But this is not the adulterous love of the troubadours. Dante’s love for Beatrice is chaste, and his salvation depends upon it. However, what is remarkable about his vision is that it implies no disregard of or contempt for what is human, no triumph of spirit over matter: Beatrice is both. Though exalted, she remains a very human figure. In the words of Marina Warner, Dante ‘. . . was too profound and noble a thinker to fall into dualism and use the perfection of Beatrice to denigrate the human race or the rest of the female sex . . .’130
Such a vision of woman as both human and an expression of beauty with the power to transfigure others could not counter the misogynistic currents running through Christianity. By the time Dante had completed his work, those currents were beginning to run more strongly. They would become a raging torrent.
The Church, always disapproving of the courtly love tradition, discovered that the land of the troubadours was home not only to seditious and disturbing ideas about women, but to a major heresy – Catharism. A large section of the population had abandoned the Catholic Church altogether in favour of a movement that rejected the world as evil and preached that the Pope and his bishops had forsaken the teachings of Jesus.131 The persecution of the Cathars linked heresy to ideas about women in a way that would facilitate the witch-hunts of later centuries.
The Cathar movement had originated in the East, cradle of many such dualistic faiths going back to before Christianity. Like earlier heresies, and indeed, like early Christianity itself, it had shocked the orthodox because of the prominent role women played in it. The Cathars allowed women to preach and to become part of the movement’s spiritual elite, the Perfects. Wealthy women of Languedoc were among the most prominent of the patrons of Cathar preachers as they were of troubadour poets.
Pope Innocent III declared a crusade against Catharism in 1208. It was conducted savagely. Over a period of thirty years, hundreds of thousands were butchered, burned and hanged, with Cathar women being singled out for special humiliation and abuse as the fate of Lady Geralda, one of the most renowned of the Cathar women, grimly illustrates. After being taken prisoner, she was thrown down a well and stoned to death. ‘Even by the standards of the day, the act was shocking,’ commented one historian of the heresy.132
The crusade against the Cathars effectively wiped out the culture that had nourished the tradition of courtly love. Troubadours continued to write love poetry – but it was chastened and thoroughly Christianized. The purge against heresy became a purge against expressing certain ideas about the relationship between men and women. Poets now sang that the purity of love was defined by the denial of its own goal: the possession of the beloved. According to Warner, this was a concept which ‘would have been nonsense’ to the early troubadours.133 The Mother of God and Queen of Heaven now emerges as part of the ideological struggle and acquires the title Notre Dame – Our Lady. The poets substitute love for one lady – Mary – for the ladies of the court. Gautier d’Arras, who came from Northern France, and wrote in disapproval of the spirit of Eleanor’s court, proclaims ‘Let us marry the Virgin Mary; no one can make a bad marriage with her,’ and casts disdain on the love of real women.134
Deification dehumanizes women as much as its polar opposite, demonization. Both deny women their ordinary humanity. However, that humanity is the theme of one of the greatest portraits of women ever written which appeared around 1387 to light the gathering gloom of the waning of the Middle Ages. It gave voice, perhaps for the first time since the comedies of Aristophanes over 1,700 years earlier, to woman not as goddess or temptress but as a human being with vices and virtues like any other. As portrayed in The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer (1342–1400), Alison, the Wife of Bath, is certainly no Beatrice – no man will find salvation through love for her. Nor is she an embodiment of the virtues of Mary. She does not try to be. Her vices, like her virtues, are rooted in the demands made upon her by the exigencies of everyday life. For Alison, men are a management problem, but one that she is confident can be solved by women who use their wits. More importantly, she protests against the history of misogyny and its injustice. In doing so she denounces every misogynist from ‘Old Rome’ to the Bible, including Metellus, ‘that filthy lout’ who beat his wife to death for drinking wine, and Gaius Sulpicius Gallus, who divorced his wife because she went out with her head uncovered (see Chapter 2); she is especially scathing on the Church’s tradition of defaming women. In ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue’, she speaks out:
For take my word for it, there is no libel
On women that the clergy will not paint,
Except when writing of a woman-saint,
But never good of other women, though.
Who called the lion savage? Do you know?
By God, if women had but written stories
Like those the clergy keep in oratories,
More had been written of man’s wickedness
Than all the sons of Adam could redress.135
Her husband (the fifth) infuriates her, constantly reading from his collection of misogynistic homilies. After a furious row, she persuades him to fling his book in the fire and to submit to her rule.
‘The Wife Of Bath’s Tale’, which follows, is about an attempt to answer the question, made famous many centuries later by Sigmund Freud, ‘What do women want?’ The hapless knight who is set the task of finding an answer fails until the solution is given to him by an old woman:
A woman wants the self-same sovereignty
Over her husband as over her lover,
And master him; he must not be above her.136
But for Alison, there was no real puzzle. Sovereignty meant freedom to be herself, in all her womanly nature.
The Wife of Bath’s indignation about the misogyny of the Church came just a few decades before it would take on its most deadly, indeed, nightmarish form. This was also prefigured in the misogynistic disdain for human sexuality expressed by Pope Innocent III, who exterminated the Cathars and the culture of courtly love. He proclaimed ‘man was formed from the itch of the flesh in the heat of passion and the stench of lust, and worse yet, with the stain of sin.’137 The Pope saw the world as beset with evil. In 1215 at the Fourth Lateran Council, confession was made compulsory for all adult Catholics. This way, the Church could police the souls of the faithful more effectively. He ruled that women’s role in the religious life be severely reduced. They were permanently barred from hearing confessions and preaching; even their role in singing during service was to be restricted. In everyday life, women too were to be confined to the role of – in the words of St Thomas Aquinas – ‘man’s helpmate’. He advocated that men should make use of ‘a necessary object, woman, who is needed to preserve the species or to provide food and drink’. Brutal force employed by an absolutist Church was the ultimate means of deterrence. Not until the totalitarian states of the twentieth century was there an institution which could wield such power. Yet, underlying it was a terrible insecurity. Cathars were not the only threat. The Church ruled that Jews must wear a distinctive form of clothing – a yellow patch and a horned cap to mark them as the murderers of Christ. In the outbreaks of religious hysteria that became more common during this period, mobs turned upon Jewish communities in vicious pogroms. According to Heer, ‘every abortion, animal or human, every fatal accident to a child, every famine and epidemic, was presumed to be the work of an evil doer. Until they had been eliminated the Jews were obvious culprits; afterwards, it was women, witches.’
The witch craze which ran from the late fourteenth to the late seventeenth centuries and resulted in the deaths of unknown thousands of women retains the ability to shock us largely because it is the only known instance in the history of persecution in which to be a woman was to be a chief suspect in a vast conspiracy and the grounds for imprisonment, torture and execution. It is the most deadly event in the history of misogyny, and still, after the lapse of many centuries, the most disturbing and perplexing.
Throughout much of hum
an history, right up until the present, people have believed in witches, both male and female, and saw their magic as capable of being exercised for benign as well as malign purposes. Periodically, witches were punished.138 But the early Church believed that the Incarnation had effectively vanquished Satan and he was not seen as exercising a powerful influence over witches or anybody else. For the first millennium and more of Christianity, belief in witches was generally treated as a superstition of the ignorant, and the Church warned against it. Usually, when witches were killed it was at the hands of enraged or frightened peasants. The official position of the Church remained that magic did exist, and some women – and men – could use it, in particular to bring about impotence and cause abortions. But it condemned as a sin the belief that witches could ride through the air at night, turn love for a person into hatred, transform themselves or others into animals, and have sex with demons.139
By the late thirteenth century the mood had changed. A darker, more pessimistic attitude replaced this healthy caution and theologians began reconsidering the status of the Devil, his demons and their human servants. Why?
Heresies had already shaken the once sturdy edifice of Catholicism. They were followed by the pandemic of the Black Death (1347–50) – one of the greatest disasters ever to strike Europe. An estimated 20,000,000 died. The world that emerged in its wake was one more full of dread and uncertainty. ‘At the close of the Middle Ages, a sombre melancholy weighs on people’s souls.’140
The late Medieval mood of pessimism, mixed with doubt and fear, expressed itself in a way that would have a direct impact on the fate of women: the growth in interest in demons, a need to prove that they were real, and therefore that the Devil and his demons were abroad in the world. As the historian Walter Stephens summed it up, ‘Without proof of a devil, there can be no proof of God.’141
The most convincing proof of the reality of demons would be their ability to interact with human beings. There is no more powerful and corporal form of interaction than sex. But to have sex, demons needed bodies. Many learned monks bent over ancient texts in bare cells burned the midnight oil pondering the corporality of demons; the great authorities St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) were invoked for those who were in favour of devilish embodiment. Augustine had pointed to the pagan gods, who he believed were demons, and their fondness for raping and impregnating women as proof they could interact with humans. St Thomas Aquinas believed demons were the supreme, supernatural gender-benders. They could appear as females – succubi – and go about extracting semen from men.142 Then they would transform themselves into male demons or incubi, and impregnate women. The sceptics argued that demons were illusionary.
To a modern reader, the whole debate over demon bodies and what demons could or could not do with them may seem remote from concerns about the status of women. But the lives of many thousands of women would depend on its outcome. Abstract arguments often have concrete consequences, sometimes of the most horrifying kind.
By the fourteenth century the arguments for the reality of demons had won crucial support at the highest levels of the Church. Pope John XXII (1316–34) was obsessed with witchcraft and heresy; and he was a true believer in demons. It was during his long reign that for the first time in history a woman was accused of having sex with the Devil. In 1324, Lady Alice Kyteler of Kilkenny in Ireland earned that dubious distinction. The Pope had appointed Richard Ledrede as Bishop of Ossory in southeastern Ireland, a man who shared his obsessions.143 Lady Kyteler was on her fourth husband when she was brought to the bishop’s attention. Bishop Ledrede listened eagerly to accusations from the children of Lady Kyteler’s three dead husbands that she had used witchcraft to dispose of their fathers. She was also accused of running a sect that forswore Christianity, using the swaddling clothes of dead unbaptized babies to concoct evil potions and poisons with which to harm good Catholics. Most sensationally of all, under torture her maid Petronilla told the bishop how she acted as a go-between for the Devil and her mistress. When the Devil as lover first appears in history he does so in the form of three big, handsome black men. Petronilla said she saw with her own eyes (and apparently she looked on frequently) Lady Alice making love with them, sometimes in broad daylight. ‘After this disgraceful act, with her own hand [Petronilla] wiped clean the disgusting place with sheets from her own bed.’144
Lady Kyteler was also accused of being the leader of an anti-Christian sect, thus linking witchcraft, demonic sex and heresy. No longer would witches be seen as lonely women mixing potions in village cabins. They were becoming part of a vast conspiracy.
Lady Kyteler escaped to England and avoided punishment. But the unlucky Petronilla was burned alive. She was one of only two people, and the only woman, to be burned as a witch in Ireland.145
Accusations of witchcraft and demonic sex began to occur more frequently in the fifteenth century. They were a feature of the first wide-ranging witch-hunt in the Rhone Valley in southern France in 1428, during which between one and two hundred witches were burned.146 Less than sixty years later, a landmark text in the history of misogyny appeared to explain why it was that more and more women were apparently leaving the Church and throwing themselves into the arms of Satan and his demons. It is not that Malleus Maleficarum, or ‘Hammer of The Witches’(1487), has anything original to say about misogyny – it has not; it merely repeats all the abuse heaped upon women in the Bible and the Classical authors. But what it does do for the first time is explicitly link the supposed weaknesses of women’s nature to their propensity to fall for the Devil, and thus become witches. Its influence was hugely augmented by a new invention – the printing press. There is more than a little irony in the fact that the invention that would revolutionize people’s access to information should be so instrumental in spreading one of the most lethal forms of ignorance, fear and prejudice ever to manifest itself.
Malleus was the work of two Dominican Inquisitors, James Sprenger and Henry Kramer (though Kramer is thought to have been chiefly responsible for writing it). Sprenger had spent time as an Inquisitor in Germany. But his main claim to fame was that, before he occupied himself with burning women, he established in 1475 the Confraternity of the Holy Rosary, a form of devotion to the Virgin Mary, which even to this day good Catholic schoolchildren are expected to join. The terrible polarity of Christian misogyny has found no more powerful expression than Sprenger’s devotion both to the Virgin Mary and to torturing and burning innocent women for supposedly having sex with the Devil.
Of Kramer less is known. He seems to have become interested in demons thanks to a chance encounter in Rome in 1460, when he met a priest who was possessed by the Devil.147 It convinced him that it might be possible to find physical evidence of demons and so prove beyond all doubt that they were real.
Kramer and Sprenger had a powerful accomplice in their campaign to prove that women were having sex with Satan. Pope Innocent VIII (1484–92) had a reputation of being not so innocent. He was born Giovanni Battista Cibo, and contemporary chroniclers depict him as one given to ‘unbridled licentiousness’, who fathered several illegitimate children. He would spend the last weeks of his life unable to digest any food except woman’s milk, an ironic fate for a man who in effect consigned untold thousands of innocent women to the flames. Kramer and Sprenger convinced the Pope with their tales of women copulating with demons, eating children, making men impotent, aborting foetuses, and killing cattle, that witchcraft was a serious threat to civilization and the Church.
In 1484, the Pope issued a Papal Bull, which gave dogmatic force to the claims that witches were engaging in sex with demons. It declared:
It has indeed lately come to Our ears, not without afflicting us with bitter sorrow, that in some parts of Northern Germany, as well as in the provinces, townships, territories, districts, and dioceses of Mainz, Cologne, Treves, Salzburg and Bremen, many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation, and straying from the Catholic Faith, have abandoned t
hemselves to devils, incubi and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offences, have slain infants yet in the mother’s womb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine . . . these wretches furthermore afflict and torment men and women . . . they hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their wives nor wives receive their husbands . . . and at the instigation of the Enemy of Mankind they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls . . .
Wherefore We . . . decree and enjoin that the aforesaid inquisitors [Kramer and Sprenger] be empowered to proceed to the just correction, imprisonment, and punishment of any persons, without let or hindrance, in every way . . .148
It was the equivalent of a declaration of war, and Malleus became a sort of justification for it. Women would be its chief victims. In the coming centuries, 80 per cent of those executed in the witch-hunts would be women.
The Inquisitors have a simple explanation for why it is that nearly all witches are women: ‘All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable,’ they write, citing Proverb XXX. ‘There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, a fourth thing which says not, It is enough; that is, the mouth of the womb . . . Wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lust they consort even with the Devil.’ They allege other faults in women that make them vulnerable to temptation, of course, including vanity, feeble-mindedness, talkativeness and credulity. But in the minds of the Inquisitors, women’s greater carnality is the primary cause for witchcraft. Since presumably this fault identified as particular to women is not new, it might be asked why there are almost no reports of women copulating with the Devil before 1400, when the Church decreed making love to demons a capital crime? Malleus has no explanation for this, other than to say that in the good old days, ‘the Incubus devils used to infest women against their wills’. But modern witches ‘willingly embrace this most foul and most miserable servitude’. The claim that neither women nor witches are what they used to be is a grotesque version of the age-old lament uttered by every misogynist from Cato the Elder to the latest TV evangelist about the low morals of modern womanhood. It would have been comic if its consequences had not been so horrific.
A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice Page 12