This week, we’re learning about 12th century attitudes on sexuality and romantic love, plus 12th century gossip and the possible origin story of Super Mario. Yes, way! Our guest this week is Dr. William M Reddy, William T. Laprade Professor of History and Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.
Dr. Reddy spoke at the What is Love? Conference at the Library of Congress on a panel about the science and history of love, and his comments about the history of romantic love stories were fascinating. I linked to them in my write up of the conference, and when filmmaker Laurie Kahn gave me his contact information, I asked if he’d be willing to share a little more of that history with us.
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Here are the books we discuss in this podcast:
During the podcast I mentioned my write up of the What Is Love? conference, and Dr. Reddy’s comments in particular.
Dr. Reddy also mentioned Fabolous’ “Make Me Better.”
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This Episode's Music
The music you’re listening to in this episode is performed by Sassy Outwater – and that is indeed Sassy on her harp. This tune is called “Rumba for SB” so I’m calling it the Smart Bitches Rumba, because, well, why not?
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Transcript
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[music]
Sarah Wendell: Hello, and welcome to episode number 132 of the DBSA podcast. I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and with me today is Dr. William M. Reddy who is the William T. Laprade [La-prayed?] – Laprade [La-prod] – all right, my dog and I vote Laprade [La-prayed] – professor of history and professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University. Dr. Reddy was one of the speakers on a panel at the recent Library of Congress conference all about romance fiction that was held in mid-February. His panel, along with other academics, was about the history and science of romance, but what Dr. Reddy talked about specifically was the origin of romantic love stories going back to the twelfth century, which, if you read my write-up online, which I will link to, I thought was really cool. So when I was given his contact information I begged, would you please do a podcast? And he was like, yeah, sure, it’s spring break. Why not? So Dr. Reddy took time out of his spring break – thank you, dude – and talked about the history of romantic love stories, what the difference between history and anthropology is, and about how the spirituality of love relationships and the sanctity of emotion is something that has been debated by the church and by ordinary people for hundreds and hundreds of years. So all of these people who devalue romance, there’s, like, a history of them and there’s a history of us who value romance. It’s really cool, so I hope you find this as interesting as I did.
This podcast is brought to you by InterMix, publisher of Echoes, Laura K. Curtis’s fantastic new romantic suspense novel, available on March 17th.
And this week’s podcast transcript is brought to you by Forever, publisher of Once and Always, the sweet and sexy new novel by Elizabeth Hoyt, writing as Julia Harper, which is on sale now. Each episode gets a full transcript, provided by garlicknitter, who is awesome, so if you prefer to read instead of listen or you’re thinking, I can’t listen this week; I’d rather read, the transcript will be added to the podcast entry.
Plus, we discuss a lot of books and twelfth century poems and some of the books that Dr. Reddy has written, and I will link to all of those in the podcast entry, also known as the show notes, should you wish to track these down on your own. Some of them are available in the public domain, some of them are academic texts that you may have to borrow from a library, but either way, I hope you enjoy this week’s podcast.
And now, on with the interview!
[music]
Sarah: I was really interested in what you had to say at the Love Between the Covers conference at the Library of Congress, so I wanted to ask if you would first introduce yourself, talk about what you do when you’re not on Skype with me – happy spring break, by the way –
Dr. William M. Reddy: [Laughs] Thank you.
Sarah: – and talk a little bit about what you introduced at that conference, because your particular session was all about love in the context of history and sociology and anthropology, and you cover two of those, am I right?
Dr. Reddy: Yeah, approximately.
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Reddy: I teach history at Duke University, where I’ve been for a long time, and I also have a secondary appointment in anthropology there, and I tend to what I’ve, I try do kind of the anthropology of the past, you know. I work as an ethnographer looking at the past. Very common for historians to work that way these days. My field is French history. Up until about ten years ago, I worked mostly on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then ten years ago I went out in search of the, trying to understand where romantic love came from, and I ended up working, doing a book on the twelfth century. The reason I did that is because I have, for about twenty years now, been working on the history of emotions, and it’s kind of a new field for historians. We didn’t realize before that emotions change over time, and I think not just the way people talk about emotions or think about them, but also the way people experience their own responses to the world change over time. I became interested in romantic love because it seemed to me the, the, a way of getting at the relation between emotions and sexuality. To look at that history a little more closely struck me as something really exciting, and as soon as I started looking at it, I realized that a huge change had occurred in the twelfth century, and that was really where the action was in, in, in the history of romantic love, so –
Sarah: So –
Dr. Reddy: – that’s why I wrote a book about it.
Sarah: Well, I think that’s a perfectly adequate response to finding something: write a book about it. I mean, that –
Dr. Reddy: [Laughs]
Sarah: – that’s totally what you should do. I think that’s in your professional mandate, actually. As a professor, you have, you kind of have to. Sorry, dude! You’ve got to write a book! So –
Dr. Reddy: I thought it was rather quixotic of me to switch from the eighteenth to the twelfth century. [Laughs]
Sarah: Oh, it’s not that big of a jump! You know, it’s just a couple years. So I have two questions: one, how do you trace the history of emotions? Are you looking at what people are writing down? Are you looking at poetry? Are you looking at diaries or personal accounts? Because, as I understand the difference between history and anthropology, history is, well, these people went here at this date, and at this time, these people were located here, and at that time, these people were located here, whereas anthropology is, okay, so all you dudes were in this place. How did that affect random farmer dude who’s lived here for fifty years?
Dr. Reddy: Hmm, yeah.
Sarah: Is that, is that about right? So, like, history is the dates of when people did stuff, and anthropology is how the individual, nameless, forgotten, non-historical figure experienced that time.
Dr. Reddy: Oh, well, we historians have been really trying to catch up and study the forgotten people in the last couple of, oh, in the last fifty years or so.
Sarah: Right, exactly.
Dr. Reddy: And we are very interested in how people’s understanding of the world changes and how their everyday practice change, practices change across time.
Sarah: And emotions are part of that.
Dr. Reddy: Yeah, yeah. So, we tend to, a lot of people do now what’s called cultural history, which is to study the history of what the anthropologists study in the present. Everyday habits of mind, everyday practices, rituals, language. It includes literature and diaries and anything else that people might engage in, but as historians we need, we prefer to have some texts so we can, some documents so we can understand more, better, what, what people were, were saying and thinking.
Sarah: So what types of texts do you use to trace the history of emotions?
Dr. Reddy: Well, it’s interesting that if you look at moral literature, conduct manuals, polite, manuals of politeness and so on, they have a lot to say about emotions, so there’s a long history of, a long tradition of literature telling you how to feel. Then there are works of art and of literature which show us characters feeling things. Then there are diaries, there are journals, there are private letters. Account books sometimes can be useful, which tell us how private people actually express their emotions, at least in writing. In all these ways, we get information about emotions that, you know, that allow us to piece together, you know, make good guesses about what people were actually feeling at a given time.
Sarah: So what brought you to the twelfth century?
Dr. Reddy: Well, apparently everyone agrees that in the twelfth century the way in which love was written about in literature changed drastically. But there’s a lot, there’s a huge debate that’s been going on for decades about why this happened. Before the twelfth century, romantic love is regarded as a weakness. This is true of the ancient Greeks and Romans and of the Christians who came along af-, in their wake. Romantic love, if you see literary treatments of it from the ancient world, it’s something that interferes with the performance of one’s duty. And so, you know, example would be in the Iliad. Paris, who has been given Helen by Aphrodite in gratitude for his judging her as the most beautiful goddess, Paris is a really bad warrior, and when he’s about to be defeated, Aphrodite saves him from the battlefield and whisks him off to Troy where, into Helen’s bedchamber, where he can do what he does better, which is make love. And another wonderful text that, that kind of exemplifies this attitude is the Life of Marcus Antonius by, by Plutarch, in which Mark Antony, as he’s sometimes known to English speakers, falls in love with Cleopatra, and as soon as he does, he becomes a bad general, timid, he runs from battle and loses the empire to Octavian, so –
Sarah: Oh, dear.
Dr. Reddy: – these are just examples of how being in love, in the ancient world, was regarded as something that would result in poor behavior, a lack of moral fiber.
Sarah: So falling in love turned you into a giant wuss who ran battle –
Dr. Reddy: Yeah.
Sarah: – and completely decimated your army?
Dr. Reddy: [Laughs] Exactly. But then, starting in the twelfth century, we suddenly have the image of the knight in shining armor who rescues his belo-, who becomes a better warrior because he is in love. Rescues his beloved, saves the kingdom – being in love becomes a, a, with a, with a refined lady becomes a, something that’s expected of knights by the, in the code of chivalry that, that reigned over the behavior of the military elite for three or four centuries there, and since that time, in literature, romantic love is often treated, perhaps predominantly treated, as something that inspires heroism, something that can make us better. I mean, there’s a wonderful, wonderful hip-hop tune of 2007 by Fabolous called “Make Me Better,” and it’s all about how his woman makes him a better man. That is the theme, that is a theme that’s central to treatments of romantic love in literature and the arts since the twelfth century, but not before. So that was the question that, why that happened, that was the question that, that really got me interested in the twelfth century.
Sarah: What did you find? What, what do you see as the cause of elevating the idea of emotional love and heroism through being in love?
Dr. Reddy: I became convinced that the, the, this, this shift in love literature reflected a shift in practices as well and that both of these shifts were kind of a, a resistance to or rebellion against the teachings of the church. You know, this is, this is something – a lot of people would dismiss this and say, well, the church had been teaching that sex was bad for 800 years at that point, which is true. Well, I’ve got a quote for you. Do you want to hear what Saint Jerome said about, about sexuality?
Sarah: Bring it!
Dr. Reddy: He said, “The wise man loves his wife with judgment, not with affection. Let not the impulse of pleasure reign in him, nor the proclivity toward intercourse. Nothing is more foul than to love a wife as an adulteress.” [Laughs]
Sarah: DUDE! Oh, no.
Dr. Reddy: Yeah.
Sarah: You know, a lot of the people who listen to this podcast are romance authors, and I think they’re all yelling in unison right now.
Dr. Reddy: [Laughs]
Sarah: NO! No, no, no!
Dr. Reddy: Jerome went on to say the generation of children is conceited in matrimony, but pleasures which are seized in the embraces of prostitutes are condemned in wives.
Sarah: Oh, dear Lord. Poor wives!
Dr. Reddy: So he, he was making these pronouncements, and other theologians were agreeing, in the fourth century.
Sarah: Oh, Lordy.
Dr. Reddy: But what happened in the twelfth century is that the church actually tried to enforce this view of sexual pleasure by making, by issuing a whole set of new rules, which had the force of law –
Sarah: Yikes.
Dr. Reddy: – about marriage and sexuality. They began to preach in the twelfth century that any consent to sexual pleasure was sinful, period. It didn’t matter if you were married or not; to enjoy sex was sinful. The only debate was whether it was bad, really sinful, or just slightly sinful when you’re married.
Sarah: Wow.
Dr. Reddy: And of course there was only one position, and that was the position, the only position allowed was the one that would promote reproduction, ‘cause that was the only reason to, to do it. You know, anyone who felt enthusiastic about a sexual partner, according to twelfth century theologians, was just someone who was in the grip of a temptation, driven by an appetite of the body, an appetite for sexual pleasure. They think that’s a wonderful person, but they’re just fooling themselves. It’s not, they’re not really out to have a relationship; they’re just out to get in bed, whether they know it or not. This is where I see the, the new celebration of love coming in, because what you see in stories, love stories of the twelfth century, you see figures who prove that they are not motivated by mere desire. They prove it by selfless acts of heroism, loyalty, self-denial, and then once they have proven it, they, you know, in effect, render their relationship, they demonstrate that their relationship is innocent and good, and then sex is okay.
Sarah: So the emotional establishment of a healthy and loving ardor for someone comes before the sexual intercourse.
Dr. Reddy: Yes, in, in, in twelfth century, and generally in, in medieval, in medieval literature, if it’s, if it’s, you know, what’s called courtly love literature, that is, literature that celebrates romantic love – there’s, there’s, there’s a lot of satire also that’s written which, which doesn’t, which really sides with the church –
[Laughter]
Dr. Reddy: It just made fun of people’s pretensions – but in the literature that celebrates romantic love, the lovers generally, yeah, have to prove their devotion prior to getting into bed.
Sarah: So you have to earn it.
Dr. Reddy: Yes, exact-
Sarah: All right, all the romance authors are cheering again, so we’re good.
Dr. Reddy: [Laughs] Okay. But the church, in the twelfth century, took over marriage. They decided marriage was a sacrament, that priests could not marry – up until then, priests were, majority of priests were marrying; they weren’t allowed to any more. No divorce; they decreed, you know, that there would be no divorce; this was new. They established rules against marrying your, anyone who was related to you, however distantly, up to, I don’t know, what, seven generations back, and –
Sarah: Good God.
Dr. Reddy: I know, and in fact this ruled out marrying out anyone you actually ever met, because, you know, in the twelfth century, most people –
Sarah: They didn’t migrate very far.
Dr. Reddy: [Laughs] That’s, they didn’t, they didn’t, or else, you know, if they’re, you’re, you’re members of a local aristocracy, your, all the families have been intermarrying for generations, and suddenly you’re not allowed to do that anymore. And it became very common in the twelfth century for aristocrats who wanted a divorce and weren’t allowed to divorce anymore, they would do their genealogies carefully and discover they should not have been married in the first place.
Sarah: Oh. Guess what, we’re twelfth cousins once removed! Woo-hoo! Get out of my house.
Dr. Reddy: [Laughs] Exactly. And so that, there, there were kind of informal practices of divorce were continued. And this posed a real problem, these new rules posed a real problem for aristocratic women. Why, because up until that time, it was, very frequently, women would inherit all of the family’s land and title, if there were no male heirs. The woman would become the duchess of such-and-such a, a duchy or the, the countess of such-and-such a, a county or earldom, and rule in her own name, or she, if she married, her husband would become Count or Duke Whatever, viscount, and so on, and so then, if there was a divorce, the woman took her title and lands with her to the next husband –
Sarah: Huh.
Dr. Reddy: – so she remained, as a result, a very powerful figure even when married, but as soon as there’s no divorce, she cannot, she cannot ever leave this husband, she has no leverage with him anymore.
Sarah: Wow. And she loses her ability to keep her stuff.
Dr. Reddy: Yeah, exactly. Even if she separates from him, still legally married –
Sarah: Yep.
Dr. Reddy: – he can rule in her name.
Sarah: Oh, Lord.
Dr. Reddy: So this posed a real problem for aristocratic women preserving the kinds of political power they had had before, and I think this too helped to feed a general underground sense of resistance to the new doctrines or the new rules about marriage. The typical lovers of the twelfth century are a younger aristocratic male in love with a female lady who is his superior, and this love relationship is, that, that is celebrated is adulterous.
Sarah: So one of them is cheating, and she is –
Dr. Reddy: Yeah.
Sarah: – higher than him in status.
Dr. Reddy: Exactly.
Sarah: So this is like the, this is sort of the origin story of Super Mario, who has to go and, go rescue a princess.
Dr. Reddy: Yeah! Perfect!
Sarah: All of these patterns of someone who is working class going after some-, a female who is higher class.
Dr. Reddy: Sure, yeah.
Sarah: They, they sort of have their origins in the twelfth century.
Dr. Reddy: Absolutely. It’s –
Sarah: Well, that’s cool!
Dr. Reddy: The, the, the Lancelot/Guinevere relationship is –
Sarah: Right.
Dr. Reddy: – is the kind of archetype of this. Lancelot is a loyal knight of King Arthur. He’s in love with the queen. King Arthur being a good twelfth-century literary figure, you know, is not jealous. Jealousy is condemned in the most uncertain terms in twelfth-century literature. King Arthur is not jealous; he doesn’t pay much attention to what his queen does. She’s kidnapped, Lancelot goes to save her, once he has saved her and also proven he will be a loyal, a loyal and submissive lover to her, she permits him to have a tryst with her.
Sarah: Whoa.
Dr. Reddy: Yeah. I see the Lancelot plot echoed in many, many contemporary love stories. I’m thinking of Casablanca or Pretty Woman. These are all variations on the Lancelot story, to my eyes, now that I’ve studied all this stuff.
Sarah: [Laughs] You see it everywhere, and you can’t unsee it?
Dr. Reddy: I see it everywhere, yeah.
Sarah: I can’t unsee it! It’s everywhere!
Dr. Reddy: You know, something like the movie, what’s it called, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Here we have a guy who heroically tries to save his memories of his girlfriend from the onslaught of this neuroscientific memory-erasing machine – [laughs] – and just barely manages to do so, end up giving it another try. That’s a good example, to me, of twelfth century conception, that you prove your love is true by some kind of heroic effort, and then that ensures that the relationship is a spiritual or holy one.
Sarah: So you mentioned a minute, a, a few minutes ago, of sort of an underground that was beginning to coalesce in response to all of these –
Dr. Reddy: Yeah.
Sarah: – rules and edicts from the church, so what came out of that underground? Not only just the, the Lancelot/Guinevere archetype, but what other things came out of the, the movement against what the church was doing?
Dr. Reddy: First of all, the promoters of this new vision of romantic love avoided writing treatises or essays arguing their case, because if they did that they would just get in trouble and be accused of heresy, so they just wrote literature. Just to write literature in lo-, not in Latin, the official language of the church, but in local languages was alweady, already a way of indicating to the world that what you’re saying is not to be taken seriously. We’re just writing fiction. It’s just some songs for after dinner. But in fact, when you read the literature, it’s instructing you in how to love, and how to live your life, and –
Sarah: [Laughs slyly]
Dr. Reddy: – we have, we have evidence that, in fact, young aristocratic men and women were told to read this seemingly non-serious stuff and expected to know this literature, because it taught people how, what kind of behavior was appropriate at court, what kind of behavior was appropriate on the battlefield, and what kind of behavior was appropriate towards someone whom one loved, and one of the most important duties of the lover was to protect the reputation of the beloved. Keep it secret. Don’t let any know, anyone know what’s happening. Go to great lengths to demonstrate your discretion and your concern about the other person’s honor, wellbeing, reputation, political status, and so on. So, we, it was very hard to document whether there were real relationships like this, but we do have a few examples, and I think the fact that we have a few examples, you know, evidence of a few examples of romantic love relationships modeled on the literature proves that there were many, many more.
Sarah: So what kind of examples do you have?
Dr. Reddy: One example I really like involves a woman named Sybil of Jerusalem, who was the sister of the King of Jerusalem – this is a Crusader State – and in about 1180, her husband, the Count of Jaffa, died, and she returned to Jerusalem to live with her brother. And shortly thereafter, it appears that she got involved with some young knight, a man of lower status from France, named Guy de Lusignan. When her brother found out about this, he was going to have the guy killed, and he was very angry, but cooler heads prevailed, and he permitted them to get married. In 1187, Sybil’s brother, the king, died, and she was the on-, sur-, surviving heir to, to the throne, but the knights at court, the lords at court said, we aren’t going to let you be queen, because then this low-life knight would become king. So if you divorce him, we’ll let you be queen. She said, okay, fine, I’ll divorce him. Make me queen. She divorced him, they made her queen, then she said, oh, yeah, the condition was I get to choose who will be my husband afterwards. As soon as she was crowned, she chose as her husband Guy de Lusignan, the same guy they forced her to divorce.
[Laughter]
Sarah: I like her.
Dr. Reddy: And the story goes that three years later when the Muslim Prince Saladin retook Jerusalem, they had to get out, and Richard the Lion-Hearted helped them escape, brought them to Cyprus, and made them King and Queen of Cyprus. [Laughs]
Sarah: Nice!
Dr. Reddy: Nice end to the story! Where their dynasty lasted into the fifteenth century, or something like that.
Sarah: Well, they got a happy ending.
Dr. Reddy: So there’s a real love story where she obviously engaged in heroic action to fool all of these powerful courtiers about her intentions and then to stay loyal to her beloved when she obviously didn’t have to. She had no particular reason to stick with him if she didn’t want to. These were, these were the characteristic behaviors of a, of true love, as it was called. That was the term that was, that came in. Fine amor, true love. Another example where we, we think maybe something was going on was, involved William Marshal and his, his lord’s wife, Margaret of France. William Marshal was accused of having a, an adulterous relationship with Margaret by certain rumormongers, and William’s lord, who was the heir to the throne of England – he was called the Young Henry because his father, Henry II, was king – Young Henry became very cold towards William Marshal when he heard these rumors. William Marshal demanded the right to have a trial by combat with his accusers. He said – he went even further – he said, you can cut off one of my fingers and then send three of them against me, and I will prove that I am innocent of these charges by killing them all. And the Young Henry said, no, I’m not going to do that, and William Marshal left his service. Later on, the following year, Margaret of France was visiting her brother, the King of France, and it seems that William Marshal made some arrangements and ended up spending some time in Paris at the same place.
Sarah: [French accent] Oh ho ho!
Dr. Reddy: I know!
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Reddy: So the records that we have of this episode are all written in order to defend William Marshal’s reputation. They’re written by supporters of William Marshal, so they would never admit, whether it was true or not, they would never admit that William Marshal was having a relationship with Margaret. All we know is that he was widely suspected of doing so, he was dismissed from the service of the heir to the throne, and he later tried to, and did, successfully did visit Margaret somewhere else. That’s all we know. But it could have been. And this is one of the problems is that the evidence of a relationship and the evidence of a person’s denying – yeah, well, let’s, let’s put it this way: evidence of a relationship will often take the form of vigorous denial.
Sarah: Oh, no, no, nothing to see here! No, no, everything’s fine! Not at all! We’re not – no, not at all! What do you mean she’s in my bedroom? ‘Course not!
Dr. Reddy: Exactly, exactly.
Sarah: Yeah, funny how that pattern still exists.
Dr. Reddy: [Laughs]
Sarah: We have a picture of you. But it’s not true! I didn’t do that! What are you talking about? I was not kissing her. Nuh-uh! So at the Library of Congress –
Dr. Reddy: Yeah.
Sarah: – you had talk-, also talked a little bit about how this, these stories and poems and songs of courtly love mostly ignored the, the church edicts about love and also pretended as if God had sanctified love and desire.
Dr. Reddy: Absolutely.
Sarah: How did they do that?
Dr. Reddy: Blatantly –
Sarah: [Laughs] So, dude, God totally says this is awesome.
Dr. Reddy: There’s, there’s one wonderful song by a troubadour named Giraut de Bornelh. It’s called a dawn song because it’s about what lovers do when the dawn comes. The speaker, the voice singing the words, is that of a retainer or servant of a lord, and his lord has gone to visit his beloved in her bedroom during the night, but now the sun is rising, and the, the servant is concerned that his lord has not gotten out of the bedroom yet.
Sarah: Uh-oh.
Dr. Reddy: And in the song, prays that God will protect my lord, I pray that God will protect my lord, who is visiting his beloved, from any harm and wake him up and get him out of there.
[Laughter]
Sarah: Excuse me, the Lord hath decreed that it is time for the walk of shame. Get out of bed!
Dr. Reddy: [Laughs] Time to avoid it! But this, this happens over and over again. God will be invoked in this offhand way as if we all know that God not only approves of lovers but is the, if you like, the, the providential arranger of love relationships.
Sarah: Oh, my.
Dr. Reddy: And there’s never any, you know, doctrinal, no theology. It was just casual, but frequent, invocations of God’s approval of such a holy thing as true love. How could it be otherwise? is the implication of the, of the literature.
Sarah: Were there any consequences for those who were writing or singing or sharing these stories from the church? Did the church ever try to say, hey, with, with the, with the nookie songs, knock that off.
Dr. Reddy: You know, that’s a really good question, and I’ve looked at that and, and I, I haven’t been able to find any specific cases of punishments or penalties. It is true that in the twelfth century the theologians of the church consistently condemned as unholy all singing outside of church. All laughter. Therefore, all actors, singers, dancers, jokesters, all of these people, and there were plenty of them at every aristocrat’s courts, there were jokers and singers and performers of various kinds entertaining people. They’re all considered to be beyond the pale by the church. Sinners, condemned, doomed to go to hell. You know, laughter is considered to be questionable and suspicious, if not outright sinful behavior. So –
Sarah: I am so screwed if I was in the twelfth century.
[Laughter]
Sarah: I’m so dead!
Dr. Reddy: I know, it’s, it’s just amazing how, how strict these, these doctrines were, and people have asked me, well, why did the church go in this direction? Why was it so out of touch with lay society? And I’m not sure out of touch is the right way to understand it. I think church figures were enhancing their power by condemning things and got a lot of practical benefits from condemning things, if for no other reason than because they could then be begged for dispensations or exceptions or – I’m not sure that explains their motivation.
Sarah: One of the things that you wrote when I first emailed you about doing this podcast – and this has been so interesting, so thank you – one of the things that you wrote was that your outlook is anthropological –
Dr. Reddy: Yep.
Sarah: – and that you’re convinced that if something is popular, it must be meaningful.
Dr. Reddy: Sure.
Sarah: So romance fixture, fiction is very, very meaningful because it is important, and the denigration of the genre is also meaningful, and that both the popularity and the denigration of romance got started in the twelfth century with the creation of this sort of underground deification of courtly love and the church trying to say, would you stop with these feelings? It’s really kind of inappropriate, and you’re going to go to hell.
Dr. Reddy: Yep.
Sarah: When you look at, do you, I mean, I don’t know how much you know about romance fiction after a full day of all of us packed into a small room at the Library of Congress talking about it. What, what do, what is your perspective on the popularity and the denigration of the romance genre in contemporary times? Do you have any thoughts or perspective on that?
Dr. Reddy: Well, I think there is – let’s put it this way, there’s a tendency on the part of modern day psychologists, psychotherapists, neuroscientists to inherit the mantle of church moralists and to regard sexual appetite or the sex drive as the source of all of our interests in persons who might be sexual partners, and therefore, to think that everything boils down to appetite. Appetite is, you know, is, when you’re hungry for, for food, you’ll take anything of the right variety. Appetite is impersonal in that sense.
Sarah: Right.
Dr. Reddy: Because of this tendency, I see romance in literature, in the arts as continuing to kind of engage in an unofficial, underground insistence that something else is going on in love relationships than just sexual gratification. One of the reasons I think this is so important is that I’ve looked at other traditions, and in no other, you go outside the West, no other tradition distinguishes between love and lust. It’s very common for love relationships to be considered spiritual in character and even, you know, if you go to Hindu temples today, you can find enactments of love relationships between a god and a woman or a goddess and her partner. These enactments are considered to be part of sacred ritual, and there are many other traditions in which love relationships, some or many love relationships are considered to be spiritual in character. There is no tradition outside the West that treats sexual desire as a bodily appetite that can fool us into thinking we want a specific person when all we want is just, like, another piece of pie, if you follow me.
Sarah: [Laughs] Sorry. I am –
Dr. Reddy: That is, that is completely a Western notion, and it, if, if it’s wrong, that would explain why people continue to display a kind of common sense resistance to this reductionist view of sexual involvements. Sexual involvements – I think the tendency is for, for them to take up, for the whole person to get involved in a sexual relationship. That’s the tendency for most of us, I think. Certainly for a lot of us, enough of us so that we deserve to have a literature of our own. [Laughs]
Sarah: Right, that accurately reflects –
Dr. Reddy: Exactly!
Sarah: – what we’re actually doing.
Dr. Reddy: Exactly.
Sarah: So now I feel the emotional distance of literary fiction and my own personal regard for romance fiction, which I like much better than literary fiction, as representing my own actual experience as a, you know, normal human being.
Dr. Reddy: Hmm. Well, the thing, if you look historically, of, of course, initially, the rise of the novel was associated with a kind of campaign for the marriage of love. Until the seventeenth century and right into the nineteenth century, most marriages of people with any property were arranged by parents. Novels were considered to – all novels were considered to be dangerous, nasty things. Many, many novels promoted marriages of love and were a critique to the arranged marriage. It’s, it’s only in the twentieth century, as I understand it, maybe late nineteenth through the twentieth century, that the Novel, with a capital N, has begun to be considered great literature, and this distinction has arisen between fine literature and popular literature. That, that did not exist in the eighteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There was no such line that you could draw. But either way, I find a lot of the – you know, if you take the F. Scott Fitzgeralds, this is kind of depressing stuff, and it seems like the more respect that, that, that there’s a relationship between the respect that is granted to the realism and beauty of a work of literature and its pessimism about human nature, if you follow me.
[Laughter]
Dr. Reddy: When The Great Gatsby goes down in flames or when some other hero or heroine ends in the, in the loony bin, we think this is really, the way things really are. This is really brave, and I, I don’t mean to denigrate these, these works of, of literature, but I’m just suggesting that – there are exceptions like George Sand or, or Charles Dickens, but there are many, many great novelists who write about disasters, write about delusion, whether we’re talking about Balzac or Dostoevsky or even D. H. Lawrence, we’re talk-, often people who, who fail!
Sarah: Yes, miserably.
Dr. Reddy: Fail miserably.
Sarah: Outside, in the rain, uphill, both ways.
Dr. Reddy: the, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Sarah: Right. And, whereas you have genres like romance which are consistently optimistic.
Dr. Reddy: Exactly.
Sarah: And devalued for their optimism.
Dr. Reddy: Exactly! It’s suspect.
Sarah: All that happiness, man, it’s just –
Dr. Reddy: Yeah.
Sarah: – it’s just not right.
Dr. Reddy: Can’t be. That’s my sense. My sense is that the, that there’s still a kind of underground pro-love literature which is standing in, substituting for a failure on the part of our official and learned culture, if you like, to subscribe to romantic love, to support romantic love as something independently valuable, even though I don’t see any exception amongst my academic friends. They all seem to want happy marriages too. I don’t know – [laughs] – why there’s this, why there’s this, this mistrust of love that’s so inveterate amongst the learned, the elite, the experts.
Sarah: I don’t know. I have said many times, ‘cause I live right outside New York, and especially if you look at fashion, misery is very fashionable. Being unhappy –
Dr. Reddy: Yeah.
Sarah: – and looking miserable –
Dr. Reddy: Yeah.
Sarah: – is very, very chic, but happiness is something we all secretly want and don’t openly talk about.
Dr. Reddy: Yeah.
Sarah: And that is part of my, my standard defenses of the romance genre, because I’ve been writing about them on a blog for ten years, and so for the past five years, this has been my full-time job, talking about romance, which is, like, the greatest job ever! But I am always asked, why do you like those?
Dr. Reddy: [Laughs]
Sarah: Why do you like those books? And I’m like, ‘cause they’re happy, and that’s automatically a limp noodle answer. Like, well, that does nothing. That is, that is not a good defense of romance, even though I think it’s a perfectly adequate defense of romances. I don’t like to be miserable in my reading.
Dr. Reddy: Well, I think my own tastes in this regard are informed partly by this research but partly by having hit my sixties, and I’ve seen a lot of real disasters, and I don’t need to be reminded of them anymore. [Laughs]
Sarah: So what do you like to read when you’re not reading twelfth-century songs and twelfth-century poems? What genres of writing do you like to read?
Dr. Reddy: Well, I, what I like are the humorous whodunits. Rex Stout. I like the, the Archie Goodwin figure. There’s this wonderful Italian detective series, Sicilian detective named Montalbano. The guy, Camilleri, writes these Montalbano mysteries, and they are so funny; they are so hilarious. I mean –
Sarah: All that happiness is very suspect, though.
Dr. Reddy: Well, I think that the other thing I like about murder mysteries is if they’re whodunits, they always have a happy ending in that, you know, you find out who did it. [Laughs]
Sarah: I, I have sensed a lot of overlap in romance readers and mystery readers, because, you know, mysteries are about the restoration of order –
Dr. Reddy: Yeah.
Sarah: – and romances are about the establishment of optimism and healthy emotional relationships, and both of those are related. There’s a lot of romantic suspense, there’s a lot of cozy romantic suspense, there’s a lot of very violent romantic suspense, so those two things have a lot in common.
Dr. Reddy: Yeah. And I think, you know, since I started working on romantic love, I, I started reading around to, at random in, in romance literature, and I tend to like the contemporary –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Reddy: – because when people are writing about history, for me, I start making a list of the questions I have about what they’re doing or the mistakes they’re making, and it’s –
Sarah: [Laughs] I can imagine that’s an occupational hazard.
Dr. Reddy: It just is not leisure. It doesn’t feel like leisure. [Laughs]
Sarah: One last question –
Dr. Reddy: Yeah.
Sarah: – and this is, like, the worst question to ask somebody who’s written a book. Could you tell us a little bit about both of your books? Because many of our readers are also academics and historians and would, would be very curious to know more about what you’ve written. Can you give us the nickel tour of your books? Is that possible?
Dr. Reddy: I’ve written, since I became interested in the history of emotions, I’ve written two books. One is called The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions, and in that book I argued that, that what we find in lots of periods of history is that people try to manage how they feel and are told to manage how they feel, and this shows up in research on foreign cultures as well. In Asia or the Pacific, people are taught to manage how they feel, and the way you manage how you feel is by repeating certain emotional expressions. One of the cases that was first investigated that I thought very interesting focused on a flight attendant school. Flight attendants were taught to have certain feelings, and if you couldn’t have them, you were basically not graduated. [Laughs] Be cheerful and calm and never give in to resentment or anger, expressions of resentment or anger or fear. The way people were trained to do this is they were trained what to say, and they had to repeat it over and over again, and you have to say, you know, welcome to flight so, such-and-such. That has to be, there’s a certain minimum amount of success in feeling what you’re saying in order to hold that job, so I think people actually do, to some extent, not manage but the way I put it in, in the book is they navigate their feelings by attempting to express feelings they want to feel. And we can see this over time in history, and what changes are the norms or ideals that people pursue in these, in these exercises.
Most recent book called The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900-1200 CE. It won a prize, I’m very happy to say, as the –
Sarah: Hey, congratulations!
Dr. Reddy: – best book in French history for 2012. That’s the book, really, we’ve been talking about the whole time. I’m not sure I have to say too much about it, except, further, except that it’s 450 pages with a lot of footnotes, so if you don’t –
Sarah: Woo-hoo!
Dr. Reddy: – agree with me, you’ve got to go confront all of that stuff. [Laughs] I wanted to write something that’d be an easy read. People were dubious and suspicious of my explanations of what happened in the twelfth century, and so I ended up writing a very serious entry into the, the grand debate over the origins of romantic love, and I really backed it up with every piece of evidence I could get my hands on.
Sarah: There are many readers of historical romance who are very attentive to the historical details of the books therein, and, and actually –
Dr. Reddy: Yeah.
Sarah: – are probably, like, hopping up and down in their, in their chairs right now. Like, ooh! I want to read all the footnotes! So, you have an appreciative audience.
Dr. Reddy: Well, there are, there are a lot of love stories in that book.
Sarah: Is there a particular love story that you really enjoy teaching when you teach this subject matter at Duke?
Dr. Reddy: I do teach a course on the history of romantic love, and one of the love stories that I really enjoy the most is the love story, it’s a real love, between Dorothy Osborne and William Temple that occurred in the seventeenth century, and the way we know about it is that Dorothy sent to William, over a period of about two and a half years, long letters, and he kept them, and they’ve now been published, and they are brilliant, brilliant letters. She wanted him to burn them as soon as – ‘cause they were trying to keep their love relationship secret. They’re brilliant, chatty, fascinating letters about what novels they read and what kinds of marriages her friends are getting involved in, and – Here’s how they met: this is a great story. They met when Dorothy and her father were going into exile because her father had been on the side of Charles I when the parliamentary forces took over during the Puritan Rebellion. They had to go into exile. Dorothy’s brother scribbled some kind of graffiti on this building in an island off the coast of England and was arrested because it was Royalist graffiti. And Dorothy stepped forward and said, no, it was I who did it, and since she was a woman, high status woman, they let her brother free and didn’t do anything. This act of bravery occurred while she was meeting this other traveler, William Temple, who was going to France as well, and they apparently got to know each other in France and started exchanging their views about, guess what, romance literature.
Sarah: Oh, ho!
Dr. Reddy: They both were fans of a French author named Madeleine de Scudéry, a famous French author of the seventeenth century who wrote these long, long romance adventures about knights and ladies and, you know, carrying on the tradition of, of the twelfth century. At some point they fell in love, and by the time we see the first of these letters, they have, they are secretly engaged, and she is trying to think up reasons to reject all of the suitors that her brother and her father bring – [laughs] – to the house –
Sarah: [Laughs]
Dr. Reddy: – to try to get her to marry, and she’s, she refuses so many of them she’s frightened that they’re going to put their foot down.
Sarah: Oh, my!
Dr. Reddy: Eventually they manage to get their parents to agree, and they were married in 1654, had a forty-year marriage, many children. Her husband became a big diplomat, ambassador to this country, ambassador to that country. It’s a very happy ending.
Sarah: Nice!
Dr. Reddy: And I can’t recommend those letters too highly. They are just witty and sparkling and full of genuine devotion to William Temple. It’s just very inspiring. The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple: you can download it off of Google Books now because there’s a good 1927 edition that came out from Oxford.
Sarah: Awesome! Thank you again, and also thank you for your comments at the Library of Congress conference. I had no idea that courtly love and the edicts of the church were related to each other as far back as the twelfth century. I’m used to –
Dr. Reddy: Yeah.
Sarah: – people saying, oh, romance, why would you read that? It’s really stupid, and they’re all the same. And I didn’t realize that the challenge to literature about emotions goes back so far in time.
Dr. Reddy: Well, yeah. Yeah, it’s, it’s amazing when you start looking at it.
Sarah: So now I get to tell people they’re on the wrong side of history!
Dr. Reddy: Exactly!
Sarah: I love this plan!
[music]
Sarah: And that is all for this week’s podcast. I hope you enjoyed the interview, and I want to thank Dr. Reddy for taking the time to talk to me.
If you have questions or you want to add something or you want to recommend a book or you want to be like, heck, no, that history is all wrong! – that would be interesting – you can email us at [email protected]. We love email, so if you send us some, it makes us very happy.
This podcast has been brought to you by InterMix, publisher of Echoes, Laura K. Curtis’s fantastic new romantic suspense novel, which is available on March 17th.
And this week’s podcast transcript is brought to you by Forever, publisher of Once and Always, the sweet and sexy new novel by Elizabeth Hoyt, writing as Julia Harper. That’s available now wherever fine books are sold.
Future podcasts will included Jane and me talking about the DABWAHA. Now, if you are curious, that is how you say it, da-bwa-ha. Yes, I am not allowed to name things anymore. That stands for the Dear Author Bitchery Writing Award for Hella-good Authors, and it’s a March madness-style tournament of romances. You can find out more at dabwaha.com. That’s dabwaha.com. Again, I am not allowed to name things anymore, and I take that very personally. So Jane and I will be talking about the DABWAHA.
And if you have ideas of what you’d like us to do or talk about, you have a question, you want us to go hunt down an author and interview her or him, please email us. We are very open to your suggestions.
The music that you are listening to at this very moment was provided by Sassy Outwater. That is Sassy herself playing the harp. This is called “Rumba for Smart Bitches.” I presume she made it up, which is even more excellent!
And speaking of excellent, as you are hearing this, Sassy got married last weekend, so mazel tov and congratulations to Sassy and her husband. I hope they are enjoying a very warm and relaxing honeymoon.
And in the meantime, on behalf of Sassy, Dr. Reddy, Jane, and myself, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a great weekend.
[romantic rumba]
This podcast transcript was handcrafted with meticulous skill by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks.
Transcript Sponsor
This week’s podcast transcript is brought to you by Forever, publisher of Once and Always, the sweet and sexy new novel by Elizabeth Hoyt—writing as Julia Harper!
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Hey Sarah, it’s not playing. If it helps I’m in Phoenix, I’m on Chrome, and I’ve tried it on my laptop and on my phone and my tablet (android). It has a play button but nothing happens.
So sorry to start your day you that way.
It won’t download to iTunes either.
On it! Thanks for the heads up!
OK! FIXED. Geez. Sorry about that.
This was fantastic! More history to read! (Like I don’t have my own research to be working on right now. Grumble. Time management skills activate!)
Yes! A podcast that recommends books I can purchase for my work library!
That’s the rough part about being an academic librarian in a religious studies collection – I never get to buy the fun romances I love to read.
@TheoLibrarian YAY! And I think you should be able to buy contemporary erotic romance for a religious studies collection, especially if the characters say, “Oh, God,” a lot. *ba dum dum*
This was a wonderful podcast. Could we have Dr Reddy back every year?
I always thought the negative attitude about romance stems from the fact that it is a genre mostly written by women for women and the general fear of women who own heir own sexuality. I loved this podcast because it forced me to rethink my simplistic views.
@Marie Dry:
I don’t think you’re wrong. I think the sexuality and ownership of that sexuality inherent in the idea of just reading about it part of the condemnation of the genre and the women who write it. But the historical roots of that same condemnation of romance stories can’t be denied as an influence, either!
I loved the podcast. Dr.Reddy’s information was fascinating.
I thoroughly enjoyed this. Thanks to SBSarah and Dr. Reddy!
I am so glad you enjoyed it – I had a great time listening to Dr. Reddy both at the conference and during the interview, and I’m so happy you found it as fascinating, too!
Awesome program!
It never ceases to amaze me what “The Church” try to pass off as God’s will. It just proves to me that They never learned how to read. Certainly they never read The Song of Solomon.
Or-
In the first part of Proverbs chapter 5 is warnings against immoral women but in the second part it’s all about rejoicing with and being faithful to your wife. 5:18 says “May your own fountain be blessed, And may you rejoice with the wife of your youth.” And verse 19 says, “…Let her breasts satisfy you at all times. May you be captivated by her love constantly.” The footnote says this satisfaction would be intoxicating.
Or-
Ecclesiastes 9:9 says, “Enjoy life with your beloved wife all the days of your futile life…” I get the idea that maybe that was the only thing you could be sure you could enjoy out of life.
Or-
In Deuteronomy 24:5 it says, “When a man is newly married, he should not serve in the army or be given any other duties. He should remain exempt for one year and stay at home and bring joy to his wife.
I cannot imagine how any of that could be interpreted to mean that joy in sex is ungodly or sinful. Dr Reddy hit it right on its head, they were seeking to enhance their power and in fact defraud God’s people. The Christian God (also the God of the old testament,) does look kindly on such behavior. For more on that, see Revelation.
*** This has been the scriptural portion of our show. We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming…***
…does NOT…
Taking a break from preparing an orals list in medieval lit to chime in here:
Prof Reddy’s hypothesis is interesting, but in fairness there are a LOT of other interpretations of the rise of courtly love. Personally, I’d really recommend Roger Boase’s article “Arab Influences on European Love Poetry”, which traces the thematic similarities between courtly love poems and seventh century Arabic poetry, especially of the Banu ‘Udhra school, which emphasized the lover restraining himself and demonstrating chastity and faithfulness to the beloved as a form of self-control to prove his love was true. This poetry (like a lot of the later European courtly love stuff) also placed emphasis on the lover as the servant of the beloved, to the point of using masculine gender pronouns for an otherwise female character and referring to the lady as “Master” (not “mistress”). Boase also talks about how Arabic poetry may have spread north into the Provencal courts of the troubadours from Andalucia, where the default language was Arabic. There’s also a whole genre of Arabic “dawn” poems about what happens when dawn separates the lovers, that pre-date the European vernaculars. It’s in Salma Khadra Jayyusi’s monumental anthology “The Legacy of Muslim Spain” (Brill 1992) which has a number of other articles that deal with the influences of Arabic language stuff of European poetry, and which is totally worth checking out of a library if you can find it. If anyone’s interested, check out Cola Franzen’s translations of the Spanish translations by Emilio Garcia Gomez of the Arabic originals, in “Poems of Arab Andalucia” (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1989)
Boase, and the poems themselves, kind of bring up the other point that Prof Reddy’s talk ignores; namely that a lot of courtly love stuff actually isn’t quite so warm and fuzzy and romantic in the modern sense. For every character like Lancelot who’s pretty much just associated with one woman, you have Gawain, who offers to “serve” the lady of every castle he shows up in, and Yvain who wins his wife by savagely beheading her husband and then lying to her (real charmer), and then succeeds in making her take him back after he’s been a total jerk by lying to her AGAIN. Nor do women exhibit any real agency in the proto-typical courtly love story. It’s a genre shot through with a fair amount of misogyny, and using it as “resistance to the church” strikes me as problematic at best. My guess is that the modern romance novel really grows out of the 19th century IDEA of what medieval courtly love was like (and owes much more to things like the “Eve of St Agnes” – complete with weird dubious consent – than actual medieval romances.)
Also, I’m not sure that you can call these stories “popular” because they are vernacular. They’re called “courtly” because they were read at courts. The characters and the readers were very much the 1%. You can look at later ballad traditions from the 15th century onward that are more genuinely popular, but as a social movement, I’d be very careful of generalizing from them. (Again, lots wider dispersion of ideas about the middle ages in the 19th century, when printing and libraries made reading people’s theories easier.) I think you could argue that the stuff about married priests and laws of consanguinity affected the 99% who weren’t reading courtly romances a good deal more than the tiny minority who were.
Loved to see such a discussion on the podcast. And thanks to Rebecca above me for the insightful comment. I don’t seemed to hear the podcast mentioning Denis de Rougemont’s classic “Love in the Western World” about adulterous love as the basis of “romantic” love in the Middle Ages. I also wanted to suggest an article that applied Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of homosociality to Arthur and Lancelot, but I don’t seem able to find it right now.
Since I couldn’t download/listen to the podcast for the commute Friday a.m. as I usually do, I listened while cleaning the house today (Sunday). I started yelling DABWAHA like a Harry Potter incantation and my daughter started laughing hysterically.
The Kindle version of The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 is FREE!
Such a fascinating interview Sarah. Professor Reddy was a great guest. Thank you so much for bringing him to our attention.
Great interview. IMHO the Puritan influence is still strong in our popular culture. Pleasure, enjoyment, especially sexual pleasure, are suspect. In contrast, as seen in the scripture quotes above, the Jewish perspective is completely in favor of the notion of men and women enjoying each other. This distaste for physical pleasure comes out in the contempt of the literary establishment for the romance genre. If it is not taken seriously or valued for its contribution to human happiness, maybe it will go away. Pleasure is to be distrusted and therefore I will close my eyes, stick my fingers in my ears, and la, la, la, I can’t hear you. Therefore you do not exist.
@Kilian: probably true Puritan values influence US culture still, but they were a good four hundred years after the 12th century, so they have nothing to do with medieval romance. The Church in Western Europe in the 1100s means the Roman Catholic Church. There’s the Caliphate of Andalucia which is Muslim, and there’s the Greek Orthodox Church in the East, but there are definitely no Puritans hiding under rocks.
As to Jewish sex — well, if you overlook that Orthodox Jews will not even shake hands with someone of the opposite sex because there is the *possibility* that the woman is menstruating and is therefore so unclean that even a touch of her hand would make a man unclean also, and that a married couple can’t have sex after a woman finishes menstruation until she’s been ritually purified in a mikvah, plus the charming passages in Leviticus suggesting the death penalty for homosexuality….sure, Jews are sex-positive. Everything is relative, I suppose.
@Rebecca
Wow, I so don’t wanna be that religious freak here but can I just say, Matthew chapter 23, in particular verses 13-33, has Jesus addressing the Jewish leadership of the time (scribes and Pharisees). He basically points out how they had made rules out of guidelines and how that was absolutely Not OK, and that they had Totally Missed The Point of the guidelines to begin with. In 23 he says, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because you give the tenth (as required)… but you have disregarded the weightier matters of the Law, namely, justice and mercy and faithfulness…” In verse 4 he says, “They bind up heavy loads and put them on the shoulders of men, but they themselves are not willing to budge them with their finger.”
Also see Mark 5:25-34, where Jesus heals a woman who had suffered “a flow of blood” for 12 years. This woman touched Jesus, which was absolutely, as you pointed out, against the law, while she was bleeding. His response to that was loving, he did not rebuke her and in fact sent her on her way with a blessing.
As I said, I don’t want to be that religious freak. However, I think what religion is made to be by imperfect people and what it is actually meant to be, and what it can be, are two totally unrelated ideas.
Imperfect humans have been attempting to speak for their gods since the beginning of time. For my part, I have faith in a loving God. I have faith in a God who wants His people to be happy, and has shown them how to achieve that.
As a Christian, the Law that I’m under is to love my God and to love my neighbor as myself. (Matthew 22:37-39). 1John 5:3 tells me that I will show love to my God by following his commandments and that his commandments would not be burdensome to me. I find that to be true.
When I see people trying to make God harsh and unloving it saddens me. It didn’t start in the 12th century and it most certainly didn’t end there.
BTW, I’m not disagreeing with your statement, I just hope to add to the discussion. I think it’s a worthwhile one.
@Coco – I was responding specifically to Kilian saying “the Jewish perspective is completely in favor of the notion of men and women enjoying each other.” That struck me as a “grass is greener” generalization that should be modified. The passages you cite are also the Christian reason for abandoning circumcision and dietary laws, but the gospels (and the new testament generally) have no standing in Jewish law or custom. You probably already knew that, but so many people take “Judeo-Christian” to mean that Jews somehow think Jesus is theologically important that I wanted to be clear, since we’re in a public forum. (It’s like all the people who think Canada is part of the US and Puerto Rico isn’t. You shouldn’t have to go over it, but combating ignorance is important.) Muslims acknowledge Jesus as a prophet though not an incarnation of god. Jews have no interest in Jesus’ teachings.
I tend to take the sociological view that religion is whatever humans make it, so if you look at any religion spread over a large time and space you’ll get wild variations, and that includes Judaism. To return to the 12th Century, which we’re getting away from, I’d say a good authority (if not THE authority) for Sephardic practices is probably Maimonides (Moshe ben Maimon 1135-1204 CE). He argued that the prohibition on “touching” a woman while menstruating meant only sexual contact, not casual handshakes or embraces or social greetings. The Ashkenazi rabbis in northern Europe (where physical greetings like kisses remain less common to this day) argued for a stricter definition. Maimonides also has the memorable line a man should be married by 18 because after 18 “an unmarried man is constantly thinking of sin.” But it’s worth noting that he also assumes that 18 year olds are NOT economically independent, and still depend on their parents. This is an unusual assumption that people who are economically not yet adults should be able to have sex, something most societies discourage for simple practical reasons. (You’re a grown-up when you pay your own bills. And God bless the child that’s got his own.) As Cecilia mentioned above, Denis de Rougemont’s very influential work pointed out that courtly love was basically based on adultery. (In fact, love within marriage was considered not only impossible but unhealthy.) This had to do with finding a sexual outlet for young knights who were not economically able to marry. Fantasy was easy, and if they did end up sleeping with their love objects any children conceived would still be the responsibility of the lady’s husband, so it cut down on the social and economic problems of bastards. The push for celibate clergy also had to do with avoiding the kind of blatant nepotism within the church that founded a couple of dynasties (the Farneses in 16th C Italy are a notable later example).
@Rebecca
You are correct. I am not confused about the Jews and their feelings about Jesus. I’m speaking purely from my own point of view, as a Christian. As such, the whole bible is seen as “inspired of God and beneficial” for me, some of it as history, some of it as prophecy, and some of it as just very good advice.
And now of course, there are “Jews for Jesus”, so there’s that. It is always good to be clear.
I believe you and I could have great conversations but likely never agree on religion. And that’s okay.
For me religion is not what we make it, it is what is required of us. For me, as a Christian, there should not be wild variations regardless of the spread of time and space.
When I look at The Church, that being the Roman Catholic Church, from the 1st century to today, I see very little that is Christian. I am NOT saying that Catholics are not doing what they’re supposed to be doing in their faith, I’m speaking about The Church itself and that it has compromised, and strayed from the footsteps of Christ. That’s not my opinion, that’s history. You can find all sorts of information on the compromises and changes that have been made, for various reasons, right in the Catholic encyclopedia.
Pope Paul VI endorsed celibacy as a requirement for the clergy, but admitted that “the New Testament which preserves the teaching of Christ and the Apostles . . . does not openly demand celibacy of sacred ministers . . . Jesus Himself did not make it a prerequisite in His choice of the Twelve, nor did the Apostles for those who presided over the first Christian communities.”—The Papal Encyclicals 1958-1981 (Falls Church, Va.; 1981), p. 204.
1st Timothy 4:1-3 “However, the inspired word clearly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to misleading inspired statements … by means of the hypocrisy of men who speak lies, whose conscience is seared as with a branding iron. They forbid marriage and command people to abstain from foods that God created to be partaken of with thanksgiving…”
That’s the Apostle Paul or, who the Catholics refer to as saint Paul, speaking about signs of the apostasy.
And 1st Timothy 3:1-4 “If a man is reaching out to be an overseer, he is desirous of a fine work. The overseer should therefore be irreprehensible, a husband of one wife … a man presiding over his own household in a fine manner, having his children in subjection with all seriousness…”
There’s Paul again, talking about what the requirements for the leaders of God’s people are.
My whole point, in all of the comments I’ve made here, is that The Church have overstepped and that it is not surprising to me that in the 12th century, or any other time, they would have made what is good bad or what is bad good.
Also, as for the homosexuality, 1st Corinthians 6:9-11 (yup, more Paul,) says this, “… unrighteous people will not inherit God’s Kingdom? Do not be misled. Those who are sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, men who submit to homosexual acts, men who practice homosexuality, thieves, greedy people, drunkards, revilers, and extortioners will not inherit God’s Kingdom. And yet that is what some of you were…”
So, sinners, yes? I’m a sinner, you’re a sinner, we’re all sinners. And this list is of course not exhaustive.
The Bible does not recognize degrees of sin. There is only one unforgivable sin mentioned, and I assure you, it is not homosexuality. Romans 6:23 says that the wages of sin (all sin,) is death. (Which is why Christians put faith in the ransom of Jesus Christ. That’s a story for another day.)
It should be noted that I am neither a historian nor a theological scholar, I’m just a bible reading Christian, and that my opinions on my own.
@Coco – don’t worry, my background is in literature, not history or theology either, although doing medieval studies you end up getting quite a bit of history and theology by the wayside.
More generally: I’ve been interested in this discussion because this is a collection of obviously really smart people, but it’s unfolded in ways that seem very odd to someone with an academic viewpoint. A bunch of people (rightly) said that Dr. Reddy’s theories were interesting and that they found the podcast informative. Then a couple of us suggested specific problems with his viewpoint (that courtly love and what we think of as romantic love are quite different in some essential points, and that there are literary precedents for courtly love from well before the 12th C in a completely different tradition).
Then a bunch of other people basically said they agreed with the theory because it fit with other things they think are already true (that the Church distorted biblical teachings and that there’s a historic distrust of human sexuality).
All the things people think are true (about the Church and human sexuality) are probably correct, but they don’t address either of the issues raised, so it’s hard to discuss the merits of the theory. It’s as if the dialogue ran: “Ice cream is the best dessert ever.” “But some people are lactose intolerant, and it’s not pleasant in winter.” “Another great thing about ice cream is that you can dress it up with all sorts of toppings. And you can eat it at the beach.” That’s true, but wouldn’t it make more sense to say “you can also have lactose free sorbet” to address the first objection?
I admit I was sort of hoping that someone who’s read all of Dr. Reddy’s book (if not the professor himself) would come forward and explain some of what seem (based admittedly on a simplified version via podcast) like weak points in an interesting argument. I totally respect people saying “this book speaks to me on a personal level because…” when discussing fiction (which is why I love the discussions here), but for actual socio-historical questions I think it’s more fun to base the arguments on facts rather than just saying YMMV as soon as it comes to history. But that’s just me, and why I find grad school fun.
@Rebecca
You are so right, I actually keep meaning to say I don’t have a clue if he is correct about courtly love and how it relates to romance in the 12th century real or fictional or how it relates to current times.
However, I have real feels about The Church. Perhaps you noticed?
Also, most of my conversations seem to be a little bit tangential. It’s the ADD. Or at least that’s what I’m saying 😛
That was an incredible episode, truly. It was fascinating to get a historical perspective on romantic love, and what it means now versus in the past. This was doubly fascinating for me, as I tend to devour Histories (15th-18th Century France/Spain) as voraciously as I do fiction.
The fact that I could sit back and gain a historical perspective on both fictional and non fictional representations of romance was a real treat. It felt like being in college…but sexier.
This may be my favorite podcast to date. So interesting!
[…] being the marker for cultural importance was introduced to me by Dr William Reddy, through this podcast with Sarah Wendell, in which they talk about the idea that ‘if something is popular, it must be […]