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.

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.