Troubadours: Quaint Singers or Purveyor of Male Dominance

Think of a medieval troubadour, and most of us envision a smooth-singing, tight-wearing gent strolling leisurely through ye olde village. The troubadour entertaining the culture-starved townsfolk with ballads about romance and chivalry, valiant knights and courtly maidens. To some degree, this image is true.

The troubadour, or travelling musician, was a popular sight in medieval Europe from the 11th century until the Black Plague in the 1300s. Songs performed by troubadours followed a common pattern and often told fictional tales of heroic deeds and complicated love triangles. But a good performer knows how to play to the crowd, so the theme of these poetic songs could take a vulgar turn, with veiled or overt references to the vagina. In fact, some of these salacious songs portrayed women as horny, sex-fiends.

 But, sadly, these tunes are vastly out-numbered by songs that thrust women into a subservient role as the recipient of men’s sexual aggression, with rape, seduction, and domestic violence as popular themes. The collection of troubadour ballads that remains illustrate the typical male-dominated attitude of the time: men were in the power roles, women were to be dominated and kept in their place. 

Birth Control: Present and Past

I thought this would be a timely post due to the recent ruling on coverage—or lack of---birth control in the United States.  Despite the current controversy, 21^st century birth control is much better now than in medieval times. 

Did you know that Michael Scot’s The Secrets of Nature, published in 1730, contains cryptic recipes that women shouldn’t eat because it will render them infertile? Also, a chap named Raymond Lull recommended that women should consume juniper and thyme to prevent pregnancy.

Despite the fact that post-modern birth control continues to improve, societal attitudes towards women and their reproduction are still consistent with medieval times. Who has a right to decide what happens in a woman’s womb? In the Middle Ages it was men: husbands, fathers, clergy, and the courts.  In 2014, it is courts, clergy, and employers.

To learn more about medieval birth control, The Medieval Vagina will be published this fall, so be sure to check it out!

Medieval Attitudes in a Modern Comnmercial

I saw a television commercial for a new product. It is a body wash that is specially formulated to be gentle on a woman's vagina. The commercial  is humorous, showing a man in the shower who accidently uses this vagina-friendly product. He freaks out – perhaps out of fear that his man-card will be revoked if his buddy learned of his faux pas or perhaps out of fear that his penis will transform into a vagina after coming into contact with a feminine soap.

 To boost his testosterone, the man seeks out a series of "manly" activities, such as chopping wood, mowing the yard, boxing, and karate. He even ends his masculine pursuits by crushing a beer can. Funny stuff!

This commercial combines three points we wrote about in The Medieval Vagina; how men fear the mysterious vagina, how we are all skittish about using the word vagina, and how vaginal hygiene products are viewed. Although the ideas in The Medieval Vagina are more than 600 years old, according to this 30-second commercial, the concepts still ring true today.

In The Medieval Vagina, we explore the vaginal paradox – how men in the Middle Ages were so fearful of the one feminine body part that they were also most attracted to. There is also a chapter dealing with term, words and euphemisms for the vagina. It seems crude and vulgar to us now, but the c-word was the acceptable term in medieval days. The word "vagina" really didn't enter English vocabulary until later, when Latin influenced the language, yet we are still intimidated by it.

 I noticed this  commercial uses "V" in place of "vagina". Maybe "vagina" is one of those words one cannot say on TV. And lastly, we included a chapter in The Medieval Vagina about douching and vaginal hygiene during the Middle Ages. Like the  company, women in antiquity recognized the need to keep the nether-regions clean, but unlike the modern company, medieval women resorted to a plethora of questionable recipes.

Kudos to the company for developing vagina-friendly products and to their marketing department for creating a memorable commercial. But the time has come for women – and men – to get over their nervousness about the vagina, both the object and the word.

Who Paints the Lion?

Many of us can recall our high school English class reading Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, arguably one of the most important literary works of the Middle Ages. In this work, the proto-feminist Wife of Bath mentions a well-known fable of the time in which a man and a lion consider a painting depicting a man killing a lion. The lion observes that, had a member of his own species painted the picture, the outcome would be different; it would have shown a lion defeating a man.
Just as the artist naturally paints himself in the dominant role as the victor, the documentarians of history favor their own kind. We know that the recorders of medieval history had one key commonality – all were sans vagina. The Middle Ages, as with all of human history, was a time of great inequality between the genders, when the balance of power favored those with a penis. Men, as the bookkeepers of history, overlooked and/or minimized the role of women, choosing instead to highlight their own accomplishments.

The Medieval Vagina is an attempt to, like the lion in the fable, reconstitute the bits of evidence that remains about women, gender roles, sexuality, power, equality, and the vagina to textually paint a picture that is quite different from the one painted by medieval men as they recorded histories. In a warped sense, one could say that The Medieval Vagina offers a view of an historical time period through the vaginal lens, with a comical twist.

Songs About V

In 1803, a collection of medieval-era songs were found in German monastery. What is remarkable about these bawdy ballads is that they digress from appropriately classical melodies fit for all audiences, to lewd and vulgar lyrics that rival many of today's rap and pop songs. Prior to these songs, acts of sexual intercourse were written about in a dry and blunt way, but in this collection, the anonymous authors jazzed up these sexual encounters, including such memorable lines as "My virginity makes me frisky". One song is a satire of Ovid's famous manuals on love-making techniques and is a first-person narrative account of a ten-hour long sexual romp with Venus, the goddess of love. Hubba Hubba!

Known as the Carmina Burana, it is believed that these songs, with their primary focus on drinking, sex, and dodging fate, were written by the Goliards, a group of monks who rebelled against the oppressive authority of the church. The Goliards lived by the "you-only-live-once" philosophy long before the YOLO acronym gained its current popularity. In fact, the Goliards were defrocked in 1300 because they were more interested in eating, drinking, and making merry than they were in reading scripture and praying. Sounds like the medieval version of frat boys! 

Interested in learning more about bawdy medieval ballads? Look for Medieval Vagina: A Hysterical and Historical Perspective of all Things Vaginal During the Middle Ages coming soon.

Lady Frances Howard

While writing the Medieval Vagina, I researched numerous fascinating medieval women and was amused, entertained, and inspired by their stories. One such woman, Lady Frances Howard, remains one of my favorites. Perhaps it is because she was a woman who wasn't afraid to go after what she wanted. Perhaps it was because she had a delicious evil streak. It could also be that I admire her luck (she escaped the gallows after a murder conviction, but that is another story). Lady Frances could rival any Game of Thrones character to be sure.

Lady Frances was married as a child to a son of a politically connected family but the youngsters were kept apart until they had reached sexual maturity. Problem was, by this time Lady Frances had fallen in love with someone else. Not just fallen in love…she was sleeping with guy. So once she was reunited with her childhood husband, she had a big, big problem. She was no longer a virgin. She sought a divorce from the husband, claiming that he suffered from erectile dysfunction and therefore, couldn't perform his husbandly duties.

The courts ordered a hymen inspection to prove that Lady Frances was, indeed, still a virgin. Because ten midwives and two court-appointed representatives would be present at the hymen inspection, Lady Frances demanded a veil over her face to preserve her modesty. Rumors exploded that the vagina being examined was not Lady Frances at all, but a stand-in hired by the defrocked Lady to cover up her philandering ways. A witty courtesan pens a clever ditty about the incident:

This Dame was inspected but Fraud interjected
A maid of more perfection
Whom the midwives did handles whilest the knight held the candle
O there was a clear inspection.

You could learn more about Lady Frances' story in the Medieval Vagina: A Hysterical and Historical Perspective of all Things Vaginal During the Middle Ages coming soon.
 

Idea for MV

Lori and I met as graduate students at Indiana University South Bend and we share a similar writing style, one that sprinkles a pinch of levity on top of the typically dry and humorless academic research writing, much to the exasperation and amusement of our professors!

The idea for The Medieval Vagina emerged from my master's thesis project and a series of Facebook messages with Lori. In short, the medieval views, attitudes, and anecdote I was unearthing in my research were simply too delicious to leave buried, yet too …well, delicious…for academic writing. I wanted to draw out this information and offer it to the general public in the form of an accessible non-fiction read but I knew I couldn't do it alone. Lori has experience in both writing and publishing.

That, plus that whole similar writing style thing, made us the perfect writing partners. With encouragement from our husbands, instructors and fellow graduate students, we embarked on a journey of discovery and research to simultaneously unearth all things medieval and all things vaginal.

The fruit of this labor is The Medieval Vagina, a collection of evidence showing that, although the Middle Ages was a male-dominated era, there was no escaping the mysterious allure and frightening repulsion of this unique, multi-functional feminine organ – and that is the paradox of the vagina.  

A Wicked Book

After completing his classic, Moby Dick, Herman Melville wrote a letter to his buddy Nathaniel Hawthorne in which he commented, “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as a lamb.”

This is exactly how I feel now that my buddy Lori and I have completed our first collaborative writing adventure, a “snarkiliscious” non-fiction book we are titling The Medieval Vagina: A Hysterical and Historical Perspective of all Things Vaginal During the Middle Ages. This experience has been a fun ride even if it hasn’t been nearly as naughty as it sounds.

Our aim with The Medieval Vagina, or the MV as we have come to call it, is to shed some light on the most feminine of body parts during one particular moment in time. This book is for the feminist. It is for the historian. It is for the medievalist. It is for the humorist. It is for the curious male.

It is for the lover of the unusual, the weird, the quirky, and the vulgar. It is for anyone who appreciates the uniquely female organ that plays a key role in progeny, pleasure, punishment and peccadillo.