Smart Podcast, Trashy Books Podcast

132. 12th Century Love Stories: An Interview with Dr. William M. Reddy

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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  1. Coco says:

    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.

  2. It won’t download to iTunes either.

  3. SB Sarah says:

    On it! Thanks for the heads up!

  4. SB Sarah says:

    OK! FIXED. Geez. Sorry about that.

  5. Wendy says:

    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!)

  6. 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.

  7. SB Sarah says:

    @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*

  8. Marie Dry says:

    This was a wonderful podcast. Could we have Dr Reddy back every year?

  9. Marie Dry says:

    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.

  10. SB Sarah says:

    @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!

  11. I loved the podcast. Dr.Reddy’s information was fascinating.

  12. chacha1 says:

    I thoroughly enjoyed this. Thanks to SBSarah and Dr. Reddy!

  13. SB Sarah says:

    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!

  14. Coco says:

    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…***

  15. Coco says:

    …does NOT…

  16. Rebecca says:

    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.

  17. Cecilia says:

    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.

  18. Julie says:

    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.

  19. Julie says:

    The Kindle version of The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 is FREE!

  20. Kaetrin says:

    Such a fascinating interview Sarah. Professor Reddy was a great guest. Thank you so much for bringing him to our attention.

  21. Kilian Metcalf says:

    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.

  22. Rebecca says:

    @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.

  23. Coco says:

    @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.

  24. Rebecca says:

    @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).

  25. Coco says:

    @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.

  26. Rebecca says:

    @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.

  27. Coco says:

    @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 😛

  28. Sabra says:

    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.

  29. bookworm1990 says:

    This may be my favorite podcast to date. So interesting!

  30. […] 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 […]

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