor, who married James IV, was his patron.2 Many of Dunbar’s poems are in fact dedicated to the queen, and quite a few contain explicit praises of women. This poem, however, announces no interest in women readers, and its portrayal of women’s laughter is thus quite different from that in the Decameron. The women’s raucous laughter over their husbands’ various inadequacies serves to indicate their less-than-ladylike demeanor, thus making them the object of the poem’s satire; in the process, it also points to the kinds of things that medieval men worried might make their wives laugh.

Women’s Private Laughter and the Male Eavesdropper Like Boccaccio’s ladies, Dunbar’s women are distinguished in social status. They are richly arrayed in kerchiefs of fine cloth, have the shining gold 2. For example, Scott, Dunbar, 191.

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tresses and lily-white complexion of romance heroines, and they meet together to chat in a pastoral setting. The two wives are noblewomen, being married to lords (36), and the widow claims to be of noble birth (312). After each woman has spoken of her woes in marriage, the narrator describes all three women’s laughter in similar terms. After the second wife has spoken her piece, for example, the narrator informs us:

Loud lauchand, the laif allowit hir mekle. Thir gay wiffis maid gam amang the grene leiffis, Thai drank and did away dule vnder derne bewis, Thai swapit of the sueit wyne, thai swan quhit of hewis, Bot all the pertlyar, in plane, thai put out ther vocis. (240– 44) [The others, laughing loudly, praised her highly. Those merry wives made sport among the green leaves; they drank and they drowned their sorrows under the sheltering branches; they drank heartily of the sweet wine, those swan-white beauties; but all the livelier they voiced their grievances without restraint.]

The loud laughter, the merry mood, the drinking of wine, and the bucolic context echo the description after the first wife has spoken, cited at the beginning of this chapter and are repeated yet a third time after the widow speaks:

Lowd thai lewch all the laif and loffit hir mekle, And said thai suld exampill tak of her souerane teching And wirk efter hir wordis, that woman wes so prudent. Than culit thai their mouthis with confortable drinkis, And carpit full cummerlik, with cop going round. (506– 10) [The others broke into gales of laughter, praised her highly, and said they would follow the example of her sovereign teaching and act as she had advised, so prudent a woman was she. Then they cooled their mouths with comforting draughts and gossiped cozily as the cup went round.]

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In all three descriptions of the women, the narrator emphasizes the loudness of the laughter and the “riatous” speech, the copious drinking of the wine, and the specifically female context (“cummerlik”) of their private merrymaking. It has been argued that this loud laughter is meant to represent “the worst feature of their depravity,” and that “it would shock the religious and idealistic in the audience.”3 Evidence that their loud laughter may have been seen as a sign of their immorality is found in the Documenta matris ad filiam, a late-fifteenth-century Scottish conduct book in which a mother instructs her daughter, and that warns women to be “Nocht lowd of lauchtir na of langage crouß” [Neither loud of laughter, nor crass of language, l. 15].4 The injunction to refrain from loud laughter is joined with the familiar warnings not to wander about town, nor to spend too much time with men lest their honor be besmirched. The women’s heavy drinking would also have indicated to the audience their questionable moral character. According to The Good Wife, a conduct book written no later than 1350, women were told not to pass too much time in “passing the cup.”5 This concern for women’s drinking occurs as well in the earlier writings of both Marbod of Rennes and Andreas Capellanus, who accused women of habitual drunkenness.6 Dunbar’s own poem, “The Tua Cummaris,” imagines that when women get together, they like to drink, even if it is the beginning of Lent.7 In his Treatise on Laughter, Joubert links wine and laughter, reasoning that since wine of good quality enriches the blood, and since good blood leads to laughter, a 3. Ibid., 186. 4. Another text, The Thewis off Gudwomen, similarly enjoins women to be “Nocht loud of lange na lauchtyr crouß” (l. 15). Both texts are found in Girvan, ed., “Ratis Raving” and Other Early Scots Poems on Morals. An older edition is that by Lumby, “Ratis Raving” and Other Moral and Religious Pieces in Prose and Verse. It is worth noting that men, too, are counseled in the Foly of Fulys and the Thewis of Wysmen not to laugh too loudly among men. In context, however, the passage is more about how to be congenial, making jokes all can understand, rather than only a few (Lumby, l. 103, p. 80). In the manuals for women, laughter is explicitly connected to speaking little, not wandering about, nor speaking with men. 5. The Good Wife Taught Her Daughter, stanza 25. 6. Marbod of Rennes, Liber decem capitulorum, chap. 3, p. 15. Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, bk. 3, p. 207. A fabliau that satirizes female drunkenness is “Des .III. Dames de Paris,” in Montaiglon and Raynaud, Recueil général et complet des fabliaux, 3:145– 55. The women become so drunk that they take off their clothes and dance outside of the tavern. They are discovered collapsed in the center of town and, assumed to be dead, are buried, only to revive, demanding more food and wine. 7. Poems of William Dunbar, no. 57, “Richt arely one Ask Wedinsday.”


person who drinks wine will laugh.8 Although Joubert does not specifically discuss women in his section on wine, the medical understanding of the importance of bodily humors in laughter makes it not surprising that women’s drinking and laughter were commonly linked. Dunbar’s loudly laughing, heavily drinking women betoken feminine carnality and excess.9 The lascivious nature of the women’s jesting is furthermore related to the subject of their jokes. Whereas Boccaccio’s ladies laugh at everything from corrupt friars who get their due to women who are too stupid to realize that they are being mocked, Dunbar’s women laugh only about men and their sexual inadequacies, and their language is far more explicit than the euphemisms considered appropriate for the medieval lady. The word in the poem that succinctly illustrates the fusion between sexuality and laughter is wanton. The narrator first describes the widow as “wanton of laitis” [of wanton habits, 37]. At the end of the poem, the narrator asks his audience which of the three “wantoun wiffis” they would marry if they had the choice. The word wanton can simply mean playful or jesting, but the Oxford English Dictionary gives as the second definition “lascivious, unchaste, lewd,” noting, however, that it has this meaning only when applied to women. Although the word in its pejorative sense could be applied to men or women in the Middle Ages, it eventually comes to be applied to women alone. The Tretis, which highlights the word, already suggests the fusion of lasciviousness and jesting when applied to women.10 Clearly, Dunbar imagines women’s laughter differently from Boccaccio, who although he insinuates that laughing about sex can compromise a woman’s modesty, insists that his ladies have remained virtuous and that their laughter is justified and appropriate. One reason for this difference is that Dunbar’s women are married, and therefore have the sexual experiences that Boccaccio’s ladies presumably do not have. But more important is that the three women believe they are 8. Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, 105– 7. 9. Other elements of the women’s description may also have suggested unwholesome features. Their hair is loose, not worn under a headdress as married women would do (Hope, A Midsummer Eve’s Dream, 10). Their shining green attire, the hawthorn under which they sit, and their meeting time of Midsummer Eve are suggestive of elves or fairies (11– 23). 10. In the Thewis of Gud Women, the word wantone or wantonneß is associated both with wandering about town (110– 12) and with giglotryß, which Lumby glosses as “giddiness,” but should also perhaps be understood as frivolity or foolish playing around. The text notes a few lines later that women should spurn such frivolity (“Nocht leif to wantoune giglotryß”). The Documenta similarly cautions against “vantoune giglotriß” (159).

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alone, speaking openly to each other as women (“full cummerlik”). Their private community of women is reflected in their choice to exchange not fictional tales, but their own personal life stories, which are predominantly of a sexual nature. The first wife, for example, complains that her elderly husband is repulsive to her not only because of his scratchy beard, but because of his inadequate male member: “Quhen kissis me that carybald, than kyndillis all my sorow. / As birs of ane brym bair his berd is als stif, / Bot soft and soupill as the silk is his sary lwme” [When he kisses me, that cannibal, then all my misery flares up. / His beard is as stiff as the bristles of a fierce boar, / but his wretched tool is soft and supple like silk, 94– 96]. While the wife has simply used the word for “tool” (lwme), the sexual connotation of the word is obvious. She later notes derisively his “rousty raid” (141), which could be translated as a rusty raid, ride, or rod, all three of which allude to the sexual act.11 The second wife makes similar charges against her husband’s tool. Her husband, although not elderly, has been a lecher for so long that his tool has lost its power: “He has bene lychour so lang quhill lost is his natur, / His lwme is vaxit larbar and lyis in to swoune” [He has been a lecher so long that he has lost his virility. / His tool has grown weak and lies in a swoon, 174– 76]. Her criticism of her husband becomes even more blatantly sexual when she mocks his “oldin erd” [exhausted rod or penis, 220]. The widow complains that she found her husband so loathsome that when he climbed on top of her she would imagine another man because she could never enjoy his “myrthles raid.” Most outrageous is the widow’s description of her current loose lifestyle now that her husband is dead. When she is in the company of barons and knights, all clamoring for her attention, some of the men, she says, pass her the wine cup or kiss and hug her, and another “a stif standand thing staiffis in mi neiff ” [thrusts a stiff, standing thing into my fist, 486]. The women’s references to silky tools, flaccid rods, and mirthless rides distinguish the wanton laughter of the three wives from the blushing laughter of Boccaccio’s ladies. The private laughter of Dunbar’s wives versus the more public laughter of Boccaccio’s ladies raises the question of whether there is any fundamental distinction between modest ladies and wanton women. Would Boccaccio’s ladies have engaged in equally raucous laughter had the three men not been 11. The Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue notes an explicitly sexual meaning for raide.


there to watch over them? The widow in fact boasts that when she is in public, she behaves as though offended when she hears bawdy talk: “At langage of lichory I leit as I war crabit” (445). Her feigned illness at hearing naughty words suggests a concern among medieval men that women put on an appearance of modesty in public when they are actually quite immodest by nature.12 Treatises from Ovid through the sixteenth century list women’s use of artifice as one of their most dangerous weapons. In the eleventh century, Marbod of Rennes warned men, “Beware the honied poisons, the sweet songs and the pull of the dark depths. Do not let the charm of contrived appearances seduce you.”13 Dunbar uses the women’s laughter to foreground the ugly reality that lay underneath courtly artifice, which serves as a satirical warning to men of what can happen if they are not sufficiently vigilant of their wives’ (and daughters’) behavior.14 This satirical focus is supported by the poem’s narrative structure. Although the narrator reports the women’s speech in direct discourse (with occasional interventions to make transitions from one speaker to the next), he reminds his audience that the women’s “pastance most mery” has been transmitted through his pen. The power he has to invade the women’s space is clear in the comment of the second wife, who claims she will speak freely since “ther is no spy neir” (161). The narrator enjoys an advantage over the women, who are unaware of his presence, and by telling the story, he increases the number of eavesdroppers since he allows the audience to spy on the women along with him.15 This ironic invasion of the women’s privacy makes clear the collision between the positions held by the women: as speaking subjects and as objects of the male gaze.16 12. See my discussion of this implication in chapter 2. 13. Liber decem capitulorum, chap. 3, p. 71. See also Howard Bloch’s discussion of the formulation of woman as ornament or decoration (Medieval Misogyny, 39– 46). 14. Kinsley, The Poems of William Dunbar, 259, notes the contrast between the courtly artifices of the women’s outer appearance and the less than courtly reality that their private behavior reveals. 15. Joldersma, “The Eavesdropping Male,” 217. 16. For a related example of how Dunbar uses the male gaze to subvert women’s power, see Louise Fradenburg’s fascinating discussion of Dunbar’s poem, “Ane Blak Moir,” which parodies the genre of the love lyric by incongruously praising a black woman, thereby implying that there is little difference between the idealized white ladies of his poetry and the black lady, traditionally viewed as exotic, but not beautiful. Fradenburg argues that Dunbar uses the male gaze made possible through the work of his pen in order to reverse his submissive position before his patron the queen to a position of power and control (City, Marriage, Tournament, 261).

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The satirical effect of the narrative frame is furthermore strengthened by the irony of the narrator’s use of seemingly complimentary words to describe actions that have just been shown to be anything but praiseworthy. For example, after the first wife has berated her husband, our narrator calls her “the semely” [that fair one, 146]. Given the woman’s unbecomingly blunt descriptions of her husband’s sexual inadequacies, the narrator surely means his readers to judge the woman as anything but “semely.” Nor is it likely that the audience is truly expected to find the second wife “amyable” (239). Although the women laugh at how they have deceived men, the narrative structure ensures that they have not deceived the male audience, who is instead ironically invited to assess the women’s desirability as marriage partners. How might women have reacted to their exclusion as readers or listeners of the poem?

Women’s Counternarrative: Mockery as Emasculation To infer what the poem suggests about the pleasure of laughter for women in particular, we need to consider the poem not for what its structure instructs the audience to understand, but for what it implicitly tries to cover over. The widow and the two wives are indisputably targets of laughter because of their stereotypically lascivious speech, but they have criticisms of their own to make about men; in their jokes, they tell their version of the “truth” about men as they know it. Their wit (wit being linked etymologically to knowledge) is in fact the demonstration of their knowledge of men, a counternarrative that tells a different story than that which men tell about themselves. Much of the women’s joking is specifically targeted at male anatomy. Boccaccio’s comic tales involving sex rarely single out the male member for attack, usually pairing male and female members, such as “mortar” and “pestle” or “Devil” and “Hell.” The laughter of Dunbar’s women is of a more “castrating” nature, for all of them use terms such as “sary lwme” or “lwme waxit larbar” to ridicule their husbands’ impotence. Indeed, the notion that women complain about men who don’t measure up, which endures in today’s popular culture, is evident in a fifteenth-century joke about a woman who was asked what kind of penises women preferred: big, small, or medium-sized. When asked to explain her response— “Medium-sized ones are the best”—she quipped, “Because there aren’t any


big ones.”17 But more than size or shape, it is the inadequacy of the sexual performance that receives the brunt of the women’s invective, such as when the widow describes her strategy for enduring the (infrequent) repugnant lovemaking of her second husband: Bot of ane bowrd in to bed I sall ow breif it: Quhen he ane hal ear wes hanyt, and him behuffit rage, And I wes laith to be loppin with sic a lob avoir, Alse lang as he wes on loft I lukit on him neuer Na leit neuer enter in my thoght that he my thing persit. Bot ay in mynd ane othir man ymagynit that I haid, Or ellis had I neuer mery bene at that myrthles raid. (385– 91) [But next I must tell you a joke about bed: when, after a whole year of restraint he suddenly felt the urge, I was loath to be leaped by such a clumsy cart-horse. All the time he was on top, I never once looked at him nor would I let myself think that he was piercing my thing, but always I would imagine [that it was] another man I had there, otherwise I should have had no pleasure from that cheerless assault (or ride).] Her mockery of her husband’s deficient performance shows her to be sexually obsessed, typical of satirical portraits of women in medieval literature, but also surely points to medieval husbands’ fears of their sexual inadequacy, and the damage it could do to a wife’s respect for him. As Jean de Condé states in his fabliau in which a noblewoman mocks the manhood of her admirer, Car il n’est femme terrienne Qui ja peust ¨ .I. homme amer, Mès qu’ele l’o¨ıst diffamer D’estre mauvès ouvrier en lit 17. From an anonymous Italian compilation (ca. 1480) called the Detti piacevoli or Bel libretto, in Bowen, One Hundred Renaissance Jokes, 28. See also the fabliau “Sohait des Vez,” in which a woman dreams she is in a “prick market” in which even the lowest-quality pricks are better than her husband’s (Noomen and Van den Boogaard, Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux, 6:261– 72).

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De fere l’amoureus delit, Et sus ce point fu ramposnez. [For there is not a woman on earth who can love a man without slandering him for being a lousy worker in bed when it comes to making love, and for this he was mocked].18 Dunbar’s text, like the fabliau, voices concern not just with male inadequacy, but with women’s mockery of it and the shame it could bring men. Indeed, the shameful aspect of the widow’s joke is suggested by her calling it a bowrd, which was usually “applied to jests with a cruel edge, or to crude practical jokes.”19 Furthermore, the widow’s joking targets not only her husband’s poor performance in bed, but his unawareness of his clumsiness. As Dunbar’s narrator invites his audience to peek into the secrets of these seemingly courtly women, the widow invites her fellow women (and readers) to learn of her private assessments that deflate her husband’s self-unaware sexual performance as that of a clumsy cart horse. The second wife deflates her husband more explicitly, noting that he struts about like an arrogant dandy, whereas in reality he is impotent as a result of his lechery: He has bene lychour so lang quhill lost is his natur, His lwme is vaxit larbar, and lyis in to swoune: Wes never sugeorne wer set na on that snaill tyrit, For efter sevin oulkis rest it will nought rap anys. ....................................... And it he is als brankand with bonet on syde, And blenkand to the brichtest that in the burght duellis. (174– 81) [His tool has grown weak and lies in a swoon; nor is it any use to give that tired snail a period of repose. . . . 18. “Le Sentier batu,” ll. 127– 32, in Montaiglon and Raynaud, Recueil général, 3:247– 51. Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale may also be an inspiration for this scene, for May is similarly shown as not liking husband’s sexual advances or “playing”: “But God woot what that May thoughte in hir herte, Whan she hym saugh up sittynge in his sherte, In his nyght-cappe, and with his nekke lene; She preyseth nat his pleyyng worth a bene” (IV.1851– 54). 19. Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, 19. Bawcutt specifically notes that the women’s raucous joking at the expense of their husbands “exposes not only women’s desires but men’s fears— concerning sexual satisfaction, material possessions, and, above all, power” (328). See also Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur, 261.


And yet he swaggers about with his bonnet at a rakish tilt and making eyes at the prettiest girls that live in town.] The wife’s “and it” unmasks her husband’s performance as a sham, as a few lines later, she points to his unjustified boasting: “He ralis and makes repet with ryatus wordis, / Ay rvsing him of his radis and rageing in chalmer” (193– 94). The lines criticize the boasting (“ralis,” “ryatus wordis,” “rusing”) more than the sexual performance itself. Such mockery of men’s sexual performances as well as their pretensions parallels rituals documented by anthropological studies. One particularly intriguing example is the tradition of the tafritahs in contemporary Yemeni society. Carla Makhlouf describes how in these regular afternoon gatherings, groups of up to fifty women congregate in a room to smoke, dance, tell stories, and especially to ridicule men through jokes or even satirical plays.20 The emasculation of men by ridiculing their performances is most clear in the speech of the widow, who made her husband do “woman’s work,” as she confides to her gossips: I maid that wif carll to werk all womenis werkis, And laid all manly materis and mensk in this eird. Than said I to my cummaris in counsall about, “Se how I cabeld one cout with a kene brydill.” (351– 54) [I put that ninny to work only at women’s tasks and made him give up all masculine business and all earthly signs of manhood. Then I would say to my gossips round about when we were chatting: “Look how I haltered that colt with a tight bridle.”] By forcing her husband to abandon his performance of all that “masculine business,” she suggests an equivalence between male sexual potency and the social roles allotted to men. A man who performs poorly in bed becomes, in fact, a woman, doing her work. Like the farce wife of chapter 5, who demonstrates her mastery over her husbands by making him do the 20. Makhlouf, Changing Veils, 46.

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housework, the widow’s boast about “bridling” her husband equates sexual performance, rather than male anatomy, with the masculine role.21 The tenuous link between male anatomy and masculine authority is suggested in the poem’s use of the word pen, which can mean either penis or pen. The word first appears when the first wife remarks, scathingly, “And thoght his pen purly me payis in bed, / His purse pays richely in recompense efter” [And though his prick pays me poorly in bed, / his purse pays richly in compensation afterwards, 135– 36]. The wife’s punning use of the word “recompense” clearly shows her preference for the more satisfying cash payment over the meager compensation provided by her husband’s tool. Later the word is also used to refer to the writer’s tool, the “pen” the narrator has used to write down the account of the women’s conversation. While on the surface the narrator’s reminder that “with my pen did report ther pastance most mery” (526) appears to put a lid on the women’s unruly conversation and reassert control, the resonance with the “pen” that all three women have just lambasted in the preceding verses was surely a self-conscious move on Dunbar’s part to symbolically, for humorous effect, emasculate his narrator. This playful move, of course, is a way of asserting the primacy of discursive power over sexual potency, for the author “puts himself on top” by laughing at his own narrator.22 Yet the dual meaning of the pun, given the context of the women’s covert resistance to the authority of their husbands (especially as seen with the widow) suggests a concern that to disparage men’s masculinity is also to undermine their authority. One is reminded of Hélène Cixous’s ridiculing of men’s “little pocket signifier” [petit significant de poche], an allusion to psychoanalytical theories of the phallus as the privileged vehicle for subjectivity.23 Whereas the Wife of Bath laments that men have written history and have therefore controlled the representation of women, the implication of the wife’s ridicule of her husband’s “pen” is that this male privilege is based on a pretty shaky claim. 21. It should be added that the fact that the widow notes that her contempt for her husband increases the more he allows himself to be bridled also relates to the fundamentally conservative message of the domestic farce: it is better for men and women alike if men perform their natural role as head of the house. 22. Although I would not go so far as Spearing does in calling Dunbar “a fascinated celibate spy” who writes out of sexual frustration (Medieval Poet as Voyeur, 265), the “pen” pun certainly suggests an awareness of some kind of relationship between sexual and authorial power. 23. Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa,” 890; “Rire de la Méduse,” 51.


Deflating men’s (writing) tool and the various discursive traditions it has produced, the women in fact produce a counternarrative of their own. The widow, as the most experienced of the group, asks the others to reveal the “truth” of their own experiences as married women: “Bewrie,” said the wedo, “e woddit wemen ing, Quhat mirth e fand in maryage sen e war menis wyffis. Reveill gif e rewit that rakles conditioun, Or gif that ever e luffit leyd vpone lyf mair Nor thame that e our fayth hes festinit for euer, Or gif e think, had e chois, that e wald cheis better.” (41– 46) [Disclose, said the Widow, you young married women, what enjoyment you have found in marriage since you became men’s wives; reveal whether you have ever repented that reckless contract, or if ever you loved a living man more than those to whom you have irrevocably fastened your allegiance; or, if you had the choice, whether you think you would make a better one?] Her command to the women to reveal the truth of their experience, along with the riddlelike form of her question, suggest a parody of the medieval demande d’amour, a courtly pastime in which young men and women asked each other such questions as whether one gains more joy from seeing ones beloved or from thinking about him.24 The three women debunk the elevated status of love in the pastime, underlining only the disappointments love and men have brought them. Their bitter revelations could be heard as a cutting response to the tradition of male-authored treatises against marriage in which men complain about women. In the enormously popular Latin De Coniuge non ducenda of the first half of the thirteenth century, the anonymous author tallies the sufferings awaiting the married man and quips, “In brief, to sum up marriage well, / It’s either purgatory or hell. / In hell there’s neither rest 24. Bawcutt notes the literary evidence of this tradition in Scotland (Dunbar the Makar, 327– 29). See also chapter 2 on this pastime.

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nor peace— / A husband’s pains have no release.”25 Whereas male authors complain about the woes of marriage because of female deceitfulness, bossiness, lechery, and more, the women come up with a list of their own complaints against their husbands. The satirical tone in the antimarriage treatises is matched by the sarcasm of the widow’s tone as she asks the women to talk about the “blist ban,” like the Wife of Bath’s sarcastic rhetorical questions that question the legitimacy of clerical discourse. In addition to leading the women in forming their own story about men, the widow becomes a kind of mock teacher, claiming like the Wife of Bath that she has knowledge from which women can learn: “Wnto my lesson e lyth and leir at me wit” (257). She teaches them how to manipulate their husbands more effectively in a kind of mock sermon in which she uses her life as a kind of exemplum: Now tydis me for to talk, my taill it is nixt. God my spreit now inspir and my speche quykkin, And send me sentence to say substantious and noble, Sa that my preching may pers our perverst hertis, And mak yow mekar to men in maneris and conditiounis. (246– 50) [It is now my turn to talk, my story comes next: May God inspire my spirit, enliven my speech and send me noble and worthwhile ideas to express so that my preaching may pierce your obstinate hearts and make you meeker to men in your behavior and in your demands.] Although the wife claims she will make the women meek and obedient wives, she in fact teaches them how to deceive men, to pretend to be sweet as angels, but sting like adders (265– 66). In other words, she urges them to play the role of docile wives (“counterfeit gud maneris,” 259) so that they can pursue their own desires. The widow’s lesson and the responses of her “pupils” counter and subvert the good-wife treatises, conduct books 25. Blamires, Pratt, and Marx, Woman Defamed, 129. The genre of the antimatrimonial treatise stretches back to the church fathers (particularly Jerome) and resurges in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, continuing well into the sixteenth century with Rabelais and the Quinze joyes de mariage, translated into Scots and popular with Scottish readers (Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, 340). See the other antimatrimonial treatises in Blamires.


that provide a model of wives as decorous and submissive.26 Such “teaching” among women is of course double-edged. On the one hand, it serves to confirm the satire against women by showing them to be duplicitous; the very title of the poem pokes fun at what passes for a “tretis” among women, exposing women’s knowledge (wit) as laughable and a source of potential trouble for men. On the other hand, the parody of the women’s teaching also suggests the fun that they have at playing with authoritative (male) discourse. Their subversion consists not only of returning tit for tat against the antimarriage tradition or pretending to be meek; they also play with the modes of authoritative speech. The widow frames her speech to the other women in the form of a mock sermon, appropriating and implicitly deflating the authority of preachers to preach sermons on women’s faults.27 As a confessor’s role is to make sinners repent their sins by telling the truth, the widow, with a wink, asks the wives to “reveill” (43) and “confese” (153) the truth of their experiences. She also says she will use her “preching” to pierce the “perverst hertis” of her companions, whose “sin” is their ignorance at how to trick their husbands (249). This appropriation of official Christian offices is further suggested in the widow’s playful statement that she has recounted the (saint’s) legend of her life (“This is the legeand of my lif, thought Latyne it be nane,” 504). Like the Wife of Bath and the wife in the Shipman’s Tale, the widow parodies the official discourse of the male world whose language is Latin, and transforms her own sufferings and “martyrdom” into matter for a mock saint’s life—a saint’s life that is in the vernacular, the language to which women more often had access.28 The 26. Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, 336– 37. See Rasmussen’s similar interpretation of the German “Stepmother and Daughter” poem, which in some manuscripts also has an eavesdropping narrator who tries to co-opt the mother’s teaching by moralizing to his readers on the dangers of women. A significant difference between these German poems and Dunbar’s, however, is that Dunbar’s women are noblewomen, not the lower-class women, perhaps even prostitutes of the German corpus (Mothers and Daughters in Medieval German Literature, 189– 221). 27. Scholars have noted the poem’s affinity with the sermon joyeux. For a full discussion of the various genres underlying the poem’s humor (demande d’amour, debate poetry, chanson de mal mariée) see Pearcy, “The Genre of William Dunbar’s Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo,” 58– 74. 28. The Wife of Bath says she will show the tribulations of marriage in which she is an expert, and she will do this using “ensamples mo than ten” (179), preaching through exempla the truth of her sermon. Another possible source for the widow’s sermon is the Shipman’s Tale, where the wife says, “Than wolde I telle a legende of my lyf / What I have suffred sith I was a wyf ” (VII.145– 46).

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women laugh after this and appear to participate in her parody of official teaching, for they say that they “suld exampill tak of her souerane teching” [would follow the example of her sovereign teaching, 507]. On one level, the wife’s mock sermon can be read as a serious comment on how older women can corrupt younger ones.29 But the context of the women’s laughter makes the wives’ use of the words “soverane teching” sound equally as ironic as the widow’s use of “legeand.” When we interpret the references to preaching and saint’s lives as a case of the women consciously parodying those traditions, what we hear is not so much blasphemous preaching as playful ridicule of dominant discursive modes. The playfulness of women adopting the preaching mode is evident in the enor´ mously popular fifteenth-century Evangiles des quenouilles (Gospels of distaffs), in which six married women described as “doctoresses” share their knowledge with each other during the course of six evenings of spinning and have it recorded by a male scribe. The women share home remedies, various folk beliefs, and sayings about men and marriage. While it is clear that the narrator’s claim that he has agreed to describe their proceedings to the honor and glory of women is ironic, since he describes folk beliefs and things “sans aucune raison ou bonne consequence” [without meaning or purpose], it is important to note that what the women say is perhaps less interesting than the fact that they parody official teaching for their own amusement. For example, in the first “chapter” of the gospel recounted the first day, the female narrator, Ysengrine, says that husbands who fritter away their wives’ dowries will have to answer to God. She or one of the other women adds a gloss (glose) to her chapter, stating that any husband who disobeys this chapter will end up in the “purgatoire des mauvais maris,” where they will be placed in a vat of burning sulphur, unless they do penance.30 This comment suggests the kind of imaginary retribution 29. See, for example, Reiss, William Dunbar, 123– 24. ´ 30. Les Evangiles des quenouilles, ll. 219– 27. The French versions first circulated in Flanders and Picardy, but translations also circulated in other European countries. See, for example, the discussion of the Dutch tradition in Verberckmoes, Laughter, Jestbooks, and Society, 25– 26. The variety of manuscripts, from luxurious illuminated manuscripts of the fifteenth century to the small printed copies of the sixteenth, suggests the wide audience of ´ the Evangiles. One of its illustrious women owners was Marie de Luxembourg. It was also widely cited, both in didactic works and comic literature, particularly farces. This wide diffusion, and its varied use, suggests how the text played on several registers. As Jeay notes, it was both positive and negative in regard to women, both comic and serious, fundamentally ambiguous (13).


the women conjure up for husbands, who normally find no punishment for such “transgressions.” Their gloss is in comic contradiction to official teachings on husband’s control over their wives’ property, and the women, rather than commenting seriously on it, instead laugh. What we see is not a brewing rebellion to overthrow bad husbands but women taking pleasure together at the subversion of male power they are able to effect in their minds, through their laughter. That their mock “preaching” is aimed at producing laughter more than corrupting other women is especially suggested in the last chapter of the day, when Ysengrine shares a remedy for women with problems with their breasts: they should have their husband make three circles around their breasts with his “instrument naturel,” for this will heal their affliction. The women laugh loudly at this “joyeuse conclusion” and promise to circulate her gospels to those who would not have a chance to read about them in the book (429– 42). ´ The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen, like the Evangiles, shows women having fun with their own playful narrative, their laughter allowing them to come together in the company of other women and subvert conventional male-authored discourse in a way that they cannot do in the world of men.

Laughter as Relief for the Woes of (Mis)Marriage More than a head-on challenge to masculine power, the women’s laughter shows them privately carving out a space for themselves in which they can exert some control over social conditions that are largely beyond their control, namely their inability to choose their own marriage partners. It has often been noted that the poem shows the women to be lascivious. It is true that the first wife argues that even birds do not stay with one mate, but rather take a new partner each year (56– 67). The widow, for her part, exults in those occasions when she simultaneously entertains a whole roomful of lusty knights and barons and other bachelors (476– 504). But the poem also has the women voice their disappointment at not having been able to choose their partners. Whereas the male narrator asks his male audience sarcastically which of the women they would choose as a wife, the widow asks the wives whether “had e chois, that e wald cheis better?” [if you had the choice, would you make a better one? 46]. In saying “If you had the choice,” the widow underlines the fact that they do not have the

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choice. In noble or wealthy bourgeois families, husbands were chosen by the family in order to cement political alliances with other families or keep land or wealth within the hands of already existing alliances, which meant that the young girl’s personal inclinations were disregarded in favor of family interests. The second wife describes her husband as a “whoremaster” whom she has caught committing adultery many a time. His sexual excesses had weakened him even before he “chesit” her (178), and now she complains that she spends many a sleepless night, tossing and turning, and cursing her wicked kinsmen who chose poorly for her, casting her away on such a poor specimen of manhood when there were many finer knights in the land to choose from (213– 16). She laments that, now married, she cannot undo her marriage and “cheise agane” (208). The first wife does not mention kinsmen explicitly, but she twice mentions her lack of choice (54 and 75), and it is likely that she also was not permitted to choose her husband, who is clearly much older than she, since she frequently uses the word ald (old) and describes him as ane wallidrag, ane worme, ane auld wobat carle, A waistit wolroun na worth bot wourdis to clatter, Ane bumbart, ane dronbee, ane bag full of flewme, Ane scabbit skarth, ane scorpioun, ane scutarde behind. (89– 92) [ a a a

a slack sloven, a worm, an old crawly caterpillar, worn-out boar good for nothing but clap-trap; bumbler, a drone bee, a bag full of phlegm; scabby scrag, a scorpion, a poop-bum.]

The descriptions of the husband would seem to suggest that she has been given to an older man, a mismarriage not uncommon in the Middle Ages, as historical records indicate.31 This practice makes its way into the literary corpus, the fabliaux authors, for example, openly taking the side of women 31. See David Herlihy, Medieval Households, 103– 11, who documents cases of wives who are sometimes as much as a generation younger than their husbands. Herlihy uses decision theory to explain this difference. Because customs of dowry were favorable to men, they could wait for the “best offer” from the bride’s family, whereas the bride, having less favorable terms in the dowry, needed to go with the first offer or risk not being married at all. For a discussion of the lack of choice of marriage partners in Scotland, see Marshall, Virgins and Viragos, 22– 27.


who have been married either to those too old for them, or too low in social station.32 Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale, which illustrates the comic mismatch resulting from the marriage of old January and young May, was in fact probably one of Dunbar’s sources.33 It is only the widow who now has free choice, for now that her mourning for her deceased husband is over, she can now enjoy and in turn please a whole crowd of men around her: “Thar is no liffand leid so law of degre / That sall me luf unluffit, I am so loik hertit” [There is no man living of such low degree / that he shall love me and not be loved in return, so tenderhearted am I, 497– 98]. The widow conjures up a sort of “free market” where the woman can choose and be chosen, love and be loved.34 The widow’s “tender-heartedness” is of course both a parody on the courtly motif of the lady’s pity and an implicit condemnation of the widow’s rampant sexuality. But what is also emphasized in the widow’s advice to her younger companions is the financial and legal management that women should learn in the face of their lack of control over the marriage itself. She notes, for example, how she cajoled her first husband, an older man who is ill-tempered and full of phlegm (272), into signing over his property to and legitimizing her illegitimate son, who he believed to be his own. The widow then boasts that she was a “wis woman” who achieved more with the force of her “wylis” than with the strength of her hands. Such financial acumen was probably what led her to marry her second husband, a merchant. Her strategies make him give the bulk of his wealth to her own sons at the expense of the children of his first marriage. The widow then notes the delicious irony that “wise men” often claim that women are bad at business (408– 9). The widow may well have been denied the choice of her first husband, but once married, it appears that she has deployed her womanly 32. For fabliaux narrators’ condemnation of older husbands’ marrying younger women see Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale (I.3221– 32) and Merchant’s Tale (IV.1248– 66). For criticism of peasant or bourgeois men marrying courtly women, see “Berengier au long cul,” 2:14– 17, “Aioul,” 3:5– 23, and “Vilain Mire,” 2:1– 40, all in Noomen and Van den Boogaard, Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux. H. Diane Russell, Eva/Ave, 190, also notes the popular use of the “unequal lovers” motif in prints and paintings in the later Middle Ages. See also the fifth joy of the Quinze joyes de mariage, which talks about the dangers of a woman’s marrying beneath her. 33. Spearing (Medieval Poet as Voyeur, 253) and McCarthy (“Syne maryit I a Marchand,” 149) assert that Dunbar’s poem is more indebted to the Merchant’s Tale than to the Wife of Bath (253). 34. Burns (Bodytalk, 61– 62) notes the similar predicament of fabliaux wives who may also be heard to demand choice rather than simply unlimited sex.

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stratagems to look out for her interests. Her laughter thus signifies her cunning manipulation of the legal system.35 It should also be noted that in the Middle Ages widows of sufficient means had more freedom to dispose of their property, even control their own businesses, than married women, who had to have the consent of their husbands for commercial and legal transactions.36 The widow’s delight in her newfound freedom about which she boasts to the two married women was thus understood to encompass social and economic as well as sexual matters. Such financial and legal control, lectures the widow, can be achieved through patience and wiles. Yet psychological control, she suggests, is equally important, and this is made possible by laughter, which is what enabled her to endure keeping up the pretense of marital bliss with her first husband: I hatit him like a hund, thought I it hid preue: With kissing and with clapping I gert the carill fon, Weil couth I claw his cruke bak and kemm his kewt noddill, And with a bukky in my cheik bo on him behind, And with a bek gang about and bler his ald e, And with a kyind contynance kys his crynd chekis, In to my mynd makand mokis at that mad fader. Trovand me with trew lufe to treit him so fair. This cought I do without dule and na dises tak, Bot ay be mery in my mynd and myrthfull of cher. (273– 80) [I hated him like a dog, though I hid that from him and with kissing and petting I made a fool of the man. 35. For a discussion of the widow’s shrewd business maneuvers in the context of Scottish marriage and inheritance laws, see Bentsen and Sanderlin, “The Profits of Marriage in Late Medieval Scotland.” The authors note the contrast between the wives’ use mostly of sexual invective and the Widow’s use of legal terminology such as “evidents of heritage,” “summonses,” “chief chemys,” and “billis” and “bauchlis” and argue that the increasing written recording of such transactions into protocol books and registers was a significant influence on the poem, one that would have resonated with many in the audience. On the laughter of a woman outwitting the legal system, see Burns’s discussion of Iseult’s mocking of legal procedure in Béroul’s Roman de Tristan (Bodytalk, 236). 36. On widows generally, see Shahar, The Fourth Estate, 95– 97. On Scottish widows, see Marshall, Virgins and Viragos, 22– 27. See also Bawcutt’s discussion of the freedom of widows as a context for reading Dunbar’s poem (Dunbar the Makar, 345).


Well did I know how to ease his bent back and comb his cropped noddle, while I puffed out my cheeks and pulled faces behind him, and with a bow came round and pulled the wool over his old eyes, and with a kindly expression kissed his shrivelled cheeks. In my mind I made mock of that mad father who trusted me to treat him so fair from true affection. I could manage this without trouble and no discomfort but was always able to be cheerful in spirit and full of gaiety.] The widow embraces outwardly the attitude of wifely concern and servitude dictated to women in conduct manuals. Her description of how she would make faces and mock him behind his back, however, suggests that this kind of playing with her wifely role allows her to “make merry in her mind.” As in the “bowrd” she tells about imagining another man in her husband’s place in the marriage bed, the widow uses her mockery as a strategy of control that gives her a different kind of pleasure than that of the marriage bed. The pleasure she takes in her own “bowrd about bed” indeed seems the more keen for her husband’s sublime unawareness that he has been ridiculed. A similar example of a woman’s private mockery of her husband is found in the French fabliau “De la Saineresse,” in which a wife decides to punish her braggart of a husband who claims that no woman can deceive him. She proves him wrong in typical fabliau style, cuckolding him in his own house with a lover dressed as a female physician (bloodletter) who has come to cure her of a “pain in the loins.” What is interesting is that the revenge does not stop at the cuckolding, for when the lover leaves, she tells her husband in great detail about her “treatment,” with its repeated “probing” and its marvelous “ointment,” delivered in a long tube. The husband is not only bested in being cuckolded, but the narrator furthermore points out that he did not get the joke: “Cil ne s’est pas aperceu¨ / De la borde qu’ele conta.”37 Proving him wrong becomes pleasure for her in the very fact that he does not know the joke has been played on him. As in the fabliau, the widow’s laughter comes from enjoying her own 37. Cuckolds, Clerics, and Countrymen, trans. John Duval and introduction and notes by Raymond Eichmann, 105– 24.

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cleverness, making a joke that her husbands do not get. What the widow wants to teach the other women concerns the psychological advantages of their own laughter, the space it offers them as a refuge from the woes of marriage, a space that can be enjoyed in the company of other women. This brings us back to my opening point that the laughter of the women is the laughter of a private women-only group, which is continually underlined throughout the text as they address each other as “wiffis” [wives, 398] or “sueit sisteris deir” [dear sweet sisters, 145]. Their community stands in opposition to the male community formed between the eavesdropping narrator and his male audience. When the second wife expresses her willingness to speak because “ther is no spy neir” (161), the irony is at her expense, but it also makes clear the violation of the woman’s community by the man who is spying on them. In fact, given the medieval garden’s function as a place of privacy, it is likely that readers would have assumed that the women have met in the garden precisely in order to prevent intrusion by men.38 The private and intimate female community in which the three women do their joking reflects the contemporary findings of anthropologists who have studied gender differences in joke-telling across cultures. Whereas women generally do not tell jokes or laugh loudly in front of men, when they are among other women, their laughter is uninhibited, as the tafritahs discussed above suggest.39 Like the women described in this ritual, Dunbar’s women bond together both in their unrestrained behavior and in their communal joking at the expense of men. In both cases, laughter marks the ritualized space of the women-only gathering that provides relief from the various pressures that circumscribe the women’s behavior in public. The cathartic function of such women-only laughter is directly invoked by the second wife, who begins her speech by saying it will help purge her pent-up frustrations: I sall a ragment reveil fra rute of my hert, A roust that is sa rankild quhill risis my stomok. Now sall the byle all out brist that beild has so lang. For it to beir on my breist wes berdin our hevy. 38. Stokstad and Stannard, Gardens of the Middle Ages, 216. 39. Apte, Humor and Laughter, 75– 81.


I sall the venome devoid with a vent large, And me assuage of the swalme that suellit wes gret. (162– 67) [I shall reveal a discourse that comes from the bottom of my heart, a disturbance that rankles so that my gorge rises. Now shall all the bile burst forth that has been swelling up for so long; for it was too heavy a burden to bear in my breast. I shall give wide vent to the poison and ease myself of a swelling which has so much increased.] The wife’s claim that her speech will enable her to purge the bile poisoning her connects to medieval views on the influence of the body’s four humors on a person’s psychological disposition. A medical condition brought about by an imbalance of the humors could be remedied by a therapy that expelled the excess humor. A therapy often prescribed by medieval medical treatises was laughter.40 As Boccaccio explains that he wants to amuse his dear ladies by chasing away their melancholy, and as the ladies in the brigata hope to forget the horrors of the plague in telling comic tales, Dunbar’s women laugh in order to assuage the sufferings they have endured from the woes of marriage. The imaginative, fantasy aspect of their narrative is evident in the terms “game” (241) and “pastance most mery” (526). Dunbar’s use of the word “game” echoes Chaucer’s in the Canterbury Tales, and his affirmation of its ability to purge “both colere and malencolye” (VII.2946). The festive opening of the Canterbury Tales is also echoed in Dunbar’s poem, set during “Midsummer Ewin, mirriest of nightis.”41 The women-only laughter also relates to medieval concerns about the dangers of women’s gossip. The term “gossip,” or cummar, was used to describe a woman with whom another woman habitually shared her secrets, illustrated in the example of Dunbar’s “Twa Cummaris.” The fact 40. See Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, 126– 28. Verberckmoes (Laughter, Jestbooks, and Society, 60ff.) also discusses Joubert and other medical treatises in this light. For a different interpretation, see Bitterling, 346, on the possible allusion to confession as a kind of purgative medicine. 41. Midsummer Eve was celebrated in June, on the day before the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. Throughout Europe, feasting, dancing, and bonfires marked the celebration of the feast, but were often condemned by medieval preachers (Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, 75).

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that the term has generally been used to denigrate women’s conversations with each other suggests men’s uneasiness about the content and purpose of women-only talk. The kind of gang ridicule performed by groups like Dunbar’s women is commonly represented in medieval culture, both in literary texts such as the fifteenth-century Fifteen Joys of Marriage, which chronicle the fifteen types of suffering (sarcastically labeled “joys”) they cause their husbands and in visual images that suggest the dangers of women’s talk.42 What is so interesting about such representations is that they suggest that women’s derisive laughter and gossip, although perhaps done in private, was well known to men and a considerable source of anxiety.

When Men Imagine Women Laughing The therapy offered by the women’s laughter has not been enjoyed by all of Dunbar’s readers. One critic labels the women “coarse, lecherous, and cruel” and argues that the “three drinking, jesting, gossips cynically pretend, as part of their festive joke, allegiance to courtly love,”43 while another critic calls the widow “hypocritical” in her teaching to the two wives.44 The notion that the women are cynical or hypocritical has led such scholars to view the humor of the poem as, well, not very funny: “[Dunbar’s] humour is a hurt, slightly mad humour—wild at times, at times gruesome, dark, and unpleasant or sweetly pathetic. . . . We suffer with him, and he does little to relieve his own pain or ours, but, on the contrary, rubs it in.”45 As Bawcutt notes, there is a distinct disparity between the hilarious laughter of the three women and the singularly unamused reaction of male critics: “It resounds with laughter, yet many 42. Examples of women laughing at men in the Quinze joyes de mariage can be found in Joys 3 and 5. Another notable text featuring gossip is Gautier Le Leu’s fabliau, La Veuve, in which a widow complains about her late husband’s poor performance in bed. Gossip is of course also satirized in the portrait of the Wife of Bath (ll. 529– 45). Diane Wolfthal, “Women’s Community and Male Spies,” notes that prints from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century showing groups of women were critical of their communal speech, but also discusses how some images were suggestive of the bonds formed between women. Wolfthal notes in particular the suggestion of female privacy given by the garden setting of one example, explicitly connecting it to Dunbar’s poem (139). 43. Kinsley, Poems of William Dunbar, 259– 60. 44. Reiss, William Dunbar, 123– 24. 45. Scott, Dunbar, 205– 6.


critics (chiefly men) are unamused and subject it to solemn and often hostile analysis.”46 Were medieval male readers as unamused as these twentieth-century men? It seems unlikely that a prominent male poet at the Scottish court would compose a poem that would offer little amusement to the men in his audience. The disapproval expressed by the male scholars seems to reveal their discomfort with what the poem reveals about women’s view of male inadequacies, and this discomfort may well have been shared by medieval men. How many wives were, like the widow, weeping on the outside but laughing in their minds? However, just as the poem portrays women seeking relief from the woes of marriage in their own laughter, male audiences were also invited to relieve their anxieties about their masculinity in laughing at the women. The eavesdropping frame of the narrative distances the threat posed by the women’s conspiratorial laughter, making it subject to the male gaze allowed to penetrate the gap in the hedges. In the closing lines of the poem, men are invited to laugh at the women, for it is their power to choose the women, and not vice versa, that is reaffirmed.47 It is worth noting that the comments of the male scholars above were made in the 1960s and 1970s, before either feminism or reader-oriented criticism had made their way into scholarship on medieval literature. Readers today are more ready to acknowledge the multiple readings a text invites and the often ambivalent stance of the author. It should also be noted that women readers of Dunbar’s poem were probably aware of the poem’s misogynous implications since the arguments Christine de Pizan made against misogynous literature were most likely known to Dunbar and the Scottish court through Thomas Hoccleve’s rendering of the Epistre au Dieu d’Amours; women may in fact have already been engaging openly in discussions these texts raised.48 The narrator’s final question to his male audience may have been his way of anticipating and stifling resistance by 46. Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, 325. 47. The poem might also have capitalized on the hostility between medieval men of different groups. Younger men could delight in jokes that ridiculed the older men who were in fact their greatest rivals in the competitive marriage market, but are effectively shown to be none the happier for being married. Brundage, for example, notes that “young bachelors in Dijon faced strong competition for brides from older men, many well established in the civic hierarchy and able to bring pressure to bear on families to give them the girls they desired” (Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 495). 48. Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, 296.

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women readers. Or perhaps, as in the court pastime of the demande d’amour, the question led to further debate between the men and women. Since Dunbar’s text was likely to have been read aloud at court, his audience may well have participated in the humor of the text by adding “ribald interjections” or “whispered speculation” about the marital relations of others present in the room during the reading.49 Both Boccaccio and Dunbar imagine noblewomen laughing and making jokes, but whereas the Tretis portrays a closed community of three women who tell dirty jokes about men, the ladies of the Decameron laugh at Dioneo’s tales of sex, but blush, reminding him that he shouldn’t tell such stories in the presence of ladies. Boccaccio’s many addresses to his lady readers contrast with Dunbar’s implicit construction of a male audience, and thus the depiction of the laughter depends in great part on the group dynamics between narrator and audience. Boccaccio paints a world of genteel play for mutual delight, where a woman’s laugh, although potentially a weapon against unwanted advances, may also be accompanied by a subtly inviting wink. Dunbar imagines a world where women laugh at men rather than with them, their wanton laughter a sign of the feminine carnality hidden beneath their decorous disguise. Both texts represent male fantasies of what women’s laughter means. In an article on comic heroines in fiction, Judith Wilt has observed male writers’ tendency to represent women’s laughter in two ways that she describes as the “laughter of maidens,” the deflating, yet bright and innocent laugh that men find beguiling, or the “cackle of matriarchs,” the witchlike laughter of the woman who is “knowing, sly, packed full of ripe experience.”50 These two types loosely describe Boccaccio’s witty and brightly laughing (although not so innocent) maidens and Dunbar’s experienced matriarchs who laugh raucously as they detail their sexual histories. Wilt argues that both types of heroines, despite the power of their laughter, ultimately cannot escape the control of patriarchy, and comments that women today “may surely hesitate” before either kind of humor, “wistfully wishing they could count more securely on a man’s sense of humor” (195). 49. McCarthy, “Syne maryt I a Marchand,” 148. Deanna Evans sees the narrator’s final question as a reminder to the audience to contemplate the greater message of the poem, returning us from laughter to serious questions. Although it seems plausible that the poem warns against the “seven deadly sins in carnivalesque disguise,” the analysis does not fully take into account the playful ambivalence generated by the competing frames of the narratives or consider that “we” as readers might differ in the questions we ponder. 50. Wilt, “The Laughter of Maidens, the Cackle of Matriarchs,” 176.


Feminists today should certainly hesitate to share fully in the laughter either of Boccaccio’s maidens or of Dunbar’s matriarchs, since their laughter marks the limitations faced by women in medieval society, limitations made most clear in the narrative frame in both works where male author asserts his power over female reader. Yet women’s laughter also marks the points at which such power over women was felt to be threatened. A woman’s laugh of contempt for the norms of modesty that would protect her reputation and that of her family was to be feared, but so too was a woman’s mute response in the face of an illicit suitor’s beguiling words. Putting the responsibility of maintaining her chastity on the shoulders of a woman also could entail acknowledging that she would need her wits about her to accomplish the task. Power to choose marriage partners or to dispose of the property of the married couple was granted mostly to men, who had legal authority over their wives, but the laughter of fictional heroines often suggests that the covert ways in which women might attempt to circumvent this authority was something over which men apparently felt they had less control. The laughter of maidens and matriarchs alike marks a space in which women, less able to record their voices alongside those of the men of their age, speak “off the record.” Dunbar’s poem, in particular, is interesting in that it both provides us with a clear example of a medieval antifeminism that laughs at women’s presumed carnality and deceit and allows us a glimpse into a feminine space of laughter, or counterculture, that offered women a kind of shelter apart from the dominant culture of antifeminism.

4

“With them she had her playful game” The Performance of Gender and Genre in Ulrich von Lichtenstein’s Frauendienst

Noch habt si dort, diu valsches vri, uf ir pferde; ir stunden bi ritter und chnappen vil, mit den het si ir schimpfes spil. das hebisen ich dar truoc. si sprach: “ir sit niht starc genuoc, ir m¨ ugt mich abe geheben niht, ir sit chranc, dar zuo enwiht.” Des schimpfes wart gelachet da. (133–34)1 [She was still on her horse, that paragon; many knights and pages were standing next to her. It was with them she had her playful game. I held the stirrup for her. She said: “You are not strong enough, you won’t be able to lift me down. You are weak, and worthless on top of it.” People laughed at the joke there.]

1. There is only one extant manuscript of Frauendienst (Munich Staatsbibliothek cgm44). Middle High German quotations are from the 1987 edition by Spechtler. I cite strophe numbers and have omitted some of Spechtler’s editorial notations. For a concordance with the page numbers of the edition by Lachmann, see Schmidt, Begriffsglossare und Indices zu Ulrich von Lichtenstein, 1:xv– xvii. The only English translation of Frauendienst is the verse translation by J. W. Thomas, which omits the last part of the work and many sections within the first part. I have therefore provided my own translations. I thank Ann Marie Rasmussen for her generous assistance with these translations.

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“With them she had her playful game” 127

lrich von Lichtenstein’s lyric narrative Frauendienst (ca. 1255) tells the comic story of a married noblewoman who becomes exasperated with the unwanted attentions of her foolish suitor and demands that he abandon his overblown lyrics and leave her in peace. While the refusal of the consummately beautiful courtly lady is standard fare in the courtly lyrics of the Minnesang or troubadour tradition, it is the form of the lady’s refusal, her derisive jest (schimpfes spil) that commands center stage in this work. With her joke, the lady publicly humiliates Ulrich in front of his male peers, who recognize her joke and laugh. The lady dominates, using the joke to ridicule the source of her irritation in front of an appreciative audience. She not only subverts the lyric genre’s conventional silencing of women (whose refusals are reported by the male poet) but attempts herself to silence the male voice, exposing its pretense to be dedicated to serving women as a sham. As many scholars have by now pointed out, the canso, formerly seen as heralding an age of chivalry that placed women on a pedestal, was largely part of a complex construction of the male self.2 The jesting of Ulrich’s lady seems calculated precisely to unmask this construction, for it exposes his obsessive claim to be motivated by hohe muot (lofty feelings) as foolish stubbornness and arrogance. The lady’s refusal to be served in a work purportedly dedicated to the service of ladies (frauendienst) raises the question of whether some women may have been skeptical of the genre’s claims to serve them. Like the Wife of Bath, who questions the discourse on women through her tendentious play, the lady interrogates the premises of the Minnesang genre, ridiculing its pretenses and exposing its contradictions. Yet her joke is also made with the men in attendance; it is with them that she has her playful game. The scene thus suggests the pleasures that such ridicule could hold for male audiences as well. The work’s humor has not been lost on readers, but most attempts to understand it have focused on the male hero. This is largely due to the fact that the story is told from the suitor’s point of view and in the first person. Indeed, the work was long considered an autobiography. The author, 2. As early as 1967, Frederick Goldin exposed the myth of the lady on the pedestal as the “mirror of Narcissus,” the male poet projecting idealized images of himself onto the lady. Since then, much feminist medieval scholarship has revealed the patriarchal values behind the texts that claim to elevate women. See, for example, Burns, “The Man behind the Lady in Troubadour Lyric,” and the collection edited by Fisher and Halley, Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings.

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Ulrich von Lichtenstein, was an actual ministerial knight who lived in Styria during the second half of the thirteenth century. He was active in the politics of his time and was respected as a skilled diplomat and politician. Because the narrator calls himself Ulrich von Lichtenstein and recounts in the first person his past service as a knight, many scholars assumed that the events narrated by Ulrich were actual events from his life. If Ulrich’s autobiography followed the plot of Frauendienst, it would run as follows. As a boy of twelve, he enters into the service of a married noblewoman as a page, falls in love and serves her so earnestly (drinking her bathwater, for example), that his father withdraws him from her household and sends him to the court of Margrave Henry. Upon his father’s death four years later, he returns to Lichtenstein, where he recommences serving his lady, fighting in numerous tournaments for her sake, cutting off his finger and sending it to her as a testament of his love. He then dresses as Queen Venus, in white gowns and long braids, and goes on an extensive journey throughout Europe in order to challenge worthy opponents in her name. None of his service helps him to obtain what he wants; to the contrary, he is forced by his lady to disguise himself as a leper, is urinated on by the watchman while waiting to enter into the lady’s castle, and finds himself hung out of the window when his lady tricks him. After sending him on a crusade but then changing her mind, the lady apparently grants him her favors, although Ulrich alludes only briefly to this change of heart (1348– 49).3 The lady then commits some unnamable deed that leads Ulrich to abandon her service, and two years later he begins serving another lady. This second service, which takes up less than a fourth of the whole narrative, appears to bring him happiness, although we hear very little about this second woman, who never speaks. During the course of this service, Ulrich masquerades as King Arthur and gathers together knights from the region who play the roles of other Arthurian knights in his service. This second service contains most of the fifty-eight love songs, and much of its narrative is simply explication of the songs. Scholars have largely succeeded in dispelling the view of the work as a serious autobiography, and most scholars now agree that the work draws largely on models from literary fiction, while combining them with factual 3. The Proven¸cal poet Peire Vidal’s “Ajostar e lassar” may be a possible source for this motif. The poet complains that his lady asked him to go on a crusade just to get rid of him and then said cruel things to him while smiling to other men around him.


details from Ulrich’s milieu of thirteenth-century Styria.4 The humor comes precisely from the gap between the historical Ulrich, a powerful, poetically gifted ministerial well known to the audience, and the fictional Ulrich, a young, naive fool for love. Furthermore, the narrative is recounted in hindsight by the narrator, who frankly refers to the folly of his youth. The gap between foolish youth and savvy poet results in a parodying of the figure of the courtly lover. Ulrich, with his frequent bouts of tears and his ridiculous services performed for his lady, certainly stretches the type of the suffering, steadfastly serving lover to an extreme.5 Others have claimed that the parody comes from Ulrich’s inappropriate application of the rules he has learned from love poetry to a world of real men and women who do not behave according to these models.6 The intrusion of mundane uncourtly details, like the suitor’s drinking his lady’s bathwater, or the watchman’s urinating on him, would serve to reinforce the incongruity of literary models transposed into real life. The work’s humor has also been explained as the result of the transfer of lyric conventions (the protesting lover and the distant and haughty lady) into the narrative genre of the courtly romance.7 The work’s hybrid genre would indeed suggest that a motivating impetus for creating the work was Ulrich’s own pleasure in playfully combining and pastiching multiple literary motifs, types, and styles. These explanations focus on the playing with generic conventions, which are certainly key to understanding the work’s humor. Much more could be learned, however, by examining the specific function of women’s laughter in this playing with genre. Ulrich’s lady openly mocks her male suitor, ridiculing his masculinity. What pleasures does such mockery offer to male and female audiences? What do the jokes made from her perspective reveal about attitudes toward male and female roles in courtship? In what way does Ulrich’s cross-dressing add to our understanding of medieval attitudes toward gender roles? How does reading for the lady’s 4. See Milnes, “Ulrich von Lichtenstein and the Minnesang”; J. W. Thomas’s introduction to Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s “Service of Ladies”; Peters, Frauendienst; Jan-Dirk Muller, ¨ “Lachen-Spiel-Fiktion”; and most recently, Freed, Noble Bondsmen. 5. Martin, Love’s Fools, 21, notes that such parodies were not uncommon, since the courtly lover “with his blond curls, his paroxysms of weeping, and his transports of joy, was an easy target” for parody from the very beginning. 6. See, for example, Brody, “The Comic Rejection of Courtly Love,” 228. 7. See Wolf, “Komik und Parodie als Moglichkeiten ¨ Dichterischer Selbstdarstellung im Mittelalter”; and Milnes, “Ulrich von Lichtenstein.”

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laughter enable us to imagine what lady service might mean to women, not themselves the authors of the courtly genres that claim to speak on their behalf? Ulrich’s work touches on subjects likely to affect most medieval women in some way: courtship, marriage, and even rape. Through the work’s humor, these concerns are brought to the fore, and the lady’s laughter serves to articulate a woman’s response that places these concerns in a new perspective.

The Mocking Lady and a Woman’s “No” Like Ulrich, the lady is a parody of a conventional figure from the courtly love lyric. She is a married woman of noble birth, thus inaccessible to the poet/lover, and she tortures the lover with her haughty refusals. In the lyric tradition, the lady must say “no” because her refusal is what enables the male lover to suffer. By demonstrating his ability to continue loving against all odds, he demonstrates his nobility of character and superior moral worth. Where Ulrich’s lady differs from the conventional lyric lady is that her refusals become part of the story. Whereas the “no” of the lady in the canso is reported by the male poet, in this narrative, the “nos” are given voice by the female heroine and played out in detail in front of us. Unlike the silent, distant lady of the lyric whose motives and desires are inscrutable, Ulrich’s lady voices her refusals directly with an earthy mockery that makes her seem more playful than cold and distant.8 Her playful voice resembles more closely female voices in other lyric genres such as the pastourelle and tenso (debate poem) where the woman openly mocks the male suitor or poet; however, in this work this voice is realized to its fullest, since the narrative allows her a fuller range of responses than is possible in the lyric. The narrative also brings out more fully one of the problems of women’s laughter for medieval culture. While courtly poetry depends on the woman’s “no” to establish the nobility of the male poet, conduct books of the later Middle Ages constantly advised women to be suspicious of the deceptive words men used to woo them: their “no,” to be delivered unequivocally, was necessary to preserve their chastity and their reputation. Mixing laughter or 8. On this point, see Dussère, “Humor and Chivalry in Ulrich von Lichtenstein’s Frauendienst and Gerhart Hauptmann’s Ulrich von Lichtenstein,” 304.


playfulness with a refusal was highly discouraged. For example, Robert de Blois in his late-thirteenth-century Chastoiement des dames exhorts his intended female readers to say “no” to zealous lovers politely but firmly. After modeling such a response as though speaking as a woman himself, he adds: “Ne le dites pas en riant, / Mes ausi con par mautalant” [Don’t say this laughingly, but with a certain irritation].9 Saying “no,” claims Robert, is a matter of utmost seriousness to the modest lady who values her honor, and laughter is therefore inappropriate. An example pertinent to the Germanic context is Der W a¨ lsche Gast by the Tyrolian Thomasin von Zirclaria (1215 or 1216), in which women are instructed: Ein vrowe sol niht vrevelˆıch schimphen, daz stât vrowelich. ¨ ich wil ouch des verjehen, ein vrouwe sol niht vast an sehen einn vromeden ¨ man, daz stât wol. ........................... Ein juncvrouwe sol senfticlˆıch und niht lut ˆ sprechen sicherlich. ......................... zuht wert den vrouwen allen gemein sitzen mit bein uber ¨ bein. (397– 412) [A lady should not impudently tease; that is more ladylike. I also say that a lady should not look straight at a man she does not know; that is for the best. . . . A maiden should certainly speak mildly and not loudly. . . . It is proper that all women sit with their legs crossed.] Thomasin brings together the familiar clichés about women’s use of humor. Women should not joke, talk loudly, or let their legs be spread apart. His admonition that women not “schimphen” (tease) echoes the “schimpfes spiel” of the lady of Frauendienst who, in her violation of this norm, is unladylike. Refusing a suitor playfully would potentially undermine a woman’s modesty, but it could have even more dire consequences, for a man might 9. Robert de Blois, ed. Fox, ll. 738– 39.

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take her “no” to mean “yes.” Christine de Pizan in fact counseled noble ladies who are wooed by men visiting their households to firmly refuse them and “be sure that her glance, words, laughter, or expressions do not give him any encouragement which might further attract him to her or give him any hope.”10 The danger of laughter to a woman was that it could authorize a man to interpret her words as not sincerely meant. This may also help to explain why some readers have not taken the lady’s rejection of her suitor seriously, claiming that she is “playing hard to get.” Some of the lady’s actions reinforce such an interpretation, as when she gives him a ring only to demand it back later, claiming he has been unfaithful. The motif of the scornful woman who enjoys testing her suitor and watching him suffer is a common motif in the lyric.11 It is also a trait typically ascribed to women of the upper nobility, as Andreas Capellanus cautioned: “For a noblewoman or a woman of the higher nobility is found to be very ready and bold in censuring the deeds or the words of a man of the higher nobility, and she is very glad if she has a good opportunity to say something to ridicule him.”12 Readers sympathetic to Ulrich’s plight might thus view his lady as a rather unsympathetic character, a “tease.”13 Although it is clear that the lady frequently does tease Ulrich, it is by no means evident that such teasing is a kind of flirtation meant to encourage her suitor. The lady in fact repeatedly refuses Ulrich’s advances in the narrative, and not always with mockery, commanding him to stop serving her nine times, either directly or through her letters and messengers.14 Despite her serious efforts, however, he refuses to believe her when she says no, twisting any response into a sign of hope. This is in fact the crux of 10. Christine de Pizan, Treasury, 134; “se garde bien que de yeux, de parole, de ris ne de contenance quelconques ne lui face nul semblant par quoy le puist attraire ne lui donner aucune esperance” (Le Livre des trois vertus, 102). 11. Peters, Frauendienst, 157. 12. Andreas Capellanus, Art of Courtly Love, 107. The Latin text reads, “Nobilis enim mulier sive nobilior promptissimo reperitur et audax hominis nobilioris facta vel sermones arguere multumque laetatur, si suis ipsum pulchre possit dictis illudere” (Andreae Capellani regii Francorum, De Amore, libri tres, 155). See also Joan Ferrante’s suggestion that this passage possibly reflects the actual presence of forceful women in twelfth-century courts (“Male Fantasy,” 69). 13. Thomas, introduction, 25. 14. The instances of the lady telling Ulrich to stop serving her are in the following stanzas: 74– 80, 151– 53, 399– 406, 427– 32, 454, 1019– 22 (the lady claims Ulrich has been unfaithful to her and despises him), 1097– 1105, 1207– 13, 1228– 37. I have not included stanzas where the messenger rephrases the lady’s direct words when those are given in the text.


the problem, for beliefs about women’s predilection for teasing their suitors, when coupled with beliefs about their insatiable sexual desire, ultimately mean that a woman always means yes (or at least “maybe”) regardless of what she actually says. Helen Solterer has deftly explored this implication in her discussion of Ovid and others who urge men to use force when women do not assent to their advances since they only refuse men because they are too modest to assent. She notes, “Both female ‘No!’ and female ‘Yes!’ are read to mean much the same thing.”15 If a woman truly means no, and her direct statements to that effect are merely seen as a deferred yes, what room is left for female agency? This problem is one perspective through which to understand the usefulness of women’s laughter, for although it may not be any more effective in persuading men to take women’s refusals seriously, it does allow the woman to recuperate a subject position that lies outside of the no-win discourse with the male interlocutor. This is brilliantly demonstrated in a key scene in Frauendienst. Toward the end of Ulrich’s persistent service to his lady, her continued refusals having fallen on deaf ears, she invites him to her castle, where she makes him wait disguised in a community of lepers, claiming that she does not want her honor to be compromised. Once in her room, Ulrich’s rather uncourtly motives are revealed, as he wastes no time in asking her to sleep with him: “sol ich iu hie geligen bi, / so bin ich allez des gewert, / des min lip ie ze freuden gert” [If I lie with you here and now, I will be winning everything I have ever sought for my happiness (1206)]. The lady refuses and explains that the only reason she has allowed him to come is so that she can tell him that what he wants is impossible. Ulrich continues to proclaim that he has served his lady out of noble feelings, but in fact admits that he would rape her to get his reward were it not for the presence of her serving women. The lady has in fact prepared for this threat, for fearing that Ulrich might try to rape her, which is the custom of some men (“nach sumelicher manne sit”), she has asked all her women to stay in her room to protect her (1216).16 Ulrich is thus not able to carry 15. Solterer, The Master and Minerva, 46. Solterer sees the woman’s “no,” or what she calls “female prevarication,” as an intrinsic part of the “game” of love as described by male authors, the deferment of her submission serving to add to the man’s excitement in pursuit of his female quarry (35). 16. The lady’s comment that rape was something men were in the habit of doing may have recalled for readers the fate of the lady in Moriz von Craûn. The lady, angered that her knight has fallen asleep, dismisses him. He later returns and rapes her (vv. 1525– 1620). J. W.

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out Ovid’s advice that an apparently unwilling woman need only be raped to enable her to give the “assent” that her modesty prevents her from giving. Although Ulrich consequently abandons his threat of taking the lady by force, he continues to plead with her to sleep with him and again asks his aunt (niftel) for help in this matter. When she conveys to the lady that Ulrich is determined to stay until he either gets what he wants or dies trying, the lady finally sees that extreme measures are called for and concocts a clever trick to get rid of him. She offers to let him make a fresh start by lowering him back out the window so he can come up a second time and address her properly. He is to hold on to her hand and not let go. If he fulfills her request, she promises she will do whatever he wants. While Ulrich is holding her hand, she asks him to kiss her; in kissing her, Ulrich lets go of her hand and swiftly falls to the ground below. Ulrich, furious and humiliated, curses her cunning (“die gewan si mir mit listen an,” 1277). Ulrich’s curse of course connects this work to the wider topos of female cunning in medieval culture. The trick Ulrich’s lady plays on her suitor was in fact a popular one in medieval art. In the early-fourteenth-century Codex Manesse (also called the Große Heidelberger Liederhandschrift), containing miniatures of 137 Minnesang poets, is a miniature of Kristan von Hamle, suspended in a basket out of a castle by a lady (fig. 2). The editor comments that this image represents the popular medieval story of the poet Virgil, who is lifted halfway to the woman’s window only to be left dangling there overnight to endure the mockery of those who gather around the following morning. The story and image are, he notes, examples of the topos of feminine cunning and power over men, for even Virgil, the wisest of men, could be outwitted by a woman.17 H. Diane Russell’s study of women in Renaissance and Baroque prints shows that the “power of Thomas notes in fact that this work may have been a source for Ulrich, and calls it “a burlesque scene” where the lady “is punished for her lack of consideration” (introduction, 38). Although some medieval men may have seen the rape of the woman as just “punishment,” it is possible that medieval women did not view the rape in this manner. In fact, the lady in this epic resembles Ulrich’s lady in that she, too, complains that she does not want to be served by any man (1340– 62) and also mocks Moriz (535– 74). 17. Codex Manesse, 63. I have also found anecdotes about women humiliating unwanted suitors in an Arabic erotic manual of the thirteenth century, al-T¯ıfa¯ch¯ı, Les Délices des coeurs, 95– 96. In one, a man who is known to be poor arrives at a lady’s residence dressed in rags and asks to be admitted to her residence. When he refuses to leave, the lady, from her balcony above, pretends to offer him an apple that she will toss into his outer garment. Instead, she throws down a stone, which rips off the outer garment, leaving the man standing only in his underpants, as the whole town looks on laughing.

Fig. 2. The poet is suspended out of the window by his lady, a reference to the topos of the tricks women play on unwanted suitors. From the Codex Manesse, of the first third of the fourteenth century. Heidelberg Universit¨ atsbibliothek, cod. pal. germ. 848, fol. 71v. (Courtesy of the Universit¨ atsbibliothek Heidelberg.)

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women” topos endured into the early modern period. A print by Lucas van Leyden (ca. 1512), for example, shows Virgil helplessly suspended in a basket as onlookers laugh at his plight.18 The trick of Ulrich’s lady, however, does more than demonstrate female cunning, for it exposes the male hero as anything but the noble courtly lover of hohe muot that he claims to be. We are invited to see her trickery and ridicule not as teasing, but as punishment for base behavior. For example, her command that Ulrich must dress as a leper, a probable play on the Tristan and Isolde story, might also be an allusion to the medieval belief that leprosy was a venereal disease that struck the lustful.19 The scene may give winking assent to clichés about feminine guile, but it simultaneously exposes masculine egotism and base sexual inclinations. Furthermore, the way in which Frauendienst stages a woman’s cunning resistance to rape suggests several ways in which women’s laughter could rewrite medieval narratives that victimize women. Kathryn Gravdal, in her study of how medieval courtly literature frequently sanctions rape, notes in particular the misogynistic assumptions behind the “comic” encounters in the pastourelle. The “slapstick” ending of pastourelles where the shepherdess thanks the knight for raping her and asks when he might return never lets us feel sympathy or outrage for the female victim. Gravdal in fact compares the comic ending of the rape to Freud’s model of the smutty joke, for the rape scene is “an act of sexual aggression on the part of the medieval poet who, again in the Freudian view, would like to ‘rape’ the female listener on behalf of the male audience.”20 Whereas the pastourelle makes light of rape, suggesting that women enjoyed it, Christine de Pizan clearly denied this: “I am therefore troubled and grieved when men argue that many women want to be raped and that it does not bother them at all to be raped by men even when they verbally protest. It would be hard to believe that such great villainy is actually pleasant for them.”21 Christine attempts to dispel this myth by giving a long list of women who killed themselves rather than submit to rape, thus attesting both to their abhorrence of rape and their virtue, courage, and determination in resisting it.22 18. Russell, Eva/Ave, 159. See also Smith, The Power of Women. 19. Brody, “Comic Rejection,” 230. 20. Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens, 109. 21. Book of the City of Ladies, II.44.1, p. 160. 22. See also the many exempla preached in medieval sermons in which women were lauded for killing themselves rather than lose their chastity at the hands of rapists. Two such


The strategy for resisting rape suggested by Frauendienst is for a woman to use her wit and cleverness, and to turn upside down the positions of power in the pastourelle encounter. In Frauendienst, it is the woman (perhaps significantly a noblewoman rather than a peasant) who controls the comedy of the rape scene by dangling the potential rapist out of the window and sending him to a literal as well as figurative downfall. The female counterreading to the misogyny in the pastourelle is further solidified by the female community (the serving women) that shares in the downfall of the aggressor, and one wonders whether women in Ulrich’s audience also participated in this comic revenge. A provocative example of female solidarity in the face of male aggression is the play Dulcitius by the ninth-century German woman playwright Hrosvitha of Gandersheim. Three maidens who have been taken hostage are about to be assaulted by their captor. However, in a drunken state, the man mistakes the pots hanging in the kitchen for the maidens and starts copulating with them. Commenting on the play, Gravdal notes that “the three virgins, the inscribed audience, observe the violation scene, holding their sides with laughter. In this staging the female characters dominate the rapist.” 23 One can imagine women in the audience of Frauendienst taking a similar pleasure at the comic humiliation of another would-be rapist, whose base sexual motives have been shown to be anything but courtly.24 The laughter shared between the lady and her serving women spills over to include the larger community of women in the audience. Like the laughter of Dunbar’s women, the laughter shared by the lady and the women of her court, although used to confront a man, seems oriented toward providing a pleasure ultimately unconcerned with his reactions. Ultimately, then, the lady’s derisive jests directed toward Ulrich are not teasing, but rather an attempt to take pleasure at transforming his unwanted service into an unwitting performance redirected toward the amusement of ladies. The lady’s maid seems to enjoy taunting Ulrich as much as her mistress does, as when she appears after Ulrich’s uncomfortable night amid various biting vermin and asks him whether he had a exempla are contained in a recent study, Gregg, Devils, Women, and Jews, 148– 49. In these exempla, the women are miraculously saved by God, a more optimistic ending than the catalog of martyrs cited by Christine. See also Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron, and the discussion by Smarr, “Boccaccio and Renaissance Women,” 290. 23. Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens, 33. 24. Dussère, “Humor and Chivalry,” 305.

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pleasant evening (1172). This kind of humor is sarcasm and contempt passing as politeness. An even better example of such humor is the trick Ulrich’s lady plays on him. After having proposed to lower him out the window, she reassures him she will lift him back up again, and seemingly flatters him: “got weiz wol, daz ich nie gesach / so lieben ritter noch erchant / so der mich hat bi miner hant” [God knows that I have never seen or known such a dear knight as the one holding my hand, 1267]. Ulrich, of course, takes her at her word and allows himself to be lowered down, resulting in his humiliation. The seeming compliment has now been revealed as false flattery, and one can imagine a woman in such a situation enjoying the savor of her own sarcasm. As Regina Barreca says of women in more recent times: Girls are taught to do this very early on, blinking darkly fringed round eyes at the most boring man in the room and telling him that he is fascinating, which he believes without the shadow of a doubt (having been told this by his relatives since birth), while her girlfriend stands behind the guy laughing silently but thoroughly at how completely, because of his arrogance, he is taken in by false flattery.25 Applying this notion of contempt passing as flattery to Frauendienst, we can see the lady’s comment as a staging of conflicting interpretations: the arrogant man who can only hear a woman’s words as a reflection of his own worth versus the female audience complicitous with the woman’s sly taunt. A later passage in the work suggests that medieval men were in fact aware of women’s use of false flattery. A young woman sent by a mysterious figure called Lady Honor has come to announce to the knights in the region a tournament in her name. The young woman praises Sir Kadolt, a man who has formerly served Lady Honor, so much that Sir Kadolt becomes flustered, believing he is the victim of her mockery: “vrowe, ir lob mich alze ho, ir lobt mich waen in spotes wis, und het ich also hohen pris, 25. Barreca, Snow White, 17.


als ir von mir hie habt gesaget. lat iwern spot, vil schoeniu maget, iwer ubric ¨ lop mich machet rot, des gat mir wol von schulden not!” Der rede manic ritter lachte da. (1509– 10) [“Lady, you praise me so highly, yet it seems to me you are praising me only mockingly, and as if I had as much worth as you have said about me here. Stop your mockery, most beautiful maiden. Your excessive praise is making me blush, and that is really making me ashamed!” Many knights laughed then about that statement.] Sir Kadolt protests that the maiden’s high praise is meant to humiliate him (“in spotes wis”), and the men recognize his vulnerability, laughing at him. The man clearly appears anxious that a woman might not mean what she says and be having a joke at his expense. In addition to ridiculing Ulrich for his base and self-serving behavior as a lover, the lady also mocks his role as a courtly poet. One striking example is in the scene (quoted at the beginning of this chapter) where Ulrich attempts to help the lady dismount. He has already declared his love to her in writing and been refused. Now he is confronted with her face to face, but he inconveniently falls mute (122– 31), and the lady has her “schimpfes spil” with those observing the dumbstruck young suitor. When Ulrich finally does get up the courage, his attempts at courtly speech are clumsy, such as in his address to her as “gnade, vrowe gnade rich, / genadet mir genaediclich!” [Mercy, lady rich in mercy, show mercy on me mercifully! 146], an appeal repeated verbatim in his first little book (b¨ uchlein) to the lady and even rendered more verbose (ll. 234– 44). In this, his first audience with his beloved, such efforts are hardly appreciated, and the lady tells him: Swiget! ir sit gar ze kint und gegen so hohen dingen blint, ir sult ¨ die rede lazen sin, als lieb iu sin die hulde min, und ritet von mir palde hin! iu ist noch gar ze tump der sin,

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iu mac diu rede ze schaden chomen, si kan iu nimmer niht gefrumen! (151) [Shut up! You are too much of a child and blind about such lofty matters. You should leave off speaking; if you esteem my favor, ride away from me immediately! You are really so foolish; your speech will bring you grief and can never bring you any success!] This encounter, early in the narrative, focuses on Ulrich’s childishness more than on his masculinity; the humor invites men as well as women to laugh at the bumbling attempts of the unskilled novice, and this youthful foolishness is clearly part of the narrative persona that Ulrich uses to safely ridicule himself in his own work. The encounter highlights nonetheless the question of what effective courtly speech might be. How does a lady judge speech to be worthy of bringing the poet success? Over and over again, the work presents a lady sitting in judgment of wooing talk. A good example of this is the lady’s response to his first buchlein. ¨ Ulrich receives the letter, but must wait ten days to have it read to him by his scribe since he is illiterate. His powerlessness is highlighted and his status as poet deflated, and we can speculate that Ulrich von Lichtenstein, far from illiterate, included this detail in order to amuse his friends and acquaintances in the audience. Once Ulrich finally does have his scribe read him the response, he is treated to the following repetitious message: Ez sprichet manic man, des in sin herze niht geleren kan, wan als er von fremdem dinge gert ze gewinnen sinne. swer muotet des er niht ensol, der hat im selb versaget wol. swer muotet des er niht sol, der hat im selb versaget wol. swer muotet des er niht ensol, der hat im selb versaget wol. (Brief a) [Many a man says that he cannot increase his worth unless he seeks unattainable things to acquire a lofty mind. He who desires what he


shouldn’t has totally ruined himself. He who desires what he shouldn’t has totally ruined himself. He who desires what he shouldn’t has totally ruined himself.] The message of the reply is that Ulrich should recognize the folly of his misplaced desires and leave her alone; failure to do so will result in his humiliation. The humor of the scene is further heightened by Ulrich’s earlier declaration that during the ten days he waited for the arrival of his scribe, he slept with the book next to him in bed each night, little knowing the response that it contained. Furthermore, unlike the earlier prose letter to Ulrich’s aunt, the lady has chosen to compose in a kind of doggerel verse, as though to mock Ulrich’s poetic wooing. Her prosaic rendering of verse might in fact be read as a deliberate parody of Ulrich’s frequently contorted rhetoric.26 In the lady’s “poem” and in much of her speech, the overblown rhetoric of the male speaker is deflated and reduced to the nonsense that it really is. Whereas the Wife of Bath literally rips the objectionable prose of her husband into bits, the lady shreds apart the poetic text of her suitor through parody. Another episode that shows Ulrich’s lady deflating courtly lyric is when Ulrich sends his second buchlein ¨ along with the finger he has cut off and sent along in a gold box. In the little book, he eulogizes his finger in epic proportions, claiming it was born to serve her and has faithfully died in her service (lines 281ff.). The lady responds sarcastically, “er mohte ¨ den vrowen verre baz / gedienen ob er in hete noch, / den vinger sin” [He could serve ladies far better if he still had his finger, 453]. The overblown epic description of Ulrich’s serving finger is met with a flat sarcasm that deflates both the act of “service” (cutting off the finger—a possible castration metaphor) and the accompanying rhetoric. The lady’s chambermaid is similarly eager to participate in the deflation of courtly love clichés. When Ulrich comes to his lady’s castle, she informs him that her mistress requires him to leave the castle secretly without anyone seeing him, adding, “tuot ir des niht, so sit ir tot” [If you don’t do this, you will die, 1147]. The command is in itself rather unremarkable if somewhat hyperbolic. The form of the lady’s command, however, must surely have rung in the ears of Ulrich’s audience as a play on the debate 26. J. W. Thomas notes Ulrich’s abundant use of circumlocutions and passive constructions that show “the deliberate avoidance of simple and concise statement” (introduction, 29).

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between the two minnesingers Walther von der Vogelweide and Reinmar von Hagenau, who argue over who ultimately is more important, the lady or the lover. Reinmar’s line is “stirbet si, soˆ bin ich tot” ˆ [If she dies, then I am dead, MF 158, 28],27 voicing his absolute reliance on his lady. Without her, he is dead. Walther replies, “stirbe ab ich, so ist si tot” ˆ [But if I die, then she is dead, L 73, 16].28 As the creation of the male poet, the lady has no existence without him. In Ulrich’s line, the lady of Minnesang herself joins in the debate by threatening the man who does not do her bidding with death. Simultaneously, the lady can be heard to be reducing the male poet’s power, while Ulrich the author can be heard having fun with his own literary predecessors. Like Chaucer, who uses the voice of his Wife of Bath to cleverly show his mastery of the debate on women, Ulrich uses his female characters to demonstrate his mastery of the topoi of Minnesang. Yet, we also hear the lady’s voice asking, what does it really mean to serve a lady?

What Does It Mean to Serve a Lady? By looking carefully at the comic strategies the lady deploys against her male suitor, we have been able to imagine medieval women mocking unwanted suitors. But even more than offering resistance to a specific suitor, the lady’s naysaying interrogates and ridicules the central and avowed purpose of the work: serving ladies. Ulrich’s service is comic precisely because he fails to consider the lady’s own idea of what service might be. He often claims that he wants to do everything that his lady wants: “ich wil doch niht, wan daz si wil” [I don’t want anything, except what she wants, 101]. Such a statement is ultimately contradicted by his repeated refusals to listen to her when she asks him to leave her free of service. Although she respects his friendship, she says, she insists that he desist from his so-called service of her: “daz er mich laze gar dienstes vri, / als liebe ich im ze vriunde si” [that he kindly leave me utterly free from service even though I am willing to be considered his friend/ally, 1105; emphasis added]. The lady’s plea to be left dienstes vri challenges the title and premise of the work: frauendienst. 27. Reinmar, Des Minnesangs Fr¨ uhling, 28. 28. Walther von der Vogelweide, Walther von der Vogelweide. Gedichte, 16.


It is important to note that the author has the lady repeatedly and explicitly voice her desire to be left free of service, making her ridicule of Ulrich look more like exasperation than caprice. The humor of the work, although perhaps initially based on an exaggeration of the type of the merciless domna, continually brings our attention to Ulrich’s inability to listen. It is this inability rather than the lady’s haughtiness that results in the hero’s serial humiliation. The trick the lady plays on Ulrich in her castle appears not so much as teasing as it does payment she had already promised him if he did not stop “serving” her, a threat she makes early on to Ulrich’s messenger, whom she commands to tell Ulrich to leave her free of courting (gewerbes vri); otherwise something terrible will happen to him (405). The lady’s threat helps us read Ulrich’s later humiliating fall as evidence of the lady’s seriousness rather than fickleness, a seriousness highlighted by her admonishment that the messenger listen to her words carefully (“nu merche es rehte, ich sag dir wes”), which seems calculated to focus our attention on the man’s refusal to listen rather than the lady’s own response. The lady’s challenge to the notion of lady service in fact goes beyond Ulrich himself to the category of men as a whole. When Ulrich clumsily tries to help her down from her horse, she orders her knights not to allow a single knight to approach her from then on (154), discouraging all knights seeking her favors. She later explains clearly to Ulrich’s messenger that there was never a man so high in birth that she would view his courting with anything other than contempt (406). This categorical refusal of all men (no matter how high in birth) emphasizes her resistance to the whole act of being served rather than contempt for Ulrich per se. It is important to note that such resistance is not to be interpreted as a desire to remain faithful to her spouse, for the lady greatly downplays the role of her husband in her determination not to give in to Ulrich: Min man und ouch der herre min, der wil des gar ane angst sin, daz ich geminnen muge ¨ immer man. ob ichz durch got niht wolde lan und durch min ere, so wolde er mich doch wol behueten; ¨ und wolt ot ich, sin huote waer hie gar enwiht und liez ichz durch min ere niht. (1210)

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[My husband and lord wishes to be without fear that I might ever make love to a man. Even if I had not already desisted on account of God and my honor, he would certainly guard against it; but if I wanted to do it, and if I did not desist because of my honor, his guardianship would be completely worthless.] With this last line, she insists on the importance of her own will rather than the surveillance of her husband. When Ulrich later pleads for her to lie with him, she reiterates this claim of autonomy and insists on her cleverness, stating: “wold ich hie minnen iwern lip, / ich bin wol also witzic wip, / daz ich iuch het enpfangen baz” [Your request is good for nothing; if I wanted to make love to you here, I am a clever enough woman that I would have received you better, 1228]. The medieval wife was typically known for her cleverness at deceiving a husband who got in the way of her sexual adventures, but here the lady boasts of her cleverness to highlight her own agency in refusing sex and remaining chaste. Neither a pliant subject of her husband nor an inherently errant wife who cannot restrain her desires, she subtly revises the deceitful wife topos common in medieval literature.29 Some of the comic situations in which Ulrich finds himself also put into question the notion of lady service, specifically in regard to this issue of choice and agency. In several situations, Ulrich is placed in the position of unwilling recipient of service from a woman. While masquerading as Queen Venus, he twice receives anonymous gifts and letters. On the first occasion he receives a skirt, a buckle, a belt, and a jeweled band, along with a letter (603). The lady sender clearly knows that Ulrich, although jousting in the region dressed as a woman, is in fact a man, for in her letter she thanks him for putting on women’s clothing (Brief d). Ulrich is furious with his steward for having brought him these gifts. The reason for his wrath becomes evident when Ulrich receives yet more gifts two weeks later. While he is sitting in the bathtub enjoying his bath, a page he has never seen before lays down a carpet in front of the tub, and places upon it a skirt, a veil, a belt and buckle, a bright headband, a ruby ring, and another letter (730– 32). Although Ulrich demands with indignation that the page remove these unwanted gifts, the page goes out and returns with two more pages who 29. Examples of fabliaux in German concerning women’s trickery are the earlyfourteenth-century adaptation of a French fabliau, “Aristoteles und Phyllis,” “Der Ritter und die Nusse” ¨ (The knight and the nuts) and the thirteenth-century “Der Ritter unter dem Zuber” (The knight under the tub), another adaptation of a French fabliau. English translations of these tales may be found in Thomas, Medieval German Tales in English Translation.


proceed to scatter rose petals on Ulrich until he is completely covered. The pages leave and Ulrich, furious, chides his steward, explaining that a man should not accept gifts from someone other than his true love (742– 43). But Ulrich also expresses his feelings of powerlessness, because these objects have been given to him against his will (ane den willen min, 738), a statement that recalls the lady’s repeated laments that her wishes have not been taken into consideration. Ulrich’s comic plight as a powerless victim of unwanted attention is highlighted by Ulrich’s comment that he himself was not amused: “man sach mich lachen doch niht vil, / wan zornic muot niht lachen wil” [No one saw me laughing very much, for an angry disposition doesn’t feel like laughing, 744]. Although this assault is clearly no laughing matter for Ulrich, it was surely calculated to amuse the audience. Not only is he wearing a woman’s clothes, he is also placed in the same position as the one in which he has attempted to place his lady—that of passive love object. Our laughter at Ulrich’s futile rage brings attention to his situation as a parallel to that of the lady and again raises the question of whether a woman can be served against her will. Even if we are to imagine that it is Ulrich’s own lady who has sent the gifts, we might reasonably assume that she is not testing him, but rather trying to teach him a lesson by having him put the shoe on the other foot: the skirt, belt, headband, and ring materially feminize him, while receiving these gifts against his will places him symbolically in a feminine position. And if we do imagine the letter to be from Ulrich’s lady, her apparent compliment could be read as sarcasm: “got mueze ¨ iu libes und eren pflegen / uf iwern ritterlichen wegen! / mit triuwen gib ich iu den segen” [May God protect your life and your honor on your knightly path. In fidelity, I give you my blessing, Brief d]. The adjective “ritterlich” (knightly) is incongruous with these feminine gifts, a joke that deflates Ulrich’s masculine identity as a knight. If we read the scenes of Ulrich’s unwilling receipt of gifts as a means to show his ignorance of his own hypocrisy in serving a woman who does not want to be served, we may perhaps better understand another set of odd occurrences in the work: Ulrich’s visits to his wife. Whereas the lady of the courtly lyric is often assumed to be married, the poet never mentions a wife. Ulrich, however, makes three visits to his wife, and these occur suddenly, with very little explanation on Ulrich’s part. Ulrich is apparently married to the perfect wife, a welcome antidote to his scornful lady: “Diu guot enpfie mich also wol / also von reht ein vrowe sol / enpfahen ir vil lieben man” [The good woman received me as well as a lady should rightly

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receive her most loving husband, 708]. Ulrich furthermore acknowledges the incongruity between the good treatment he receives and his wooing of another woman, but does not seem particularly troubled by it: “diu chunde ¨ mir lieber niht gesin, / swie ich doch het uber ¨ minen lip / ze frowen do ein ander wip” [She could not have been sweeter to me even though I had chosen another woman as my lady, 1088]. These meetings with the good wife comically juxtapose the real-life Ulrich known to the audience and the fictional Ulrich and furthermore highlight the absurdity of Ulrich’s claim to serve women so well. How can he be angry at the lady for her refusals when he returns to his own wife only periodically, indeed serving her very poorly? This question of a husband’s service to his wife is raised in Ulrich’s other important narrative, the Frauenbuch, thought to have been written two years after Frauendienst. The long work is a debate between a man and a woman about who is responsible for the degradation of former ideals concerning romantic love. One of the woman’s charges against men is that they go off hunting, get drunk, and forget their wives. In a description bound to speak even to some modern housewives, she describes the man who comes home at the end of his day’s work: ez ist sˆın geschefte und ouch sˆın pet, daz man im bringe dar ein pret: dâ spilt er unz an mitte naht, und trinket daz im gar sˆın maht geswˆıchet und verswindet. soˆ gêt er dâ er vindet sˆın wˆıp dannoch warten sˆın. diu spricht “willkumen, herre mˆın”: mit z¨ uhten si gên im uf ˆ stêt, durch ir zuht si gên im gêt. soˆ gˆıt er ir antwurte niht, wan daz er vlˆıziclˆıche siht wâ er sich dâ sâ nider lege, slâfens unz an den morgen phlege. (608, ll. 1– 14)30 30. All quotations of Frauenbuch are from the edition by Karl Lachmann. Page numbers and line numbers are given. Translations are my own.


[It is his custom and also his request that a game be brought to him. Thus he plays until midnight and drinks so that he becomes completely weak and loses his power. And so he goes to where he finds his wife still waiting for him. She says, “Welcome, my lord”: with good breeding she rises to greet him and goes up to him dutifully. But the only answer he gives her is to passionately throw himself down where he will go about his business of sleeping until the morning.] Ulrich does not hunt, drink, or gamble, but he obviously does not attend very often to his wife since he spends most of his days tourneying for his lady. The parallel between his wife and the hypothetical wife referred to by the woman of the Frauenbuch suggests the possibility that the figure of Ulrich’s neglected wife resonated with women in the audience. Furthermore, one questions Ulrich’s claims of being faithful to his lady since he rides home to seek comfort in his wife’s waiting arms. Even more questionably, Ulrich is frequently distracted by other women.31 Neither wife nor lady appears to be particularly well served. If Ulrich is unable to imagine what service might mean to a lady, it is because he functions according to the logic of a genre that gives women no voice. Ulrich is not an inept courtly lover, but rather the manifestation of the very rules of the genre. Much of the humor comes of course from the deflation of the ideal of sacrifice and suffering performed in honor of a lady by the earthy or mundane examples. But the author is clearly doing more than parodying the hero’s extreme or inept service. The repeated emphasis on the lady’s refusal to be served and Ulrich’s seeming inability to hear this refusal bring into focus the logic or monologic underlying lady service. Although there may be conversation between suitor and lady in the courtly lyric, there can be no dialogue since the woman’s words have no meaning in themselves; according to the genre, a “no” is nothing more than a deferred “yes,” and a lady is merely the projected mirror image of the lover 31. In church, for example, he is so distracted by the women around him that “God was served very little” (935). A few lines later, Ulrich comments that he would have succumbed to one beautiful woman had it not been for his constancy (staete) (937). But far from assuring us that he serves his lady faithfully, Ulrich only brings attention to the comic inconsistency of his wandering eye. See also the Adevineaux Amoureux, in which a woman characterizes men’s love as false as foam, light as a feather, and flighty as a sparrow (250) and another in which a woman mocks the unfaithful heart of men (253).

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himself. It is this logic that the author appears to be targeting in the many examples of how Ulrich empties his lady’s words of any desire that does not reflect his own. Repeatedly, her refusals, no matter how patiently explained, are taken as signs of encouragement, as though she had offered no discouragement at all. For example, when Ulrich conceives the idea of dressing as Queen Venus, he sends word asking his lady to tell him whether she approves his plan. She encourages him, telling him that it will be good for his honor—even though it will not bring him any success with her. Ulrich tells his audience that he was quite happy with her reply: “daz ir min vart geviele wol, / des wart ich aller freuden vol” [I was full of joy to know my undertaking pleased her so, 470]. Whereas the lady tries to make distinctions (gaining honor from the event does not mean he will gain her love), Ulrich takes any sign of encouragement as an indication of imminent reward. Like Henri Bergson’s automaton who is comic because of his inflexibility in situations demanding flexibility, Ulrich is programmed, following to the letter the role of the ever faithful minnesinger, sublimely deaf to the words of the distant lady who now is present. Bergson’s concept of “the mechanical superimposed on the living” [du méchanique plaqué sur du vivant] helps us to see that Ulrich’s relationship with his lady is comic precisely because of his mechanical, puppetlike obedience to the norms of the lyric genre, by which the man must woo the woman whether she says yes or no.32 This puppetlike behavior is demonstrated in the many examples of Ulrich’s “selective listening.” He chooses to hear only those words that reflect his own desire. When Ulrich sends the lady his severed finger, his messenger relates to him that he has successfully delivered the finger to her but that she has told him that even were he to serve her for a thousand years, his service would never meet with success (454). Ulrich responds only to the fact that she has his finger in her possession, declaring, “da von ist mir lipe, daz si in da / hat behabet, daz tuot mir wol” [I am happy that she has it; that does me good, 456]. One laughs at Ulrich because his response is always the same regardless of what the lady may say. One way for the lady to respond to this automatism is, as I have suggested, with laughter. If her words have no effect in altering his behavior, at least she can play him like a puppet for her own amusement. But the 32. Bergson, Le Rire, 39. On the notion of Ulrich’s behaving with “marionettenhaften Automatismus,” see Wolf, “Komik und Parodie,” 78– 79.


lady also at times seems to play the role of a wise teacher, as though trying to educate Ulrich in the inadequacy of his lover’s logic, to make him see that there is a middle ground. For example, when the lady receives Ulrich’s finger, she shows sympathy for his loss, but urges him (through his messenger) not to confuse sympathy with love: mir tuot des vingers sterben we, doch durch dins herren liebe niht, wan daz din munt gein mir des giht, er hab in von den schulden min verlorn, des muoz ich truric sin. [I feel bad about the death of the finger; however, it is not out of love for your lord, but because of what you have said against me, that it is on my account he has lost it: for that reason should I be sad, 450]. With her use of the conjunction “doch” (however), she attempts to prevent Ulrich from incorrectly equating her feelings of compassion with love. One of the lady’s first lessons goes directly to the heart of courtly love: the love lyric itself. When Ulrich sends his first love song along with his niftel to plead on his behalf, the lady responds that good songs do not necessitate a woman’s love: diu liet diu sint ze ware guot, ich wil aber mich ir niht an nemen, sin dienst mac mir niht gezemen. du solt der rede gar gedagen und mir von im niht mere sagen. (74) [The songs are indeed good, but I won’t concern myself with them; his service cannot be worthy of me. You must completely abandon this talk and not mention him to me any more.] The lady’s use of the word “aber” (but) again points to the false binary logic that governs Ulrich’s thinking, whereby good lyrics are equivalent to successful courtship.

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The lady later tries to explain to Ulrich (via his messenger) that there exists a broader range of feelings than simply love or hate: ich bin fur ¨ war im niht gehaz; du solt aber mir gelouben daz: des er von mir ze lone gert, des ist er immer ungewert, daz sol er niht fur ¨ ubel ¨ han, wan ichs gewern wil nimmer man. (1097) [In truth, I don’t hate him. But you should believe me about this: he will always be unworthy of the reward he wants from me. He shouldn’t take that badly, for I will grant it to no man.] Again, the lady uses the conjunction “aber” to explain that just because she does not love Ulrich does not mean she hates him. She would perhaps like to be his friend or ally, as when she says she wants him to stop serving her, “als liebe ich im ze vriunde si” [even though I am willing to be considered his friend/ally, 1105; emphasis added]. Hoping that they can be friends, but not lovers, Ulrich’s lady attempts to transfer Ulrich’s egocentric wooing onto a more neutral plane, spurning him not because she is married or because she hates him, but rather because she does not want to be served by any man. Her desire to be just friends echoes the equally frustrated woman in one of Reinmar’s songs: “Das wir wip niht mugen gewinnen / frunt ¨ mit rede su¨ enwellent dannoch me, / das muet mich. ich enwil niht minnen” [That we women are not able to win friends with our conversation without their wanting more, this distresses me. I do not want to love].33 The woman directly locates the problem of male-female relations in courtly talk (rede), since women’s words are not taken to reflect the desire of the female speaker. This problem is even better articulated in Ulrich’s Frauenbuch. Responding to her male interlocutor’s claims that women have brought about the downfall of love because they do not greet men graciously, the woman counters that if women do greet men, they are taken for women of easy virtue, and thus lose their honor: 33. The verse from Reinmar is number 6 from the monograph by Jackson, Reinmar’s Women. Translation is Jackson’s.


ob iuch ein frowe gruozte, den gruoz mit lachen suoze, ir daeht also, ˆ “si ist mir holt. jâ herr, wie hân ich daz versolt daz si mich als guetlˆ ¨ ıch an siht, sˆıt ich ir hân gedienet niht? si mac wol sˆın ein gaehez wˆıp, sit ir soˆ wol behagt mˆın lˆıp und si soˆ guetlˆ ¨ ıch tuot gên mir. si hât gein mir lˆıht minne gir.” sˆıt ir diu wˆıp nu soˆ verstât, dâ von iuch guetlˆ ¨ ıch gruoz vergât. ir habt iuch frowen dienst bewegen: ir kunnet ¨ niht wan ruemens ¨ phlegen. (600, ll. 3– 14) [If a woman greets you laughing sweetly, this is how you think: “She likes me. Oh Lord, what have I done for her to look at me so nicely since I haven’t served her? She may well be a loose woman since she finds me so attractive and treats me so well. Perhaps she desires love from me.” Since this is what you think of women, you forfeit the sweet greeting. You claim to be serving women, but you can do nothing but boast.] Somewhat like the Wife of Bath, the woman voices frustration that men badmouth women no matter what they do.34 The mocking tone with which she mimics men’s talk about women attacks its monologic that places women in a no-win position within discourse about male-female relationships in courtly society.35 The punishment delivered to men by the woman is the withholding of sweet speech ( guetlˆ ¨ ıch gruoz). The lady similarly punishes Ulrich, not with silence, but with her laughter. Both 34. An additional charge the woman of the Frauenbuch levels against men’s unfair criticisms of women is that they complain that women don’t dress well in order to please them, but if women do dress well, men accuse them of looking for other lovers (603, ll. 15– 16). 35. For a discussion of the comic and irony in the Frauenbuch, see Elke Bruggen, ¨ “Minnelehre und Gesellschaftskritik im 13. Jahrhundert,” who sees the text’s “kunstvollsubversive Ironie” [artfully subversive irony] directed against the “dogmatischen Form der monologischen Rede” [dogmatic form of monologic discourse] (97).

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silence and laughter appear as strategies for withdrawing from a discursive operation that typically marginalizes women’s voices.

Ulrich’s Narrative Games: Lady’s Man, Fool, “Queen” As one might expect from a work entitled Frauendienst, Ulrich frames his story as a dedication to women: Den guoten wiben si genigen von mir, swie si mich doch verzigen nach dienest ofte ir lones hant. her, waz si tugent doch begant! der werlde heil gar an in stat. ich waen, got niht so guotes hat als ein guot wip: daz ist also, des stat ir lop von schulde ho. [May good women be knelt before by me, however much they have denied me reward for serving them. Lord, what virtue they possess! The salvation of the world resides in them. I believe that God has made nothing as good as a good woman. That is why their praise is so high.] Like Boccaccio, Ulrich opens his work by inviting women, so full of virtue and worthy of praise, to enjoy an especially privileged position.36 That Ulrich expected his work to be read by women is probable. While few noblemen in thirteenth-century Germany were literate, German noblewomen were more likely to engage in reading, an activity sometimes considered beneath the dignity of men.37 Ulrich’s claim that his work serves ladies is thus in part an appeal to important patrons or judges of his work. Throughout the work he paints himself as their counselor, expecting them to appreciate his service, even claiming to serve women better than other men, who only want to deceive them.38 36. Minnesang poets normally distinguished between frau (a lady, noblewoman) and wˆıp (woman). Ulrich uses the two terms with no apparent distinction between the two. 37. Green, Medieval Listening and Reading, 215. 38. On these various characterizations of Ulrich’s claim to be writing on women’s behalf, see stanzas 1753, 1819, and 1843.


Yet even in Ulrich’s opening words to the women he serves, readers may be suspicious as to just how earnestly Ulrich sets out to praise women. Like Boccaccio, Ulrich’s narrator has apparently had an unfortunate history with women, making us wonder whether his adulation of women’s virtue (tugent) is in fact irony on his part.39 Ulrich also shows a more flirtatious, lascivious side, like Boccaccio’s narrator. In a passage in which Ulrich advises women how to live well, he urges them to don the “clothing” of lofty spirits and goodness: “Swelch frowe hochgemuete ¨ treit, / da bi guete, ¨ daz ist ein chleit, / daz vrowe noch pezzer nie getruoc” [Whatever lady wears lofty spirits and goodness too, that is the best clothing that a lady could ever wear, 1755].40 It is surely no coincidence that only a few strophes later Ulrich uses the same clothing motif to tell how he wanted to test his own (second) lady: Ich gedaht: si mugen ¨ daz niht bewarn, ich welle ir heinlich alle ervarn und wil ouch al ir tugende spehen, ich wil in in diu herze sehen beidiu durch chleider und durch lip. sich chan vor mir bewarn dehein wip: sit ich die warheit sprechen sol ich ervar ir heinlich alle wol. (1780) [I thought: she can’t prevent it—I want to find out all about her in secret and I also want to espy all of her worthy qualities. I will see them in her heart, both through her clothes and through her body. No woman can protect herself from me: since I must speak the truth, I spy on them all with pleasure (or: I discover all of their secrets completely).] 39. Wolf suggests, in fact, that in this opening frauenlob, as elsewhere in the work, Ulrich uses an overdose of clichés deliberately for playful effect (“Komik und Parodie,” 77). On Ulrich’s self-conscious narrative poses and his interest in highlighting writing itself, see Tinsley, “Die Kunst der Selbstdarstellung in Ulrichs von Lichtenstein Frauendienst.” 40. The notion of women clothing themselves with moral qualities has a long medieval tradition. Tertullian advises women in De Cultu Feminarum (The appearance of women), “Dress yourselves in the silk of modesty, with the linen of holiness, and with the purple of chastity. Dressed up in this way, you will have God as your lover” (II, 13). St. John Chrysostom urged women to be silent: “This is order, this is modesty, this will adorn her more than any garments. Thus clothed, she will be able to offer her prayers in the manner most becoming” (Homily X on St. Paul’s Epistle to Timothy I, 435).

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Like a voyeur, Ulrich sees through women’s clothing: although they have donned the protective clothing of their honor and goodness, women are not safe from his prying eyes, a notion that is confirmed a few strophes later in Lied 54, where the poet’s eyes can see through a lady’s clothes. Like Dunbar, Ulrich is able to spy on women and find out their secrets. His risqué boast that he “knows” women is surely an innuendo to women in the audience, although cloaked in didactic clothing: “He delicately suggests stripping the ladies in the audience and simultaneously revokes the suggestion by turning it into a figure of speech in the service of a virtuous train of thought.”41 Nor is this salacious address an isolated moment in the narrative, for many of the lyrics in the purportedly didactic section of the work, far from idealizing love, play with the motifs of love poetry in a way that emphasizes the poet’s sexual power over the love object. In poems such as these, men in the audience are invited to share his privileged voyeuristic position, and women in the audience then become the naked recipients of this gaze. This objectification of women readers is paralleled by the co-opting of the work’s heroine. As though to punish her for humiliating him and making all the jokes, Ulrich abandons her and then sings angry and insulting songs about her, his lyric having become a weapon to keep her in her place. It is thus fitting that Ulrich’s second lady is a much more manageable object of pursuit. She is virtually invisible, for the period of Ulrich’s second service includes almost no mention of the lady herself except that she is a beautiful brunette who is pleasing because of her beautiful laugh and smile: “Ir chuslih munt so lachen chan, / swenne er mich guetlich ¨ lachet an, / daz da uf stiget mir der muot” [Her kissable mouth can laugh/ smile so that whenever it looks at me, my spirits soar, 1646].42 Unlike the 41. Milnes, “Ulrich von Lichtenstein,” 32. Milnes discusses in detail the smuttiness of Ulrich’s lyric in the second service. For a detailed discussion of the “silly erotic fantasies” of Ulrich’s lyrics, also see Goldin, The Mirror of Narcissus and the Courtly Love Lyric, 171– 72. Goldin discusses in particular the lyrics of Song 41, in which Ulrich promises to lock up his hôher muot in the lady’s heart where it can do whatever it likes with her. It should be noted that Ulrich comments that after singing this song, he thought on his lady, thereby indirectly implicating her as the subject of his dirty song (1639). 42. There are several other references to the laughing or smiling body parts of the second lady or of women in general. The second lady has eyes whose laughter makes men feel better, which Joubert felt to be the purpose of women’s laughter (strophe 1647 and similar passage from 1732– 33). In Song 51, Ulrich suggests that women are desirable to men for their good laughter: “Swelch wip guetlich ¨ lachen chan / schone mit z¨ uhten, hat die roten munt, / diu mac einen werden man / siuften bringen uz des herzen grunt” [Whatever


scornful laughter of the resisting lady of Ulrich’s first service, her laughter is rather the compliant laughter of the appreciative girlfriend.43 One wonders how medieval women reacted to this badmouthing of the comic heroine. Ulrich apologizes for having said unseemly things about her, but voices confidence that no good woman (“dehein guot wip”) in his audience will be angry with him since the lady has deserved it on account of her bad deed (1368). Ulrich’s appeal to his lady readers reveals an anxiety about their reaction to his negative portrayal of the comic leading lady, for it effectively raises the question of how women should feel about it. Not only has Ulrich said bad things about the woman he had been so lyrically praising for thirteen hundred strophes, but he has also coopted the heroine of the narrative and taken her away from his female readers.44 The female reader laughing along with the first lady as she tells Ulrich to shut up and tosses him out the window may find that she has stopped laughing once she becomes the object of Ulrich’s own joke. But the displacement of Ulrich’s attentions from one woman to another also serves to implicate Ulrich’s lady service in a further layer of irony. The hyperbole of Ulrich’s claims to never-ending and boundless service in the first two-thirds of the work are suddenly undercut by a sudden and smooth transition to an equally hyperbolic service to another woman. This sudden juxtaposition makes it difficult to believe in the poet’s claim to sincerely love either of the two women, and moreover, as Sarah Kay has pointed out in her discussion of “narratives of two women” in troubadour lyric, “The whole genre of the love lyric is implicated in this irony, because it suggests the possibility that any love narrative may be unreliable.”45 The displacement of Ulrich’s lady service is thus polyvalent: simultaneously a punishment of feminine misbehavior (especially laughter) and a deflation, through overdeterminacy, of the whole discourse on courtly love. The polyvalence of this procedure is echoed in Ulrich’s self-fashioning as a fool. Because of his na¨ıveté, he has been compared to the young and woman can laugh nicely, prettily and with good breeding, if she has a red mouth, she can bring forth in a worthy man sighs from the core of his heart, III,1– 4]. 43. Barreca, Snow White, 6. 44. This appropriation of the heroine, with whom female readers have come to identify, is a procedure that Roberta Krueger has termed “displacement” in her discussion of medieval French romance (Women Readers, 11). 45. Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry, 26.

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inexperienced Parzival.46 But a key difference between Ulrich and his foolish literary confrere is that Ulrich tells his own story, recollecting in the present the follies of his youth. There is thus a gap between the wise Ulrich, a man who has been a knight for thirty-three years (strophe 1845), and the foolish Ulrich, the young page who from the age of twelve dedicated himself to serving a lady, a distance signaled early in the narrative. After explaining that he had heard wise men say that the best way to become a worthy man was to praise women, he comments on his tumpheit, a term encompassing both the na¨ıveté of inexperienced youth and foolishness or stupidity: Do ich daz hort, ich was ein kint und tump als noch die jungen sint, so tump, daz ich die gerten reit, und gedaht doch in der tumpheit: sit daz die reinen suezen ¨ wip so hohe tiurent mannes lip, so wil ich dienen immer me den vrowen swie so ez mir erge. (10, 1– 8) [I was a child when I heard that, and naive as children are, so naive that I still rode a hobbyhorse, and I thought foolishly: “Since lovely sweet women bring esteem to a man, then I will serve ladies from now on, however it may go with me.”] Rather than lament his past foolishness, of course, Ulrich delights in it, frequently remarking his own foolishness and having characters in the story comment on it as well. The lady’s page, for example, calls Ulrich crazy (“sinne bloz”) upon hearing that he will have his mouth operated on, which could kill him (92). The lady herself sees this as stupidity, exclaiming, “ez diuht mich tumplich gar getan, / wold er sich also sniden lan” [It seems to me completely stupid if he really had himself cut in that way, 98]. Her complaint about his mouth was in fact probably not about his mouth at all, but rather about his speech; he has taken her metaphorical criticism literally. The lady also calls him stupid after he has had his finger cut off and sent to her in a golden chest: “ich ensolt der tumpheit trowen niht, / 46. Thomas, “Parzival as a Source for Frauendienst,” 419.


daz immer ein versunnen man / im selben hete daz getan” [I cannot believe a sane man would ever be so stupid as to do that to himself, 448]. By having his own lady continually berate him for his foolishness, he creates self-deprecating humor in which he offers himself up as an object for laughter. In fact, almost every instance of laughter is directed against himself rather than against others.47 What purpose could directing humor against himself have served? Two scholars of humor have suggested the following: Self-deprecation is ingratiating rather than aggressive; it allows the speaker or writer to participate in the humorous process without alienating the members of the majority.48 We beat the others to the punch line and render ourselves the victim. This makes people in positions of power comfortable.49 While these statements about self-deprecation fit Ulrich’s narrative pose, they come from discussions of women’s humor! Both scholars agree that women today commonly make jokes about their own deficiencies. If Ulrich the author, like a woman, is ingratiating himself to people in positions of power, who are these people in positions of power? Are they women? Ulrich’s self-deprecating humor may well stem from his acute awareness of his power deficiency, but the power he lacks is more likely to be based on class rather than gender. The historian John Freed argues that Ulrich’s work is largely directed toward affirming the common bonds between the free nobility and the ministerials, those knights who, though wealthy and influential, were bound in service to higher lords. Ulrich’s self-deprecating humor, argues Freed, is a means of affirming his own cultural and social standing in a way that was nonthreatening to free nobles: “the Frauendienst may have been a humorous way to assert that the Liechtensteins and ministerial lineages like them were in fact the social equals of the old free nobles, who were in many cases their kinsmen or their former peers.”50 Freed notes several examples in the text where Ulrich anxiously plays with differences in status, such as when Duke 47. 48. 49. 50.

This point has been made by Milnes, “Ulrich von Lichtenstein,” 36– 37. Walker, A Very Serious Thing, 123. Barreca, Snow White, 25. Freed, Noble Bondsmen, 264.

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Frederick II, the highest-ranking feudal lord and Ulrich’s rightful lord, asks to serve Ulrich/Arthur (1457). Freed concludes that such playful examples of feudal inversion represent the powerful ministerial’s anxieties about his unequal status. Through the fictional inversion of feudal relationships in Frauendienst, Ulrich is indulging in his own carnivalesque fantasy, imagining himself as the equal of the free nobility by playfully subverting the boundaries between free and unfree in his text while never truly challenging the status of such boundaries in real life. The humor relied on the fact that Ulrich’s audience knew full well that Frederick II was a duke and he was not. But Freed’s discussion ignores gender altogether. Might there be a way to connect gender and class to understand Ulrich’s use of humor? One way to consider the interdependence of these two factors is to see Ulrich’s comic pose as a victim of women as a way to create a bond of common understanding between his fellow men, regardless of rank.51 Despite Ulrich’s claim to be serving ladies, the work focuses heavily on what it means to be a man, demonstrated in Margrave Heinrich’s advice to young Ulrich: “ez tiuret junges mannes lip, / der suoze sprichet wider diu wip” [It brings esteem to a young man when he speaks well of women, 33]. Furthermore, Ulrich’s interest in appealing to his male readers is suggested by the fact that while there are no historical female personages named in the work, there are dozens of men named, particularly in the tournaments. Indeed, much of Frauendienst treats the jousts between men; women are simply the vehicles through which men prove their prowess to each other. The words man and mannlich (manly) appear repeatedly, and it is clear that Ulrich, the eager server of ladies, is equally eager to prove his manliness.52 Assuming that Ulrich’s fictional lady is superior to him in station, the equal of the powerful free nobility, Ulrich’s comical masquerading as the emasculated man was thus meant not to emphasize his inferiority, but rather to highlight the common bond of masculinity that he, although a ministerial, shared with the free men in the audience. In this way, selfdeprecatory humor allows gender solidarity to overcome class boundaries. 51. That artistic representations of femininity could serve as a leveling device between men is suggested by John Berger’s discussion of female nudes in European art: “Men of state, of business, discussed under paintings like this. When one of them felt he had been outwitted, he looked up for consolation. What he saw reminded him that he was a man” (Ways of Seeing, 57). 52. Two stanzas in particular that emphasize manliness are 97 and 1034.


The notion that Ulrich might be using women to affirm his bond with men is furthermore suggested by his other narrative persona of the second part of Frauendienst, the narrator whose smutty joking appeals to men at women’s expense. Both the playful masquerade as the emasculated suitor and the lascivious narrator who strips women in the audience potentially function as a joke between men.53 Ulrich’s ridiculing of his own masculinity is furthermore dramatized materially in his cross-dressing, which underlies much of the humor of the second half of the work, eliciting laughter from women in particular: des smielten al die vrowen gar, daz ich ez also blide an vie und ouch in wibes chleidern gie und also schoene z¨ opfe truoc— des wart gelachet da genuoc. (933.4– 8) [The ladies all smiled a lot because I was going along so merrily and was wearing women’s clothing and was wearing such beautiful braids—there was a lot of laughing about that.] Although there are few instances of men dressing as women in medieval literature—the cases of women dressing as men are many54 —Ulrich’s cross-dressing is perhaps the most comic aspect of Frauendienst, evident in 53. Robert Allen, in his discussion of the American burlesque, notes cogently that resistance against “ordinate” groups by “subordinate” groups is often “not only directed against those conceived of as ‘above,’ but constructing yet another object of subordination. In this process, there is frequently a slide from one register of social power to another—from class to gender, from class to race, and so forth” (Horrible Prettiness, 33). In Ulrich’s work, the ministerials’ resistance to their subordinate status is displaced onto the register of gender. 54. Nicolette dresses as a man in the twelfth-century Aucassin et Nicolette. Silence dresses as a man in the twelfth-century Roman de Silence. Marjorie Garber notes the many female saints in the Middle Ages who dressed as men to preserve their virginity or to enter into the monastic life (Vested Interests, 210– 17). Ulrich is the only medieval man to be mentioned in the survey of cross-dressing through history by Vern and Bonnie Bullough, Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender, 64. As discussed in chapter 1, men were known to dress as women in the sixteenth century when rioting against civil authorities. Examples of literary male crossdressing can be found in the fabliau Trubert and in book 10, chapter 49 of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, where Lancelot dresses as a woman in a tournament and defeats Sir Dinadan, who is himself forced to don woman’s clothing and be paraded in public. Guinevere is described as laughing so hard she falls to the ground.

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the laughter of the men and women who greet Ulrich. Not only emasculating himself through his pose as foolish lover, he literally dresses as a woman. What is the connection between these two poses? On a superficial level, Ulrich’s cross-dressing reinforces the theme of serving ladies. By donning the garb of the goddess of love and jousting in her name, Ulrich conveys symbolically his service to ladies. Indeed, several ladies thank him for honoring them in this way. But the author clearly has more in mind than honoring women symbolically, for he repeatedly exploits cross-dressing for burlesque effect. While a chivalric knight commonly dons a lady’s sleeve or some other love token as he fights in her name, Ulrich exaggerates this topos, having his hero dress in full female garb, complete with braids and flowing robes. The parody of this topos serves to bring to center stage the rather vexed linking of chivalric masculinity and ladies’ garments. Indeed, in the cross-dressing scenes Ulrich ironically juxtaposes terminology associated with male and female roles. For example, Ulrich explains his “knightly” bearing: “Ich fuort ein hemde, daz was planc / ze mazzen als daz rokel lanc, / dar an zwene vrowenermel guot, / ich was vil ritterlich gemuot” [I wore a shirt that was as white as the long skirt, and attached to it were two ladies’ sleeves; I felt very knightly, 489]. Not only does Ulrich describe his feminine clothing with an attention to epic detail, but the deliberate juxtaposition of the feminine “vrowenermel” (lady’s sleeve) with the masculine “ritterlich” (knightly) underlines the play with gender. A few strophes later, Ulrich continues to note the incongruity: “Sus zoget ich sa von Meisters dan / (in vrowen wis und was ein man)” [Then I quickly left Mestre (dressed as a woman, and was a man), 492]. The conjunction “und” (and) highlights the incongruity between feminine appearance and manly reality. The ironic lady/knight pair is again repeated as Ulrich notes, “Sus chom ich durch die stat geriten / in vrowen chleit nach riters siten” [Then I came riding through the town, in women’s clothes, with knightly manners, 514]. The constant juxtaposition between exterior and interior brings attention to the masculine identity hidden beneath feminine clothing. As Madeleine Kahn reminds us, generally the transvestite is “a heterosexual man who reaffirms his masculinity by dressing as a woman. . . . The cross-dressing, no matter how elaborate, is not the goal; rather, it is part of the process of creating a male self.”55 When Ulrich dresses as a woman, it is not to under55. Kahn, Narrative Transvestism, 13.


cut his masculinity, but rather to reinforce it. Rare examples in nonliterary texts of jousts in which knights cross-dressed may have performed the same function of underlining the masculinity of the participants by contrasting it with the femininity the performance was meant to exorcise.56 Several of the cross-dressing scenes in Frauendienst dramatize succinctly the anxiety concerning not only masculine identity but homosexuality. The first important scene is Ulrich’s encounter with the allegedly homosexual knight Hademar. Exhausted from a full day of tourneying, Ulrich declines to fight a knight who requests to joust with him. Consequently, people begin to gossip that Hademar must be a homosexual since this is the first time Ulrich has declined to fight with a man: “man sprach: ‘diu kuneginne ¨ hat verseit / hern Hademar ir tyoste hie, / daz tet si fur ¨ war ritter nie; / ich waen, siz dar umbe hat getan, / daz man des giht, er minne die man’” [People said: “The queen has refused to joust with Sir Hademar; truly she has never done that for a knight; I think that she has done it so that people will know he loves men,” 878]. The implication is that since Ulrich as Queen Venus fights so that men may show their erotic attachment to women, if he does not fight, this means that the opponent is erotically attached to men. Ulrich functions as a perpetual machine, churning out “real men.” The machine breaks down when a “false” man tries to engage the man-making machine. Yet Ulrich is a man dressed as a woman! The scene between Ulrich and the knight posing as a Slavic woman also demonstrates how masquerading as women returns to questions of masculinity. During the Venusfahrt, Ulrich’s page tells him that a Slavic woman has challenged Ulrich to a joust. Ulrich, far from being honored by this request, refuses to fight the woman, but offers her a different kind of “joust”: Ich smielt und hiez dem boten sagen: “swa ich noch ie bi minen tagen 56. See Brundage’s description of Cypriot knights dressed as women in Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 473; and Philippe de Navarre’s account of a tournament where knights dressed both as knights of King Arthur’s court and as women of “Femenie,” in Recueil des historiens des croisades, 2:793. See also Ad Putter, “Transvestite Knights in Medieval Life and Literature,” who argues that male transvestism, particularly when initiated by the knight rather than forced upon him (as in the case of Malory’s Lancelot or Ulrich), relieves anxiety about the threat to the male knight’s masculine identity by creating “the powerful illusion that the masculinity it manufactures (by assuming and dropping the female disguise) could always have been taken for granted” (287).

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getyostirt het wider diu wip, da waer gar harnasch bloz min lip gegen ir aller tyost gewesen, und bin doch vor in wol genesen; ir tyost tuot herzenlichen wol, gegen in sich niemen wapen sol.” .......................... ist iwer vrowe fur ¨ war ein wip, die sol gar harnasch bloz min lip vil wunnecliche alhie bestan, ir hulde ich wol verdienen chan. (688; 690) [I smiled and said to the messenger, “Whenever I in all my days ever jousted against women, my body was completely without armor against their jousting and yet I survived them quite well. Their jousting does heartfelt good; no one should arm themselves against them. If your lady is indeed a woman, I shall stand her a joust right here with great pleasure and I can certainly earn her favor.”] This is a classic example of a medieval smutty joke, and Ulrich’s smile shows that he is conscious of the joke he is making (the “woman” has not yet been revealed to be a man). Ulrich attempts to deflate female pretensions to power and to put women in their place and parades his masculinity before the male page—and potentially before his audience. The reader forgets the work is addressed to “good women” and feels rather like a witness to a “stagparty.”57 Ulrich’s smutty joke may very well have recalled a similar example from Heinrich von Veldeke’s Eneit (finished ca. 1187). The female warrior Camilla encounters an enemy Trojan, Sir Tarchon, who taunts her by offering to battle with her in a manner more “suitable” to her sex: lying comfortably on a fine bed. In such a battle, he proclaims, he would gladly suffer defeat and he knows that she too, would gain much profit from it.58 Camilla reacts to this Trojan smut by killing Tarchon with 57. Wolf, “Komik und Parodie,” 92. On the notion of this passage as medieval smut, see Milnes, “Ulrich von Lichtenstein,” 35. 58. See strophe 241 of Eneit (p. 100 in Thomas’s translation). Sarah Westphal notes that this scene meets Freud’s definition of smut and takes away the woman’s power by reducing her to a sexual object ( “Camilla,” 250). Westphal also notes that Camilla slays Tarchon and


a powerful thrust of her spear. In Ulrich’s story, the Slavic woman warrior actually turns out to be a man who, like Ulrich, has decided to don women’s clothing. Thus Ulrich’s smutty joke is actually directed at a man! Although the smuttiness appears quite similar to that of Tarchon’s taunting of Camilla, the dynamics are ultimately quite different. Dressed as a woman, Ulrich speaks as a man to a woman who is really a man, who may or may not know that Ulrich as Queen Venus is really a man. What is going on here? What did Ulrich’s audience make of this elaborate layering of gender poses? Although we have seen that Ulrich’s cross-dressing does not put him in the true position of the feminine but rather reinforces his position as masculine, the encounters between cross-dressers bring attention to the comic precariousness of gender categories. It is part of the story medieval people tell themselves about themselves, to take up Geertz’s formulation. Even though the inversion of male and female roles ultimately reaffirms the status quo, it points to a certain anxiety about just what it means to be a man or a woman. If one becomes a man through serving women, what does this mean for masculinity?59 Judith Butler argues that parody of socalled natural gender roles helps to show that there is, in fact, no such natural position to occupy. Rather, gender is a citational mode in which the subject “cites” norms regulating gender.60 One does not assume a ready-made gender that remains fixed, for gender is itself a process that one continually acts out. This notion of gender as a process parallels Madeleine Kahn’s assertion that transvestism is “part of the process of creating a male self.” Ulrich’s cross-dressing certainly does bring attention to the ways in which gender is performative, as when Ulrich, as Queen Venus, goes to give the offering: attacks with a hostile joke of her own. See also Westphal’s discussion of the anonymous Frauenturnier (Ladies tournament) (1300), in which women who have been staging their own jousts are made to promise that they will “joust” only in the marriage bed (“The Ladies’ Tournament,” 170). 59. Ulrich Muller ¨ views Ulrich as fundamentally anxious about his masculine role, arguing that the cross-dressing, as well as the simultaneous quest for power and desire to completely subject himself to a woman, indicates that he is deeply insecure about his role as man and knight (“Männerphantasien”). I would add that the anxiety at the heart of Ulrich’s poses represents a social, not just personal, insecurity about masculinity, which an analysis of class helps to show. 60. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 13.

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Ich gie ze dem opfer schone sa, nach mir gie vil manic vrowe da. daz ich den ganc so blide an vie, des wart gelachet dort und hie; min nigen und min umbeswanc diu wurden da envollen lanc. ich gie nach blider vrowen sit, chum hende breit was da min trit. (945) [I went to give my offering in front; many ladies came after me. There was laughter here and there because I tripped so merrily up the aisle. My bowing and my turning around really took a long time. I was walking merrily the way women do. My stride was only as long as a hand’s width.] In this passage Ulrich’s small ladylike steps show him citing femininity, playing at being a woman while putatively in control of his manhood, an incongruity that might have been even more comic in a live recital of the work since a male entertainer might accompany his recital with gestures and voice to capture the travesty.61 What does this gender travesty mean for women’s laughter in particular? How does it reformulate the gendered dynamics between male narrator and female audience? For the women in Ulrich’s audience, whether reading privately in their chambers or listening among others, Ulrich’s performance creates a space that goes beyond the pattern of male as jokemaker, woman as joke-object. He not only dresses like a woman, he even speaks as a woman, using pronouns like “we” and “us” in a way to ally himself with his “fellow” women, as when he says, “von busunen grozen schal / hort man vor uns vrowen do, / man was uns an ze sehen vro” [One could hear the loud sound of trumpets before us ladies: people were happy to look upon us, 541]. Ulrich’s pose as a woman meets with hearty approval from the women he meets. Perhaps the most comic episode of the masquerade is when Ulrich must give the kiss of peace in church and is unveiled as the man he really is: 61. Two similar passages where Ulrich’s offering meets with laughter are in strophe 536 and 600.


Die schoene lachen des began, si sprach: “wie nu, ir sit ein man? daz han ich kurzlich ¨ wol gesehen; was danne? der kus sol doch geschehen. ich wil durch elliu guoten wip iuch kussen, sit daz iwer lip hat vrowen chleit an sich geleit, des sol min kus iu sin bereit.” (538) [The fair lady began to laugh and said: “How is this, you are a man? I just saw this clearly. So what? The kiss should still happen. I intend on behalf of all good women to kiss you; since you have dressed yourself in ladies’ clothes, my kiss shall be extended to you.”] The lady is amused and honored by Ulrich’s feminine masquerade, and the pleasure resulting from this masquerade is mutual: Ulrich gets an illicit kiss and the lady gets a good laugh. But the men within the narrative laugh too, such as when Ulrich’s companion jokes about his having been not only a woman, but a queen: Er sprach: “got wunder hat getan an iu, daz ir nu sit ein man und wart vor vier tagen ein wip. daz ir sus wandelt iwern lip, daz ist ein wunder endelich. ir wart ein chuneginne ¨ rich, nu sit ir als ein ander man, wem habt ir iwer chunicriche ¨ lan?” Des lacht ich und manic ritter guot, als man nach spaeher rede tuot. (988– 89) [He said “God has performed a miracle on you that you are now a man and were four days ago a woman. That you have thus transformed yourself is truly a wonder. You were a rich queen and now you are like any other man. To whom have you given your realm?” I and many other good knights laughed at that, as people do after witty talk.]

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Thus, inscribed laughers of both genders appreciate Ulrich’s cross-dressing, suggesting the pleasures the text may have offered to men and women alike among Ulrich’s readers. While on the one hand offering women a female protagonist who ridicules the male hero and a narrator who self-deprecatingly serves women, and on the other hand displacing the female hero and casting a lascivious eye on women in the audience, Frauendienst in some ways created different kinds of laughter along gender and class lines. The cross-dressing scenes serve more as common ground, bringing attention to the socially constructed roles that must be continually performed by men and women alike. As Marjorie Garber argues, transvestism is “not just a category crisis of male and female, but the crisis of category itself.”62 Beyond putting into question femininity or masculinity, the laughter generated by cross-dressing interrogates those categories as they relate to each other, those social conventions that men and women must daily cite. If we were able to eavesdrop on a performance of Frauendienst before a mixed audience of the thirteenth century, we might have witnessed moments of tension between the sexes: nervous laughs, sideways glances, angry blushes, exclusionary winks. But we might also have observed women and men laughing openly with each other in recognition (probably unconscious) of how gender is a social category requiring performance by men and women alike. Making jokes about a man to his face, the lady uses her laughter as a public act in which she asserts herself rather than a private act solidifying bonds between women. Could scenes in Ulrich’s work such as the lady’s trick that sends her would-be rapist on his degrading fall have likewise instructed medieval German women how to use their wits to protect themselves, just as Boccaccio’s ladies learned to use their wit to deflect unwanted attentions from men? Perhaps, but this was unlikely to have been Ulrich’s intention. For him, the noblewoman ridiculing her suitor was instrumental in his parodying of the generic conventions of courtly love. Through the witty barbs of his heroine, Ulrich is able to ridicule the literary texts in which men weep and moan all in the service of women. And yet, his lady’s laughter marks the many ways in which the classics of courtly love did not allow women a voice. If lady service in fact relies on a woman’s silence or absence, then laughter is what exposes the operations of the genre’s silencing of women. 62. Garber, Vested Interests, 17.


Furthermore, the self-deprecating humor of the male narrator and his pose as a woman at times push the terrain of comedy beyond the limits of male versus female and bring attention to the performativity of gender and genre alike. By playing the fool, the narrator offers himself up for the laughter of both men and women. This pose as a fool may also have relied on issues of feudal hierarchy. But by dressing, walking, and speaking as a woman, Ulrich adds a complicating layer to his narrative persona that distinguishes his tale from the tales of so many other hapless suitors. Even the smutty joke Ulrich directs at a person he believes to be a woman invites women in the audience to occupy a position other than the position of the passive object of aggression, for the smut is hilariously misdirected at another man so that the audience can no longer be so sure whom they are laughing with and whom they are laughing at. By understanding the multiple facets of the work’s humor and the pleasures it offered to women, we can recognize ways in which Frauendienst could indeed have been in the service of ladies.

5

“My wife will be mistress” The Loquacious Farce Wife and Laughter in the House

Chères dames, par ma simplesse Il me conviendra fermer l’uys Et ma femme sera mestresse.1 [Dear ladies, because of my simplicity I will have to shut the door And my wife will be mistress.] Mes bonnes gens, qui nous voyez, Venez de la gajeure boire; Et annoncez et retenez Que les femmes que vous s¸cavez Ont gaigné le pris.2

1. The full title heading is Farce Nouvelle Très Bonne des Drois de la Porte Bodès et de fermer L’Huis a` Trois Personnages (Cohen, Recueil, 20, vv. 379– 81). Farces from Cohen’s collection will be indicated by RC followed by the number in the collection. All translations of the farces in this chapter are my own, unless otherwise indicated. The date of Porte Bodès is uncertain, but Cohen believes that it came after Le Chaudronnier, which is found in one printed edition (ca. 1550) from the Parisian printer Nicolas Chrestien (British Museum C20 e. 13) that Tissier, Recueil de Farces (1450–1550), speculates came well after the manuscripts (but no earlier than 1494). 2. Full title heading: Farce nouvelle très bonne et fort joyeuse a` troys personnages d’un Chauldronnier c’est assavoir l’homme, la femme et le chauldronnier (Tissier, Receuil de Farces, 3:185– 89). The farce is of probable Picard provenance. All farces from Tissier’s collection will be indicated by T and the volume number. Translations are my own. Also see the translation in Boucquey, Six Medieval French Farces, 143– 64.

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“My wife will be mistress” 169

[My dear people who see us here, Come and drink to the wager; And make it known and remember That women, as you have seen, Have won the prize.]

he men who address the audience at the end of these northern French farces openly proclaim the victory of wives over their husbands. The husband in the Chaudronnier announces the victory with an almost celebratory tone, suggesting that all go off to the tavern together to drink on it. The husband in Porte Bodès shows particular interest in the women in the audience, admitting his own defeat at the hands of one of their sex. Why would these conjugal farces of the late fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries celebrate a wife’s overthrowing of her husband’s authority?3 Who was laughing at the sight of a woman out-arguing her husband and forcing him to do the housework? The plots of the conjugal French farce generally hinge, at first glance, on the most banal of issues, such as who gets to choose the bird to put in the cage (Obstination des femmes) or which of the spouses has farted (Farce du pet). It is the very triviality of marital quarrels such as these that makes the humor, as André Tissier has commented: “The more futile the reason for the quarrel, the less troubling it is, and consequently, the more amusing it is to watch the spouses quarrel with each other.”4 Although seemingly superficial, their humor deriving in great measure from slapstick gestures and obscene puns, farces point to issues important to domestic relations in the Middle Ages, particularly the role of each spouse in maintaining the household. Both farces I discuss in this chapter center on the seemingly trivial bet between a husband and a wife over who can keep quiet longer. In Le Chaudronnier, a man of little means, perhaps a cobbler, bets his wife that he can remain silent longer than she. A kettle maker5 appears at their 3. Out of the 136 farces identified by Barbara Bowen, she classifies 61 as “farces conjugales” (Les Caractéristiques essentielles de la farce fran¸caise, 13). 4. “Plus le motif est futile, moins la querelle est inquiétante et, par conséquent, plus il est amusant de voir les e´ poux se querreler” (T 6:24). 5. The medieval chaudronnier not only made pots and pans, but sold and repaired them, evident in the ambulating chaudronnier’s hawking his services in the farce of the same name (“Qui veult ses poesles reffaire?” 91).

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house and, puzzled by their silence, attempts to force the husband to speak by putting straw on his face and placing a spoon in one hand and a chamber pot in the other, an allusion to the game of Saint Cosme where the goal is for one person to remain silent while the other tries to make him laugh by presenting him with ridiculous gifts. The kettle maker then makes amorous advances to the wife, calling her his “little cutie” [ma godinette] and addressing her in mock courtly speech—“Baiser vous vueil et acoller” [I want to kiss and hug you, v. 163]—and touching her all over, advances that she silently allows. The outraged husband pummels the kettle maker and curses his wife for immodestly failing to protect her body, but when she replies that she would thereby have lost the bet, the husband concedes that she has won. In Farce des drois de la Porte Bodès (twice the length of Le Chaudronnier), a cobbler and his wife argue over who should close the door, which is drawing in smoke from the fire. In this farce, the husband is confronted by two of the three things reputed to drive a medieval man from his home: “a drip, the smoke, a wife—these three compel a man his house to flee.”6 The husband suggests that whoever speaks first will have to close the door, and the two begin their wager. A judge comes by and, like the kettle maker, makes sexual advances to the wife, who, in contrast to the wife in the Chaudronnier, openly resists the male passerby’s advances, and angrily berates her husband for not having stopped him. The husband declares that his wife has lost the bet because she spoke first, but when she refuses to close the door as promised, he calls upon the judge to intervene and decide the case. After the husband presents his grievance against his wife, the wife claims that it was her natural right as a woman to speak out, citing as her legal evidence the “drois de la Porte Bodès,” edicts alleged to be posted on the Bodès door outside Paris that proclaimed women’s authority over their husbands.7 Thus, while not contest6. From the anonymous Latin satire against marriage De Coniuge non ducenda (Against marrying) of the thirteenth century, quoted in Blamires, Pratt, and Marx, Woman Defamed, 128. Initially, in Prov. 19:13 and in Jerome’s Against Jovinian, the dripping is used to describe the consistent nagging of the wife. The Wife of Bath also refers to this saying (ll. 278– 80), as does Christine de Pizan, quoted later in this chapter. 7. Cohen, Recueil, notes that the Porte Baudoyer, Baudeer, or Baudet was located in the city wall of Paris from the eleventh century and was the site of a famous auberge, Heaume de la Porte Baudet. The place-name undoubtedly had a particular appeal for Parisian audiences, one that is lost to readers today.


ing her husband’s claim that he has won the bet, she trumps him by presenting legal principles that supersede those of this individual case. The bewildered judge accepts this evidence, pronouncing in her favor and ordering the husband to close the door. When read side by side, these two farces demonstrate the way in which medieval discourse placed women in a no-win situation. Learned antifeminist texts and common proverbs alike characterize women both as excessively talkative and excessively libidinous. These farces imagine what happens when women attempt to defy such clichés by placing the female characters in a situation where trying to disprove one makes them inevitably confirm the other. While one wife is able to win the bet by demonstrating her ability to hold her tongue, but at the expense of her modesty, the other wife, conversely, assigns a greater value to her modesty than to the winning of a silence wager. Like the lady of Frauendienst, who cannot praise her suitor, as is expected of a courtly lady, without being perceived as accepting his love (but conversely is criticized if she is not courteous to his advances) the wives show that women are presented with false choices. Whatever attempts women might make at conforming to expectations about proper feminine comportment, they can never measure up since ready-made formulas about their deficiencies are ever available to castigate a woman for any “choice” she might make: all women, as the Wife of Bath has already taught, will go to the devil as far as men are concerned. While the farces generate laughter through their world-upside-down structure of a woman wearing the pants in the house, and can thus be said to base their humor on subverted expectations about marital relations, they also play with the discourse on women itself. If the laughter of parody in Frauendienst brings attention to the sometimes ridiculous implications of the logic governing genre, the farces make clichés and proverbs that circulate in marketplace as well as literary text the subject of scrutiny. As public performances staged before an audience of mixed social groups, they also allow us to consider how a more socially diverse group of spectators participated in the culture of laughter in the Middle Ages. Looking at these farces side by side in the context of other farces, this chapter first examines how their humor responds to notions of women’s alleged loquacity and points to concerns regarding the authority of a man over his wife, then considers what scenes of domestic dispute had to say about the value of women’s work as it contributed to the medieval household.

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Women in Medieval Theater: On Stage and Off A particular difficulty we face in considering the relationship between the medieval farce wife and the audience is that both female and male roles were probably played by men, although information about the assigning of theatrical roles in the Middle Ages is sketchy. There is evidence of women having acted in some of the mystery plays of medieval England, and we know that women acted in plays on the continent, such as the women who played the female roles in the Mystery of the Three Masters in 1509 at Romans or the woman who played the role of St. Catherine in a mystery in 1468 in Metz.8 Scholars of the farce have by and large assumed that men played the roles of women in the French farce because there is no evidence of a woman acting in a farce until 1545: a contract in which the director of an ambulating troupe promises to feed and lodge the actress, Marie Ferré, as well as pay her “douze livres tournois.”9 A key reason for women’s exclusion from acting in farces comes from the fact that maledominated organizations generally were in charge of mounting farce performances.10 In the first hundred or so years of the farce, performances were predominantly in the hands of various student groups or professional associations from which women would have been excluded, such as the Parisian Basoche (association of law clerks) or the Enfants-sans-Souci, known mostly for their performances of sotties. In the middle of the sixteenth century, however, the performance of farces was gradually being taken over by traveling troupes or by the Parisian companies based in the Hotel ˆ de Bourgogne. In performances where men did play female roles, how would this 8. According to records from Metz, the woman played so well that she made several people weep (Petit de Julleville, Les Comédiens en France au Moyen Age, 10). Apparently, the role most often played by women was that of the Virgin Mary. In some cases, in plays where other female roles were played by men, the role of the Virgin was played by a young woman. See Harris, Medieval Theatre in Context, 150; and Ogden, “Women Play Women in the Liturgical Drama of the Middle Ages.” 9. Lacour, Les Premières actrices fran¸caises, 6. Lacour remarks that the matter-of-factness of the terms of the contract suggest to him that the practice of hiring actresses by this time was routine rather than exceptional, and he suggests that the poor evidence for women’s playing on the stage may simply be due to a paucity of surviving documents. See also Lebègue, Le Théaˆ tre comique en France de Pathelin a` Mélite, 24; and Hindley, “Acting Companies in Late Medieval France,” 83. 10. Clifford Davidson, discussing primarily British theater, remarks the control of dramatic productions by male organizations (“Women and the Medieval Stage,” 102).


affect the relationship between the fictional women on stage and real women in the audience? Scarce attention has been given to this question by scholars of medieval French theater, but it has been the subject of lively debate among scholars of English Renaissance theater. Some of these scholars argue that the audience willingly suspended their knowledge of the male sex of the performer and that young male actors could perform so well that the audience forgot they were actually watching boys on stage.11 Such suspension of disbelief in the context of medieval French theater is suggested by an account of a miracle play in Metz in 1485 where the young son of a barber apparently played the role of St. Barbara so well that all of the townspeople wanted to take him in under their roofs and a rich widow even wanted to adopt him. The following year, however, the same boy had less success playing St. Catherine because his voice had ripened.12 In other words, the biological proximity of young boys to women (with their unripened voices and assumedly effeminate physique) allowed the audience to suspend their disbelief and accept the performance as authentically female. But the image of a male on stage dressed as a woman could also have been exploited for burlesque purposes, particularly if the actor was a man rather than a boy. The male actor dressed as the farce wife might have used exaggerated tones and gestures to parody femininity and bring attention to the male body of the actor on stage, similar to Ulrich’s masquerade as Queen Venus, discussed in chapter 4.13 Unfortunately, we have no evidence of how Le Chaudronnier or Porte Bodès were performed. Male actors playing the wives may have exaggerated their feminine roles for burlesque effect, or they may have been directed to play the parts straight so that the humor would focus on the marital quarrel and the silence wager. The response of men and women to the performance of the farce wife would undoubtedly have varied from one performance to the other based on such choices. 11. See Brown, “The Boyhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines.” On the unique possibilities of identification with the boy actors among both male and female viewers, see Barbour, “When I Acted Young Antinous.” 12. Petit de Julleville, Les Comédiens en France au Moyen Age, 275– 76. 13. Edelgard E. Du Bruck, “The Sociology of the Nuernberg Shrovetide Plays,” 107, notes the burlesque results of men playing women in comic drama, as does Raymond Lebègue who cites one example where an actor playing a woman, having kept his beard while wearing a woman’s kerchief and apron, asks her newly married friend how she spent her wedding night (Théaˆ tre comique, 24).

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This leads to the question of whether women were present at performances. Select audiences indoors sometimes watched farces performed by school groups or by the puys, medieval versions of the literary salon. Women might have been excluded from such groups, although indoor performances could include family members of guilds or confraternities. But farces were frequently performed in a public square during the celebration of a religious or civic festival or a procession honoring the arrival of an important civic figure.14 Crowds would gather around the scaffolding and watch the performances while standing rather than sitting. A sixteenthcentury painting by the Flemish painter Pieter Balten, The Flemish Kermess, shows a farce being performed in front of audiences comprised of men and women. Documents from Lucerne also show that women were in public areas in which plays were performed, although their presence near the stage was not appreciated by some.15 There is also evidence of women’s presence toward the end of the sixteenth century in Paris, when the farce was often presented indoors in the houses run by the confraternities, such as the famous house run by the Confrérie de la Passion, L’Hôtel de Bourgogne. In 1588, a prelate complained about the mounting of plays on feast days and Sundays at the Hotel, ˆ lamenting the licentious activities that took place and their threat to women’s modesty: In this place, a thousand scandalous assignations are made, which damages the honesty and modesty of women and ruins the families of the poor artisans, of which the lower room is always full and who, more than two hours before the performance, spend their time in immodest pastimes, in games of cards and dice, in gluttony and drunkenness . . . etc., and from which result several quarrels and fights.16 14. Farces were often performed as part of a larger religious drama. See Lintilhac, La Comédie, 33. In his discussion of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century processions of Lille, Alan Knight suggests that whereas the biblical plays were presented during the first day of the procession, farces were performed in the evening or the next day (“Processional Theatre and the Rituals of Social Unity in Lille,” 101, 105). See also Hindley’s discussion of the various venues for farces, including in public on platforms, or in private (wedding feasts and school groups) or professional performances indoors by troupes such as Triboulet’s (“Acting Companies in Late Medieval France,” 94). 15. The “to-ing and “fro-ing” of the female servants or assistants was considered inappropriate, and the actors were asked to have male servants do any necessary errands (Meredith and Tailby, The Staging of Religious Drama in Europe in the Later Middle Ages, 55). 16. This passage is quoted in Petit de Julleville, Comédiens en France, 79 (translation is mine). Petit de Julleville’s source is a book entitled Remonstrances très-humbles au Roy de


This passage testifies not only to the presence of women, but also to the popularity of such spectacles, for which audience members would come two hours early to hold their places. There is also evidence of noblewomen attending farces. In 1498, Anne de Bretagne herself paid the Enfants-sansSouci thirty-five “livres tournois” for having performed in front of her “plusieurs jeux, farces et esbatements” [several games, farces, and amusements].17 Perhaps the strongest evidence of women’s attendance is that many farces themselves (including Porte Bodès) address women in such phrases as “Seigneurs et dames, hault et bas” [Gentlemen and ladies, high and low].18 Although participation of women as actors is difficult to document, it is clear that many performances included women among their audiences.

Women’s Wagging Tongue and the Farce Wife’s Challenge According to farce husbands, the principal flaw of their wives is that they talk too much. The husband in Le Chaudronnier goes so far as to claim that female loquacity, in its sheer force, is capable of overpowering the Devil himself:19 Femme le gaignera a` caqueter. Vous verriez plustost Lucifer France et de Pologne, printed in 1588 and attributed to Pierre d’Epinac, archbishop of Lyon, or to Nicolas Roland, counselor to the “Cour des Monnaies” in Paris. On the concern over women’s attendance at plays, see Jean Howard’s study of the Renaissance English stage, in which she argues that the antitheatricalists perceived women’s access to the public realm, purchased with a theater ticket, as a threat because it allowed them to see the whole theatrical display of possibilities they otherwise would not know in the confines of their homes, the “proper” place for women (The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England, 78– 79). 17. Quoted in Petit de Julleville, Comédiens en France, 163. 18. Just a few examples of farces that address women at the end are Maistre Mymin qui va a` la guerre (RC 4), Farce des esveilleurs du chat qui dort (RC 34), Farce de Martin de Cambray (RC 41), Farce du goguelu (RC 45), Farce de la trippière (RC 52), and Colin qui loue et dépite Dieu (T 1). 19. One fabliau even attributes woman’s loquacity and laughter to the Devil, who in making her, farted on her tongue, which is why she talks and jokes so much (“Por ce bordeele et jengle tant”: “Du con qui fu fait a la besche” [Barbazan, Fabliaux et Contes, 4]). The association between the shrewish wife and the Devil was common. Lucy de Bruyn, Woman and the Devil in Sixteenth-Century Literature, 129– 49, notes that the shrew was such an indomitable figure that the Devil became a sympathetic character when viewed next to her!

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Devenir ange salutaire Que une femme eust un peu de repos, Et soy taire ou tenir maniere. (vv. 68– 72) [Woman will always win when it comes to yakking. You would be more likely to see Lucifer become a salutary angel than a woman calm down and keep quiet or to even look like she’s trying to.] Confident that the only victory available to his wife is in yakking—caqueter being a word onomatopoetic in origin and meant to compare a woman’s prattling with the cackling of a hen—the husband declares that his wife will lose the silence wager and will have to pay. He in fact declares that the loser will have to buy “la soupe payelle,” a kind of soup fried in a pan, but perhaps, as Tissier suggests in his note, a word game: paye elle (she pays). This declaration conveys his confidence that he, unlike his wife, will be able to hold his tongue. The husband in Porte Bodès similarly believes that victory is unquestionably his. His wife is surprised at his cocky confidence, but he explains: Car je ne viz onques La femme qui se peust passer De caqueter ou de tencer. Leur langue, par Saint Matelin, Est comme le claquet du moulin, Jamais nul tour n’est a` repos. (vv. 141– 46) [For I have never seen the woman who can refrain from yakking or arguing. Their tongue, by Saint Matelin, is like the clacker of the windmill. It never ceases turning.] The farce husbands’ distaste for the allegedly wagging tongues of their wives reflects a long tradition of clerical and literary discourse on female speech in the Middle Ages, and it is thus no surprise that the husbands are fully confident that they will win the bet. The notion that man, gifted with reason, can speak, whereas woman, the irrational creature, can only make


noise can be traced back to the Bible.20 A few examples will suffice to show the ubiquity of this topos in medieval discourse. St. John Chrysostom writes in the fourth century that women should be forbidden from speaking in church even about religious matters. Echoing St. Paul’s famous ban on women as teachers, he explains that women should learn, not teach, “For thus they will show submission by their silence. For the sex is naturally somewhat talkative.”21 Around 1185 Andreas Capellanus comments, “Every woman is also loud-mouthed, since no one of them can keep her tongue from abuses, and if she loses a single egg she will keep up a clamor all day like a barking dog, and she will disturb the whole neighborhood over a trifle.”22 In the thirteenth century, Jean de Meun warns men “not to confide in their wives unless they want to hear their secrets repeated in town.”23 Boccaccio, following Juvenal’s sixth satire, declares that women “chatter incessantly with the maid, the baker’s wife, the green-grocer’s wife, or the washerwoman, and become greatly put out if they are reproved for talking to any of them.”24 Perhaps the best literary illustration of women’s chattering is the farce in which women plagued with taciturnité go on a pilgrimage to their patron saint, Sainte Caquette, who heals them.25 The preponderance of texts lamenting female loquacity in literary texts, conduct manuals, and church sermons, not just in clerical treatises, shows that women were well aware that they were considered to be the talkative sex.26 Le Chaudronnier and Porte Bodès, while in some measure reinforcing these clichés, simultaneously end up questioning their shaky foundation. 20. Lucken, “Woman’s Cry,” locates the topos in the story of the Fall and traces its progress into the farce corpus. 21. Homily IX on Saint Paul’s Epistle to Timothy I.2: Homilies on the Epistles of St. Paul the Apostle to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon, 435. 22. The Art of Courtly Love, 207. 23. Le Roman de la Rose, vv. 16347– 53 (through the words of Genius). 24. Boccaccio, The Corbaccio, 31. 25. Le Grant voiage et pelerinage de Saincte Caquette a` quatre personnages, composé a` Caen par le nouveau général, in E. Droz and H. Lewicka, Le Recueil Trepperel. See also the farce Mâitre Mimin Etudiant, where the moral at the end is in fact “Au moins on a bien veu comment femmes ont le bruyt pour parler” [At least we have seen how women have the reputation for talking, T 3]. 26. For examples of sermons warning against women’s talkativeness, see Jacques de Vitry, Sermones vulgares (ca. 1170– 1240), quoted in Blamires, Pratt, and Marx, Woman Defamed, 145– 46.

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First of all, the farce wives challenge their husbands’ assertion that loquacity is a quality particular to women. In Le Chaudronnier, the wife insults her husband by calling him “maubeq” [bad beak, v. 17], which as Tissier notes, is similar to the term bequerelle that one finds used to describe a loud-mouthed woman. The insult she hurls at her husband implicitly questions the natural association between femininity and loquacity; it is in fact the husband’s failure to control his own tongue that causes him to lose the bet to his wife, who knows how to hold hers. Men’s excessive speech is a more explicit topic in Porte Bodès, where it is the husband’s continual nagging of his wife to shut the door that drives her to confront her husband with his hypocrisy: Vous dictes bien qu’entre nous femmes Caquetons tousjours, mes vous-mesmes Ne vous en povés pas tenir. (vv. 130– 33) [You say that we women are always yakking, but you yourselves can’t refrain from it.] The wife’s use of the pronoun “you” is directed not only at her husband, but at all men in general, for she distinguishes the group of “nous femmes” [us women] from “vous-mesmes” [you yourselves], making clear that the battle is not just between spouses, but between men and women more generally. In fact, it is only at this point, after her husband has made his speech about women’s alleged loquacity, that she defends herself and all women against the unfounded clichés that men make. The wife continues to challenge the foundation of such clichés, for when her husband claims that women’s tongues are like windmills, she responds: N’esse pas a` nostre propos Vous-mesmes qui l’avés conclus Et preposé; vous parlez plus Que je ne fois de la moitié. (vv. 147– 50) [Isn’t it true that you yourselves have concluded and asserted that about us? You speak twice as much as I do.]


Like the Wife of Bath, who questions the legitimacy of discourse about women since it is written by men, she points out that it is “you yourselves,” men, who have crafted and perpetuated the myth of woman’s wagging tongue. She challenges the cliché not only by undermining the legitimacy of its source, but also by bringing in her own personal observation that he talks more than she does. Christine de Pizan, too, questioned such assumptions in her attack on “gossips,” in this case, men who bragged of their sexual conquests.27 While on the one hand disputing the legitimacy of what men say about women’s talkativeness, the women elsewhere praise their putatively feminine loquacity as an asset that they can exploit to their advantage. The wife in Le Chaudronnier brags, “Je ne crain femme de la ville / A caqueter ny a` playdier” [There’s not a woman in town I fear when it comes to yakking or arguing, vv. 65– 66]. The wife in L’Obstination des femmes also brags about her loquacity and its usefulness to women. When her husband tells her to be quiet and let him be the boss in the house, she replies, Cela n’est pas a` nostre usaige Et ne sert point a` mon propos. Femmes n’ont jamais le bec clos, Et ce n’est pas de maintenant! (T 6:vv. 169– 72) [That is not our custom and doesn’t at all serve my purpose. Women never have a closed beak, and that’s nothing new!] This wife admits that women are by nature talkative—it is “our custom”— but also suggests that there is a utility in this talkativeness: it serves her 27. Thelma Fenster notes that Christine’s clever reversal of the gossipy woman topos is an example of her sense of humor (134). See also chapter 1 on the Wife of Bath’s ridiculing of men’s pretentious speech. R. Howard Bloch also points to the paradox underlying the discourse of male misogynists who go on at length about alleged feminine loquacity (Medieval Misogyny, 55– 57), and Patricia Parker discusses Erasmus’s 1525 treatise Lingua, sive de linguae usu ac abusu (On the use and abuse of the tongue), in which Erasmus claims that he would have dedicated his treatise to women since they are most often reproached for their wagging tongues but cannot because men’s tongues are so uncontrolled “that women appear subdued and restrained in comparison.” He then lists examples of overabundance in speech from Greek and Roman literature and oratory. Parker argues that the work is representative of a whole body of literature including conduct literature and Shakespeare’s plays that show “the anxieties of effeminacy which attended any man whose province was the art of words” (“On the Tongue,” 445– 46).

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purpose. In Le Chaudronnier and Porte Bodès, the question of what specific purpose woman’s loquacity might serve hinges, ironically, not on woman’s speech but on her silence. In Le Chaudronnier, although the wife first brags about her loquacity, as soon as her husband claims women are unable to keep quiet, she disputes him. In winning the bet, she demonstrates that women can remain silent when it suits their purpose, just as the wife in Obstination des femmes states that women talk when it suits their purpose (propos). Although in Porte Bodès the wife technically loses the bet by breaking her silence, she uses her tongue to serve her own purpose: to put a stop to the judge’s advances and to point out her husband’s own failure to protect her against them. The first wife had made the opposite choice, but with the similar goal of responding to men’s claims about women’s failings. The false choice between staying quiet and staying chaste brings us back to the larger medieval preoccupation with woman’s body. A farce that explicitly explores the trouble woman’s body makes for men is the Farce moralisée a` quatre personnaiges, a dialogue between two husbands where the mouth/vagina dichotomy is expressed as an opposition between the head (teste) and the backside (bas) or ass (cul). The negative behavior of each wife is thought to stem from a buildup of pressure caused by an improper venting of the humors through the two orifices in question. Husband one complains about the head of his wife who is bossy and argumentative, and withholds from him the pleasures of her bas. Too much pressure is released from the head and not enough from the backside. The second husband, by contrast, finds his wife both sweet of speech and generous with her backside. However, she is overly generous with the latter, since she offers it not only to him but to other men as well. The two men ponder how to remedy this problem and consider a laxative for the head of the first one and a restrainctif for the backside of the second. The men realize, however, that this remedy will only end up reversing the problem. The men conclude: “Ici nous disons qu’il n’est femme / Qui ne crie, tempeste ou blasme, / Ou a quelcun le bas ne preste” [We state here that there is no woman who doesn’t either shout, thunder, and castigate or (on the other hand) give her backside to someone, vv. 151– 53].28 As Jane Burns notes in her discussion of this farce, although the men frame the problem as an either/or deficiency 28. In Picot, Nouveau recueil de farces fran¸caises des XVe et XVI siècles. This farce is also called Les Deux hommes et leurs deux femmes (T 1). Translation is by Burns, Bodytalk, 36.


of female anatomy, what is really at issue is the men’s inability to control their wives and the corresponding threat to their masculinity. The first husband is emasculated because his wife “wears the pants” at home, and the second husband is emasculated because he is made a cuckold because of his wife’s activities outside of the home. The apparent concern over women’s troublesome body parts covers up an underlying anxiety about female agency. Female speech and sexuality are shown to be “something mysteriously elusive and unknown to man,” and woman is troublesome for man “because she has a head, a mouth, and a working mind, or because her ‘ass’ dares to have a mind of its own.”29 The context of the teste/bas dichotomy is somewhat different in the case of the wives in Le Chaudronnier and Porte Bodès—the wives’ marital fidelity is not at issue, and their actions are constrained by the terms of the wager— but it frames similar concerns. Each woman attempts to rein in the troublesome body part, but in doing so the body part on the opposite of the binary causes trouble of its own. To a greater extent than the Farce Moralisée, these two farces explicitly dramatize female agency because the choice of the wife is highlighted. In her decision to speak or not to speak, each woman proclaims that she does have a mind of her own, that she can choose when to control her head and when to control her backside. In both situations, the husbands are forced to acknowledge their wives’ victory. The wife in Le Chaudronnier not only gets to have soup at her husband’s expense, she also invites the kettle maker along, despite her husband’s grumbling. In the wife’s desire for the company of the man whose sexual advances she had not discouraged, she reconfirms her association with the backside end of the binary. The wife in Porte Bodès manages to point out her husband’s moral weakness and eventually succeeds in making him submit to her complete authority. In the closing lines of the play the husband gallantly admits his own foolishness to the dear ladies in the audience, whereas she threatens to throw her husband in a well if he talks back to her, thereby reinforcing her association with the first part of the head/backside binary. Both plays, in other words, allow women to have the last word, but demonstrate anxiety about female dominance in reasserting her association with either the loose tongue or the loose backside. Medieval audiences, not yet equipped with the tools of feminist criticism, would probably not have interpreted these plays in quite this way. 29. Burns, Bodytalk, 37.

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However, examining the structuring principle of the farce genre can shed light on how our observations on the patriarchal logic underlying these plays and medieval laughter might ultimately coincide. In her highly regarded study La farce ou la machine a` rire, Bernadette Rey-Flaud explains the farce as a machinelike mechanism in which characters are manipulated by a trick or ruse. Far more important than the principle of moral right or wrong is that of trickery itself.30 Although the inversion of social mores may play a role in creating humor in the farce, Rey-Flaud argues that it is the manipulation of the puppetlike characters by the mechanism set into motion that ultimately creates the humor. Thierry Boucquey similarly notes that farce does turn the world upside down, but the authority that is usurped is that of reason itself. Folly, rather than conventional morality, is the rule of order in the genre.31 Recently, scholars have also focused on the farce’s self-reflexive attention to language, such as the farces that dramatize proverbial expressions, imagining them to mean literally rather than figuratively, such as the Farce des femmes qui font accroire a` leurs maris de vecies que ce sont lanternes.32 Christopher Lucken notes that in the farces, the folie of language, verbal excess devoid of signification, and its representation of a fallen world, is the true subject of conjugal farces: The authors of these farces are not concerned either to vindicate or to condemn the descendant of Eve. Using the figure of the shrew in pursuit of their own artistic purposes, using her in accordance with a rhetorical pattern rather than a simple expression of a misogynistic tradition, as a means to contradict the need for intelligibility represented by man and the theory of signs that goes with it, these farces play with their characters in order to play their own game, that of a language left to its sensuous fantasy in a world where the Fall has put an end to the Word of God.33 Lucken emphasizes that medieval authors are often less interested in defending or defaming women than in “playing their own game,” using 30. Rey-Flaud, La farce ou la machine a` rire. 31. Boucquey, Mirages de la farce, 31. Alan E. Knight, Aspects of Genre in Late Medieval French Drama, 48– 65, also notes that the world of the farce, governed by irrationality, is in sharp opposition to the morality play, where Reason is a fundamental structuring principle. 32. RC 14. This point has been made by Boucquey, Mirages de la farce, 66; and Lucken, “Woman’s Cry,” 176 n. 37. For examples, see RC 9, 19, 24. 33. Lucken, “Woman’s Cry,” 173.


female characters to explore questions of language and art rather than to engage in social questions related to gender. Jody Enders likewise considers the specific language of medieval law, whose practitioners were also authors of farces. She notes that Porte Bodès plays with legal rhetoric, for each spouse “accuses the other of the kind of ‘chattering’ and ‘debating’ with which the Basochiens habitually disrupted the court. . . . This is a description of the degeneration of law itself: too many words about nothing and too many words about words.”34 While the apparent subject of the dispute is conjugal authority, the laughter relies to a large extent on the audience’s knowledge of legal disputation. These studies, focusing on medieval rhetoric and poetics, help to explain why many farces allow women to prevail over their husbands in the end. While some farce wives are eventually put back in their place by the end of the play, such as the wife in Le Cuvier, who upon falling into the washtub is forced to return to her proper role as housewife, in many other farces a restoration to “natural order” never occurs.35 This is because the laughter they generate does not always rely on whether one is to view the female characters negatively or positively. Yet we should not make the opposite mistake of ignoring the ways in which that laughter both reflects and reshapes the audience’s understanding of gender. Explaining the humor of the farce through its structural mechanisms or its poetics while giving short shrift to the ideology of gender in which they are implicated implies that because texts equate women with language (or noise or folly), we need to erase historical women from the equation altogether.36 In Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de la Feuillée (1276), the cliché of women’s shrewish speech is (playfully?) directed at the actual wives of the town of Arras, specific women well known to the play’s spectators, which thus invites a clear connection between convention (whether popular or literary) and reality. The laughter of Chaudronnier and Porte Bodès may ultimately derive from 34. Enders, Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama, 213. 35. Farces where women remain “on top” at the end include (just to mention a few) Farce d’un savetier nommé Calvain (T 3), L’Obstination des femmes (T 6), Femmes qui se font passer Maistresses (RC 16), Colin qui loue et dépite Dieu (T 1), and Farce du Dorellot (RC 24). This is perhaps one important characteristic distinguishing medieval farce from Renaissance British comedy, where the happy ending places the rebellious heroine firmly in the hands of her husband. See Carlson, Women and Comedy, 21. 36. On the problem of scholarship on medieval culture that erases historical women in favor of Woman as sign, see the discussions in the Medieval Feminist Newsletter 6 (fall 1988) and 7 (spring 1989). This publication is now called the Medieval Feminist Forum.

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the pleasure at seeing both husband and wife manipulated by the silence wager mechanism, but in the process, clichés about female sexuality and loquacity are put on display. It is not just language that takes center stage, but language about women. We might say that medieval discourse about gender is itself a “character” in the farce, and it is perhaps this character, more than the wife herself, which makes noise.

Domestic Authority: Cracks in the Household Walls Whether husband or wife prevails in the end, conjugal farces do rely on the expectation that a man’s rule over his wife should be the norm. Both Porte Bodès and Chaudronnier connect this concern over who is the boss in the house to the issue of female speech. As the example of the Wife of Bath attests, in the Middle Ages, a talkative woman is inevitably a woman who talks back. In 1371 or 1372 Jehan LeFèvre, in his translation of Matheolus’s Lamentations argues that women’s quarreling results in an overturning of the natural order, for her poor husband cannot withstand her quarreling.37 The loathing of female speech extends not just to loud or violent speech, but to any form of contradiction to a man’s word. Women were explicitly told to obey their husbands, no matter how seemingly trivial the issue at hand. In a conduct manual of 1394 known as Le Ménagier de Paris, an elderly Parisian husband counsels his young wife: Et pour ce je vous conseille que les trespetites choses et de trespetite valeur, et ne fut fors d’un festu que vostre mary qui sera apres moy vous commandast a garder, que vous, sans enquerre pour quoy ne a quelle fin, puis que la parole sera telle yssue de la bouche de vostre mary qui sera, vous le gardez tressongneusement et tresdiligemment; car vous ne savez ne ne devez adonc enquerir, si ne le vous dit de son mouvement, qui a ce le meut ou a meu, se il a cause, ou se il le fait pour vous essayer. Car s’il a cause, dont estes vous bien tenue de le garder, et s’il n’y a point de le non garder, maiz le fait pour vous essaier, dont devez vous bien vouloir qu’il vous treuve obeissant et diligent a ses commandemens; et mesmement devez penser que puis 37. Jehan LeFèvre, Lamentations de Matheolus, 1:824– 90. Also see Blamires, Pratt, and Marx, Woman Defamed, 178– 79.


que sur ung neant il vous treuve obeissant a son vouloir, et que vous en tenez grant compte, croira il que sur ung gros cas vous trouveroit il encores en cent doubles plus obeissant.38 [Therefore, I advise you that when your husband who will come after me asks you to do something, even though they are very little things of very little importance, that you do them very carefully and very diligently, even if were only some trivial matter, without asking why or for what reason, since such a command will be issued from your future husband; for you do not need to know, nor should you try to find out unless he tells you of his own accord since he decided it, whether he had a reason, or whether he is doing it in order to test you. For if he does have a reason, then you are obligated to follow it, and if there is no reason for doing it except the fact of testing you, then you should want him to find you obedient and diligent to his commands; and, in fact, you should figure that since he finds you obedient to his will when it comes to something trivial and that you take it very seriously, he will believe that when it comes to some serious situation he will find you even a hundred times more obedient.] The author notes the importance of a wife obeying her husband even in the most trifling matters (“les trespetites choses et de trespetite valeur”) and notes the right of a husband to test his wife. Christine de Pizan similarly notes that some foolish women think “that to be good housekeepers they must be disagreeable and make trouble for their husbands and households over nothing. So they make great disturbances over trivialities, criticizing everything and chattering unceasingly.” By contrast, Christine urges her female readers that a good housewife should be judicious and wise and avoid “babbling, which is most unbecoming to a woman.”39 Good housekeeping thus requires restraint in speech. That both authors focus on not quarreling over trivial matters suggests that the apparent triviality of the farcical domestic disputes, although it enables us to laugh at the quarreling couple, is actually central to the marital dispute. In the husband and wife’s argument in Porte Bodès, it is not closing the door that is at issue, but domestic authority in general. The husband 38. Le Ménagier de Paris, 97. Translation is my own. 39. Christine de Pizan, Treasury, 189.

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explicitly links his wife’s tongue to her unruliness. Complaining before the judge about his wife’s faults and why she should be punished, he laments that she never ceases cursing and insulting him: “Et veult par son caquet mesdit / Estre mestresse comme moy” [and with her cursed yakking, wants to be boss like me, vv. 280– 81]. The husband of Le Chaudronnier announces this issue early on in the play, for as his wife scolds him for singing and calls him an idiot, he laments her sharp tongue thus: “A! ma femme, a` ce que je voy, / Vous me voulez suppediter” [Oh, my wife, from what I see, you want to subdue/tame me, vv. 5– 6].40 With the sigh of the henpecked husband, the farce husband appeals to the men in the audience for sympathy, asking, “Me vouldroit-elle suppediter?” [Is she trying to subdue me? v. 52]. The husband in Porte Bodès also looks for a sympathetic ear from the audience. While he and his wife are beating each other, the husband declares, “Haro! ma femme me veult batre, / Au meurdrier, a` l’aide, bonnes gens!” [Ho! my wife wants to beat me. After the murderer, help, good people! vv. 103– 4]. According to a common reading of the farce, these two works are conservative in that they ridicule the man who lets his wife rule the roost. Men, as well as women, are to be judged negatively, for the husband who let his wife dominate had forsaken his masculine role as head of the house.41 Images of authoritarian women in the farce are indeed sometimes associated with castration. The wife in the Chaudronnier calls her husband a “poupon” [little boy, v. 38] and a “chappon” [castrated cock, v. 39].42 Like the cuckold who was paraded through the streets to be mocked by his fellow villagers for letting his wife beat him, the farce husband was a cautionary example that served to remind men of their role as head of the house but simultaneously offered them an outlet to relieve anxieties should they fail to do so.43 The male spectator could judge that he, at least, was superior to the emasculated man he saw on stage, or he might pass off 40. Suppediter literally means to put beneath one’s feet. Thus the idea of the wife taming the husband is rooted in a physical, visual manifestation of the “woman on top” topos. 41. See, for example, Aubailly, Le Théaˆ tre médiéval profane et comique, 184. 42. In Le nouveau marié qui ne peut fournir l’appointement de sa femme (T 1), a mother-inlaw accuses her son-in-law of lacking freros (“little brothers,” i.e., testicles) and threatens to beat him because said lack is bringing her daughter misery. It should also be noted that the use of the term to wear the pants was already in place in the Middle Ages to signify control over the household, since fabliaux showed husband and wife fighting over who would get to wear the breeches, literally and figuratively. 43. See Knight, “The Farce Wife,” 23.


problems in his own household as the result of woman’s inevitable triumph through her natural guile, thus exculpating himself of any blame. Interpreting the function of the farce in this way of course also entails the assumption that if medieval men were anxious about their ability to maintain their role as paterfamilias, then wives were apparently not assuming their subservient roles so readily, which is demonstrated in court records in which wives are either accused of disobedience or justify their failure to obey violent husbands.44 What is less often acknowledged is the way in which farces frame male anxiety in terms of the fragile separation between the private and public sphere. Whereas the Tretis shows medieval men imagining what women might say about them behind closed doors, the farces in fact demonstrate deeper concerns about how female subversion might circulate not only among women, but leak outside the household walls into the community at large. These cracks in the wall of masculine authority are attested by the author of Le Ménagier de Paris, who lectures his wife on the scandalous behavior of women who dare to disgrace their husbands by talking back in front of others: Jasoit ce qu’ilz sont aucunes femmes qui pardessus la raison et sens de leurs maris veulent gloser et esplucher; et encores pour faire les sages et les maistresses font elles plus en devant les gens que autrement, qui est le pis. Car jasoit ce que ne vueille mie dire qu’elles ne doivent tout savoir et que leurs mariz ne leur doivent tout dire, toutesvoies ce doit estre dit et fait apart, et doit venir du vouloir et de la courtoisie du mary, non mie de l’auctorité, maistrise et seignourie de la femme qui le doit par maniere de dominacion interroguer devant la gent; car devant la gent, pour monstrer son obeissance et pour son honneur garder, n’en doit elle sonner mot, pour ce qu’il sembleroit a la gent qui ce orroient que le mary eust acoustumé a rendre compte de ses vouloirs a sa femme. (77) [These days there are some women who try to altercate and split hairs beyond the reason and understanding of their husbands; and what is more, in order to pass themselves off as wise women and bosses of the house, they do this more often in front of people rather than in some other way, which is the worst. For although this doesn’t 44. Opitz, “Life in the Late Middle Ages,” 276.

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mean that they shouldn’t know anything or that their husbands shouldn’t tell them anything, nonetheless, this must be said and done in private, and must come from the wish and courtesy of the husband, and not in any way from the authority, bossiness, or dominion of the wife who, to show her domination, interrogates him in front of people; rather, in order to show her obedience and to guard her honor, in front of people, she should not speak a word, because it would seem to people who heard this that the husband was accustomed to accounting for his wishes to his wife.] Although the elderly Parisian had first counseled his wife not to speak at all, he now urges her, if nothing else, to be discreet, suggesting that a husband’s principal concern is to bolster his image as patriarch before the eyes of the world. His concern is echoed by the Knight of La Tour Landry, who, in his conduct book to his daughters, warned them that although a wife might gently point out her husband’s error, she must not openly argue with him, right or wrong, especially not in front of people (“estriver a` son seigneur, soit droit, soit tort, et par especial devant les gens”).45 Similarly, in both farces the men worry not just that their wives will get the upper hand but that people outside the household will find out. For example, the husband in Porte Bodès explains why his wife must close the door and not he: Pas n’apartient Qu’ung homme s’abesse a` sa femme. On me reputeroit infame Devant Dieu et devant le monde! Vas le fermer! (vv. 75– 79) [It is not the place of a man to lower himself before his wife. People would consider me dishonorable before God and the whole world. Go close it!] While reiterating clichés about a man’s authority over his wife, the husband demonstrates considerable concern for public opinion. The husband in L’Obstination des femmes similarly worries that “Les gens me tiendront 45. Le Livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry, 41.


pour beste, / Ce n’estoye maistre a` ma maison” [People would consider me stupid if I weren’t master in my house, vv. 165– 66]. The husband in Porte Bodès is so concerned about what people will think that he asks his wife to pretend he is beating her, although it is in fact she who is beating him: Je me rends, Par ma foy et mercys vous crie, Mais d’une chose je vous prie Pour garder l’onneur de nous deux Que cries ung cry treshideux Et les voisins qui vous orront Si hault crier, ilz cuideront Que je vous bate, entendez-vous? Mais quoy, j’endureray les coups Paciamment, soit droit ou tort. (vv. 105– 14) [I submit, by my faith, I cry mercy to you. But I beg of you one thing. In order that we both keep our honor, let out a very hideous cry and the neighbors who hear you will think that I am beating you, okay? In actuality, I will endure your blows patiently, whether it be right or wrong.] The husband’s willingness to endure his wife’s beating, whether right or wrong (“soit droit ou tort”) echoes the knight’s command to his daughters (“soit droit, soit tort”); but here the husband requests not obedience, but a performance directed at an audience outside the household itself. The husband’s concern over what the neighbors will think brings us back to the important issue of the conservatism of the farce, for both spouses need to defend their reputation by putting on a show for the outside world in which ritualized violence of husband against wife proves that they are a normal couple. Yet in the face of clichés about absolute authority, this farce stages the possibility that woman can be mistress of the house as long as no one realizes that this is the case. The private power exercised by the wife is authorized as long as it does not slip through the cracks of the household into the public arena. By asking his wife to stage her submission, the husband effectively brings attention to his own authority as a performance

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that requires his wife’s participation. That the wife willingly goes along with this charade of husbandly authority suggests the usefulness of this performance for herself.46

Women’s Work and Women’s Worth It is significant that quarrels over conjugal authority were staged in the domestic sphere, where the running of the household is the woman’s domain. In fact one way that a woman was expected to demonstrate her obedience to her husband was in her diligent attention to housework. This point is neatly illustrated in the farce where wives, upon receiving “diplomas” in being mistress of the household, refuse to do the housework, and in the farce where a husband brags that he has complete control over his wife who “is so ready to do her housework, she knows everything it is her duty to do.”47 The end of Porte Bodès, too, neatly fuses concerns with obedience and housework. When the wife pleads her case before the judge, she claims that not only do women have the right to chastise and beat their husbands; they can also make them do housework: Nous les debvons tout a` nostre aise Chastier et bastre tresbien Et oultre plus, s’il y a rien A besongner en la maison, Selon nostre droit et raison. L’homme est tenu de faire tout Et s’il en veulx venir a` bout, Il n’y doit jamaiz contredire Ne nulle chose nous mesdire, Mais l’acomplir tresvoulentiers, Velà les estatus entiers Que les femmes doivent avoir. (vv. 308– 19) 46. Another example of a farce where men’s primary concern appears to be with public opinion is at the end of Les deux maris et leurs deux femmes, discussed earlier in this chapter, where the conclusion is that it is better to have an unfaithful wife than a bossy wife as long as she gives her backside secretly (“secretement”) (T 1:627– 31). 47. Farce des femmes qui se font passer Maistresses (RC 16, 388– 89) and Farce nouvelle de l’ordre de mariage et de prebstrise treshonneste et joyeuse (RC 31, 40– 41).


[We have the right to chastise them and beat them as we please. On top of it, if there is anything that needs to be done in the house, according to our right and privilege, the man is required to do everything. And if he wants to come out all right, he mustn’t ever contradict anything nor say anything bad about us, but rather accomplish it very willingly. Those are the entire statutes to which women are entitled.] That she claims both that women have a “natural” right to rule over husbands and that it is men’s responsibility to tend to the house, suggests that these are a logical pairing. In medieval culture, images of men doing housework signified emasculation and always served satirical aims.48 The wife’s appeal to laws stipulating that men must do housework is a specific manifestation of the world upside down, resulting in laughter because the audience knows that, on the contrary, women are to be subject to their husbands. When the wife produces these imaginary laws, the judge is indeed amazed, finding it unlikely any (male) official in late medieval Paris would ever conceive of such legislation: “Qui est le hault Provincial / Qui a esté si liberal / De vous donner telle franchise” [Who is this high provincial official who was so liberal as to give you such license? vv. 326– 28]. But the judge is faced with written evidence, and so he is forced to find in favor of the wife. The husband, although having won the silence wager, is now defeated because of the imaginary laws that substitute for Rey-Flaud’s ruse. Although the trick results in the husband’s defeat, men can laugh at women’s victory precisely because such imaginary laws pose no threat to the status quo.49 At the same time, the farces reminded men and women in the audience all that women did to maintain the household. When the judge reads the 48. A specific example of the emasculation of men through women’s work are the images in the margins of medieval manuscripts in which cuckolded men are represented as carrying distaffs. See Camille, The Gothic Idol, 301– 2. 49. Another example of an imaginary female law may be found in the Farce des femmes qui se font passer maistresses (RC 16). A papal bull grants women the right to rule over their husbands since they have spent so many years in the study of ruling their husbands that they should be allowed to graduate. Once again, women’s power revolves around their tongues because, as the women claim, “Certes nous s¸cavons bien parler / En toutes les Facultés” [Certainly, we know how to talk well in all of the Faculties, 104– 5]. Konrad Schœll views this farce as an example of “feminist” farces that could be seen as advocating women’s equal access to education (“Des farces féministes?” 180– 85).

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long list of all the things men are now required to do, we are reminded, on the contrary, of the reality for women: Je treuve en escript cy devant Que l’homme doit estre servant De sa femme en toutes manières Pour escurer poilles, chaudières, Faires lis, houser la maison Et s’il fault que toute saison Il soit levé tout le premier Et qu’il se couche le dernier Et qu’il destaigne la chandelle Et de ce ne soit point rebelle, Les escuelles aussi laver Et si ne doit jamais baver De chose que face sa femme Ou on le tiendra pour infâme. La farine luy fault sasser Et si luy convient sans cesser Filler et faire la lessive Sans que jamais il en estrive, Aller au moulin et au four Et puis quant viendra ou retour, S’il n’a tresbien fait la besongne, Il doit avoir de la quenoulle Deux ou trois coups sans contredire. (vv. 336– 58, emphasis added) [I find here in writing before me that the man must be a servant to his wife in every way—to scour frying pans and pots, to make beds, to sweep the house. And at all times of the year he must get up first and go to bed last and he must put out the candle and not be rebellious about this. He must also wash the bowls and he must never malign a thing that his wife does, or he will be considered despicable. He must sift the flour and he must without cease do the spinning and do the wash. Without ever complaining, he must go to the mill and to the oven, and when he comes back, if he hasn’t done his work well, he must have two or three blows from the distaff without contradicting. (Emphasis added)]


In specifying several times that men must not resist these laws, this passage of course makes clear that men would find the performance of such tasks unthinkable, but for women in the audience, it is also an acknowledgment of the work of which they are in charge. Through their point-by-point inversion of patriarchal law, the imaginary laws might furthermore have served to articulate women’s frustration in not having their work valued. Indeed, a current running through many conjugal farces is that husbands fail to appreciate the contribution of their wives’ labor to the household. The wife in Porte Bodès explicitly argues that her work is equally as important as her husband’s, which is why he should shut the door and not she: Escoutés, J’ay bien autre besongne a` faire, Mais vous, c’est vostre droit affaire. ............................ Et j’ay a` filer ma quenouille, Qui me touche bien d’aussi près Que vostre ouvrage. (vv. 35– 37, vv. 45– 47) [Listen, I have other work to do. But you, it’s rightly your business (to close the door). And I have to do my spinning, which concerns me as closely as your work (concerns you)]. The wife’s complaint to her husband that he undervalues her work compared to his own focuses on a new angle in the quarrel between the sexes. She accepts her place within the social fabric (the domestic sphere) but challenges the poor value that it is accorded by men. Women’s work is as important and as deserving of respect as men’s work, she seems to say. Moreover, both farce wives implicitly challenge the notion that there even exists such a thing as men’s work, since the men do nothing but sing and drink, and it is the wives’ attention to the practicalities of everyday life that ensures the couple’s survival. The husbands, however, show little appreciation for their wives’ practical bent. Whereas the wife of Chaudronnier shows concern with the daily bread that must be put on the table, the singing husband views his wife as a “wet blanket” trying to spoil his fun. To her complaints, he responds, “Ne vault-il point mieulx de chanter /

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Que d’engendrer melencolye?” [Isn’t it better to sing than to bring about melancholy? vv. 10– 11]. The wife retorts, “Il se vauldroit mieulx consoler / A robobeliner voz soulliers / Que de penser a` leur follye” [It would be better to console yourself with fixing your shoes than to indulge in such foolishness, vv. 12– 14].50 This scene of domestic tension, which opens the farce, serves to highlight the conflict between the working woman and the lazy, singing husband, and although there are no stage directions indicating it, we can imagine the actor playing the wife engaged in some household task as the play opens. The husband in Porte Bodès also complains about his wife’s lack of good humor, explaining that even though he would like a drink, he must return home to his wife, who will complain about his bit of fun: Il me fault estre diligens, Devers mon hostel me retraire, Il me semble que j’os jà braire Ma femme et en suis bien loing, Dieu s¸cait comme j’auray du groing, Mais que venir elle me voye, Elle dira: “Bien froide joye Puissiés-vous avoir des genoux!” Et je diray; “Saint Jehan, mais vous!” Mais ce sera tout bellement Qu’elle ne m’oye, car vrayment, Se une foiz m’avoit ouy, Mieulx me vauldroit estre enfouy, Elle est si malle que c’est raige. (vv. 11– 24) [I have to be diligent and go back home. It seems to me I already hear my wife braying, and I’m quite far away. God knows how I’ll have a scolding. As soon as she sees me coming she’ll say, “May you have an entirely cold joy in your knees!” And I’ll say, “St. John, the same to you!” But it will be just as well that she not hear me, for in truth, once she has heard me, it would better for me to flee. Her bad behavior is outrageous.] 50. Tissier notes the difficulty of translating the phrase “penser a` leur folie” and wonders whether it might simply mean “dire des choses peu sensées,” which I have loosely translated as “indulge in such foolishness.”


Both wives are thus viewed by their husbands as enemies of good fun. The first wife cannot tolerate her husband’s singing, while the second cannot bear her husband’s drinking. The nagging of these women is a common characteristic of the farce wife who is of “mauvaise humeur.”51 But whereas the farce husband appears to fault his wife for her bad humor—not unlike the typical charges of men who have accused women of having no sense of humor—some spectators viewing the conjugal quarrel might well have recognized the validity of such complaints. That some women could understand the complaints of the farce wives is suggested by Natalie Davis’s study of letters of remission, the letters one could write in order to receive pardon for a capital offense. These letters show that women would sometimes claim to have killed their husbands because their husbands were dissipating the goods of the household. One woman, Jeanne Regnart, complained that the troubles in her marriage started when her husband began drinking, making bad business transactions, and dissipating the goods and property of the household, particularly those she had brought to the marriage. Recounting her story, she says the fight started one night when he came home drunk from the tavern and she rebuked him for his ridiculous business transactions (“ses sotz marchez”).52 That women would cite their husband’s squandering of household resources to defend themselves in a court of law suggests that women in the audience of farces may have responded to the fictional representation of these complaints with sympathy. The list of household chores in the Cuvier that the husband must perform under his wife’s command, while a farcical joke for the men in the audience, may have 51. Rey-Flaud, La Farce ou la machine a` rire, 246. Other examples of men who see their practical wives as killjoys are in L’Obstination des femmes, where the husband complains he has to go to work in order to avoid her loud speech “haut langaige” (T 6:13– 14); Celuy qui se confesse a` sa Voisine (RC 2); Farce des femmes qui se font passer maistresses (RC 16); Les deux maris et leurs deux femmes (T 1); Savetier Calbain (T 3); and Colin qui loue et dépite Dieu (T 1). A good example of a lazy husband is to be found in Farce des botines gaultier (RC 9, ll. 422– 28). On the tradition of the woman as killjoy as it relates to men’s fear of domestication, see Levin, Playboys and Killjoys, especially 101. 52. Davis, Fiction in the Archives, 94. Christine de Pizan also notes the problem of men of the artisan class (especially in Paris) who spend all their money at the tavern rather than at home. Christine then puts the burden on wives to keep their husbands attracted to them so that they will stay at home, reminding them, “Common wisdom has it that three things drive a man from his home: a quarrelsome wife, a smoking hearth, and a leaking roof ” (Treasury, 210), an argument echoed in Le Ménagier de Paris, 99– 100. A widow also worries that in remarrying, her husband might squander all her goods (Farce joyeuse a` iii personnaiges, in Philipot, Six Farces Normandes, 163– 86, ll. 120– 23).

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represented for many women in the audience an embodiment of a housewife’s dream. Like the imaginary edicts of the Bodès door, the list evokes a possibility, one that may have served as a focal point for discussion and joking between women. The motif of women’s work and its potential to engender laughter in female audiences occurs in other literary texts. For example, in “The Wright’s Chaste Wife” (in a manuscript of about 1462), a woman outwits the three men who have taken advantage of her husband’s absence to woo her, forcing them to do her housework as punishment. Barbara Hanawalt comments, “The wife has humiliated the suitors by forcing them into female roles. The humor of such role reversal was, no doubt, more amusing to a female audience than to a male one, and suggests that women were the weavers of the tale. Males might well have felt the punishment was too threatening.” Hanawalt may be underestimating the pleasures of such a tale to men, who likely appreciated the inversion because they believed themselves smarter than the foolish (and adulterous) men who fell into the wife’s trap, but she is certainly right to note the pleasures it offered to female readers.53 Similarly, in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, a servant thwarts her master’s advances by making him dress in her clothes and perform her task of sifting grain. The master’s wife, upon discovering him thus caught, laughs, claps her hands, and asks, “How much per month are you asking for your work, wench?”54 Attention to women’s work is also dramatized in one of the notoriously humorous scenes of the English Corpus Christi cycle in which Noah’s wife berates her husband for his absence, remarking that she does all the work because they have little food and drink while he does nothing but amuse himself. Although the scolding tongue of Noah’s wife, as well as her refusal to board the ark, are meant to indicate her failure to understand God’s greater plan, and are humorous because they highlight the inappropriateness of domestic concerns in this context, her specific charges of husbandly neglect were likely to have resonated with women who were similarly frustrated with their husbands’ drinking, singing, and domestic bungling.55 From the perspective of women in the audience, the social 53. Hanawalt, Of Good and Ill Repute, 98. 54. “Goujate! combien veux-tu par mois de ton labeur?” (Heptaméron, 465). See Polacheck, “Save the Last Laugh for Me,” 155– 70. 55. Mary Wack, in “Women, Work, and Plays in an English Medieval Town,” 46, suggests that the Noah play had a specific meaning for women in sixteenth-century Chester.


issues that were dramatized concerned not so much obedience, but rather establishing and maintaining a household in which all members contributed to the common good. If women are to do the housework, then men should uphold their end of the bargain: providing for the household. It should be added that although medieval men believed that a woman’s place was in the home, preachers such as Gilbert of Tournai emphasized that the work of husband and wife, although different, were complementary, and that a wife’s labor in the home was equal in value to her husband’s work outside of the home.56 What the farces demonstrate, however, is that despite sermons on marital cooperation, woman’s work was not generally accorded equal value to man’s work. This question of the maintenance of the household goes beyond the domestic chores we today call housework, for married women in the towns of northern Europe often worked in trades alongside their husbands or by themselves after their husband’s death; this sort of work was also literally housework since most crafts in the Middle Ages were performed at home. Although the guild system generally excluded women from many of the political and economic benefits enjoyed by men, the work they performed was crucial to the livelihood of the family, and in given regions and time periods women even dominated some trades such as clothmaking (the trade of the Wife of Bath) and ale brewing.57 Women in towns and villages were clearly doing more than the dishes; their work contributed in a vital way to the growth and prosperity of Europe in the later Middle Ages. They had seen their female communities weakened in the face of laws restricting childbed and churching ceremonies and their economic participation greatly restricted in laws against women tapsters. The drinking of Noah’s wife and her gossips, while meant to justify such legislation, also “publicly recognizes the value to women both of community among themselves and of a secure place within the social body,” 46. See Laura Hodges’s reading of the social context for spectators in Wakefield (“Noe’s Wife”). Joseph Ricke discusses the carnivalesque meaning of Noah’s wife more generally in “Parody, Performance, and the ‘Ultimate’ Meaning of Noah’s Shrew.” See also Viviana Comensoli’s discussion of the persistence of the motif of the squandering husband into the early modern period in England. One particular conduct manual for families (1633) “denounced the growing number of husbands who wasted their earnings ‘in whoring, idleness, drunkenness, [and] gaming,’ leaving the support of the household entirely to their wives” (Household Business, 21). 56. On sermons praising wives’ equal contribution to the household, see Vecchio, “The Good Wife,” 125– 26. See also Collingwood, Market Pledge and Gender Bargain, 157; and Schnell, “Discourse on Marriage,” 781– 82, who argue that the Cuvier, like many medieval treatises on marriage, emphasizes the importance of compromise and equality. 57. For a detailed discussion of women’s participation in guilds as wives, widows, or single journeywomen, see Kowaleski and Bennett, “Crafts, Gilds, and Women in the Middle Ages,” particularly 16– 17, and 24.

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Yet it is striking that the representation of women’s work in the farce corpus rarely extended to the income-generating activities in which we know women participated. Given this discrepancy, it may be that the farce performed ideological work in addition to reasserting traditional power relations between spouses. Scholars have remarked that men’s anxiety about women’s active participation in the economic and civic life of towns and the erosion of male power it threatened led to a backlash in which women’s economic and civic participation was curtailed.58 Perhaps farces served to displace anxiety over women’s participation in the urban economy onto the battle over who would control the household. With their emphasis on who wears the pants in the house, the farces could thus be said symbolically to confine women to the household by focusing the comedy on the battle over housework, suggesting that the threat posed by women was really only domestic after all; men need not be concerned that women’s participation in urban work would shift the balance of economic power away from men.59

On the Way to the Tavern At the end of Le Chaudronnier, the actor playing the husband concludes by announcing that women have won and inviting the spectators to drink to the wager, and it is intriguing to ponder what men and women might have been saying to each other on the way to the tavern. But first some attention should be given to the ways in which many farce endings do attempt 58. Claudia Opitz notes that the backlash against women’s economic importance within the artisan class was clearly visible in the increasing restriction of women’s participation in guilds beginning with the fifteenth century (“Life in the Late Middle Ages,” 303). Kowaleski and Bennett, “Crafts, Gilds, and Women,” 23, note that when men in London took over the silkwork craft from women in the sixteenth century, one of their first moves was to form a guild and prohibit hiring women as apprentices. P. J. P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy, discusses the rising demand for labor in the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries in Yorkshire, causing more women to enter the labor force and defer marriage. See also Felicity Riddy’s argument that the good-wife treatises of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England were designed in part to keep bourgeois women at home and not in the streets selling cloth as “hucksters” where their independence became threatening to men (“Mother Knows Best”). On the threat of single women working in medieval German cities and their evasion of male supervision, see Rasmussen, Mothers and Daughters, 201– 8. 59. Wilson and Makowski, in Wykked Wyves and the Woes of Marriage, 7, note that overt criticism of women and marriage tends to surface in periods when there are real or imagined improvements in women’s status.


to announce or impose a specific ideology, particularly in the traditional envoi, in which the actors sum up the message of the play and ask their audiences to judge their performance favorably. At the end of Le Savetier qui ne respont que chansons, the actor comments on vain and greedy women and advises the beleaguered husbands of such women in the audience that just like the singing cobbler of the play, they too should just start singing when their wives ask for rings or dresses, for eventually their wives will just give up (RC 37). Other farces are more direct in making the women in the audience a final butt of their humor. At the end of Les femmes qui font rembourer leurs bas, in which women use the metaphor of stuffing saddles to ask two men to give them sex, the actor seems to enjoy his complicity with his fellow men (“Seigneurs”), noting that they have seen how the women of this city (“les femmes de ceste ville”) get their saddles stuffed (RC 36). This envoi privileges its male spectators by addressing them and also targets the women of the city, making them the focus of the sexual humor. Whether or not women in the audience would have laughed at or been offended by the suggestion that they were looking to have their saddles stuffed, the ending clearly brings their own sexuality into the light and puts them in the position of comic object.60 Farces that conclude with an antifeminist cliché generally have the husband deliver the moral, so that the man literally gets the last word. In a number of farces, however, the female character delivers the moral instead of the man or delivers an additional moral different from the one he gives, one that embodies feminine unruliness.61 The actors thus often deliver their morals in character, and not surprisingly, the moral varies according 60. A curious example of sexual address to female spectators is Frère Guillebert, where early in the play the male actor declares, “Entendez-vous bien, mes fillettes, / S’on s’encroue sur voz mamelettes / Et qu’on vous chatouille le bas, / N’en sonnez mot: ce sont esbatz, / Et n’en dictes rien a` vos mères” [Listen well, little girls. If someone takes hold of your little breasts and tickles you “down there,” don’t say a word: it’s just a bit of fun. And don’t say anything to your mothers, T 6, vv. 15– 19]. As Tissier notes, the farce seems to have been a performance for a school group, from which women were excluded. The address is thus to an imagined, or fictive, female audience, which one can only speculate served to heighten the men’s enjoyment of the bawdy humor of the play. 61. In Farce des Femmes qui font accroire a` leurs maris de vecies que ce sont lanternes (RC 15) the second wife boasts of women’s ability to deceive men. In Farce des femmes qui se font passer maistresses (RC 16), Alison and her friend advise women in the audience to “plant” their dried-out husbands in the ground so that they will regain their verdure. At the end of Farce de Resjouy d’Amours qui révèle son secret (RC 18), Tendrette boasts of her cleverness, as does Sadinette at the end of Farce du Dorellot (RC 24).

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to the (performed) gender of the speaker. That the plays get interpreted differently according to which character gets the last word further suggests an expectation that men and women in the audience might react differently to the spectacle they have just witnessed. One play that could be said to testify to anxiety about this interpretative ambiguity is Le Pont aux anes, in which a henpecked husband finds out that the best way to tame his disobedient wife is to beat her as he would his donkey, an anecdote also found in the Decameron (Day IX, Tale 9). The actor with the husband’s role proclaims to “seigneurs, et près et loing” that the play has demonstrated the dictum that “necessity makes the old lady trot” [Besoing fait la vielle trotter, T 6]. The actor playing the wife confirms the same moral— understood to be that a beating is necessary to tame the unruly wife—but addresses this moral specifically to the “nobles dames.” It is as though female spectators are being explicitly told not to misunderstand what they have seen, as if the ending of the farce, where the wife is “tamed” were not enough in itself.62 The endings of the farces I have discussed above show that those producing the dramas were aware of differing audience responses to their spectacles and at times tried to control responses that might be at odds with the desired message. Le Chaudronnier and Porte Bodès, however, are less clear about what audiences are to make of the women’s winning the wager. The husband in Porte Bodès, although he gets the last word, makes no moralizing speech, rather admitting his foolishness to the dear ladies in the audience. In Le Chaudronnier, the husband takes his defeat with good humor; when his wife points out that it would have been stupid for her to speak and thereby lose the bet, he simply responds, “Il est vray. Allons boire” [That’s true. Let’s go drink, v. 175]. The spouses are finally in agreement, for the wife simply interjects, “Dame! voire,” which we could translate loosely as “You can say that again!” The husband then invites the whole audience to go to the tavern and make merry (“jouer de la machouere”) and have a drink. As Tissier notes, everything ends up “dans la bonne humeur, autour de ‘deux potz de vin’” [in a good natured way over ‘two pots of wine,’ 91]. Although messages about the natural order of domestic relations may well have been implicit, the endings of these and other farces certainly 62. A similar division according to gender is found in the envoi of Colin qui loue et dépite Dieu (T 1), where the woman addresses the moral to “bonnes dames” and the man addresses it to “messeigneurs.”


leave open room for other reactions from medieval audiences.63 It has rarely been asked what women in particular might have made of the unruly farce wife since it is commonly assumed that such spectacles offered pleasures only to men.64 Of course, both husbands and wives were caricatures in the farce, exaggerations of the failings attributed to their sex and class roles, and so perhaps audience identification is a concept ill-suited to the genre. But we can imagine that after such performances women did go off to the tavern to exchange complaints or jokes about their own husbands who did not contribute enough to the welfare of the household. Medieval French townswomen did in fact go to taverns, some of which were even run by women. In Le Brigand, le vilain, le sergent, two wives share a drink together in a private room in a tavern and are served by a female tavernière.65 Significantly, the two women are celebrating the misfortune of the one woman’s husband (he has broken his arm), for he will no longer be able to beat her. The tavern, although coded negatively as a locus of sin throughout medieval literature, is here represented as a place in which women can share common bonds. Whether or not women shared jokes with each other in taverns after performances of these farces is of course a matter of speculation, but remembering Dunbar’s three wives privately joking about their husbands over a few cups of wine, we can similarly imagine how the mythical laws of the Bodès door could have become an inside joke between medieval women spectators, perhaps even serving as a kind of counternarrative to Le Cuvier, women joking with each other about how they would like to throw their husbands in the washtub and give them a list of household chores to 63. See similar arguments by Claire Sponsler (“The Culture of the Spectator”), who argues that views of medieval theater performances as mechanisms for fostering collective identity and communal feeling in urban settings are simplistic and that performances were just as likely to sow discord among competing interests in the audience; and Clark, “Community versus Subject in Late Medieval French Confraternity Drama and Ritual.” 64. Bowen, Caractéristiques essentielles, 29– 30, wonders whether women could possibly have laughed at farces since to her their humor is by men for men, but since they were performed in public settings that included female audiences, speculates that perhaps female spectators did not recognize themselves in the character of the farce wife. 65. This farce is contained within the morality play, La Vie S. Fiacre (Fournier IV). See also the female tavern owner in the Farce d’un pardonneur, d’un triacleur, et d’une tavernière (T 5) and the fabliau “Les trois dames de Paris” in Montaiglon and Raynaud, Recueil général, 3:145– 56. On women going to taverns, see Shahar, The Fourth Estate, 213. See also Alan Hindley’s discussion of some farces being performed in taverns at the end of the fifteenth century: “L’Escole au deable,” 469. On the tavern as a popular site for gossips in the British tradition, see Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate, 94.

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do.66 Furthermore, given that many tasks typically performed by women were carried out among other women—going to the oven and the mill and doing the wash—we can imagine women who had seen these farces laughing about these domestic themes precisely in that sphere of women’s work staged by the farces.67 Like Ulrich’s lady and the Wife of Bath, the wives in Le Chaudronnier and Porte Bodès bring attention to the impossible bind in which medieval discourse places women. Rather than critique its logic, however, they do whatever they must to win, playing that game as strategically as the Wife of Bath. Whether the women choose to speak or to remain silent, each does so in order to win—to keep the upper hand within the household but also to win recognition for the work she contributes to the household. While both plays can be seen to demonstrate the folly of a husband who forgets his place, they also in some measure justify female unruliness, for the issue at stake is not simply that husbands allow their wives to dominate them, but that some men are too foolish, lazy, or irresponsible to be master of the house. While many men in the audience could undoubtedly laugh, confident that they were more capable than the poor husband on stage, women with their own wit and sense of humor may have turned the dramatic performance into a comic performance of their own, telling jokes to each other at the well, at the public oven, or on the way to the tavern.

66. In fact, a later revision of the Cuvier story shows a woman using the same trick of the list to teach her unreasonable husband a lesson. In a collection of comic German tales of 1522 is a story about a tyrannical husband who can find nothing good in his wife, despite her patient efforts. She finally has the clever idea to have her husband make up a list of all the things she must do. When the husband falls into a stream one day, she of course observes that pulling him out of streams is not one of the tasks on his list. He tells his wife, “Do what you think is right,” and they live harmoniously together thereafter. See the discussion by Schnell, “Discourse on Marriage,” 781. See also a similar inversion in a Dutch jestbook discussed by Verberckmoes, Laughter, Jestbooks, and Society, 161. 67. A woodcut of about 1560, the Caquet des Femmes (Gossiping of women) depicts the many activities that brought women out of the house into the market. Some are doing wash, some have brought their bread to the oven, some are fetching water from a fountain, and some are bathing in a bathhouse. The title of the woodcut of course suggests the opportunity for frivolous gossip or bickering that contact with other women could allow.

6

“No, this is not its name” Anatomy of the Joke Women Teach Men in the Thousand and One Nights

Then she washed herself under the belly, around the breasts, and between the thighs. Then she rushed out, threw herself in the porter’s lap, and asked, “My little lord, what is this?” “Your vulva,” said he, and she gave him a blow with which the hall resounded, saying, “Fie, you have no shame.” “Your womb,” said he, and her sister hit him, saying, “Fie, what an ugly word!” “Your clitoris,” said he, and the other sister boxed him, saying “Fie, fie, you are shameless.” They kept at it, this one boxing him, that one slapping him, another hitting him, another jabbing him, repeating, “No, no,” while he kept shouting, “your womb, your cunt, your pussy.” Finally he cried, “The basil of the bridges,” and all three burst out laughing till they fell on their backs. But again all three slapped him on the neck and said, “No, this is not its name.” (73–74)1

1. For the Arabic text, please see appendix B. The Arabic edition of the Nights used is Muhsin Mahdi’s, the edition Husain Haddawy uses for his English translation, which I use here. Transliterations of Mahdi’s Arabic text throughout this chapter are my own. For an explanation of the system used, consult appendix A. I thank Professor Julio Cortés for his invaluable assistance in transliterations. In cases where the text is not cited directly, page numbers will be given, Arabic first. For ease of reading, I omit diacriticals from proper names in the Nights.

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n this scene from the Thousand and One Nights, an exchange between three sisters from Baghdad and the poet they have hired, laughter is literally focused on the woman’s body, but it is the words to describe female anatomy more than the body itself that take center stage. As in the Decameron, the scene interrogates the relationship between sexual language and humor, but more than feminine modesty, it is masculine knowledge, the porter’s inability to get the name right, that is at issue. In the “Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies,” three wealthy sisters in Baghdad during the reign of the caliph Harun al-Rashid (reigned 786– 809) invite the porter they have hired for the day to join them in merrymaking. After they have eaten many delicacies and drunk much wine, one by one, each sister removes her clothing, plunges into a pool, emerges, and sits on the porter’s lap. Each sister then points to her sexual parts and asks the porter, “What is this?” When the first sister asks him to name her parts, she and her sisters scold, slap, and hit him as each answer he gives is judged incorrect: “your womb,” “your vulva,” “your clitoris” (rah·imuki, farjuki, zanburuki). She reveals the correct name: “the basil of the bridges” (alh·abaqu al-jusu ¯r). The second sister poses the same question, again punishing the porter for the anatomical terms he proposes. Finally he cries out, “The basil of the bridges,” using the term he had learned for the first sister’s anatomy. All three sisters laugh so hard they fall on their backs. He is slapped some more and informed that the correct name is “the husked sesame” (al-simsim al-maqshu ¯r). When the third sister asks the same question, he tries both “basil of the bridges” and “the husked sesame,” but after receiving numerous blows and pinches, he is finally told that the name is “the inn of Abu Masrur” (kha¯ni abu ¯ masru ¯r).2 The porter then decides to play their game, and after he, too, has made them try to name his anatomy correctly, tells them the nickname he has invented, to which the sisters respond with gales of laughter. This scene raises several new questions about the relationship between women and laughter in medieval texts. What knowledge or pleasure do 2. The three metaphors have sexual connotations. Basil was considered an aphrodisiac, and beautiful women in the Nights are sometimes compared to a “stalk of sweet basil.” I have not, however, found an explanation for the “bridges.” Sesame was a valuable commodity as well as a symbol of fertility. The inn surely refers to the vagina, and masru ¯r means “happiness.” Abu Masrur could refer to several possible historial figures. The caliph’s eunuch is also called Masrur, although there is no evident connection between the two in the story.

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men gain from jokes women tell? What happens when the outsider who is the butt of the joke himself becomes the one making the joke? How does laughter about male and female genitalia relate to attitudes toward sexuality? How does the presence of the female narrator, Shahrazad, whose own story frames that of the three sisters, shape the response of the men and women who read or heard this tale? In what way do the particularities of medieval Arabo-Islamic culture shape the represenation of women’s laughter differently from that in medieval European culture, and what might we learn about laughter in medieval Europe in turn? It should first be noted that despite their cultural differences, the European and Arab worlds shared significant intellectual and literary traditions. Arab medicine and philosophy drew from the Greeks, and Aristotle, the first Western theorist of laughter, was to become known as “The Philosopher” in the Arab world; indeed, some of the misogyny in Arabic discourse is his legacy. The thirteenth-century essayist al-Jawbar¯ı, for example, in his essay on female ruse and trickery, cites Aristotle.3 Furthermore, Islam incorporated many stories and practices from the Judeo-Christian tradition, including some of its misogyny.4 Finally, the influence of Arabic literature on European literature is well documented, although debates about the extent of this influence continue.5 The anonymous tales of the Nights themselves had considerable influence on the European narrative of the Middle Ages after being brought to Spain through Petrus Alfonsi’s twelfth-century Latin collection, the Disciplina clericalis. A French fabliau may in fact be inspired by the “Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies.”6 3. Al-Jawbar¯ı, Le Voile arraché, 242. 4. Robert Irwin, in The Arabian Nights, 76, notes the futility of trying to locate the misogyny within certain tales of the Nights as Arabic in origin: “As a frame story, in various later and distorted forms, it was much imitated in Persian literature and then in Arab literature, so that the misogyny of the Pythagoreans came to mingle with that of the ancient Buddhists and Hindus in the Arabian tales of the Nights.” On the shared heritage of misogyny in the various cultures of the Mediterranean, see Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 25– 37. 5. Maria Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, has documented the influence of Arabic literature on medieval European literature ranging from troubadour poetry to Dante and Boccaccio. See also Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England. 6. In the fabliau, “Des .III. Chanoinesses,” three women invite the male poet (not a porter) to their residence, where they bathe, drink wine, and eat sumptuous delicacies. They ask the poet to tell them stories that will make them laugh (Montaiglon and Raynaud, Recueil général, 3:137– 44). A miniature preceding the fabliau in the manuscript (fol. 84vo of the Arsenal manuscript) shows the three canonesses naked in three bathtubs on a curtained platform. The poet is sitting, holding a cup and a bone from a fowl or ham. Like the three

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There are also many examples of possible Greek and Roman prototypes for stories in the Nights, so that European stories and Arab stories may resemble each other because they share a common source.7 These shared traditions are significant and explain why Arabic and European literature take up many of the same antifeminist themes. It might also be added that Arabists, like scholars of the European Middle Ages, have begun to examine the ways in which women in the medieval Arab world may have wielded more influence in public life than negative pronouncements on women might suggest.8 A significant difference between the discourses on women in the two cultures is worth noting. Whereas Christian clerical writing on women, which informed even the primarily secular classics of European literature, debated whether woman was good or evil, to be praised or blamed, and correspondingly whether marriage was to be embraced or scorned, in medieval Islam, it was largely accepted that men would marry.9 There are numerous quips about undesirable wives, or about the difficulty of satisfying multiple wives, but more often texts treat the question not of whether to marry, but how to ensure a wife’s chastity and keep peace in the household. In addition, divorce, although not always sanctioned to the same degree by Islamic texts, was a common practice, and not seen as incompatible with an upright pious life. A troublesome wife, therefore, could be expeditiously removed from a man’s household. Moreover, a Muslim man, particularly one of means, could also take any number of concubines, and the culture of the singing girls, those women whose charms, whether literary, musical, or sexual, could be bought or sold, shapes the representaBaghdad sisters, the three women, as canonesses, live in their own community apart from men, which they use to justify their bawdiness: “Nous n’en poons estre accusées, / Car nous sommes en lieu secré” 191– 92. 7. Irwin discusses Greek and Roman prototypes (The Arabian Nights, 72– 73) and specific examples of stories from the Nights that made their way into Europe from the Middle Ages to the present (92– 102). 8. See the essays in the recent addition to the New Middle Ages series, Women in the Medieval Islamic World, edited by Gavin R. G. Hambly. 9. Bellamy, “Sex and Society in Islamic Popular Literature,” 32. James Bellamy notes that although one can find some arguments for celibacy in earlier periods of Islam, most Islamic jurists are in favor of marriage, particularly since the prophet Muhammad had four wives. Al-Ghaza¯l¯ı, the philosopher/theologian turned Sufi mystic, writes in his Kita¯b ada ¯b alnikah (Book on the etiquette of marriage) (A .D . 1096– 1106) that marriage is fitting for some and abstinence fitting for others (47– 77).


tion of women’s wit and laughter in interesting ways.10 Finally, the seclusion of women in upper-class Arab households, and a generally greater degree of segregation according to gender, were also factors that should be taken into account when considering how the jesting of the three Baghdad ladies might have been understood by Arab readers.

Manuscript Traditions and Audiences for the Nights Assessing audience reception of texts, difficult enough for the European texts I have been considering, is even more difficult in the case of the Thousand and One Nights because of the oral circulation of various cycles and the curious history of manuscript transmission. A version of the Nights existed as early as the ninth century, evidenced by a paper fragment entitled Kita¯b h· ad¯ ıth alf layla (Book of the tale of the thousand nights), which appeared to be the title page of the manuscript. A tenth-century writer later describes the collection, noting that it was a translation of the Persian Hazar Afsaneh (A thousand stories), which contained Persian, Greek, and Indian tales. The stories gradually developed other cultural layers—the Iraqi layer, best illustrated in the cycles of stories in Mahdi’s edition, and an Egyptian layer. The result, the Alf Layla wa-layla, is a collection of stories of diverse cultural origin that were Arabized and Islamicized. The popularity of the collection was so immense upon its introduction into Europe that scores of Europeans went in quest of “complete and authentic” versions that would contain the full one thousand and one nights (Galland’s Syrian manuscript—probably fourteenth century—the basis for Mahdi’s edition, contained less than three hundred). This quest led to the incorporation of tales that were not authenticated as part of the original collection of tales and the outright fabrication of tales that editors then included in their new “complete” editions.11 It is thus difficult to ascertain which specific stories men and women in a particular region of 10. The Qura¯n allows Muslim men to have intercourse with “the slaves whom ye have acquired” (Sura 4:3, 4:24). That medieval Arabs found Christian monogamy to be curious is illustrated in an anecdote about a Christian physician to the caliph Mansu ¯ r who was given three slave girls when his wife was reported to be ill. He angrily refused, noting that according to his religion, a man can take only one wife (Burgel, ¨ “Love, Lust, and Longing,” 103). 11. For a thorough account of the manuscript and translation history of the Nights, see Irwin, The Arabian Nights, 9– 62.

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the Arab world at a particular time would have known. Scholars agree that because the stories told in the Nights by and large reflect urban life, they were probably known mostly to urban audiences, both educated and uneducated. Whereas the educated might read to each other in private gatherings, the uneducated were likely to have heard the tales from a storyteller in a public marketplace or in the booths of professional storytellers.12 The oral circulation of the tales over an extensive temporal and geographical range also means that it is difficult to determine the precise authorship of the Nights, sometimes known as “the book without authors.”13 Although the compilers of the tales—such as the hypothetical thirteenth- or fourteenth-century Syrian reconstructed by Mahdi in his edition—were probably men, it is possible that women influenced the shape of some of the tales. Some scholars have in fact suggested that women were the privileged audience of the Nights because in the Arab world fanciful stories (khurafa) like those in the Nights have traditionally been seen as suitable only for women and children, whereas poetry and forms of narrative considered more serious are associated with men, a tradition that persists today in some regions.14 Other scholars, although they agree that women were among the Nights’ audiences, believe that their presence was somewhat problematic. Mahdi claims that women in the courts of Baghdad and Cairo read the Nights, but that this was frowned upon (presumably because of the ribald content of many tales).15 Some scholars argue that the presence of women was particularly problematic in the case of mixed audiences. In twelfthcentury Andalusia, the tales were told in the public marketplace, a source of much concern to a market inspector who warns of the dangers of unaccompanied women entering the booths or homes of storytellers and fortune-tellers.16 Most scholars tend to assume that if women heard the stories, it was in strictly female company. Richard Burton, the nineteenth12. On audience and transmission of the tales, see Irwin, The Arabian Nights, 121; and Pinault, Story-telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights, 13. 13. For example, Gerhardt, The Art of Storytelling, 39; and Irwin, The Arabian Nights, 42– 62. 14. On the traditional distinction between tales told by men and tales told by women as it pertains to the Nights, see Irwin, The Arabian Nights, 118. On the persistence of this tradition in the Arab world today, see El-Shamy, Folktales of Egypt, xliv– xlviii; and Webber (who discusses Tunisia), “Women’s Folk Narratives and Social Change,” 310– 16. 15. Mahdi, introduction to The 1001 Nights, 3:206 n. 87. 16. Irwin, The Arabian Nights, 109.


century translator of the Nights into English, tried to counter any squeamishness among his European readers by noting that sexually explicit scenes such as the one between the porter and the three ladies were no more obscene than certain scenes from Shakespeare and that, in any case, they were not recited before mixed audiences.17 In Burton’s time the Nights were probably not recited publicly in mixed company, for beginning with the sixteenth century, storytelling was eventually removed from the marketplace to coffeehouses, from which women were (and often still are) excluded.18 Although the medieval Arab marketplace may have offered more opportunities for men and women to hear the tales in mixed company, Burton’s conclusion that they were not recited before mixed audiences certainly reflects what we know about the segregated nature of storytelling in much of the Arab world today. In his research on storytelling in Egypt, Hasan El-Shamy found that women generally get their stories from other women in their families, often their mothers, and that husbands often have no knowledge of the stories that women in their family tell.19 Like Dunbar’s fictional portrait of married women joking about sexual matters together, anecdotes about Hubba¯, an older woman expert in such questions as various sexual positions, frequently showed her joking with her daughters and other women, and there is also evidence that in Muhammad’s time, female jesters would entertain women, whereas male jesters would entertain men.20

Great Is Woman’s Cunning: Shahrazad and the Ambivalence of Female Eloquence But morning overtook Shahrazad, and she lapsed into silence. Then Dinarzad said to her sister Shahrazad, “Sister, what a lovely and entertaining story!” Shahrazad replied, “What is this compared with what I shall tell you tomorrow night if the king spares me and lets me 17. Burton, Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, 1:93 n. 2. 18. Irwin, The Arabian Nights, 110. 19. El-Shamy, Folktales of Egypt, 213 and 216. 20. For anecdotes reported about Hubba¯, see Ibn Ab¯ı T·¯ahir, Bala¯gha¯t al-nisa¯ . As Fedwa Malti-Douglas notes, Hubba¯, called the “mother of mankind,” purveys sexual knowledge, especially to women (Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word, 45– 46). On female jesters, see Moreh, Live Theatre and Dramatic Literature in the Medieval Arab World, 65.

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live!” The king said to himself, “By God, I will not have her put to death until I hear the rest of the story. Then I shall do to her what I did to the others.” (135; 74– 75)21 It has become a commonplace among readers of the Nights that Shahrazad’s enless spinning of tales is a survival strategy through which she manages to save her life by proving to the king that her wonderful stories are worthy of his keeping her alive. It is less often acknowledged that Shahrazad is telling stories to save the lives of all unmarried women, not just her own. The communal, rather than individual, nature of her project is made explicit in her statement to her father, the king’s vizier: “I would like you to marry me to King Shahrayar, so that I may either succeed in saving the people or perish and die like the rest” (66; 11). This mission is recalled for readers continuously throughout the Nights as the above passage, with variations, is repeated at the end of each of the thousand and one nights, so that far more than a simple device of linking stories together, Shahrazad serves as a nexus of three intertwining threads concerning the representation of women in the medieval Arab world: eloquence, sexuality, and cunning. While there are few examples of known women in medieval Europe whose witticisms have been recorded, there are, surprisingly, quite a few in the medieval Arab world, although since they come to us primarily from male-authored texts, it is difficult to know how accurately they reflect what the women actually said. On the whole, there seems to have been less hostility toward women’s speech in the Arab world; this may be in part due to the fact that A’isha, Muhammad’s favorite wife, was revered for her knowledge, and the hadiths she transmitted (traditions about the life of Muhammad) were highly valued.22 In addition to her eloquence, A’isha was said to have a sharp wit. When God told Muhammad he could marry as many women as he wished, she is said to have remarked sarcastically, “Allah always responds immediately to your needs.”23 Such sarcastic retorts against 21. For the Arabic text, see appendix B. 22. Opposition to A’isha’s position of power in the Muslim community stemmed far more from political factionalism than hostility to her being a woman, although it is interesting to note that Christian accounts of rumors of A’isha’s alleged adultery emphasize not only her lack of chastity, but Muhammad’s alleged complicity in her affair, thus using the story to discredit Islam as sexually decadent. For a discussion of Western accounts of A’isha, see Spellberg, Politics, Gender and the Islamic Past, 96. 23. Quoted in El Saadawi, The Hidden Face of Eve, 131.


husbands and other men were known from other women in the Arab world such as Sukayna, great-granddaughter of Muhammad.24 A thirteenthcentury North African erotic manual also tells anecdotes of women who rebuff unwanted suitors with their sharp and witty retorts or humiliating tricks. In one example, a man looking for an adulterous liaison approaches a woman and says he would like to sample her to see whether she is tastier than his wife. She replies that he should simply ask her husband, who has already tasted both of them.25 Ibn Ab¯ı T·¯ahir’s Kita¯b bala¯ghât al-nisa¯ (Book of women’s songs) contains several anecdotes in which women shout sexual insults at their husbands.26 Although poetry was generally the privileged domain of men, there were several notable exceptions such as Humayda bint Numa¯n ibn Bash¯ır, who composed invective poems about her husbands, or the Andalusian female poets Walla¯da, daughter of a caliph, and Nazhu ¯ n bint al-Qala¯ ¯ı, contemporary of the twelfth-century poet Ibn Quzma¯n, both of whom wrote scathing, and sometimes obscene, verse about suitors or rival (male) poets.27 Although such wit among women appears to have been tolerated, and perhaps even welcomed in some cases, it was not likely to have been a trait commonly encouraged in wives. In his Book on the Etiquette of Marriage, the philosopher al-Ghaza¯l¯ı instructs husbands to jest and play with their wives, but only as a strategy to preserve harmony in the household.28 An explict warning against witty wives is found in the Tunisian al-Nafza¯w¯ı’s 24. Mernissi, Women and Islam, 192– 94. Franz Rosenthal’s collection of anecdotes about Ashab translated into English include several in which Sukayna plays tricks or makes jokes (Humor in Early Islam, especially 69– 73, 81– 82). See also Ulrich Marzolph’s catalog of humor in Arabic literature, Arabia Ridens. 25. Al-T¯ıfa¯ch¯ı, Les Délices des coeurs, 85. Al-T¯ıfa¯ch¯ı died in 1253, and was either of Algerian or Tunisian origin. The anecdotes in which women rebuff suitors are actually contained in a chapter on women who engage in love affairs on their own initiative (rather than through an intermediary), and several of the anecdotes show women tricking their husbands. Given this indiscriminate mix, it would seem that women’s control over their pleasures (whether sexual or comic) was the focus of the author’s concern. 26. Ibn Ab¯ı T·¯ahir, Bala¯gha¯t al-nisa¯ , 149 and passim. 27. Schippers, “The Role of Women in Medieval and Andalusian Arabic Story-Telling.” Her sources include the Kita¯b al-agha¯n¯ ı. It is interesting to note that invective poetry (hija¯ ) was an esteemed genre in medieval Arabic poetry, but a genre generally associated with men, evident in Nazhu ¯ n’s remark during a barbed exchange with a male poet: “Although I am a woman by nature, my poetry is masculine” (146). Women were generally associated with the more somber genres of the ritha¯ or marthiyya in which women mourned their men killed in battle. 28. Al-Ghaza¯l¯ı, Marriage and Sexuality in Islam, 94– 96.

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early-fifteenth-century erotic manual, al-Rawd· al- a ¯t·ir (The perfumed garden), which describes the ideal wife thus: She will not be given to much laughter or frivolous talk nor to much coming and going to the houses of neighbors. . . . She will not seek the close friendship of other women but will be at ease with and put her trust in her husband alone. . . . She will complain little, neither will she cause offence. She will relax and laugh only in the intimacy of her husband’s company and will give herself to him alone, even though she were to die of forbearance.29 Like the proper European lady, the Arab wife should talk little, refrain from wandering about, restrain her merriment, and mold her disposition to suit that of her husband. The chapter on women to be avoided, by constrast, describes she who laughs too easily, talks too much, and goes in and out of the house, explicitly condemning laughter as a sign of sexual debauchery: “A raucous woman with a loud laugh is unattractive. It has been said that if a woman is often seen joking and fooling around then she is a slut.”30 Bodily decorum and chastity are linked with the behavior of the mouth, characterized by restrained speech and moderate amusement. Arab writers in fact explicitly connected the woman’s mouth with her vagina. A large mouth signaled a large vagina; this woman was to be avoided in favor of a smaller-mouthed woman with a narrower vagina who would presumably give men more sexual pleasure.31 Al-Nafza¯w¯ı’s treatise continues to be available at low cost in the medinahs of the Arab world today, and so it is not surprising that the contemporary Egyptian physician and writer Nawal El Saadawi recalls that when growing up she was told not only to avoid laughing, but to keep her eyes down, her legs closed, and her mouth shut.32 While wives were anxiously supervised and monitored, more license was accorded other women particular to the medieval Islamo-Arab world—the singing girls kept to amuse the men of elite urban culture. In his study of the Nights, Irwin notes that 29. 30. 31. 32.

Al-Nafza¯w¯ı, Perfumed Garden, 18; al-Rawd· al- a ¯t·ir f¯ ı nuzha¯t al-kha¯t·ir, 47. Al-Nafza¯w¯ı, Perfumed Garden, 32; al-Rawd· al- a ¯t·ir, 75. A¨ıt Sabbah, La Femme dans l’inconscient musulman, 48. El Saadawi, Hidden Face of Eve, 9– 10.


it is often the singing girl (qaina, pl. qiyan) who is provided with the wittiest lines and the most appropriate verses. The stories of “Harun al-Rashid and the Two Slave-Girls” and “Harun al-Rashid and the Three Slave-Girls” commemorate the bawdy wit of these accomplished entertainers. In historical fact, singing girls were much in demand at the court of the Abbasid caliphs and in the houses of other rich men, particularly as after-dinner entertainers and as a female counterpart to the learnedly witty nudama, or cup-companions.33 Since the singing girl was either a freeborn performer whose talents could be purchased or a slave who was property rather than a spouse in whom the honor of the family was invested, the entertainment she provided, whether in sex, singing, or storytelling, was not threatening to men’s control over women, and it is perhaps for this reason that her wit was granted greater license. Such latitude may similarly have been accorded to European prostitutes, although there is little evidence to document this. By contrast, anecdotes about the witticisms recounted by Arab singing girls are numerous in the Nights and also in the adab, encyclopedic collections of anecdotes or essays that document an elite male culture in which maintaining female entertainers testified to a man’s wealth and status. Although many of the anecdotes involve women’s witty retorts that put men in their place, most often they revolve in some way around the woman’s body so that women are associated, as in European discourse, with corporeality. This is most evident in the adab where women are dicussed in chapters that treat various bodily deformities. For example, in his chapter “The Book of Women,” Ibn Qutayba includes material on various body parts of both sexes as well as general physical characteristics and physical handicaps. Such an amalgam in a chapter purporting to discuss women suggests that women are defined by the body itself, and a deficient or abnormal one at that.34 The general tendency of Arab authors to put women at the ends of their adab works furthermore reinforces their status as marginal, trivial, even laughable. The last chapter of Abu ¯ Tamma¯m’s H ama ¯ sa is entitled madhammat al-nisa ¯ (blaming women), yet not all of the · eighteen poems even concern women. The poems are largely light and humorous, probably meant to contrast with the more serious preceding 33. Irwin, The Arabian Nights, 172– 73. 34. Malti-Douglas, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word, 30.

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sections, the playful (hazl) following on the serious (jidd) as is customary in medieval Arab poetics; the implication of the chapter’s title is of course that women, who are criticized chiefly for their physical appearance, are not serious subjects for the writer.35 Yet, as Fedwa Malti-Douglas has noted, a distinctive feature of adab anecdotes is the way in which the wit of the slave girl also serves to redefine the value of her body in some way. One such example is found in the work by al-Thaa¯lib¯ı, the Lata¯ if al-lutf (The witticisms of courteousness). In it, the narrator, in the person of the adab master himself, al-Ja¯h·iz· (776– 869), recounts: “I inspected a slave girl and said to her, ‘Do you play the u ¯d well?’ She replied, ‘No, but I can sit on it well.’” The joke plays on the double meaning of the u ¯d, a stringed musical instrument, but also a stick, rod, or pole, allusions to the male member. The witty slave girl thus turns her potential purchaser’s question about her value into a joke in which her sexual charms are traded for her musical talents. In another anecdote, a caliph, again planning to purchase a slave girl, asks, “Are you a virgin or what?” The girl replies, “Or what, O Emir of the Believers.” The anecdote concludes with the caliph laughing and purchasing the girl. Malti-Douglas notes that it is the man who initiates the exchange by asking the girl to state her status as an object worthy of purchase, but that the girl one-ups him by seizing on the man’s avoidance of naming her lack (not being a virgin) by turning it into a witticism that “counteracts her physical deficiency, which might normally disqualify her from purchase. Wit neutralizes a lack in the female body, a lack related to a woman’s sexual behavior.”36 It should be noted that all of these anecdotes end with the witty woman being purchased by the male. Although her witticism has potentially deflected views of her deficient body onto the superior quality of her intelligence, her body and the pleasures it offers (whether sex or laughter) can be bought and sold.37 When read within the context of the witty and bawdy singing girls or 35. See Van Gelder, “Against Women, and Other Pleasantries,” which includes a translation of the last chapter of the H · amâsa. In another article, “Mixtures of Jest and Earnest in Classical Arabic Literature,” Van Gelder discusses the pairing of jest (hazl) and earnest (jidd) in medieval Arabic texts. Like their European counterparts, Arab authors justified their use of humor and jesting as a way to keep their readers engaged but cautioned that moderation should be observed. 36. Malti-Douglas, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word, 34– 36. 37. For jokes about and narrated by slave girls, also see Abu ¯ l-Qa¯sim’s Hika ¯yat (Anecdotes), which represents the Baghdad of the early eleventh century.


slave girls, Shahrazad’s eloquence is highly ambivalent, and highlights several sources of tension within Arab discourse on women. While many readers have emphasized the narrative pleasure Shahrazad provides the king with her stories, it must be acknowledged that her body, too, is in the service of the king. In some manuscripts, the epilogue of the Nights indicates that over the course of her storytelling, Shahrazad has given birth to three sons, and is eventually married to the king. Shahrazad is thus a hybrid, both a kind of singing girl enlisted for palace entertainments and a faithful and patient spouse useful for constant companionship and producing male heirs to the throne. Her storytelling services ultimately serve a different goal than that of the singing girl, however, for her goal is not to amuse the king, but to educate him out of his misogyny. The prologue of the Nights tells the story of how King Shahriyar and his brother, King Shahzaman, because they were both cuckolded by their wives, came to believe that all women are evil. When King Shahzaman finds his wife in the arms of a kitchen boy, he concludes, “al-nisa¯ ma¯ alayhim it¯ıqa¯d” (57) [Women are not to be trusted, 4]. Later, when the brothers encounter a woman who has cuckolded her ifr¯ ıt (demon) captor, they both conclude that no woman can be trusted, vowing never to remarry, a pledge that unites them in a homosocial bond against women. This asocial behavior is remedied by Shahrazad, who cures the king of his extremism, and it could be said that she represents the force of renewal, her creative and life-giving stories paralleling her life-giving motherhood that overturns the violence and destruction of patriarchy gone awry.38 More than a nurturing mother figure, however, Shahrazad possesses great learning, intelligence, and cleverness. The prologue notes that she “had read the books of literature, philosophy, and medicine. She knew poetry by heart, had studied historical reports, and was acquainted with the sayings of men and the maxims of sages and kings. She was intelligent, knowledgeable, wise, and refined. She had read and learned” (66; 11). Significantly, however, she needs more than this knowledge to accomplish her goal. She must call upon her uniquely feminine skills in the art of deception. Her narrative strategy of deferring the endings of her stories is designed to leave her male listener yearning for more. Shahrazad plots with her sister exactly how they will carry out their narrative project, like a director staging the movements of a play. Before her father, the vizier, 38. Faris, “1001 Words,” 815– 16.

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sends her to King Shahrayar, she explains to Dinarzad, “When I go to the king, I will send for you, and when you come and see that the king has finished with me, say, ‘Sister, if you are not sleepy, tell us a story.’ Then I will begin to tell a story, and it will cause the king to stop his practice, save myself, and deliver the people” (71; 16). In order to set the plot in motion, once in bed with the king, Shahrazad puts on a show of tears so that he will allow her to send for her sister, who will then ask her to tell her first story. The putting on of tears was considered one of women’s tricks by al-Ja¯h·iz· in his treatise on singing girls and thus links Shahrazad to this long tradition in Arabo-Islamic writing about the cunning of women, in which women’s dual sins of lechery and deceit are paired, as they are in the examples of the Wife of Bath, Dunbar’s women, and the fabliaux where women use their cunning to conceal their adulterous liaisons.39 Such examples in the Arabic tradition include al-Jawbar¯ı’s thirteenthcentury Kita¯b al-mukhta¯r f¯ ı kashf al-asra¯r wa-hatk al-asta¯r, in which he relates a “true-life” story told to him by a male friend of how a woman had sex with her lover in her husband’s house before his very eyes. Al-Jawbar¯ı concludes that since trickery is an innate talent in women, men should beware of all women.40 Al¯ı al-Baghda¯d¯ı’s Kita¯b al-zahr al-aniq fi l-bus wa lta niq (The book of the delicate flowers regarding the kiss and the embrace), written for the early-fourteenth-century Mamluke court, includes a discussion of the wiles of women (kayd al-nisa¯ ), particularly the tricks they use to deceive their husbands and lovers. Al-Nafza¯w¯ı’s work, although ostensibly an erotic manual, also includes a chapter “Women’s Tricks” (maka ¯ id al-nisa¯ ), especially wives who deceive their husbands. In the Nights themselves there is an entire cycle of stories on the theme, “The Craft and Malice of Women.”41 Fears about female sexuality are also 39. In the Epistle on Singing-Girls [Risa¯lat al-qiya¯n], al-Ja¯h·iz· describes the guile of the singing girl who “weeps with one eye to one and laughs with the other eye to the second, and winks at the latter in mockery of the former; she deals in secret with one, and openly with the other, giving the former to understand that she really belongs to him and not to the other, and that her overt behaviour is contrary to the promptings of her heart” (34). This topos of weeping out of one eye and laughing out the other of course recalls European descriptions. 40. Al-Jawbar¯ı, Le Voile arraché, 253– 55. The condemnation of women’s cunning is all the more striking when read against the vast corpus of works treating men’s cunning, which loses its negative connotations, becoming the positive figure of the trickster, a figure that enjoyed high status in medieval Arab culture (Irwin, The Arabian Nights, 80). Yet it should be noted that there are also numerous examples of women who trick potential seducers in order to remain faithful to their husbands (Burgel, ¨ “Love, Lust, and Longing,” 111– 12). 41. Burton, Plain and Literal Translation, vol. 6.


evident in the various traditions concerning female demons, such as Aisha Kandisha, a female demon with pendulous breasts in Moroccan folklore known to assault men in dark places, sometimes through trickery.42 In the Nights, many female characters, particularly genies or spirits, appear ready to unleash their sexuality at any moment upon unsuspecting men, and it is primarily through their cunning speech that they conquer their prey. This tradition linking women’s sexual excess and deceit can be traced back to the Judeo-Christian scriptures that Islam inherited, such as the story of Joseph in Sura 12 of the Qura¯n, where Potiphar sees that his wife has falsely accused Joseph of seducing her and cries, “inna min kaydikunna, inna kaydakunna az·¯ım” [Surely it is a device of you women. Your device is indeed great! 12:28]. Here, the “device” or “deceit” (kayd) of Potiphar’s wife is condemned as a general trait of womankind, for the possessive pronoun kunna belongs to the feminine plural, not singular. This Qura¯nic quotation is repeated verbatim in the prologue to the Nights, setting up early on the theme of women’s sexual voracity and cunning. When the two brothers witness how the ifr¯ ıt’s captive woman has managed to cuckold him right before his eyes, they declare: “Inna kaydakunna az·¯ım” (64) [Great is woman’s cunning, 10]. Believing that “[t]here is not a single chaste woman anywhere on the entire face of the earth,” the king swears never to marry and, instead, to kill each woman he sleeps with so that he will save himself “min shariha¯ wa-makriha¯” (65) [from the wickedness and cunning of women, 10]. Shahrazad’s storytelling contests the facile association of women with cunning encapsulated in the paired examples of Potiphar’s wife and the ifr¯ ıt’s captive.43 Rather than enlisting her guile in the service of her sexuality, Shahrazad uses her storytelling to counter masculine pretensions to define all women as alike. Whereas Shahriyar makes his claim based on misogynous clichés and on his personal experience, Shahrazad counters this narrow knowledge with the collective experience of many that she has acquired through her learning, “combating the King’s narrow reading of experience [all women do it] with the immense resources of reported lives: 42. For a discussion of this figure, see Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 42. 43. See the intriguing article by Ashley Manjarrez Walker and Michael A. Sells, “The Wiles of Women and Performative Intertextuality,” which examines how A’isha strategically uses the story of Joseph in her own hadith narrative to vindicate herself against charges of adultery. The authors note that the word kayd is itself neutral in the Qura¯n, since God also uses kayd to defeat enemies of the faith (67– 68).

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the line between history and storytelling must be blurred here, as it was in the medieval period itself, to stress a common focus on life-histories.”44 Shahrazad’s dual role as storyteller and historian is evidenced by her knowledge of akhba¯r, which could be translated both as “stories” and as “historical annals,” history often being recounted through anecdotal stories in the Arab Middle Ages. It is also important to observe the way in which the cunning of women structures the narrative of the Nights. The presence of Dinarzad, a figure often overlooked in discussion of the outer frame of the Nights, is key to the work’s framing of female storytelling and male listening. It is Dinarzad who initially sets the storytelling in motion by asking her sister to tell a story, and she remains in the bedchamber to hear it, then praising it as lovely, entertaining, or amazing. Shahrazad’s inscribed audience is thus a mixed one: female (Dinarzad) and male (Shahriyar). Dinarzad requests her story as a fulfillment of her sister’s lifesaving project, whereas King Shahriyar listens to fulfill his own desire for narrative pleasure. The audience outside of the framework (the historical reader) is reminded of the gendered readers inscribed in the text and of the stakes involved. The king, oblivious to the sisters’ prior plotting in which he is their prey, becomes the object of scrutiny. Although the women are at the mercy of the king for their lives, the power to structure the narrative is theirs, and by virtue of their guile, his agency is reduced, his role having already been scripted for him. Both a sexual object and a learned and clever narrator, Shahrazad harnesses her putatively feminine gifts in a way that challenges misogynous discourse on women. Beguiling a man for socially productive ends, deceiving through learning and eloquence, Shahrazad conforms to traditional writing on women in her seductive cunning, while countering much of its misogynous assumptions by enlisting her guile to expand men’s narrow vision of women.

Vision, Veiling, and Fitna In the Nights, men’s claim to know women indeed has much to do with the faculty of vision, an aspect that links the verbal arts of Shahrazad with the linguistic play of the three sisters. The prologue, which recounts in almost 44. Grossman, “Infidelity and Fiction,” 120– 21.


voyeuristic fashion how King Shahzaman witnesses the cuckolding of his brother, who then has to see for himself, emphasizes the faculty of vision.45 Just as King Shahriyar and Shahzaman believe they know about women’s deceitfulness because they have seen it with their own eyes, the porter’s knowledge of the three sisters is also distinctly visual. As the porter meets each of the sisters, he gazes upon her stunning beauty, described in the superlative terms of the beauties of classical Arabic poetry: eyes like a deer, teeth like pearls, breasts like pomegranates, and (curiously for the reader not familiar with Arabic poetry) a belly with a navel like a cup that holds a pound of benzoin ointment (128– 29; 68– 69).46 The passages emphasize the porter’s gaze upon the women in the verbs of seeing, ra a ¯ and naz·ara. The porter’s gaze on the female body implies his domination over the three sisters. Joking with the women that they are like a table lacking a fourth leg, then reciting a poem about the pleasures of music, spices, wine, and love, he concludes, “wa-antum tala¯ta tah·ta¯ju ¯ na ra¯bian wa-yaku ¯ nu rajulan” (131) [You are three and you need a fourth, a man, 70]. The porter’s declaration that the women need a man could be said to be symptomatic of the assured gaze of the male who masters his world. Yet the porter’s gaze on the beautiful women is precisely what renders him vulnerable. This is because women in the Arab world have been thought to possess fitna, “a fatal attraction which erodes the male’s will to resist her and reduces him to a passive acquiescent role.”47 This connection between physical beauty and the social riot it can cause is corroborated by the definition of fitna as “temptation, trial; charm, charmingness, attractiveness; enchantment, captivation, fascination, enticement, temptation; infat45. Malti-Douglas has noted the prevalence of verbs of vision in the prologue, which she argues “call attention to a certain type of male active power, of the subject/looker on the object/looked upon. This is male scopic activity, to use Luce Irigaray’s terminology” (Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word, 24). Malti-Douglas is referring to Luce Irigaray’s notion of the penis-eye. Taking Freud’s assertion that the little boy sees that the little girl “lacks” a penis, Irigaray connects this original act of looking with the phallocentric construction of the male as seeing subject and the female as object to be seen. The act of looking is consequently extended to subjectivity itself and the male claim to knowledge (Speculum of the Other Woman, 47– 48). The association of the gaze with male power in Arabic discourse is also suggested by the fact that the penis is sometimes called al-a war (the one-eyed) or abu ¯ ayn (he of the one eye), which Malti-Douglas notes (126). See also chapter 8 of al-Nafza¯w¯ı’s Perfumed Garden for this and other names for the penis. 46. In classical Arabic poetry, a deep navel is considered a sign of beauty (as opposed to an outward-turning navel). 47. Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 41.

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uation; intrigue; sedition, riot, discord, dissension, civil strife.”48 This list evokes the socially disruptive power of women’s guile paired with their beguiling beauty, an association reinforced in the stories of the prophet Muhammad’s being enchanted and tempted by beautiful women, which of course parallel stories in the Christian tradition of insatiable women ready to tempt even the most holy of men, including Jesus himself. To protect men’s eyes from women’s beguiling charms, in many Islamic societies, particularly in well-to-do urban households, women have historically been secluded and obliged to cover their body and wear a veil if they should need to venture outdoors.49 The “Porter and the Three Ladies” reflects this concern with the veiling of women by emphasizing the process of uncovering the women’s bodies. With the shopper, the unveiling is literal: she removes her veil and the porter sees her deerlike eyes. The porter first sees the second sister, the doorkeeper, as the doors are unlocked and swing open. The third sister emerges from behind curtains that are unfastened. Furthermore, as each sister jumps in the pool, the text reminds us that she takes off her clothes, another form of unveiling. True to expectation, the sight of the women’s beauty incapacitates the porter, rendering him passive. He “marvels” (yatafakkaru) at the shopper’s beauty. When he sees the second sister, he loses control: “fa-lamma¯ naz·ara al-h·amma¯lu ilayha¯ salabat lubbuhu wa-aqluhu wa-salima yaqau al-qafas·u min ala¯ rasihi” (129) [When the porter saw her, he lost his senses and his wits, and the basket nearly fell from his head, 69]. He is so astonished (ta ajjaba ta ajjuban) by the beauty of the women that when he is paid for his services, he remains rooted to the spot. Futhermore, the danger of looking at women is particularly strong when the other senses are aroused. In one section of his treatise Risa ¯lat alqiya¯n (The epistle on singing girls), al-Ja¯h·iz· cautions, citing a hadith, “‘Beware of gazing [on women], for it sows carnal desire in the heart, and 48. The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, 3d ed., s.v. “fitna.” 49. While some Islamic cultures have insisted on a complete veiling, others have insisted only on headscarves that cover the hair. In the case of the three sisters, the shopper lifts her veil, not just a head scarf. Veiling was instituted before Islam and was a sign of class distinction, limited to freeborn women. For a discussion of the three principal sources used to justify both seclusion and veiling, see Stowasser, Women in the Qur an, Traditions, and Interpretation, 90– 93. Mernissi derives her discussion of fitna from Amin, The Liberation of Women, 64, who notes that veiling and secluding women implies a belief in male weakness (31). The notion that women are to blame for the desires they arouse in men who look upon them is also prevalent in the Western tradition, as Howard Bloch discusses in Medieval Misogyny, 100.


that is a most grievous temptation for one who experiences it.’ How much the more will this be the case with gazing and carnal desire, when they are accompanied by music and helped along by flirting.”50 The sisters are not singing girls by profession, but the text links them to the bawdy singing girls in the description of all the sensual pleasures they have prepared: exotic foods, spices and wines for the nose and tongue, singing for the ear, and of course the luxurious bath to please the flesh. They also appear to “flirt” with the porter, which arouses him (133; 72). The verb used to describe the porter’s arousal (int·aba a) connotes his subjection to the women, coming from the root t·aba a, “to impress, to stamp, to tame and domesticate.” And the verb to convey his losing of inhibitions, inkhala a (from the root khala a), underlines his loss of control, for one literal meaning of the verb is “to be stripped of one’s clothing.” Both of these verbs are form 7 verbs, the form that conveys passivity, something happening to oneself. The porter, victim of fitna, is reduced to passive acquiescence. At this point, it is worth noting the close phonological relationship between fitna and fit·na. While fitna denotes chaos, charm, and temptation, the similar word fit·na is defined as “clearness, astuteness, sagacity, perspicacity, acumen, intelligence.”51 A scene from the Nights that leads us to think further about the relationship between fitna and fit·na is the wellknown episode (not contained in Mahdi’s edition) in which the slave girl Tawaddud outwits the most learned men in the realm.52 In this story, possibly based on a true account,53 the caliph, having heard of the incredible knowledge of the slave girl, summons the wisest men of the realm, all of whom are outwitted by her. Tawaddud stipulates that as punishment for their lack of knowledge, the men must take off their clothing! Through her cleverness, Tawaddud disrobes an Islamic scholar, a reciter of the Qur aˆ n, a physician, an astronomer, and a philosopher. The caliph, Harun al-Rashid, gives her five thousand dinars, but significantly, Tawaddud’s 50. Al-Ja¯h·iz·, Epistle on Singing-Girls, 31. 51. Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, 3d ed., s.v. “fitna.” 52. Burton, Plain and Literal Translation, 5:190– 245. 53. Tritton, Materials on Muslim Education in the Middle Ages, 140, notes the possible truth behind this scene, discussing the many examples of women as teachers in medieval Arabic texts. Also see the Nights, “The Man’s Dispute with the Learned Woman on the Relative Excellence of Male and Female,” in which Sitt al-Mashaikh lectures to students on theology from behind a curtain, arguing that young women are superior to young boys (Burton, Plain and Literal Translation, 6:1720). On women in the Arab Middle Ages as teachers, also see Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 113– 14.

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foremost wish is to be restored to her master, who had offered her as the last of his remaining riches he had squandered. Although her intelligence and wit, like that of the “anecdotal woman” discussed earlier in this chapter, ultimately serve only to turn her into an even more valuable commodity, Tawaddud reverses the paradigm of nakedness and truth, for it is she who is able to gaze upon the men, who are, in each case, reduced to naked silence. Shahrazad then guides the king to understand the relevance of Tawaddud’s story, telling him to take note of “the eloquence of this damsel and the hugeness of her learning and understanding and her perfect excellence in all branches of art and science” (245). Shahrazad invokes the very qualities she possesses as though to remind the king that his reduction of women to aberrant corporeality does not account for their intellect, an asset to any wise ruler who recognizes its value.

Lewd/Ludic Lessons Although the initial description of the sisters emphasizes their physical beauty and beguiling charms, as the scene unfolds, it is the realm of the linguistic that takes center stage, and the porter will learn, as will King Shahriyar, that women’s desires are not always so easily reduced to the corporeal. As Shahrazad shifts the king’s attention away from the simultaneously pleasurable and threatening female body onto her powers of eloquence, the three sisters demonstrate that the pleasure they are after with the man they have snared in their lair is laughter rather than sex. When the porter first jokingly compares their absence of a man to a table that lacks a fourth leg, citing a poem on fourfold pleasures as his evidence, the women laugh, either pleased by his poetic wit or amused by his inept poetics: “falamma¯ samiu ¯ kala¯mahu ¯ajabahum wa-d·ah·aku ¯ ” (131) [His words pleased the girls, who laughed, 70]. The sisters then proceed to tease him, saying that if he wants to participate as an equal, he will have to pay his share. The mistress of the house quips, “Without gain, love is not worth a grain.” Using the term of affection h·ab¯ ı b¯ ı (my love), the doorkeeper adds, “maak shayun ya¯ h·ab¯ıb¯ı, ant shayun ma¯ maak shayun, ru ¯ h· bi-la¯ shayin” [Have you got anything, my dear? If you are emptyhanded, go emptyhanded]. In response to the porter’s confident assertion that they need a man to make their pleasures complete, they counter with teasing love talk as though to mock his pretension to know what they need. The fact that the two women


are joking with the porter is evident in the shopper’s admonishment: “kafu ¯ anhu fa-wa-allah ma¯ qas·ara maay al-yawm” (131) [stop teasing him, for by God, he served me well today, 71].54 He is allowed to stay, his patient service gaining him admission to their party. It is important to note here that, as in the case of Frauendienst, the women are superior in class to their porter, which partially redirects the threat away from gender onto class.55 The opening description of the porter is in itself comic as the porter follows the shopper through Baghdad, increasing piles of exotic wares loading down his basket as he struggles to keep up. When he complains that, had he known he would be asked to carry such a burden, he would have brought along a mule, the sister, in her position of power, only smiles. Once in the home, his stupefaction is humorous because it points to the incongruity between his humble status as a porter and the luxurious surroundings in which he unexpectedly finds himself. The poetry he recites to the ladies is also incongruous with his status, and would not be so amusing if spoken by the traditional handsome lover of the Arabic lyric tradition. The importance of class, however, does not lessen the force of the questions the tale raises about gender. The examples of Aisha Kandisha, ıt’s captive, and the kings’ own wives seemingly testify to women’s the ifr¯ uncontrollable desire for sex to the point that they will trap men into being their partners. The three sisters challenge this theory of rampant female sexuality with their comic anatomy lesson. First it is important to note that the three sisters display their naked bodies before the porter on their own initiative. This voluntary self-exposure contrasts with Freud’s explanation of smut as an “exposure of the sexually different person to whom it is directed. By the utterance of the obscene words it compels the person who 54. Haddawy’s translation of “kafu ¯ anhu” as “stop teasing him,” is rather loose, but is fitting given the context. 55. Another tale in the Nights, “The Sweep and the Noble Lady” also explores the confluence of gender and class in women’s laughter, but is not well developed. In this tale, a street sweeper has been commandeered by a noblewoman for her own purposes: she has intercourse with him, the foulest man in the city, in order to avenge herself on her unfaithful husband. Preparatory to the fulfillment of her plan, the lady has him attended to by three slave girls, who strip him bare in a bathroom, rubbing and shampooing him, and laughing at him all the while. The sweep, as a man of the streets, is both powerless to resist his noble captor and made laughable by the incongruity that his foul odor and bumbling manners create in the majesty of his surroundings (Burton, Plain and Literal Translation, 4:125– 30). The porter, it should be noted, far from being a captive in the three sisters’ house, stays of his own volition because he is charmed and intrigued by them.

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is assailed to imagine the part of the body or the procedure in question and shows her that the assailant is himself imagining it.”56 By literally exposing themselves to the porter and by making their own jokes about their anatomy, the three women invite the porter to look directly at their female difference, as Cixous’s Medusa should be faced head on by the men who fear her. As Sandra Naddaff has noted, “Far from tempering any potential embarrassment or humiliation that might result from uncovering their bodies, the three women are instead proclaiming their difference.”57 Yet the emphasis on biology on which such a proclamation of difference would seemingly rely is undercut, for rather than insisting on anatomically precise language, the sisters demand that the porter learn the metaphorical nicknames that their sexual parts have been given. Each time he answers their question “What is this?” with a literal name such as “womb,” “vulva,” or “clitoris,” the women scold and beat him, substituting his literal terms with the metaphorical “basil of the bridges,” “husked sesame,” and “inn of Abu Masrur.” At first glance, it might be assumed that the women are offended by the porter’s use of clinical language, and prefer he use more decorous metaphorical language.58 The distinction between literal and metaphoric language was a prominent one in medieval Arab rhetoric, particularly in the concept of kina¯yah (usually translated as “metonymy”); according to proponents of kina¯yah, objectionable terms considered ugly, which generally “concern woman, the sexual organs, defecation, various forms of uncleanness,”59 should be properly rendered by euphemisms. However, to explain the women’s chiding of the porter as an objection to dirty language does not account for their laughter. Although the women do at first insist on metaphorical terms and label the porter’s clinical terms qab¯ ıh· (ugly, nasty), the women later use the same kind of clinical terms to refer to the man—“penis,” “testicles,” “prick.” Rather than being offended by clinical language, the three sisters may in fact be making fun of the practice of kina¯yah by pretending to take offense. AlJa¯h·iz· in fact made fun of the prudery of those who cover their faces upon hearing “naughty” words, arguing that God would not have created such words if they were not intended to be used.60 Ibn Qutayba (d. 889) 56. Freud, Jokes, 98. 57. Naddaff, Arabesque, 26. Burns, Bodytalk, 42– 46, sees a similar lesson about female sexual difference in her reading of some French fabliaux. 58. See for example, Naddaff, Arabesque, 20– 35. 59. Pellat, “Kina¯yah.” 60. Cited in Pellat’s definition of kina ¯yah.


makes this same argument in Uyu ¯n al-akhba¯r: “Should you come across some account referring to private parts, vagina or a description of coitus, you should not, out of piety or piosity, raise your eyebrow and look askance, for there is no sin in mentioning the [sexual] organs.”61 One is reminded of Jean de Meun’s declaration in the Romance of the Rose (through the voice of Reason) that testicles in itself is no dirtier a word than relics.62 The mocking of kina¯yah might have specific implications for understanding women’s laughter as a response to the gendering of sexual knowledge. In the Decameron, I argued, Boccaccio’s seven ladies manage to demonstrate that they are not naive about sexual matters while still skillfully preserving their modesty by avoiding sexual language through their wit. Dunbar’s widow, by contrast, boasts about how she pretended to be offended by obscenity, thus underlining men’s anxiety about women’s modesty as mere performance. If in the Arab context kina¯yah associates the obscene and unclean especially with woman, as Pellat’s definition notes, a distinction that is not made so explicitly in European discussions on sexual language, the three sisters’ mimicking or overplaying of the practice of prudery could be read as a resistance to the linking of “female” with “nasty” (kab¯ ıh·). Through their feigned disgust, they mock the practice of using euphemisms. Although medieval Islamic scholars and jurists at times condemned the use of sexually explicit language or inappropriate material, in urban literary circles of the Abbasid period, it was expected that even the most refined of men should have a stock of obscene stories to tell in order to entertain the caliphs and sultans after dinner.63 These stories were even given a special name that, in effect, put them in their own special genre: muju ¯niyyah (licentious verse) or muju ¯n (obscene stories). This culture has largely been lost, for twentieth-century Arab bureaucrats and writers have censured the obscene sections of the Nights, and in 1985 the Egyptian government confiscated an unexpurgated edition of the Nights, allowing “only a censored, Islamically ‘correct’ version of the text to be sold.”64 For their part, 61. Quoted in Kishtainy, Arab Political Humor, 27. 62. See the discussion of this passage in chapter 2, on Boccaccio’s use of sexual humor. 63. Irwin, The Arabian Nights, 114. 64. Naddaff, Arabesque, 6– 7. On censorship of the Nights, see also Pinault, Story-Telling Techniques, 3. On various sexual behaviors that were proscribed, see Bellamy, “Sex and Society in Islamic Popular Literature.”

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European translators of the tales left out sexually explicit scenes or left sexually explicit terms untranslated. In the “Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies,” E. Powys Mathers gave euphemisms such as “house of compassion” and “the thing” for female sexual parts and simply left the word for the male member (zebb) in Arabic.65 Such choices, of course, totally obscure the sophisticated alternation between literal and metaphoric in the ladies’ linguistic game. Lane omitted the entire scene from his translation, explaining, “I here pass over an extremely objectionable scene, which would convey a very erroneous idea of the manner of Arab ladies.”66 What precisely is “the manner of Arab ladies” suggested by the three sisters, and how might it connect to the court culture of medieval Baghdad? If the whole scene can be taken as an example of an elaborate sexual riddle (the smashing mule who grazes on the basil, eats the husked sesame, and crashes into the inn of Abu Masrur), it is then a kind of mujun. Yet what is remarkable is that it is the ladies themselves who initiate this exchange and hold the keys to the riddle. In the adab examples I discussed at the beginning of the chapter, the man approaches the slave girl or singing girl to initiate a purchase. Her clever reply, deflecting his assessment of her defective body onto the value of her wit, is part of a transaction in which the woman’s cleverness is a commodity for a man’s pleasure. In this scene, by contrast, the women orchestrate the entire interaction for their own laughter. The women’s mocking of kina¯yah announces not only female sexual difference, but female textual difference, for they simultaneously expose their female anatomy as though to say it needs no euphemisms and expose the porter’s insufficient knowledge of their metaphorical language. Sitting on his lap and pointing to their genitalia, they could be seen as doing what Hélène Cixous punningly describes as women showing their sextes, proclaiming their subjectivity, undoing the configuration of woman as dark continent of lack.67 Following Cixous, we might say that the three sisters’ “text” is the metaphorical language of their inside joke. They laugh at the porter’s failure to come up with the punch line; he is no longer the privileged subject of 65. Mathers, The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, 1:73. 66. Lane, The Thousand and One Nights, 1:214. On the frequency of sexual wordplay in medieval European literature and contemporary scholars’ resistance to acknowledging it, see Delany, “Anatomy of the Resisting Reader.” 67. “Le Rire de la Méduse,” 47; “Laugh of the Medusa,” 885.


language, for only the women know the rules of the game. Metaphors applied to sexual members were a common feature of medieval Arabic literature, and in al-Nafza¯w¯ı’s erotic manual, two whole chapters (8 and 9) are devoted to the various nicknames given to men and women’s sexual parts. The sister’s names are not like these common nicknames, which is why the porter has so much difficulty coming up with them. This difficulty is of course necessary to the mechanism of the joke, with the “ah ha” of the punch line we finally get from the porter’s own metaphor. But during the porter’s struggle with this realm of metaphor he cannot grasp, their secret code acts as a kind of “feminine syntax,” to borrow Irigaray’s term, that binds the women together in their laughter at the porter’s expense.68 They are aggressive verbally, physically, and sexually, leading one scholar to remark that “physical beating, verbal drubbing and general shrewish behavior towards the porter are part of the ladies’ sexual allure, and provide anticipation of sexual performance.”69 The women are certainly portrayed as sexually alluring, but their performance, although lewd, emphasizes the ludic. The whole scene does lead readers to expect sexual performance, but that is perhaps part of the game the text plays with us, as the three sisters do with the porter. Shahrazad’s interruptions into the text in fact serve to heighten readers’ anticipation of sexual performance, pausing at thresholds of imagined climax, such as when the porter arrives at the door, is paid and seemingly about to leave, when the first girl jumps naked into the pool, and when the porter follows. At each turn, the reader anticipates the sexual performance the women’s sensuality would seem to promise, but the text, although giving us much laughter and nudity, along with other foreplay, does not describe a sexual act. Lest we conclude that this is due to a general tendency in the Nights to be vague about copulation, it should be noted, for example, that in describing the treachery of Shahrayar’s wife, the text states that the queen’s lover “rushed to her, and raising her legs, went between her thighs and made love to her” (59; 5). The original Arabic (dakhala baina awra ¯kiha) in fact is a bit more blunt still, suggesting the idea of penetrating or entering between the thighs. The three sisters’ performance is not described in this way. The reader, like the porter, who enters each scene confident that what you see is what you get, discovers that understanding the women’s pleasures requires a second look. 68. See the discussion of Irigaray’s “feminine syntax” in chapter 1. 69. Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters, 123.

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Female Community and the Male Interloper’s Offering In the first part of the narrative, the porter observes the women’s isolation and lack of men, the reason for which he learns only upon the later arrival of the three dervishes and the caliph Harun al-Rashid and his companions. All the men, in order to receive the sisters’ hospitality, must pledge not to ask questions about anything they may witness there, for according to the motto inscribed at the entrance of their house, “Whoever speaks of what concerns him not hears what pleases him not” (136; 76). The men inevitably regret having made this rash promise, for the sights they witness cause them to burst from curiosity. The mistress of the house reveals two black bitches that have been hidden away, beats them, and then cries and kisses them. The doorkeeper sister, as the shopper sister sings a melancholy tune and plays her harp, tears the clothing off her back, exposing deep welts. When the men can no longer keep their tongues tied, and discuss how to find out the secrets, the mistress of the house comes upon them huddled in discussion, and promptly taps three times on the floor, upon which seven servants appear, each holding a sword, and threaten to cut off the head of one of the male visitors as punishment for his violation. However, the women show mercy, allowing each man to redeem his life by telling his story, an evident symmetrical pairing with Shahrazad’s own lifesaving narrative. The women then tell their stories. The doorkeeper, actually the halfsister of the mistress of the house, had been brutally beaten and banished by her husband for having looked at another man. The mistress, in telling her tale, explains that the two black bitches she ritually beats every evening are actually her full sisters. After the death of their parents, the first sister had married, but her husband squandered away all of her money and then deserted her. The second sister also had married and apparently suffered an equally bad marriage, for she too returned home, in an even worse plight. The mistress then explicitly cautioned her sisters against marriage: “Sisters, there is little good in marriage, for it is hard to find a good man. You got married, but nothing good came of it. Let us stay together and live by ourselves” (202; 135). The sisters did not listen, remarried, and after again suffering the same unhappy fate, returned to live with their sister. The mistress eventually fell in love and married, but the two sisters, envious of her happy marriage, murdered the husband. As punishment, they were transformed into black bitches, and through a curse, must be flogged


nightly by the mistress. Although themselves guilty because of their treachery toward their sister, they have twice been victims of men, made clear by their sister’s declaration that “it is hard to find a good man.” Thus, the halfsister of the mistress as well as her two full sisters have all been mistreated by men, and it is for this reason that all of the sisters now live together without men, thus mirroring the male bond forged by Shahriyar and Shahzaman in their decision never to remarry. Their all-female community may have been reminiscent of actual communities in medieval Arabia, called ribat, for women who had been widowed or abandoned by their husbands.70 The sisters’ attempt to create for themselves their own protective world, in which men are absent, is evident in the motto of silence that insulates their dwelling from the outside world. This continual repetition of the command emphasizes the bond of secrecy shared by the three sisters and also shows the extent to which the arrival of men on the scene poses a threat to their community. Moreover, the metaphorical alterity of their joking language is paralleled by their enigmatic ritualistic displays. While the joking brings them the pleasure of laughter, the rituals allow them to vent the shared sorrows of their past. The particularly female “language” articulated in this reenactment is made evident by the distress of the men, for although they gaze upon the semiotic displays that the women perform in front of them, this scopic activity gains them no access to meaning. Their exclusion from this semiotic realm is reinforced by the fact that each man seeks understanding from the other men. The caliph believes that the men who arrived before him are members of the household and thus understand the women’s performance. When the caliph discovers that even the porter does not understand, he concludes that now they are all in the same predicament (145; 84). The homosocial bond of the men’s exclusion is reinforced by their misery, for all of the men had been attracted to the dwelling by the promise of delights the household offered, in particular the sounds of music and laughing. This promise of amusement has been utterly destroyed by the women’s enigmatic performance, leading the dervishes to comment that they would rather have spent the night on the garbage heaps outside the city than to have witnessed those sights (145; 83). The caliph finally suggests to the other men that they can use physical force to pry the secrets from the women, since there are seven of them and 70. On these communities, see Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 110.

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the women are only three, and lack a man, a pronouncement we have already heard earlier from the porter. All of the men expiate their intrusion into the women’s semiotic world through their own tale. The dervishes each explain why they have only one eye (a return to the vision theme), and Jafar explains the story of how he, Masrur, and the caliph, have spent the night at the house of a local merchant, enjoying wine and singing girls. The porter’s story (the first told) is simply to repeat all of the tasks he accomplished assisting the shopper that morning. This is not much of a story, but the porter has in a sense already redeemed himself by learning to joke according to the women’s rules, and in doing so has become one of the household, as the mistress impatiently reminds him when she needs his assistance (79). It is the porter’s joke that allows him to enjoy a status different from that of the other male interlopers, for it shows his willingness to match his disposition to theirs, which he demonstrates as he undresses, plunges into the pool, and emerges to sit on the laps of the three sisters to ask them to solve the riddle of his genitalia: “Ladies, what is this?” They were pleased with his antics and laughed, for his disposition agreed with theirs, and they found him entertaining. One of them said, “Your cock,” and he replied, “You have no shame; this is an ugly word.” The other said, “Your penis,” and he replied, “You should be ashamed; may God put you to shame.” The third said, “Your dick,” and he replied, “No.” Another said, “Your stick,” and he replied “No.” Another said, “Your thing, your testicles, your prick,” and he kept saying, “No, no, no.” They asked “What is the name of this?” He hugged this and kissed that, pinched the one, bit the other, and nibbled on the third, as he took satisfaction, while they laughed until they fell on their backs. At last they asked, “Friend, what is its name?” The porter replied, “Don’t you know its name? It is the smashing mule.” They asked, “What is the meaning of the name the smashing mule?” He replied, “It is the one who grazes in the basil of the bridges, eats the husked sesame, and gallops in the Inn of Abu Masrur.” Again they laughed until they fell on their backs and almost fainted with laughter. Then they resumed their carousing and drinking and carried on until nightfall. (135– 36; 75)71 71. For the original Arabic text of this passage, please see appendix B.


The porter has finally learned his lesson, and the sisters apparently are pleased with their pupil’s progress, for they now see that his “disposition” (t·iba¯ uhu) agrees with theirs. He mimics almost precisely the words initially spoken by the women: “You have no shame,” “ugly word,” “no, no, no.” And whereas they had slapped, pinched, and punched him, he punishes them with nibbles and bites. It has been suggested that at this moment the porter still shows his imperfect mastery of the women’s linguistic universe, for his metaphor “the smashing mule” is dependent upon those metaphors already established by the women and that “smashing mule” “suggests a kind of deep, abiding, unwillingness, indeed inability, to understand and to change accordingly.”72 Viewed more carefully, however, the porter’s repsonse is really a kind of one-upmanship. His metaphor does rely on those of the women, but it outdoes those metaphors by combining and even consuming them, for the smashing mule (baghl al-kusu ¯r) is “alladi yara¯ h·abaqa al-jusu ¯ r wa-yusuffu al-simsim al-maqshu ¯ r wa-yubart·iu f¯ı kha¯ni abu ¯ masru ¯ r.” His metaphor literally consumes theirs, evident in the aggressive verbs he employs: he ¯) in the basil of the bridges, “eats” (yusuffu) the husked “grazes” (yar a sesame, and “gallops” (yubart·i u) in the inn of Abu Masrur. It also rhymes with the metaphors of the three sisters: kusu ¯r, jusu ¯r, maqshu ¯r, masru ¯r. The mule’s smashing quality suggests not stubbornness, but brute force. Furthermore, it is possible that the mule had sexual connotations for readers of this story. Erotic manuals of the late Middle Ages in the Arab world frequently recount episodes of women copulating with donkeys or mules because only in this way can they sate their enormous appetites. In one anecdote, it is a porter who discovers this odd proclivity in his wife.73 If readers did connect the mule to female insatiability, then the porter’s joke is a sly innuendo aimed at the women’s sexuality, a sort of smutty joke, and 72. Naddaff, Arabesque, 28– 29. 73. A¨ıt Sabbah, La Femme dans l’inconscient musulman, 52. For the anecdote, see alNafza¯w¯ı, Perfumed Garden, 60. Al-Nafza¯w¯ı also notes that both donkey and mule have enormous sexual organs (55). See also Juvenal’s sixth satire, vv. 322– 34. It should be added that beliefs concerning women’s insatiability and preference for large male members lead to numerous jokes concerning men’s fears of their sexual inadequacies. In al-Nafza¯w¯ı’s chapter on all the names given for the penis, the nickname jerk is described as “Approaching a woman when erect, he is full of conceit at his own strength and virility and seems almost to be saying to her vagina, ‘Today, my rival, I’m going to make you love me!’” Vagina, however, discovers that such boasting is highly unjustified, for “once she finds that he’s inside, she starts laughing . . . ‘You’re just a little jerk! I can hardly feel you!’” (43).

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a joke through which he has reasserted masculine control over a female community aberrant in its lack of men. If the women welcome the joke, it is because it has been offered in the spirit of merrymaking the women themselves have established. In the medieval Arab world, an uninvited guest’s wit could often gain him access to a gathering from which he would otherwise be excluded.74 The porter, likewise, has used his wit as an offering, and it is precisely because of his wit (kays), that the shopper urges her sisters, “let him stay tonight, so that we may laugh at him and amuse ourselves with him, for who will live to meet with one like him again? He is a clever and witty rogue” (136; 75– 76). This sort of payment or offering of a guest to host suggests the way in which laughter and joking can blur boundaries between insider and outsider, community and interloper. The porter’s probing into the women’s realm of metaphor in fact produces a kind of intimacy.75 The word intimacy captures both the affection and the tension inherent in any situation where two parties reveal themselves before one another. In this sense joking is very much like a sexual performance: the fear of failure and the thrill of victory are both potential outcomes of the experience for the joke teller, a point not taken up by Freud, who focuses only on the exposure of the object of the joke. But the person who tells the joke simultaneously exposes himself, for if the third party fails to laugh because the joke has been poorly constructed or because the hearer does not share the values implicit in the joke, then the joking subject loses face, exposes himself as lacking in wit or good taste, or whatever criteria would, in a successful joke, bind together the teller and hearer. The three sisters capitalize both on the affection and tension of the joking triangle. In their chiding and beating of the porter, they expose and ridicule his lack of knowledge, just as Tawaddud exposes the ignorance of the male scholars. But they also try to draw him in and help him out. They give him hints as he tries to come up with the correct name, saying “Why don’t you say the husked sesame?” or “Why don’t you say the inn of Abu Masrur?” as though to give him a chance to deliver the punch line. That the women and the man can eventually laugh together, their dispositions finally at one, offers possibilities not raised by Freud, who assumes that hostility is a key element in a truly amusing joke. He argues that the kind 74. See, for example, Malti-Douglas, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word, 36. 75. This point has been made by Naddaff, Arabesque, 30– 31.


of pleasure to be gained from innocent jokes is “a moderate one; a clear sense of satisfaction, a slight smile, is as a rule all it can achieve in its hearers. . . . A non-tendentious joke scarcely ever achieves the sudden burst of laughter which makes tendentious ones so irresistible.”76 The sisters’ gales of laughter when the porter delivers his punch line suggest a joking pleasure principle that is less reliant on heirarchy, more welcoming, capable of bringing the outsider in. The porter’s transition from outsider to insider recalls Ernest Dupréel’s argument in the 1920s that the best way to understand laughter is to examine the communal dynamics in which it takes place, for there are essentially two types of laughter: the laughter of exclusion (rire d’exclusion), in which one group shows its solidarity by laughing at the expense of an outsider, and the laughter of welcome (rire d’accueil), in which a group welcomes with their laughter a member or in which a group itself forms precisely because of its shared laughter.77 Dupréel notes, however, that the most accomplished or complete kind of laughter is one that moves from exclusion to welcome or that combines both: “We like the person who makes us laugh, and the more pronounced the initial distance separating them from us, the more forecefully we are propelled toward them.”78 Dupréel appears to embrace the potential for union and community that this laughter can enable, a potential realized in the laughter of the three sisters, for while they initially target the port for their own laughter, strengthening their “in-group” unity at his expense, they eventually allow him to join them, lessening the distance between themselves and him. In addition to teaching the porter about their ludic rather than lewd pleasures, part of their lesson appears to concern the power of laughter itself to bring about this new vision of the relationships opened between self and other, where both parties give and receive pleasure. Theirs is a laughter, in Irigaray’s words, that is not a “simple reversal of the masculine position,” not an act of tit for tat. This potential for laughter to form community is powerfully suggested in the “Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies,” but one whose importance should not be overstated. Wit may be a kind of payment a man can 76. Freud, Jokes, 96. 77. Dupréel, “Le Problème sociologique du rire,” 228– 36. 78. “Nous aimons qui nous a fait rire et un e´ lan nous reporte vers eux, d’autant plus fort que plus sensible a e´ té d’abord la distance marquée entre eux et nous” (Dupréel, “Problème sociologique,” 255).

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make to join a female community, yet the very notion of an independent female community is not allowed to stand. All five sisters, like Shahrazad, are married off by the caliph (who himself marries the shopper), and their unique world is dissolved upon the imposition of the happy ending. The narrative co-opting of the sisters’ female community is made particularly striking by the fact that the curse that doomed the mistress to nightly whip her own sisters can only be undone by the powerful caliph; for him, the genie utters those famous words “your wish is my command,” and the man saves the day (218; 149). The three sisters, like Shahrazad, have mastered their male audience, but in turn have been returned to their roles as wives.

Laughing Bodies: Aisha Kandisha and the Wife of Bath Although the eloquence and wit of the women of the Nights are ultimately contained in marriage, they do portray an economy of laughter more complex than that of the slave girls of the adab corpus, whose wit is a commodity purchased for male pleasure, male laughter. Shahrazad and the three sisters channel sexual desire into the desire for narrative pleasure, and like the plotting between Shahrazad and Dinarzad, the three sisters direct their performance toward a male audience, using their linguistic craftiness as a challenge to men’s claims to know women. In their laughter, Arab women have far more in common with their European sisters than they have differences, and this is because both cultures expressed a profound distrust of an alleged female corporeality and the enigmatic power women’s sexuality could have over men, a shared tradition that is nicely illustrated by a personal anecdote. When I taught English at a university in Morocco from 1989 to 1991, I was asked several times by my female students (when no male students were around) whether I knew any of the stories about Aisha Kandisha, a figure popular in Moroccan folklore. When I asked who Aisha Kandisha was, my students would only say she was a demon who attacked men and then giggle, only occasionally and obliquely alluding to the sexual nature of this assault. One of these occasions was after I used the Wife of Bath’s Tale in a conversation class, anticipating that it would stimulate debate between the male and female students (approximately two-thirds and one-third of the class, respectively). After the indeed lively debate over whether women truly could have dominion over men (which included


many citations of the Qura¯n and various hadiths), several of the female students asked me once again about Aisha Kandisha. Although I did not recognize it at the time, I now see that these women were making a connection between Aisha Kandisha and the Wife of Bath (and the loathly lady of her tale), for both figures are symbols of female domination. It is also clear that tales and jokes about Aisha Kandisha were a great source of pleasure these women shared with each other. Their almost conspiratorial laughter while recalling the stories of the female demon that got the better of men suggests how women still make use of ambivalent figures such as Aisha Kandisha. And that the Wife of Bath’s Tale incited so much heated debate in the classroom and led the women in the classroom to think about Aisha Kandisha suggests to me that the questions about the representation of women and laughter in medieval culture that I have explored throughout this study continue to be relevant to women’s laughter today. The representation of women’s laughter in the Nights does, however, raise issues specific to the medieval Arab context, in which more license is accorded to singing girls than to wives. Shahrazad and the three sisters are ambivalent partly because they are located at the crossroads between the two. Shahrazad begins her storytelling odyssey a virgin, but her sexual knowledge, made clear in her tales, and her carnal relationship to the king throughout, distinguish her from the innocent bride brought blushing to her husband’s bed. Not simply sold or given to the king, she actively gives herself for the good of all women in her land, using the verbal arts of female entertainers as her strategy. The three sisters begin their role in the narrative as sexually alluring, paralleling the sensual revelry and bawdy joking of the singing girls populating the Nights and adab literature. But they are wealthy Baghdad ladies, wielding significant power, both in their generosity to their guests and their harsh threats to the men that might break their secrecy. All the women are eventually absorbed comfortably into the status quo, married to wealthy men and returned to the normal role of wife. In this way, both Shahrazad and the three sisters blur the boundaries between good girl and bad girl in a way that the women of the European texts do not. The Wife of Bath’s frequent marriages are coupled both with her playfulness and sexual exuberance in a way meant to make her amusing to men, perhaps, but surely not to encourage men to marry oft-widowed

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women. While perhaps showing the humorous side of being a bad woman, she does not change in her status to become a good woman. Boccaccio’s ladies, although their laughter and witticisms challenge a facile dichotomy between sexual wit and modest innocence, do not use sexually explicit language, and it would be hard to imagine Boccaccio arguing on behalf of the propriety of his Florentine noblewomen had they dallied in the bath with one of their servants. While questioning some of the assumptions of what makes a good woman, Boccaccio’s ladies are represented consistently as virtuous, and Boccaccio seems rather interested in the mutual pleasures of solace to be enjoyed in mixed company among polite urban circles. Dunbar’s wanton women share in the bawdy language of the three sisters, but their sexual joking, while it may be understood as a justified therapy for women’s marital woes, also serves to warn against deceitful wives, as the celibate Dunbar succinctly reminds his readers in his ironic closing demande d’amour. Farce wives who get the better of their husbands may win sympathy through their complaints of unjust husbands and admiration in the wit they demonstrate in getting the upper hand, but their laughter generally marks anxiety of the husband expected to maintain order in the household. The lady of Frauendienst whose haughty laughter serves to mark her disdain is expeditiously dropped by her suitor. Although winning the appreciative laughter of men within and outside of the text, the lady’s own laughter marks a separation that keeps her distinctly removed from the man who woos her.79 The three sisters, by contrast, are happily married off, and their licentious joking does not seem calculated to warn of any misfortune awaiting their future spouses. Rather, it is their lack of a man that must be remedied, and the serendipitous marriages allow for a peaceful transition from a woman’s semiotically and physically isolated community to socially sanctioned and productive life with men.80 The ways in which Shahrazad and the three sisters blur distinctions between wives and singing girls may also be expressing anxieties about the existence of two distinct models of behavior permitted to each group. A hadith of al-Bukha¯r¯ı recommends educat79. Remke Kruk’s discussion of the comically self-humiliating behavior of an overeager suitor in an Arab epic who is spat upon by the unwilling object of his yearning suggests a parallel, “The Bold and the Beautiful,” 104– 5 and 109. A comparative analysis of disdainful ladies in both traditions could prove fruitful. 80. Fears of women who refuse the company of men may help to explain the anecdotes in adab literature describing lesbian sex. See, for example, the Kitab balagha¯t al-nisa¯ of Ibn Ab¯ı Ta¯hir.


ing a slave girl and if possible, eventually freeing her and marrying her, presumably so that her status may be improved.81 In his famous, often richly ironic, treatise on singing girls, al-Ja¯h·iz· shows considerable concern for justifying the licentious behavior of men in the company of singing girls. Appearing to praise days gone by when men and women flirted and conversed together without blame, he notes that the bedouins “were accustomed to foregather for conversation and evening parties, and might pair off for whispering and joking. . . . All this would take place under the eyes of the woman’s guardians or in the presence of her husband, without these taking exception to conduct not in itself exceptionable, provided they felt secure against any misbehaviour occurring.”82 Since such flirting even with married women was tolerated in the past, suggests al-Ja¯h·iz·, surely flirting with singing girls cannot be condemned. His attitude toward the girls themselves is ambivalent. He accuses them of feigning love for the master of the house’s guests to get at their wallets, but allows that sometimes “this pretence leads [a girl] on to turning it into reality, and she in fact shares her lover’s torments” (33). While criticizing the singing girl as innately deceitful, he also makes allowances for her because of the way she has been brought up, surrounded by “idle talk, and all sorts of frivolous and impure conversation, as must hinder her from recollection of God” (34). Moreover, al-Ja¯h·iz· devotes considerable attention to blaming the male owner, who exploits the charms of his singing girls to extract more gifts from his guests. He also points to the peculiar logic whereby men attach social disgrace to men who marry free women who have previously been married yet will take as their concubine a slave girl who has been in the possession of many masters. He asks, “Who, however, can [reasonably] approve of this in a slave and object to it in a free woman? (22). Such a question invites a closer examination of the boundaries between licit and illicit male-female interactions in the medieval Arabo-Islamic literary corpus. That the wit and laughter of the women of the Nights trouble the boundaries between entertainer for hire and spouse suggests that this bifurcation was a key factor in the ambivalent attitude toward women in the medieval Arab world. Considering the bifurcated nature of women’s status in the Arab Middle Ages may also help to suggest new 81. Burgel, ¨ “Love, Lust, and Longing,” 103. 82. Al-Ja¯h·iz·, Epistle on Singing-Girls, 16.

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avenues of investigation for feminist studies of medieval European literature, where monogamy and misogamy are perhaps playing a more significant role in the representation of misogyny than has yet been examined. Such an investigation would of course entail an enormous range of material, and quality translations of the many Arabic texts on women not yet translated would be invaluable toward this end, as would analyses by Arabists of the wealth of material yet to be investigated from a feminist perspective. Much more stands to be learned by looking at these two traditions side by side, and I hope that my work has served as a small step in that direction.

Conclusion

oth a source of pleasure and something to be feared, women’s laughter aroused a complex array of responses in medieval men. As the figure of woman was a “vehicle to be used for thinking,” her laughter, too, allowed male authors to articulate a spectrum of concerns. The haughty laughter of Ulrich von Lichtenstein’s lady enabled him to express his anxiety over his inferior social status in the Styrian feudal hierarchy, his narrator of the humiliated suitor offering himself up as an object of their amusement, while showing their common bond of masculinity. The laughter of the seven Florentine ladies served Boccaccio in his justification of the healing power not only of laughter, but of comic fiction, during a time of social chaos. These authors were furthermore able to display their own talent as writers through the words of the women they used, nowhere more evident than in Chaucer’s use of his Wife of Bath to engage playfully with a long-standing masculine tradition of praising and blaming women. To give their heroines the last laugh did not require them to be particularly sympathetic to women. As the antitheatricalists lamented, the devils were far more entertaining to watch than the saints, and they got the best lines. Although this may be because, as Dioneo suggested, humans as fallen beings are more likely to laugh at scandalous behavior than virtuous deeds, it is also because our minds seek the opportunity to turn around commonly accepted truths. The Wife of Bath wins us to her side and Madonna Filippa wins her case, not because of their feminism, but because of the privileged space of laughter they have opened and in which the audience is invited to share. Yet the men who used their witty heroines for their own purposes were also drawing from the world around them; their fictional creations do give us glimpses of a culture of medieval women’s laughter. While we have a 239

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tendency to envision medieval women, like the two women who objected to the bookseller’s wares in Le Vendeur de Livres, running away from humor that is offensive, the literary texts I have examined allow us to imagine under what circumstances women were not only the willing recipients of jokes, but active producers of jokes as well. Given what we know about the many ways in which women’s lives, both public and private, were constrained by an economic, political, and social system that privileged men, it is reasonable to suppose that the kind of reactive laughter we see in fictional heroines may have resembled that of actual women. The pragmatic laughter that the Wife of Bath carves out for herself faced with a tradition that will never take her seriously anyway, like the derisive laughter of the lady of Frauendienst confronted with a lady service tradition that figures women as absent, is a logical response entailed by women’s limited options. The mocking jokes that Dunbar’s unhappily married women make in their own minds, like the elaborate anatomical riddles of the Baghdad sisters, similarly allow them control over mental space, when control over social space is not so easy. The experiences about which these women laugh were furthermore shared by many medieval women. The lady of Frauendienst’s clever plan to foil her would-be rapist invokes the specter of rape, with which many medieval women were threatened, and the farce wives’ appeal to imaginary lists of household chores to be done by their husbands and their call for men to recognize the value of their work must have struck some chords. It is not surprising to observe that the laughter of fictional heroines is most often linked to subversive strategies of appropriation rather than open confrontation and critique. Rather than claim that women are men’s intellectual equals, the Wife of Bath cheerfully advocates reading like a mere woman to suit her own purpose. The farce wives do not so much contest the feminine loquacity topos as they do appropriate it to win the game against their husbands, whether this means speaking up or remaining silent. Shahrazad does not tell the king that his misogyny is based on ignorance; by seducing him with her storytelling, she makes it appear that he has reeducated himself. The literary texts I have examined are also strikingly similar in their concern with female community, most evident in the example of Dunbar’s women, whose joking and drinking bring them together in their complaints about men. The women in Frauendienst also band together to laugh

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at the less-than-courtly man who will rape the lady if she does not submit to his offer of “service.” The three sisters from Baghdad exclude men from their dwelling, taking solace in shared rituals and laughter whose meaning is obscured for men. Female audiences, too, are asked to join this community, as when the Wife of Bath addresses “wise women” and claims to speak on their behalf. The farce wives, although each alone in her struggle against her husband, repeatedly speak on behalf of “we women” against “you men.” This communal aspect of women’s laughter arouses concern on the part of male narrators, who often try to contain or co-opt their space, physical and symbolic. In Dunbar’s poem, the women’s privacy is invaded by the voyeuristic gaze of the man who then offers the women up as the comic object of scrutiny for the male audience. In the Nights, the exclusionary female space of the three Baghdad sisters is opened up as all are then removed, like Shahrazad, to the conjugal sphere. In addition to containing their female characters, narrators often attempt to turn women in the audience into sexual objects who are invited to sample and enjoy the author’s sexual as well as literary wares. Boccaccio, boasting of his fine “tongue,” declares that he is a “weighty” writer, inviting his lady readers to sample his weight, and Ulrich insinuates that he can strip his lady readers of their clothing to see what lies underneath. That narrators put the lid on their female heroines and on their female readers can be seen to reveal men’s anxiety about the disruptive social potential of women’s laughter. Indeed, as conduct manuals fret over women’s disruptive laughter, medieval literary texts invoke women’s unruly interpretive practices, suggesting that medieval women were not always compliant readers. Ulrich’s apologies to his lady readers for any offense they might take, like Boccaccio’s concern that ladies might object to the things he has made them hear, suggest women’s contestive reading practices. Perhaps Boccaccio’s own suggestion of “reading for roses,” or reading selectively, was a strategy women applied to other comic texts as well, taking pleasure in the parts of the narrative they liked while rejecting those that they did not. Given the predominantly communal and oral nature of medieval literary culture, many women were also likely to have been sharing their responses with others. Even with an increase in literacy toward the end of the Middle Ages, the pleasures of the communal experience of listening to a story meant that literary texts continued to be read aloud to a group of

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people who could discuss with each other their reactions.1 The performance of a farce, the recitation of a tale, or an oral reading from a romance may well have functioned as springboards for discussion or playful verbal duels between men and women. Storytelling may also have been an occasion for women, in particular, to share their reactions with each other. The frequent separation of women’s work from men’s work meant that there were numerous opportunities for women to interact with each other. Women of the towns would go to public ovens and washing places where they would meet other women engaged in these daily tasks. Women in rural areas would also meet each other at the flour mill or during communal spinning and weaving. This is perhaps particularly true for Arab cultures in which women, especially in urban centers, generally lived secluded from men in a world of their own. As the anthropological research I discussed in chapter 3 suggests, one can well imagine that one of the primary activities of medieval women during these all-female gatherings was to exchange stories and tell jokes, many of which they would not tell in front of men. Although the texts I have discussed allow us to imagine a culture of women’s laughter, this is not to say that women’s sense of humor in the Middle Ages was qualitatively different from that of men; rather, it is the multiple relationships of the comic transaction that shape the nature of laughter. The texts suggest that when women were in private, their laughter was irreverent and even bawdy, whereas in front of men, it was more restrained. Women were more likely to make jokes at the expense of men when they were superior in social status to the men. The interactions in the Decameron and in the Thousand and One Nights suggest that women could well have appreciated sexual humor (typically considered more masculine) when it was offered to them in a spirit of communal play, in the effort to include rather than exclude; the scene between the porter and the three sisters suggests that the gift of laughter itself can transform the male outsider who is forbidden to know women’s secrets into an insider who becomes part of the household. Although not always for the same reasons, men too could laugh along with the heroines of medieval comic literature. If women were often invited to enjoy the rule of the unruly woman, men could be reassured that 1. See, for example, Joyce Coleman’s study of medieval English readers, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France, 221.

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their own anxieties were shared by other men. Many of the texts offer up inferior specimens of manhood (the old and impotent husbands of the Wife of Bath or Dunbar’s women, the naive and inept suitor of the lady in Frauendienst, jealous or stupid husbands of the Decameron, the lazy cobblers of the farce) against which men in the audience could judge themselves to be superior. The serious business of masculinity itself becomes the target in the Frauendienst, which has fun with the central problem in courtly culture—masculine identity comes from service to women— pushing this idea to the extreme so that the way to demonstrate one’s manhood is to dress as a woman. Antifeminist discourse, too, is targeted in comic literature, and although male authors may wink in complicity with their male audiences even as they have their female characters critique this discourse, one can often hear in their uneasy laughter an awareness that the privilege accorded to them as men had the ironic result of excluding women from discourse about them. The self-consciousness with which Chaucer has his Wife chastise men for comparing everything to women suggests a willingness to concede that men’s discourse on women has become so excessive as to be emptied of meaning, whether or not this means that women should be entitled to have their say. Women’s laughter often renders tit for tat, reversing the charges men make against them, so that men’s words are deflected onto themselves, nowhere more clear than in the critique of clichés of feminine loquacity and deceit. The Decameron and Frauendienst both caution women against the deceptive and beguiling speech of men, even as the narrators of both in fact enact this process in their attempt to flatter and seduce female readers of the text. The farce wives mock the pat clichés voiced by their rather long-winded husbands about the evils of female speech, showing that they can either hold their tongues or speak as it suits them, thereby challenging the assumption that loquacity is an essentially female property. Women’s laughter also points to the ways in which the logic of medieval discourse on women works against itself. Not only does it unfairly place women in a no-win position but, if read to its fullest implication, ironically makes it impossible for women to be good. Chaucer’s Wife, after all, does not simply rant and rave like an emotional woman, but implies that it is men’s inconsistent or contradictory criticism of all women that authorizes this behavior. While men may take great pleasure in laughing about women’s stupidity and hypersexuality, it is in their interest to appeal

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to women’s reason to police their own behavior since the honor of any man’s household depended on the chastity of its women. Boccaccio may have been so ready to give his ladies sickles of wit to match men’s arrows in part because he recognized that sheep would need better defenses if they were to resist the wolves. The lady in Frauendienst in fact shows that it is not so much women’s responses to men’s wooing that is the problem, but men’s failure to listen. For if there are men who hear “no” as “yes,” a woman will need to be more resourceful in deflecting men’s advances. This does not mean that medieval authors were consciously attempting to undo the logic of medieval antifeminism through their comedy. Yet educated authors naturally turned to the tools of their trade (especially logic and rhetoric) in order to demonstrate their wit; a bit of fun through twisting an argument inevitably ended up exposing the vulnerabilities of truths otherwise taken for granted. If in joking there is truth (“en burdant dit hom veir”) what precisely was the truth of comic literature about gender? Was it that deviating from social norms would be punished by laughter? Or was it that other, more liberating ways of viewing male and female roles could or should be possible? The laughter of medieval texts suggests both. As the story medieval people told themselves about themselves, the deep play of comic texts provided a space for medieval culture to play with the problems of its gender system. Woman’s laughter could be used to reinforce dominant views of women’s subordinate status, but it could also unsettle these views in ways that pointed to the limits of such views. I have argued that one way of reconciling these seemingly opposing truths about medieval comedy is to consider the difference between the initial purpose of a comic text and its effect. Chaucer may have intended to make his Wife laughable, but with her resourceful, irreverent strategy of reading the authorities, the Wife herself invites us to join in her own laughter. Boccaccio may perhaps have been using his ladies to wishfully laugh away women’s objections to antifeminism, yet his heroines model for readers the power of women’s wit in their battles against men. In many respects, laughing women reconfirmed for men their fears of the weaker sex, and reassured them of the need for the gender system that privileged them, but it also sent the message to women, in Natalie Davis’s words, to “keep up the fight.” Indeed, I imagine that many of my readers who have been as entertained as I have by the words of the medieval women in this book would like to think that this fictive laughter had a real effect—that it spurred on

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“uppity” women in everyday life to resist with the jokes told to each other at the public oven or with the wisecracks made to rebuff or ridicule men.2 We would perhaps also like to imagine that this playful unwritten culture is what would eventually give voice to women such as Jane Austen or Dorothy Parker who would take all this laughter and put it in writing. That it has so often been difficult for women writers to claim laughter as their own is a sign of the energies they have needed to claim writing itself for their own. Christine de Pizan may have had a keen sense of humor, but she may well have sensed that comic writing, with its ambivalence, was not the vehicle best suited to a woman who wanted to make herself perfectly clear. The laughter of the fictive women populating medieval literature invites us to consider the specific cultural conditions that shape women’s relationship to humor today, to appreciate the gains women have made as well as reflect on the limitations that they share with their medieval forebears. The most significant difference between today and the Middle Ages of course is that we now have documented examples of female writers, stand-up comediennes, cartoonists, playwrights, filmmakers, actresses, and situation comedy writers who have invaded the formerly all-male arena, often creating humor specifically calculated to amuse women in their audience.3 A recent current of “male-bashing” humor testifies that women can use their humor to render tit for tat, daring to do in public what medieval women may have done in private. Feminist academics, too, use their sharp wit and a “playful, punning attitude to language” as they perform their work of critiquing language and thought patterns harmful to women, testifying to their increasing ease with an academic discourse they have claimed for themselves.4 Yet, women continue to be charged as lacking a sense of humor and women themselves continue to be common targets of male comics. Moreover, they are targets in ways that readers of this book now recognize as all too familiar. Jokes about women continue to characterize them as vehicles 2. I have in mind here the recent coffee-table books on “uppity women” by Vicki Leon, ´ which provide short anecdotes about known historical women. These books cover “ancient times,” “medieval times,” “the Renaissance,” “Shakespearean Times,” and “The New World.” 3. See Susan Horowitz’s 1997 study of women’s stand-up comedy in the United States, Queens of Comedy, 133– 61. 4. Frances Gray, Women and Laughter, 35, thinks that it is not mere coincidence that contemporary feminist scholarship (notably the work of Cixous) employs a playful attitude toward language, for it serves to “de-familiarize language itself, to expose the hidden agendas behind words taken for granted.”

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for men’s sexual pleasure but unpleasant in their incessant talking. Wisecracks about nagging and bossy wives have changed little since Juvenal and Ovid wrote their antimarriage satires.5 Moreover, the backlash against women comics suggests that some of the social structures that limited women’s laughter in the Middle Ages remain in place. A woman who uses her humor publicly still risks being considered too aggressive, unfeminine. One example is the stand-up comedienne turned situation comedy star Roseanne, whose show of the same name ran from 1988 to 1997. Roseanne unleashed her cutting wit against all levels of the male establishment, including her boss, her husband, and the male-dominated domain of television. This assertive humor resulted in great ratings and spawned many fan clubs, but unleashed a tide of negative responses from the mainstream press that castigated Roseanne’s physical and verbal unruliness, that familiar combination that made her “unfeminine.” Complaints by male critics about Roseanne’s “bitchy, crass” humor echo the complaints about “bossy, ribald” women made by medieval conduct book writers.6 That complaints about women’s behavior in the thirteenth and twentieth centuries share common features should caution us against assuming any inevitable progress in the history of women’s laughter. While feminist theory has helped us to theorize women’s comedy in the Middle Ages, I hope that my study of medieval women’s laughter will in turn provide useful lines of inquiry for feminist investigations of contemporary humor. Medieval texts may surprise some readers with the complexity of their concerns, many of which can still speak to contemporary audiences. Given the long history of the censure of women’s laughter, it is unlikely that women who laugh assertively and loudly in public will be able to escape any time soon being perceived and labeled as unfeminine. But perhaps women can work within this bind that they have inherited, finding new ways to adapt it for their own purposes, just as medieval heroines willingly admit to the faults men attribute to them, but take pleasure in their ability to put these attributes to their own use. The Wife of Bath’s pragmatic wit as a response to antifeminism, the Decameron ladies’ sharp sickles in sparring with their male companions, the Tretis women’s ribald mockery of pretentious husbands, the Frauendienst heroine’s ridiculing of her arrogant 5. The syndicated cartoon strips Beetle Bailey and Dagwood are examples. 6. See Kathleen Rowe’s discussion of the attacks on Roseanne in The Unruly Woman, 51– 65. See also Dresner, “Roseanne Barr.” It should be noted that class is also at issue in the response to Roseanne’s blue-collar values.

Conclusion 247

suitor, the farce wives’ triumphant victory over their lazy husbands, and the three Baghdad sisters’ unabashed joking over sexual body parts: all offer portraits of medieval women laughing for their own pleasure, making us take a second look at texts long assumed to serve solely as amusement for men. And in reading for women’s laughter we will do justice to the rich layering of medieval comic literature, whose ambivalent female characters beckon to us with a wink, and whose narrators equivocate and tease, ultimately letting readers, from multiple and diverse perspectives, have the last laugh.

APPENDIXES

•

A PPENDIX A

Arabic Transliterations Arabic Letter

Transliteration b t th j h· kh d dh r z s sh s· d· t· z· gh f q k l m n h w y 251

252

A PPENDIX A

Long vowels are indicated by a ( ¯) macron over the vowel; a ¯ is given for alif ( ) or alif maqsa¯rah ( ). Ta¯ marbu ¯tah ( ), when not vocalized is rendered as ah.

A PPENDIX B

Arabic Text for Chapter 6 Below are passages from Mahdi’s edition of the Alf Layla wa-layla. The passage number given corresponds to the page of the chapter on which the English translation is cited. 203:

209:

230:

253

254

A PPENDIX B

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Index

Abbasid, 213, 225 Abu ¯ Tamma¯m, 213– 14 Abu ¯ l-Qa¯sim, 214n. 37 Adab, 213– 14, 226, 235 Adam de la Halle, 183 Adevineaux Amoureux, 95– 96, 147n Adultery, 74, 85, 87, 116, 196, 210n. 22, 217n. 43. See also Husband, as comic butt; Marriage; Wife, as comic butt Against Jovinian, 37, 170n. 6 Ahmed, Leila, 205n. 4, 221n. 53, 229n A’isha: charges of adultery against, 210n. 22, 217n. 43; respected teller of hadiths, 210; wit of, 210– 11, 217 Aisha Kandisha, 217, 223, 234– 35 A¨ıt Sabbah, Fatna, 9n. 29, 212n. 31, 231n. 73 Alf Layla wa-layla. See Thousand and One Nights Al¯ı al-Baghda¯d¯ı, 216 Allen, Robert, 17n. 57, 159n. 53 Amin, Qasim, 220n. 49 Andalusia, 208, 211 Andreas, James, 54n. 47 Andreas Capellanus, 102, 132, 177 Anne de Bretagne, 175 Anne de France, 8, 10– 11, 82 Antifeminism: binary logic of, 20– 21, 36– 37, 149– 52, 171, 180– 81, 239, 243– 44; clerical tradition of, 2– 3,

20, 33– 37, 176– 77, 206; as cliché, 20, 178– 79, 217– 18, 243; as defamation, 23, 182– 83; as “game,” 20, 26, 29– 62, 92, 97; label applied to medieval comic literature, 2– 3; in medieval sermons, 3, 45, 113, 177; shared European and Arabic heritage of, 205 Apte, Mahadev L., 10, 26n. 85, 71n. 16, 120n. 39 Arab world, relationship with Europe in the Middle Ages, ix, 205– 6 Aristotle, 5n. 10, 11n. 34, 49n. 38, 205 Ars amatoria, 9, 88n Arthur, King, 128, 161 Artifice, women’s use of, 105 Aubailly, Jean-Claude, 186n. 41 Aucassin et Nicolette, 159n. 54 Austen, Jane, 245 Authorship, male, 2– 3, 20, 41, 105, 124– 25, 157– 59, 182– 83, 210 Autobiography, 127– 29 Baghdad, 37n, 208, 214n. 37, 226 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 7, 13, 16, 32, 44, 47, 54n. 46 Balten, Pieter, 174 Barber, C. L., 32n. 6 Barreca, Regina, viii, 2, 10, 12, 31n. 5, 71, 138, 155n. 43, 157n. 49 Basoche, 172 Bawcutt, Priscilla, 108n. 19, 111n,

275

276 Bawcutt, Priscilla (continued) 112n, 113n. 26, 118n. 36, 121n. 41, 122– 23 Bayless, Martha, 14n. 42 Bédier, Joseph, 13n. 39 Beetle Bailey, 246n. 5 Bellamy, James, 206n. 9, 225n. 64 Bennett, Judith, 197n. 57, 198n. 58 Benson, Pamela, 83n. 37 Bentsen, Eileen, 118n. 35 Berger, John, 158n. 51 Bergson, Henri, 15, 16– 17, 148 Béroul, 118n. 35 Bible, 34, 39, 51, 153, 170, 177, 217 Bitterling, Klaus, 121n. 40 Blamires, Alcuin, 29n. 2 Bloch, R. Howard, 20, 59, 105n, 179n, 220n. 49 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 63– 98, 121, 124– 25, 152– 53, 166, 177, 205n. 5, 225, 236, 239– 47 Body, female: associated with irrationality, 4– 7, 41– 42, 58, 92; control over movement of, 1, 9– 10, 131– 32, 212; hypersexuality of, 3, 31, 107, 217, 231, 243; as matter, 5, 21, 44, 83, 89, 213– 14, 222; mutability of, 4– 6; mystification of, 21, 216– 17; orifices in, 9– 10, 180– 81, 212; and reproduction, 215; veiling of, 220. See also Humors; Uterus; Vagina Book of the Duchess, 6n. 13, 7 Boucquey, Thierry, 182 Bowen, Barbara, 169n. 3, 201n. 64 Bowrd, 108, 119 Branca, Vittore, 65nn. 4– 7, 79n. 31 Bremmer, Jan, 2n. 4, 11n. 34, 79n. 30 Brody, Saul N., 129n. 6, 136n. 19 Brown, Steve, 173n. 11 Brownlee, Marina Scordilis, 94n. 50 Bruggen, ¨ Elke, 151n. 35 Brundage, James A., 72n. 17, 123n. 47, 161n al-Bukha¯r¯ı, 236

IN D E X

Bullough, Bonnie, 159n. 54 Bullough, Vern, 159n. 54 Burgel, ¨ J. C., 207n. 10, 216n. 40, 237n. 81 Burns, E. Jane, 9, 21, 22, 38n. 16, 41, 117n. 34, 118n. 35, 127n, 180– 81, 224n Burton, Richard, 208– 9 Butler, Judith, 17– 18, 163 Cadden, Joan, 5n. 10, 17n. 56 Cairo, 208 Calabrese, Michael, 66n. 11 Camilla, 162 Camille, Michael, 191n. 48 Canso, 127, 130 Canterbury Tales, 25, 29– 62, 77, 91, 93, 121; Clerk, 32, 37, 43– 44, 48, 53– 55, 60– 61, 91; Friar, 54; Host, 31, 48; Jankyn, 33– 35; Man of Law, 37, 57; Merchant, 57– 58, 117; Miller, 117n. 32; Nun’s Priest, 35; Pardoner, 40, 48, 54; Parson, 56; Shipman, 51, 57, 113; Wife of Bath, 29– 62, 63– 64, 86, 112, 113, 127, 142, 151, 170n. 6, 171, 179, 202, 234– 35, 239ff. Caquet des Femmes, 202n. 67 Carlson, Susan, 183n. 35 Carnival and carnivalesque, 124n. 49, 158; Bakhtin’s theory of, 13– 14; in the Canterbury Tales, 32, 43– 44, 47, 54; in drama, 173; in public rituals, 13– 15, 186 Castiglione, 89n. 46 Cent nouvelles nouvelles, 22 Chanson de mal mariée, 113n. 27 Chastoiement des dames, 131 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 6, 29– 62, 75, 95, 121, 142 Christine de Pizan: advice to women by, 1, 7, 73, 132, 185, 195n. 52; attacks on antifeminist discourse by, 24, 33, 36, 46, 75, 88, 123, 136, 179; charges of defamation by, 23;

Index 277 prudery of, 75– 76, 80; use of wit by, 41– 43, 41n, 179, 245; as woman reader, 24– 25 Cicero, 85– 86 Cixous, Hélène, 12, 21– 22, 38, 110, 224, 226, 245n. 4 Clark, Robert, 201n. 63 Class: in Freud, 19; in medieval estates literature, 24; in reader interpretation, 24– 25, 59; and relation to humor, 11, 13, 16, 20, 25, 70, 80– 81, 113n. 26, 157– 59, 223, 239; women as separate, 24, 213 Clef d’amors, 9n. 25 Clement of Alexandria, 4n. 9, 7 Codex Manesse, 134 Cohen, Gustave, 170n. 7 Col, Gontier, 75 Col, Pierre, 33 Coleman, Joyce, 242n Collingwood, Sharon, 197n. 56 Comedy: in Aristotle, 49; as control, 47, 115– 21, 240; in Renaissance, 173, 175n. 16, 183n. 35 Comensoli, Viviana, 197n. 55 Comic transaction, 18– 19 Community. See Laughter; Play Conduct literature, vii, 1, 7– 12, 70, 102– 3, 119, 130– 31, 177, 179n, 241 Confrérie de la Passion, 174 Contenance des Fames, 6 Cook, Jon, 43n. 28 Corbaccio, 97, 177n Corpus Christi cycle, 196– 97 Cortés, Julio, 203n Courtly love, 21; absence of female voice in, 147– 52, 166, 240, 244; parody of, 117, 129– 30, 139– 43, 170; test of male suitor in, 132 Courtly lover, parody of, 129 Crane, Susan, 46n. 32, 58n. 54, 61n. 59 Cross-dressing, 145, 159– 67 Crusades, 128

Culler, Jonathan, 23n. 75 Cunning. See Wiles, women’s Curse: as marketplace humor, 54; of Wife of Bath, 52– 58 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 32n. 6 Dagwood, 246n. 5 Dante Alighieri, 74, 90, 205n. 5 Davidson, Clifford, 172n. 10 Davis, Natalie, 15, 58n, 195, 244 De amore, 102, 132– 33, 177n De Bruyn, Lucy, 175n. 19 Decameron, 25, 63– 98, 99– 100, 103, 106, 124– 25, 166, 200, 204, 225, 236, 239– 47; Alibech, 73, 76, 92; Dioneo, 77– 81, 97, 239; Filostrato, 78– 79, 92– 94; Madonna Filippa, 85– 86, 239; Madonna Oretta, 84– 86; Pampinea, 68, 78, 81– 83 De claris mulieribus, 83, 97 De Coniuge non ducenda, 111, 170n. 6 De Cultu feminarum, 153n. 40 Defamation, 23, 32n. 8, 182– 83 Delany, Sheila, 36n. 13, 39n. 19, 226n. 66 Demande d’amour. See Pastimes Detti piacevoli, 107n Devil, 37, 175– 76, 239 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 33n. 9, 39n. 20, 46n. 32, 52n Disciplina clericalis, 205 Disputatio, 20 Documenta matris ad filiam, 102 Dodici avvertimenti, 8n. 22 Douglas, Mary, 16n. 53 Dresner, Zita Z., 246n. 6 Drinking: associated with laughter, 102– 3; men’s, 47, 146, 195– 97; women’s, 102– 3, 197 Du Bruck, Edelgard E., 173n. 13 Dulcitius, 137 Dunbar, William, 99– 125, 137, 154, 209, 236, 239– 47; “Ane Blak Moir,” 105n. 16; “Richt arely one Ask Wedinsday,” 102n. 7; Tretis of

278 Dunbar, William (continued) the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, 99– 125; “Twa Cummaris,” 102, 121 Dupréel, Ernest, 18, 233 Dussère, Carolyn, 130n, 137n. 24 Eavesdropping. See Narrator, male Education: of male character by female, 93– 94, 149– 50, 172, 215– 17, 240; of Shahrazad, 215– 18; of Tawaddud, 221– 22; viewed as unfeminine, 83; of women, parodied, 112– 14, 191; women’s lack of access to, 35– 36, 62, 191n. 49 El Saadawi, Nawal, 212 El-Shamy, Hasan M., 208n. 14, 209 Enders, Jody, 183 Eneasroman, 162– 63 Enfants-sans-Souci, 172, 175 English, James, 19n. 62 Epistre au Dieu d’Amours, 43, 88, 123 Erasmus, Desideramus, 6– 7, 179 Erotic manuals, medieval, 134, 211– 12, 227, 231– 32 Euphemism. See Kina¯yah; Sexual language ´ Evangiles des quenouilles, 95n. 53, 114– 15 Evans, Deanna Delmar, 124n Eve, 21, 36, 182 Fabliaux, 9, 17, 51, 86, 117, 144, 216; antifeminism of, 2, 13, 86; and “woman on top,” 13, 186n. 42; individual titles: “Aioul,” 117n. 32 “Aristoteles und Phyllis,” 144n “Berangier au long cul,” 117n. 32 “Chevalier qui fist les cons parler, Le,” 9 “De la damoisele,” 73 “De la saineresse,” 119 “Des .III. Chanoinesses,” 205n. 6 “Des .III. Dames de Paris,” 201n. 65

IN D E X

“Du con qui fu fait a la besche,” 175n. 19 “Ritter und die Nu¨ sse, Der,” 144n “Ritter unter dem Zuber, Der,” 144n “Sentier batu, Le,” 96– 97, 108 “Sohait des vez, Le,” 107n “Tresces, Les,” 86– 87 “Trubert,” 159n. 54 “Veuve, La,” 122n. 42 “Vilain mire, Le,” 117n. 32 Falvo, Joseph, 79n. 29 Farce, 9, 17; conservatism of, 110n. 21, 186; female roles in, 172– 73; silence wager in, 169– 70, 181; slapstick in, 169; troupes performing, 172– 74; women as spectators of, 174– 75, 199– 201; individual titles: Botines Gaultier, Les, 195n. 51 Brigand, le vilain, le sergent, Le, 201 Celuy qui se confesse a` sa voisine, 195n. 51 Chaudronnier, Le, 168– 202 Colin qui loue et dépite Dieu, 175n. 18, 183n. 35, 195n. 51, 200n Cuvier, Le, 183, 195– 96, 201– 2 Deux Maris et leurs deux femmes, Les, 180– 81, 190n. 46, 195n. 51 Dorellot, Le, 183n. 35, 199n. 61 Drois de la Porte Bodès, Les, 168– 202 Esveilleurs du chat qui dort, Les, 175n. 18 Farce joyeuse a` iii personnaiges, 195n. 52 Farce moralisée a` quatre personnaiges, 180– 81 Femmes qui font accroire a` leurs maris de vecies que ce sont lanternes, Les, 199n. 61 Femmes qui font rembourer leurs bas, 199 Femmes qui se font passer maistresses, 183n. 35, 190, 191n. 49, 195n. 51, 199n. 61 Frère Guillebert, 199n. 60

Index 279 Goguelu, Le, 175n. 18 Grand Voiage et pelerinage de Saincte Caquette, Le, 177 Maistre Mymin qui va a` la guerre, 175n. 18 Maˆıtre Mimin e´ tudiant, 177n. 25 Martin de Cambray, 175n. 18 Nouveau marié qui ne peut fournir l’appointement de sa femme, Le, 186n. 42 Obstination des femmes, L’, 169, 179– 80, 183n. 35, 188– 89, 195n. 51 Ordre de mariage et de prebstrise, L’, 190 Pardonneur, d’un triacleur, et d’une tavernière, Un, 201n. 65 Pet, Le, 169 Pont aux anes, Le, 200 Resjouy d’Amours qui révèle son secret, 199n. 61 Savetier Calbain, 183n. 35, 195n. 51 Savetier qui ne respont que chansons, 199 Trippière, La, 175n. 18 Vendeur de livres, Le, 22– 23, 240 Faris, Wendy B., 215n Farmer, Sharon, 47n. 34 Feast of fools, 13 Femininity: medieval ideal of, 20– 21, 37; as performance, 37– 41, 163– 64 Fenster, Thelma, 41n. 23, 179n Ferrante, Joan M., 20n. 66, 132n. 12 Feudalism, 13, 157– 58 Fickleness: in men, 146– 47, 155; in women, 6, 92, 143. See also Adultery; Husband, as comic butt; Wife, as comic butt Filocolo, 97 Finney, Gail, 26n. 85 Finucci, Valeria, 89n. 46 Fisher, Sheila, 127n Fitna, 219– 22 Flattery, false, 138– 39 Flynn, Elizabeth A., 23n. 76 Flyting, 54n. 47

Folly, 6– 7, 182– 83 Foly of Fulys, 102n Fradenburg, Louise, 105n. 16 Francesco da Barberino, 9n. 25, 69– 70, 83 Frauenbuch, 146– 47, 150– 51 Frauendienst, 27, 126– 67, 171, 173, 202, 223, 236, 239ff. Frauenturnier, 163n. 58 Freed, John B., 129n. 4, 157– 58 Freud, Sigmund, 19, 42, 75, 76, 97– 98, 136, 162n, 219n. 45, 223– 24, 232– 33 Fuss, Diana, 23n. 75, 25n. 82 Galen, 5 Game. See Jesting; Play Games. See Pastimes Garber, Marjorie, 159n. 54, 166 Garden, as a place of privacy, 120– 22 Garin lo Brun, 8n. 22 Gaunt, Simon, 17n. 57 Gautier le Leu, 122n. 42 Gaze, male, 105, 219– 22, 241. See also Fitna; Narrator, male, voyeurism of Geertz, Clifford, 16, 163 Gender: as performance, 17– 18, 163– 66; medieval views of, 17, 21. See also Femininity; Masculinity Gerhardt, Mia T., 208n. 13 al-Ghaza¯l¯ı, 206n. 9, 211 Gilbert de Tournai, 197 Gluckman, Max, 14, 16 Goldberg, Harriet, 15n. 46 Goldberg, P. J. P., 198n. 58 Goldin, Frederick, 127n, 154n. 41 Good Wife treatises, 102, 198n. 58 Gossip, 121– 22, 179, 196n. 55, 202n. 67 Gravdal, Kathryn, 16, 136– 37 Gray, Frances, 245n. 4 Green, D. H., 152n. 37 Green, Richard Firth, 95n. 52 Grimaldi, Emma, 77n Griselda, 37, 48, 55, 60, 77, 91

280 Grossman, Judith, 218n Guinevere, 159n. 54 Hadith, 210, 217n. 43, 235, 236– 37 Hahn, Thomas, 61n. 59 Halley, Janet E., 127n H ¯sat Ab¯ ı Tamma ¯m, 213 · ama Hambly, Gavin R. G., 206n. 8 Hanawalt, Barbara A., 196 Hansen, Elaine Tuttle, 29n. 2, 54n. 45, 55n. 48, 60– 61 Harris, John Wesley, 172n. 8 Harun al-Rashid, 204, 213, 221, 228 Hazar Afsaneh, 207 Heinrich von Veldeke, 162– 63 Helisenne, 89n Heptaméron, 65n. 8, 196 Herlihy, David, 116n Hika ¯yat, 214n. 37 Hindley, Alan, 172n. 9, 174n. 14, 201n. 65 Hobbes, Thomas, 25n. 83 Hoccleve, Thomas, 123 Hodges, Laura F., 197n. 55 Holcomb, Chris, 89n. 46 Hollander, Robert, 89– 90 Homosexuality, 71, 161 Hope, A. D., 103n Horace, 31, 89 Horowitz, Susan, 245n. 3 Hostiensis, 71 Hotel ˆ de Bourgogne, 172, 174 Household. See Work, women’s Howard, Jean E., 175n. 16 Hrosvitha von Gandersheim, 137 Hubba¯, 209 Huizinga, Johan, 31n. 6 Humayda bint Numa¯n ibn Bash¯ır, 211 Humor: and feminism, 2, 245; gender differences in, 26, 120, 242; and historical change, 245– 46; lacking in women, viii, 2, 23, 75, 193– 95, 245; self-deprecating, 157– 58; studies on women and, 2. See also Sexual humor Humors, 5– 6, 121, 180

IN D E X

Husband, as comic butt, 15, 25, 44, 86; cuckolded, 57, 86– 87, 119, 181; drunken, 47, 119; dull- witted, 17, 44, 119, 243; henpecked, 15, 109– 11, 181, 184– 91, 200; hypocritical, 42– 44, 178– 79; jealous, 44; lazy, 193– 97, 243, 247; old, 44, 47, 49, 123, 243; pretentious, 42– 44, 108– 9, 119, 246; sexually inadequate, 44, 49, 104– 8, 186, 243 Ibn Ab¯ı T·¯ahir, 209n. 20, 211, 236n. 80 Ibn al-Matran, 5 Ibn Qutayba, 213– 14, 224– 25 Ibn Quzma¯n, 211 Impersonation, female, in Chaucer, 58– 59 Invective: by female characters, 54, 107, 118n. 35, 211– 12; medieval genre (hija¯ ), 211n. 27; in medieval London, 50 Iovino, Angela Maria, 94n. 49 Irigaray, Luce, 22, 37– 38, 46n, 219n. 45, 227, 233 Irony, 42– 43, 105– 6, 151 Irwin, Robert, 205n. 4, 206n. 7, 207n. 11, 208nn. 12– 14, 209n. 18, 212– 13, 216n. 40, 225n. 63 Iseult, 118n. 35 Ishaq Ibn Umran, 5 Isidore of Seville, 5 Isolde, 136 Jackson, William E., 150n Jacques de Vitry, 177n. 26 Jaeger, C. Stephen, 81n al-Ja¯h·iz·, 214, 216n. 39, 220– 21, 237 James IV (king of Scotland), 100 Jardine, Lisa, 228n. 69 al-Jawbar¯ı, 205, 216 Jean de Condé, 24n. 80, 96– 97, 107 Jean de Meun, 8– 9, 23, 33, 74– 75, 80, 177, 225 Jeay, Madeleine, 114n. 30 Jehan LeFèvre, 20n. 65, 184

Index 281 Jerome, Saint, 37, 39n. 20, 112n, 170n. 6 Jesters, female, 209 Jesting: anger in, 55– 57, 97; as humiliation, 95– 96, 126– 27; and immodesty, 1, 10– 11, 246; intent behind, 18, 77– 80; mental acuity in, 41– 42; in opposition to earnest, 14, 31, 58, 96– 97, 214 ; truth in, 55– 58, 106, 244. See also Wit Jesus, 4, 39, 220 Jeu de la Feuillée, 183 John Chrysostom, 153n. 40, 177 John of Salisbury, 4n. 9 Johnson, Lesley, 13n. 40 Jokes: and joking relationships, 18– 19; as self-exposure, 232; tendentious, 32, 40, 95– 96, 232– 33; as triangle, 19, 75– 76, 97– 98, 232– 33 Joking. See Jesting Joldersma, Hermina, 105n. 15 Joseph (Old Testament), 217 Joubert, Laurent, 4– 8, 41, 43, 49, 86, 87, 102– 3, 121n Jousting, as battle between sexes, 34, 96– 97, 161– 63 Justice, Steven, 59n. 56 Juvenal, 177, 246 Kahn, Madeleine, 160, 163 Kay, Sarah, 44n. 30, 155 Kayd, 217 Kendrick, Laura, 47n. 35, 51n. 42, 53n, 56– 57 Kina¯yah, 224– 27. See also Sexual language King, Margaret L., 83n. 37 Kinsley, James, 105n. 14, 122n. 43 Kirkham, Victoria, 66n. 11, 68n. 13, 78, 90n Kishtainy, Khalid, 4n. 9, 225n. 61 Kita¯b adab al-nikah, 206n. 9, 211 Kita¯b al-agha¯n¯ ı, 211n. 27 Kita¯b bala¯gha¯t al-nisa¯, 209n. 20, 211, 236n. 80 Kita¯b h·ad¯ ıth alf layla, 207

Kita¯b al-mukhta¯r f¯ ı kashf al-asra¯r wa-hatk al-asta¯r, 216 Kita¯b al-zahr al-aniq fi l-bus wa l-ta niq, 216 Knapp, Peggy, 30n. 3, 46n. 33 Knight, Alan E., 174n. 14, 182n. 31, 186n. 43 Knight of the Tower. See La Tour Landry, Geoffrey de Kowaleski, Maryanne, 197n. 57, 198n. 58 Kristan von Hamle, 134 Krueger, Roberta, 17n, 24n. 77, 155n. 44 Kruk, Remke, 236n. 79 Lacour, Léopold, 172n. 9 Lacy, Norris, 13n. 40 La Fave, Lawrence, 25n. 54 Lamentations de Matheolus, 184 Lancelot, 159n. 54, 161n Lane, Edward William, 226 Language. See Sexual language Lata¯ if al-lutf, 214 La Tour Landry, Geoffrey de, 11, 95, 188 Laughter: and aggression, 12; anthropological studies of, 10, 14– 19, 120, 242; church attitudes toward, 4– 6; communal, 77– 80, 232– 34; as correction, 15; and disfigurement of women, 8– 9, 70; and female promiscuity, 10, 103, 212; as feminist resistance, 12, 21– 22; at inflexibility, 17, 90, 148, 182; medical understandings of, 5– 6, 43, 120– 21; moderation in, 4, 80, 212; of Muhammad, 4n. 9; as relief, 14– 15, 120– 21, 186; and superiority theory, 25, 186; therapeutic justification of, 7, 77– 79; as unfeminine or immodest, 1, 10, 69– 71, 102, 246; womenonly, 76, 104, 114– 15, 120– 22, 137– 38, 201, 235– 36, 241– 42; women’s, as source of pleasure to men, 7– 8, 98

282 Lauretis, Teresa de, 22n. 72 Law, medieval: criticized by female characters, 84– 86; parodied in farce, 183– 84; subverted by female characters, 117– 18 Lebègue, Raymond, 172n. 9, 173n. 13 Lees, Clare, 26n. 84 Le Goff, Jacques, 6n. 15 Leisure, women’s, 66 Lent, 43, 102 Léon, Vicki, 245n. 2 Leprosy, 136 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, 15 Levin, Harry, 195n. 51 Liber decem capitulorum, 102n. 6, 105n. 13 Lindahl, Carl, 32n. 8, 50n. 39 Lintilhac, Eugène, 174n. 14 Literacy, female, 152 Literature, medieval: as corruption, 74– 75, 81; as instruction, 89– 91, as recreation, 7, 31– 32, 66 Livre de Leësce, 20n. 65 Livre des trois vertus, 1, 25, 185 London, 50 Lovesickness, 66– 67 Love tokens, 144– 45 Lucas van Leyden, 136 Lucken, Christopher, 177n. 20, 182– 83 Luttrell Psalter, 96n. 55 Lydgate, John, 49 Macrobius, 4n. 8 Mahdi, Muhsin, 203, 208, 221 Makhlouf, Carla, 109 Makowski, Elizabeth M., 198n. 59 Malory, Sir Thomas, 159n. 54, 161n Malti-Douglas, Fedwa, 209n. 20, 213n. 34, 214, 219n. 45, 232n. 74 Mann, Jill, 24n. 77, 59n. 55, 75n. 23 Map, Walter, 43n. 27, 59 Marbod of Rennes, 102, 105 Margaret Tudor, 100

IN D E X

Marguerite de Navarre, 7, 65n. 8, 196 Marie de Luxembourg, 114n. 30 Marriage, in Middle Ages: conjugal “debt” in, 49, 85; as containment of feminine misrule, 183n. 35, 234, 236– 38; discourse against, 58, 97, 111– 12, 198n. 59; and divorce, 206; and husband’s authority in, 51n, 125, 184– 90; and Islam, 206– 7; lack of choice in, 85, 115– 17; reciprocity in, 46– 47, 52, 197; unequal ages of spouses in, 116– 17, 123; women’s unhappiness in, 111– 22, 228– 29, 236. See also Husband, as comic butt; Wife, as comic butt Marshall, Rosalind K., 116n, 118n. 36 Martin, June Hall, 129n. 5 Martin, Priscilla, 31n. 5, 39n. 20, 43n. 27, 59n. 54 Martines, Lauro, 87n. 43 Marzolph, Ulrich, 211n. 24 Masculinity: and class difference, 157– 59; as performance, 163, 189– 90; ridiculed by women, 109– 11, 145, 243; women as vehicles for demonstrating, 158– 63, 243 Mathers, E. Powys, 226 Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 66n. 9, 68 McCarthy, Shaun, 117n. 33, 124n. 49 McCash, June Hall, 24n. 79 McDonald, Nicola F., 60– 61 McGhee, Paul E., 26n. 85 Medusa, 21– 22, 224 Melancholy, 6, 66, 87, 121 Ménagier de Paris, 11– 12, 72– 73, 184– 85, 187– 88, 195n. 52 Ménard, Philippe, 8n. 24 Menocal, Maria Rosa, 205n. 5 Mensa Philosophica, 4n. 8 Meredith, Peter, 174n. 15 Mernissi, Fatima, 211n. 24, 217n. 42, 219n. 47, 220n. 49 Mesura, 4, 80 Metlitzki, Dorothee, 205n. 5 Midsummer Eve, 121

Index 283 Milnes, Humphrey, 129nn. 4– 7, 154n. 41, 157n. 47, 162n. 57 Mimicry, 37– 44, 47 Minnesang, 127– 30, 142 Misogyny. See Antifeminism Modesty, feminine: and blushing, 63– 64, 70– 72, 75, 83, 166; compromised by laughter, 1, 10, 69– 71, 102, 246; and medieval theater, 174– 75; norm of, 9– 12, 89– 91, 212; as performance, 73– 74, 104– 6; speech and, 71– 73, 131– 32. See also Sexual humor; Sexual language Moreh, Shmuel, 209n. 20 Moriz von Craûn, 133n. 16 Morreall, John, 25n. 83 Morte d’Arthur, 159n, 161n Mother: responsible for controlling daughter, 10– 11, 82, 102; as subversive “teacher” to daughter, 45, 113n. 26 Muller, ¨ Jan-Dirk, 129n. 4 Muller, ¨ Ulrich, 163n. 59 Muhammad, 4n. 9, 209, 210– 11, 220 Muju ¯niyyah, 225 Mules, in erotic manuals, 231 “Mumming at Hertford,” 49 Mystery of the Three Masters, 172 Naddaff, Sandra, 224, 225n. 64, 231n. 72, 232n. 75 al-Nafza¯w¯ı, 9n. 29, 49, 211– 12, 216, 219n. 45, 227, 231 Narrator, female, 27, 205, 217– 18 Narrator, male, 19, 26, 167; apologies by, 24, 59, 68, 75, 155; eavesdropping by, 99– 100, 105– 6, 120, 123– 24; flattery by, 26, 55, 152; lovesickness of, 27, 66– 67; playfulness of, 60– 61, 95; self-deprecation of, 140, 157– 58; sexual innuendo by, 67– 68, 153– 55, 241; voyeurism of, 153– 54, 241 Nazhu ¯ n bint al-Qala¯¯ı, 211 Neff, Théodore Lee, 13n. 39

Noah’s wife, 196– 97 Noakes, Susan, 39n. 18, 74n. 22 Obscenity. See Sexual language Ogden, Dunbar H., 172n. 8 Olson, Glending, 4n. 7, 31– 32, 47n. 35, 56, 59n. 56, 66n. 9, 78, 96– 97 Opitz, Claudia, 187n, 198n. 58 Ovid, 3, 9, 66, 88n, 105, 133– 34, 246 Owst, G. R., 33n. 10, 45n Paris, 170, 172 Parker, Patricia, 179n Parody, medieval: of authoritative tradition, by women, 55, 111– 15; and class, 16; of courtly love, 117, 129– 30, 139– 43, 170; of legal rhetoric, 183; religious, 13, 55 Parzival, 156 Pastimes, medieval, 60– 61: demande d’amour, 94– 97, 111, 113, 236; roi qui ne ment, 95n. 52; Saint Cosme, 170; vendition, 96 Pastourelle, 20, 130, 136– 37 Pearcy, Roy, 113n. 27 Peire Vidal, 128n Pellat, Charles, 224 Penis: and male gaze, 219; nicknames for, 219n. 45, 227, 231; as object of ridicule, 106– 7, 110; relation to pen, 110– 11 Peregrinus, 46 Peters, Ursula, 129n. 4, 132n. 11 Petit de Julleville, Louis, 172n. 8, 173n. 12, 174n. 16, 175n. 17 Petrus Alfonsi, 205 Philippe de Navarre, 10, 161n “Phyllyp Sparowe,” 49 Pinault, David, 208n. 12, 225n. 64 Plague, 65, 69, 77– 79, 121 Play: anthropological studies of, 16; in the Canterbury Tales, 29– 62; and community, 31– 32, 92– 96, 242; as distancing mechanism, 17, 22;

284 Play (continued) encouraged in marriage, 211; as temporary, 13– 14, 31, 56 Pliny, 5 Polacheck, Dora E., 196n. 54 Polygamy, 206– 7 Potiphar’s wife, 217 Potter, Joy Hambuechen, 64n, 89n. 46 Praise of Folly, 6, 7 Pratt, Karen, 20n. 65, 29n. 2 Prostitution, 85, 113n. 26, 213 Psaki, Regina, 97n. 57 Putter, Ad, 161n Quintilian, 18, 85 Quinze joyes de mariage, 112n, 117n. 32, 122 Qura¯n, 207n. 10, 217, 217n, 221 Rabelais, Fran¸cois, 5 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 19n. 61 Randall, Lilian M., 96n. 55 Rape, 50, 130: in the pastourelle, 136– 37; women’s wit as resistance to, 133– 37, 240, 241 Rasmussen, Ann Marie, 113n. 26, 126n, 198n. 58 al-Rawd· al- a ¯t·ir [Perfumed Garden], 9, 212, 219n. 45, 231n Reader-oriented criticism, 123 Readers (audience), medieval: of Canterbury Tales, 48– 49, 61; of Decameron, 64– 65; of Frauendienst, 152– 53; gendering of, 23– 24, 199– 200; responsibility in interpreting by, 75– 76, 91; of Thousand and One Nights, 208– 9; of Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen, 100, 123– 24; women as, 23– 25, 39– 40, 240. See also Narrator, female; Narrator, male Recreation, medieval theories of, 31– 32 Reid, David, 39n. 19, 50n. 40 Reinmar von Hagenau, 142 Reiss, Edmund, 114n. 29, 122n. 44

IN D E X

Remedia amoris, 66 Rey-Flaud, Bernadette, 182, 191, 195n. 51 Ribat, 229 Richard de Bury, 34– 35, 62 Ricke, Joseph M., 197n. 55 Riddy, Felicity, 198n. 58 al-Risa¯lat al-qiya¯n, 216n. 39, 220– 21, 237 Robert de Blois, 131 Robertson, Pamela, 38n. 16 Rogers, Katharine, 201n. 65 Roi qui ne ment. See Pastimes Romance (genre), 50– 53, 129 Roman de la Rose, 22, 44, 88n, 177; debate surrounding, 23, 33– 37, 41– 43, 75; sexual language in, 74– 75, 80, 225; and women’s laughter, 8– 9 Roman de Silence, 159n. 54 Roseanne, 246 Rosenthal, Franz, 211n. 24 Rowe, Kathleen K., 246n. 6 Roy, Bruno, 95n Russell, H. Diane, 15n. 50, 117n. 32, 134– 36, 159 Sarcasm, of female voice, 12, 42, 112, 138, 141, 145, 210– 11 Schibanoff, Susan, 39n. 18 Schippers, Arie, 211n. 27 Schmidt, Klaus M., 126n Schnell, R udiger, ¨ 47n. 34, 52n, 197n. 56, 202n Schœll, Konrad, 191n. 49 Scholes, Robert, 23n. 75 Scott, Tom, 100n, 122n. 45 Seclusion of women, in Arab world, 207, 242 Sells, Michael A., 217n. 43 Sermon joyeux, 113 Sexual humor: and Freud, 19, 75– 76, 136, 223– 24; medieval men’s use of, 136, 154– 55, 162– 63, 225– 26, 231– 32; medieval women’s use of, 106– 8, 204, 209, 211, 234– 35,

Index 285 247; women’s laughter at, 76– 78, 242 Sexual language: by married women, specifically, 103, 209; medieval attitudes toward, 74– 75, 224– 27; translator’s treatment of, 226; women’s avoidance of, 71– 73, 224– 25; women’s use of, 103– 4, 204, 224– 26 Shahar, Shulamith, 24n. 80, 118n. 36, 201n. 65 Shakespeare, William, 208 Singing girls, in Arab world: contrasted with wives, 235– 38; education of, 236– 37; for men’s entertainment, 206– 7, 212– 16, 230; and sexual arousal, 220– 21; wit of, 212– 14 Sins: laughter as a doorway to, 6; seven deadly, 123n Skelton, John, 49 Smarr, Janet Levarie, 65nn. 3– 8, 74n. 21, 78n. 27, 80n. 32, 89n. 45, 91n Smiles, women’s: contrasted with laughter, 7, 10, 12, 31, 71; etymological confusion with laughter in French, 8n. 24 Smith, Susan, 15n. 50, 136n. 18 Solterer, Helen, 23n. 74, 133 Spearing, A. C., 108n. 19, 110n. 22, 117n. 33 Spearman, Alan, 43n. 27 Speech, men’s: boasting, 89n. 45, 179; deceitful wooing, 88– 89, 93, 125, 130– 32, 243; judged by women, 140– 42, 149 Speech, women’s: danger of silence, 81– 83, 125; deceitful, 13, 45– 46; eloquent, 85, 210, 215, 222; and erosion of husband’s authority, 125, 184– 90; excessive, 3, 30, 175– 85, 212, 240, 243; flirtatious, 92– 96, 132, 237; quarrelsome, 13, 30, 94; and refusal of suitors, 20, 131– 33, 147– 48, 211, 240. See also Gossip; Invective Spellberg, D. A., 210n. 22

Sponsler, Claire, 201n. 63 Stannard, J., 120n. 38 Stokstad, Marilyn, 120n. 38 Storytelling: in Arab world, 208– 9, 218; in frame narrative, 25; gender differences in, 208– 9; medieval value of, 84; and oral tradition, 207– 8, 241– 42; and relation to medieval historiography, 218 Stowasser, Barbara Freyer, 220n. 49 Strohm, Paul, 30n. 3 Suchomski, Joachim, 4n. 7 Sukayna, 211 Sutton-Smith, Brian, 16n. 53 Suzuki, Mihoko, 80n. 33 Tafritahs, 109, 120 Taverns, women’s presence in, 201 Tears, women’s: and deceit, 216; and mutability, 5– 6 Tease, woman as, 131– 38, 143 Tenso, 130 Tertullian, 153n. 40 al-Thaa¯lib¯ı, 214 Theater, medieval. See Farce Theophrastus, 34– 35 Thewis off Gudwomen, 102n. 4, 103n. 10 Thewis off Wysmen, 102n. 4 Thomas, J. W., 129n. 4, 132n. 13, 133n. 16, 141n, 156n Thomas Aquinas, 76n Thomasin von Zirclaria, 131 Thompson, N. S., 87n. 43 Thousand and One Nights, 203– 38, 240– 43, 247; Dinarzad, 218; Shahrazad, 27, 205, 209– 19, 240– 41; Tawaddud, 221– 22, 232 al-T¯ıfa¯ch¯ı, 4n. 9, 134n. 17, 211 Tinsley, David F., 153n. 39 Tissier, André, 168n, 169, 176, 178, 194n, 199n. 60, 200 Transvestism. See Cross-dressing Treasury of the City of Ladies. See Livre des trois vertus

286 Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, 99– 125, 201, 225, 236, 239– 47 Tricks, women’s: compared with men’s, 88– 89, 216– 17; in the Decameron, 86– 91; in farce, 182, 191; in Frauendienst, 134– 37. See also Wife, as comic butt; Wiles, women’s Trickster, 216 Tristan, 136 Tritton, A. S., 221n. 53 Troubadours, 127, 205 Turner, Victor, 14, 79n Ulrich von Lichtenstein, 27, 127– 67, 239– 47 Unruly woman. See Woman on top Uterus, 6 Utley, F. L., 24n. 77 Uyu ¯n al-akhba¯r, 225 Vagina, 9, 180– 81, 204, 212; nicknames for, 227 Vagina dentata, 9 Valerius, 34, 43n. 27 Van, Thomas, 40– 41 Van Gelder, Geert Jan, 214n. 35 Vecchio, Silvana, 197n. 56 Verberckmoes, Johan, 6nn. 15– 16, 11n. 34, 12n. 37, 95n. 52, 114n. 30, 121n. 40, 202n. 66 Vernacular, opposed to Latin, 35, 113 Vie S. Fiacre, La, 201 Violence, domestic, 15, 33, 76, 92, 189– 90, 195, 200 Virgil, 136 Virgin Mary, 136, 172n. 8 Wack, Mary, 196n. 55 Walker, Ashley Manjarrez, 217n. 43 Walker, Nancy, 157n. 48 Walla¯da, 211 W a¨ lsche Gast, Der, 131 Walther von der Vogelweide, 142

IN D E X

Wanton, etymology of, 103 Webber, Sabra, 208n. 14 West, Mae, 38 Westphal, Sarah, 162n. 58 Widows: communities of, in Arab world, 229; financial independence of, 118 Wife, as comic butt: adulterous, 86– 91, 144, 216; deceitful, 13, 112– 13, 144, 216– 17, 236; domineering, 15, 181, 184– 91, 246; killjoy, 193– 95; loquacious, 175– 84, 212, 240, 243, 246. See also Husband, as comic butt Wife of Bath. See Canterbury Tales Wiles, women’s, 44– 46, 86– 89, 117– 18, 134– 36; in Arabo-Islamic tradition, 216– 18; justified, 46– 47, 86– 87. See also Wife, as comic butt; Wit Williams, Robert I., 16n. 53 Wilson, Katharina, 198n. 59 Wilt, Judith, 124 Wit: as commodity, 214, 226; and courtliness, 92; in the Decameron, 63– 98; and etymological connection to wisdom, 44– 45, 106; and hospitality, 232; as innate in women, 44– 48; of medieval Arab women, 210– 11; and oratory, 85– 86; as weapon, 26, 41– 43, 84– 86, 211, 244; of Wife of Bath, 29– 62. See also Jesting Wolf, Alois, 129n. 7, 148n, 153n. 39, 162n. 57 Wolfthal, Diane, 122n. 42 Woman on top, 3, 12– 17, 58; in carnival, 13– 14; in medieval art, 134– 36; Wife of Bath as, 51– 52 Work, women’s: and emasculation, 109– 10, 191– 93; and guilds, 197– 98; household, 190– 202, 240; and public life, 202, 242; and urban economy, 197– 98 “Wright’s Chaste Wife,” 196 Zago, Esther, 66n. 10

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