44

heaven, looming over the castle horizon with
only a little soot on her feet suggesting that she
didn’t belong there.

Never mind that the only pure-white creature
was the post-menopausal albino rabbit—or that
even the ladies depicted in romance were
potentially swivers of heroic proportions. Since
sex distinguished the distant fay from the dung-
filled floozy, relatively sexless love became
prevalent, and many women—whether they
liked it or not—played along.

There were advantages, of course. Love be-
came a rare delicacy whereas before it had been
something like yesterday’s leftovers. As Ovid’s
classical formula goes: “Pleasure coming slow is
the best”;9 meaning, the longer the foreplay the
better the orgasm; meaning, some courtly
couples, when they finally did come, must very
nearly have blown their brains out.

But some, for sure, were disappointed. Wom-
en were dropped, men bumbled like Perceval or
—like some knights in the bawdier tales—
they’d win their ladies with lots of pomp and
peter out before they could even open the pack-
age, their worlds ending not with a bang but a
whimper. These were particularly grateful for
courtly love.

Courtly love was a game of foreplay whose
rule was often touch and go; it was an answer
(and a spur) to impotence. Some knights were
barely post-pubescent and many were sexually
insecure, preferring rich expectations to poor
reputations and one-night stands. Better to tilt
about the countryside, flaunting a passion and
flailing a sword (the sword had always been a
metaphor for penis—‘"vagina” is merely Latin
for “sheath”), imagining a truly magnificent sex-

ual prowess when the real thing was maybe limp
by comparison. Love by its very nature was a
test, and knights were afraid to take the exam.
Or sometimes, it was better to put it off than to
putitin.

Love became formalized. The knight waxed
and grew pale, and waxed, and waxed, and
waxed. It was blissful and aggrandizing antici-
pation. Too bad if a lady sometimes felt cheat-
ed—if watching her knight charging and gleam-
ing, she secretly wished he’d get off his high
horse and get down to business. What could the
women do? Their iron-clad men performed in
the tournaments. Ramming, sweating, thrusting
and galloping. . . . Ah, those impervious men in
the metal suits.

... The only things naked weére their swords.

1. “An Exhortation to Theodore after His Fall,” in A Select
Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip
Schaff et al. (New York, 1889), IX, 103-104.

2. From the Carmen de Mundi contemptu, quoted in Not in
God’s Image, ed. ). O'Faolain and L. Martines (New
York, Harper and Row, 1973), p. xiii. St. Odo of Cluny
had earlier phrased this with almost identical wording in
his Collationes, lib. 2, cap. 9 (in J. P. Migne’s Patrologia
Latina (Paris, 1844-82), CXXXIIl, 556), while Ancrene
Riwle (below) directly refers to a similar expression in
St. Bernard’s Meditationes Piissimae de Cognitione
Humanae Conditionis, cap. 3 (Migne, op. cit., CLXXXIV,
489). The key phrases are “stercoris saccum” and
“saccus stercorum” — literally, a bag of shit.

3. The Early English Text Society’s Ancrene Riwle, ed. E. .
Dobson (London, 1972), pp. 202-203; author’s transla-
tion.

4. Salimbene, in From St. Francis to Dante: Translations
from the Chronicle of the Franciscan Salimbene (1221-
1288), 2nd ed., ed. and trans. G.G. Coulton (London,
1907), p. 97; and Tertullian, quoted in G.L. Simons’ A His-
tory of Sex (London, New English Library, 1970), p. 71.

5. From La Clef d’amor and La Cour d’aimer in Nina Epton’s
Love and the French (London, 1959), pp. 30ff.

6. For troubadour biographies, | have consulted Jehan de
Nostredame, Les Vies des Plus Celébres et Anciens
Poétes Provencaux, ed. Camille Chabaneau (1913; rpt.
Geneve, 1970—first published in 1575); La Curne de
Sainte-Pelaye, Histoire Littéraire des Troubadours (1774;
rpt. 3 vols. in 1, Genéve, 1967); and Victor Balaguer, Los
Trovadores, 2nd ed. (Madrid, 1883), 4 vols.

7. Jaufre was not the only fatality of romance. Andrieu of
France—eulogized by at least six troubadours—also fell
victim to “too much love” and he’d never set eyes on his
lady either. See Jehan de Nostredame, op. cit., pp. 166,
180.

8. Plutarch’s Lives, trans. Langhorne (London, Frederick
Warne, n.d.), IV, 37.

9. Ovid's Remedia Amoris, line 405; Rolfe Humphries’
translation in The Art of Love (Bloomington, 1957),
*pi. 193,

Arlene Ladden is a poet, scholar and medievalist who
teaches at LaGuardia Community College in New York. She
is interested in “the forces motivating culture—especially
the more absurd ones,” and in this spirit is now working on
a cultural history of sex and power. She is also co-authoring
a textbook series on literature and creative writing for
children.