From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  When the Knight of La Tour Landry composed a manual for his daughters’ behaviour in the fourteenth century, he enumerated the nine follies of Eve: ‘And know ye that the sin of our first mother Eve came by evil and shrewd acquaintance by cause she held parlement with the serpent which as the History saith had a face right fair like the face of a woman. And spake right meekly.’10 The chapter and verse of Eve’s folly continues to concentrate on her speaking: to the serpent in the first place, to Adam about the fruit, to God when she tried to excuse herself. ‘Therefore my fair daughters,’ the Knight admonishes, ‘herein may you take good example, that if one require you of folly or of any thing that toucheth your honour and worship you may well cover and hide it saying that you shall speak thereof to your lord.’11 The virtue of Prudence, portrayed as a good housewife, wears a padlock on her mouth. Sixteenth-century morality tales likewise painted the portraits of the Wise Man and the Wise Woman (here), the latter declaring through lips firmly under lock and key:

  Everyone look at me because I am a wise woman …

  A golden padlock I wear on my mouth at all times

  so that no villainous words shall escape from my mouth

  but I say nothing without deliberation

  and a wise woman should always act thus …

  do not tell tales on others’ actions, I say to you roundly …12

  By contrast, the foolish prattler was a standard, and often bitter, subject of jest. A figure from the topsy-turvy world of carnival, the Dutch saint Aelwaer – Saint All-True – was envisaged by the artist Cornelis Antonisz. in a broadsheet of around 1550 which brazenly parodies holy pictures (here).13 Sister to other mock patrons of such sinners as sluggards (Sinte Luyaert; Sainte Fainéante), spendthrifts (Sint Reijnuut), and prattlers (Sainte Babille), Aelwaer was paid tribute in a lengthy but not entirely ill-tempered ballad which targeted many men who marched under her banner:14, 15

  On Saint All-True’s head sits a bird

  Called a magpie, who always chatters,

  Just so is a quarrelsome man who never shuts up

  Who never has anything good to say …16

  She was made patron saint of all quarrellers, rioters, troublemakers, revellers, musicians and other rowdy crew of Flanders and of Amsterdam in particular. She wears a screeching magpie on her head, carries a squealing pig under her arm, and holds up a fighting and no doubt caterwauling cat in her other hand. This comic epitome of the fighting, nagging, scolding, malicious, prattling, tongue-wagging busybody rides upon an ass: a blasphemous parody of the Virgin – of Dürer’s Flight into Egypt in particular – with a piglet replacing the baby, and the magpie the Holy Ghost. Interestingly, the anonymous verses celebrate her powers and the chorus calls all to join in worship of the Great, the Holy Aelwaer, presiding genius of all uproar, for at the end of the day the gravity of such noise, says the anonymous author, has been much exaggerated.

  Gossip was perceived to be a leading element in women’s folly, and in the sex’s propensity to foment riot.17 Yet the changes in meaning of the word ‘gossip’, however pejoratively weighted, illuminate the influential part of women in communicating through informal and unofficial networks, in contributing to varieties of storytelling, and in passing on their experience in narrative.

  II

  In 1014, the word ‘gossip’ was used in English for a baptismal sponsor, god-mother or -father; by 1362, it denoted a ‘friend’ and applied almost exclusively to female friends invited by a woman to the christening of her child. A ‘gossiping’ is an old word for a christening feast. Jan Steen’s high-spirited painting known also by that title, in the Wallace Collection in London (Pl. 3), shows a kitchen bustling with friends and helpers; the confined mother lies in bed in an alcove, looking very weak, while two women keep by her side; around the table, by the chimney, more women are heating water, gesturing to each other, engaged in conversation as they focus on the newborn child. From 1590 to the 1660s, when such festivities were set to become ever more popular and lavish sources of social bonding, among Catholics and Protestants alike, the word ‘gossip’ had gone into free fall, and came to mean ‘a person, mostly a woman, especially one who delights in idle talk; a newsmonger, a tattler’.18

  The words compadre and comare or commare reveal a similar shift in meaning in Italian: originally a co-father or co-mother, the masculine variant retained its meaning of godfather (Marlon Brando continued the custom in the film). The feminine version meanwhile shifted to refer to a midwife. In modern Italian, commare means a gossip or crony, one of the grackle women dressed in black who can still be seen sitting out in the street passing the time of day with her friends in the traditional daily chiacchiera or gossip. The word’s connection to midwives has become obsolete, but was current before the seventeenth century and the (male) professionalization of the skill. Scipione Mercurio’s early treatise on childbirth was entitled La commare o’ raccoglitrice, and was published in 1595, with a dedication in verse to the ‘learned daughter of a wise man’ whom everyone honours for her skills.19 In French, commère followed the same downward path: originally a godmother, it too came to mean a gossip-monger, a telltale; the English ‘Cummer’, now obsolete, also meant godmother, intimate friend and gossip, as well as midwife and wise woman until the last century.

  The Wise Woman, a paragon compounded of classical and biblical morality, wears a padlock on her lips to signify obedience and discretion, and declares that she would rather die, like Lucretia, than dishonour her husband. Her key signifies good housekeeping, the mirror recalls the transience of worldly pleasures, the snakes at her waist warn of evil backbiting and quarrelling, the jug represents her charity to those in need, and her horses’ hooves stand here for sure-footedness in the treacherous ways of temptation; she exhorts all wives to follow her example. (Anton Woensam, c. 1525.)

  There are several strands in this web of associations around women as gossips which, pulled together, enhance the emblematic figure of the storyteller. Women dominated the domestic webs of information and power; the neighbourhood, the village, the well, the washing place, the shops, the stalls, the street were their arena of influence, not only the household.20 To some extent, in some societies, women still do so, and their roles as unofficial carers, voluntary fund-raisers, parish helpers often make women newsbearers and informal fixers in the modern city as well as the medieval, and in London as well as Naples.

  The control of fertility and mortality, through skills like midwifery, and the direction of attitudes and alliances and interests through gossip exist in close relation to each other in the unofficial networks of the social body; informal speech and exchanges are ‘a catalyst of the social process’, which can produce harmony and conflict, which can divide and bind: ‘Gossip is a powerful social instrument’, writes the anthropologist Robert Paine, ‘for any person who learns to manage it and can thereby direct or canalize its catalytic effect.’21

  Gossipy gatherings of women together were the focus of much male anxiety about women’s tongues in Reformation as well as Catholic Europe: when the Knight of La Tour Landry’s instruction manual was published in Augsburg in 1498, the woodcuts illustrating it pictured women in church incited to chatter by the Devil; the following page showed a group of them gossiping during Mass (above). One devil is sitting in the corner with pen and inkwell, taking down what they are saying, while another is busy stretching the parchment with his monstrous mandibles because, as the Knight wrote, it was too short to contain all the talk. Tellingly, the Knight included men among the chatterers in church in his text, but the illustrator shows only women so engaged. His men are depicted at prayer.22

  Sinful women prattle during Mass and keep the devils busy: one chews on a parchment to stretch it so that the devil scribe will have enough room for all the wicked tittle-tattle he overhears. (From Der Ritter von Turn, Augsburg, 1498.)

  Typical meeting places for women alone, like public laundries and spinning rooms, were feared to give rise to slander and intrigue and secr
et liaisons.23 Of all the professions, official and unofficial, those which allowed women to pass between worlds out of the control of native or marital family seemed to pose the greatest threat to apparent due order. Prostitutes, midwives and wetnurses occupied no fixed point in the structure of society, as they physically moved between worlds: in a 1508 edition of The Hours of Simon Vostre, one of the earliest printed prayerbooks in Europe, a dance of death depicts the Reaper gathering up one woman after another to the grave. He dances off with a queen, a duchess, a regent, a knight’s lady, an abbess, a prioress, a damoiselle, a market vendor, a theologian – théologienne! – all the way down the moral and social scale to the witch, the bigot and the fool – la sote (here). All are wearing headgear or hairstyles appropriate to their walk in life, and of all the older women, only the nourrice (wetnurse) has her hair escaping, untidily, from under her headcloth – this unkemptness betokening the essential disarray of her role, neither virginal (symbolized by long maiden hair) nor matronly (hair hidden beneath a wimple) nor cloistered (veiled), but passing between those states, as a ‘mother’ to other women’s children, perhaps unattached herself, a messenger bringing news, gossip, from another place.24

  One of the earliest secular books of tales attributed to women, Les Evangiles des quenouilles – or The Gospel of Distaves, as it was known in the translation printed by Wynkyn de Worde – first appeared around 1475 in French, in Bruges, and it relates a typical session – or so it claims – of women’s gossiping and consultation.25 Numerous references in other works, from sermons to plays, attest the wide diffusion of this book; there was a copy in the library of the château at Chantilly, and Colbert, the great statesman and financier of the early part of Louis XIV’s reign, owned another. Colbert was Charles Perrault’s patron and friend, so that the Evangiles were known in the circle of the first writers of fairy tales as literature.

  The book belongs, generally speaking, to the tradition of gossiping and eavesdropping, of which tale-telling is a branch – Straparola, the author of Le piacevoli notti, when summoned before the Inquisition for indecency, defended himself by pleading that he had only taken down the stories he had heard from the lips of the lady storytellers.

  The pretext is a common one, and disingenuous, as we shall see in the case of the Evangiles des quenouilles, where the writer informs us, from the start, that he has been called in as a mere scribe to record the wit and wisdom of the gathering, exchanged over a series of six days, a traditional hexameron (here). The questions are practical, and frequently erotic; the group of matrons – of old wives – give remedies for impotence, wife-beating, unwanted babies, they interpret dreams and omens and weather portents, they recommend love potions, they give advice about handling animals, they foretell the future – all tasks intimately connected with natural processes. This was of course the domain of midwives, layers-out – and witches – and the target concern of a hellfire preacher like the Franciscan Olivier Maillard, who inventoried current superstitions. He naturally denounced sorcerers, who made pacts with the Devil, but he also attacked the practices described in Les Evangiles: carminatores (charmers) who use verbal spells to heal, diviners who prognosticate, chiromancers who interpret bodily signs, and interpreters of dreams, all fell to the lash of his tongue.26

  The friar was in deadly earnest, but in Les Evangiles the author has his tongue in his cheek. The whole proceedings are presented in facetious, mock-scholarly style, with Question and Answer in the schoolmen’s favourite manner of disputatio, and glosses offered by the attendant ladies. The woodcuts included in the first edition of Les Evangiles depict the participants telling the points of their arguments on their left hand with the index finger of their right, in the classical style of the rhetor, while the youthful scribe sits at work to the side with pen and scroll. Apart from the off-colour character of the remarks, the participants are given burlesque, dirty-minded names – Sebille des Mares (Sybil of the Swamps), Ysabel de la Creste Rouge (Isabella Red Crest) – or downright bawdy – Belote la Cornue, Perrette du Trou-Punais, Noir Trou (Big Horned Bella, Little Perry Stink-Hole, Black Hole), and so forth; the artist represents some in full matronly veils and coifs, their younger companions in décolletage and the fashionable steeple wimples of the late fifteenth century. Though it is indisputable that the book contains lore in circulation as seriously intended remedies and methods of redress, it passes it mockingly as lewdness and superstition and guys the purveyors as whores and bawds, beldames and trots. The distaff, the symbol of women’s domestic industry, also carried dubious connotations, on account of its shape, and it was frequently positioned by artists at a suggestive angle. It is also featured as a recurrent double entendre in the solution to obscene popular riddles – for instance, ‘I am one span long, delicate, round and white …’ (here).27

  When one of the distaff-wielding beldames, Transie d’Amour (Transported by Love), hears from the group that the loss of a shoe means that a lover or husband will go astray, she comments that this must be correct, as she lost her garter in the street a few days ago and has not seen her lover Joliet – Little Pretty One – since. The text does not fail to tell us that she is sixty-seven years old – a stereotypical figure from the danse macabre of the crone inflamed with lust.28 Cuckoldry fans the jokes, at the expense of women who instigate chaos and of men who allow it, just as in Steen’s christening feast a guest is already surreptitiously making the sign of the horned beast over the baby’s head, an apotropaic gesture, perhaps, against the humiliation inevitably threatening his future in this unruly society dominated by the deceits and scandalous appetites of women (Pl. 3).29

  Les Evangiles des quenouilles sends out conflicting messages, but it clearly parodies a type of circulating medieval text which had on occasions been written by a woman: the mirror of conduct, or, in other words, ‘life, a user’s manual’. Christine de Pizan, for instance, earnestly composed deeply felt variations on this didactic genre, and when she was invited, by a nobleman, to compose a poem about an unhappy love affair, she took the opportunity to combine a long verse romance with personal, stinging comments on the problem of passion for women. Like a beldame in the circle of the Evangiles des quenouilles, she doled out advice in the risky area of sex. But unlike them, she was sceptical of love’s promises. The Book of the Duke of True Lovers was probably written between 1403 and 1405, and in it Christine creates, as the mouthpiece of her practical discourse against romance, an older woman with the emblematically lofty name of Sebille de Monthault, Dame de la Tour. This Sibylline figure interrupts the lovers’ poetic duet to warn that their adultery is folly and will bring them misery and shame.30

  Not a message for gallant ears, and indeed a dynamic part of Pizan’s continuing campaign against medieval perceptions of women’s primary erotic role, for good or ill. The letter Sebille writes the lovers reappears as an example of the good advice a chaperone might send her mistress in Christine’s The Treasure of the City of Ladies of 1405, and it takes up a theme already present in yet another urgently phrased document, the earlier Debate of Two Lovers: thraldom to love, she points out there, very rarely truly happens, in spite of romance literature’s obsession with its power.31 ‘That’s a very common conte’, she writes dismissively, ‘a tale told to women’, and ‘she who believes it in the end is not considered very wise’.32

  Bearing in mind Christine’s Sibylline rejection of prejudice and fraudulence in traditional courtly romance and her level-headed warnings against its harmfulness, the claim that the parodic old women in Les Evangiles des quenouilles are peddling ancient, typical female wisdom looks collusive with that precise fraudulence. Attributing to women themselves the kind of salacious advice that corroborates adultery conveniently portrays women inciting and perpetuating the conditions which make them – as well as men – suffer. The male scribe, the male author, by picturing such erotic conspiracies among women alone, exculpates his own kind from responsibility for current fantasies about the opposite sex. But it is also clear, both from
Christine’s strictures and from the Evangiles’ author’s asides, that storytelling and spindle chatter were agreed to gather together women of different classes, and to disseminate dangerous attitudes to love and the governance of men.

  In the Evangiles the female ‘secrets’ on which he eavesdrops transgress as well in refusing a rational perception of the universe – as Christine implies with her reproaches against mother-wit. At the end, the self-styled scribe evades involvement altogether, and issues a warning that what is written in these Gospels demonstrates the frailty of those who give way to gossip when they find themselves together.

  In France and England, in the two centuries following the publication of the Evangiles, the theme of women’s gossip and its dangerous powers grew in intensity. In the seventeenth century, broadsheets denounced women’s rattling tongues. They were associated with curses and spells, with the vices of nagging and tale-bearing; there even exist, from the same century that saw the development of Mother Goose tales, branks or scold’s bridles – contraptions like dog muzzles designed to gag women who had been charged and found guilty of blasphemy and defamation.33 In England, in 1624, a law against cursing was passed, and its targets were not only men who swore, but women who could conjure.34 Victims identified as witches in league with the Devil by inquisitors and prickers were often only poor old folk who might use swearing and vituperation to retaliate against maltreatment or neglect in default of other means of defence.35 The classical and medieval topoi of unruly wives and matrimonial pains survived sturdily in the culture of print and gained a more sinister social and legal footing.