The third and last volume of Women of the Twelfth Century, "Eve and the Church," presents a disappointing conclusion to the career of Georges Duby. Like the earlier installments, it is based on the false and rather surprising premise that no writings by women of the twelfth century survive (pp. 1-2, 121). Ignoring the writings of Marie de France, Heloise, and Hildegard of Bingen, Duby instead looks to the words of twelfth-century men for textual evidence regarding the women of that period. Moreover, Duby himself seems confused as to what he is trying to accomplish in the book. In the Introduction to Volume 3, he tells us that he is "seeking to discover . . . how women were treated at this period" (p. 1) but that he is unable to determine "the actual reality of women's daily lives" (p. 1) and can "capture only images, flickering and imperfect reflections, of the women of the twelfth century" (p. 2). In the last chapter, he writes "I am seeking in this book to see more clearly how men of the Church regarded women" (p. 86). In the Conclusion, however, Duby presents a different goal, stating that for the past fifteen years he "had been searching among all the traces left by the women of the twelfth century" and that he had "hoped to catch sight of some aspects of the way they behaved, and of how they saw themselves, the world and men" (p. 121). It is left to the frustrated reader to attempt to determine the purpose of Duby's book. In Chapter 1, "The Sins of Women," Duby discusses Stephen of Fougeres' misogynous text, the Book of Manners (c. 1174- 1178), according to which women's nature included three vices or defects: their propensity for using sorcery to change the course of events, their rebelliousness and treachery, and their lust or sensuality (pp. 3-8, 24-28). The majority of the chapter (pp. 8-24), however, focuses on an earlier work, the Decretum, which was written by Burchard of Worms between 1007 and 1012 (p. 8). Serving as a penitential and interrogation manual for confessors, the Decretum was in turn based on a tenth-century text, Regino's De Ecclesiasticis Disciplinis. Throughout the chapter, Duby attempts to describe and explain the evolving attitudes of men, particularly men of the church, regarding women. For example, he states that by the end of the twelfth century, women were seen as active agents in affairs of the heart. Because the texts are discussed primarily in reverse chronological order, however, with very few dates and very little expository framework and because the chapter deals very little with the twelfth century, the reader is left confused, with only a muddled impression that in the twelfth century women were still considered untrustworthy and the source of all evil. It was up to men to subdue and control them. But it is not clear whether the attitudes depicted reflect societal opinions or merely those of one individual, Stephen of Fougeres. Chapter 2, "The Fall," focuses on the Genesis account of Adam and Eve and its ramifications in the Middle Ages. Duby discusses twelfth-century commentaries by Robert of Liege, Abelard, Peter Comestor, and Hugh and Andrew of Saint-Victor. He also discusses their precursors: the Venerable Bede, Alcuin, Rabanus Maurus, and Saint Augustine. Although Duby provides a partial chronological framework for this chapter, his discussion is not straight-forward but jumps back and forth between the various commentators and their precursors. The overriding concern here is neither twelfth-century attitudes toward women nor the reality of their daily existence, but rather medieval interpretations of the story of Adam and Eve. Duby discusses one noteworthy change: by the twelfth century, theologians no longer adhered to Augustine's interpretation of sexuality as the consequence of sin but believed instead that sexuality caused sin. Since Eve violated the natural order when she tempted Adam, she was punished by God, who made her subject to Adam. The last few pages of the chapter address the question of the concern of twelfth-century churchmen for protecting men from women like Eve. Chapter 3, "Speaking to Women," presents letters written by churchmen (St. Bernard, St. Anselm, Hildebert of Lavardin, Arnulf, bishop of Lisieux, Adam of Perseigne) to women. Most of them take the form of model sermons that were meant to be read to households in order to instruct them in issues of morality. Duby examines the differences between letters written to nuns and those written to princesses and other noblewomen. He also discusses collections of model sermons in Latin, most of which are from the thirteenth century. In the majority of the letters and sermons, women are advised to fear God, resist all temptations of the flesh, and renounce the world. Since married women are obligated to surrender their virginity to their husband, they are told they must dissociate themselves during the act, to separate their soul from their body. They must be obedient to their husband but they must never take pleasure in sharing his bed. Instead, using language deliberately chosen to arouse ardor, these churchmen propose Jesus as the "celestial lover" for virgins, nuns, and married women (pp. 55, 58, 60, 67). "Love," the last and longest chapter, discusses the various types of love (fornication, friendship, pure love, married love) posited by twelfth-century theologians and distinguishes between caritas 'divine love' and cupiditas 'carnal love.' It primarily examines, however, the rituals of courtly love and how it was used in the twelfth-century to control the acting out of sexual impulses, primarily those of the jeunes, the unmarried but frequently not-so-young knights. Duby argues that he has not strayed from his "theme" and justifies the inclusion of this material by stating that the "authors of chivalric literature were men of the Church" (p. 86) and that he could learn about their attitudes toward women by examining the literature that they wrote, but he spends very little time looking at this chivalric literature (pp. 96-99). He offers instead a lengthy analysis of Andrew the Chapelain's De amore (pp. 99-117) and then concludes the chapter with a rapid review of Jean Renart's L'Escoufle and Guillaume de Dole and Gautier de Coincy's thirteenth-century Miracles de Notre-Dame (pp. 117-120). The entire text is flawed by its lack of scholarly apparatus: there are no notes, no bibliography, no index. Duby provides few dates and frequently ignores chronology, both in his selection of which texts to include in this study of twelfth- century women as well as in the logical organization of that study. Throughout the book, it is often difficult to determine whose opinion is being expressed, Duby's or that of one of the twelfth-century men he is discussing. Duby presents contradictory images of women as evil temptresses and as weak victims, but fails to acknowledge these discrepancies, much less explain them. Awkward syntax further weakens the text. For example, one particularly long sentence is so convoluted that it is almost totally incomprehensible ("In his History of the Lords of Amboise . . . in particular Cicero," p. 91). Another has so many bracketed explanations that it too becomes unreadable ("It is, he says . . . it has discovered]," pp. 100-101). Ambiguities ("those" in "Those who were worried . . . .", p. 118) that would not have existed in the French (ceux versus celles) are left unclarified. All of these problems, in addition to the text's faulty premise, diminish its use for medieval scholars. Although Duby professes a sympathetic and respectful attitude toward women and seems shocked at times by the texts that he discusses, some of which he labels "misogynous," all that we find in his book is a display of misogynism. The fact that Duby relies on these texts rather than those surviving texts attributed to women of the twelfth century betrays his own prejudices and condescending attitude. Duby ends his book with the following criticism: "It was men, ultimately, who failed women" (p. 122). And, I'm sad to say, so has Georges Duby.
99.04.19, Duby, Women of the Twelfth Century, Vol 3
