Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature: Rabelais, Brantôme, and the Cent nouvelles nouvelles 9781317113379, 1317113373

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INTERTEXTUAL MASCULINITY IN FRENCH RENAISSANCE LITERATURE

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series Editors: Allyson Poska and Abby Zanger In the past decade, the study of women and gender has offered some of the most vital and innovative challenges to scholarship on the early modern period. Ashgate’s new series of interdisciplinary and comparative studies, ‘Women and Gender in the Early Modern World’, takes up this challenge, reaching beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Submissions of single-author studies and edited collections will be considered. Titles in this series include: Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe Kathleen P. Long Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France Mastering Memory Faith E. Beasley English Printing, Verse Translation, and the Battle of the Sexes, 1476–1557 Anne E.B. Coldiron From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris Gender, Economy, and Law Janine M. Lanza Women, Imagination, and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France Rebecca M. Wilkin Masculinity, Anti-Semitism and Early Modern English Literature From the Satanic to the Effeminate Jew Matthew Biberman

Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature Rabelais, Brantôme, and the Cent nouvelles nouvelles

DAVID P. LAGUARDIA Dartmouth College, USA

First published 2008 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © David P. LaGuardia 2008 David P. LaGuardia has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data LaGuardia, David, 1963Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature : Rabelais, Brantôme, and the Cent nouvelles nouvelles. – (Women and gender in the early modern world) 1. French literature – 16th century – History and criticism 2. Masculinity in literature 3. Intertextuality I. Title 840.9’3521’09031 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data LaGuardia, David, 1963Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance literature : Rabelais, Brantôme, and the Cent nouvelles nouvelles / by David P. LaGuardia. p. cm. — (Women and gender in the early modern world) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-7546-6216-7 (alk. paper) 1. French literature—16th century—History and criticism. 2. Masculinity in literature. 3. Intertextuality. I. Title. PQ239.L34 2008 840.9’3521—dc22 ISBN: 978-0-7546-6216-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-3155-8965-7 (ebk)

2008011916

In memory of Frank Paul Bowman

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Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1

viii 1

Masculinity as an Intertextual Concept in Legal, Pastoral, and Clerical Documents of the Late Middle Ages

15

2

Masculinities in the Intertext: Les Cent nouvelles nouvelles

57

3

Intertextual Masculinity in Rabelais’s Tiers Livre

107

4

Toward Unstable Masculinity in Brantôme’s Recueil des dames

181

Conclusion

227

Bibliography Index

237 245

Acknowledgements I have to thank a number of people who helped me in various ways while I was writing this book: Lawrence Kritzman, for being the marvelous person he is; John Rassias, whose warmth and generosity never cease to amaze me; Keith Walker, for his friendship and intellectual stimulation; Faith Beasley, for being a role model and an inspiration; Andrea Tarnowski, for her editing advice on numerous occasions; Lynn Higgins and Kate Conley, for their years of service to my department at Dartmouth, during which they allowed me a great deal of freedom both as a teacher and a scholar. I also have to thank a number of specialists in my field whom I’ve met over the years, whose work has inspired my own: George Hoffmann, Kathleen Perry Long, Jeff Persels, Dora Polachek, and countless others who are too numerous to name. Throughout the footnotes of the following text, I have noted the influence of Ashgate’s outside reader, whose comments on my manuscript helped to make this a much better work. I especially wish to thank Gary Ferguson for reading over some drafts that appear in their final form here, and on which he made insightful remarks that were quite useful; Richard Regosin, whose thoughtful comments helped me to clarify my thinking; Ann Rosalind Jones for steering me toward the series on Women and Gender at Ashgate, edited by Allyson Poska and Abby Zanger, whose suggestions were very helpful to me; Erika Gaffney for her invaluable aid; Todd Reeser and Lewis Seifert for their tireless promotion of the study of masculinity in early-modern France, and for including me in their projects; Tom Conley for inviting me to read a lecture about masculinity in his Renaissance seminar at Harvard. Lastly, and most importantly, I want to thank Juana Sabadell-Nieto for her intellectual vitality and passion, which have helped me to develop my own thinking in so many ways, and for the love and support she gives me every day. Part of this research was completed during a sabbatical leave that was graciously financed by a Senior Faculty Grant from the Dean’s Office at Dartmouth College. I am grateful to the Deans for their support of my research. Part of chapter three was published as “Masculinity and Metaphors of Reading in the Tiers Livre.” “French Masculinities,” special issue of L’Esprit Créateur, eds. Todd Reeser and Lewis Seifert, Fall, 2003, Vol. XLIII, No. 3, 5–15. An article derived from chapters three and four will be published as “On the Male Urge: Masculinity in Rabelais and Brantôme.” Entre Hommes, edited by Todd Reeser and Lewis Seifert (forthcoming, University of Delaware Press).

Introduction In the last few decades, in the wake of groundbreaking research in feminist theory, masculinity as a conceptual category and masculinity studies have become areas of increasing interest to scholars.1 This book contends that literature is a particularly valuable and dense source of information and knowledge about how masculinity was structured and how it functioned in the formation of men’s identities in France in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It also argues that the figure of the cuckold provides a point of entry into the complexities of what explicitly and implicitly was presented as normative masculinity in Renaissance France. The kind of vernacular literature that appeared in print in France in the 1480s with the publication of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, and which continued in the following centuries in Rabelais’s Tiers Livre and in Brantôme’s Dames galantes, represented a world in which the sexual desires of both men and women conflicted with the interdictions of the civil and ecclesiastic legal codes that defined marriage. The first of these texts is populated by characters who continuously break the rules of sexual exclusivity that were constitutive elements of matrimony and of the religious orders: husbands who try to seduce their chambermaids, who covet and possess their neighbors’ wives, and who sneak into the beds of any woman who happens to be at hand; wayward wives who rush their husbands off to work, trap them in closets and clothing trunks, lock them out of the house, or simply run away, so that they can be with their lovers; priests, monks, and nuns who are not only gluttons and profligates, but who also indulge their prodigious sexual appetites whenever they have the chance, which often means that they have to run away from irate husbands and wives. With these kinds of stories in mind, of which the potential cuckold as a literary figure is always a collector, the Panurge of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre is mired in ironic denial that he will ever be the victim of both married and unmarried women and their seemingly infinite ruses, which were catalogued in the clerical literature ranging from the Lamentatione Matheoluli to the Disciplina clericalis, and were subjected to countless variations in the novella tradition that flourished in Europe in imitation of Boccaccio’s Decameron. Premodern audiences never tired of hearing cuckold stories and jokes. More than half of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles are about cuckoldry, while Rabelais’s Tiers Livre consists essentially of Panurge’s desire for an answer to the question, “Dois-je me marier?” [“Should I get married?”], to which he receives the standard response, “vostre femme sera ribaulde, vous coqu par conséquent” (385) [“Your wife will be a slattern, consequently yourself a cuckold” (289)].2 Finally, the large section 1 For a summary of the scholarship on the relation between these two fields, see Judith Kegan Gardiner, ed., Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 1–29. 2 François Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Mireille Huchon (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). All parenthetical page references will be to this edition. All translations are from The Complete Works of François Rabelais, tr. Donald Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

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Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature

of Brantôme’s text on the “gallant ladies” of the French court that I will examine is devoted to “Les Dames qui font l’amour et leurs maris cocus” (“On Ladies who make love and their cuckolded husbands”). Why was this figure so popular, and considered to be so funny by even the most erudite readers and writers of both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, in the most varied of European cultural contexts? What was the cuckold’s significance within the popular and public imaginary of the time, which has been preserved for us in the voluminous comic treatments of marriage and its undoing? Throughout the following pages, I will argue that the cuckold must be understood as an embodiment of a particular type of historically-contingent masculinity that is an essential element of late-medieval and Renaissance culture. An understanding of the cuckold as a representative of masculinity requires that we examine the conceptual framework in which he makes sense. The primary components of this context are the institution of marriage before and during the period in which the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, the Tiers Livre, and Les Dames galantes were written, as well as the function of sex both within and beyond the bounds of marriage, and its regulation by explicit and highly-developed rules. In almost all cuckold stories, the supposed humor of the tale derives from the fact that “the man of the house” has been “unmanned” by his wife and her accomplices, who usually have as their goal the wife’s sexual infidelity. The social being of this masculine personage was determined entirely by the diverse sets of laws governing marriage, which in turn were contingent upon the sexual usage that he made of his body in both civic and domestic space. In other words, throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, sexual activity was proscribed and prescribed in at least two ways: the major social institutions of marriage and the religious orders called either for celibacy or for the limitation of intercourse to one socially-sanctioned partner, whose status and being were predicated on this exclusivity. This regulation of sex produced gender difference as a series of social practices and institutions that had both positive and negative effects. People who engaged in sex beyond its codified restrictions were subject to both civil and ecclesiastic punishments and penances, but they also activated social networks or groups that constantly surveyed both public and private space in order to determine who was involved in relations with whom, and acted in order to maintain the social order that was based on institutionally sanctioned sex relations. All of this surveillance, legislation, and legal or civic action was undertaken from a decidedly “masculinist” point of view, meaning that the maintenance of the definition of men as men was the primary object of these kinds of activity.3

3 Throughout this study, I will use the term “masculinist” to refer to actions, ideas, and discourses that were consciously used and propagated in order to ensure the domination of certain kinds of men over women. I will use the term “masculine” to refer to the type of subjectivity and gender identity that is a function of masculinist practices, and “male” to refer to the biological characteristics of bodies that are distinguished from female ones in a very simple sense. Compare this usage to Toril Moi, “Feminist, Female, Feminine,” in Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore, eds., The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism (New York: Blackwell, 1989), 117–32.

Introduction

3

The narrative tradition that I will examine was inscribed within an immense intertextual corpus of legal, didactic, and pastoral works concerned primarily with defining what was appropriate and proper behavior for men, predicated upon the usage and surveillance of sex in both public and private space, which itself was contingent upon the legislation of sex within and beyond marriage. In general, the official codes that defined early-modern European sexuality appear at times to have been quite flexible, which meant that many offenses were prohibited yet tolerated, especially within the bounds of canon law and its application, and within pastoral practices that pardoned even sins such as bestiality and sodomy, which were thought to be “against nature.”4 The diverse laws governing marriage thus established an official/unofficial opposition that was rich in implications for comic literature, which exploited the possibilities of a transgressive “counter-rule” or “world upsidedown,” requiring an intimate knowledge and understanding of the rule itself in order to achieve its effect.5 The cuckold was a key figure in this dichotomy, since he embodied the inversion of the patriarchal power structure of marriage, and since his very being depended upon a conception of the permitted and the prohibited that established legal and conceptual boundaries for masculinity within marriage. The husband whom one glimpses in the civil law texts of the period, who was a severe and at times even murderous guardian of his household’s honor, which entailed his wife’s sexual limitation to a given body and a given domestic space, is transformed in the comic literature into a stingy, paranoid, stupid, and often debauched buffoon who was, paradoxically, the hero of the inverted comic world of public festivals.6 I will argue here, then, that the literature devoted to cuckoldry should be read in the context of a much larger body of texts, in which the concept of normative masculinity is a function of an incessant intertextual process. This type of literature develops on two separate levels, one literal, that of the comic fiction, and the other figural, which enumerates the attributes of masculine identity within the social

4 See Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité I: la volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 134–5, for a discussion of the confusion surrounding the status of sodomy in the early modern world. This notion of sodomy as an “utterly confused category” is picked up by Jonathan Goldberg in Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 1992, 1–26. 5 The notions of the “world upside-down” and of the “counter rule” as principles of comic or “festive” writing are developed throughout Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). 6 The literature devoted to the cuckold as one of the heroes of the carnival processions and charivaris of the late Middle Ages is enormous. Claude Gaignebet’s A plus hault sens: l’ésotérisme spirituel et charnel de Rabelais (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1986), is particularly instructive in this regard. See also Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975); Jacques E. Merceron, Dictionnaire des saints imaginaires et facétieux (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002), the entries for “Sainte Cornandine” and “Saint Còrnèri,” 197. Several primary sources document the cuckold’s role in festival processions: see for example the Recueil faict au vray de la chevauchee de l’asne, faicte en la ville de Lyon : Et commencée le premier jour du moys de Septembre, Mil cinq cens soixante six (Lyon: Guillaume Testefort, 1566).

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institution of marriage as it “interpellates” and “captures” men as gendered beings.7 Masculinity thus proliferates both within and even as the massive intertext devoted to marriage and the myriad transgressions that sought to undermine it. As one discourse among many others that relayed and supported one another, the cuckold literature helped to propagate a set of ideas that called on masculine subjects to perform their genders, and whose very meaning and structure was contingent upon the “correct” performance of that gender as the essential condition of marriage at the very foundation of social structure.8 At the philological origins of this tradition in the immense corpus of misogynist, exemplary clerical literature, the writing and retelling of anecdotes with their moral interpretations was an intentional and conscious reflection on what a “real man” should be and do in his relations with women and with other men. In the case of this literature, the inculcation of masculinity was a clear and integral structure that was found within the text, or perhaps constituted the text itself, at the same time that this inculcation required consistent and constant references to other texts in which misogyny and the structuring of masculinity operated together as the thematic foundations of a narrative practice. In other words, reading and writing for men throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance was in large part both a continuous reflection upon the relation of texts to other texts, and a constant consideration of what it meant to be a man, and to read as a man within the social context that was defined by those texts. The idea of “intertextual” masculinity that appears in my title is, therefore, quite simple, and concerns men’s activity as readers and writers of texts about being a man, written for the benefit and instruction of other men.9 The intertext that I will examine here as a conceptual foundation for the literature of cuckoldry includes several types of works: firstly, the enormous body of legal documents, both civil and ecclesiastic, from which one might discern the complex rules that governed marriage. Secondly, there are the penitentials or confessional manuals that drew the boundaries between licit and illicit sexual behavior for several categories of men (husbands, priests, clerics, bachelors) in their relationships with diverse categories of women (wives, widows, virgins, concubines). Thirdly, there are numerous “officialities” and criminal registers that enumerate sexual transgressions, how often the culprits engaged in them, and what they had to pay, literally and figuratively, for their crimes and sins. Finally, there are the voluminous collections of exempla that propagated a given notion of masculinity from men of one generation to those of another through a certain kind of didactic narrative practice. These documents offer a rather expansive view of the “official” conception of marriage 7 The terms “interpellation” and “capture” [prise] are borrowed from Louis Althusser, “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’état,” in Positions (Paris : Éditions Sociales, 1976), 67–125, and Jacques Lacan, “Le Séminaire sur ‘La lettre volée,’” in Écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), 19–75. 8 The notion of gender as performance is borrowed from Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). 9 The ideas of the “intertext” and of “intertextuality” have an extensive history in contemporary critical thought. For an overview of the term’s history and usage, see Laurent Milesi, “Inter-textualités: enjeux et perspectives,” in Éric Le Calvez and Marie-Claude Canova-Green, eds., Texte(s) et intertexte(s) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 7–34.

Introduction

5

in Europe, which was full of contradictions and tensions, relative tolerance beside intolerable ferocity unleashed against those who disobeyed gender rules. I would contend that these official documents constitute a material body of thinking not only about marriage, but also about what it means to be a “real man” in a very precise and historically contingent sense. Moreover, I will argue that the narrative literature that will be my object continues the elaboration of masculinity as a concept that took place over the course of nearly a thousand years in the legal, pastoral, and clerical texts that I have just mentioned. Masculinity itself is an extraordinarily difficult concept to define, especially given the fact that, in our current theoretical context, it would undoubtedly be more appropriate to speak of “masculinities” always in the plural, since the selection of one given version of the gender assigned to men as normative would participate in the kind of hegemonic imposition of gender stereotypes and behaviors against which women’s studies, feminism, and gender studies have consistently struggled.10 At this point, the literature on masculinities in sociology, anthropology, critical theory, gender studies, feminist theory, and literary criticism is enormous.11 The vocabulary that I will use to speak of a certain kind of historically contingent, normative masculinity as a concept will be derived from a limited number of now classic theoretical sources, and will use the following hypotheses as points of departure. The type of masculinity I will examine here is socially constructed, and has a concrete existence in the material practices that structure institutions (Althusser). It is configured within the visual field or domain of social space in the surveillance and display of consciously and coercively gendered bodies (Foucault). The masculine subject stratifies this space by casting his gaze upon the diverse objects of his desire, which form his identity as a gendered being in relation especially to other men (Lacan, Sedgwick). In this process, women’s bodies serve as markers or “fetishes” for the relations of men to other men that function as the conceptual grid upon which they continuously elaborate their gendered identities (Freud, Irigaray, Rubin). Masculinity is hence a performance within the social domain, intended to produce a gendered body that may and must be read as such in visual terms (Butler); it is also a set of signs and 10 I am grateful to Juana Sabadell-Nieto for pointing out to me that using “masculinity” in the singular is quite problematic. Nevertheless, for the sake of convenience, I will use masculinity as a singular noun in the following pages in order to refer to a given set of practices, behaviors, attitudes, and ideas that were affirmed by certain men as normative in the historical context that will be my focus here. 11 For a useful summary of definitions of and approaches to masculinity studies in these diverse fields, see R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Stephen M. Whitehead and Frank J. Barrett, eds., The Masculinities Reader (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2001), 1–26; Rachel Adams and David Savran, eds. The Masculinity Studies Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 1–9; Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman, eds., Theorizing Masculinities (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1994). On masculinity in Renaissance France, see Kathleen Perry Long, ed., High Anxiety: Masculinity in Crisis in Early Modern France (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002); Todd Reeser and Lewis Seifert, eds., “French Masculinities,” L’Esprit Créateur,Vol. XLIII, No. 3 (Fall 2003); Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, eds. Premodern Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1996).

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disciplinary marks written on men’s bodies considered as legible surfaces that are continuously deciphered by other men (Grosz).12 From this theoretical point of view, one of the central material practices involved in the performance of masculinity for an important class of men in the early modern period was that of reading and writing.13 The fundamental thesis or insight that I will present here is that masculinity as scopic drive, set of relations, mode of surveillance, corporeal and linguistic performance, and manipulation of a visual, spatial, and imaginary social domain develops within and as the intertextual practices of a particular written tradition, stretching from the earliest legal compendia, to canon law texts, to penance manuals, to criminal registers, to didactic clerical manuals, and finally to the comic narrative literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Some points concerning the critical apparatus that I will employ in the following pages require clarification, since their usage might lead some readers to conclude that I am presenting this reading of a specific historical masculinist practice in terms of timeless theoretical truths. This reading is Lacanian in that it examines the positions of the cuckold tale as “subject positions” into and out of which individual characters circulate. The act of occupying one of these positions constitutes becoming or being a particular kind of masculine “subject.” While these roles are socially determined, they involve the person who inhabits them in intellectual and intertextual processes that constitute his subjectivity. “Having” a gender, to my mind, is precisely taking up residence in one of these positions, which is structured in the social domain, and which must be recognized both on a collective and an individual level (this is essentially Panurge’s problem in the Tiers Livre, as we will see in chapter 3).14 This does not mean, however, that this is a strictly psychoanalytical reading: this book uses 12 See Althusser, “Idéologie,”; Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité I and Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); Jacques Lacan, “Le Séminaire sur ‘La lettre volée’”; Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 204–209; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Luce Irigaray, Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Éditions du Minuit, 1977); Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women,” in Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, eds., Literary Theory: An Anthology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 770–94; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble; Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion (New York: Routledge, 1995). 13 One of my readers suggested that “warrior masculinity” was perhaps the most important and noteworthy manifestation of a normative gender form throughout the early modern period. Brantôme’s work, like that of so many other memorialists and biographers of the second half of the sixteenth century, supports this claim, since the bulk of his writing describes the exploits of noble captains and soldiers. My goal here, however, is to examine a “domestic” form of masculinity, which complements its belligerent counterpart, as we will see in chapters two and three. 14 Judith Butler comments on this kind of subjective “occupation” of recognizable gender positions as follows: “The very criterion by which we judge a person to be a gendered being, a criterion that posits coherent gender as a presupposition of humanness, is not only one which, justly or unjustly, governs the recognizability of the human, but one that informs the ways we do or do not recognize ourselves at the level of feeling, desire, and the body, at the moments before the mirror, in the moments before the window, in the times that one turns to psychologists, to psychiatrists, to medical and legal professionals to negotiate what may

Introduction

7

Lacan’s idea of intersubjectively-defined subject positions as a metaphor to describe the ways in which male characters in (fictional) stories (attempt to) occupy multiple positions that are socially pre-determined as belonging to the masculine gender role. More specifically, this analysis describes the importance of reading, writing, and storytelling done by men to or for other men in the occupation of these predetermined “sites” of masculinity. My primary contention is that the performance of the male gender in the texts that I analyze is inherently intertextual, and relies upon modes of textual practice, transmission, and “telling” that men have passed on to one another from generation to generation at least since the texts from late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages that I will examine in chapter one. More narrowly, this study contends that a specific mode of storytelling, that of men speaking and writing to other men about marriage, cuckoldry, and the varieties of adultery, was one of the main elements in the performance of a masculinity that was implicitly described as normative. As I have already noted, Butler’s notion of gender as performative is hence crucial to my understanding of how masculinity “works” in this context. I will accept as a given in the following pages the definition of gender as a set of “performative acts” that are defined differently in diverse social, cultural, and historical contexts such as the one I examine here, and which must be repeatedly assumed by subjects in the elaboration of their own exteriorized identifications in gendered terms.15 The following readings also “use” or “apply” in a metaphorical sense Lacan’s theories regarding the role of the gaze (le regard) in the structure of subjectivity, especially in the subject’s relation to or projection into space.16 My usage of this theory is motivated by the insistence of the legal and didactic texts examined in chapter 1 that men must be vigilant in their surveillance of the domestic space that is under their control and of the women’s bodies that are “given” to them by the institution of marriage. For Lacan, a certain manner of looking at oneself and accommodating oneself as a “stain” in the field of vision is constitutive of the “capture” of the subject’s very being within that visual domain. Similarly, the male characters whom I will examine here as masculine subjects seem constantly to structure their subjective being in relation to their visual surveillance of domestic and civic space, and of gendered bodies, including their own, that act within that space. These men see themselves as a set of practices and actions that they must accomplish in that space, and they are dedicated to envisioning themselves within this pre-ordained social role. My insistence on the agency of the masculine gaze in the configuration of the domus in the following pages is a corollary to my primary thesis that the male gender role is explicitly described in an intertextual corpus disseminated among men, while the acts of reading, writing, and storytelling that

well feel like the unrecognizability of one’s gender and, hence, the unrecognizability of one’s personhood.” Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 58. 15 See Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” in Rivkin and Ryan, eds. Literary Theory: an Anthology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 900–911. 16 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre XI : les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 1973).

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Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature

are integral to this dissemination are constitutive elements of the performance of masculinity in this historical and cultural context. My usage of the Lacanian notion of the gaze as one of the bases of masculine subjectivity has been considerably influenced by other theorists who have dealt with the subject. Laura Mulvey’s seminal article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” developed the Freudian notions of “scopic desire” and “scopophilia” to which I refer throughout this argument.17 My usage of these terms in the following pages refers to a pleasure in looking linked to the “proper” disposition of domestic space that is a priority of the male characters who appear most notably in the tales of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles. In other words, what a normative “man” in this context wanted to see was that his household was in order, that he had visual access to all of its secret corners, and that his wife occupied her proper place within it. Of course, in comic tales and anecdotes about adultery, the other characters in the typical adulterous triangle—the wife, the lover, and their accomplices—do everything in their power to ensure that the would-be normative husband is blinded, imprisoned, and humiliated in his own house. As we will see, the social order represented in these texts is an extraordinarily visual one, which means that the concept of masculinity that one derives from them is also partly a desire to see the social world, with its bodies and its domestic and civic spaces, organized in a specific way that confirms the masculine subject in (the place of) his gendered identity. The literary, legal, and pastoral intertexts that I examine here are essentially manuals on how to organize domestic space, how to discipline women’s bodies within it, and how to inspect space and to place it under surveillance such that it will confirm or even personify the masculinity of the man who inhabits it. The “scopophilia” that I borrow from Freud via Mulvey is the pleasure experienced by the normative masculine subject when he sees what he wants to see, i.e., the projection of his own gender being into domestic space. It should be clear from the preceding sentences that the ways in which the masculinist gaze configures space and disciplines bodies is formulated in the terms made famous by Foucault in his well-known chapters on Bentham’s panopticon in Discipline and Punish, and in his description of the “apparatus of sexuality” in the first volume of The History of Sexuality. My thinking about masculinity has perhaps been most influenced by Althusser’s famous definition of ideological interpellation, which is the basis of my idea of masculinity as intertextual transmission. The “ideology” of the male gender role calls upon men to perform their gender by reproducing that ideology in or as texts and stories about its numerous variations, and the dangers that women’s agency presents to them as masculine subjects. To express my thesis in the Althusserian terms that are implicitly yet continuously developed in the following pages, masculinity as a dominant ideology has a material existence as the intertextual practice of telling stories, expressing opinions, and transcribing examples concerning adultery, cuckoldry, and “women’s wiles,” which men are called upon to share with one 17 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, eds., Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 438–48. For Freud’s treatment of scopophilia, see Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, tr. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1962).

Introduction

9

another. For example, in the famous scene from Rabelais’s Tiers Livre, which I will examine in detail in chapter three, the doctor Rondibilis says to Panurge, who has come to consult him as to whether he should marry or not, “… quand vous oirez dire de quelqu’un ces trois motz : « Il est marié », si vous dictez : « Il est doncques, ou a esté, ou sera, ou peult estre coqu » : vous ne serez dict imperit architecte de consequences naturelles (452–3) … [“when you hear said of anyone these three words: ‘He is married,’ if you say: ‘Then he is, or has been, or will be, or may be a cuckold,’ you will not be called an inexpert architect of natural consequences” (355).] The pronunciation of this kind of sentence, the act of asking another man to articulate it, and its transcription in a book meant to be published for the reading pleasure of learned men, are among the concrete acts that constitute the material existence of the normative masculinity that I will examine in the following pages. Once again, my fundamental point here is that the primary material manifestation of this masculine “ideology” was the dissemination of a legal, literary, and didactic intertext that men transmitted to one another over the course of centuries. This intertext may be divided into two opposing groups of documents, one “official” and serious, the other “unofficial” and comic. On the official side, there was a vast body of texts representing given institutions or individuals (the courts, the Church, local dukes or princes in the case of customary laws, one generation of clerics responsible for passing on a kind of masculine wisdom to the next generation of clerics), preoccupied by the surveillance and control of a wide range of sexual acts that were categorized according to their relative severity as infractions of a given law. While the categorization of these transgressions did not necessarily constitute the “identities” of the individuals who were guilty of them, the type of masculinity that is my subject here was contingent upon the kinds of acts in which both men and women engaged in relation to this general notion of legality.18 On the unofficial side, in texts that seem to be concerned only with entertainment, the nouvelle literature is an intertext in which the characters represent primal figures who return repeatedly in different guises. Cuckold stories are thus doubly intertextual: for their meaning, they rely upon a constant series of references to other cuckold stories, as well as upon 18 As Foucault pointed out, in early modern society, there were large “gray areas” when it came to the status of sexual acts in relation to the notion of identity. Foucault famously proclaimed that such interdicted acts as sodomy and incest did not constitute the culprits of these acts as “sodomites” or “perverts”; rather, one was guilty of an act that had to be atoned for, but which did not constitute the essence or the identity of the individual. See Histoire de la sexualité I, 59. This thesis has been debated extensively since the publication of Foucault’s work. Didier Eribon provided one of the most detailed critiques of Foucault’s thinking on this matter in the final section of Réflexions sur la question gay (Paris: Fayard, 1999), translated by Michael Lucey as “Michel Foucault’s Histories of Sexuality,” in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2001; 7 (1): 31–86. For a discussion of recent arguments for and against Foucault’s controversial insight, see Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon, “Queering History,” PMLA, October, 2005 (Volume 120, Number 5), 1608–17. See also Carla Freccero’s extensive discussion of the modernist preconceptions that dominate the acts versus identity debate concerning the early-modern world in Queer/Early/Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 31–50. I am grateful to the outside readers of Ashgate for calling my attention to the chapters by Eribon and Freccero.

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an incessant, implicit reference to the official conception of masculinity inscribed in legal and clerical documents. In this sense, the literature of cuckoldry catalogues the attributes of a kind of masculinity that exists within and as these enumerations themselves, while telling stories about cuckolds is a practice in which normative early-modern masculinity, as a constitutive element of a dominant ideology, has its material reality. The tale of cuckoldry, along with its later variations in Rabelais and Brantôme, puts into play a vast intertext on masculinity as it relates to marriage and the law, and especially to a problematic and misogynist conception of femininity that has deep roots not only in Western literature, but in Western philosophy and law as well.19 Masculinity is thus both a structure within the text (the standard set of variations on male-female sexual relations both within and beyond the bounds of marriage, and the comic undermining of masculine attributes that is a consequence of adultery), as well as a much larger structure that lies outside of the immediate context of the works themselves, in the “official” texts on marriage and adultery. Chapter 1 is devoted to an examination of a significant “sampling” of both civil and canon law texts, penance manuals, criminal registers, and collections of exempla that predate my primary texts and serve as an intellectual context for them. The Digest of Justinian, for example, provides a very early and foundational definition of marriage that prescribes different roles for men and women within this fundamental social institution. Later texts, such as Gratian’s Concordia discordantium canonum, look at marriage from a more theological perspective that categorizes specific sexual acts within and beyond marriage in terms of a striking, if implicit, definition of gender difference. Similarly, penance manuals ranging from the earliest Irish examples of the genre to Thomas de Chobham’s Summa confessorum offer an implicit yet comprehensive definition of the differences between men and women as gendered beings that will be essential to my reading of masculinity in cuckold stories in the following chapters. The ideas of sex and marriage that are developed within these texts, in criminal registers such as the Registre criminel du Châtelet de Paris, and in exempla collections such as the Exempla ex sermonibus vulgaribus of Jacques de Vitry, all of which I will examine briefly in the first chapter, serve as the conceptual paradigm that makes possible a reading of the cuckold tale as a problematic and often paradoxical intertextual elaboration of a certain kind of masculinity. Chapter 2 focuses on the transmission of a particular “story of women” in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, which is the basis of both the official doctrine that mandates the control of women’s desire, and of the comic literature in which the supposedly unbounded nature of women’s bodies undermines the obsessive masculinist need for control and power. The cuckold himself is a scrupulous reader of the intertext of clerical, misogynist literature, in which the potential ruses of women are detailed and catalogued. He is always accompanied in these stories by his wife, her would19 Feminist thinkers have long argued that Western philosophy rests upon a foundation that requires a fundamental characterization of the feminine as the “other” of the masculine. For a discussion of the foundations of this mode of thinking in Plato’s chora in the Timaeus, and the modern critiques of Derrida and Irigaray of this concept, see Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion, 111–24.

Introduction

11

be lovers, and numerous other “attendants.” The role of the masculine gaze in the working out of this triangular, intersubjective drama is primordial since it surveys the topography of imaginary space and saturates it with opposing values defined by the performance of gender difference. Interiors (bedrooms, closets, clothing trunks, storage bins, etc.) are spaces of punishment for the married man, and places of pleasure and transgression for his wife and her lovers. Exteriors are realms of work, warfare, and of the public surveillance of the female body that constitutes the social order. This scopic configuration of space was literally legislated in the legal texts examined in chapter one, while the material limitation of women’s roles in domestic and public spaces as a foundation of patriarchy has long been one of the primary topics of feminist theory, which is thus an indispensable aid in the reading of this text.20 The chapter concludes with a consideration of the consequences of this gender system when the jealous cuckold becomes serious, and turns the full force of masculine violence against the fantasy figure of the insatiable wife and her many lovers, resulting sometimes in the literal castration of the usurping lover, and even in his murder, along with that of the unfaithful wife. Consequently, masculinity in this context often entails its own undoing, since the symbolic and material violence done to women that is one of its foundations ultimately is a form of violence against the social order that gender differentiation institutes. Chapter 3 examines the peculiar form that the cuckold story assumes in Rabelais’s Tiers Livre. This extraordinary text presents a series of internal intertexts— quotations, prophesies, poems, medical pronouncements, etc.—that are offered in response to Panurge’s query concerning his future life as a married man. The diverse interpretations of these texts inscribe the primary elements of masculinity that are evident from the intertext of cuckold stories: an obsession with the social implications of sex, a dread of unbounded women’s sexuality, a paranoia concerning the virility of the male body that will always be inadequate to women’s desires, a fierce jealousy against possible sexual rivals, etc. These elements may once again be discerned beneath the literal level of a work that seems to be concerned primarily with processes of reading and interpretation, and with the “correct” method of telling stories, which is intimately linked to the elaboration of this kind of masculinity.21 The Tiers Livre runs the gamut of subjects and obsessions that constitute the core of the cuckold’s being, and which are reflected at all of the discursive levels on which the text operates: the need for a hyperbolic proclamation of an imaginary masculine virility, which is confirmed as a truth of the male body in medical discourses; a dread of castration that is transformed into the vituperative promise to castrate other, usurping males, which is justified in legal discourse; the ambivalence of a masculine subject who sees his own body as a kind of seminal cornucopia that is, nonetheless, 20 See Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion, 111–24, for a discussion of the deep roots in Western philosophy of men’s misrepresentations of women’s relation to space as one of the foundations of masculinist hegemony. 21 Edwin Duval reads the opening of the Tiers Livre as a commentary on the correct method for “writing histories,” that is, of telling stories, which was inspired largely by Lucian’s How to Write History. See The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel. Études Rabelaisiennes XXXIV (Geneva: Droz, 1997), 15–29.

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the butt of jokes and scorn, as in the novella literature; the specular construction of masculinity as the model for all textual procedures and even for the interpretation of truth, as in the clerical literature; the fear provoked by the male body’s possible inadequacy when faced with women’s overabundance, which serves as a pretext for bonding among men. Chapter 3 thus highlights the extent to which this polyvalent text is largely concerned with the construction and performance of the masculine gender in a very restricted and historically-contingent context, which nonetheless is elaborated within the surprisingly diverse intertext that is reflected in the work. Chapter 4 is a reading of significant passages of Brantôme’s Dames galantes. This anecdotal work provides some of the most stunning examples of the ways in which early-modern masculinity constructed itself through the display of masculinist emblems in and around the women’s bodies, to use Brantôme’s own formulation. Just as this mode of producing the male gender fragments men’s being into dispersed visual signs, it also transforms the male body’s virility into economic commodities, in a process which Brantôme calls a “distillation spermatique.” In other words, Brantôme sees masculine physical superabundance as the basis of a homosocial economy, in which the demands of an ever unbounded female body bring forth an equally limitless masculine capacity for producing what Montaigne called “une bonne semence” in “De l’oisiveté.”22 Brantôme is hence largely concerned with giving a narrative account both of the women whose hyperbolic desires participated in the interpellation of men as men, and of the material consequences of these interpellations, which writers were obliged literally to count and to present in narrative accounts. In this work, the display of masculinity is hence essentially a process of economic accumulation in writing, which represents not only a fantasy image of women as insatiable beings who call forth men as sexually indefatigable— which is a familiar topos of both comic and serious literature23—but also uses the process of this imaginary interpellation as the basis and the motivation of a textual practice. In a sense, the intertextual elaboration of masculinity that I trace here reaches its culmination in both Brantôme and Rabelais. From the starting point of legal texts concerned with the literal prescription of what constituted men as men, these later writers were essentially engaged with gender as a trope that allowed for rhetorical imitation and improvisation. Through the reading of these works, masculinity may ultimately be understood as an entity that can be located within them as a kind of rhetorical “play” or “effect.” Men were called upon by other men to tell stories about gender difference, with the consequence that their being as gendered subjects was displayed within writing, as a mode of storytelling, and as a long intertextual tradition. Moreover, Brantôme’s work represents a significant departure toward perverse or perhaps even “queer” sexual practices that might be involved in the elaboration of masculinities that are well beyond the bounds of the normative model 22 Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Albert Thibaudet et Maurice Rat (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 33. 23 Montaigne’s “Sur des vers de Virgile” includes an interesting discussion both of the insatiable woman topos and its counterpart, that of the tireless man. See Montaigne, 832–3 and 844–5.

Introduction

13

examined here. It could be argued, in light of recent theoretical developments, that the normative masculinity that is the subject of this text could and perhaps even should be read in the context of its constant attempts to displace and even efface these “other” sexualities and “other” masculinities. This book develops gradually from an initial stage in which it seems as though early-modern masculinity is a kind of monolith that displays itself within a number of different discourses, to a final stage in which the norm of the male gender appears to be unthinkable without the numerous others from which it continuously distinguishes itself. At its conclusion, I hope that it will be clear that this implication was present from the beginning, and that even the most monolithic masculinity has always been structured in terms of its constant instability and undoing in the face of unquantifiable others that were beyond men’s control. The most noteworthy of these were undoubtedly the figure of woman and the possibility of her agency, which, as Rabelais’s work makes evident, served as definitive points of reference in the configuration of masculinity. In more general terms, genders and the subjective identities that are largely a function of them are constructed in different kinds of activity in the material world: disciplines, educations, punishments, therapies, medical interventions, ceremonies, institutions, propaganda, fashion, etc. Literature as an imaginary discourse plays an important role in supporting, disseminating, and ultimately transforming the official discourses concerning gender and identity that structure our conception of the social world. The rather vast “literature” on marriage and adultery, which includes (romance) novels, soap operas, television drama series, films, fashion magazines, tabloids, and afternoon talk shows, continues to play a major role in our perceptions of ourselves as gendered beings. By reading a specific moment in the history of this ever expanding literature, we may ultimately recognize the extent to which we have always been interpellated and captured in and as our genders by certain persistent kinds of narrative about sexual difference. It could be argued that by concentrating on the increasing instability of what was supposedly a monolithic and invariant performance of masculinity, one radically revises our understanding of what that masculinity may have been in the distant past. I hope that the work undertaken in the following pages ultimately contributes to the “queering” of the history of gender that has been so important in scholarly discourse over the past fifteen years, at least as Goldberg and Menon have described it. Despite reactionary proclamations to the contrary, masculinity is not and never has been the solid and stable entity on which anxious men both then and now wanted to construct their identities. By reading this desired stability essentially as a constant “work in progress” within a broad intertext, I hope that my work here demonstrates that the goal of building a single, impenetrable gender that would serve as the basis of any individual’s subjective identity was an ideal that remained unachievable in early-modern France. This book describes the material foundations upon which men sought to construct their masculinity at a specific moment in history, and within a given corpus, but it also describes that construction as a project that some men, such as the ones Brantôme describes at the end of the period I examine here, increasingly abandoned in order to “inhabit” other bodies and other pleasures. We can only hope that their example will allow us to do the same.

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Chapter 1

Masculinity as an Intertextual Concept in Legal, Pastoral, and Clerical Documents of the Late Middle Ages Introduction The reality of sexual behavior and its regulation in civil and ecclesiastic legal practices at the end of the Middle Ages is inscrutable and perhaps irreducibly multiple. The enormous body of documents available to us from the fifth through the sixteenth centuries—the Corpus iuris civilis, the Corpus iuris canonici, the penitential books, the criminal registers of the civil and church courts, collections of exempla, and the literature of the period, including the nouvelles—provide anything but a coherent picture of sex and its role in the all-important institution of marriage as it would have been understood by the writers whom I will examine in the following chapters. The complexity of what marriage and sex may have really been when the anonymous author of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles transcribed his tales, when Rabelais sent Panurge in search of an answer to his question in the Tiers Livre, or when Brantôme described “Les dames qui font l’amour et leurs maris cocus” requires that one read a wide variety of conflicting texts on the subject dating from the beginning of the Christian era in Europe to the Renaissance, during which marriage was drastically transformed. This chapter will discuss the different conceptions of sex and matrimony that may be derived from a significant sampling of the official documents concerning marriage in order to provide a broad background for narrative representations of social relationships between men and women determined by this fundamental social institution. The “official” representations of sex derived from these works provide a context for the understanding of adultery as it is presented in narrative literature. The early modern obsession with the cuckold as a paradoxical embodiment of masculinity might thus be explicated through an examination of the intertextual relationship between official and unofficial, “true” and fictional accounts of sex, its place in marriage, and the elaboration of the masculine gender as a concept in relation to the different roles for men and women configured by marriage. Some of the most important civil law texts of the Middle Ages depict a rather severe portrait of matrimony and sexuality, which were strictly regulated within the social world that they helped to structure. The desires of men and women were secondary to the economic, even mercantile relationships that marriage established between families. As such, any sexual activity that took place beyond the bounds

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of the marriage bed and the couple was perceived as a threat to these arrangements and could be severely punished. According to some civil law texts, both fathers and husbands had the right to kill their adulterous daughters or wives, just as they had the right to kill their lovers if they caught the two of them in the act, within the household of either the husband or father-in-law. From this point of view, sex and desire were subversive forces that were “demonized” especially in the case of women who indulged their pleasures beyond the legal boundaries of their own homes and husbands. Unequivocally, a sexually active woman who did not uphold her marriage vows was a criminal who could be subjected to the most severe capital punishments; moreover, most women accused of crimes were also said to be guilty of adultery or fornication. The case of male adulterers was much less dramatic; the criminal registers of the Middle Ages do not impute “loose” sexual behavior to every commoner who is accused of theft or larceny, as is the case with most women accused of crimes. Beside the stringency of civil law and custom, canon law and penance manuals depict an alternate reality in which sexual excess was included within a general ethical code that stressed the possibility of atoning for one’s sins in the future, whereas the civil code seems to have been much more focused on the dowry, and on the means of recovering it if the marital contract was broken. From this perspective, the penitential books describe an alternative model that allowed for sexual indiscretions as long as those who were guilty of them made amends in one way or another. “Illicit” sexual activity in all of its varieties—incest, bestiality, masturbation, fornication, adultery, sodomy, rape—could be atoned for by penances that consisted of one kind of abstinence or another (from wine and meat, from juicy foods, from all foods but bread and water, etc.), over varying periods of time. Sexual transgressions had no place in marriage from this ecclesiastical perspective, since copulation served merely as a means of “consummating” the union between husband and wife, while sexual pleasure was not a necessary component of married life; on the contrary, sex that was too pleasurable within a marriage was considered sinful. Beyond the bounds of marriage, these indiscretions were examined strictly from a masculine point of view, and came in many varieties. Adultery, for example, was defined as copulation between a man and a woman betrothed to, or married to, another man, while fornication was the same act performed by a man with a widow or a girl. In both the civil and ecclesiastic systems, therefore, men were the subjects of sex and its control, while women served as the conduits through whom goods were exchanged from family to family, or as the supports of a varied and often violent sexual activity that took place beyond the limits of the marriage contract.1 1 This depiction of marriage is a deliberately simplified one based on the primary texts that I will read here. In the enormous scholarly literature on the subject, historians are quite divided as to its exact nature in the Middle Ages. D.L. D’Avray, for example, argues that the familiar description of marriage, supported by eminent scholars such as Georges Duby, as a proprietary transaction between families in which affection and above all religious symbolism played a secondary role is a caricature that he corrects with a detailed account of the symbolic significance of the sacrament in medieval religious life. See D.L. D’Avray, Medieval Marriage: Symbolism and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1–18. In contrast, Nira Gradowicz-Pancer argues that even the seemingly primary notion of women’s

Masculinity as an Intertextual Concept

17

In general, then, the role of sex in marriage varies according to the document that one reads. Within the code of civil law, its place was absolutely limited to the couple, with severe repercussions for offenders of the established order. From the point of view of the Church, however, the punishment for adultery and fornication was limited to more or less severe forms of repentance. Nevertheless, it is clear from these documents that gender difference is the determining factor in the formulation of the law. Since the law was inherently masculinist, its configuration of social structures both relied upon and constituted an elaboration of the concept of masculinity almost as the basis of the very notion of legality. For men, the possibility of sex beyond the bounds of marriage meant that they were responsible for the surveillance and control of their wives’ bodies, and for protecting their homes and wives from the possible assaults of other men. The two possible roles that men could play in this schema were, therefore, that of the husband, guardian of the domus of his marriage, or that of the usurping lover, who sought an illicit sexual satisfaction with women categorized in terms of their relationships with men, running the gamut from virgins, to wives, to prostitutes, to adulteresses, to widows. The difference between masculine and feminine in this context, then, was quite conventionally that which separated subject from object, authority from subjection, the ruler from the governed, and this difference generated two contradictory kinds of masculine subjectivity. On the one side was the male interpellated as a masculine subject who meticulously, even obsessively, legislated his relationship to other men via the institution of marriage and its transfer of wealth and property. This kind of subjectivity focused its attention incessantly on the threat to the marriage posed by the possible sexual indiscretions of the wife. The code of honor and the vengeance that accompanied its abrogation were based upon a perception of women’s desire as boundless, treacherous, even criminal, and this distrust of desire in general was complemented in the Middle Ages by the Church’s official vilification of sex as sin, at the same time that penance seemed to provide a space for sexual transgressions. Woman, therefore, was an entity that men sought to quantify, to place under surveillance, and to contain within boundaries. Her desire for sex was conceived of as unbounded, untouchable, unquantifiable, even criminal. Curiously, however, this categorization of woman as the unknown quantity in a legal system based upon knowledge of her behavior was the mirror image of the desire that defined a second masculine subject position, that of men who always sought their pleasures beyond the bounds of the economy of sex and property that was inherently masculinist. In other words, marriage was instrumental in the structuring of a patriarchal, social, and sexual economy built upon an aporia at its core: that is, the necessity that men had simultaneously to control their own wives’ desire, to provoke the desire of other men’s wives, and, as we will see in sexual purity was secondary to the social and collective bonds established among families by marriage, meaning that its larger implications were fundamentally important both from the point of view of the individual and of the “clan” to which she belonged. See “Honneur féminin et pureté sexuelle: équation ou paradoxe?” in Michel Rouche, ed., Mariage et sexualité au Moyen Âge: accord ou crise? (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2000), 37– 51. The contradictory conceptions of marriage throughout the early modern period might be multiplied ad infinitum.

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both Rabelais and Brantôme, to incite the desire of other men for their own wives. This set of incompatible imperatives generates virtually the entirety of the literature devoted to cuckoldry and adultery. An important question that has to be raised here is that of the definition of a “feminine” subject position in these documents, since women are consistently conceived of in them either as sexual objects or conduits of wealth. In simpler terms, what could a woman “do” sexually and actively in this context? How was she constructed and interpellated by official proclamations concerning marriage, sex, adultery, and punishment? If the masculine position is sketched out in meticulous detail both in legal texts and in the narrative literature of the period, the role of women is much more difficult to discern and must be described largely in terms of the implications that can be drawn from the delineation of masculinity, which itself is “unthinkable” unless we conceive of it as a “place marker” in a system of gender relations, meaning that the delineation of masculinity as a “project” requires the existence of femininity.2 The position of women is unavoidably contingent in these documents: it depends always and everywhere upon its relations with men in order to be understood. Nevertheless, this same statement is true of the masculine subject position: just as an adulterer and a fornicator cannot be defined as such without considering the kind of woman with whom a given man had sexual relations, so a woman in any situation cannot be defined in social and gender terms without considering her own relations to men of differing social statuses. This second, contingent, “feminine” position is complementary to its masculine counterpart, which presupposes the existence of the feminine as a pre-condition for its own existence. In other words, men who were the subjects of an entire legal and intellectual system made explicit in an enormous corpus of documents required both women as the objects of their actions, and the potentiality or threat that men themselves could become objects or victims within this system. Curiously, then, when medieval and Renaissance men looked at the position of women within the legal system meant to codify and institutionalize their own privilege, they saw their own gender reflected back at them in an inverted or “transposed” form, in the musical sense. The possibility that men could be “victimized” by women apparently terrified and fascinated early-modern men, leading to the voluminous comic meditations on this theme that constitute the adultery literature that is my focus here. Moreover, this comic literature seems to explore and to describe the possibility of women’s agency, or better yet its probability and ubiquity, which posed a problem for men that was at the core, I would argue, of both the legal documents I will examine, and of the structuring of masculine subjectivity as well. A brief if detailed survey of the legal texts at our disposal will give us a clearer idea of how masculinity was structured as a place, process, and project within this enormous intertext. The three necessary figures of the cuckold tale—the watchful, paranoid husband, the uncontrollable wife, and the usurping lover—are also the main characters of official documents that date back thousands of years. 2 The notion of masculinity as a “place marker” and “process” or “project” in a system of gender relations is developed in R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 67–86.

Masculinity as an Intertextual Concept

19

The meaning and the “being” of the cuckold tale’s characters are derived from an intimate understanding of pre- and early-modern marriage as it is described in different kinds of legal discourse. If cuckold tales fascinated Europeans for so many centuries, it is perhaps because the gender positions defined by their legal institutions were personified in these stories as comic figures or even icons. The official documents that I will examine represented masculinity as a function of a spatial, domestic, and disciplinary order that often could not be enforced, since both men and women were unwilling to conform to it, not only in the fantasy world of comedy, but also apparently in the real world. According to the didactic literature, men judged their performances of their gender in relation to the masculine role defined by this order, which generated an anxiety that their own lives would not conform to this rigid paradigm, an anxiety that was often parodied in comic texts. Renaissance masculinity was thus perhaps unavoidably multiple, since the normative and surprisingly consistent idea delineated in the texts that I will examine here of the vigilant, disciplined, and masterful husband, which Rabelais parodied in the Tiers Livre, conflicted with examples of masculinity taken from the “real” world, revealed to us in criminal registers, in the margins of penance manuals, and in comic literature, which seemed to contain only the diverse ways in which both men and women transgressed gender norms or failed to live up to them. The Digest of Justinian is a good starting point for a discussion of the “official” conception of masculinity within marriage. The Corpus iuris civilis: The Transportation and Surveillance of Women’s Bodies From the point of view of the Byzantine compendium of laws compiled by the Emperor Justinian, and known throughout the Middle Ages as the Digest or the Corpus iuris civilis, marriage was an institution that determined an individual’s role in the social order for life. 3 One went from being the child of a sanctioned union, to an adolescent son or daughter “in power” for whom decisions had to be made in the process of betrothal, to a husband or wife, to a father and mother who had to make decisions for their own children, etc. In turn, these designations of social roles were intimately linked to the concepts of ownership and property, often predicated upon the establishment of alliances between families through marriage. Every stage of the marriage ritual was thus strictly defined by the civil laws that medieval Europeans borrowed from Justinian’s Digest, beginning with the tutoring of children, to their betrothal by their parents, to the transfer of goods and property accomplished by the 3 My readings are based on Alan Watson, et al., ed. and trans. The Digest of Justinian (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). All page references are to this edition. According to Ken Pennington, the Digest served as an inspiration for laws enacted across Europe in the Middle Ages: “Its doctrines provided medieval jurists with a sophisticated model for contracts, rules of procedure, family law, testaments, and a strong monarchical constitutional system. Six hundred years after his death, Justinian’s name became eponymous for legislator and codifier.” “Roman and Secular Law in the Middle Ages,” in Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide, eds. F.A.C. Mantello and A.G. Rigg (Washington: Catholic University Press of America, 1996), 254.

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marriage, to the penalties for the breaking of marriage vows, and so on. The Digest was especially meticulous with regard to the laws concerning dowries, which leads one to conclude that marriage was founded mostly on the basis of economic exchange. For example, there are eighteen citations, articles, examples, or commentaries on laws and precedents concerning betrothals in the Digest, sixty-eight concerning the formation of marriages, forty-five on punishing adulterers, and eight on divorce and the dissolution of marriage. The remainder of the copious texts concerning marriage in the work are devoted to dowries and the exchange of property in general: one hundred and thirty-nine articles in the Digest concern marriage itself, while three hundred and fifteen entries are devoted to dowries and the transfer of wealth from family to family via the nuptial pact. This numerical preponderance means simply that marriage was an institution devoted mainly to the exchange of property and wealth, and had little to do with love or “sexuality.” The contractual nature of the verbal agreement that constituted a betrothal united two families in an exchange of wives: Florentinus, Institutes, book 3: Betrothal is the announcement and mutual promise of marriage in the future. Ulpian, Betrothal, sole book: “Betrothal was so called from the “solemn plighting of troth,” since it was customary for our ancestors to stipulate and solemnly promise their wives-to-be to each other. [... nam moris fuit ueteribus stipulari et spondere sibi uxores futuras.] (656 –7)

The relationship between families in this case is thus predicated on the exchange of women conceived of as future wives. Moreover, the etymology of the term “betrothal” (sponsalia) cited by the author is linked to the act of promising (spondendo, spondere), but which is distinguished into masculine and feminine terms in its nominative forms: “unde et sponsi sponsaeque appellatio nata est,” (656) “from which the appellation betrothed [men] and betrothed [women] is born.”4 This conceptual maneuver is crucial to an understanding of gender as it is structured by marriage: the text asserts that the social status of unmarried young men as of unmarried young women was determined by the solemn promise of a literal exchange of women’s bodies between families. This basic configuration constitutes both masculine and feminine subjects on the basis of a hierarchically-gendered social structure and is fundamental to a description of masculinity as it is formulated in the intertext. The laws concerning marriage and betrothals in the Digest are thus squarely focused on the establishment of interfamilial relations. The concepts of consent and power developed in the text highlight the extent to which marriages were meant merely to confirm and to support the status quo of a given social hierarchy, as well as of the institutionalized dominance of men over women. The status of a masculine or feminine subject was predicated on the ability of an individual to consent to or to decline a marriage betrothal. Despite the law’s insistence that consent was necessary from both partners to the marriage contract, a girl could refuse the marriage partner selected for her only under very limited circumstances, while the boy or man to 4 Watson’s translator renders this phrase as follows: “This is the derivation of the term ‘betrothed’ for both sexes” (656).

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whom she was promised seemingly had the right to refuse her according to his own will: ... Betrothal, like marriage, takes place with the consent of the parties to it. So, as in the case of marriage, a daughter-in-power must consent to her betrothal [et ideo sicut nuptiis, ita sponsalibus filiam familias consentire oportet]. ... But if she does not oppose her father’s wishes, she is held to consent. A daughter can only refuse to give her consent where her father chooses someone who is unfit for betrothal because of his bad behavior or character [si indignum moribus uel turpem sponsum ei pater eligat]. ... The betrothal of a son-in-power cannot be carried out in his name where he refuses his consent to it (658).

From the beginnings of their insertion into the social order founded on marriage— and betrothals could be arranged for “consenting” children who had reached the age of seven—men and women were called upon to become different kinds of subjects, contingent upon gender difference, and upon their consent to exogamous relationships that were the fundamental links between families. The desire of the betrothed partners for one another was the least consideration in this establishment of extended families and distributions of wealth. In other words, “sexuality” was a minor issue in a social structure predicated on gender difference. In contrast, in the world-upside-down of the cuckold tale, even the most frivolous kind of desire is the motivating force of its plot, and almost always plays itself out in opposition to the social configuration of marriage. In the Digest’s definition of marriage, it seems that sex was irrelevant to the alliances that it brought into being, while gender difference determined the identity and legal status of the union’s participants. ... Marriage is the union of a man and a woman, a partnership for life involving divine as well as human law. ... Marriage cannot take place unless everyone involved consents, that is, those who are being united and those in whose power they are... ... It is settled that a woman can be married by a man in his absence, either by letter or by messenger, if she is led to his house. But where she is absent, she cannot be married by letter or by messenger because she must be led to her husband’s house, not her own, since the former is, as it were, the domicile of the marriage (657–8).

While the main definition to appear in book twenty-three of the Digest sounds quite modern and even “humanist,” the original Latin of the text throws quite a different light on this conception of the law: “Nuptiae sunt coniunctio maris et feminae et consortium omnis uitae, diuini et humani iuris communicatio” (657). From this point of view, the institution of marriage is the union of husbands with women—that is, the language of the text gives priority to the role of the man, defined in terms of his place in the arrangement, while the female parties to this contract are named as women (feminae) here, instead of the uxore (wives) of the earlier passages. This reversal of the performative utterance against which women struggled throughout the twentieth century—“I now pronounce you man and wife”—highlights the extent to which the masculine role was the determining factor in the formation of a household

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in the wedding ceremony, while women were necessary but somehow ancillary to this primary gender role. The important detail of this passage is, however, the idea of the domus or domicile of the marriage, and of a woman’s role in it, which is rich in implications for the comic literature of adultery. The husband’s house or home is the place of the marriage, which is inextricably associated with it. The act that constitutes matrimony from a legal standpoint is the transporting of the woman’s body to the household of the husband, even in his absence, in which case a letter or messenger may serve as a substitute for the him.5 Throughout the nouvelle literature, the figure of the wife is associated with the interior of the home, which is the site of her infidelities, and of her capture by her always soon-to-be cuckolded husband. Moreover, the absence of the husband is the motif that most often motivates or makes possible the adulterous act in these stories. The substitution of another in the place of the husband in his own domicile is the essential maneuver of the cuckold tale; curiously, the Roman law that served as a standard for medieval and Renaissance civil practices provided a foundation for this gesture. On the wedding day, if the husband is absent, a text that declares a primary masculinist will must occupy the man’s place in the marital domicile structured around the possession and transportation of a woman’s body from one domus to another.6 The essential violation of adultery is the substitution of a male body of the wife’s choosing in this place reserved for the text of the law, which is a domestic location in which masculinity elaborates itself continuously in reference to the fundamental intertext of the patriarchal law. Normative masculinity derives several characteristics from the inaugural moment of marriage as it is described in the Digest. Subjects engendered as men have a particular relation to the space within the domicile of their marriage. They are responsible for transporting their wives’ bodies to that space, and for confining her being and her pleasure to it. Masculine subjects are defined by a necessary surveillance of this enclosure, and in cuckold tales this necessity reaches the level of a hyperbolic anguish and paranoia, which, as in the case of Panurge in the Tiers Livre, often translates into an obsession with texts that describe the necessity of controlling one’s future wife. The normative man in the Renaissance imaginary is thus a person who must see everything that goes on in his household, and everything that his wife does within it. Consequently, cuckold stories often overturn or invert the defining visual or scopic characteristics of masculinity in this context. If married men must be all-seeing and all-knowing within their domicile, the tales render them at least temporarily blind and ignorant; if women are required to be visible and contained, the tales make them invisible and unbounded. In this specific and historically contingent 5 This practice was apparently common throughout Europe in the Renaissance: “In Tuscany, daughters left their family of birth at their marriage and went to live with their husband; the son-in-law living under his father-in-law’s roof is a figure practically nonexistent in this region. Sons, on the other hand, whether married or not, remained in their father’s house, bringing their young bride there if they took a wife.” Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy. trans. Lydia Cochrane. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 18. 6 For a theoretical perspective on the persistent association of women with domestic interiors, see Levinas’s discussion of “L’habitation et le féminin” in Totalité et infini: essai sur l’extériorité (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), 127–31.

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context, then, normative masculinity signifies surveillance and the imposition of boundaries on women’s bodies as property within strictly defined domestic space, which requires surveillance of men both in public and private space as an integral and essential part of their performance as masculine subjects. According to the Digest, the substitution of another man for the husband was considered a grievous crime, especially within the domicile of the marriage: A woman caught in adultery is in the same position as one convicted of a criminal offense. So if she is shown to be guilty of adultery, she will be branded with infamia not just because she was caught in adultery but also because she has been convicted of a crime. However, if she was not caught in adultery, but was convicted of it, she will suffer infamia because of the conviction. If she has been caught in adultery, but not convicted, would she still suffer infamia? I think that even if she were acquitted after being caught, she will still suffer infamia, because it is clear that a woman taken in adultery suffers infamia automatically by statute, no judgment being required. We are not told here, as in the lex Julia on adultery, who must catch her or where it must be done; so it seems she will suffer infamia whether it is her husband or someone else who catches her. Even if she is not caught in her husband’s house or her father’s, she will suffer infamia according to the terms of the statute (662–663).

A woman who was caught in adultery suffered the same fate as, for example, soldiers who had deserted their armies, pimps, thieves, those convicted of violent assault or fraud, bigamists, etc. (82). According to Watson’s glossary, infamia was “a condition of disgrace resulting from certain types of immoral or wrongful conduct” (xx).7 This first reference to punishment confirms the emphasis on place that was evident in the definition of marriage in the absence of the husband. Moreover, the phrasing of the last two sentences of this passage implies that the wife is continuously under surveillance: no matter where she goes, if she engages in the unlawful activity of adultery, she may be caught and reported to her husband, and suffer the public shame of infamia. The public nature of marital relations and the collective surveillance to which the wife is subjected are both salient features of the imaginary world that is depicted in the cuckold tales, which inscribe an incessant vigilance characteristic of the husband’s position in the social structure. One of the defining characteristics of masculinity in this context is hence this overdetermined relationship to vision: the primary activity and performance of men is scopic, and their very being as gendered subjects must “invest” the space they occupy with a coercive gaze in which often

7 Cf. William Smith, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (London: John Murray, 1875), 634: “The consequences of Infamia were the loss of certain political rights, but not all … The Infamis … lost the capacity for certain so-called public rights, but not the capacity for private rights.” Other legal texts are much less lenient than the Digest appears to be in this case. An early penitential manual, the Poenitentiale Cordubense, composed between 850 and 1000, details distinct penalties for women caught in adultery and their lovers. Following the example of the Lex Julia, on which the Digest comments, the Poenitentiale Cordubense authorized capital punishment for adulteresses, while their lovers were subject to public penitence for the rest of their lives. See Francis Bezler, Les Pénitentiels espagnols (Münster: Aschendorff, 1994), 174.

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family members and even entire communities participate, while this notion of public surveillance of women’s bodies is inscribed and legislated in the text of the law. It seems clear at times from the Digest that the punishment for adultery was a severe one, which entailed a state of permanent disgrace for the wife caught in the act by her husband, her father-in-law, or by anyone other member of the community. The text later cites the authority of the Lex Julia regarding the penalties inflicted upon adulterous wives and sometimes upon their lovers, which are much more severe than the social infamia mentioned in earlier passages. The Lex Julia condemned sex and sexuality to the realm of the illegal, since it confounded sexual “offenses” of all types into a single category, beyond the realm of legality. The author of the Digest is careful to point out this inexactitude of the authoritative law, and initiates a legal distinction that will be echoed in all of the major sources of medieval law: The law refers to stuprum and adultery indiscriminately and with rather a misuse of terms. But properly speaking adultery is committed with a married woman, the name being derived from children conceived by another (alter); stuprum, however, is committed against a virgin or a widow; the Greeks call it corruption (805).

Once again the law describes a masculine subject position that takes the figure of woman as its object, defined by her place in a set of relations with men. Here the compiler of the Digest is careful to establish distinctions that were not evident from the decrees on which he comments. Throughout this section, book forty-eight, the text refers to the Latin legal concepts stuprum and lenocinium, which are indiscriminate terms according to Watson’s glossary, signifying “a range of sexual offenses from illicit intercourse with a respectable unmarried woman or widow to homosexual rape” (xxii). In contrast, in the Digest, adultery is ultimately distinguished from other sexual offenses because the women with whom a man may commit this act are bound by marriage to a living man, hence adultery is one man’s infraction against another man, accomplished via the woman to whom the latter is related by marriage.8 From this perspective, normative masculinity is a contingent construction predicated upon the control, surveillance, and purity of women conceived of as objects whose behavior had decisive consequences for the men who were called upon to control them, and who were thus interpellated as gendered beings through the performance of their masculinity according to a strictly codified set of instructions. Masculinity was hence a function of how women were required to act and the space that they necessarily had to occupy in pre-determined ways if the men to whom they were 8 The question against whom or what women’s adultery was an infraction has been discussed in an intriguing manner by Nira Gradowicz-Pancer as partly “un outrage à la virilité et à la réputation des hommes” [“an outrage against men’s reputations and virility”], and partly as “la désobéissance à un ensemble de dispositions qui entendent réglementer toutes les relations, y compris les rapports sexuels, en fonction des intérêts dictés par des stratégies matrimoniales et selon des impératifs d’une hiérarchie sociale qu’il faut préserver” [“an act of disobedience against a set of arrangements intended to control all relations, including sexual ones, as a function of the interests dictated by matrimonial strategies according to the imperatives of a social hierarchy that has to be maintained”]. “Honneur féminin et pureté sexuelle,” 38–9.

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bound were to be recognized as masculine subjects. In other words, a man in this context simply could not be identified as a “real” or “proper” man if the women to whom he was socially, contractually, and sexually related did not behave according to a strict code of legality that was gender specific. In this sense, normative masculinity in the early modern period and throughout the Renaissance was much more contingent than its feminine counterpart: it was a function both of necessary masculine performances, and of necessary controls placed on women’s lives. In terms of the legal consequences for adultery, the Digest is highly ambivalent. Above we saw that women suffered infamia for their betrayal of their husbands, while at other times the text states that both women and men were condemned to the most severe penalty imaginable for adultery: A father is granted the right of killing an adulterer along with a daughter whom he has in power... The right to kill is granted to the father in his own house, even if his daughter does not live there, or in the house of his son-in-law; the term “house” is to be taken as meaning “domicile,” [sed domus et pro domicilio accipienda est] as in the lex Cornelia on injuria ... The reason why it is the father not the husband who is allowed to kill the woman and any adulterer [caught with her] is that, for the most part, the concern for family duty [pietas paterni] implicit in the title of father takes counsel for his children... (810). The translator of this passage reveals what is really at stake in the institution of marriage at this time, since the idea of “family duty” is nothing more than a literal translation, in the sense of movement from one place to another, of the “pietas paterni” that is transferred from one household to another. There is perhaps no better description of patriarchy than as this paternal right to kill his daughter if she transgresses the law that defines her social and sexual role as a wife. Moreover, the father’s right to kill those who transgress an explicit restriction of sex is inscribed in the domiciles that define marriage as such, and on the very body of the wife whose movement from house to house constitutes the marriage even in the absence of the man to whom she is bound. This chilling idea will appear on numerous occasions in the cuckold tales, at the precise moment when the cuckold catches his wife “in the act.” The Latin text highlights the bodily sense of the preposition contained in this colloquial expression: “The words of the statute ‘shall have caught the adulterer in his daughter’ do not appear to be otiose [Quod ait lex in filia adulterum ‘deprehenderit,’ non otiosum uidetur]” (810). The adulterer had to be caught literally “in” the body of the woman who was the “property” of another man, and within one of the domiciles that was identified with her necessary sexual continence, in order for her father to be justified in committing murder. It is evident from the literary texts that I will examine that the paternal right to kill a daughter caught in adultery would later include husbands as well, while the Digest makes clear that this murderous right is only that of the father. The spatial obsessions of this kind of masculinity were hence transferred from spaces on to bodies, from exteriors to interiors, and from the civic to the domestic realm.

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The configuration of masculinity that the literature devoted to cuckoldry enacts or puts into play is thus a set of variations on the idea of gender’s contingent relationship to domestic space. Stories or accounts of adultery (or, in the case of Rabelais, adultery’s mere possibility) are not literal meditations on the construction of a man as a gendered being; nevertheless, their comic effect depends upon a recognition of the ways in which households are staked out and marked by bodies in what supposedly is the “real” world and the consequences of this “surveying” of space for the definition of individuals as subjects interpellated as masculine or feminine. The domicile of a marriage is structured such that its inside is defined necessarily by the presence of a woman’s body conceived of in a certain way: she has to be transported there on the day of her marriage, which is, by definition, the day when she supposedly has her first sexual relations. Her body must also be defined by her sexual exclusivity with her husband. In the quite literal terms used in the Digest, the wife must be in this household, which is the place where the husband must be the only one who is in his wife. This interior, however, is eternally haunted by the presence of other men: firstly, and perhaps most importantly, is the ghost of the pietas paterni, with its menacing threat of death, which defines the marital household; secondly, and as both Rabelais and the author of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles make clear, is the potential presence of other men, the alterity that is etymologically linked to the concept of adultery. In this historical context, subjective identity is determined by a set of intersubjective relations that are mapped onto both domestic and public spaces, and onto human bodies conceived of as spatial surfaces. The literature devoted to the theme of adultery is an extended, intertextual reflection on these relations, and on the interpellation that calls upon men to act in certain ways, displaying their identities in space as masculine subjects. The Corpus iuris canonici and the Place of Sex in Marriage Modeled on the Digest of Justinian, Gratian’s Concordia discordantium canonum was the most important text contained in the Corpus iuris canonici. Like the Digest, the Concordia, or Decretum, as it was known throughout the Middle Ages after its redaction in the 12th century, is a compilation of already existing laws, with commentaries and glosses provided by its editor. While Gratian’s text was never officially recognized by the Catholic Church, its authority in legal matters was so widespread that it apparently worked in tandem with numerous compilations of civil laws.9 In general, the legal systems of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance were rather complex, and it would be difficult for one to sort out the relative weight of the civil and ecclesiastical legal compilations, which apparently were employed differently by the diverse courts. The Decretum as the most substantial compilation of canon law that was used in the same way that the Digest was, i.e., as an authoritative text to which jurists could refer in rendering legal decisions. As we will see in our analysis of judge Bridoye in chapters 39–44 of the Tiers Livre, the complexities of 9 On the interrelation and coexistence of Roman and Canon Law throughout the Middle Ages, see Stephan Kuttner, ed., Gratian and the Schools of Law 1140–1234 (London: Variorum Reprints, 1983).

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this multiple legal system were such that it often was the subject of satires, parodies, and farces. The Decretum conceives of marriage as a sacred union between a man and a woman, echoing the Byzantine law that predates it by eight hundred years. Compared to the Digest, the ecclesiastical definition of marriage is a radical, perhaps even revolutionary, development of the institution, since the later text focuses the union of husband and wife solely upon the consent of these two parties, leaving aside the socio-economic apparatus to which the overwhelming bulk of Byzantine law was devoted: Nuptials, or marriage, is the union of a man and woman who keep an undivided way of life, and between whom there was consent [Instit. 1.19.1]. The latter is the efficient cause of matrimony, according to [the] saying of Isidore [cf. C. 27 q. 2 c. 6], “Consent makes marriage” (C. 27 q. 2 part 1; Migne 1391).10

While the idea of consent was important to the Roman conception of the law, it was apparent that an individual’s agreement involved him or her in an alliance overdetermined by gender-specific, patriarchal relations of power. From Gratian’s affirmation about the nature of marriage, it seems as though the consent of the individuals is divorced from the will of their parents, and especially from their respective fathers. In contrast to the Digest, which had virtually nothing to say about the role of sex in marriage, the Decretum considers in detail the importance of copulation to matrimony. Gratian’s initial definition of the marital union implies that husband and wife need not be carnally joined in order for the marriage to be recognized, since the perfect Christian marriage should be modeled on that of the Virgin Mary and Joseph, which had to be a sexless one if the doctrine of Mary’s lifelong purity from sin were to be maintained.11 Even more radically, Gratian himself seems to remove the spatial and bodily restrictions that constituted marriage from the civil point of view. Whereas the Digest inscribed the patriarchal logos on the body of the woman within the home, the Decretum apparently sought to abstract the constitutive elements of marriage so that they would be contingent only upon the will of the individuals involved, independently of the economic, social, and spatial concerns that had defined marriage to that point: Not intercourse, but the will makes a marriage. The separation of bodies does not dissolve it, only the separation of wills. Thus he who dismisses his spouse and does not take another 10 The translations of Gratian are from Marriage Canons from the Decretum of Gratian and the Decretals, Sext, Clementines and Extravagantes, tr. John T. Noonan, ed. Augustine Thompson, published at http://faculty.cua.edu/Pennington/Canon%20Law/marriagelaw.htm, accessed June 12, 2006. Since this translation, which is the only one available in English (!), has not been published in book form, I will refer to the text using Case, Question, and Comment numbers, followed by the page number of the Latin text in J.P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae, cursus completus. Volume 187: Decretum Gratiani, emendatum et notationibus illustratum Gregorii XIII Pont. Max. (Paris: Enfer, 1855). 11 See Migne, 1395. For an interesting discussion of Mary and Joseph’s marriage in relation to the idea of consummation, see D’Avray, Medieval Marriage, 171–4.

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The perfect Christian marriage consisted, then, in the faithful union of husband and wife and their willingness to remain together throughout their lives whether or not they had sexual relations. Moreover, the idea of a sexless marriage was affirmed by the major authorities whom Gratian cites. The canonist also notes, however, that these same authorities have proclaimed precisely the contrary principle as the true conception of marriage, which means that the text of the Decretum often seems to contradict itself: [Augustine:] Those who are not joined by sexual intercourse have not entered marriage. [Gratian:] There is, I say, no doubt that a woman has not entered marriage, if there has been no sexual intercourse. [Leo:] A woman has not entered matrimony if the nuptial mystery has not been consummated with her. [Gratian:] Since the marriage community was so instituted from the beginning that, without sexual intercourse, marriage does not contain the Sacrament of Christ and the Church, there is no doubt that a woman who has not experienced the nuptial mystery has not entered marriage (C. 27 q. 2 c. 16; Migne 1397).

Gratian arrives at a conclusion that is a hybrid of these two positions; the perfect marriage begins with the agreement and consent of all of the parties involved that the union will be brought about; it is perfected, however, when the sacramental and ceremonial union is consummated in the sexual act. The Christian version of marriage was hence apparently more concerned with the importance of sexual relations to the marriage pact than was the Digest, since the performance of the sexual act as part of the nuptial ceremony was not discussed in the earlier text. The carnal union transformed a woman into a wife for the man who became her husband. For canon law, therefore, sex takes the place of the bodily transfer of the woman to the household of her husband or father-in-law that constituted marriage from the point of view of the Digest. The Decretum is quite explicit on this point, which is a radical departure from the earlier civil laws that were much more concerned with marriage as a means of transferring property, rather than as a physical and emotional relationship between a man and a woman: Neither intercourse without intention to contract marriage, nor deflowering without a conjugal agreement, make marriage. Rather the preceding intention to contract marriage and conjugal contract bring it about that the woman, in the deflowering of virginity or intercourse, will be said to be the wife of a man, or to celebrate marriage (C. 27 q. 2 c. 45; Migne 1410. Translation modified in passage in italics).

At this point, Gratian’s argument comes full circle, when it affirms the sexual act as the decisive element of marriage, as long as it is accompanied by the intention to “contract” matrimony.12 This act is especially important in the transformation that it 12 For a detailed consideration of the historical evolution of copulation’s importance in the establishment of a marriage, see Philippe Toxé, “La copula carnalis chez les canonistes médiévaux,” in Mariage et sexualité au Moyen Âge, 123–33.

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enacts in women. Noonan renders “ut mulier in defloratione suae virginitatis vel in coitu dicatur nubere viro, vel nuptias celebrare” (Migne 1410) as “the woman, in the deflowering of virginity or intercourse, marries the man, or celebrates marriage.” It seems to me, however, that the original text insists on the nominative transformation of a woman into a bride through her first “deflowering.” After perusing the body of texts that insisted upon the carnal necessities of marriage, including the Bible itself (Genesis 2:24), Gratian focuses upon the crucial moment when a man transforms a woman into his wife by means of the sexual act, hence “felicitously” fulfilling one of the most fundamental performative requirements of his gender.13 From Austin’s point of view, this performative would be quite peculiar, since it involves not only the entire marriage ceremony, which is necessarily public and visible from the point of view of canon law, with its required acts and pronouncements, but also the performance of what we consider a “private” act, but which was also public and festive in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as we will see both in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles and in Brantôme’s Dames galantes. If adultery is the slightest and most laughable of crimes in the cuckold’s world, what was its status in the “real” world that is available to us in more official documents? We have already seen from the Digest that an adulterer was considered in the same light as a criminal, while women guilty of performing sexual acts beyond the bounds of marriage could be subject to corporal and capital punishment. In contrast, it is difficult to say how the major text of canon law from the Middle Ages conceived of the punishment for adultery. The text of the Decretum consistently activates a pejorative metaphorical register for the description of adultery and sex itself, which “pollutes,” “stains,” “marks,” and “darkens” a marriage if it is not performed in a chaste way.14 While copulation was absolutely necessary to the formation of a marriage, any kind of sexual activity that was engaged in beyond the bounds of marriage became a “stain,” or “mark” that invaded its private space, and could be atoned for only after periods of sexual abstinence. The sin of adultery understood as a kind of radical alterity “infected” sex within the marriage, but even sex itself within the legal bounds of matrimony was quite problematic. Thomas Tentler has examined in detail the extent to which medieval Christians were caught in a kind of “double bind” regarding sex: because of the “conjugal debt” that St. Paul mentions in I Corinthians 7:1–8, both husbands and wives were obligated to satisfy the desires of their spouses in order to help them to avoid sin.15 On the other hand, as Gratian 13 The idea of the consummation of marriage as a “felicitous performative” is adapted from John Langshaw Austin’s famous discussion of this expression in How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962). 14 “A man violated and debauched the wife of another; when her husband died, the adulterer accepted the adulteress as his wife ... It is asked: whether one can conclude a marriage with one previously polluted by adultery?” (C. 31 q. 1; Migne 1451). 15 “It is well for a man not to touch a woman. But because of the temptation to immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does. Do not refuse one another except perhaps by agreement for a season, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, lest Satan

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clearly points out in the above passage, as do the penance manuals examined by Tentler, the satisfaction of sexual desire within marriage was nearly impossible without sin.16 The canonist addresses this fundamental problem for married people in Case 32: Whenever married people treat each other in immodest, shameless, or obscene ways, this is a human vice, but it is not an offense against marriage. When one immoderately demands the conjugal debt, something the Apostle [cf. 1 Cor. 7] did not order but only permitted as a concession, even if it is not for procreation, this does keep one’s dirty habits [pravi mores] in the bedroom, and so protects the marriage from adultery and fornication. This is not permitted because of marriage, but overlooked on account of marriage (C. 32 q. 2 c. 3; Migne 1469).

The canonical Catholic idea of marriage and sex is thus both a bodily and spatial one, with the bedroom constituting a space within which the “depraved” practices of the couple must be confined. The domicile in which a marriage is located is a paradoxical space characterized by a fundamental double-bind expressed in the casuistry of the preceding passage’s last sentence, which describes the paradoxical injunction both to control one’s desires and to satisfy them in order to avoid sin. The male and female bodies that “roam” around in the imaginary space of the nouvelle literature seek the satisfaction of their bodily desires in places other than their own households, perhaps because this site is so overdetermined by millennia of meditations on its importance for the definition both of social structures and the individual identities within them. For the early modern mind, sex had its place and its space, which could be either defended or attacked (hence the plethora of military metaphors for sex in the comic and serious literature of the period), opened or closed, darkened (stained) or lightened, polluted or cleansed. The marriage and the household that contained it were also metaphorical bodies that could be infected with the “disease” and the “pollution” of an excessive desire for pleasure. The masculine subjects described in the narrative literature devoted to the theme of marriage are inextricably bound to this metaphorical conception of sex within space, and their performance as engendered beings is predicated upon the maintenance of a certain relation to this space and to its rhetorical transcription. The continuous articulation of texts about this subjective, gender-contingent relation to domestic space constitutes an intertextual tradition that configures and disseminates a would-be normative masculinity that is continuously undermined by desire as a motivating force. From this brief glance at the major text of canon law from the Late Middle Ages, one may delineate the period’s definition of marriage and the place of sex within tempt you through lack of self control. I say this by way of concession, not of command. I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own special gift from God, one of one kind and one of another. To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.” The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Edition (New York: American Bible Society, 1980), 994–5. 16 Thomas Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 165–74.

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this institution. In general, from the Christian point of view, marriage was not a contractual arrangement, as it was above all for the Romans who preceded them; rather, it was a sacramental relationship entered into by two consenting adults, meant to last for their entire lives. Furthermore, as D.L. D’Avray has demonstrated, marriage as well as sex within marriage had a symbolic value for medieval Christians that cannot be overestimated. The desire of the husband and wife to live together and to maintain their relationship was the first determining factor for the establishment of a marriage, but it was not the only one. The authors of canon law considered sex to be an important part of marriage, so much so that a woman could not become a wife unless she had participated in the “nuptial ministry” of sex with her husband. Her desire had to be limited to the marriage, and the restriction of one’s sexuality to this specific space was one of the constitutive features of matrimony from a Christian point of view. Concupiscence had no place in the marriage bed itself, however, apart from whatever good usage it could be put to in the service of procreation or in the payment of the “marriage debt.” While adultery and sexual transgressions were “stains” that “polluted” or “obscured” the clarity of Christian marriage, the Church offered a way that even the crime of infidelity on the part of a wife, which was a capital offense according to the Digest, could be forgiven. In the same gesture that the Church forbade sexual transgressions, it also offered the possibility of atonement for these “crimes.” The practice of penance, then, caused medieval canonists to explore the domain of what we call “sexuality” and to codify each sexual act in terms of a corporeal code of payment for one’s sins in diverse kinds of abstinence. By doing so, however, these documents describe a world of sexual activity in the Middle Ages that was, evidently, much more extensive and multiple than a naïve reader from the modern age would suspect. Following in the wake of these definitions, normative masculinity in the Renaissance mind, at least as we know it from the period’s literature, was thus partly a function of a man’s sexual performances and practices, especially as they related to his existence in a domestic space in which he was called upon to perform diverse activities (surveillance, certain sexual acts, the study of “women’s tricks” inscribed in a given intertext) meant to control both the usage of his own body and that of his wife in the performance of his gender. Before closing this section on canon law, I must address an important question that will be voiced by Renaissance scholars. Is the meditation on marriage that appears in Justinian’s Digest and the Decretum Gratiani relevant to a later period characterized by the rejection of scholastic thinking in this and other matters? Do Gratian’s and Justinian’s texts really provide an intellectual context for the reflection on marriage carried out by Rabelais and Brantôme? Undoubtedly, sixteenth-century writers in France were working within an conceptual context that was radically different from that of the texts I have just examined, and which has been examined in depth by scholars since the appearance of Michael Screech’s book on Rabelaisian marriage and the querelle des femmes.17 Nevertheless, I will argue that these later 17 Michael Screech, The Rabelaisian Marriage: Aspects of Rabelais’s Religion, Ethics, and Comic Philosophy (London: Arnold, 1958). For recent treatments of this topic, see Todd Reeser, Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), especially chapter 3, “The (Im)moderate Other in Marriage Discourse

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writers directly engage the medieval conception of marriage when they write about the cuckold, a figure who derives his meaning from a centuries-old elaboration of the social positions ascribed to two “normative” versions of the masculine and feminine genders. The Cent nouvelles nouvelles submit the idea of the husband to a series of comic variations, while they never seriously question his meaning and importance for social structures. The Tiers Livre pauses at the moment when a man had to decide whether to become a husband or not, which in itself was, perhaps, a major event in the evolution of humanist thinking. As Floyd Gray has argued, the question of the significance of marriage for a man’s identity was the subject of a certain form of “textuality” over the course of millennia, becoming the object of rhetorical exercises in which men participated as part of their formation as gendered subjects.18 The very being of masculinity hence resides in the process and project of textual elaboration that has taken place continuously in the West, beginning with the Platonic and Hellenistic problematization of sex for men, and extending to the medieval rhetorical elaborations of the question of marriage.19 The author of the Burgundian Cent nouvelles nouvelles, Rabelais, and Brantôme are the heirs to this intertextual tradition of writing about how men should act as men, which often took the form of a prolonged meditation on the complementary phenomena of cuckoldry and adultery, on their consequences for masculine identity, and on the problematic relation of men to their eternal “other,” the figure of woman. Penance Manuals and the Spatial Configuration of Masculinity Penance was an institution of incalculable importance in medieval and Renaissance Europe. The circulation of manuals meant to instruct the clergy in the usages of penance began perhaps as early as the fifth century and continued into the modern period.20 Even the most cursory summary of the immense body of documents on and in Rabelais’s Tiers Livre,” 121–50; Reinier Leushuis, Le mariage et ‘l’amitié courtoise’ dans le dialogue et le récit bref de la Renaissance (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2003), chapter 3, “Rabelais et la fécondité du mariage,” 153–205. I will discuss these readings in my chapter on the Tiers Livre. 18 See Floyd Gray, Gender, Rhetoric, and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 11–12. Gray’s first chapter provides an ample bibliography of texts in which the question of marriage had been proposed as a rhetorical exercise. I will return to this point in a moment. 19 Michel Foucault’s L’Histoire de la sexualité II: L’usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984) is largely concerned with the ways in which masculinity as a social phenomenon was structured in ancient Greek texts through a prescriptive theorization of sexual practice. See particularly chapters 1 and 2. 20 See John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer, eds. and trans. Medieval Handbooks of Penance. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), 23–50, for a description of the spread of penitential manuals from fifth-century Ireland and Wales to the rest of the European continent, and the effect of this dissemination on Christian fervor. Thomas Tentler’s Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation remains the most comprehensive guide to penance manuals and their significance in early-modern Europe. See also Pierre MichaudQuantin. Sommes de casuistique et manuels de confession au moyen âge (Louvain: Analecta

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penance yields a surprising picture of medieval sexual practices, their place in marriage, and their importance for the production of normative masculinity and its various others. The codification of accepted and interdicted sexual acts within diverse texts on penance is an integral part of masculinity’s elaboration as an intertextual process, as was the formulation of laws concerning the male body and its necessary usages in both ecclesiastical and civil legal texts. On the basis of these manuals, one could hypothesize that the practice of penance recognized sexual activities as multiple and problematic, and in fact may even have fostered the growth of this multiplicity of desire, which served as raw material in the comic works in the vernacular that will be my focus in the following chapters. Within this intertextual domain, normative masculinity develops as an obsession with the actions of bodies in different kinds of literal space, and with bodies themselves configured as spatial entities and surfaces. The development of sexual “sins” as concepts within an enormous intertext written over the course of millennia participates, therefore, in the elaboration of masculinity taken as a subject position that constantly seeks to define itself in relation to uncontrollable others whom it is required to control. As we will see in more detail further on, masculinity thus must be intuited within the multiple series of “other masculinities” detailed in these textual catalogues of legal infractions, capital sins, and comic transgressions that seem to indicate the possible existence of a singular gender entity that is, however, more and more difficult to locate as the literature of the Renaissance progresses. As the methods for examining, speaking about, and laughing at the multiplicity of sinful desire developed and became more voluminous with the ready availability of printed texts, the realm of “other” masculinities rendered the supposed norm increasingly unstable, to such an extent that, by the “end” of the Renaissance during the French Wars of Religion, normative masculinity seemingly was eclipsed by the erratic and volatile gender of a figure such as Henri III. One of these catalogues of transgressions is the Summa confessorum of Thomas de Chobham, the subdean of Salisbury, who studied in Paris and wrote his manual some time in the early thirteenth century. The work’s modern editor claims that it was one of the most important books of its kind in medieval Europe.21 Penance manuals such as this inscribed an entire domain of sexual experience that became an important point of reference for masculinity as a social function and place marker. Mediaevalia Namurcensia, 1962). Karma Lochrie develops a rather different notion of penance in reference to Michel Foucault’s discussion of confessional practices as the origin of the modern techniques and “deployments” that produced our contemporary notion of sexuality. See Covert Operations: the Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 12–55, for a detailed discussion of Foucault’s problematic thesis, and a more exact description of actual confessional practices after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 and its famous requirement that Christians confess their sins once a year. 21 The Reverend F. Broomfield, ed. Thomae de Chobham, Summa Confessorum (Louvain: Éditions Nauwelaerts, 1968), XXVIII–XXIII. All page references are to this edition. My own translations appear in brackets in the text. “On the evidence available, we may conclude that it [the Summa confessorum] must have been one of the most influential summae confessorum, and so it may be presumed that it was one of the best guides for confessors produced during the medieval period” (LXXV).

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According to its dictates, men had to perform certain acts, desired others that were forbidden, and had to undertake certain kinds of penance in order to maintain their proper location in the social order and to be recognized publicly in gender terms. As we have just remarked, this “official” masculinity relied for its definition upon the thorough examination of “other” modes of using the male body that were supposedly confined to a marginal realm of the invisible and the illegal. For example, in the compact section of the Summa devoted to sexual offenses, de Chobham divides the sin of luxuria into several species, which are in turn divided into numerous sub-species. The major categories are the following: nocturnal visions, divided into three categories, those resulting from an “excess of natural humors,” from an excess of food and drink, and from illicit “cogitations” during the waking state; sins of conjugal coitus, whether of the “fragile” type, or of the “impetuous” type, divided into numerous sub-species—libidinous intercourse with one’s wife, which transformed her into a kind of prostitute or adulteress, intercourse with parts of a woman’s body that were not formed for that purpose, intercourse during periods of fasting, intercourse with a pregnant or menstruating wife, or even with one in labor, intercourse with one’s wife in public; and finally the sins of adultery, fornication, prostitution, rape, stuprum (which differs drastically from the Roman conception of the term), incest, and concubinage, all of which de Chobham describes in some detail.22 Canon law and the penance manuals codify and multiply conceptions of sex in ways that were exploited by later comic writers. The dangers of adultery, for example, were largely explicated in these texts from a point of view that was fundamentally different from that of the Digest or the Decretum Gratiani: ...si vir exponat uxorem suam adulterio et sit quasi leno proprie uxoris, graviter debet puniri. Unde dicit canon: si quis adulterio uxoris sue consenserit, placuit nec in fine ei dandam communionem. Tenetur enim vir etiam cum periculo corporis sui uxorem suam defendere quamdiu habet spem eripiendi eam ab adulterio, sed non tenetur mittere se in certum periculum mortis (340). [If a man exposes his wife to adultery and if he acts as if he were the seducer (or pimp) of his own wife, he is to be severely punished. Hence the canon says: whoever consents to his wife’s adultery, it is not pleasing in the end that he should be given communion. For indeed the man will be constrained by the danger to his own body to withhold himself from his wife as long as he has the hope of tearing her away from adultery, but he will not be constrained to place himself in certain danger of death.]

22 These categories are drawn from the Summa confessorum, 330–35. The following passage, which is paraphrased in my own text, is typical of de Chobham’s mode of expression: “Tertius est impetuosus coitus qui dividitur quadrupliciter. Quidem enim est coitus propter satruandam libidinem per meretricias blanditias: quidam autem fit in membro mulieris non ad hoc concesso; quidam autem coitus fit in tempore prohibito; quidam etiam coitus impetuosus est cum muliere pregnanti vicina partui, vel cum menstruata, vel cum decubante in puerperio. Quidam etiam addunt quod impetuosus coitus est si fiat in publico cum propria uxore multis videntibus, et tunc mortale peccatum est” (335).

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This passage describes a masculinist usage of women’s bodies that is prevalent throughout the cuckold literature. The work conceives of a woman “exposed” to adultery, perhaps through the fault of her own husband, as a danger to men. Throughout the sacred literature on confession there is thus a conflation of two diametrically opposed bodies situated along the same axis that separates the sacred from the profane, and which traps and generates the normative masculine subject position at the pivotal point in the center of this opposition. The body of woman represented the sinful nature of the flesh. As such, any man who had partaken of the pleasures of this flesh beyond the bounds of a strictly limited situation was prohibited from receiving the sacred body of Christ. Thus the carnal hierarchy for the medieval man led from the lowly body of woman to the holy body of the Savior, with his own body transfixed in between, and his subjectivity defined by an incessant longing for the radically different pleasures associated with two completely different types of flesh. From this perspective, normative masculinity is a place marker within or upon this carnal and spiritual paradigm, while the practice of the male gender was a certain restrictive practice of the flesh. It is also a relation to “differently sexed” bodies situated on a hierarchical paradigm, on which the bodies of women occupy the lowest rank, below that of men who must maintain their identities as masculine in relation to the concept of the sacred, despite the problematic necessity of their social and sexual links to women. For the author of the Summa confessorum, whether a sinner was a fornicator or an adulterer depended upon his or her social status, as determined by the kinds of relationships in which he or she was bound. Sexuality thus played an important role in the definition of an individual’s social being, meaning that the positions or subject places that defined the social hierarchy were constituted by restrictions of different kinds of sexual relations: Est autem simplex fornicatio cum solutus solutam naturali usu cognoscit. Et intelligatur hic solutus a vinculo coniugii, a vinculo consanguinitatis, a vinculo affinitatis, a vinculo ordinis, a vinculo religionis, a vinculo etiam alicuius voti, quia si aliquo istorum vinculorum fuerit ligatus, non committit quam simplicem fornicationem adulterium vel incestum. Quidam tamen canon dicit quod qui accedit ad meretricem venalem plus committit quam simplicem fornicationem, de quo postea dicetur. Ideo autem diximus “naturali usu,” quia si aliquis in vase vel in loco non ad hoc deputato aliquam polluerit, contra naturam peccat (341). [Simple fornication occurs whenever a man who is unbound knows a woman who is unbound in natural enjoyment. And “unbound” is meant in terms of the marital bond, blood bond, kinship bond, bond of ordination, religious bond, and indeed in terms of all bonds or vows such that if one were bound by such vows or bonds, he would commit not simple fornication, but rather adultery or incest. The canon states, nevertheless, that whoever approaches venal prostitutes commits more than simple fornication, on which we will have more to say. I believe, however, that when we say “natural enjoyment,” if a man pollutes a woman in a vessel or a place that was not esteemed for that purpose, he sins against nature.]

De Chobham seemingly maps out the relations defining the social “space” that determined the significance of individual actions, especially in the domain of sexual

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acts. The moral system that resulted from the various links (or ties, bindings, cords, bonds, fetters, and all of the metaphorical senses of vinculum) decreed that whoever was bound in any way—through blood, kinship, ordination, religion, or marriage— could not be sexually active beyond the literal and figurative limits defined by those bonds. The late medieval conception of sexuality was thus intrinsically territorial, and sexual indiscretions consisted of unauthorized trespassing in a territory or even a part of the body that was deemed “off limits” by the hierarchical organization of sexual space. De Chobham goes on to discuss whether or not simple fornication as he defines it—intimacy between “unbound” men and women—is a sin. After a brief summation of the authoritative texts on this point, he comes to a startling conclusion: “Dicimus ad predictam quod constat omnibus christianis omnem fornicationem esse mortale peccatum, licet simplex fornication minus peccatum sit alliis” (342). [“We said at the beginning that all Christians viewed all fornication as a mortal sin, but simple fornication is esteemed less of a sin than others.”] Since he is not defined by his restriction to a specific social space, therefore, the unbound, undefined solutus and the soluta whom he gets to know are, to a certain extent, incapable of the graver sins that are inherent to this spatial configuration of sex. The penance imposed upon these unbound sinners was relatively light, compared to what we have seen in the Decretum: Ad arbitrium igitur discreti sacerdotis talibus est imponenda penitentia, ut si occulte et non diu peccaverint saltem per annum peniteant, et semper cum aliqua asperitate et castigatione carnis, ut preterita voluptas carnali pena compensetur (345). [In the judgment of a discrete priest, such is the penance imposed, so that if they [the fornicators] sinned in private and not for a long time, they should do penance at least for a year, always with some austerity and punishment of the flesh, compensating for their carnal voluptuousness by means of pain (or punishment).]

Compared with the three years of sexual abstinence imposed upon an adulterous wife and her husband by Gratian, a year of carnal deprivation seems mild. For those who did not limit themselves to discreet, private, and limited relations, the punishment was much more severe: “Debent autem iurare quod nunquam carnaliter commiscebuntur nisi contraxerint...” (345). [“(Even after marriage) they should swear that they will never engage in carnal copulation...”]. Can we conclude from this meticulous distinction of individuals into different categories based on sexual behavior (whether public or private; whether engaged in over a long period of time, or a short period of time; whether performed by bound or unbound people, etc.) that the people of this period actually did the things that these texts describe?23 In the long run, the answer to this question may be irrelevant. 23 Charles M. Bourel de la Rancière, for example, argues that the penitential manuals of fifteenth and sixteenth century Tuscany indicate that marital “fantasies” and multiple sexual variations were widespread practices, if one is to judge from the frequent discussions of them in the pastoral literature of the period. See “Le mariage chrétien à Florence au XVe siècle,” in Mariage et sexualité au Moyen Âge, 273–86.

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What is important to my argument is that the intertextual, masculinist consciousness that stretched from the Decretum Gratiani to the Tiers Livre and beyond in both directions paid careful attention to the ways in which an individual’s social and gender identity was contingent upon the kinds of sexual acts in which he or she engaged, which were defined by the imaginary space of their relations to others, and by the literal space in which their bodies moved. Moreover, this intertext considered bodies themselves as spatial entities with numerous restricted zones, possible points of entry, areas susceptible to opening that had to be closed off, and so on. The later comic literature, from the Decameron, to the Facetiae of Poggio Bracciolini, to the French nouvelles of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, represents a set of variations on the procedures, described in legal and ecclesiastical texts, that were intended to restrict sexual behavior within space. In these official texts themselves, however, the kind of sexual multiplicity that is typical of the nouvelles is already evident in increasingly developed descriptions of sexual transgressions or “trespasses,” as in the archaic version of the Lord’s Prayer in English. Since the body itself is a kind of space in this imaginary realm, sexual transgression is a poly-metaphorical “pollution” and “trespassing” in that space. Moreover, the body as a spatial entity is also determined by its relation to external spaces as they are staked out in terms of the “bonds” of intersubjective social relations. The fictional body is thus consistently mapped onto two intersecting grids, that of its own spatial existence, and that of the social relations among which it must be situated, from which it derives its identity, and which are projected into domestic and civic space. The legal texts that provide a historical context for Renaissance narrative are constantly resolving questions that arise from this projection of the body into conceptual space: is this body capable of penetrating others? Where did it penetrate/trespass/pollute another body? Where/in what part has it been polluted or “trespassed” upon? Where on the body and in what space did it experience this pleasure? How is that space defined, as public or private, open or closed, “unbounded” or “bounded”/“bound”? Did anyone “bound” to that body witness this pleasure? To whom was that body bound when it was polluted by another body? The literature on adultery that arises in the vernacular following the example of Boccaccio provides a series of comic responses to these questions, in which one can decipher the ways in which gender, particularly the masculine gender, was structured as a concept. An interesting example of these kinds of procedures is to be found in the description of prostitutes and prostitution, as they are defined in the Summa confessorum: Dicitur autem meretrix multipliciter. Vocat enim Apostolus meretricem omnem mulierem que preter matrimonium se libidini exponit, ut in prima epistola ad Corinthios legitur hoc modo: an nescitis quoniam membra vestra membra sunt Christi? Tollens ergo membra Christi faciens membra meretricis? Absit. Et iterum: qui adheret meretrici unum corpus efficitur. Sed secundum hanc acceptionem omnis simplex fornicaria meretrix dicitur... In canonibus autem meretrix secundum quod hic accipimus ita describitur : vidua est cuius maritus defunctus est; eiecta est que a marito viventi proicitur; meretrix est que multorum patet libidini. Attenditur autem vis in hoc verbo , quia illa mulier dicitur patere multorum libidini que nulli multorum se negat, et uno non contenta, multis se exponit, et sicut dicit scriptura : divaricat pedes suos omni transeunti... Meretrix autem est cuius publice venalis est turpitudo. Si enim aliqua in occulto se venderet, non ideo diceretur meretrix (346–47).

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Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature [Prostitute is said variously. The Apostle calls prostitutes all women who expose themselves to pleasures after their marriage, and in the first letter to the Corinthians may be read the following: do you not know that your members are those of Christ? Should the members of Christ be made into the members of a prostitute? Abstain. [I Corinthians 6:15] And this: whoever adheres to a prostitute becomes one flesh with her. In the second place, all women guilty of simple fornication are said to be prostitutes... In the canons, the sense in which we accept the term prostitute is described: a widow is a woman whose husband is dead; a rejected wife is one who has been expelled by her husband; a prostitute is a woman who is open to the pleasures of many. It is remarked that the expression “to be open to” means that that woman is said to be open to the pleasures of many who does not refuse herself to the many, and not happy with one, she exposes herself to many, and thus the Scripture says, she offers herself to anyone passing by. [Ezekial 16:25]... A prostitute is someone whose exposure for public sale is a dishonor. If indeed a woman sells herself in private, I do not think she may be called a prostitute.]

Aside from the astounding conclusion at which de Chobham arrives, there are two points that should be highlighted in this catalogue. The first is the multiplicity of the definition of the prostitute. Essentially, any woman who did not restrict her body to the space ordained for sex, i.e., the “domicile” of her marriage, would be considered a prostitute. The “opening” of a woman’s body, from the point of view of masculinist power, was simply unacceptable, since by definition a woman had to be “closed” in both of the senses mentioned above: her body had to be impermeable, and to remain within the closed space that defined her marriage and her social status. Women who were not restricted spatially in this way inevitably were equated with those who were for sale on the public market, and in an enigmatic phrase, de Chobham claims that women who were not publicly for sale could not be considered prostitutes. The married woman thus had to be honorable, that is, she had to be withdrawn from the public domain, closed off to the pleasures of the many, protected, and confined to a restricted space that was under surveillance to ward off potential “trespassers.” This idea of the proper space to which a woman’s body had to be restricted is crucial to a reading of the comic literature on adultery from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.24 Secondly, the notion that any sexually active woman who was “open to the pleasures of many men” was a prostitute was a commonplace of comic literature, which here finds its most canonical expression. The celebrated text of St. Paul from I Corinthians, which is quoted by Gratian as well, establishes an opposition between the erotic, female body, and the sacred body of Christ. The profane, then, was inextricably linked with the idea of the sensual as feminine, unbounded, public, and open to multiple partners. As de Chobham notes, the economic aspects of the erotic had to be public if they were to be considered illicit. The proliferation of adultery stories was thus perhaps a manifestation of the imperative that the idea of woman as profane, marketable, and infinitely and multifariously sensual be made public, 24 On the topos of women’s bodies enclosed as one of the bases of early modern patriarchy, see Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers, eds., Rewriting the Renaissance: the Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 123–42. I thank the outside readers of Ashgate for referring me to this article.

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and that this idea itself circulate as a kind of narrative merchandise that served as a material base for relations among men. I will examine this idea in detail particularly in my analysis of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles. When de Chobham finally gets to the heart of the matter concerning adultery, we see this type of offense ranked, perhaps for the first time, in relation to other kinds of sins: Est autem adulterium alieni tori violatio, unde adulterium dicitur quasi ad alienum torum accessio... Unde de adulterio sicut dicit canon : quod in omnibus peccatis adulterium gravius est, secundum enim locum obtinet in penis, quem primum obtinent qui a fide aberrant licet sobrie vixerint, quasi dicens apostasia primum et summum peccatum est, adulterium secundum (356–357). [But adultery is the violation of another’s marriage bed, hence the mere access to another’s marriage bed may almost be called adultery... Thus the canon says of adultery: insofar as adultery is the most serious of all sins, [this kind of] dissipation nevertheless occupies the second place behind those who forsake the faith that allows them to live so moderately, thus it seems to say that apostasy is the first and most serious of sins, and adultery the second.]

The territorial nature of the restrictions placed on sexuality is more than evident in this passage: mere trespassing upon the space that defined a man’s marriage could be considered adultery, which here seems to be an extraordinarily grave sin. In other passages, however, de Chobham seems to think that since adultery was corporeal in nature, it was less serious than those sins that involved the spirit (357). This passage provides an idea of the extent to which sexual behavior was confined, constrained, and restricted to specific spaces, reflecting a hierarchical theology based upon subdivisions, schemas, grids, and rankings of all kinds, and within which individuals were differentiated depending upon their gender and the different kinds of relations within which they were bound. De Chobham’s manual contains several crucial references that describe the ways in which the Church and the civil authorities conceived of adultery and sexuality in general at this time. Unfortunately, these references are so ambiguous that it is difficult for us to know what the actual state of affairs concerning sexual behavior was. At two points in the Summa confessorum, de Chobham offers us a glimpse of the severity with which women caught in adultery were treated, perhaps in keeping with civil laws that still followed their Roman models. In one section, the author seems to deplore the ancient custom, which may have still been in force in the Middle Ages, that allowed an adulterous woman’s husband or father to kill her and her lover, if they were caught either in the domicile of the marriage, or in the father’s house (362). In another passage, however, he implies that the public, corporal punishment of adultery that was characteristic of civil justice was well beyond the authority of Church officials.25 As ambiguous as they are, these two indices clearly show that the 25 “Pena autem deprehensorum in adulterio est quod publice nudi ducantur per vicos civitatis et flagellentur. Non tamen hanc penam potest simplex sacerdos infligere, sed maior iudex” (368). [“Another reprehensible punishment for adultery was the public exhibition and naked flagellation of adulterers. A simple priest cannot inflict such a punishment, but only a more powerful judge.”]

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penalties especially for women caught in adultery were extremely severe, ranging from lengthy periods of penance at best, to public corporal punishment and even outright murder in the worst cases. Given these facts, one would assume that the revelation of adultery would be avoided at all costs, which raises the question as to why its literary representation in cuckold stories became so widespread from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. As I have already noted, one of the most provocative answers to this question has been suggested by Floyd Gray in reference to the debate surrounding the institution of marriage and the querelle des femmes. Gray writes that misogynist arguments against marriage were merely topoi that belonged to an ancient pedagogical tradition that taught young male clerics the art of rhetoric through the development of standard topics, themes, and questions, such as the question as to whether a young man should marry, parodied at length by Rabelais in the Tiers Livre. Similarly, it may be that the clerks who began the nouvelle tradition in medieval Europe merely employed the same rhetorical habits and built stories around the standard figures of the lusty wife, the duped husband, the clever lover, the libertine monk, and the concupiscent nun. From this perspective, the entirety of the cuckold literature could be nothing more than a rhetorical effect that has nothing whatsoever to do with the historical realities of adultery in the period in which it was written. One of my main theses here, however, is that the cuckold as literary chimera tells us something decisive and fundamental about the material construction of the masculine gender in the real world of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Furthermore, the cuckold literature in particular, and story telling in general, were in fact among the most important elements in the interpellation of individuals as masculine subjects. The crux of my argument is thus that the cuckold literature tells the very real and material story of the structuring of masculine subjectivity, which takes shape in the fictional, intertextual, and rhetorical practices of reading, writing, and storytelling in which actual men engaged over the course of centuries. Thus while the cuckold, the lover, and the wayward wife may or may not be historical figures from medieval and early modern Europe, they are textual signs through which one may catch a glimpse of the intellectual paradigm in relation to which real men living in that context structured their subjectivity, their gender, and their identities. The practice of confession was one of the most important elements of this paradigm. The Story of Women’s Desire and the Display of Masculinist Juridical Power The idea that adultery is a crime is deeply rooted in the history of European jurisprudence, as we have seen in our examination of the Digest of Justinian. Furthermore, the reform of canon law and the introduction of penance as a practice aimed at the delimitation and control of sex conceived of erotic acts as illicit activities both within and beyond marriage. Paradoxically, however, both of the discourses that constituted a “theory” of sex at the end of the Middle Ages, canon law and the penitentials, elaborated a multiplicity of possible sexual acts, hence possibly expanding “sexuality” considerably in the process, at least according to Foucault’s familiar argument from the first volume of L’histoire de la sexualité. Throughout

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European history, most kinds of sexual behavior were relegated to a domain defined by criminality, violence, profanity (as opposed to sacrality or sacredness), and even “anti-naturalness,” as in the characterization of sodomy, homosexual acts, oral sex, and incest as “offenses against nature.” The quantitative preponderance of this region of alterity might lead one to believe that the good husband and the good wife were, in a sense, merely potential beings, since all of the legal and pastoral texts at our disposal catalogue these “other sexualities” as common and well-known phenomena in reference to which the restricted realm of normative sex and its attendant genders were structured. In the exercise of juridical power in late medieval Europe, the chronicles of actual cases and their verdicts often highlight the sexual indiscretions of criminals who were on trial for offenses such as larceny, repeated cases of petty theft, murder, and arson. In other words, from records such as the Registre criminel du Châtelet de Paris, 1389–1392, it appears that medieval Europeans, following a long tradition, considered “illicit” sexual activity to be a characteristic of criminals, especially of women who were accused of crimes.26 The Registre depicts a form of justice that was severe and swift, and which barely made distinctions between the penalties for petty offenses and major crimes. After being coerced into making complete confessions, the numerous thieves, panderers, accomplices to murders, arsonists, rapists, batterers, prostitutes, pimps, and even potential regicides who populate these pages were subjected to a limited number of penalties by the judges of the prison at Châtelet. The most benign of these was banishment and exile, while one of the most severe ones was suffered by a woman who was burned at the stake after being tied to the rack, because she had prostituted her sister-in-law (I:47). The standard penalty for repeated thefts, especially if they were committed against members of the nobility, was hanging, while a woman who was caught stealing two silver spoons, an old sheet, and a valuable gold coin (louis d’or) suffered a relatively milder penalty, since it was her first offense: “... elle feust menée ou pillory, tournée illec, l’oreille destre coppée, &, en après, banye de la ville de Paris & dix lieux environ à tousjours, sur peine d’estre enfouye toute vive” (I:310). [“… she was led to the pillory, turned upon it, had her left ear cut off, and was afterwards permanently banished from the city of Paris and ten leagues around it, on pain of being buried alive.”] The most common penalties seem to have been hanging and burning at the stake. The justice of Châtelet thus operated by means of public, visible, and perhaps even festive marks of power that ruled by means of display, transforming the bodies of transgressors into spectacles meant to instruct a populace that understood abstract concepts in iconographic terms, while these executions were carried out at the marketplace of Les Halles almost as a daily part of economic activity in the city. The punished or executed bodies of supposed criminals thus became icons of power that were familiar features of civic space in the city.27

26 Registre criminel du Châtelet de Paris, 1389–1392 (Paris: Société des Bibliophiles François, 1864), two volumes. All page references are to this edition. My translations appear in brackets. 27 For more on the Registre, as well as on the logic of corporeal display that governed the operation of the prison at Châtelet, see my article “Interrogation and the Performance of Truth in the Registre criminel du Châtelet de Paris, 1389–1392,” Yale French Studies 110 (Fall, 2006): 52–62.

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In the case of one woman by the name of Belon who was burned at the stake, her fate seems to have been decided not by her participation in the criminal act, since she actually took no part in her husband’s murder, but by the fact that she had been sexually involved with the man for whom her husband worked, Jehan Ferry, and with the man who committed the murder, Thévenin Tout Seul. In the collective imaginary of marriage in the early modern world, adulterous acts often entailed the criminal and violent dissolution of marriage, which is figured graphically in this case. The first stage of her condemnation is the mere establishment of her illicit behavior with Ferry, which is the sign of her criminality. Similarly, the second stage establishes the concupiscence of the murderer, and especially the wife’s complicity, as the motive that ultimately causes the crime. This stage situates the criminal act in the marriage bed, which is, according to the penance manuals, the place that defines the sacred and indissoluble union of husband and wife. The woman’s testimony is transcribed as follows: ...elle qui parle estoit couchée en la compaignie de sondit feu mari Drion, & que elle ot laissié l’huys de sadite chambre ouvert, ainsi comme elle ot dormi son premier somme, senti que l’en la bouta du genouil, &, en soy esveillant, oy & entendi que c’estoit ledit Thevenin Tout Seul, qui dist à elle qui parle ces moz : Tay-toy; ce suis-je. J’ay fait. Et lorsque elle qui parle se retourna vers sondit mary, auquel elle avoit tourné le doz, trouva que icelli son mary estoit mort, & que ledit Thevenin l’avoit estranglé à ses mains... ...[elle] aida audit Thevenin à porter sondit mary en la riviere d’Essone, qui est assez près de leurdite maison & demeure, après ce que ilz orent vestu & chaucié sondit mary. Et eulx retournez, se revindrent couchier en leurdite maison, c’est assavoir : elle qui parle toute nue, & ledit feu Thevenin tout vestu, sur le lit d’elle qui parle, & ouquel sondit mary avoit esté tuez, sanz ce que lors ne paravant icellui feu Thevenin eust eu aucunement compaignie charnele à elle qui parle (II:57–8). […the woman who speaks was lying in the company of her said late husband Drion, and she had left the door of her said room open, and as she was falling asleep, she felt that someone touched her with his knee, and waking up, she heard and understood that it was the said Thevenin Tout Seul, who said the following words to her: Be quiet; I’m here. I did it. And when she who is speaking turned toward her husband, to whom she had turned her back, she found that her husband was dead, and that the said Thevenin had strangled him with his own hands… … (she) helped the said Thevenin to carry her said husband to the Essone river, which is rather close to their house and residence, after they had clothed and shod her husband. Having returned, they went back to sleep in the said house, to wit: she who speaks completely naked, and the said late Thevenin completely dressed, on the bed of she who speaks, in which her said husband had been killed, without the said late Thevenin having had carnal knowledge of she who speaks either at that moment or earlier on …]

The implication of this description is that the concupiscent woman who has a reputation for scandalous behavior is guilty for the crime that was committed by a man. Even under extreme duress, the “woman who speaks” before her interrogators here is apparently very careful to emphasize that even though she admitted to being “completely naked” in her bed next to the murderer, she never had sexual relations

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with him, since undoubtedly she knew what the consequences for her would be if she were “guilty” of having sex with this man. The murderer in the case, Thevenin, will contradict Belon’s testimony when he is interrogated, providing what was, for the judges of Châtelet, the decisive evidence of her guilt. In other words, the image of woman that is propagated by this account of her own testimony, wrung from her by means of torture, is one that accords perfectly with the masculine anxiety that is a constitutive characteristic of the cuckold tale, and which is explored in depth in Rabelais’s Tiers Livre. The wife who submits to the incessant demands for sex that she receives from other men figuratively murders her husband, at least from this masculinist perspective. In this case, she leaves the door to her bedroom open, as the wayward wife will always do, which meant that the husband had to guard this interior, the domicile and marker of his marriage, from intruders. The murderer here is a kind of solitary vagabond, as his name indicates, figuring masculine desire as a wandering entity that seeks to penetrate wherever it may find a woman willing to undermine the integrity of the structure based on the spatial restriction of sex. In the comic literature of the period, almost all female characters were always open to this kind of roving, rapacious, and murderous masculine urge. This figure of the wandering “sex drive” is a death drive as well, as Thevenin says to the unfortunate wife whom he desires: “... car tant qu’il [le mari] seroit vif, ilz ne pourroient faire leurs voulentez ensamble” (II: 57). [“… for as long as [the husband] would remain alive, they could not what they wanted together”] The crime takes place in the marriage bed itself, and provides another icon of the wayward wife who should have been subjected to surveillance by her guileless husband, and who will be executed for her complicity: she is naked in her own bed, apparently ready to commit the sexual act that figuratively kills her husband even after his death, even though Belon insists that the two did not have sexual relations either before or after the murder. In sum, this account of the woman’s confession reaffirms the link of adulterous acts and criminality that is a constant feature of Western legal and ecclesiastical documents on the subject of sex. Moreover, the husband’s murder is seemingly an inevitable consequence of his wife’s desire, which cannot be held within the boundaries that must contain it if the marriage is to exist as such. The unbounded desire that characterizes the domain of the feminine from the point of view of an anxious masculine subject is the basis of the cuckold story in its myriad variations, including the merely virtual ones that make up the Tiers Livre. Here the insertion of wandering masculine desire into the realm where such desires must be absolutely restricted and restrained has dire consequences. In general, the male criminal as vagabond is inevitably an “oversexed” being, who has relationships deemed to be criminal and sinful with women who are themselves mobile, which is anathema in legal terms, since women are supposed to be limited to the domicile of their marriage or to their father’s house. A certain thief, for example, is described in the following way: “... icelluy Raoulin est homme vacabond, alant par le pays, frequentant foires & marchez, fuyant les ribaux et ribaudes, menent femmes par le pays, & houllier publique, & aussi joueur de dez & de dringuet ès foires et marchez” (I:150). [“… this man, Raoulin, is a vagabond, traveling throughout the country, frequenting fairs and markets, fleeing from ribald men and women, leading women around the country,

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and is a general public menace, as well as a player of dice and confidence games at fairs and markets.”] While this “player of dice” may remind us of certain aspects of Panurge’s character, his primary immorality resides in the fact that he “leads women around the country.” In the same way that “criminals” such as this man were transformed into public examples by the exercise of legal power, so the punishment of the adulterous wife, who is the feminine counterpart of the roving, masculine sexual predator and thief, is spectacular and exemplary. To return to the case of Belon, the end of the record of her testimony makes clear what she was actually being punished for: ... elle, pour ceste singuliere affeccion, se accorda faire la voulenté & plaisir dudit feu Thevenin, lequel, par plusieurs fois paravant la mort de sondit feu mary, ot compaignie charnele à elle depposant. Et dit que il n’avoit pas plus de viii jours paravant la mort dudit son feu mary que icellui feu Thevenin avoit premierement eu compaignie charnele à elle. Et atant fini ladite Belon ses jours... (II:61). [… she, because of this singular affection, agreed to do the will and satisfy the pleasure of the said late Thevenin, who, several times before the death of the woman’s said late husband, had carnal company with she who is testifying. And she said that not more that eight days before the death of her said late husband, the late Thevenin had first shared carnal company with her. Thus the said Belon ended her days…]

This insistence on the place, the time, the duration, and the quantity of the sexual acts that sealed the fate of this woman gives one an idea of juridical power’s obsessive relation to sexual activities, which were a locus of the forces that shaped the identity of each individual living in this social context. In a sense, women were always guilty from the point of view of masculinist power, precisely because their bodies were objects of roaming desires that could undermine the strict control of sex within domestic space. Many other women appear in the pages of the Registre criminel du Châtelet, most of them judged to be guilty not because of their acts, but because of their reputations for sexual immodesty. One case concerns a woman by the name of Marguerite de Bruges, who was accused of having caused two men to beat her neighbor, Colin le Rotisseur, to death. The clear perpetrators of the crime, Jaquet (or Jaquotin) Quenal and Jehanin de Fine, are arrested and left in an “oubliette” after their testimony does not satisfy the judges (I:255–6). Throughout this case, those accused of crimes resist the efforts of the authorities to make them provide a narrative account of events that the judges will deem to be “truthful.” From the beginning, there is no doubt that these two men are guilty of actually committing the crime. Yet, from the inception of the inquest, the investigators attempt to tell the story of the murder differently from the account provided by the two men, and clearly wish to implicate the woman in the crime, even though the men resist doing so. Marguerite was initially accused of the crime by the victim, who lived for a time after he was beaten. Yet he never accused her of the act itself, only of its intention: “...il dit qu’elle l’a fait battre & navrer” (I:255). [“…he said that she had him beaten and battered.”] On the basis of this accusation, the investigators interrogate witnesses from the community in order

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to see if there is any truth to it. Even though they confess their crime, the two men still resist the account that the judicial authorities wish to impose on Marguerite. In contrast, the mere accusation of the dying man brings the entire judicial apparatus into play against the woman: ... fu comendé & commis par ledit maistres Jehan Truquam, lieutenant, honorable homme & sage maistre Nicolas Bertin, examinateur de par le roy nostre sire oudit Chastellet de Paris, pour soy imformer de la vie, renonmée, conversacion de ladite prisonniere, & aussi se elle est en rient coulpable, consentant ou chargiée, par sa confession ou autrement, des bateures faites audit Rotisseur... (I:256). [… the said advocates Jehan Truquam, lieutenant, and the honorable and wise master Nicolas Bertin, our lord the King’s prosecutor at the said court of Châtelet of Paris, recommended and commissioned a report about the life, the reputation, and the conversations of the said prisoner; they also wished to know, through her confession or otherwise, if she was guilty of anything, whether by her consent or by hiring others, in the beating of the said Rotisseur …]

The main thrust of the accusation will be based upon testimony given by witnesses who claim that they heard Marguerite ask the two clerics to beat her neighbor during a conversation in the local tavern, which is a locus of dissipation in the comic literature of the period. What is really at stake in this inquest, however, appears here: the “life” and the “reputation” of the woman. The first witness questioned by the two lawyers, a girl by the name of Jehannette, claims that she does not know whether or not the two men beat the victim at the request of Marguerite, but that she has heard this story from another man: ...un nommé Jacob [Jaquot]... lui dist [à Jehannette], cogneust & confessa que, puis IIII jours ençà, il avoit très-bien batu & navré ledit Hennequin. Requis se ledit Jacob lui dist point pourquoi ne à quelle cause, dit que non, ne elle ne scet. Requis de la vie & renommée de ladite Marguerite, dit que ledit Jacob a esté & est son amy, & repairé plusieurs fois avecques elle (& que elle) est mal renommée de son corps; & oy dire plusieurs fois à plusieurs personnes que ledit Pierre, son mary, la print au bordel, & depuis l’espousa; & plus n’en scet (I:257). [… a man named Jacob told Jehannette, admitted and confessed that, four days ago, he had severely beaten and battered the said Hennequin. Asked if the said Jacob had not told her why or for what reason, she said that no, she did not know. Asked about the life and reputation of the said Marguerite, she said that the said Jacob was and is her, Marguerite’s friend, and that she had seen him several times with her, and that she has a bad reputation in her body; she also heard several times from many people that the said Pierre, her husband, found her at a bordello, and later married her; and that she knows nothing else.]

The text seemingly accords little importance to the fact that the perpetrator did not mention that he had beaten the victim at the request of Marguerite, since the investigator finds what he is looking for in this testimony: evidence that this woman led a life of dissipation, and that she had a “bad reputation” (i.e., she was sexually active) both before and during her marriage.

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This same configuration is repeated in the testimony of several of the witnesses, for instance, in that of another neighbor: Requis de la bature dudit Hannequin [le Rotisseur], dit que riens n’en scet. Requis de la vie & renommée de ladite Marguerite, dit que il a oy dire à aucuns de ses voisins que elle n’estoit pas proude femme de son corps, & que son mary l’avoit prinse au bordel; & plus n’en scet (I:259). [Asked about the beating of the said Hannequin [another name for the Rotisseur], he [the witness] said that he knows nothing. Asked about the life and reputation of Marguerite, he said that he has heard some of his neighbors say that she was not a prudent woman with her body, and that her husband had taken her in a bordello. More than that he doesn’t know.]

Marguerite’s crime is essentially a bodily one, and it is circulated in the civic imagination of neighborly hearsay. The text establishes a parallel between the story of her immoderate and uncontrolled body and the story of her transgression, which equates adultery and crime in a characteristic manner. In general, this woman is a criminal because she resists being incorporated into a certain order based on the restriction of her body. The functioning of power is to wrest this truth of her transgression in the form of a testimonial narrative from a reluctant body through torture. Marguerite de Bruges was subjected several times to the “question,” an interrogation technique that is described in some detail in the account of her trial, yet somehow she persisted in the denial of all of the charges against her. In the second of her denials, she claims that she herself was the victim of what we would call sexual harassment by the ultimate perpetrator of the crime (I:262). The third application of the question breaks her, however. The agents of power force the body of the accused to emit a discourse that they recognize as the truth, which is coerced out of the accused by means of a technique that binds the individual, undresses her, abuses her, forces her to speak. During the first of these interrogations, it is clear that this kind of torture was quite severe: the accused was tied to two trestles, while one interrogator held her nose, and the other poured water into her mouth. ... fu ladite prisonniere mise à question sur le petit tresteau; & illec ne voult aucune chose confesser qui li portast prejudice. Et pour ce qu’il nous fu dit que elle estoit entechiée du hault mal, fu ostée & mise hors d’icelle question, & menée choffer en la cuisine en la maniere acoustumée, & après remise en la prison ... (I:261). [… the said prisoner was tied to the question on the small trestle; therewith she did not want to confess to anything prejudicial. And because we were told that she was touched by great pain, she was untied and taken off of this question, and led to warm herself in the kitchen in the accustomed manner, and afterwards led back to prison …]

This type of interrogation was common to most of those who resisted their confession, while Marguerite was one of the few who was able to withstand several sessions. In the end, however, she confessed the “truth” of her adulterous relation with one of the accused: “... ledit Jaquotin & elle qui parle ont eu compaignie charnelle ensamble

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par trois foiz & plus” (265) [“the said Jaquotin and she who speaks kept carnal company with one another three times or more.”] We cannot verify whether or not this was the actual truth of the situation, since her confession was obtained under extreme physical duress. What matters here is that the authorities of Châtelet wanted to recognize this version of the story as the truth, and they inflicted physical pain on the body of this woman until they were satisfied that she herself had pronounced this narrative version of her case in her own voice, “sanz aucune force ou contrainte” [“without force or constraint”], as the scribe remarks (I:265). In essence, this truth agrees with the story of women that circulates among an exclusively masculine audience for hundreds or even thousands of years in Christian Europe: if her desire and her body are not bounded by the vigilance of the righteous male, the adulterous woman as criminal will bring about death, destruction, and perhaps even the dissolution of the social order based on marriage. Far from being an independent discourse, the flourishing of the narratives devoted to cuckoldry is derived directly from the legal and ecclesiastical documents on adultery that provided a conceptual framework for the numerous European novella collections of the end of the Middle Ages, as well as for the much later works devoted to cuckoldry written by Rabelais and Brantôme. The astounding stories of perhaps imaginary sexual indiscretions in the Registre were almost always linked to crimes that were judged to be worthy of extreme punishments. The performative and generic imperative that forced men to display and to control women’s bodies in codified ways in the public domain generated an intertextual discourse that men propagated among themselves, in countless texts derived from widely divergent professional domains, that disseminated what they accepted as the truth of gender difference: i.e., women who were beyond the spatial boundaries of masculinist control would bring about literal death and destruction for the men who were “bound” to them by blood or marriage. The kinds of transgressions we have seen in the Registre thus had to have as a consequence the exhibition of the transgressive woman’s body as a literally blazing icon of masculinist power, since the women who were convicted of crimes that were invariably associated with illicit sexual acts were usually burned alive. The exercise of this power in and as a visual projection mapped into space and onto bodies is thus at the core of normative masculinity as an intertextual function, a process, and a configuration of bodies as spatial entities, from before the medieval period through the end of the Renaissance and beyond. Exemplary Masculinity Would-be normative masculinity as an intertextual concept was elaborated over the course of centuries in countless stories that survived across cultures and languages in a persistent oral tradition that eventually was transcribed in both Eastern and Western collections of exemplary stories. The transmission of these stories about women and about men’s relations with them formed the basis of the earliest scholarship devoted to the European novella collections, and continues to be of interest to philologists who have examined diverse narrative practices as the sources of a genre that was “new” when Boccaccio gave it a definitive form and direction in the fourteenth

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century. While recent work in this regard has begun to include a wider range of texts at the origins of the early-modern novella, there are a number of canonical texts containing exempla that have always been recognized as the “forerunners” of Boccaccio and his epigones: the Disciplina clericalis of Petrus Alfonsi, the “story of the seven sages,” translated into medieval French as Le Roman des sept sages, the Gesta Romanorum, translated into medieval French as Le Violier des histoires rommaines [sic], the Spanish Libro de los exenplos por A.B.C., Jacques de Vitry’s Exempla from his Sermones vulgares, and Vincent de Beauvais’s Speculum exemplorum. One of the most important themes running throughout these stories is that of the definition of men and masculinity in opposition to, or in comparison to an idea of women and femininity characterized as evil, sinful, deceitful, sensual, and uncontrollable. These definitions of the masculine gender are rarely developed in positive terms; they almost always rely upon a thoroughly misogynist description of “women’s tricks,” which men are required to know and literally to transcribe in order to protect their “honor” as men. A brief glance at a few texts taken from the immense body of exemplary, didactic literature is a necessary part of the description of intertextual masculinity that serves as a conceptual foundation for the imaginary worlds of Rabelais, Brantôme, and the Cent nouvelles nouvelles. What is striking in the exemplary tradition is the consistent virulence of the misogyny that defines the stories men told one another as part of their self-definition as men over the course of millennia, and in the most diverse of cultural contexts. The editor of a modern Spanish edition of the Seven Sages of Rome, Ventura de la Torre, describes the historical depth and persistence of this tradition as follows: The Seven Sages of Rome belongs to a long European transmission stretching from the Dolopathos of the twelfth century, based on an Oriental fable of the eighth century, to the twentieth century, through more than 200 manuscripts and more than 250 editions in diverse languages. These are both oral and written enunciations that appear in literary forms which continuously bring up to date one of the most common topoi of the Middle Ages, which might be expressed in the proposition “woman is bad or evil” [la mujer es mala]. This topos owes its existence, in the first place, to a long misogynist tradition (Sumerian, Acadian, Persian, Indian, Cynic, Semitic), in which woman symbolizes a category of attributes that are marked negatively with respect to man, the producer, guardian, and holder of official power, who determines the social, literary, and religious forms in which woman appears in archetypes that are traditionally biased and misogynist. Popular literary culture, as a form of collective memory that generates social structures, organizes the referential world by means of illocutionary mechanisms whose standard phrases propagate a dominant ideology which is, in this case, that of misogyny.29

28 For a brief discussion of these trends in scholarly discourse see my Iconography of Power: The French Nouvelle at the End of the Middle Ages (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), chapter 1, as well as the introduction to Gary Ferguson and David LaGuardia, eds., Narrative Worlds: Essays on the Nouvelle in 15th and 16th Century France (Tempe, AZ: MRTS, 2005). 29 Ventura de la Torre, ed. Los Siete sabios de Roma (Madrid: Miraguano Ediciones, 1993), VI, my translation.

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De la Torre makes evident that the transmission of this story of women is a consistent element of cultural and social structures built upon the notion of gender difference, and that misogyny is a discursive object that apparently had to be put into play or activated by men in order for them to perform their gender in public, first in the forum of oral tradition, and later in the more durable domain of textual transmission. The insistence on the number of manuscripts and editions in which these exemplary stories appear is a constant of the scholarly literature on the subject, as a glance at studies by scholars as diverse as Joseph Bédier, Werner Söderhjelm, Pierre Jourda, and Roger Dubuis attests.30 As the sheer number of cuckold stories and collections makes clear, men devoted a considerable amount of energy to making sure that these stories were preserved and passed on from generation to generation. These facts highlight an important and multi-faceted point that is the core of my argument here and in the following chapters: the propagation of masculinity as a normative concept is largely a discursive and intertextual affair; it calls upon men, or interpellates them to perform their gender in the public domain, either through the telling of a specific type of story about women, or through the collection and transcription of these stories as texts; the telling and retelling of these stories, which results in the development of masculinist homosocial bonds, runs parallel to the sharing of women’s bodies among men in the comic variants of these stories, which are familiar features of the nouvelle literature and beyond; finally, a certain, particularly widespread practice of reading and writing, and hence of intertextual transmission, is thus devoted specifically to the propagation of normative masculinity that is associated with misogyny as an “ideology,” as de la Torre remarked. A certain image of women, or more precisely the image of a certain masculine characterization of women, may be derived from the consistently misogynist exempla of Jacques de Vitry, which were used in this famous preacher’s twelfthcentury sermons, and were collected and transcribed in a wide variety of manuscripts over the course of the next two centuries.31 An important question that perhaps has never been addressed is that which concerns the reasons for the consistency of this misogynist depiction of women. In what ways does the transmission of (the idea of) women contribute to and participate in the conceptual structuring of masculinity? An examination of specific exempla provides us with some answers. From Vitry’s point of view, woman is obstinate, querulous, adulterous, and maliciously clever. Her sole purpose in life seems to be to contradict her husband, who punishes her brutally for her obstinacy, in which she continues even after she has been literally mutilated by him. The first version of the “quarrelsome woman” motif to be found in Vitry is exemplum CCXXI in its modern edition, which Crane translates as follows: A quarrelsome woman accused her husband, in the presence of others, of being lousy. He asked her, many times, to refrain from insulting him so. She continued, however, and her 30 See my Iconography of Power, 30–33, for a description of these diverse theories of the nouvelle’s “orientalist” origins. 31 For a detailed description of the ten manuscripts consulted by Vitry’s modern editor in order to compile his collection, see Thomas Frederick Crane, ed., The Exempla, or Illustrative Stories from the Sermones Vulgares of Jacques de Vitry (Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1967), xlvi–liii. All references are to this edition.

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Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature husband, in his anger, threw her into the water. When she was nearly drowned, and could not speak, she still held up her hands, and made with her fingers the gesture of killing a louse (222–3).

This micro tale contains several elements that are characteristic of this representation of women: the vicious violence that the husband unleashes against his wife, which we will see repeated in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles; her persistence even when threatened with death; finally, the nature of the “shrewish” woman—a commonplace into the seventeenth century and well beyond—is manifested first in persistent speech that is later translated into physical signs, when the body of the woman has been rendered incapable of speaking. The second version of this story, exemplum CCXXII, is even more brutally violent, and embodies in an emblematic fashion the desire to silence women that characterizes this version of masculinity: A woman was crossing a field with her husband, who said, “this field is mowed.” She replied, “No; it is shorn.” Her husband said, “It is mowed with a scythe.” She answered, “It is shorn with shears,” and began to quarrel for a long time. Finally, her husband in a rage cut out her tongue. Notwithstanding which, she made the sign of the shears with her fingers to show that the field was shorn, and when she could not quarrel with her tongue she did so with her fingers (223).

This woman with her tongue cut out who continues to oppose her husband’s characterization of events might serve as an emblem of the idea of women that persistently appears in the masculinist intertext, which is transmitted first in oral discourse meant for public display and reception, and later in compilations of exempla and stories that instructed men in the “art” of being men, which also required certain kinds of linguistic and rhetorical performances in public. According to this discursive art and the transmission of its exemplary knowledge, masculinity demanded women’s obedience, but it also paradoxically inculcated in men the certainty that women will never obey completely, and will never be entirely under the control of men, who nevertheless must control women in order to be identified as masculine. In this context, then, masculinity is almost always a process or a project that exists only as a potentiality, and must always face the threat that its performance of itself may be undermined by what were perceived to be the inevitable actions of women. One of the most famous exempla in Vitry’s collection concerns the tricks that women play on men in order to subvert the hierarchical organization of the household or domus within which the integrity of marriage had to be located as a precondition for the performance of masculinity. Maleness in this context required the surveillance of women who were supposed to be under masculine control in both the domestic and civic domains, in both interiors and exteriors. Exemplum CCXXX describes how women supposedly manipulated the visual domain of appearances, linked to clothing as bodily surface, in order to subvert the established order and satisfy their desires:

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A certain husband guarded his wife so closely that he never allowed her to leave the house without him. She considered often how she could deceive her keeper, and finally sent word to her lover to await her in a certain house. While she was passing in front of this house, she let herself fall into the mud, pretending that her feet had slipped, and dirtied her whole dress. She said to her husband: “Wait for me here at the door for I must remove my dress and clean it.” So saying, she entered the house, spent some time with her lover, came out with clean garments, and thus deceived her husband (226).

As Crane remarks, this anecdote was taken up by late medieval writers in France, and appears in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles and in the tales of Bonaventure des Périers, which means that it was well-known and appreciated as an archetype of feminine wiles. The original Latin uses terms that are fascinating in their specificity: the wife is literally in the “custody” of the husband; the entirety of her existence is spent devising multiple schemes or “cogitations” whereby she may escape from this custody (“Ipsa vero cepit multiplex cogitare quomodo custodem suum posset decipere” [95]). Despite the vigilance of her husband, she is able to “signify” to her lover, named here with the significant term “adultero,” to wait for her in his own home (domo). These apparently innocent remarks point to the existence of a world of “otherness” controlled by the woman, in which a multiple and different kind of thinking that is beyond the husband’s “custody” is constantly going on, in which an alternate mode of communication and signification is in effect, and in which an alternative space or domus is available to this enterprising woman, where a kind of male servant waits to serve her sexually. The ruse that allows the woman to enter this alternate world involves both dissimulation and a kind of external, bodily disguise: beneath her apparent weakness (she slips and falls in the mud), the woman hides the strength of her desire and her clever intellect. Nevertheless, her appearance just before she enters the house of her lover presents her as she inevitably is for the paranoid men who wrote and read these pages: she is stained, dirtied, unfit to be accompanied by a legitimate man in public. Another striking exemplum concerns the manipulation of the visual domain by the adulterous wife, which causes the unsuspecting husband to “misrecognize” that which should be evident to him, i.e., the truth that his wife has been unfaithful to him. This méconnaissance is a permanent feature of cuckold stories and is part of the aporia that constitutes masculinity in this context: men will always fail to see women’s duplicity that is right in front of their eyes. The didactic literature is literally obsessed with the role of vision in the surveillance of women and wives. Exemplum CCLI transcribes this scopic obsession in one of its most minimal forms: A husband discovered his wife with her lover, and laid in wait to kill him at a spot where he must pass in leaving the house. The wife sent for a crafty old woman to help her in this strait. The old woman told her to conceal her lover, and then went herself to where the husband was, and said: “The Lord be with you, and with your companions.” The man answered: “What are you saying? I am alone.” She replied: “Sir, forgive me, for there is a certain hour in the day when eyes are so changed that they see two persons where there is only one.” Then he began to think that possibly this had happened to him when he saw his wife, and he went to see if it were so. When he found his wife alone, he asked her pardon for believing ill of her (240).

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As is often the case, complicity among women leads to both a falsification of the visual field and the escape of an adulterous wife from the violent punishment that surely awaits her. This kind of feminine complicity is a constant of the didactic literature, dating at least from the Disciplina clericalis, in exemplum 9, which is the story of the vintner who is struck in the eye on his way home to his adulterous wife, who will help her lover to escape with the aid of her mother.32 Here the female helper is not the notorious figure of the mother-in-law, but her ruse is all the more effective. This “crafty old woman” has the kind of “malicious” feminine knowledge and wisdom (“vetula leva, valde maliciosa, que multa sciebat” [106]) that will somehow always be available to younger women when they need it in order to satisfy their desires. The Latin text is very careful in establishing the performance of the adulterous act in its proper place (“…maritus vidisset eum in lecto, exiens insidiabatur ei in tali loco quod per alium non poterat transire” [106]), declaring that the husband has seen his wife in bed with her lover. The text also makes clear that there is a kind of familiarity that unites the husband to the figure of the wily elderly woman, since she addresses him informally (“Dominus sit tecum et cum sociis tuis” [106]). Finally, the moralizing comment at the end of the exemplum, which Crane omits from his translation, makes it clear that from an official masculine position, which is associated with the figure of Christ and with the idea of chastity, women who act together to blind men are “enemies of Christ and ministers of the devil, as well as being hostile to chastity”: “Hujusmodi autem vetule leve sunt inimice Christi et ministre diaboli atque hostes castitatis ...” (106, Crane’s ellipsis). The image of woman as devil, shrew, maliciously clever adulteress, and shrewd helper of adulterers permeates the didactic literature that men transferred from one generation to the next. Moreover, this transmission of a kind of knowledge about women was an integral part of the cosmic hierarchy that led from the divine to the profane, in which men’s bodies were situated above those of women on the corporeal scale that culminated in the sacred body of Christ. As such, stories about the infidelities of women were meant to serve as lessons in chastity for men. For example, the ninth exemplum of the Disciplina clericalis is retold in the Gesta romanorum, and receives a moral commentary in its French translation in the sixteenth century, entitled Le Violier des histoires rommaines [sic]: Des femmes adulteres et excecation d’aulcuns prelatz. Ung chevalier s’en alla vendenger sa vigne. Parquoy sa femme, sperant qu’il demourast plus qu’il ne fit, fit venir son amoureulx. Et comme ilz estoient ensemblement couchez, retourna le chevalier qui avoit esté frappé en l’oeil d’ung ramel d’olive. Quant il fut entré, il fit appareiller son lict pour se coucher, pour ce qu’il estoit malade de blessure. Sa femme ja avoit faict musser son amoureulx en la chanbre, par adventure derriere l’huis. La femme, doubtant que son mary ne vist son paillard, luy dist qu’elle le vouloit mediciner ains que se poser sur le lict. Elle mist sa bouche sur l’oeil de son espoulx qui estoit sain, et fit signe de la main à son amoureulx qu’il saillist, ce qu’il fit sans estre veu. Lors dist la femme: —Maintenant suis asseurée que le mal de vostre mauvais oeil ne descendra ja sur le bon Reposez vous maintenant et allez en vostre lict. 32 On the different versions of this anecdote, see my “Exemplarity as Misogyny: Variations on the Tale of the One-Eyed Cuckold,” in Narrative Worlds, 139–58.

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Moralisation sur le propoz Ce chevalier est le prelat de l’eglise qui a à garder l’eglise saincte par le gouvernement de ses brebis à luy commises. La femme qui est adultere, c’est l’ame qui peche. Le prelat est en l’oeil frappé toutesfois et quantes qu’il est aveuglé par dons. Parquoy il fault qu’il entre dedans la chambre de bonne vie pour oster toute cupidité et avarice par le sacrement de penitence. Mais, par charnelles affections, l’oeil sain par lequel nous deussions Dieu contempler est obfusqué, tellement que le prelat ne congnoist la faulte de ses subjectz et son peril n’advertist.33 [On adulterous women and the execution [?] of some prelates. A knight went to harvest his vines. For this reason, his wife, hoping that he would stay longer in the field than he did, had her lover come to her. And as they were lying together, the knight returned home, having been struck in the eye with an olive branch. After he entered, he had his bed made up so that he could lie down in it, as he was sick from his wound. The wife had already hid her lover in the room by chance behind the door. The woman, doubting whether or not her husband could see her bawdy friend, told him that she wanted to lay him down and doctor him. She placed her mouth over the healthy eye of her spouse, and gestured to her lover to leave, which he did without being seen. Then the woman said: —Now I’m sure that the pain in your bad eye will not descend upon the good one. Rest now and go to bed. Moralization of this story The knight is the prelate of the church who has to guard the holy church by governing the sheep who are in his charge. The adulterous wife is the soul that sins. The prelate is struck in the eye every time he is blinded by gifts, which is why he has to enter into the room of good life by taking away all cupidity and avarice through the sacrament of penance. However, by means of carnal affections, the healthy eye by which we should contemplate God is darkened, to such an extent that the prelate does not see the faults of his parishioners and does not foresee the danger he is in. (My translation)]

This kind of allegorical “moralization” of a conventional exemplum is an integral part of the structuring of masculinity at the end of the medieval period and in the Renaissance. As I have already remarked, masculinity might be understood as a location, process, and project inherent to a grid of social relations that are depicted on two levels in the Violier’s exemplum. Within the restricted domain of the domus or domicile of an individual marriage, certain kinds of visibility and vigilance are required of a man in order for his gender to be enacted as such. He must see his wife’s indiscretions or violations of the household’s “honor,” along with those of other men who seek illegitimately to occupy his marriage bed. The bedroom to which a married couple’s sexuality has to be restricted is described here on the allegorical level as “la chambre de bonne vie.” A kind of primary masculine desire in this domain is represented quite clearly: he wants simply to take his repose in a wellmade bed, with all of the connotations that this idea might have—that his household is in order, that his wife is submissive and “in her place,” that no foreign elements have penetrated his personal space, etc. Unfortunately for him, from this point of view, the peace, rest, and healing associated with this place are contingent upon 33 Geoffroy Hope, ed. Le Violier des histoires rommaines (Geneva: Droz, 2002), 451.

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the fidelity of woman, who by her nature is unfaithful, treacherous, deceitful, and so on. Her duplicity also entails a doubling of masculine representatives: there are two men present in the anecdote’s bedroom, which is completely under the control of the deceitful wife in all of the variants of this tale, except for the one that appears as day 1, tale 6 of the Heptaméron. Throughout the literature on adultery, the man who is blinded by his wife’s deceitful intelligence is invariably accompanied by another man whom the wife hides in the shadows, under the bed, in closets, or, as here, behind the bedroom door. At times this second man adopts a disguise to escape from the bedroom; at other times he feigns madness; at still other times he is instructed by the wife’s mother to hold a sword and to pretend that he is enraged, as in tale 72 of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, which I will examine in the following chapter. Thus the supposed unicity of the masculine persona exists only in the form of a project or even of a projection that is always accompanied by shadowy doubles. Instead of being in control of his own being and possessions, a man in this context defined himself in relation to an enigmatic, shifting “other” whom he was unable to see clearly, but whom he feared was always near. Moreover, his relation to this other and to the numerous shadow beings who complemented his wife’s existence (female helpers, mothers-in-law), generated an obscure double of his own body: the figure of the lover hiding somewhere, invisible, in the room, the embodiment of a ubiquitous and unstoppable masculine desire. The moralization of this anecdote expands the notion of masculinity to include metaphysical concepts that are nonetheless firmly rooted in earthly actions. From this perspective, a masculine subject always has to be watchful so that his eye remains firmly focused on God. The question remains, from the point of view of gender studies, as to what it means for a man to concentrate on the divine image as part of the performance of his gender. As the incarnation of the sinful soul, woman will seek always to blur that vision, as will the anonymous others who bribe the allegorical prelate in order to be pardoned of their sins. It is also clear from the commentary that the masculine figure is blinded not only by sinfulness, but also by his own “carnal affection” or desire, which keeps him from entering “the (bed)room of the good life,” which must be cleansed of its sins through penance. This commentary on the necessity of vision and visibility is marked, however, by an extraordinary blindness of its own: while the figures of the wife and the husband are both allegorized, to become the sinful soul and the prelate, that of the lover hiding behind the door is wholly absent from the moralization. In his place, there appears the prelate’s greed, which blinds him to the faults of those subject to his authority. This dreamlike displacement indicates, perhaps, the extent to which the figure of the lover hiding in the bedroom is a manifestation of the desire that undermines and accompanies a man’s need in this context to concentrate on his gender as a “singularity” or monad that is not contingent upon “other,” perhaps more transgressive masculinities. Expressed in philosophical terms, this characteristic of normative masculinity might read as follows: thinking that it is one, masculinity projects itself into the many, while all of the figures who populate its imaginary are merely projections or displacements of its own multiple desires.

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Conclusion Masculinity is a multi-faceted and difficult concept to define, especially during historical periods that are hundreds of years in the past. The documentation in which one might look for its definition is vast, and cuts across generic boundaries to include the different kinds of texts that I have examined here. The preceding analysis was meant to establish a well-developed context for the readings that will follow, and not to provide an exhaustive account of what the parameters for a conceptual elaboration of masculinities might have been in the pre-modern period. In the immense period of time that I have traversed between the Digest of Justinian and the exempla literature, I have discussed the following notions of masculinity as a project, process, and performance. Masculinity as a would-be normative and singular concept is relational and can be defined only as a position that is opened for subjects to occupy in a hierarchical set of social relations. It is spatially and visually articulated in the domestic and public domains. Certain performances are required of the male body within these domains, and in relation to other bodies conceived of in their alterity, as part of the process of interpellation that brings forth the material practices that are constitutive of the male gender. This interpellation is, however, also carried out within a “spiritual” realm that situates men’s bodies between the sacred body of Christ and the profane bodies of women. An integral part of this spiritual practice is the act of reading and writing about what it means to be a man, which might be discerned or “read into” most of the texts that men have written in the past. As we have just seen, however, there are some texts that are more consciously concerned than others with inculcating a certain version of masculinity in the minds of men, and it is this intertextual process that ultimately concerns me here, especially in those works which were written ostensibly for the sake of amusement. Many (heterosexual) men know perhaps from their everyday lives that the practice of their gender partly involves speaking in a certain way to other men, telling them particular kinds of stories and jokes, and eliciting a specific type of discourse from them. My contention here is that the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, the Tiers Livre, and Les Dames galantes transcribe these kinds of gender-driven, heteronormative, masculinist discourses; moreover, that they are grounded in a millennial tradition of reading and writing that required men to formulate their subjectivity in terms of its relations to women as others in a number of senses: woman as a malevolent intelligence to be avoided; woman as a body to be situated in domestic space, controlled by the masculine gaze and punished when it transgressed; woman as a body to be tracked, seduced, transported, and violated; woman as the cause of crime, pollution, corruption, and domestic dishonor; woman as an earthly presence that distances men from the domain of the sacred. When men tell jokes and comic stories to other men in the texts that will be the focus of the following chapters, they are speaking about all of these images of women, in relation to which their own subject position is defined. In the final analysis, the normative masculinity of this period is precisely this, a kind of speech act that is transcribed so that other men may learn to internalize and repeat it in the same kind of ritualized circumstances among men. The intertext of my title is thus the conceptual and semantic domain in which this discourse is continuously being rewritten, and in which the “being” of this kind of masculinity might be located.

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Chapter 2

Masculinities in the Intertext: Les Cent nouvelles nouvelles

The would-be normative version of medieval and Renaissance masculinity that I am examining here was inherently intertextual. As a function, place marker, project, and process, the male gender was embedded in the institution of marriage, the organizing principle of social relations, which generated thousands of legal documents and manuals, some of which we have just examined briefly in the preceding chapter. Far from being merely a relation between two people, this institution was also a textual event that had been scrupulously documented for at least a thousand years before the publication of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles in the fifteenth century.1 The multiplicity and divergence of the documents I have just examined leave one with an ambiguous image of marriage’s significance in pre-modern Europe, with the consequence that one’s conception of masculinity shares this same ambiguity. The fictional texts that I will examine in the next two chapters complicate the matter significantly. For example, one might ask if it is possible to make a judgment about the nature of marriage in fifteenth-century Burgundy on the basis of reading the Cent nouvelles nouvelles. If such were the case, one would be forced to conclude that adultery and cuckolding were widespread and easily accepted by this society, and that marriage was simply an institution that provided a pretext for laughter and philandering. A reading of the “official” documents in which the laws and customs concerning marriage were explicated provides an entirely different understanding of matrimony, and it is against this backdrop that one must read the cuckold tales of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles. The transcription of these stories participated in complex intertextual procedures in which men of one generation passed on masculinist knowledge to men of the following generation, which is one of the primary acts in the performance of normative masculinity. While the Cent nouvelles nouvelles may seem to be an innocent comic text on its surface, it nevertheless engages in a deceptively subtle manner an enormous intertext of comic and serious works. In the tales themselves, the masculine obsession with retelling certain kinds of anecdotes becomes evident in the figure of the cuckold, who at times appears concerned primarily with reading and 1 On the date and place of composition and publication of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, see Pierre Jourda, Conteurs français du seizième siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), xix–xxi. All references will be to this edition. My translations appear in parentheses after each citation. Jourda dates the presentation of the work’s manuscript to the Duke of Burgundy, Philippe le Bon, in 1462, which appears on the only extant manuscript of the work in Glasgow. The first edition of the work was published by Antoine Vérard in 1486. See also Roger Dubuis, Les Cent nouvelles nouvelles et la tradition de la nouvelle en France au Moyen Age (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1973).

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rereading stories about adultery and its infinite possibilities. As such, he is, in one of his most basic manifestations, a collector of exempla about women’s infidelities, and his being as a masculine subject is determined by his relationship to these “texts.” Tale 37: Space, Knowledge, and the Catalogue of Women’s Tricks In the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, the cuckold signifies an intertextuality that links the didactic religious tradition to comic parody, both of which are founded on a masculinist fear of women’s desire, which they consider to be unbounded and uncontrollable. The jaloux of the 37th tale, for example, is a collector of stories in which women fool their husbands: Ce bon jaloux... estoit tres grandhistorien et avoit beaucoup veu, leu et releu de diverses histoires; mais la fin principale a quoy tendoit son exercice et tout son estude estoit de savoir et cognoistre les façons et manieres e[n] quoy et comment femmes pevent decepvoir leurs mariz. Et car, la Dieu mercy, les histoires anciennes comme Matheolet, Juvenal, les Quinze Joyes de mariage, et aultres pluseurs dont je ne scay le compte, font mencion de diverses tromperies, cauteles, abusions et deceptions en cest estat advenues, nostre jaloux les avoit tousjours entre ses mains, et n’en estoit pas mains assotté qu’un follastre de sa massue. Toutesfoiz lysoit, tousjours estudioit, et d’iceulx livres fist ung petit extraict pour luy, ou quel estoient emprinses, descriptes et notées pluseurs manieres de tromperies, au pourchaz et emprinses de femmes, et es personnes de leurs mariz executées. Et ce fist il tendant afin d’estre mieulx premuny et sur sa garde si sa femme a l’adventure vouloit user de telles querelles en son livre croniquées et registrées. (164) [This jealous man …. was a very great historian and had often examined, read, and reread diverse stories; but the principal end to which all of his effort and all of his study led was to know and understand the ways and means by which women may deceive their husbands. And since, thank God, ancient stories such as Matheolet, Juvenal, the Fifteen Joys of Marriage, and several others with which I am not familiar, mention the diverse trickeries, cautions, abuses, and deceptions that happen in this state, our jealous husband always had these in his hands, and wasn’t less stultified by them than a fool is by his club. He was always reading, always studying, and from his books he extracted a little list for himself, on which he had seized upon, described, and noted all manner of tricks, pursued and employed by women, and executed upon the persons of their husbands. And he did this so that he would be better prepared and on his guard if his wife by chance wanted to use these arguments that were chronicled and registered in his book.]

The potential cuckold is a collector of stories, accumulated and multiplied within several narrative traditions that all have the same subject. He looks for indices of his wife’s infidelities, and prepares himself for her eventual tricks by studying the available textual models. In tale 37, this obsessive rereading of a given narrative tradition has one purpose: to protect the cuckold against his wife’s infidelity, which he dreads, but which is nevertheless trivialized when it occurs. The practice of reading or listening to stories of women’s unfaithfulness as a means of controlling their bodily desires echoes the Disciplina clericalis, a text that would have been familiar to the author who compiled the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, and which is particularly emphatic on this point in exemplum 14:

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Quidam iuvenis fuit, qui totam intentionem suam et totum sensum suum et adhuc totum tempus suum ad hoc misit ut sciret omnimodam artem mulieris, et hoc facto voluit ducere uxorem. Sed primitus prrexit quaerere consilium et sapientiorem illius regionis adiit hominem et qualiter custodire posset quam ducere volebat quaesivit uxorem.2 [There was a certain young man who devoted all of his intentions, his understanding, and his time to knowing and recognizing all of the modes of women’s arts, and afterwards he wanted to take a wife. But before marrying he wanted to ask for advice and so he sought out the wisest man of his region and asked him in what way he would be able to watch over his wife, as he wanted to strive to command her.]

The fifteenth-century translator of Matheolus refers to this same practice: Je suy tempestés en courage;/ Je sueffre tourment et orage/ A bon droit, car trop variay/ Au jour que je me mariay./ Si avoye des lors veüs/ Pluseurs volumes et leüs,/ Tant versifiés com en prose,/ Neïs le livre de la Rose,/ Qui dit en cueillant la soussie,/ Ou chapitre de jalousie:/ « Nul n’est qui marié se sente,/ S’il n’est fols, qu’il ne s’en repente. »3 [My mind is a tempest/ I suffer from storms and torments/ For good reason, for I made a mistake/ On the day I got married./ If I had at that time seen/ Several volumes that I should have read/ Those in verse as well as those in prose,/ Even the Roman de la rose, / Which says that by harvesting one’s worry/ In the chapter on jealousy/ “No man who feels himself to be married/ does not repent doing it, unless he is mad.”]

This tale thus activates a literary topos that would have been easily recognized by readers who were familiar with the clerical literature on marriage. Moreover, this process of reading and recognition is crucial to the structuring of relations between men and women, bringing into being a certain kind of historically-contingent masculinity as part of the intertextual process. Finally, the masculinist necessity of cataloguing women’s tricks is intimately related to the control and surveillance of women’s bodies in domestic space, which has clear ramifications for the disposition or arrangement of domestic space. The most canonical example of this relation is described in a Spanish collection of exempla, El libro de los exenplos [sic] por A.B.C., in a slightly revised version of exemplum XIV from the Disciplina clericalis: Dixo el maestro: Un mançebo fue que toda su entençion e seso e su tiempo expendio por saber encobiertamente el arte de la mugier. E esto fecho, ovo de casar. Empero primeramente ovo consejo del mayor sabidor de toda la comarca en que manera guardaria la mugier con que avia de casar. E el sabio diole por consejo que feziese una casa alta de paredes de piedra, e posiese dentro la mugier e le diesse asaz de comer e vestir honrradamente, e que feziesse en casa una sola puerta e non mas, sola una feniestra por donde mirasse, e la casa fuesse tan alta que ninguno non posiesse entrar synon por la puerta.4

2 Alfonsi, Disciplina clericalis, 35, my translation. 3 A.G. Van Hamel, ed. Les Lamentations de Matheolus et le Livre de leesce (Paris: Émile Bouillon, 1892), 1. 4 Clemente Sánchez de Vercial, Libro de los exenplos por A.B.C. ed. John E. Keller and Connie L. Scarborough (Madrid: Ars Libris, 2000), 256, my translation.

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Clearly this text is almost a literal translation of Petrus Alfonsi’s classic work. What interests me here, however, is the mere fact of its transmission from generation to generation in diverse kinds of texts that men were required to study as part of the practice of their virtue as masculine subjects. Masculinity in this context is partially constituted by a compilation of texts concerning the wiles of women, which is translated into a disposition of space that prohibits women from using their ingenuity to trick men. The organization of concepts in the misogynist intertext hence parallels the arrangement of constructed space that is heavily marked in terms of its usage in the performance of gender. Tale 37 retains some of the serious elements of this didactic discourse, but inserts them into a context that mocks the seriousness of religious ritual. The wife of the cuckold is strictly guarded by her husband, except when she goes to mass accompanied by “la plus pute vieille qui jamais aultruy destourba” (165–6) [“The most disgusting old hag who ever bothered anyone.”]. A gentleman (“gentil compaignon”) falls in love with the wife, and invents a trick or bon tour that will enable him to speak with her when she goes to Mass. The method by which the lover seduces the wife under guard provides us with one of the most succinct and almost “iconographic” versions of this conventional maneuver. Moreover, the particular means employed here belong to the same semantic field as that of the main motif developed in the tale: [L’Amant] au lendemain, garny d’unes lettres que Dieu scet comment dictées, vint rencontrer sa dame, et tant subitement et subtilement les luy bailla que oncques le guet de la vieille serpente n’en eut la cognoissance. Ces lettres furent ouvertes par elle qui voluntiers les vit quand elle fut a part. Le contenu en gros estoit comment il estoit esprins de l’amour d’elle, et que jamais ung seul jour de bien n’aroit si temps et loisir prestez ne luy sont pour plus au long l’en advertir, requerant en conclusion qu’elle luy veille de sa grace jour et lieu assigner convenable a ce faire, ensemble et response a ce contenu. Elle fist unes lettres par lesquelles tres gracieusement s’excusoit de vouloir en amours entretenir aultre que celuy auquel elle doit et foy et loyauté. Neantmains toutesfoiz, pourtant qu’il est tant fort esprins d’amours a cause d’elle, qu’elle ne vouldroit pour rien qu’il n’en feust guerdonné, elle seroit tres contente d’oyr ce qu’il luy vouldroit dire, si nullement povoit ou savoit... (165). [[The Lover], on the next day, armed with a letter that was well written, God knows, came to meet his lady, and so suddenly and subtly gave the letter to her that the watchful eye of the old snake never noticed it. This letter was opened by she who gladly looked at it when she was alone. In short, the contents described how he was in love with her, and that he would never have another good day if he were not granted the time and the leisure

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to tell her about his love at more length, asking her, in conclusion, to grant him by her good graces a time and a place where it would be convenient for him to do so, as well as a response to the contents of his letter. She wrote a letter in which very graciously she excused herself for wanting to speak of love to someone other than the man to whom she owes her faith and loyalty. Nevertheless, since he is so taken by love for her, she would not want for anything in the world that he should not be rewarded for it, and she would be very happy to hear that which he wanted to say, if she only could and knew how…]

The interplay between the authoritative stories collected by the husband, anchored in the tradition of clerical, misogynist writing, and the private communication between the would-be lovers that inscribes the topos of the “lover’s complaint,” establishes a hierarchy of discourse that is characteristic of the cuckold literature. Here, then, we have two male characters engaged in two different modes of writing that are, nonetheless, complementary forms of masculinity’s intertextual inscription. The first mode involves the transcription and repetition of an authoritative body of stories devoted to cataloguing women’s wiles and tricks; the second mode involves the translation of an already trite masculine desire—the narrator’s ironic comment (“Dieu scet comment dictées!”) is significant here—into a letter that has woman, conceived of as the object of this desire, as its privileged recipient. Thus the masculine persona is composed of two fundamentally distinct manners of writing that are divided along public and private lines. The rehearsal and denunciation of feminine infidelity is inherently a masculinist, homosocial affair, which interpellates individuals as masculine subjects who must recount and retell these stories about women’s wiles to other men in order to be recognized in gendered terms. In contrast, the dictation of the private letter that tells the intimate story of one man’s rather conventional desire for a married woman participates in the formation of a mass of “unauthorized” literature that undercuts the power and authority of the highly scripted and exhibitionist masculinist hierarchy. The idea of a letter’s destination is important here: while the public discourse of misogyny is not oriented in any particular direction, the private one of the letter that describes masculine desire as a trope always takes an individual object as its goal, even if, in the most exaggerated and comic versions of cuckold tales, almost any female character will do as an object of desire. This type of masculine longing is hence a specific type of discourse, shaped by a masculinist intertext, which must be received and acknowledged as a certain kind of message by a woman bound by impossible restrictions and equally impossible injunctions. In this literary tradition, the proper destination for this message is not one man’s own wife, but almost invariably another man’s wife. While the private correspondence would seem to undermine the authority of the intertextual tradition that requires feminine fidelity, it nonetheless works in tandem with this tradition, and becomes a source for a continuously expanding catalogue of the ways in which men in fact impose paradoxical demands on women, who must be both faithful wives and willing participants in the transgression of marriage. The way in which the wife reads the letter of masculine desire is indicative of her plight, which she bears with enigmatic grace, excusing herself for breaking the interdiction against writing about or discussing (both contained in the verb entretenir) the possibility of infidelity, while

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also expressing her eagerness to reward the lover by receiving his letter as it should be received. This letter must be both written and read in a certain way if masculinity is to be activated and displayed as it must be in order to exist, since display is one of the fundamental modes of its being. The lover’s ruse develops as follows. When the wife passes by his house on her way to mass, he pours a bucket of water full of ashes on her dress, and she takes refuge inside, asking her monstrous escort to return home and to bring her new clothes. What seemingly bothers her husband the most upon learning of this trick is the idea that the events resulting in his disgrace have not been contained within his strict notion of cuckoldry’s intertext, which is the foundation of his being and identity as a masculine subject: Lors elle [the escort] luy monstra la robe et le couvrechef, et luy compta l’adventure de la tyne d’eaue et des cendres, disant qu’elle vient querir aultres habillemens, car en ce point sa maistresse n’osoit partir dont elle estoit. « Est ce cela? Dit il. Nostre Dame, ce tour n’estoit pas en mon livre! Allez, allez, je voy bien que c’est. » Il eust voluntiers dit qu’il estoit coux. Et creez que si estoit il a ceste heure, et ne l’en sceut oncques garder livre ne brevet ou pluseurs tours estoient enregistrez. Et fait assez a penser qu’il retint si bien ce derrenier qu’oncques depuis de sa memoire ne partit, et ne luy fut nesung besoing que a ceste cause il l’escripsist, tant en eut fresche souvenance le pou de bons jours qu’il vesquit (167). [Then she (the escort) showed him the dress and the headpiece, and told him the story of the bucket of water and ashes, saying that she has come to get other clothes, for in her current state her mistress did not dare to leave where she was. “So that’s it?” he said, “Mother of God, this trick wasn’t written in my book! C’mon now, I see what’s going on.” He would be damned if he wasn’t a cuckold. And I do believe that he was one at that moment, and from then on he did not know how to maintain either a book or a breviary where several tricks were written down. And one can imagine that he retained so well this last trick that it never again left his memory, and he had no need whatsoever of writing it down, so fresh was his recollection of it during the few good days that he lived after that.]

Just as the potential cuckold is haunted by the image of his wife’s tricks, so the actual cuckold is made miserable by the memory of the trick that has eluded his control and especially his ability to write it down, despite his study of the art of female duplicity and his consistent inscription of women’s tricks as the basis of his own gendered identity. Unlike the solemn wise man of the Disciplina clericalis and his willing disciple, the parodic figure of the Cent nouvelles is defined as a coward (lasche, recreant) who will live a short life made miserable by his obsession with the textual representation of that which he dreads. From this perspective, the writing of cuckoldry in its eternal intertext will always elude complete transcription even in the most complete and obsessive of books. What remains hidden in this tale of writing and reading is the fact that the main body of the anecdote itself is a tale that underwent numerous variations in the intertext long before it was taken up by the anonymous author of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles. As we have already seen in the last chapter, exemplum CCXXX of Jacques de Vitry’s collection presents a much simpler and more primary version of this same story.

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It is striking to note, then, that this anecdote, which was undoubtedly familiar to the implied readers of these tales, is recognized as novel by the husband. Since he dedicates himself to the study of texts about women’s infidelities, his attribution of novelty to this trick is simply impossible. This kind of inexplicable oversight is at the core of early-modern masculinity understood as a continuous process of misrecognition within an intertextuality constituted by diverse modes of writing both in the fictional world and beyond its boundaries. We have already noted the first, conventional love letter that was written to the wife in this tale. There is, however, a second letter written by the lover to the wife that describes in detail the intersubjective and spatial frame in which the “lover’s complaint” can be properly received by the object of this speculative masculine desire. Unlike the minimal version of the tale given by Vitry, tale 37 does not attribute the invention of the trick solely to the would-be adulteress. It is in fact the intrusive male character who devises the ruse with the help of a female friend, meaning that the story activates a social network that displaces the wife’s body from the public space where it is defaced, to a private realm in which female helpers are in complicity with the transgressive male: Il s’advisa d’un tresbon tour en la parfin, qui ne fait pas a oublier : car il s’en vint a une sienne bonne amye qui demouroit entre l’eglise ou sa dame alloit a la messe et l’ostel d’elle; et luy compta sans rien celer le fait de ses amours, luy priant que a ce besoing luy veille aider et secourir. « Ce que je pourroye faire pour vous, dist elle, ne pensez pas que je ne m’y employe de tresbon cueur.—Je vous mercye, dit il; et seriez vous contente qu’elle venist ceans parler a moy?—Ma foy, dit elle, pour l’amour de vous, il me plaist bien.—Et bien! dit il, s’il est en moy de vous faire autant de service, pensez que j’aray cognoissance de ceste courtoisie. » Il ne fut onques aise tant qu’il eust rescript a sa dame et baillé ses lettres, qui contenoient qu’il avoit tant fait a une telle « qui est ma tres grande amye, femme de bien, loyalle et secrete, et qui vous ame et cognoist bien, qu’elle nous baillera sa maison pour deviser. Et veezcy que j’ai advisé ... » (166). [He came up with a very good trick in the end, which is not to be forgotten: for, he went to see a good woman friend of his, who lived between the church where his lady went to mass and her house; and he told her, without hiding anything, the details of his love, begging her to help and aid him in this matter. “Whatever I can do for you,” she said, “don’t think that I won’t do it gladly.” “I thank you,” he said, “and would you mind if my lady came here [to your house] to chat with me?” “By God,” she said, “out of friendship to you, I wouldn’t mind at all.” “Well then,” said he, “if I can render you a service in any way, remember that I will be much obliged to you for your courtesy.” He then could not rest until he wrote back to his lady and gave her his letter, which said that he had done a favor for such and such a woman “who is my very good friend and a woman of quality, loyal and discreet, who knows you well and likes you, and who will give us her house so that we can chat together there. And this is what I’ve devised…”]

At this point the lover explains the trick in writing to his beloved, claiming that he himself will throw the bucket of ashes mixed with water on her, but in an interesting disguise: “Et si seray en habit si descogneu que vostre vieille ne ame du monde n’ara garde de moy cognoistre” (166). [“And I will be dressed in such a strange way that neither your old hag nor anyone else will be able to recognize me”]. As in almost all

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comic texts of this period, the narrator and his listeners seem to derive pleasure from a kind of play that takes the external signs of gender identity as its object, disguising and defacing those signs, and leading to forced misrecognitions. The fact that this kind of masculine desire exists, and that it must reach woman as its object, has drastic consequences for the other half of masculinity’s being, that is, the “rational” side that represents woman as problematic, untrustworthy, sinful, and malicious. This tale illustrates the extent to which, for the late-medieval mind, gender difference was involved in a complex relationship with social space, which various instances of writing configured in gendered terms. The rational side of masculinity, linked to the intertext of exemplary literature that is at the basis of this tale, claims, like the wise man of the Libro de los exenplos, that woman should be locked into a house with stone walls and a single door, so that she will not be able to deceive her husband. The corporeal side of masculinity, on the other hand, collaborates with women in their deception of husbands, ridicules men who are consumed by jealousy because of women, and activates a textual correspondence that holds up an alternative conception of women’s honor, as the lover’s second letter makes clear in tale 37. The female collaborator is described by the lover using the terms that are usually reserved for chaste women: the formula, “ma tres grande amye, femme de bien, loyalle et secrete” could almost be used to describe some of the honnêtes femmes of the Heptaméron. All of the movement of this comic tale has as its goal the establishment of this alternative, upside-down sense of “honor,” which is built around the necessity that the discourse of masculine desire reach its “honorable” recipient who, paradoxically, incarnates the masculinist dread of being dishonored by women’s intelligence. In spatial terms, the tale is concerned with configuring gendered bodies in an alternative space such that a certain kind of “discourse” may be pronounced despite the vigilance of the rational, intertextual cuckold and the chaperone he employs to watch his wife. The “loyal” and “discreet” or “secretive” woman who collaborates with the lover has her own house near the church where the wife attends mass with her bodyguard, but the tale does not clarify her social status at all. How is it possible that a woman should be responsible for her own home to such an extent that she can loan it to her male friend—another strange detail—for illicit rendez-vous? Whatever the case may be, the lover claims that he will “[avoir] cognoissance de ceste courtoisie” [“remember this favor [or courtesy]],”during the course of which he disguises himself so that the vieille serpente or pute who guards the wife “n’ara garde de [le] cognoistre.” This play on the the cognates of the verb connaître, “to know or to have knowledge of,” cannot be rendered in English. “Avoir connaissance d’une courtoisie” is to be obliged or grateful for a service rendered, while the usage of the infinitive of the verb in the second instance is more specifically concerned with having the knowledge required to recognize someone in a public space. As the middle French spelling indicates, recognition is etymologically linked to the French word for knowledge, the sense of which is expanded in the tale to include the network of social obligation that requires a gift exchange of information, the implication being that the lover recognizes his obligation to his female friend, and that he is indebted to her for the favor she is about to do for him. This tale is hence a kind of exploration of the ways knowledge is structured and exchanged in domestic

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and public spaces, both orally and in writing, in relation to normative conceptions of how gender must be performed, and how it is undermined. The recognition of an upside-down gender order, which requires the misrecognition of the “right-side-up” order of things, is accompanied in the tale by a public display of the wife’s body as it is defaced in this process: Or fut venu ce jour, et la damoiselle affublée par son serviteur du seau d’eaue et de cendres, voire par telle façon que son couvrechef, sa robe et le surplus de ses habillemens furent tous gastez et percez. Et Dieu scet qu’elle fist bien de l’esbahie et de la malcontente; et comme elle estoit escollée, elle se bouta en l’ostel, ignorant d’y avoir cognoissance. Tantost qu’elle vit la dame, elle se plaindit de son meschef, et n’est pas a vous dire le dueil qu’elle menoit de ceste adventure. Maintenant plaint sa robe, maintenant son couvrechef, et a l’autre foiz son tixu. Bref, qui l’oyoit, il sembloit que le monde fust finé. Et Dangier sa meschine, qui enrageoit d’angaigne, avoit ung coulteau en sa main dont el nestaioit sa robe le mieulx qu’elle savoit. (166–7) [So the day arrived, and the young woman was splattered with a bucket of water and ash by her suitor in such a way that her headpiece, her dress, and the rest of her clothes were completely soiled and torn. And God knows that she played well the part of a surprised and unhappy woman; and when she had to uncover herself, she slipped into the house, pretending not to recognize [or know] it. As soon as she saw the lady of the house, she complained of her mishap, and you can imagine how she was going on about her misadventure. Now she laments the state of her dress, now her headpiece, and finally the fabric of her dress. In short, whoever heard her would have thought that it was the end of the world. And Danger her handmaid, who was raging on about the deception, had a knife in her hand with which she was cleaning the dress as best she could.]

The defacement of the wife here takes the form of a discursive enumeration that must be pronounced aloud in a semi-public space—here the maison is named as an ostel—for the benefit of the old woman who is the guardian of the patriarchal order. Given the narrative habits of the period, it is no surprise that the chaperone is given an allegorical name, highlighting the erudition of the writer of these tales, and winking at readers who were familiar at least with the Roman de la rose and its personified characters. Perhaps the most interesting detail of this passage is, however, the knife that the old woman carries with her, and with which she tries to clean the wife’s clothing. At the risk of over-reading, one might say that the knife embodies the murderous will of the cuckold, and hence it is a kind of phallic object that has been transferred to the old woman, who must brandish it when the chastity of the wife is threatened, and which she must use to clean off the “stains” of infidelity with which the adulterous woman is marked, and which display the husband’s disgrace in public space. This tale illustrates rather well, then, the ways gender difference is configured in spatial terms, and within intertextual procedures that bifurcate masculinity into two aspects. The first type is that which is named at the beginning of the tale, the misogynist practice of cataloguing women’s tricks. This clerical tradition is emphasized in the choice of the anecdote, which is borrowed from collections of exempla. The second aspect is the convention of declaring a man’s often illegitimate love through letters, which requires a kind of collaboration from female characters. Masculinity in this

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work thus develops among visual manipulations of bodies and the surveillance of those bodies, within processes of recognition and misrecognition by which the male gender is both mystified and mystifies, and within the configuration of space into licit and illicit zones, which fall under the gaze of the controlling male character, or escape his control and his field of vision. Paradoxically, the being of masculinity in this context seems to require both of these “zones” of shadow and light, of ignorance and knowledge, in order to exist as such. Tale 4: Masculinity as Specular Irony In some cuckold tales, the narrator plays with the ambiguities that define the procedure of assigning new attributes to a figure that is already defined by the intertext. In tale 4, for example, the husband is described as “bon et sage, preu et vaillant, comme après vous sera compté” (37). [“good and wise, brave and valiant, as you will hear in the following story.”] At this early stage of the narrative, it is impossible for the reader to know whether or not these attributes accurately describe the husband, though one should recognize the narrator’s irony on the basis of one’s knowledge of other tales of this sort. There is another indicator, however, that allows one to surmise what the outcome of the story will be. The seducer who wishes to make love to the wife of the brave husband described above is qualified by the narrator of the tale, named as “Monseigneur,” supposedly Philippe le Bon, the Duke of Burgundy himself,5 in the following terms: “Le roy estant nagueres en sa ville de Tours, ung gentil compaignon escossois, archier de son corps et de sa grand garde, s’enamoura tresfort d’une tresbelle et gente damoiselle mariée et merciere” (36). [“While the King was in the city of Tours, a Scottish gentleman who was an archer in his guard fell madly in love with a very beautiful and gentle woman who was married and worked as a mercer.”] Evidently, this passage defines the wife and the seducer in terms that are situated on a hierarchical scale of value that is directly related to the distinct classes to which they belong. The Scotsman is in the King’s guard, while the wife and her husband are mere merchants. The narrator thus affixes a superlative marker to the seducer, while the husband and wife belong to a merchant class that is often the object of ridicule in these tales. Thus the irony with which the noble narrator of this tale regards the qualities that he initially attributed to the eventual cuckold lures the reader into supposing that this definitive masculinist trope will somehow be confirmed by the narrative, since precisely this kind of irony was required of men in this context as part of the performance of their gender; moreover, the pleasure of the narrative comes precisely from the reader’s recognition that this estimation of the poor husband was a stylistic turn of the narrator, which amounts to a rhetorical display of his gender. The most interesting moment of the tale for my purposes, however, comes just after the departure of the Scotsman, when the frightened husband is reluctant to come out from under the bed where he has been hiding, fully armed, while his wife has sex 5 See my Iconography of Power, 51–62, for a description of Philippe le Bon, who commissioned the Cent nouvelles nouvelles and who is a crucial figure for an understanding of how class and gender interact in the narrative frame of the work.

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with the King’s archer: “Le pouvre martir estant soubz le lit, a peu s’il n’osoit tirer de la, doubtant le retourner de son adversaire, ou, pour mieulx dire, son compaignon” (39; my emphasis). [“The poor martyr hiding under the bed hardly dared to climb out from under it, fearing the return of his adversary, or, to describe him better, his companion.”] Throughout the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, as in much of the narrative literature from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in France, the term compaignon is overdetermined by a number of connotations. The compaignon is invariably a person who revels in debauchery, trickery, sexual seductions, and the general mistreatment of others. In the Cent nouvelles, the various narrators seem to understand the compaignon specifically in the sense of a man who is adept at seducing other men’s wives or lovers. This sense of the term is developed to such an extent that there are numerous tales in which the friendship that unites two men is based on their agreement to take turns sexually with one woman, as we shall see further on. From the point of view of the hyperbolically noble narrator of tale 4, an adversary who has been to bed with a man’s wife becomes that man’s compaignon. What could this assertion mean? Paradoxically, the bons compaignons or gentils compaignons who figure so prominently in the literature of this period—the works of Philippe de Vigneulles and Bonaventure des Périers are swarming with them—were valued because of the tricks that they played on people, which were often quite vicious.6 Thus the sadistic pleasure of the seduction described in tale 4 is accompanied by a masculine masochism that is fundamental to the figure of the cuckold: he loses sleep over the possible variations of his dishonor, but once the deed has been done, he is inextricably drawn into a relationship with the man who has shamed him. Furthermore, some cuckolds ultimately find it amusing or pleasurable that their wives have been to bed with other men, as we shall see in detail in a moment. The cuckold thus both dreads and provokes another man’s intrusion into his marital bed, just as the masculine narrators who tirelessly describe women’s deception seem to dread their wiles at the same time that they take an evident pleasure in the sharing and circulation of stories about them. Thus the masculine “subjectivity” or “identity” that is figured here is predicated on the idea of one man’s possible and real relationships to other men, which develop via women’s bodies as mediums of exchange. Masculinity in this context is an inherently specular phenomenon, in the sense that the men described in these tales are always looking at the ways in which their own gender identity is figured and deformed in the mirror images presented to them by other men. The male figures in early-modern narrative always seem to be elaborating their identities as masculine subjects in terms of the relative value of their own images with respect to those of other men. In tale 4, there are three intersubjective positions at work: first, the position of the male victim, adorned with markers of masculinity that are “empty” or inappropriate to his class (“sa salade, ses ganteletz, et en sa main une grand hache” (38) [“his helmet, his gloves, and in his hand a giant axe”]), who hides under the 6 Consider, for example, a trickster by the name of Mannis, in Philippe de Vigneulles’s collection: “Cestuit Mannis estoit ung homme fallacieulx et joyeux et faisoit beaucop de nouvelletez pour gens rire, pour lesquelles choses estoit souvent mandez en bonne compaignie.” Philippe de Vigneulles, Les Cent nouvelles nouvelles, ed. Charles Livingston (Geneva: Droz, 1972), 112.

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bed; second, the position of the aggressor, marked by a hyperbolic symbol of his gender (“sa grande, forte et bonne espée a deux mains” (38) [“his big, strong, good, two-handed sword”]), which is also undermined by the narrator’s description of his amorous “sickness”; finally, the positions occupied by the storyteller and his listeners, all of them men, all of them implicitly present in the telling of this story, the humor of which depends upon a proper understanding of the gender code that defines them as noble men. The pleasure of the story for them derives from their specular identification with the aggressive Scotsman, which is simultaneously accompanied by their ironic detachment from his conventional longing for the wife. All of these relative and complementary positions might be thought of as different aspects of the same kind of masculinity, which means that “being masculine” in this context often manifests itself in quite different ways. The most fascinating position in this tale is, however, that of the wife, and the displacement of her role into narrative discourse. In other words, it is only through their relationships with women that the men of this imaginary context can enter into relationships with other men. The symbolic positioning of the two male figures in this story with respect to the woman is telling, the dominant figure above her on top of the bed, the submissive figure below her beneath the bed. Masculinity as it is delineated here thus seemingly requires two incompatible halves in order to exist, the two images seen in and through the deforming mirror of woman in her “proper” place, the marriage bed. While these two components are apparently opposites, they presuppose one another, and are actually complementary. Men in this context are thus defined by a desire that develops in two opposing directions: they want both to transgress the marital order that defines their gender and their social role, and to preserve that order at all costs. Their relationships to one another are thus saturated by a desire that overwhelms the woman who must act as its medium. The position assigned to the woman in this masculinist configuration is characterized by fear and obedience provoked by constraints imposed upon her by the paradoxical desires with which men continually invest her body. Her only recourse throughout the story is to manipulate language as a means of maneuvering between the two primal male figures. One should also note the pleasure of the male figure whose hyperbolic happiness depends precisely upon the possibility of inflicting seductive discourse on women, and on having it received and agreed to. The pleasure of this reception is deflected or detoured into the irony with which it is described, which then provokes the pleasure that is shared by the men who tell these stories and listen to them. This pleasure of telling the story of woman’s seduction, which is an integral element of masculinity in this context, includes the sadistic enjoyment of seeing the figure of woman ensnared in a web of discourse, and an appreciation of the clever maneuvers that she is forced to perform in order to avoid the effects of this discourse, which comes at her from both of the incompatible yet complementary sides of the male figure: she is forced by her husband to accede to the demands of the Scotsman (“recordant de la leczon que son mary luy bailla”), who in turn assails her with his lover’s demands: [Elle] fut par luy humblement saluée, et de rechef d’amours si doulcement priée que les requestes du paravant devoient bien estre enterinées par la conclusion de ceste piteuse

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et derreniere; qui le oyoit, jamais femme ne fut plus loyalement obeye ne servye qu’elle seroit, si de sa grace vouloit passer sa treshumble et raissonnable resquete (37). [She was humbly greeted by him, and again she was so sweetly asked for her favors that his former requests would have to have been completely confirmed by the conclusion of this last, piteous one; according to what she heard, never would a woman be more loyally obeyed and served as she would be, if she were graceful enough to accept his most humble and reasonable request.]

The ellipsis of the wife’s response is significant here: La belle merciere, recordant de la leczon que son mary luy bailla, voyant aussi l’heure propice, entre aultres devises et pluseurs excusations servans a son propos, bailla journée a l’Escossois au lendemain au soir de comparoir personnellement en sa chambre, pour en ce lieu luy dire plus celeement le surplus de son intencion et le grand bien qu’il luy vouloit (37). [The beautiful lady mercer, remembering the lesson that her husband taught her, and seeing that the time was right, among other conceits and excuses that served her purpose, granted the Scotsman a meeting for the next evening, so that he could appear personally before her in her bedroom, in order to say to her more intimately in this place the rest [surplus] of his intentions and the great good that he wanted to give her.]

“Devises,” “excusations,” “propos”—all of these terms are added to the catalogue of discursive elements that structure the passage. The exact contents of her speech are perhaps irrelevant, as long as she participates in the chain of communication that unites the two men. Her response to the Scotsman also clearly calls for more speech. The figure of woman in this paradigm is thus one that calls for, relays, and occasions discourse between or among men, which concerns the relation of men to one another via the medium of the female body that is necessary to men’s elaboration of their gender identity. The final stage of these discursive articulations of masculinity is the transposition of these communications to the realm of narrative and of the nouvelle. As the story tells us, the accession of a woman to a man’s demand for the satisfaction of his desire is a bonne nouvelle, which furthermore is a piece of news that men simply have to share with one another. No matter how detached and ironic they may be concerning the actual telling of this kind of story, and here they are not free to adopt a different attitude, men display themselves as gendered beings in this historical context when they partake in this kind of narrative ritual and perform their gender in a masculinist homosocial context in which this kind of performance is obligatory. Tale 88: Space and the Configuration of Gender A reading of legal and ecclesiastic documents on marriage reveals that this institution was largely concerned with surveying and configuring social and private spaces. The configuration of space in the nouvelles interacts directly with the delineation of gender and especially of masculinity. Such is the case of the 88th tale of the

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collection, which expresses the opposition between the husband and wife who are its protagonists in terms of the enclosed town versus the open fields: Le bon mary d’usage demouroit tressauvent aux champs, en une maison qu’il y avoit, aucunesfoiz trois jours, aucunesfoiz quatre jours, aucunesfoiz plus, aucunesfoiz mains, ainsi qu’il luy venoit a plaisir, et laissoit sa femme prendre du bon temps a la bonne ville, comme elle faisoit (313). [The good husband would remain often in the fields, in a house that he had there, sometimes three days, sometimes four days, sometimes more, sometimes less, as much as it would please him to do so, and he would leave his wife having a good time back in the good city, as she regularly did.]

The house, itself an enclosed space within another enclosure (the city walls), is the space of the wife’s pleasure, while it should be the domicile in which she guards her virtue and her chastity, and which the husband should be concerned with guarding as the locus of his identity as a masculine subject. From the point of view of the Digest, this tale begins essentially with a description of the world-upside-down, echoing the ninth exemplum of the Disciplina clericalis in which an absent husband, working in the fields, is betrayed by his clever wife who remains home. In tale 88, when the husband returns unexpectedly one night shortly before the closing of the city gates, the wife has already turned in for the night with her lover: ...une foiz, ainsi que son mary avoit demouré deux ou trois jours routiers, et pour le quatriesme avoit attendu aussi tard qu’il estoit possible avant la porte clorre de la ville, cuidant que pour ce jour ne deust point retourner, [la femme] ferma l’huys et fenestres comme les aultres jours, et mist son amoureux au logis, et commencerent a boire d’autant et faire grand chere (313–14). […once when her husband had remained two or three days on the road, and on the fourth he had waited as late as possible before the closing of the city gates, thinking that he would no longer return on that day, [the wife] closed the doors and the windows as on other days, and invited her lover to her lodgings, and they began to drink and to live it up.]

This brief passage is marked by two verbs of enclosure that operate on two different levels, one the public domain of entrance to and exit from the town, the other the private or domestic realm of locked windows and doors of the domus. One must be careful, however, not to project the distinction between public and private as we know it today on to the town that is described here. As we have already seen in legal texts, the domus was a private space that was singularly invaded by a collective and communal surveillance, as it is in this tale. Both the male and female characters of this story develop their positions in relation to the ideas of enclosure and surveillance performed on multiple levels. In order to fool her husband, the wife invents a story in which she claims that the town sentinels (sergents) have been looking for him there. The husband fails to escape back to the fields beyond the city walls, and so he returns to his house, where he must hide in a rather disagreeable place:

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—Il vous faut musser quelque part ceans, dit elle, et si ne sçay lieu ne retrait ou vous puissez estre asseur.—Seroye je point bien, dit l’autre, en nostre colombier? qui me chasseroit la? » Et elle, qui fut moult joyeuse de ceste invencion et expedient trouvé, feindant toutesfoiz, dist: « Le lieu n’est grain honneste; il y fait trop puant...» Ce vaillant homme monta en ce colombier, qui se fermoit pardehors a clef ... (315). [“You have to hide somewhere,” she said, “but I can’t think of any place or hole where you might be safe.” “Won’t I be safe,” said he, “in our pigeon coop? Who would track me down there?” And she, who was delighted with the invention and expedient that he found, pretended to be displeased, saying, “It’s not very clean in there; in fact, it stinks quite a bit …” Our brave man climbed into the pigeon coop, which was then locked from the outside.]

All of the spatial dictates and boundaries that we have seen in some detail in legal texts constitute a young man as a husband and a woman as a wife when the latter is transported bodily and installed in the domicile of the husband, who sets himself up as a kind of sentry charged with guarding the integrity of its walls. As in the Disciplina clericalis and its paraphrase in the Libro de los exenplos, the higher the walls of a house, and the more difficult the access to it, the better, from the point of view of the man charged with surveying this space as part of the performance of his gender. According to the dictates of the law and of the didactic tradition, the vigilance of this man in this situation was an obligatory part of his masculinity. In the comic literature of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, however, this investment of space with gender-specific meanings is turned inside-out and upside-down. Not only are husbands imprisoned beneath their own beds as their familial honor is violated, as in tale 4, but they also become semi-debauched characters who are more concerned with escaping to boundary-less exteriors than they are with maintaining the security of their domicile. Read from the point of view of the intertext’s definition of the domus, this tale appears to be concerned with undoing and undermining the spatial mapping of gender into or upon space as the principle of its comic procedures. While the spatial theme that is developed in most cuckold tales may seem quite different from the constant textual references that constitute intertextuality, I would argue that these two types of conceptual “movement”—bodies moving and acting in space, male readers moving from text to text—operate together in the delineation of early-modern masculinity. Within the nouvelle’s intertext, almost every word, gesture, attribute, or character type could be a referential link to other nouvelles and texts. For example, when the text reads, “ce vaillant homme monta en ce colombier, qui se fermoit pardehors a clef ...”, the reference to enclosure and locking could trigger a series of references to other manifestations of this same motif in Boccaccio, Poggio, the fabliau, and so on. In this ancient narrative tradition that is at once oral and intertextual, any word can serve as a “link” to another text, in the hypertextual sense of this word. In the most sophisticated of sixteenth-century texts—Rabelais’s works come to mind—this procedure is continuous and of a daunting complexity. On a smaller scale, this phenomenon also occurs in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles. A sentence like, “the lover hid under the bed” immediately sends the reader along a chain of reference such as the one I mentioned above. In what way, then, is this automatic intertextuality of early-modern texts an integral part of the period’s construction,

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definition, and delineation of masculinity in and as text? Was the early-modern masculine “mind” intimately and intrinsically linked to this mode of thinking? Like the husband of tale 37, the male protagonists of these tales are constantly looking for other references that they may inscribe in their catalogue of possible maneuvers that threaten their stability as gendered beings in the spaces proscribed by the legal and clerical intertext. This referential anxiety is an integral element of men’s gender in Renaissance texts, and situates identity in a mode of constant flux, in the incessant movement from reference to reference. I would contend that masculinity itself is this constant need to displace oneself toward other “links” that promise definitions of terms that should serve as stable foundations for gender identity. Even if most of the “men” depicted in these stories, including the predatory male characters and the noble narrators who add their stories to the Duc de Bourgogne’s narrative collection, seem to be laughing at this instability, it remains true that their understanding of their “world” is formulated almost exclusively in reference to the very rigid model of gender roles that is staked out in the intertext. In other words, would-be normative masculinity in the Renaissance might be identified with this constant quest for different narrative variations on the theme of gendered bodies situated and functioning “properly” within space, or of space as comprehensible only when it is laid out topographically such that gendered bodies are legible within it. These diverse variants, however, continuously send the anxious man who seeks confirmation of his gender identity toward other texts and other men. In the nouvelle literature, this anxiety becomes the pretext for jokes that men tell other men about the dangerous possibility that women might appropriate stories about the relation between collective gender surveillance and space for the sake of their own pleasure. The end of tale 88 provides one of the most uncanny examples of this “feminist” appropriation of the millennial story of the marital domicile’s subjection to a controlling gaze. After the husband has spent the night imprisoned in his pigeon coop, hiding from the imaginary sergents that his wife has invented, while she has spent the same night in bed with her lover, the text describes its denouement as follows: Au point du jour, qui estoit l’heure que l’amoureux se partoit du logis, ceste bonne femme vint hucher son mary et luy ouvrit l’huys, qui demanda comment on l’avoit la laissé si longuement tenir compagnie aux colons. Et elle, qui estoit faicte a l’euvre, luy dist comment les sergens avoient toute nuyt veillé autour de leur maison, et que pluseurs foiz avoit a eulx devisé, et qu’ilz ne faisoient que partir, mais ils avoient dit qu’ilz viendroient a telle heure qu’ils le trouveroient. Le bon homme, bien esbay quelle chose ces sergens luy povoient vouloir, se partit incontinent et retourna aux champs, promettant bien que de long temps ne reviendroit. Et Dieu scet que la gouge le print bien en gré, combien qu’elle se monstrast doloreuse. Et par tel moien elle se donna meilleur temps que devant, car elle n’avoit quelque soing du retour de son mary (315). [At daybreak, which was when the lover left the wife’s lodgings, this good woman roused her husband and opened the door for him. He asked why he had been left there for so long keeping the pigeons company. And she, who was made for this kind of work, told him that the sentinels had been keeping watch all night around their house, that she had spoken with them several times, and that they had just left, saying that they would return at such

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and such a time to find him. The good man, afraid of what the sentinels might want him for, left right away and returned to the fields, swearing that he wouldn’t be back for quite a while. God knows the wench was happy to hear that, even if she pretended to be sad. In this way, she had an even better time than ever before, because she could have cared less if her husband ever returned.]

In the wife’s version of this story, representatives of the law surrounded the house and watched for the possible arrival of the husband, who is already guilty of some transgression for which he must be captured and punished. In “reality,” however, he has spent the night locked up in the stinking, scatological prison of his pigeon coop. The anxiety of the world-upside-down that is a constitutive element of early-modern masculinity is crystallized precisely in this story, and could be summarized in a series of sentences such as the ones that Pantagruel repeats to Panurge throughout the Tiers Livre: your wife will deceive you in your own house; you will be humiliated and treated like an animal in your own home; the members of your community will see what she has done to you. All of these ideas are intertextual echoes that were repeated in both serious and comic variants over the course of hundreds of years. This referential “repetition compulsion” is at the heart of masculinity at the end of the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance. And even if men tell each other these stories mostly for the sake of amusement in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, it is clear that their humor is a mode of reinforcing the rigidity of their gender identities. Tale 27: On the Location of Masculinity, Woman’s Mind, and the Nameless Book of Cuckoldry The narrator of tale 27 opens the story with an editorial comment that describes rather well the project uniting the group of gentlemen who have gathered in the imaginary forum of the text in order to tell their stories.7 Within the consistently oral fabric of these tales, there are numerous indices and references to writing and to the written tradition of stories about love as a comic topos, highlighting the textual and intertextual nature of the cuckold, of the narrators who bring them to life, and especially of the anonymous clerk who transcribed the work: Ce n’est pas chose pou accoustumée, especialement en ce royaume, que les belles dames et damoiselles se treuvent voluntiers et souvent en la compaignie des gentilz compaignons. Et a l’occasion des bons et joyeux passetemps qu’elles ont avec eulx, les gracieuses et doulces requestes qu’ilz leurs font ne sont pas si difficiles a impetrer. A ce propos, n’a pas long temps que ung tresgentil homme qu’on peut mectre ou renc et du compte des princes, dont je laisse le nom en ma plume, se trouva tant en la grace d’une tresbelle damoiselle qui mariée estoit, dont le bruit n’est pas si pou cogneu que le plus grand maistre de ce royaume ne se tenist treseureux d’en estre retenu serviteur, [la]quelle luy voult de fait monstrer le bien qu’elle luy vouloit. Mais ce ne fut pas a sa premiere volunté, tant l’empeschoient les 7 See Chapter 2 of my Iconography of Power, 51–82, for a detailed description of the ways in which the Cent nouvelles nouvelles assemble this group of gentlemen as a male homosocial gathering. See also Pierre Jourda’s comment on this all-male assemblage in Conteurs français du seizième siècle, xix.

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The idea of location is often activated in the definition of masculinity that this work consistently offers to us. The narrator of this passage makes an explicit reference to a geographical location in conjunction with an idea of what is appropriate to relations between men and women. The first index virtually predicates the definition of the kingdom of Burgundy on the idea that beautiful women often and willingly are in the company of gentils compagnons. I have already remarked the importance of the adjective gentil for the definition of masculinity in this context; here the beauty and the iterative desire of women are linked explicitly to the character of men who may be described using this adjective, who are held up as models of masculinity throughout the work. In other words, the text proclaims that women who are “correctly” defined by their proper characteristics—beauty, desirability to men, openness to men’s sexual advances—appropriately find themselves in the company of men who are defined by their proper gender characteristics: sexual aggression, verbal facility for seducing women, gentillesse. The very notion of the noble for men is here intertwined with these attributes, which are often celebrated in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles as motivating forces for the production of both oral and written stories that men must tell one another in the performance of their gender. Moreover, the tale also establishes a parallel between the activity in which these women engage, and the discourse that the men who court them employ in order to ensure that this kind of relationship between the genders is established. The usage of the verb “impétrer” is important here. In modern French, this verb is used only rarely in legal contexts: “impétrer DR. RARE Obtenir de l’autorité compétente, à la suite d’une requête” [“impétrer: a legal term rarely used; obtain from a competent authority following a request”] (Petit Robert, 1134). This verb is strongly marked as Latinate, being derived from impetrare, “to obtain.” While the fifteenth-century usage of the verb is probably much closer to the Latin sense, the modern usage of the verb describes perfectly the dynamics of the relations between men and women in this context, which are the focus of the tale’s opening. The male character approaches

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the female object of his desire with “graceful and sweet requests,” which she, as a “competent authority” in matters of sex, accepts or rejects. A legal gloss on this sentence might read then as follows: “according to the customs of our kingdom, in the court of love, given the pleasure of their activities therein, women easily accept the sweet petitions of their lovers.” It is evident from the convoluted rhetoric of the text that its author often wrote legal texts as well. The legal understanding of gender relations that is put forth here—love as physical desire is a (masculine) petition that is made to a competent (feminine) authority—structures masculinity within a hierarchical order of rank. Superlative men, such as those “who may be placed at the rank of princes,” are those who are able to “petition” suitable and competent women in this way, and here we are reminded of the topos of the “lover’s complaint.” The masculine subject of these pages, both within the fiction, and at the level of the allmale narrators, is thus obligated to display his gender in narrative discourse that confirms distinctions of rank. It might even be said that in this context masculinity often exists within or as discourse formulated as a request or petition, while a man’s being as masculine is contingent on the acceptance of this request by a competent authority, which, paradoxically, can only be a woman. Hence while these tales seem largely to ignore the question of women’s agency in the production of masculine subjects, in this case, it is clear that men may produce themselves discursively as men only when the conventional speeches they pronounce are received and understood correctly by women, and by the men who witness and recount the scene of this discursive transaction. The double maneuver that follows is the crux of this opening movement of the tale. The hyperbole of the “tresgentil homme” who could be granted not only the rank of prince, but who would also be worthy of being spoken about, or being taken into account (the word compte in this context is both an accounting of something and a generic term for a verbal or written account), is nonetheless left nameless by the narrator, for the sake of maintaining his anonymity, which surely is known by all who listen to the tale. This ellipsis, however, is clearly a written one: “je laisse son nom en ma plume.” The text of masculinity in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles is paradoxical, since it has to be written at the same time that it must not be written. The work repeats the following gesture over and over again: “there was an exemplary gentleman living in our kingdom, whose exploits are worthy of coming to your attention, my good sirs, but my pen or quill will leave his name unwritten.” Meanwhile, it remains clearly understood that the nouvelle itself will be an oral and performative “writing” of this man’s identity as a masculine subject defined in very precise terms. The hyperbolic value of the gentleman in the social order of rank is paralleled by the beauty of the woman whom he desires. The narrator proclaims that her physical appearance is such that the greatest prince in this kingdom, which the listeners understand to be their own kingdom, characterized by the frequency of sexual encounters between beautiful women and noble men, would not be ashamed to be her faithful servant. The fact of this hyperbolic compatibility is phrased in parallel negations: “her reputation is not so little known, that the greatest master of this kingdom would not be happy to be her servant.” The crucial element of this rhetorically tortured passage is the idea of the “bruit” or “rumor” of the woman’s beauty, which traverses the entirety of the location in which these men tell their

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stories, and which in fact defines that location and their place in it. In other words, the narrator seems to be saying, “this place is defined by beautiful women and noble men, by the frequency of their relations, and by the narrative accounts of these relations with which everyone who counts is familiar.” The allegorization of the male and female characters of the story continues in the following passages, in which the clerk who transcribes these lines continues to demonstrate his erudition and his knowledge both of medieval allegory and of the misogynist, exemplary tradition of clerical literature. Predictably, the wife grants the lover an assignation: Or devez vous savoir que environ une bonne heure, ou plus ou mains, devant l’heure assignée dessus dicte, nostre gentille damoiselle, avec ses femmes et son mary, qui va derriere, pour ceste heure estoit en sa chambre retraicte puis le souper; et n’estoit pas, creez, son engin oiseux, mais labouroit a toute force pour fournir la promesse a son serviteur; maintenant pensoit d’un, puis maintenant d’un aultre, mais rien ne luy venoit a son entendement qui peust eloigner ce maudit mary; et toutesfoiz approuchoit for l’heure tresdesirée. Comme elle estoit en ce profond penser, Fortune luy fut si tresamye que mesme son mary donna le tresdoulx advertissement de sa dure cheance et male adventure, convertie en la personne de son adversaire, c’est assavoir du serviteur dessus dit, en joye non pareille, deduit, solaz et lyesse tres accomplie (118–19). [Thus you should know that about an hour or so, more or less, before the appointed time, our good woman, with her servant women and her husband behind them, had withdrawn into her chamber after supper; and, believe me, her ingenuity was not at rest, but was working as hard as it could so that she could keep her promise to her faithful servant; now she thought of one thing, then of another, but nothing came to her mind that could get rid of her cursed husband; and it was getting dangerously close to that most desired time. As she was deep in thought, Fortune smiled upon her in such a way that her husband gave her the clue as to how to transform her bad luck and chance, changing the person of his adversary, that is, the faithful servant mentioned above, into unequaled joy, pleasure, solace, and delight.]

There are two apostrophes to the reader in this brief passage that are important: “you should know, reader,” that the wife withdrew to her room to think, and “you must believe, reader,” that her “engin” was not idle in thinking of ways to get rid of her husband by the time of the assignation. The many senses of this French noun configure the scope of the masculinist definition of woman that is developed in these pages.8 In fact, the expression engin de femme had by this time achieved a proverbial

8 “Engin lat. ingenium ‘talent, intelligence’ 1. Tout object servant à faire une opération précise—appareil, instrument, outil ... 2. ENGINS DE GUERRE. Anciennement, Ensemble des armes lançant des projectiles (en dehors du canon) ... 3. (XVe) Machine puissante servant à des opérations diverses (levage, terrassement, etc.).” [“Engine, lat. Ingenium ‘talent, intelligence’ 1. Any object that serves for a specific operation—apparatus, instrument, tool… 2. War Engines. Archaically, the ensemble of arms used to launch projectiles, except for cannons … 3. (XVth century) a powerful machine used for diverses operations (lifting, levelling, etc.)”] (Petit Robert, 764).

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9

status. Woman’s mind is conceived of in this context as a ceaseless source of ingenuity (engin is derived from ingenium), and as a machine for accomplishing a specific kind of devastating work, which occupies all of her thoughts: the destruction of the domicile’s honor, predicated on her sexual fidelity. Here the text echoes the topoi both of the Disciplina clericalis and, at the end of the passage, of the Roman de la rose. The earlier personifications of the characters as “Amour” and “Danger” is continued in the figure of “Fortune,” which provokes the catalogue of properties that brings this passage to a close. Here the tireless ingenuity of the wayward wife converts her lover’s “dure cheance” and “male adventure”—two characters who could be guarding the walls of de Lorris’s garden—into “joye, deduit, solaz et lyesse,” names of other characters who might accompany the rose. Thus in this paradoxical structuring of masculinity, it is the dark ingenuity of woman, plotting the dishonor of her husband, that allows for the flowering of masculine desire into personified concepts. It is this primal object of both dread and longing, the feminine mind, that brings about the unfolding of masculinity into and as an intertextual discourse that is codified in diverse ways: as legal document, didactic treatise, and allegorical love poem. This astounding tale is, however, just beginning to exhibit its vertiginous procedures. It next transcribes a typical bet sequence which explores the significance of clothing in the display of gender. As we have already noted, the wife invites her lover to come to her house at a certain hour; after supper, the husband notices that she is preoccupied, and tries to make conversation by referring to a clothing chest (bahu) that is in her bedroom (“...il perceut d’adventure au pié de la couchette ung bahu qui estoit a sa femme” [“… he happened to see a clothing trunk that belonged to his wife at the foot of her bed”] (119)). These nouvelles often seize on apparently incidental elements such as this in order to build narrative sequences. It soon becomes clear that the choice of the clothing trunk is far from fortuitous, as the reader of the Decameron, Day 8, tale 8, recognizes immediately. The husband comments that the chest is too small to hold all of her dresses, and the wily wife bets him that the chest is big enough to hold even him: —Je gageray a vous, s’il vous plaist, pour une demye douzaine de bien fines chemises encontre le satin d’une cotte simple, que nous vous bouterons bien dedans, tout ainsy que vous estes... Et lors [elle] s’avance et fist tirer du bahu les robes qui dedans estoient; et quand il fut wide, madamoiselle et ses femmes a quelque peine firent tant

9 See Godefroy’s definition: “engin: habileté, adresse, ruse, fraude, tromperie, artifice, expédient...” [“Engine: skill, dexterity, ruse, fraud, trickery, artifice, expedient …”] (III:171). Godefroy provides forty-odd examples of the word’s usage, which includes the following gems: “Si tu viex estre em pais et hom sages sour toutes choses, te garde d’engiens de femme... Que li homs est mosquans/ qui trop se fie en femmes; car leurs engiens est grans... Ainsy que aves ouy fut le bon chevalier deceu par le subtil engin de sa femme.” [“If you want to live in peace and above all be a wise man in all things, protect yourself from women’s wiles … A man will be angry (or mocking)/ who trusts women too much; for their ingenuity is great … As you have heard, our good knight was deceived by the subtle cleverness of his wife.”] (III:171–2) See also Cotgrave’s definition: “Engin, m. An engin, toole, instrument; also understanding, policie, reach of wit; also suttletie, fraud, craft, wilinesse, deceit.”

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Several female helpers assist the wife in her plan, which is a commonplace of this literary tradition, starting (at least) with the Disciplina clericalis, and stretching through Brantôme’s text on “Les dames qui font l’amour et leurs maris cocus” [“women who make love and their cuckolded husbands”], which I will examine in chapter four. Cuckolding thus often takes the form of a feminine conspiracy to circumvent the masculinist control of women’s bodies, and to transform the domicile of the marriage into an enclosure that degrades the man who is supposed to be its master. While the enlightened men of the Disciplina are warned to be aware of the subversive network of women who collaborate against the sexual restrictions that define patriarchy, here the feminine conspiracy is nothing more than a cause for laughter. Moreover, as we will see in a moment, the participation of the servant women in the ruse brings about a parodic treatment of the Mass that completes the degradation of the source exemplum that is typical of this comic literature. The four main elements of this tale—the rewriting of the exemplum in a vestimentary register, the female helpers, the working-out of the bet, and finally the parody of the Mass—operate together when the husband is finally liberated from the trunk. The festival logic that is already apparent in the parade of the laughing female helpers here achieves its logical conclusion: in the carnival procession, the cuckold must be paraded and mocked in public as an integral part of festive activities that include the celebration of the Mass. After her night of infidelity, during which the husband has been held captive in the clothing trunk, the wife excuses herself by claiming that she instructed her servants to release him. As a recompense for his suffering, the husband believes that he should at least receive the six shirts that he was promised if he were to win the bet. At this point, the female helpers intervene on his behalf, playing the role of the female characters of the Disciplina (such as the mother-in-law of exemplum X) who seek to beguile the husband after the cuckolding is complete by siding with him, and helping him to win his side of the bet. After the wager has been settled, the husband becomes a kind of sacrificial victim who is led to church:

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Comme ung chien, qui ne fault que escourre la teste au matin quand il se leve qu’il ne soit prest, estoit monseigneur; car il ne luy faillut que une secousse de verges a nettoier sa robe et ses chausses qu’il ne fut prest. Et ainsi a la messe s’en va; et madamoiselle et ses femmes le suyvent, qui faisoient de luy, je vous asseure, [grans risées]; et creez que la messe ne se passa pas sans foison de ris soudains, quand il leur souvenoit du giste que monseigneur a fait ou bahu, lequel ne scet, encores qui fut celle nuyt enregistré ou livre qui n’a point de nom (122–3; my emphasis). [As a dog only has to give his head a shake in the morning when he awakens in order to be ready, so was my lord; for, his smock and his stockings only had to be beaten a bit with some sticks in order to be cleaned and ready. Thus he goes to church, and my lady and her servant women follow him, and I assure you that they were laughing heartily behind his back; and you better believe that the mass did not pass by without bursts of laughter, when these women remembered the shelter that my lord had in the trunk, and that even though he doesn’t know it, he was registered that very night in the book that has no name.]

The text implicitly degrades the husband to the level of a dog who is beaten with a stick, even if the beating of clothes to free them of their dust and dirt was a common means of cleaning them until the nineteenth century (we recall the knife carried by the female chaperone for this purpose in tale 37). Both of these gestures, the conflating of the human with the animal, and the act of beating, are the stock in trade of carnivalesque literature, and specifically of trickster/cuckold figures who are the stars of festival parades and chevauchées. The goal of religious parody is precisely the entrance of this type of figure, who is one of the embodiments of carnival, into the church, where he is accompanied by attendants who mock him after his burlesque resurrection. While Christ is crucified and dies as part of every Mass, and while his resurrected body remains enclosed on the altar, the “resurrected” body of the cuckold, who has spent the night in his own “tomb,” is a kind of Anti-Christ, whose story is written down in the Anti-Bible of cuckoldry, which, appropriately, has no name, even if adultery stories and their heroes/protagonists are involved in an essential process of “naming” masculinity and its unraveling. The goal of the reader in cuckold tales is to reconstruct this unwritten, nameless book, and to give names to the various intertexts that constitute it and delineate a continuous discursive display of masculinity. Tale 1: Scopic Desire and the Lost Letter of Debauchery The relations among the male characters of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles are defined by a logic of liberality and avarice, the positive and negative poles that drive the desire for exchange among them in the masculinist, homosocial “contract” that constitutes the work’s narrative situation. As Sedgwick, Irigaray, Rubin and other feminist thinkers have demonstrated in numerous works that describe the “traffic in women” thesis,10 this means that women’s bodies serve as a conduit for relations 10 See Luce Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Éditions du Minuit, 1977); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes

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among men, while it is precisely the idea and the material fact of this mediated relation that is crucial to the performance of masculinity in diverse contexts, such as this one: En la ville de Valenciennes eut nagueres ung notable bourgois, en son temps receveur de Haynau, lequel entre les autres fut renommé de large et discrete prudence. Et entre ses loables vertuz celle de liberalité ne fut pas la maindre, car par icelle vint en la grace des princes, seigneurs et aultres gens de tous estaz. En ceste eureuse felicité Fortune le maintint et soustint jusques en la fin de ses jours. Devant et après que la mort l’eust destaché de la chayne qui a mariage l’accouploit, le bon bourgois, cause de ceste histoire, n’estoit point si mal logé en la dicte ville que ung bien grand maistre ne se tenist pour content et honoré d’avoir ung tel logis. Et entre les desirez et loez edifices, sa maison descouvroit sur pluseurs rues; et de fait avoit une petite posterne vis a vis de laquelle demouroit ung bon compaignon, qui tresbelle femme et gente avoit et encores en meilleur point. Et, comme il est de coustume, les yeulx d’elle, archiers du cueur, descocherent tant de fleches en la personne dudit bourgois que sans prochain remede son cas n’estoit pas maindre que mortel (21). [In the city of Valenciennes there was once a notable bourgeois, who was the tax collector of Haynau, who among others was known for his ample and discreet prudence. Among his praiseworthy virtues that of liberality was not the least, for by means of it he got into the good graces of princes, lords, and other people of all estates. In this happy felicity Fortune maintained and supported him until the end of his days. Both before and after death had detached him from the chain that bound him to marriage, the bourgeois, who is the cause of this story, was not so poorly lodged in the said city that a very noble lord would not have been happy and contented to have such a house. And among the desired and praised edifices, his house opened on to several streets; and in fact there was a trap door in front of which there lived a good fellow who had a very pretty and nice wife, but she was even more attractive than she was nice. And, as custom would have it, her eyes, which are the archers of the heart, shot so many arrows at the person of the said bourgeois that without further ado his case was no less than mortel.]

By means of his practical generosity, the rich bourgeois establishes relations with other men that traverse the entirety of the social spectrum. This activity is made possible by an accumulation of wealth symbolized by a house with an overdetermined value, measured in terms of a stratified social hierarchy. The final sentence of this passage puts into play a set of conventional, even trite connotations associated with the idea of vision: the image of the desirable woman immediately translates into its corporeal effect in the male protagonist. Curiously, the “scopic drive”11 that dominates these on the Political Economy of Sex.” In Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, eds., Literary Theory: An Anthology, second edition. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004, 770–94. For an interesting discussion of this classic “traffic in women” thesis, see Gayle Rubin, with Judith Butler, “Interview: Sexual Traffic.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies vol. 6, nos. 2–3 (1994): 62–99. 11 The term “scopic drive” is borrowed from Lacan: “...l’objet mystérieux, l’objet le plus caché—celui de la pulsion scopique” [“… that mysterious object, the most hidden object—that of the scopic drive”]. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre XI : les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973), 21.

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tales, and most of the cuckold literature, is commented upon ironically by the narrator, named as “Monseigneur,” Philippe le Bon himself, whose jaded narrative sophistication is a characteristic of masculinity’s performance in this context. The most astounding detail of this passage, however, is the way in which it configures the bourgeois’s house, the streets that surround it, and the trap door in relation to which the seducer’s house is situated. Defined in terms of the masculinist homosocial relations that are established within it by means of gifts and material exchanges, this domestic enclosure opens on to several streets, and occupies a central, panoptical position from which the bourgeois can see everything that is going on around him. Moreover, in a spatial disposition that is repeated in other tales, the house is constructed in such a way that only its master has knowledge of all of the secret passages that grant him special access to women’s bodies. It is within this visual configuration of space that masculine desire proclaims itself in conventional terms that are overdetermined by the intertext. The entirety of this initial description seems to be a spatial transcription of normative masculinity as it was structured in the official documents we have already examined. The masculine gaze is called upon to survey domestic and civic space, to stake it out, to exercise control over the bodies that come into its view, and to make sure that other bodies, especially those of women, always remain visible within the space it must keep under surveillance. The seduction of female characters in adultery stories often entails the seduction of their husbands, a primary procedure which is written in this tale in an alimentary register. One male character’s seduction of another male character develops in a hyperbolic corporeal sequence: A chef de peche, ce desiré jour fut assigné, et dist le compaignon a sa femme qu’il s’en alloit a ung chasteau loingtain de Valenciennes environ trois lieues, et la chargea de bien se tenir a l’ostel et garder la maison, pource que ses affaires ne povoient souffrir que celle nuyt il retournast... Il n’avoit pas cheminé une lieue quand le bourgois sceut ceste adventure de pieça desirée. Il fist tantost tirer les baings, chauffer les estuves, faire pastez, tartres et ypocras, et le surplus des biens de dieu, si largement que l’appareil sembloit ung grand desroy. (22) [After a while, the desired day was assigned, and the fellow said to his wife that he was going to a château three leagues away from Valenciennes, and charged her with keeping their lodgings and guarding their house, because his business would not allow him to return that evening… He hadn’t travelled a league when the bourgeois heard of this chance that he had so desired. Right away he had hot baths drawn, he had the stoves heated up, had pâtés, tarts, and hot spiced wine cooked, and the general surplus of all of God’s goods, so prodigally that the household seemed to be in chaos.]

Expenditure and consumption to the point of “grand disorder” or chaos are among the principle characteristics of early modern comedy. The desire for disorder associated with the husband’s absence is also linked to the notion that wives themselves are a kind of disorder that threatens to undo the household. Yet, the economy based upon this necessity and on the confinement of wives to the domus also demands that husbands leave their homes in order to supply the domestic economy. What a

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husband’s “true” activity is when he is absent is one of the questions that this tale both asks and answers in a surprising manner. As a parody of the serious literature devoted to marriage, the cuckold tale inverts nearly every element of this institution. Here the stern husband becomes the stock figure of the bon compagnon or reveler, when he returns unexpectedly from his business trip. Curiously, he returns first to his neighbor’s house, where he interprets the signs of alimentary consumption as indicators of a scene of sexual excess to which he contributes a verbal improvisation based on what he witnesses: ... quand il vit la table chargée de vins et grandes viandes, ensemble le beau baing tres bien paré, et le bourgois en tres beau lit encourtiné avec sa secunde personne, Dieu scet s’il parla hault et blasonna bien les armes de son bon voisin. Or l’appelle ribauld, après loudier, après putier, après yvroigne; et tant bien le baptise que tous ceulx de la chambre et luy avec s’en rioient bien fort (23). […when he saw the table charged with wines and large cuts of meat, together with the hot bath that was carefully prepared, and the bourgeois in a beautiful, curtained bed with his second person, God knows he spoke out and blazoned verbally the arms of his good neighbor. First he called him a ribald, then a lecher, then a whore monger, then a drunk. And he baptized his neighbor so well that everyone in the room laughed their heads off, and he along with them.]

At this point, the husband demands to see the body of the woman with whom his neighbor is sleeping, as if it were his right to share all of the goods that were consumed in his male friend’s household. The visual demand that unites the two male characters also puts into play one of the most canonical transcriptions of both the production and reception of the blason du corps masculin, which is motivated not by a glance at the male body, but by a series of objects—wine, meat, hot bath, curtained bed—that signify the sexual excess of that gendered body. The scene reproduces a familiar motif from marriage feasts as they are described in the nouvelles: there are several witnesses assembled in the room where the adultery takes place, who also are the intended recipients of the blason as message. Their laughter signifies that they have received and understood it perfectly, while this understanding is a constitutive element of masculinity itself in this context. The concupiscent gaze that motivates the blason is transposed from the male body to the female body here as the verbal catalogue of indirect discourse quoted by the narrator becomes an enumeration of the female body’s private parts. ...tenant la chandelle en sa main, [le mari] se tire près du lit. Et ja se vouloit avancer de hausser la couverture soubz laquelle faisoit grand penitence en silence sa tres parfecte et bonne femme, quand le bourgois et ses gens l’en garderent; dont il ne se contentoit pas, mais a force, malgré chascun, toujours avoit la main au lit. Il ne fut pas le maistre lors, ne creu de faire son vouloir, et pour cause. Mais ung appoinctement tresgracieux et bien nouveau au fort le contenta, qui fut tel. Le bourgois fut content que luy monstrast a descouvert le derriere de sa femme, les rains et les cuisses, qui blanches et grosses estoient, et le surplus bel et honeste, sans rien decouvrir ne veoir du visage. Le bon compagnon, tousjours la chandelle en sa main, fut assez longuement sans dire mot. Et, quand il parla, ce fut en loant beaucop la tresgrande beaulté de ceste, sa femme. Et afferma par ung bien grand serment que jamais n’avoit veu chose si tresbien ressembler le cul de sa femme; et, s’il ne fust bien seur qu’elle fust a son hostel a ceste heure, il diroit que c’est elle! (23)

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[…holding the candle in his hand, [the husband] approaches the bed. He already wanted to lift the covers beneath which his good and even perfect wife was doing a great penance in silence, when the bourgeois and his people kept him from doing so, at which he was not satisfied, but forcefully kept his hand on the bed, despite the resistance of the others. He was not the master here, however, nor was he allowed to do his bidding, and for good reason. But a very clever trick that was quite new satisfied him in the end, which was the following: the bourgeois allowed him to be shown the backside of his wife, the small of her back and her thighs, which were white and fat, while the rest was lovely and clean, and he wasn’t allowed to discover anything about her face. The good fellow, holding the candle in his hand, was speechless for a long moment. And, when he finally spoke, it was in order to praise the great beauty of this woman, his own wife. And he swore by God that he had never seen anything that looked so much like his wife’s ass, and if he weren’t sure that she was at home at this hour, he would have said that it was she!]

The image of the desirous husband approaching the adulterous bed with a candle in his hand is an apt figure of the scopic drive that animates the role of the husband in the intersubjective triangle of the cuckold tale. The méconnaissance that constitutes a certain kind of masculinity in this context is immediately translated into the verbal blason that parallels the earlier encomium to the husband’s debauchery. The narrator activates a number of different gazes that interpellate the reader as a masculine subject at the same time that these characters derive their meaning from being engendered in the same way. The first gaze is that of the husband who sees his neighbor’s banquet and all that it signifies; the second is the gaze of those present in the room who receive and correctly interpret the drunken husband’s verbal excesses; the third is the ironic glance of the narrator, who describes the “penitent” and “perfect” wife who hides under the covers; the fourth is that of the bourgeois who formulates the ruse. This intersection and crossing over of distinct gazes, which incarnate different aspects of this peculiar type of masculine desire, constitutes a visual matrix in which (across which, as which) masculinity takes shape.12 Another interesting detail of this first and perhaps most fascinating of the Cent nouvelles appears after the wife has taken a short cut, and returned home before her husband. One immediately wonders: has she used the bourgeois’s trap door in order to do so? The text evokes the image of the paranoid man who is excluded from his own home by a woman’s duplicitous and unbounded sexuality. In another maneuver that is a standard motif of the cuckold tale, the adulterous wife begins to berate her husband as if he were the one guilty of an indiscretion, upon which he has no option but to recognize his “error,” and to make amends: ... et le courroux qu’en son cueur avoit conceu, quand a sa porte tant hurtoit, fut tout a coup en courtois parler converty. Car il dit pour son excuse, et pour sa femme contenter, qu’il estoit retourné de son chemin pource qu’il avoit oublyé la lettre principale touchant le fait de son voyage. Sans faire semblant de le croire, elle recommence sa grande legende 12 In his “Le séminaire sur ‘La Lettre volée,’” Lacan describes the intersubjective situation of Poe’s famous story as a drama that plays out in three temporal moments structured by three different gazes. Lacan’s project is to “faire saisir dans son unité le complexe intersubjectif ainsi décrit” [“make one grasp in its unity the intersubjective complex that is thus described”] (Écrits, 15).

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Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature dorée, luy mettant sus qu’il venoit de la taverne et des estuves et des lieux deshonnestes et dissoluz, et qu’il se gouvernoit mal en homme de bien, maudisant l’eure qu’oncques elle eut son accointance, ensemble et sa tresmaudicte allyance. (25) [… and the anger that was in his heart when he was banging on his own door was suddently converted into courtly speech. For, he claimed as an excuse, in order to satisfy his wife, that he had returned home because he had forgotten the principal letter that described the reason for his trip. Without appearing to believe him, she began again with her great, golden legend, saying that he had just come from the tavern and the hot baths and other such dishonest and dissolute places, and that he was behaving badly instead of as a good man, cursing the hour that she ever met him, together with their cursed alliance.]

This lost, forgotten, or imaginary letter is the basis of the numerous displacements of the tale’s characters. It does not matter whether or not this letter exists; rather, it is an uncanny image of the masculinist homosocial contract itself, which brings about the displacements, detours, and dissimulations that define the identity of each of the players in the intersubjective drama of the cuckold tale. Several kinds of language morph into one another here. The vituperation of the husband is quickly transformed into the “courtois parler” in which he lies about the forgotten letter, motivating the “gilded legend” that describes the husband’s debauchery and echoes the scene from which the wife has just escaped. The gender identities of these characters are located precisely in this continuous discursive displacement, which reproduces at a verbal level the primary characteristics of intertextuality. From the admiring blason, to the drunken husband’s demand for entry both into the scene of debauchery and into his own home, to his “courtly” speech and invention, to the wife’s diatribe of mock indignation, these discourses stake out available subject positions that individuals occupy by enunciating them. Moreover, the being of gendered subjects as such requires precisely the activation or performance of diverse discourse types, which are continuously elaborated and structured within the intertext, that structure intersubjective relations. The topography of gender of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles is thus configured within two domains, both of which are intersubjective. The first is the visual realm, in which distinct glances or gazes determine the relations of characters to one another. These gazes enact a partitioning of knowledge that is central to the structuring of gender, which may be understood as a series of inquiries: who sees what, and who is blind to what? Who is able or unable to recognize what he/she sees? Who is able to present false appearances to whom? By means of these inquiring glances, characters seek to clarify or to mask their positions, and hence to define the being of their own bodies, in a sense, within this domain. The second domain is discursive: who is able to enunciate given discourses (those of the male friend, the blasonneur, the indignant wife, the outraged husband, the merchant or knight who has to be absent), and for which purposes? Who receives these discourses, what is their effect, and how does their enunciation determine a character’s position relative to other characters in gendered terms? The delineation of masculinity is thus contingent upon the constant discursive formatting of three kinds of space as they relate to fictional bodies. The first is the domus of Roman law, and its relation to other domiciles. The second is the visual space in which individuals are always seeking to see and to recognize

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others, especially insofar as that recognition pertains to one’s own social and gender identity. Finally, the epistemological space of an order of discourses makes the (often spurious) display of a codified gender identity possible through identifications that are accomplished in literal citations of pre-existing types of language. In the final analysis, one could say that masculinity is itself a kind of continuous, intertextual quotation in this historical context, and relies on the agency of the gaze in order to activate the process through which it displays itself in and as discourses that must be pronounced in public, and received and recognized by others in specific, codified ways in order for the performance of gender identity to be operative. Tale 62: Surveillance and Bodily Substitutions in the Place of Desire One of the characteristics of patriarchy is the desire of men to enter into relationships with other men through which they establish and maintain their hegemony over women. According to many feminist critics, the idea of culture itself is intimately linked to the subjugation of women for the purposes of masculinist homosocial relations, which famously for Irigaray had “deferred” erotic implications.13 We have already seen in detail the process by which the young men of the Disciplina clericalis entered the domain of culture via their apprenticeship in the retelling of a certain kind of “story of women.” In Irigaray’s terms, woman as “sign” serves as a “support” for the establishment of a hierarchical relationship between the sage and his disciple. Despite the dangers of anachronism it represents for understanding the literary artifacts of late-medieval French culture, Irigaray’s now classic thesis is quite useful for an examination of the cuckold tale. To paraphrase her work, the cuckold stories represent a “play of mirrors” that reflects the procedure by which men enter into homosocial relationships with one another, which are predicated on their reduction of women to mere pretexts or supports of this figurative intercourse between men. One of the most astounding variations of a cuckold tale that represents this homosocial contract is provided by nouvelle 62. A delegation of Englishmen led by a Cardinal has arrived in northern France to negotiate the release of an important prisoner, the Duke of Orléans. Among them, there are two men who represent in a hyperbolic fashion the basic configuration of an explicit homosocial desire:

13 “In this new matrix of history, where man engenders man in his own likeness, women, girls, and sisters serve only to foster the possibility and to define the stakes of relations among men. Their usage and their commerce suppose and support the reign of masculine hom(m)osexuality, at the same time that they maintain this sexuality in speculations, in the play of mirrors, in identifications and appropriations that more or less defer the real practice of homosexuality. Reigning everywhere, but forbidden in practice, this hom(m)o-sexuality is played out via women’s bodies as material or sign, and heterosexuality until now has been nothing but an alibi for the smooth functioning of the relationship of man to himself, and of relations among men.” Luce Irigaray, Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un, 168, my translation. On the intense intimacy of men’s friendships in the early-modern period, which may explain some of the details of this story, see Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

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Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature ... Jehan Stotton, escuier trenchant, et Thomas Brampton, eschanson dudit cardinal... se entreaymoient autant ou plus que pourroient faire deux freres germains ensemble; car de vestures, harnois et habillemens estoient tousjours d’une fason au plus près que ilz pouvoient; et la plus part du temps ne faisoient que ung lict et une chambre, et oncques n’avoit on vu entr’eulx deux que auculnement y eut quelque courroux, noise ou maltalent (242). [… John Stotton, a squire, and Thomas Brampton, the cup holder of the said cardinal… loved each other as much or more than two brothers could have; for, their vestments, harness, and clothing were always the same in as much as they could be; and most of the time they shared only one bed and one room, and never had one ever seen between them any anger, shouting, or ill will.]

Is this explicit description of two men who occupy the same bed for the sake of their love for one another an example of what is implicit in all homosocial relations, i.e., deferred homosexuality, as Irigaray famously claimed? Whatever the response to this question may be, it is clear that this text describes a domestic relation between two men that is reflected in the external symbols that define their rank: clothing, arms, official vestments. This codified display of their relationship is perhaps an accurate image of what was really at stake in such friendships: the exercise of power in which men were mutually involved, which excluded women even if it relied upon them as an indispensable material support, and which manifested itself in a given disposition and display of goods. As usual, however, this relation of man to man must pass through the intermediary of women, or must be detoured through them. Hence, the two gentlemen find themselves attracted to the same woman, the wife of their host, who initially resists their advances, but eventually manages to get both of them into her bed at different times. I have often remarked that the concept of surveillance is at the core of a social arrangement based on marriage. Appropriately, then, the wife responds to the “sweet request” of the first of her prospective lovers by implicitly describing her own place within an order of visual vigilance to which she is bound by her husband: « Je voys bien que je ne puis de vous eschapper que je ne face ce que vous voulez ; et puis qu’il fault que je face quelque chose pour vous, sauf toutesfoiz tousjours mon bon honneur, vous savez l’ordonnance qui est faicte de par les seigneurs estans en ceste ville de Calais, comment il convient que chacun chief d’hostel face une foys la sepmaine, en personne, le guet par nuyt, sur la muraille de la dicte ville. Et pour ce que les seigneurs et nobles hommes de monseigneur le cardinal, vostre maistre, sont ceens logez en grand nombre, mon mary a tant fait par le moien d’aucuns ses amis envers mon dit seigneur le cardinal qu’il ne fera que ung demy guet, et entens qu’il le doit faire jeudy prochain, depuis la cloche du temps au soir jusques a la mynuyt. Et pour ce, tantdiz que mon dit mary sera au guet, si vous me voulez dire aucunes choses, les orray tresvoluntiers, et me trouverez en ma chambre, avecques ma chambriere », la quelle estoit fort en grand [vouloir] de conduire et acomplir les voluntez et plaisirs de sa maistresse (243). [“I can see that I can’t escape from you without doing what you wish; and since I’m obliged to do something for you, within the bounds of my honor, you know about the ordinance [also ordonnance] that has been passed by the lords of this city of Calais, that requires each head of the household in person to keep watch by night on the walls of the

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said city. And since the lords and noblemen of the holy Cardinal, your master, are lodged in the city in large numbers, my husband has done so many favors, through his friends, for my lord the Cardinal that he will only keep half of the watch. I understand that he will have to do so next Thursday, from six in the evening until midnight. For this reason, while my husband will be at his watchpost, if you want to come and say sweet things to me, I will listen to them gladly, and you will find me in my room, with my chambermaid,” who was more than willing to conduct and accomplish the wishes and pleasures of her mistress.]

The elements of this scene describe a certain material organization of power which is gender assymetrical and historically contingent. The wife takes up a discursive position by enunciating the masculine order of rank that literally surrounds her and encloses her within the concentric circles of her domus, the city, and its enclosing walls, which are continuously guarded by men. The lie she tells—her husband in fact has to keep the entire, twelve-hour watch—reproduces the logic of this type of masculine homosocial relations so well that her would-be lover accepts its truth without hesitation. For, in a certain sense, her lie incarnates perfectly an essential truth of masculinity in this context: by means of their male “friends,” men must always solicit the favors of other men in positions of power in order to circumvent the rigors of the law, which is incarnated in a visual and spatial order of rank. Moreover, in one of the rare instances of quoted discourse in the text, the wife as grifter “sets up” her “mark” by pronouncing a rather canonical statement of women’s entrapment between an indefatigable masculine desire on the one hand and the demands of feminine honor on the other. The husband has to be absent from his wife, so that he may participate in his duties as a member of the hierarchical masculine society that maintains its power by keeping watch from the town’s walls, and by imposing a spatial “ordonnance,” in the architectural sense, on the city.14 The wife manipulates this scopic necessity in order to satisfy her own desire by falsifying the information that she supplies to the usurping male figures in a form that reproduces perfectly the logic of the masculine homosocial order. She tells the same lie to each of the male characters, instructing one to come from six to midnight, and the other to come from midnight to six in the morning. The result of this ruse is the continuous substitution of male characters in the place of masculine desire (the woman’s bed), which runs parallel to the continuous substitution of male bodies in the place of surveillance. Within this masculine fantasy of adultery, then, the effect of woman’s desire is to multiply the number of men who can occupy the same significant places, those associated with the objectification of women’s bodies and the visual imperatives of a masculinist, homosocial economy, resulting in a transfer of wealth from one man to another. One of the constitutive characteristics of this type of economy is the masculine mis-recognition of the other men who are present at the scene of desire. In tale 62, this aspect of the primal scene is figured by a doubled misrecognition at the hour of midnight, when the first lover is replaced by the second:

14 “Ordonnance, n. the systematic or orderly arrangement of parts, especially in art and architecture.” (New Oxford American Dictionary).

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Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature Et en yssant hors de la dicte chambre et au plus près d’icelle, le dit Jehan Stotton encontra le dit Thomas Brampton, son compaignon, cuidant que ce fust son hoste Richard. Et pareillement le dit Thomas, qui venoit a l’heure que sa dame luy avoit mise, semblablement cuida que le dit Jehan Stotton fust le dit Richard, et attendit ung peu pour savoir quel chemin tiendroit celuy qu’il avoit encontré (245). [While leaving the said room, right outside its door, the said John Stotton met the said Thomas Brampton, his companion, thinking that it was his host Richard. In the same way, the said Thomas, who arrived at the hour his lady appointed to him, thought that the said John Stotton was the aforementioned Richard, and waited a bit in order to know which way the man whom he met would go.]

The female character reinforces this doubt and ignorance of her male “victims” by telling Thomas that the man who left was indeed her husband, on his way to keep watch. Thus the entire system of displacements is predicated on a fundamental misrecognition of the substitution of several men in the same place of desire, which is mirrored by the legislated substitution of men in the place of vigilance. The final element of this masculinist, homosocial, fetishistic economy is the exchange of a marker of great wealth from man to man at the site of the primal scene. The dreamlike quality with which the narrator imbues the passages in which this transfer takes place is quite appropriate to the dynamics of the cuckold tale as an intertextual “system”: Et avant qu’il [Jehan] entrast en la dicte chambre, il avoit bouté en ung de ses doiz ung aneau d’or garny d’un gros dyamant qui bien povoit valoir la somme de trente nobles. Et en eulx delectant ensemble, ledit aneau luy cheut de son doy dedans le lit, sans ce qu’il s’en apperceust... Mais en faisant les dictes armes il advint au dit Thomas une adventure, car il sentit soubz sa cuisse le dyamant que le dit Jehan Stotton y avoit laissé; et comme non fol ne esbahy, le print et le mist en l’un de ses doiz... (245–6) [And before he [John] entered into the said room, he had put on his finger a gold ring with a large diamond which may have been worth as much as thirty nobles. And as he and the woman were taking their pleasure together, the said ring fell off of his finger into the bed, without his realizing it… While he was jousting with the lady Thomas by chance felt beneath his thigh the diamond that John Stotton had dropped there; and pretending to be neither dumb nor surprised, he took it and put it on one of his fingers…]

One man just happens to lose an object of great wealth during his performance of the carnal act with another man’s wife; another man just happens to find that same object while having sex with the same woman. This transfer seems to be incidental to the act of adultery itself, as if these characters lost and gained possession of such a valuable object without even noticing it. The happenstance characteristics of this exchange obey the laws that govern the masculinist homosocial economy. In entering the domain of another man, a lover brings his goods to be traded, at the same time that he comes away with the goods that belong to the other man. The two Englishmen of

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this anecdote incarnate this twofold character of the usurping lover, doubling what is essentially the role of a single character in a conventional erotic triangle. Exchange is inevitable, and is linked to the sexual usage of women’s bodies by men. In the tradition of the story of women’s trickery that is passed on from one generation of men to the next, the point of retelling the story is to enforce a vigilance intended to confine or control women, who are nonetheless recognized as being inherently beyond men’s control. In the parodies of this narrative “technology” of masculine power, the story is merely retold by one man in the company of other men, often in a context overdetermined by connotations of debauchery (the tavern, the marketplace), often merely as a self-aggrandizement of masculine fecundity. Moreover, the parody of this didactic narrative tradition often overturns the sacredness of religious institutions. After Mass, Jehan and Thomas go to dine in the tavern in the company of other gentlemen. The character who has lost the diamond recognizes it on the finger of the character who has found it, and a heated discussion ensues. Finally, one of the men who is present at this dispute decides on a manner of solving it: the gentlemen leave the tavern, and ask the first person whom they meet to decide who should have the diamond, he who lost it, or he who found it. Uncannily, yet appropriately, the first person they meet is Richard, the husband of the wily wife, who decides that the diamond in fact belongs to him: “Lequel Richard ... dist par sentence que ledit dyamant luy demourroit comme sien et que l’une ne l’autre des parties ne l’aroit” (247) [“This Richard… rendered his verdict, which was that the said diamond would belong to him from then on, and that neither the one nor the other party to the case would have it”]. When Jehan and Thomas see that the diamond has made the complete circuit of the men’s network that surrounds the female body in this tale, they decide to invite all of their male companions to dinner, where the story of the double adultery and its corresponding transfer of wealth is recounted, resulting in a kind of institutionalization of the set of relations that united the three men via the intermediary of the woman’s body: [Jehan] tenoit fermement avoir laissé cheoir son dyamant ou le dit Thomas l’avoit trouvé, et qu’il luy devoit faire plus mal de l’avoir perdu qu’il ne faisoit audit Thomas, lequel n’y perdoit rien, car il luy avoit chier cousté. A quoy ledit Thomas respondit qu’il ne le devoit point plaindre si leur hoste l’avoit adjugé estre sien, attendu que leur hostesse en avoit eu beaucop a souffrir, et qu’il avoit eu le pucellage de la nuytée, et le dit Thomas avoit esté son page et de son escuyrie et allant après luy. Et ces choses contenterent assez bien le dit Jehan Stotton de la perte de son dyamant, pource que aultre chose n’en povoit avoir. Et de ceste adventure tous ceulx qui presens estoient commencerent a rire et menerent grand joye (248). [John swore that he had dropped his diamond where the said Thomas had found it, and that he suffered more from having lost it than did Thomas, who hadn’t lost anything, since the ring had cost him, John, quite a bit of money. To this the said Thomas replied that he shouldn’t complain if his host decided that the ring belonged to him, since their hostess had borne a lot for the sake of it, and that he John had taken the first course [literally, he enjoyed the virgin] of the evening, while the said Thomas was his page and stablehand by taking sloppy seconds after him. This rather satisfied the said John Stotton for the loss of his diamond, since he couldn’t do anything about it. Hearing of this adventure, those who were present [in the tavern] began to laugh and had a joyful time.]

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The complex code in which one of the characters retells the story displays several layers of hierarchisation that dominate the imaginary of masculine-feminine relations in this context. The seduction of the wife is, in fact, a miniature version of the wedding night. The man who “deflowers” a virgin becomes her husband and owner, in a sense; here, Jehan “avoit eu le pucellage de la nuytée,” that is, he was the first to take possession of the woman’s body by “taking” her virginity. In contrast, Thomas is described using equestrian terms that establish a stratified relationship between the two men: the man who first takes possession of the woman’s body becomes the master of those who will “work in his stable” by possessing her afterward. The end of the passage seals this idea of feasting with peals of laughter in the tavern, where the assembled gentlemen seem to celebrate a mock wedding reception meant to fête yet again the eternal deflowering of a (in this case debauched) virgin bride by a group of best male friends. From this powerful example, masculinity may be construed as a possibility for “subjectivation” that is an inherent characteristic of the imaginary social and spatial grid depicted in the tale. There are four kinds of space that interact in the text to form this grid, three of which we have already discussed: the interior of the domus, the place of pleasure and deception for the wife whose chastity should serve as the material foundation of its honor; the watchtower on the city walls, where sets of vigilant male eyes are continuously substituted for one another; the tavern, in which men are called upon, for the pleasure of other men, to tell stories of their roaming desires; and finally, the unbounded exterior where the husband wanders aimlessly until he arrives exactly where he is supposed to be in order to complete the transaction that solidifies the relation of the three men. If we think back to the exemplary literature, and to its explicit definitions of masculine roles, the figure of this wandering husband could hardly be further removed from the normative masculinity that the exempla sought to propagate. From this perspective, a husband must always guard his wife within the high walls of his house. In the paradoxical realm of comedy, however, this husband becomes a particularly apt embodiment of his gender. By participating in the masculinist, homosocial intercourse that defines the social order, and which his wife knows how to describe and to manipulate all too well, the husband unknowingly opens his home and invites other men to establish their presence within it. The performance of masculinity requires that this openness of a space meant to be closed be displayed and emblematized within a conventional narrative discourse. It also requires that multiple subject positions—those of the usurping male friends, the husband, the listeners in the tavern, the network of friends surrounding the cardinal described by the wife—configure the diverse possibilities and aspects of a more global definition of the masculine gender role. Masculinity is hence linked to the possibility of assuming all of these subject positions through the constant displacement and circulation that is made possible by the existence of this all-encompassing network of relations among men, which saturates both private and public space, and in which women’s paradoxical desire seems both to undermine the masculinist order at the same time that it is the driving force in the order’s necessary reconfigurations, movements, and substitutions. In this sense, women’s agency is crucial to the continuous staking out of distinct masculine subject positions, as it is in this story.

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Tale 49: Panoptical Masculinity and the Blason du Corps Féminin Tale 49 is an example of how the cuckold character in his more serious guises disgraces the figure of the adulterous wife and excludes her from the social order. This tale describes its female character as a threatening being defined in terms of predatory and military connotations: J’ay bien sceu que nagueres, en la ville d’Arras, avoit ung bon marchant auquel il mescheut d’avoir femme espousée qu’il n’estoit point de meilleur au monde. Car elle ne tenoit serre, tant qu’elle peust veoir son cop, et qu’elle trouvast a qui, neant plus que une vieille arbaleste (202–203). [I have heard that once upon a time, in the city of Arras, there was a good merchant who was unlucky enough to have married a woman who was not the best in the world. For, she wouldn’t stay cocked, as long as she had eyed her target, and had seen somebody to shoot at, any more than an old crossbow would.]

In middle French, the term serre has a wide range of meanings that makes it particularly appropriate for this masculinist conception of women’s bodies. According to the Godefroy dictionary, the word can be used as a noun to designate a collection of objects, all of which are related to the notion of closure: “serrure... ce qui serre, ici les mains... mors... objet d’emballage ... prison ... reserve ... garde...” (VI:397) [“lock… that which closes, here the hands... bit [for horses] … object of packaging …prison … reserve … guard …”] For the specific expression “tenir serre” or “tenir en serre,” the Dictionnaire offers the following definitions: “tenir en serre: tenir en subjection, tenir assujetti... tenir serre: tenir ferme” (VI: 397) [“to hold closed: hold in subjection, to keep subjected, to hold firm”]. The Dictionnaire cites an extraordinary example of a text in which the word serre was used: “Et aussi moins est femme en serre,/ Et moins est du mari guettee,/ Et tant sera meilleur trouvée,/ Que celle a laquelle on deffent/ D’aler au marchié ou l’en vent” (VI:397) [“And the less a woman is enclosed,/ and the less she is spied upon by her husband,/ the better off she will be,/ than she who is not allowed/ to go to the market where things are sold”]. According to these definitions, the meaning of the phrase is quite clear: the wife of this tale never stayed closed in or enclosed or even embraced within the confines that were preordained for her; moreover, like the old weapon to which she is compared, the wayward wife never stayed “cocked” or under the control of the man who was meant to use her for his own purposes.15 Her desire is beyond the control intended for it; thus she is not the “best wife in the world”; on the contrary, she is outside of the boundaries of the usage that her husband intended for her. Moreover, her predatory desire never misses its “target.” The seemingly innocent simile used to describe her reveals a deep-seated paranoia of her desire that is a constant feature of this literature. 15 As I have already remarked, on the motif of women’s bodies enclosed as property within the limits of the household, see Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: the Body Enclosed,” in Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers, eds., Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 123–42.

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This paranoia manifests itself as a series of symptoms here, when the husband is thrown into a fit at the idea that he may have been fooled by his uncontrollable wife: “Ce bon marchant se donna garde du gouvernement de sa femme; il en fut aussi adverty par aucuns des plus privez amis et voisins. Si se bouta en une bien grande frenesie et parfonde melencolie ...” (203) [“This good merchant saw the way his wife was behaving; he was also warned by some of his closest friends and neighbors. He thus fell into a great frenzy and and a deep melancholy…”] As is often the case, the surveillance and maintenance of marriage are public functions that are performed by the male character’s friends and neighbors, giving rise to a visual field and register that will be developed throughout the tale. The knowledge that others are aware of his wife’s indiscretion is intolerable to the cuckold, since his control of his wife’s body is the basis of his position among those who are continually on watch to see if the social rules have been broken or not. His awareness that others have seen what he cannot see or has not yet seen provokes a melancholy in him that immediately translates into an obsessive desire to see the fact of his own cuckolding.16 This tale provides perhaps the most extreme example of the visual fiat that dominates late medieval stories of adultery: Puis [le mari] s’advisa qu’il esprouveroit s’il savoit par bonne façon s’il pourroit veoir ce qu’il scet que bien peu luy plaira : c’estoit de veoir venir en son hostel, devers sa femme, ung ou pluseurs de ceulx qu’on dit qui sont ses lieutenants. Si faindit ung jour d’aller dehors, et s’embuscha en une chambre de son hostel dont luy seul avoit la clef. Et destournoit la dicte chambre sur la rue, sur la court, et par aucuns secrez pertus et treilliz regardoit en plusieurs aultres lieux et chambres de leens (203). [Then the husband thought that he would test whether or not he could see that which he knows he will like very little: that is, he wanted to see coming into his house one or many of those who were called his “lieutenants.” He pretended to leave one day, and hid in a room in his house of which only he had the key. And the said room opened onto the street, onto the courtyard, and by some secret chinks and lattice work it looked out on several other places and rooms therein.]

The cuckold’s desire to control his wife is a panoptical one, an urgent need to see everything without being seen himself, as the basis of his power and control over others.17 By means of his predatory gaze, the husband constitutes his wife as the transgressive other whose actions undermine the integrity of the domestic order. Only he has the key to the secret room that is, perhaps, the heart and soul of the household based on marriage in the medieval context, which is an intriguing metaphor or even emblem for the masculinist visual obsessions that dominate the cuckold tale. Only men can open the room in the house from which all the other rooms can be seen, 16 In “Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification,” in Maurice Berger, et. al., eds., Constructing Masculinity (London: Routledge, 1995), 21–36, Judith Butler argues that masculinity might be described as an identification of the self with this type of melancholia. For a reponse to this point of view, see Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999). 17 On the panopticon, see Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 228–64.

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and their being as men depends upon this exclusive access to the panoptical center of the domicile. Above all, the masculine desire to control women’s bodies is a paradoxical longing to see the primal act of betrayal. Read in psychoanalytical terms, the cuckold’s melancholy is a symptom of a more general hysteria, which is his fundamental dread and fascination of witnessing the scene of his own figurative emasculation: “Et bonne damoiselle de despoiller sa robe, et se mect en cotte simple; et le bon compaignon de la prendre a bons braz de corps, et faire ce pourquoy il vint. Et tout ce veoit a l’oeil son pouvre mary par une petite treille. Pensez s’il estoit a son aise!” (203) [“And the good lady took off her dress, and remained in her slip; and the good fellow took her into his arms, and did what he came for. And all of this the poor husband saw with his own eyes through a little trellis. Imagine if he was comfortable!”] Following the lead of Freud and Butler, one might claim that this melancholia is one of the most essential parts of the cuckold’s identity as a masculine subject.18 Yet, when the cuckold/voyeur looks from his secret place, he witnesses what his own desire does to women’s bodies; that is, the masculine gaze inevitably fragments and fetishizes its object in a familiar blason: Et comme le serviteur regardast sa dame, qui tant belle estoit que merveilles, il la commence a rebaiser, et dit en la baisant : « M’amye, a qui est cest belle bouche?—C’est a vous, mon bel amy, dit elle.—Et je vous en mercie, dit il. Et ces beaulx yeulx?—A vous aussi, dit elle.—Et ce beau tetin qui tant est bien troussé, n’est il pas de mon compte? dit il.—Oy, par ma foy, dit elle, il est a vous, et non a aultre. » Il mect après la main au ventre et a son devant, ou il n’avoit que redire, et luy demanda : « A qui est ce cy, m’amye?—Il ne le fault ja demander, on scet bien que tout est vostre. » Il vint après gecter la main sur son gros derriere, et luy demanda en soubzriant : « Et a qui est ce cy?—Il est a mon mary, dit elle, c’est sa part; mais tout le demourant est vostre » (203–204). [And as her faithful servant looked at his lady, who was wonderfully beautiful, he began to kiss her again all over, and said while kissing her, “My love, whose is this pretty mouth?” “It’s yours, my love,” she said. “And I thank you for it,” said he. “And these fine eyes?” “They’re yours also, said she.” “And this beautiful breast that is so perky, is it not also in my account?” “Yes, my word,” said she, “it’s yours, and no one else’s.” He put his hand afterward on her stomach and her forward parts, about which there was nothing to be said, and asked her, “And to whom does this belong, my love?” “Need you ask? You know that everything is yours.” Afterward he slapped his hand on her fat backside, and asked her, smiling, “And whose is this, my love?” “That belongs to my husband,” she said, “that’s his part, but everything else is yours.”]

18 See Judith Butler, “Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification.” Freud’s foundational article on the subject is “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953–1974), vol. 14. For an extensive discussion of Freud’s conception of melancholia and its relation to gender, see Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), especially the chapter on Freud, 33–95. I am grateful to the outside readers at Ashgate for drawing my attention to this last reference.

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The desirous masculine subject cannot be satisfied with the sexual act. Incited by the appearance of its object, his gaze continuously explores and traverses its surface. Moreover, this visual desire translates into a fetishistic discourse of ownership, that enumerates and explodes the constitutive elements of the female body. The lover here needs not only to hold, to touch, and to possess his object, he also needs to hear that every part of it belongs to him, in a comic version of the blason du corps féminin that confirms male ownership of the female body. From this example, one could describe this type of late medieval masculinity as a constant linguistic and visual configuration of surfaces and spaces for the sake of presenting them to the hypothetical focal point at which masculine subjectivity is constituted. Domestic space must be laid out so that every part of it will be visible to the eye of the man occupying this position. This extension of the masculine gaze into space is complemented by the projection of a proprietary discourse across the surface of the wife’s body, which is itself extended into that space by the lover’s blason as it is witnessed and heard by the husband. Within the logic of this gender system, women’s bodies become surfaces upon which the tag of masculine possession and ownership can be affixed and displayed within and even as space. In a sense, space is the void that masculine desire must fill with objects that it owns, and which serve as supports for the unfolding of a discourse of anxiety concerning this ownership. The constitutive parts of women’s bodies become names that fulfill this role, and configure space both visually and conceptually. The being of a phantasmal projection of the female body as object of desire is thus contingent upon the spatial working out of masculine desire’s procedures, which, paradoxically, require that the primary transgression described here always be made visible, audible, and epistemologically recognizable to other men. Masculinity is hence a configuration and surveying of space such that diverse series of elements (tags and markers of possession, rooms and objects, bodies) converge to form a visual, signifying domain that confirms a man in his subjective being as the crucial point that determines the being of everything else that he sees. “Her body exists in space so that I may desire it,” he seems to say. “Her body parts exist so that I may name them as my possessions. Her body exists in my house so that I may see my jealousy and my desire in every room of it. Other men exist so that I may see my desire reflected in their actions.” The being of masculinity in this context is, therefore, non-Cartesian, external, intersubjective, discursive, and exists only in projections of itself into spaces and on to bodies seen as signifying surfaces. It is not a cogito, but a desideraro videre, or better yet a concupisco cernere: I desire to see and to seize the significance of things through my eyes, and everything that I see confirms the centrality of my gender as the basis of my being. Thus is the specific type of obsessive early-modern masculinity that is my subject here. To return to the tale, the melancholy husband invites his father, mother, cousins, and other relatives to dinner on the Sunday following the betrayal. He prepares an intriguing garment for his wife to wear, which marks her as an adulteress, and to which she herself is blind: “[The husband] avoit fait faire une robe pour sa femme de gros bureau de gris, et a l’endroit du derriere fist mectre une piece de bonne escarlate, a maniere de tasseau ...” (204) [“The husband had had a dress made for his wife of gray burlap, to the backside of which he had attached a kind of tassel made of scarlet”]. The text thus translates the fragmentation of the female character’s body

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into a vestimentary code. Bureau was a fabric used for patching other garments, implying that the dress itself is of a lowly order, and made of bits and pieces. As we will see in the following chapter in my analysis of the Tiers Livre, and as Daniel Russell has observed, bureau is also a fabric that is associated with humility and penitence, as well as with accounting and the domestic economy.19 The scarlet tassel marks the only part of her body that the wife leaves to her husband, which is also the part of the body that is associated with the “sin against nature” of sodomy. As we saw in the last chapter, according to St. Paul husbands were supposed to “rule over” the bodies of their wives; here, in contrast, we are offered a visual rebus of an unruly wife who has inverted that rule, and has left to her husband only an interdicted part of her anatomy. The discourse of bodily fragmentation and its attendant visual obsessions is perhaps an inevitable part of masculine sexuality in this context. The paradox that haunts the nouvelle of the cuckold, however, is the desire to make this discourse public. The goal of the cuckold in this variant is to translate the primal scene that he witnesses in secret into a public scene that is written in a vestimentary code, accompanied by his own repetition of the discourse of fetishism that he has overheard. He describes the scene to his assembled guests in this way: Entre leurs aultres devises, l’homme luy demanda de sa bouche, de ses yeulx, de ses mains, de son tetin, de son ventre, de son devant et de ses cuisses, a qui tout ce bagage estoit. Et elle luy respondit : « A vous, mon amy. » Et quand vint a son derriere, il luy dist: « Et a qui est ce cy, m’amye?—A mon mary », dist elle. Lors, pource que je l’ay trouvée telle, je l’ay en ce point habillée. Elle a dit que d’elle il n’y a rien mien que le derriere : si l’ay houssé comme il appartien a mon estat. Le demourant ay je houssé de vesture qui est deue a femme desloyale et deshonorée. Et car elle est telle, je la vous rends (205). [And among other topics of conversation, the man [her lover] asked her, concerning her mouth, her eyes, her hands, her breasts, her stomach, her forward parts, and her thighs, to whom all of this baggage belonged. And she responded, “they’re yours, my love.” And when he got to her backside, he said, “And whose is this, my love?” “My husband’s,” she said. Then, since I have found her thus, I dressed her in this way. She said that there was nothing mine on her body except her backside: I’ve dressed it in the manner appropriate to my state, while the rest is accoutred in the way a disloyal and dishonored woman should be. And since she is one of those, I’m giving her back to you.]

The pronunciation of this forbidden discourse about the fetishistic fixation on body parts results in the rupture of the social contract structured upon marriage: the wife is shamed forever, and remains “deshonorée et reprouchée entre ses amys” (205) [“dishonored and reproached among her friends”]. In this instance, the iconographic and discursive representation of the secret that rules a masculinist, homosocial patriarchy transforms the surface of the woman’s body into another of the books of cuckoldry, which may be read as an allegory of masculinity’s effects on bodies, both male and female: the imposition of a certain kind of masculinity renders its subject sick and melancholy; the transposition of masculinity’s visual drives on to the female 19 See Daniel Russell, “Panurge and His New Clothes,” Études Rabelaisiennes XIV (1977), 89–104, for a description of bureau and its symbolic significance.

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body parades her as an object of scorn and derision. Tale 49 is hence one of the best inscriptions of the aporias that result from the two fundamental yet incompatible drives that define this form of early-modern masculinity. The conservative drive charged with the maintenance of household honor and the surveillance of space must display the wife as an icon of household honor, or as a shameful object of derision if she does not remain firmly within the marital code. The second, subversive drive is linked to the repetition of a traumatic primal scene in which women’s bodies are continuously fetishized and fragmented into their constitutive parts, which are named in proprietary enumerations. These two versions of masculinity can coexist only in a comic context in which the rules of property are largely suspended or transmuted into an alternative order of masculinist, homosocial exchange through the conduit of women’s bodies, as in tale 62. When the rules are enforced and taken seriously, the characters involved in these stories suffer drastic consequences, as the wife does here. Tale 64: Castration as the Symbolic “Node” 20 of Masculinity The Cent nouvelles nouvelles contains three tales in which the main characters are literally castrated, which means that this figure was at least present within the elaboration of the masculine gender identity that was depicted in the work. In the works that I am examining, castration exists as a possibility, a sign, and, ultimately, in the case of Panurge, as the basis for rhetorical bluff and bombast that generates a peculiar kind of discourse meant to mark the speaker as hyperbolically masculine. In many stories from this period, as in the Tiers Livre, some male characters seem compelled to react in a codified way to the threat that they will be cuckolded. In a language that often repeats standard expressions, these characters respond to this threat by promising castration for the other men who threaten them, or by pronouncing a menacing discourse that actually brings about the emasculation of their rivals, as is the case in the Burgundian tale collection. As one would expect from the numerous examples that we have seen in the preceding pages, this rhetorical maneuver and its actual performance are inscribed within a more general visual economy of intersubjective misrecognition that is one of the bases of masculinity as it is staked out in these pages. In this context, castration is, as Lacan expressed it, a node (noeud means both “knot” and “node” in French) at which several elements converge, forming what he describes as the conceptual “core” of the kind of masculinity I have been examining here. In other words, (the possibility of) castration serves as a point of convergence around which the intersubjective relations of diverse types of beings gendered as masculine are organized, and from which these types derive the multifaceted meanings of their gender. Tale 64 maps out this kind of gender configuration, representing the encounter and confrontation of two of the most typical characters of the nouvelle literature. The first is a ribald priest who “faisoit rage de confesser ses parrochiennes ... voire des

20 On the idea of castration as a symbolic “node” (nœud) in the formation of masculine subjectivity, see Jacques Lacan, “La signification du phallus,” in Écrits, 685.

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plus jeunes” (252) [“enthusiastically ‘confessed’ his female parishioners … even the youngest ones”]. The second is a far more interesting variant on the character of the rogue or trickster. Here he is a kind of village dentist, surgeon, and even castrator, as his name indicates in the following scene, when he arrives at a meal to which the ribald priest has been invited: Et comme il[z] estoient ou meilleur endroit de leur disner et qu’ilz faisoient le plus grand het, veezcy leens venir ung homme qui s’appelle Trenchecoille, lequel se mesle de taillier gens, d’arracher dens, et d’un grand tas d’aultres brouilleries (252). [And as they reached the best part of their dinner and were having the most fun, a man whose name was Ballcutter came in, who used to cut [or geld]21 people, to pull teeth, and a whole bunch of other tricks.]

This opening of the tale, which brings together a prolific adulterer and a professional emasculator, perhaps has predictable results, especially when the host of the dinner party is the husband of one of the priest’s young female parishioners. The priest of tale 64 combines the “saincte vie et ... vertueux exercice” [‘saintly life and … virtuous exercise”] of “confessing” his female parishioners with many other festive activities, since he is a “grand farseur et fin homme” [“quite a joker and a clever man”]. This type of character is determined by the consistent irony both of his own pronouncements, and of the language with which he is described by the narrator. This double coding, which is a salient element of the narrative discourse employed throughout the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, is particularly appropriate to the figure of castration, which must be both presented and negated in the same breath, so that the masculine subjects of these pages may have a kind of paradoxical, unconscious consciousness of its existence and possibility. Because he is a farceur, the priest decides that he wants to play a trick on the trenchecoille (a term used throughout the story both as a noun and a proper name) that will be written in the register of the grotesque body. The priest suggests to his host: ...je faindray avoir mal au coillon et marchanderay a lui de me l’oster, et me feray lyer et mettre sur la table tout en point, comme pour le trencher. Et quand il viendra près et il vouldra veoir que c’est pour ouvrer de son mestier, je me leveray et luy monstreray le derriere (253). [… I’ll pretend to have a pain in one of my balls and I’ll bargain with him so that he will remove it. I’ll also have myself placed on top of the table and be tied to it, as if he were going to cut it off. And when he comes close and wants to see what it is he’ll be practicing his trade upon, I’ll get up and show him my backside.]

As the curé describes it, the trick that is at the heart of this tale unfolds according to a strange series of visual imperatives. If masculinity is a scopic desire that traverses every level of the society that is depicted in these tales, even a farcical if sinister 21 See Cotgrave’s definition of “tailler”: “To cut, slit, slice, hew hacke, slash, gash; nicke, snip, notch, indent; carve, grave; also, to gueld, or spey.”

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figure such as the trenchecoille is defined by a visual need associated with the exercise of his profession. The revelation of the body’s private parts was evidently one of the most compelling acts for the tellers of these tales, since it is focused upon with evident relish (as in tales 1 and 49), or with derision and laughter, as the priest intends it to be here. As is the case with “mooning” today, the uncovering and elevation of the lower body was a quintessentially comic act for the fifteenth-century audience of these tales, especially when performed in sacred contexts: Philippe de Vigneulles’s tale 7, in which a priest reveals his backside to the congregation at the moment of the consecration, is a case in point. Far from being pejorative figures, the “farceurs et fins hommes” were required characters at festive occasions, which always included scatological jokes. Within the intersubjective triangle of the tale, in which two of the characters are devoted to manipulating appearances, the trenchecoille is the only character who is there to be what he is, instead of trying to influence the visual interpretations that must be made by the other two characters. The meeting of two radically opposed characters—one who represents the “authenticity” of castration, incarnated in his name, while the other is pure surface, appearance, inauthenticity—in the presence of the key, third character, the husband who must represent order, surveillance, domesticity, and the display of domesticated bodies, is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating moments in the entire text. We should pause for a moment to examine this meeting, especially a discursive exchange between the two characters that precedes the priest’s plan, and the husband’s counter-plan: “Ce maistre curé, qui estoit grand farseur et fin homme, commence a prendre la parolle a ce trenchecoille et luy va demander de son mestier et de cent mille choses, et le trenchecoille luy respondoit au propos le mieulx qu’il savoit” (252–3) [“The good priest, who was quite a joker and a clever man, began speaking with the ball-cutter, asking about his profession and a hundred thousand other things, to which the ball-cutter responded as best he could”]. How can one explain the fact of castration to a character who embodies its opposite, since the farceur et fin homme is associated with carnival, the copia of discourse (“a hundred thousand things”), sex, and gluttony, all of which imply fullness and presence? For these types of characters, castration can only be a rhetorical figure, just as everything else is for them, which means both that emasculation can never be a literal truth for them, and that it must be detoured and displaced, for example, into the elevation and revelation of the backside. The juxtaposition of these two characters might thus serve as a fitting emblem for everything that I have been discussing in this chapter. By its nature, masculinity is duplicitous, paradoxical, even oxymoronic. On one side of this two-fold structure, we have the figure of death and dismemberment, which is laconic, efficient, and present even at the most festive of gatherings, ready to “render its courteous services” if needed. On the other side is the trickster, all bluff, surface, and appearance, always ready to tell a joke, always ready to intrude where he is not wanted, to “confess” his young parishioners and to take off running. In the middle of them, presiding over their interaction, is the husband, a kind of superego who knows exactly what to do, and how to make these two “drives” relate to one another when the appropriate moment arrives. In this context, normative masculinity always has at least these three aspects. To the extent that we can say what masculinity in the singular is, we

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must describe it as a range of possibilities, modes of being, and subject positions presented as an intersubjective network. The castration complex in fact requires two forms of action, one a projection of appearances, the other a performance of speech acts meant to position the characters or subjects in relation to one another. After the first elliptical and indirect description of the verbal exchange between the priest and the castrator, the text offers us a long passage in which it quotes the exact words of the latter character: Après ces paroles, monseigneur le curé rassaillit nostre trenchecoille d’unes et d’aultres, et en la parfin luy dist, pardieu, qu’il avoit ung coillon tout pourry et gasté, et vouldroit qu’il luy fust cousté bonne chose et qu’il eust trouvé homme qui bien luy sceust oster. Et si froidement le disoit que le trenchecoille cuidait veritablement qu’il deist voir. Lequel luy respondit: « Monseigneur le curé, je veil bien que vous sachez, sans nul despriser, ne moy vanter de rien, qu’il n’y a homme en ce pays qui mieulx que moi vous sceust aider; et pour l’amour de l’oste de ceens, je vous feray de ma peine telle courtoisie, si vous vous voulez mettre en mes mains, que par droit vous en devrez estre content.—Et vrayement, dit maistre curé, c’est bien dit. » Conclusion, pour abreger, ilz furent d’accort (253). [After these words, our good priest took up again with the ball-cutter about one thing and another, and in the end, he said to him, that by God one of his balls was all rotted and ruined, that it was hurting him a lot, and that he would like to find a man who knew how to cut it off. And he said it so coldly that the ball-cutter truly thought that he was saying it for real. He thus responded, “Father, I want you to know that, without disrespecting anyone else or blowing my own horn, there’s no one in this country who could help you more than I could. And for the love of our host, I will perform my labors as a courtesy to you, if you want to place yourself in my hands. I guarantee that you’ll be satisfied.” “Truly,” said the priest, “that’s well said.” Conclusion: to make a long story short, they were in agreement.]

One could hardly imagine a stranger figure than that of the trenchecoille courtois et poli who appears here. Read from an allegorical point of view that might have appeared in a hypothetical version of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles moralisées, one could imagine that the castrating figure here renders a service to the male body that is “afflicted” with the “disease” of concupiscence, and need only be applied to by the rational part of one’s being, personified here as the husband, whose conversation with the trenchecouille is likewise cited by the narrator: Et tantdis que ces approuches d’un costé et d’aultre se faisoient, l’oste de leens vint au trenchecoille, et luy dist: « Garde bien, quelque chose que ce prestre te dye, quant tu le tiendras pour ouvrer a ses coillons, que tu les lui trenches tous deux rasibus, et n’y faulte, si cher que tu as ton corps.—Saint Martin, si feray je, dist le trenchecoille, puis qu’il vous plaist. J’ai un instrument si prest et si bien trenchant, que je vous feray present de ses genitoires avant qu’il ait loisir de moy rien dire.—Or on verra que tu feras, dist l’oste; si tu faulx, je ne te fauldray pas. » (253–4) [While these approaches were taking place from one side and the other, the host came to the ball-cutter, and said to him, “Make sure that, no matter what the priest tells you, when you have him in your hands to work on his balls, that you cut them both off at their roots, and don’t fail me, if you value your life.” “By St. Martin, I will,” said the ball-cutter,

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The menacing severity of the husband contrasts strongly with the frivolity of the ribald priest as well as with the polite efficiency of the professional emasculator. There are several uncanny details here: just as there happens to be a professional dismemberer present at this peculiar feast, he also happens to have his sharp instruments with him so that he can provide his services if they are needed, and in such a way that they will reduce this singularly verbose priest to silence. The subject positions of the three protagonists of this tale are largely defined by their relation to one another in and through speech that refers to the act of castration. The trenchecoille is the recipient of what are, on the surface, two identical messages: both the husband and the priest demand of him the performance of his duties, and the promise that these will be done professionally, to which he responds with a promise and an oath that his deeds will be true to his words. The first promise is greeted by the priest with a concise affirmation (“vraiment c’est bien dit”) that confirms the appropriateness of the emasculator’s discursive efficiency, in which word and act are intimately linked. The second oath (“Par St. Martin!”) is met with a threat by the serious husband, who menaces the trenchecoille with death if the efficiency of that relation is not maintained. The important distinction between these two demands is, of course, the inauthenticity of the first one, which assumes the classic form of the “bait and switch” kind of joke. “I promise you that I need to be castrated by you, but you will in the end be the one who is figuratively ‘castrated’ by my joke”: this is what the priest’s maneuver “says” to the trenchecoille. None of these three positions as they are defined by a conception of discourse and its relation to bodily acts can exist independently of the others, nor can they exist without the notions of marriage and adultery, transgression and the maintenance of order, surveillance and dissimulation, and the whole narrative tradition associated with cuckoldry and scatological comedy, which are developed as extensive intertexts within which this anecdote displays its meaning. Intertextual masculinity is perhaps best understood on the micro level as this exchange of discourse among diverse subject positions that defines each of them in relation to an overdetermined object with respect to which bodies and subjectivities are structured in gender terms. The primal scene of the castration is written as a festive sacrifice, which makes perfect sense, since public celebrations in the early-modern world almost always required a sacrificial victim. A feast is always a collective activity, and requires celebratory eating and drinking. Hence, the sacrifice of the priest as carnival victim is prepared and takes place on a table top, where he is “served up” by the husband and his servants, among them the trenchecoille: Tout fut prest, et la table apportée, et monseigneur le curé en pourpoint, qui bien contrefaisoit l’adolé, et promectoit bon vin a ce trenchecoille. L’oste aussi et les serviteurs de leens, qui devoient tenir bon curé, qui n’avoient garde de le laisser [eschapper]. Et affin d’estre plus seur, le lierent trop bien, et luy disoient que c’estoit pour mieux faire la farce, et quand il vouldroit ilz le laisseroient aller. Et il les creut comme fol. Or vint ce vaillant trenchecoille garny a la couverte main de son petit rasoir, et commença a vouloir mectre

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les mains aux coillons de monseigneur le curé: « A dya! dit monseigneur le curé, faictes a traict et tout beau; tastez les le plus doulcement que vous pourrez, et après je vous diray lequel je veil avoir osté.—Trop bien », dit il. Et lors tout souef leve la chemise et prend ses maistres coillons, gros et quarrez, et sans en plus enquerir, subitement les luy trencha tous deux d’un seul cop. Et bon curé de cryer, et de faire la plus male vie que jamais fist homme. « Hola! Laisser vous adouber. » Alors le trenchecoille le mect a point du surplus qui en tel cas appartient, et part et s’en va, attendant de l’oste il savoit bien quoy. Or ne fault il pas demander si monseigneur le curé fut bien camus de se veoir ainsi desgarny. Et mectoit sus a l’oste qu’il estoit bien, et disoit que si le trenchecoille ne se fust si tost sauvé, qu’il l’eust mis en tel estat que jamais n’eust fait bien après. « Pensez vous, dit il, qu’il ne me desplaist bien de vostre ennuy, et plus beaucop qu’il est advenu en mon hostel » (254). [Everything was ready, and the table was brought in, and our priest in his cassock, was pretending to be in great pain, and promising good wine to the ball-cutter. The host and the servants of the house, who were supposed to hold down the priest, were careful not to let him escape. And in order to be sure of it, they tied him up very well, and said that it was to make the joke look more real, and that whenever he wanted they would let him go. And he believed them like a fool. So the brave ball-cutter arrived, carrying his little razor hidden in his hand, and he began to place his hands on the priests balls. “By God,” said the priest, “make it a clean and fast cut; handle them as carefully as you can, and afterward I’ll tell you which one has to be cut off.” “Very well,” responded the other, then he softly lifted the shirt and took the priest’s huge balls, which were fat and square, in his hand, and without asking anything else, he quickly cut them both off with a single swipe. The priest began to scream and cry more than any man ever had. “There now! Lie down!” Then the ball-cutter finished the job as best he could, as one should in such cases, and then he got up and left, expecting from his host what had been agreed upon. It goes without saying that the priest was stumped to find himself stripped in this way. And he tore into his host, and said that if the ball-cutter hadn’t fled right away, he would have left him in such a state that he never would have worked again. “Believe me,” said the host, “that I’m displeased at your troubles, especially since they came about in my house.”]

Émile Benvéniste has described a certain semantic family of terms that includes the seemingly contradictory ideas of being a “host” and being “hostile,” of “hospitality” and “hostility.”22 This scene inscribes rather well what hospitality is and must be in the context of a masculinity defined by its situation within a marital domus. The exercise of masculine power in its multiple manifestations, as the vigilance that maintains a sexual status quo, as an intrusive, ubiquitous, and indefatigable desire, and as a murderous, castrating desire for revenge, almost ineluctably includes this kind of violence within the historically-contingent social structure that configures its primary subject positions. Within this context, masculinity is the desire to maintain an intersubjective configuration (husband, wife, in-laws) that provides men with stable gender identities; the need, for the sake of satisfying one’s lust, to transgress the boundaries, walls, and surveillance points that define the social order; and the desire to be courteous, polite, and efficient, even in the execution of the most sinister tasks that underlie apparently benign intersubjective relations. While this tale is seemingly about an extreme vengeance perpetrated against the figure of the usurping priest, it 22 Cited in Jacques Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 32.

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in fact stakes out a multiplicity of possible positions that define the diverse aspects of a single masculinity. For one to understand what masculinity in the singular is in this context, one thus has to understand the essential multiplicity of its diverse manifestations, which interact to form a coherent whole. Conclusion This analysis of the adultery stories in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, coupled with the description of the intertext on marriage of the preceding chapter, has led us to the development of a complex definition of masculinity as it is represented in narrative discourse in fifteenth-century France. For the men who told, retold, listened to, formulated, gathered, imitated, copied, translated, transcribed, printed, and ultimately sold the stories of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, it is both explicitly and implicitly evident what masculinity meant for them. Their gender was a series of place markers or nodes in a network of relations, or a mode of being and a type of subjectivity made possible by the occupation of diverse positions along the network. The question of what gender being was in those positions, or even as those positions, is an extraordinarily difficult one. One response to it is the notion of intertextuality that I have been developing throughout this study. Being masculine as the occupant of a subject position made possible by a network of intersubjective relations involves the reactivation or transcription of a body of texts, through narration or textual transmission, that affirm conventional gender truths such as the maxims concerning l’engin féminin, and conventional declarations of virility, such as Panurge’s claim that he will castrate his rivals. These pronouncements are all integral parts of the performance of masculinity in this historical context: in gender terms, one is what one says, writes, reads, or interprets as a means of occupying a given subject position. Men are engendered when they are authorized by other men to speak and to write in specific contexts and in specific ways. As Clare Lees has remarked, however, it is important to note that gender cannot be reduced solely to discursive pronouncements or transcriptions.23 Gender, and hence masculinity, is also defined by the non-verbal situation of bodies, and by the objects that those bodies use in spaces that are staked out in proprietary terms predicated on the gendering and hierarchization of individuals. In other words, masculinity is not only a set of complex discursive procedures, acts, and performances; it is also the non-discursive recognition of a given position that depends upon visual signs and icons, among which are the bodies of men and women that are immediately seen in terms of their gender difference. As a mode of reading and interpreting these signs, masculinity is inextricably linked to the practices of surveillance and display. The type of masculine subject derived from the pages of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles is always involved both in the exhibition of his own body and property in terms of what is considered proper to the male gender role, and in the marking, presentation, and surveillance of women’s bodies as the foundations of this conception of an honorable domus. Throughout this text, masculinity may thus be characterized as a dialectical relationship between the notion of a “proper” or “honorable” domestic space, and 23 Clare A. Lees, ed., Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), xvii–xix.

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the visual control and exhibition of gendered bodies as signifiers within that space, which itself is conceived of in its relation to the idea of the public, the civic, the exterior, and the festive. In this text and its historical and intellectual context, masculinity might also be described as a series of acts codified as required or interdicted. The examples of a husband’s necessary transportation of his wife’s body to the domicile of his marriage on his wedding day, and of his required penetration of his wife’s hymen on the wedding night are only the most evident among a continuum of material imperatives that structured masculinity at this time, and which traversed the entirety of a man’s existence. From the comic point of view represented in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, as in the Tiers Livre and in any number of masculinist homosocial jokes, men had to engage in certain kinds of sexual seduction, and to adopt certain attitudes toward women, in order to be recognized by other men as men. Paradoxically, some of these acts, detailed in canon law texts and penance manuals, were also forbidden to those who wanted to be recognized as “honorable” men. Masculinity was, in this respect as in many others, two-fold and duplicitous, requiring a paradoxical enforcement of both sides of a binary opposition separating the forbidden from the necessary. For this reason, perhaps, it seems clear at least from the Cent nouvelles nouvelles that late-medieval men were highly aware of the “constructedness” of their own gender, at least if we are to judge by the consistently ironic and mocking depictions of certain conventional acts, attitudes, opinions, and discourses. The standard position of the narrators of these tales is one of ironic detachment from topoi such as a male lover’s pathetic longing for the object of his affection, a husband’s obsessive jealousy regarding his wife’s possible infidelities, a husband’s inability to perform on his wedding night, a wife’s assurances of faithfulness, the horrific suffering of an adulterer or adulteress who has been severely punished, and so on. Perhaps one of the most interesting and unexpected attributes of fifteenth-century Burgundian masculinity is the self-consciousness of these narrators when it comes to the construction of their gender in a literary discourse overdetermined by the inheritance of generic and narrative conventions. As we saw in our analysis of tale 64, the correct performance of a masculinity seen to be normative could and did have drastic consequences for real and imagined men living at a given time and place, as it still does today. In contrast, the ironic consideration of the failures of gender performance opens the possibility for play that Butler has offered as a solution to gender aporias.24 Nevertheless, in the context of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, one also notes that sarcasm and haughty indifference to sex and sex roles were also apparently required attitudes for the men who were summoned to tell their stories in the masculinist homosocial gathering developed as the work’s narrative frame. Apparently, a serious description of a man’s “love,” which did not lead to the eruption of a homicidal or castrating violence, simply was not possible for these men, who most often remained in the safe distance of their ironic depictions of men’s sexual exploits. While masculinity is a network of sites or nodes at which intersubjective, social relations intersect to produce meaning, and while it could perhaps be argued, against 24 See “Subversive Bodily Acts,” in Gender Trouble, 79–141.

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much of the scholarship on the subject, that medieval and Renaissance masculinities are in fact rather stable entities that are reproduced in countless texts, it nonetheless remains true that gender as a series of sites, nodes, and place markers must be grasped in its multiplicity, which at times have the appearance of instability.25 In this sense, masculinity might be described as “rhizomatic” and reticular.26 It presents us with multiple generative points or “clusters” out of which its diverse meanings and significations seem to grow: the configuration of space and of bodies within space; the surveying and surveillance of the domus as a visual domain; the transmission of texts, stories, exemplary topoi, laws, and narrative traditions among men; the idea and the material realities of relations among men, which require that they master a certain narrative “technology” that is passed on from generation to generation; the necessary performance of both required and interdicted acts; the marking, dressing, undressing, penetration, and general manipulation of women’s bodies as visual signifiers. Viewed from the exterior, it might seem as though masculinity as an object were continuously shifting and “morphing” into the different shapes or figures that one might associate with these cluster points. In contrast, one has to interpret these differences and divergences as multiple aspects of a single entity that is continuously growing and assuming ever more grotesque and perhaps even monstrous forms. In this sense, for example, the three male characters of tale 64 must be understood as the different, intersubjective aspects of a multiple yet strangely unified masculinity. On the whole, the complex processes of intertextual citation that I have highlighted throughout this chapter might be thought of as fundamental to the continuous subjectivation that constitutes masculinity. As in Lacanian psychoanalysis, masculinity offers a multiplicity of subject positions among which individuals interpellated as masculine may circulate. The act of occupying a given position, or of becoming a subject in that position, most often involves literal or figurative citation: a man can simply quote truisms about his own gender or about women (“men don’t cry,” “if you want to be a wise man, beware of women’s tricks”), or reproduce conventional acts or gestures (such as the ironic posture of the narrators in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles), or tell certain kinds of stories (the one that describes the speaker as a hyperbolically virile lover will, for example, be taken up by both 25 “The challenge, however, is to begin to see sexuality and its categories not simply as system-bound surfaces permanently encoded by the social process that produced their coherence, but as virtualities, bodies, and affects in motion that are always crossing lines, always becoming deterritorialized and reterritorialized, always becoming something other than an immobile and eternal self-same. Gender is a culturally specific process of becoming. It is a kind of alchemy: perhaps it has a stated telos (the ‘purity’ of frozen being, of exactly coinciding with the static ‘gold’ of a gender ideal), but in fact it is all about impurity and phantasmatic ‘refinement,’ explosions of like and unlike, matter warring against matter, multiple transubstantiations, equations that map trajectories of perpetual motion rather than models that trace the contours of closed and lifeless systems.” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, eds., Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), x–xi. 26 On the famous notion of the rhizome, which is perhaps somewhat problematic when applied to this work, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980).

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Rabelais and Brantôme later on), or structure domestic space in a given way (men should enclose women in towers or behind high walls), and so on. The “I” identifies itself as a given manifestation of the masculine subject in and through these citational acts which are, in a sense, felicitous performatives: “I punish my querulous wife and laugh about it, hence I am a real man,” it seems to say. This process of citation is ineluctably visual: it is not enough for men in this context to reproduce conventional discourses, acts, or postures, they must also be seen by other men while doing so, and must see themselves being seen by others at the same time. This discursive, specular, material, spatial, and abstract conception of masculinity may be derived from a close reading of almost any text that considers gender in such an obsessive way as the Cent nouvelles nouvelles does. It remains to be seen, in the next chapter, if this kind of multiple and paradoxical version of masculinity will be applicable to another text written in a radically different cultural and historical context.

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Chapter 3

Intertextual Masculinity in Rabelais’s Tiers Livre Introduction The Cent nouvelles nouvelles is a compendium of narrative genres. It also catalogues millennial modes of thinking about masculinity in relation to early-modern marriage. The detailed examination of this text that I have just undertaken provides a narrative context within which one could analyze Rabelais’s major work on masculinity, the Tiers Livre. I say that this latter work is about masculinity because, in my opinion, its multiple themes and intertextual threads are all structured around the idea of the male gender. This provocative claim, which I will explicate and support in this chapter, will trouble some scholars who would raise several questions and objections that are central to the enterprise of reading Renaissance literature in general, and Rabelais in particular. What is the proper context or mode in which one may read and interpret his works? Can twenty-first-century critical theory provide tools for reading a sixteenth-century text? Is it possible for one to read a Renaissance text, such as this one, in the framework that one develops by examining a late medieval work such as the Cent nouvelles nouvelles? Does it make any sense at all to speak about “masculinity,” a thoroughly modern concept, when discussing pre-modern texts? Responding to questions such as these, many important scholars, including Gérard Defaux and Edwin Duval, have consistently argued that Renaissance texts must be read “on their own terms.” From their point of view, this means that interpretations based on modern critical theory are extraneous to the “real” task of philology, which is the establishment of the historical and intellectual context in which sixteenth-century writers produced their texts.1 This philological insistence on a kind of historical “purity” with which one must approach texts from this period raises the following question: to what extent is one authorized or prohibited from using theoretical concepts in the analysis of Rabelais’s works? It is clear that the notions of gender, masculinity, and their social and intellectual construction and performance are modern and theoretical in nature. Nevertheless, the analyses of the preceding chapters have demonstrated that the construction of the masculine 1 For an in-depth discussion of the debates surrounding these issues, see my article, “French Renaissance Literature and the Problem of Theory: Alcofribas’s Performance in the Prologue to Gargantua.” EMF 10 (Spring, 2005), 5–38. See also the Prologue to Carla Freccero, Father Figures: Genealogy and Narrative Structure in Rabelais (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), ix–xii.

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gender, and the propagation of the discursive practices intended to produce men as men, were an integral part of a large body of medieval and Renaissance writing that consciously reflected upon the processes by which men were engendered as masculine subjects. Reinier Leushuis has argued convincingly, for example, that the Tiers Livre adopts a position in the ancient marital debate concerning an uxor sit ducenda (whether a man should marry) that is influenced by Erasmian and Evangelical developments proper to the Renaissance. From this perspective, in the midst of arguments promoting chaste marriage, Rabelais’s work militates in favor of marital fecundity, which is mimetically reproduced in the form of Panurge’s inexhaustible linguistic fecundity. What Leushuis does not remark in this intriguing argument is the masculine, even masculinist specificity of Rabelais’s text, which is derived from the millenial textual tradition devoted to the definition of the masculine role in marriage that is my object here.2 Similarly, on the basis of marriage tracts from the Renaissance, Todd Reeser has examined masculinity and the marriage question in the Tiers Livre in relation to the Classical ideal of moderation: “it is tempting to read the end of the Tiers Livre, then, not only as Panurge’s individual failure to achieve moderation through marriage, but also as a failure to associate masculinity with moderation in the first place.”3 In contrast to Reeser’s satisfying argument, mine will examine Rabelais’s most intractable work in a much broader sense, in terms of the spatial, domestic, civic, and legal fiats associated with the performance of masculinity, and in terms of the positive and negative constraints that comic narrative practice placed upon men who told stories to other men regarding their relations to women. Rather than reading the Tiers Livre as defined by its belonging to the Renaissance, as these other scholars do, I attempt to analyze the ways in which the work continues and carries forward a certain medieval, clerical, legalistic, comic, ironic, and intertextual mode of masculinity. There is thus nothing extraneous or anachronistic about discussing the scope and characteristics of this early-modern or pre-modern reflection on gender, since the texts themselves, both in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, were concerned with examining, documenting, configuring, and passing on the knowledge that was necessary to the performance of the male gender role within intersubjective and social situations. In this sense, the complex explication of the masculine gender as it is derived from the intertext I have chosen is an attempt to combine theoretical with philological approaches to reading literature. This type of analysis would be impossible without the archival work involved in reading the penance manuals, law texts, criminal registers, canon law compendia, and exempla collections that were my object in chapter 1. Moreover, intertextual explications of the kind that I undertook in chapter 2, in which one examines the relationship between variants of given stories or ideas written in different texts in diverse historical contexts, is perhaps the most conventional form of philological scholarship imaginable. Nevertheless, this type of analysis would also be impossible without an understanding of how critical theory has conceived of gender as an object of knowledge. This critique is indeed 2 Reinier Leushuis, Le mariage et ‘l’amitié courtoise’ dans le dialogue et le récit bref de la Renaissance (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2003), 153–205. 3 Todd Reeser, Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 147

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anachronistic in the sense that, as far as we can tell, Rabelais himself would perhaps not have been able to examine his own gender with the detachment and critical distance that a modern reader may bring to his or her own being as a gendered subject. On the other hand, as we will see in this chapter, Rabelais’s text addresses consciously and ironically precisely those issues that were central to the construction of masculinity before and during the historical period in which he wrote, and which were rehearsed and worked out over the course of centuries in countless texts: the anxiety of men when faced with the fact of women’s desire; the apparent need that men had to speak to one another and to tell each other stories about that anxiety; the hyperbolic overestimation of men’s virility; the displacement of masculine desire into space and the visual realm; the fetishization of women’s bodies. I will argue here, therefore, that the way in which the masculine subject is constructed in and through the production and interpretation of texts is precisely Rabelais’s subject in the Tiers Livre, a work that describes in detail the narrative “technology” that men consciously and willfully passed on to other men as an essential part of their production of themselves as men, and of their hegemony over women.4 As we remarked repeatedly in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, the men of this period were capable of regarding with a kind of sly irony the conventionality of this production of their own gender, which at times becomes itself a requirement in the performance of their gender. Rabelais’s work could perhaps be regarded as a protracted meditation on this irony, which demonstrates an all-too-modern detachment from the notion of the writer’s own gender. Rabelais’s construction of a particular kind of masculine subject begins in the work’s first pages. The classical example of Diogenes Laertius’ barrel that opens the Tiers Livre is an allegory of the set of variations to which Rabelais will subject the characters of his text, as well as an emblem of the work’s procedures. Edwin Duval describes this prologue in relation to a series of classical intertexts, including Lucian’s How to Write History, allowing Duval to claim that the tonneau Diogenique [Diogenic tub] serves as a mise-en-abîme for a work that in fact parodies the correct manner of writing history, thus making Panurge’s quest throughout the text a farce. According to Duval, the core message of the Tiers Livre, as well as of the other books, is that Pauline caritas must be the guiding principle of the Renaissance gentleman’s actions and life. From this perspective, Diogenes’ barrel would have to be another figure or representation of a Pantagruelism that must be equated to the highest form of Christian, Evangelical love, while its function as an allegory for the text’s own procedures juxtaposes Pantagruel’s Humanist wisdom to the folly of Panurge, who seeks to have certain knowledge that his own domus will function as it should after he is married. Thus for Duval the central “design” of the work is the antagonism between Pantagruel and Panurge, which plays itself out in the text’s persistent chanson de ricochet [ricochet song], pre-figured in the example of Diogenes’ tonneau.5 Duval discerns distinct modes of governance that are associated with the opposing 4 On the ideas of technologies used to maintain gender hierarchies, see Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender. Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 1–30. 5 Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel. Études Rabelaisiennes XXXIV (Geneva: Droz, 1997), Chapters 1–2.

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figures of Pantagruel and Panurge, which are derived from the vast intertext that stretches from ancient Greece and Rome to Renaissance Italy, culminating in the seminal figure of Erasmus: Having come to the Tiers Livre directly from the Pantagruel we were naturally inclined to ask: “What can possibly happen in the timeless perfection of Utopie?” After reading the first chapter we must modify that question to something like: “How would an ideal Christian prince behave, what particular forms would his caritas take, if he were somehow transported from the utopian world of an evangelical kingdom of God on earth into our own world, this real world of men and institutions that we all know to be only too imperfect?” Or to rephrase the same question in the terms suggested by the narrator’s essay: “What would happen if the Prince described by Erasmus were to rule in the world described by Machiavelli?” (Duval, The Design, 37)

These questions go directly to the heart of Rabelais’s enterprise in the Tiers Livre. To rephrase Duval’s point using the vocabulary that I have developed throughout this study, the work is concerned with the relation between a given narrator’s textual practice, based on his reading of a vast intertext, and the production of male characters as gendered subjects. After all, the text is decidedly not speaking about how an ideal Christian princess would behave. I would argue that the work’s two main characters represent two modes of being masculine, the first a larger and more global conception of what the male gender role is in a social setting, and the second a smaller and more domestic idea of an individual man’s function in the administration of the domus. Duval addresses this point directly, referring to Panurge’s disastrous role as the châtelain of the Dipsode colony: Now a châtellenie, or estate, is not a polis (a “political” thing) or a respublica (a “public thing”) that demands to be ruled by a beneficent king. It is rather a domus (a “domestic” thing), an oikia (an “economic” thing)—that is, a maison, a “mesnie” or ménage, that demands to be overseen by a prudent and economical ménager. The prince’s [Pantagruel’s] gentle reproof to his irresponsible vassal [Panurge], together with the latter’s vociferous self-defense, emphasize this shift and indicate the purely domestic, “economic” nature of the vassal’s offence... Clearly, in moving from the subject of a prince’s government to that of a châtelain’s “self-government” the narrator has shifted his attention from the public to the private branches of moral philosophy—that is, from politica to oeconomica and ethica (Duval, The Design, 39).

Thus, as Duval makes clear, a Renaissance man’s actions as a public, princely figure were potentially influenced by any number of texts, ranging from the Bible to Erasmus’s famous work on The Education of a Christian Prince, that spelled out the masculine subject’s function as a leader of a public entity. In contrast, the Tiers Livre will be about the mock process by which a given man (or male character) seeks to determine, through the consultation of various kinds of texts, what his role will be in his own ménage or household, and what his relation will be to his future wife if he gets married. Rabelais’s structuring of the work as a series of responses to mainly textual inquiries highlights the extent to which the male gender role was generated by and through the reading, interpretation, and generation of texts, no matter how

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6

spurious and ridiculous those texts may be. Moreover, as the work progresses, the specialists who appear as characters in its pages, and who are responsible for reading given texts from the perspective of specific kinds of knowledge—jurisprudence, philosophy, medical discourse—are increasingly “gendered” as masculine authority figures. The prologue continues its development in a semantic displacement from the Cynic’s barrel, to the idea of wine barrels, to the Pantagruelesque praise of wine, drinking, and writing at its end, foregrounding the notions of fecundity and abundance that are expressed in an enological code. The literal cornucopia of the grapevine is thus equated to the figurative copia (or perhaps logorrhea) of the Rabelaisian text, which goes to unsurpassed extremes of verbal excess, especially in its blasons of the male anatomy’s private parts in the Tiers Livre. In the work’s opening pages, the series of verbs that describes Diogenes manipulating his barrel (“...[il] le tournoit, viroit, brouilloit, barbouilloit, hersoit, versoit, renversoit, nattoit,” etc. (347) [“he twisted it, scrambled it, garbled it, churned it, turned it, overturned it, rustled it,” etc. (255)]), which occupies nearly two pages, is the emblem of a narrator whose writing is equivalent to a bodily function, the act of drinking, just as so much of Rabelais’s other writing is corporeal in nature: “Icy beuvant, je delibere, je discours, je resoulz et concluds. Aprés l’epilogue, je riz, j’escripz, je compose, je boy” (349) [“Here drinking I deliberate, I discourse, I resolve and conclude. After the epilogue, I laugh, I write, I compose, I drink” (257)].7 If ever language served as a means of writing the body, it is here, at least if we are to believe the proclamations of the voice that seemingly speaks these lines directly to its readers, who are also explicitly interpellated as masculine subjects, despite the ironic dedication of the work to Marguerite de Navarre. The association of drinking, wine, and writing links the author’s body with the harvest, which is the ultimate symbol of fecundity. In other words, the body of Rabelais’s narrator (who is no longer Alcofribas Nasier in this text, but “M. Fran. Rabelais, docteur en Medecine,” [339]) as it is described in these pages is one that “bears fruit,” and is compelled to procreate and produce at the same time that it consumes and digests. This consistent association of textual copia with the fruitfulness of an inexhaustible male body is a topos that runs throughout the work, and is constitutive of a certain kind of masculinist thinking that is characteristic of the Renaissance. In a sense, then, the work is a transcription of a body that is utterly male and masculine. In other words, the extraordinary excess of the Rabelaisian text, which is clearly evident in the authorial introduction to the Tiers Livre, is a signifier both of the linguistic and semantic procedures of Rabelais’s work, and of the kind of masculinity that is peculiar to it, which is constructed upon the historical, literary, and intertextual foundation that I have been describing to this point. 6 For a rather different account of the Tiers Livre’s intertextual foundations in the ancient genre of the dialogue, see Véronique Zaercher, Le Dialogue Rabelaisien: le Tiers Livre Exemplaire, Études Rabelaisiennes XXXVIII (Geneva: Droz, 2000). 7 All page references to the French text are to François Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Mireille Huchon (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). All translation page references are from The Complete Works of François Rabelais, tr. Donald Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

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The Tiers Livre is perhaps Rabelais’s most intractable and illegible work, as most scholars writing on the subject have agreed.8 Nevertheless, it proposes a certain kind of male body and its corresponding masculine subjectivity as referents with which we are intimately familiar from our readings in the last two chapters: the masculine subject as overly concerned with sex and its social connotations; as master of an interior “domicile” of marriage that he must protect against all aggressors; as a paranoid sentinel who must obsessively watch all of his wife’s actions; as the pathetic and inevitable dupe of his wife’s sexual indiscretions. Taking such a conventional figure as its focus, the work is not about anything “real” at all, since writing about the masculine role in marriage constituted a trite and “tired” rhetorical exercise by the time Rabelais took up the subject, as Floyd Gray has demonstrated.9 This, however, could be interpreted as precisely the most important aspect of this troubling work. From the perspective of critical theory, gender performance is nothing but surface, citation, play, and disguise, which means that if there is anything “real” about it, and hence about masculinity, it is to be found in the manipulation of signs and processes of signification by which gender is produced, and within which it must be interpreted and located. Rabelais’s text describes the ways in which a would-be conventional masculine subject can be flabbergasted and befuddled by these procedures if he engages in them with the aim of taking them seriously as signifiers of his “real” identity. The Tiers Livre is thus ultimately “about” the relation between rhetoric and the construction of masculinity as an intertextual phenomenon, or masculinity as a topos that generates texts and their interpretations. Insemination and the Phallic Economy of Marriage In the work’s opening chapter, Rabelais focuses on a major theme of the Renaissance: the concept of the good prince, and of the proper manner of ruling his state. Like the author’s other books, this third installment includes dense and complex references that operate simultaneously on several semantic levels. Pantagruel’s conquest of Dipsodie and his transfer of the Utopians to this colony engenders a linguistic movement across a range of conceptual frameworks. Fecundity, birth, utopia, the rule of law under the monarch—all of these themes play together in the institution of the colony, and its proper government by the Prince. Hence the ideal conquest on the part of the patriarch involves a kind of love relationship between the conqueror and the vanquished that generates the copia of insemination, the patriarch being the male, and the colony becoming the body of the female. In fact, the foundation of Utopia in this case requires the proper management of the colony’s processes of procreation, and hence of the bodies of its female members. Here we recognize a 8 See especially Duval’s brief synopsis of the text’s complexity in The Design, 15–16. 9 Floyd Gray, Gender, Rhetoric, and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 21–9. For a detailed discussion of the appearance of this topos in Quintilian and Erasmus, see Reeser, Moderating Masculinity, 129. See also Chapter 1 of Michael Screech, The Rabelaisian Marriage: Aspects of Rabelais’s Religion, Ethics, and Comic Philosophy (London: Arnold, 1958), 5–11; and the introduction to Leushuis, Le mariage, 1–30.

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familiar sixteenth-century conceit, which Montaigne described succinctly in “De l’oisiveté” [“On Leisure”]: ...comme nous voyons que les femmes produisent bien toutes seules des amas et pieces de chair informes, mais que pour faire une generation bonne et naturelle, il les faut embesoigner d’une autre semence : ainsin est-il des espris. Si on ne les occupe à certain sujet, qui les bride et contreigne, ils se jettent desreiglez, par-cy par-là, dans le vague champ des imaginations.10 […as we see that women produce all by themselves piles and pieces of unformed flesh, but that, in order to produce a good and natural generation, one has to inseminate them in a particular way: thus it is with the mind. If one does not occupy it with a definite subject, which bridles and constrains it, the mind throws itself uncontrollably here and there into the vague field of the imagination. (my translation)]

From the point of view of the noble masculine subject, there is a continuum in which the governed, the colonized, the female body, and even the unruly mind itself are all objects that must be controlled and disciplined by men if they are to “bear fruit.” In Rabelais’s version of this topos in the first chapter of the Tiers Livre, the fecundity and abundance of women’s bodies are considered to be a direct result of the enlightened gestation of the state by the prince. In fact, the desire of the Utopians to serve and to be loyal to their prince passes from generation to generation through the milk that the fecund wet-nurses feed to their hyperbolically numerous babies, “les quelz dés lors que nasquirent et entrerent on monde, avec le laict de leurs meres nourrices avoient pareillement sugcé la doulceur et debonnaireté de son regne, et en icelle estoient tousdis confictz, et nourriz ...” (353–4). [“who, when they were born and came into the world with their mothers’ milk also imbibed the sweetness and kindness of his rule, and in this were ever confected and reared …” (261).] Hence the three levels of masculine control converge here: the self-discipline of the prince, the proper government of his state, and the abundant insemination of the women through whom his power is disseminated to his subjects. Rabelais inscribes in broad geographical and political terms, therefore, what I have discerned as the substructure of the cuckold tale, i.e., the necessity that masculine subjects control women’s bodies as mediums for the transmission and maintenance of masculinist domination and power, which give form to both domestic and public space. When Panurge is appointed as the châtelain of the colony,11 however, the seriousness that was implicit in the description of its administration gives way to comic inversions of the fundamental attributes of its government. Consistent with his character as a bon compagnon and charlatan, Panurge immediately begins to squander the riches that he has been given, throwing lavish parties for the colonists. Thus Panurge is an anti-Pantagruel in these early chapters, replacing the careful 10 Michel de Montaigne, Oeuvres complètes, eds. Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 33. 11 In our current critical context, one might be tempted to read this passage from a post-colonial perspective, analyzing the role of women’s bodies as “subaltern” in colonial situations. Although I will not explore this possibility, the colonial theme should be noted as an important subtext at the beginning of the Tiers Livre.

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surveillance and organization of the colony with the wasting of all of its goods. At the heart of this inversion of the civic economy is its miniature version, that of the individual household, run by a married man: “Que dict Caton en sa mesnagerie sus ce propos? ‘Il fault (dict il) que le perefamiles soit vendeur perpetuel.’ Par ce moyen est impossible qu’en fin riche ne devieigne, si tousjours dure l’apothecque” (358). [“What does Cato say in his Husbandry [De re rustica 2.55.7] on that subject? The paterfamilias, he says, must be a perpetual seller. By this method it is impossible for him not to become rich at last, if his provisions hold out” (265).] As Guy Demerson notes in his edition of the text, “Panurge déforme un axiome bien connu de l’austère Caton, qui enjoint au chef de famille d’être un producteur plus qu’un consommateur.”12 [“Panurge deforms a well-known axiom of the austere Cato, who encourages the head of the family to be a producer more than a consumer.”] While the character’s reversals all operate within the realm of the domestic and civic economies, there is a subtext in this passage that applies to the peculiar economy of the cuckold, which Rabelais will develop at length in the male bonding scenes between Frère Jean and Panurge in Chapters 26–8. The husband and paterfamilias must continually “sell” his wife’s body in order to maintain his relations with other men, while the boundlessness of her sexual appetite serves as an inexhaustible “provision” (written here in Greek, “l’apothecque”) for the expenditure of cuckoldry, which maintains a masculinist homosocial economy. The text thus begins by juxtaposing three parallel domains: the proper maintenance of the kingdom; the fecundity of the population that the enlightened prince must learn to manage; and the domestic economy of the household, which must be managed properly by the good husband. Panurge turns the imperatives of all of these domains on their heads. After the long and paradoxical defense and illustration of the practice of contracting debts, Panurge arrives at the end point of his ruminations: the body itself, which he describes as a conglomerate of debtor-creditor relationships among the organs. Panurge’s harangue concludes with a parodic re-inscription of what Demerson recognizes as the Hippocratic theory of the generation of sperm (106, note 20): A ceste fin chascun membre du plus precieux de son nourrissement decide et roigne une portion et la renvoye en bas : nature y a praeparé vases et receptacles opportuns, par les quelz descendent es genitoires en longs ambages et flexuositez, reçoit forme competente, et trouve lieux idoines, tant en l’home comme en la femme, pour conserver et perpetuer le genre humain. Se faict le tout par prest et debtes de l’un à l’autre : dont est dict le debvoir de mariage (367). [To this end each member cuts and clips off a portion of the most precious part of its nourishment and sends it back down below; there Nature has prepared opportune vessels and receptacles for it, by which, flowing down to the genitals through long roundabout windings, it receives adequate form and finds suitable places, in man just as in woman, to preserve and perpetuate the human race. The whole thing is done by loans and debts from one to another; therefore, it is called the duty or debt of marriage (273).]

12 François Rabelais, Le Tiers Livre, ed. Guy Demerson (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997), 82, n. 22.

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The text consistently examines the body as an entity that is constituted by a metaphoric economic activity, which is appropriate to an imaginary in which both adultery and marriage are seen in terms of buying and selling, consuming the female body as good and commodity, and protecting it from being “stolen” by thieves. According to this quintessentially Rabelaisian logic, the other organs loan a portion of their nourishment to the genitals, which contract a debt that must be repaid. Hence the need to procreate and propagate the species that is at the heart of marriage becomes an economic duty that the partners must repay. While Rabelais’s mock description of marriage is perhaps little more than a rhetorical exercise, it nonetheless links two domains that are crucial to this social institution: the economic relation of creditor and debtor is transposed to the corporeal domain of sex and procreation, which in matrimony necessarily becomes a contractual relationship between families that is accomplished via women’s bodies, as we saw in our analysis of the Digest. This passage ends, however, with a learned joke that activates an intertext we have already examined: “Le debvoir de mariage” refers to the marital or conjugal “debt” that Saint Paul described in I Corinthians 7, which required that husbands and wives satisfy the desires of their mates in order to help them to avoid sin.13 It is evident that the private parts of the male anatomy as they are described in this text cannot be conceived of as things-in-themselves that function according to biological or logical principles. As we will see, the bonding episode of Frère Jean and Panurge centers on the seemingly infinite discursive epithets that can be applied to the male testicles or couillons, demonstrating that this literature is a protracted and obsessive verbal improvisation on a certain phallocentric idea of maleness. In other words, for Rabelais, the male testicles are transposed into multiple discursive domains as economic conduits or channels, subjective mirrors in which men see themselves reflected, structural lynch pins, and cornerstones of the patriarchal edifice of early-modern marriage. Moreover, the text expresses this polymorphous knowledge of male anatomy in relation to a millennial tradition of texts written about men’s bodies, which the male characters of this work continuously and increasingly reference in their discursive elaboration of themselves as masculine subjects. Panurge’s Braguette The most noteworthy symbol or embodiment of Rabelais’s masculinism is the braguette or codpiece. This “useful,” “comfortable,” and “dignified” part of men’s attire from the sixteenth century occupied a small if conspicuous part of Rabelais’s literary imagination. From the mock titles De la dignité des braguettes [On the Dignity of Codpieces] and De la commodité des longues braguettes [On the Comfort of Long Codpieces], mentioned in the prologue to Gargantua and in chapter XV of Pantagruel, to the florally decorated appendage that graces Gargantua’s adolescent garb in chapter VIII of Gargantua, to the signifying excesses of Panurge during his debate with Thaumaste, there is perhaps no more prominent element of clothing in 13 André Tournon reads this passage in relation both to medical discourse and to revolutionary developments in banking practices in Lyon. See “En sens agile”: Les acrobaties de l’esprit selon Rabelais (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1995), 42–6.

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the wardrobe of these characters.14 In Chapter XII of Gargantua, the young giant’s first attempts at using the contents of his braguette, and its subsequent decoration and naming by his governesses, are presented in stark contrast to the irony with which Rabelais expounds upon the meaning of the colors blue and white that Gargantua adopts as his own. The body of the Renaissance nobleman was a signifying medium meant to indicate the higher spiritual concerns of the person presented for public interpretation in or as that body.15 At the same time, in Rabelais, bodies meant to be read as masculine, such as that of Panurge, were often presented bearing signifiers of this gender that were essentially empty. In all of his manifestations, Panurge is essentially involved in processes of signification and interpretation, which at times use the codpiece as a medium of meaning, as in the débat par signes with Thaumaste in chapter 19 of Pantagruel. If the text is indeed “about” masculinity, this means that its signifying practices, especially those of its anti-protagonist, represent some of the key concepts of the masculine gender, primary among which is the idea of the male body and its anatomy as they are detailed in a certain kind of speculative discourse. What becomes of a man if he marries? To what use should he put his own body, especially its privileged member, in the fulfillment of his marital and social duties, and in the payment of the marital “debt”? What place does the male body occupy in a political, philosophical, juridical, medical, geographic, and cosmic hierarchy? The text engages these primary questions from its opening chapters, describing Panurge’s engagement on both sides of the interpretative equation: he is a character who is actively involved in (bad) interpretations of the diverse kinds of signs and portents that he elicits from his more serious companion, Pantagruel; on the other hand, he is also concerned with transforming his own body into a signifying object. Just as he bungles his way through the prognostications of his impending marriage, so does he make a mess of the vestimentary allegory that he wants to construct for himself before embarking on his quest for knowledge of his future fate as a married man.16 Rabelais, however, presents us with an enigma with Panurge’s sudden change of costume in chapter 7. Why would the character remove his codpiece precisely at the moment when he is preparing to become a “complete” man by marrying? The answer to this question is very complex, and must be presented in stages. Let us begin with Panurge’s initial decision to change his attire:

14 For a complete description of the braguette’s role in men’s clothing during the Renaissance, see Jeff Persels, “Bragueta Humanistica: Humanism’s Codpiece,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 1997, Spring 28(1), 79–99. 15 See Daniel Russell, “Panurge and His New Clothes,” Études Rabelaisiennes XIV (1977), 89–104. “Among the powerful, governing nobility this tendency to read rank, quality, or personal attitudes into the style, color and material of a person’s clothing was often consciously and aggressively exploited in an effort to create a favorable public image through juxtapositional association often known as convenientia” (92). A long list of works and critical texts on this subject could be cited, ranging from Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano, to Chapters 8–10 of Rabelais’s Gargantua, to Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning. 16 Michel Jeanneret comments on Panurge’s inadequacy to the task of presenting himself as a legible object in “La Sémiotique sauvage de Panurge,” Études Rabelaisiennes XXXIII (1998), 339–47.

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[Panurge] print quatre aulnes de bureau : s’en accoustra comme d’une robbe longue à simple cousture : desista porter le hault de ses chausses : et attacha des lunettes à son bonnet. En tel estat se praesenta davant Pantagruel : lequel trouva le desguisement estrange, mesmement ne voyant plus sa belle et magnificque braguette, en laquelle il souloit comme en l’ancre sacre constituer son dernier refuge contre tous naufraiges d’adversité (372). [[Panurge] took four ells of bureau; dressed himself in it as a long gown with a single closure; left off wearing his breeches; and attached spectacles to his bonnet. In such a state he presented himself to Pantagruel, who found the disguise strange, especially no longer seeing his lovely magnificent codpiece, in which, as in a holy anchor, he was wont to constitute his last refuge against all shipwrecks of adversity (277).]

The semantic dissonance produced by this shift may be read in many ways, as Daniel Russell does in his interpretation. By adopting his new outfit, Panurge wants to signify that he is a “bon mesnaiger,” and hence that he is prepared for marriage, since, as we have already noted, a ménager is essentially in charge of the ménage, that is, the domicile of the marriage as it was defined by the Digest. By choosing bureau [burlap] as the fabric of his toga, Panurge wants to signify his thriftiness as he prepares to contract marriage, since the name of this material is also a pun on the place where accounts were calculated and books were kept.17 There are, however, two elements of Panurge in this brief description that connect him explicitly to the cuckold character. Most of the scholars who have read this passage fail to remark, while all of Rabelais’s readers would have recognized, that the glasses on top of his head signify that Panurge is the grotesque figure of the cuckold/fool who was the butt of all jokes in carnival celebrations and in the chevauchées or parades that were put on by what Natalie Zemon-Davis has called the “Abbeys of Misrule.”18 Claude Gaignebet has moreover assembled a convincing set of graphic evidence indicating that the glasses on top of the fool’s cap were in fact a late substitution for the phallus that previously was placed there.19 Gaignebet comments on Panurge’s attire as follows: Au XVIe siècle, les lunettes, par paires, remplacent, sur les bonnets de clercs de la Basoche, le phallus. Les clercs n’ont abandonné ni le chat favori, perché sur les épaules, qui les réchauffe dans les études glaciales, ni l’encrier et l’étui à plumes pendus à la ceinture. La tenue de Panurge lorsqu’il commence la Quête de la Bouteille, lunettes au bonnet et vétu de toile bureau (à son bureau), rappelle toutes ces caractéristiques des Basochiens (A plus hault sens II :216). 17 “Not only does its [bureau’s] cheapness connote thrift, but, through the punning resonances of the word, it also comes to symbolize his design to become a ‘grand mesnaiger’ in yet another way. Bureau was the material which covered the tables at which accounts were established, and at about this time, it was also coming to refer, by extension, to the table itself” (Russell, “Panurge and His New Clothes,” 96). 18 Natalie Zemon-Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), Chapter 4, “The Reasons of Misrule,” 97–123. 19 See Claude Gaignebet, A plus hault sens: l’ésotérisme spirituel et charnel de Rabelais (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1986), vol. II, 213–16, for images of the phallic fool’s cap that was modified to include a pair of glasses, which appears notably in an engraving of the feast of fools by Pieter Brueghel.

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Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature [In the sixteenth century, the glasses, by pairs, replace the phallus on the caps of the clerks of Basoche. The clerks abandoned neither their favorite cat, perched on their shoulders, that kept them warm in their frigid studies, nor the inkwell and the quill cases hung on their belts. Panurge’s outfit when he commences his Quest for the Bottle, with his glasses on his cap and dressed in bureau, recalls all of these characteristics of the Basochians.]

This means, then, that the glasses were a highly ambivalent symbol that signified masculinity in at least two intriguing ways. The phallic obsessions that we just examined, figured in the codpiece, were also present in the glasses. Moreover, as we saw in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, the cuckold is an obsessive reader and collector of stories about the ways women deceive their husbands, which is a masculinist literary tradition that dates back to Classical Antiquity and beyond, and was propagated by the class of clerks that Gaignebet describes. Here the glasses indicate a character who is devoted to “keeping the books” on his domestic economy. Moreover, they suggest the cuckold’s visual obsession, meaning that he has to keep a watchful eye on his wife’s activities, his head buried in books that will tell him what his wife might do to deceive him. Like his earlier avatars, Panurge as cuckold is presented with abundant evidence of the phantom infidelities of his still non-existent wife, which he is unable or unwilling to recognize, a blindness that is once again figured in the detail of the glasses worn permanently on the top of his hat. By removing his “magnificent” braguette, Panurge does two things: he refuses essentially to be a “real man” in any recognizable sense for the male readers of this period, and becomes the comic, hybrid, and ridiculous figure that we know so well from the nouvelle literature. Even though the braguette itself is nothing but a parodic marker in much of Rabelais, both the wearing of it and its removal highlight the artificial and constructed nature of the male gender in this context. The radical transformation of Panurge’s body as public signifier makes sense only in reference to a semiotic system that is wholly devoted to the definition of masculinity as an intertextual and interpretative practice, concerned with reading and manipulating different kinds of discourse as the basis of its performance.20 In its earliest chapters, the Tiers Livre implicitly investigates the intersection of these diverse elements of masculinity. In the comic imagination, the battlefield and the bedroom were two primary reference points in the construction of masculine subjectivity within domestic and public space. From the masculinist perspective of this period, men had to place not only women under permanent surveillance, but also other men, especially as their identities were constructed relative to these two points of orientation. Hence, as Gargantua makes clear, one of the most important questions for men in this context was the following: how can a nobleman be properly prepared for going to war? The Tiers Livre asks the complementary question, which was also that of the cuckold, and was apparently much more problematic: can a man be properly prepared for marriage? These questions became especially difficult when they both had to be answered at the same time. Chapter VI of Rabelais’s text offers an ironic comment on the junction of the domains of matrimony and warfare, which in the minds of Renaissance men were intimately linked. Following its format 20 On the centrality of types of discourse to the development of the Tiers Livre, see Richard Regosin, “Opening Discourse,” in Jean-Claude Carron, ed., François Rabelais: Critical Assessments (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 133–47.

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as a series of responses to mock rhetorical questions, the chapter begins with the promise to explain “Pourquoy les nouveaulx mariez estoient exemptz d’aller en guerre” (369) [“Why newlyweds were exempt from going to war” (275)]. As we have come to expect, the positive and negative responses to this sentence correspond to Pantagruel and Panurge. The “Humanist” explanation, then, is the following: —Scelon mon jugement (respondit Pantagruel) c’estoit, affin que pour la premiere année, ilz jouissent de leurs amours à plaisir, vacassent à production de lignage, et feissent provision de heritiers. Ainsi pour le moins, si l’année seconde estoient en guerre occis, leur nom et armes restast en leurs enfans (370). [“In my judgment,” replied Pantagruel, “it was so that for the first year they should enjoy their loves at their pleasure, keep busy in the production of lineage, and make provision of heirs. Thus, at the least, if in the second year they were killed in war, their name and coat of arms would remain in their children” (275).]

The serious purpose of marriage receives here its most canonical expression, which will be repeated at the end of the work in the form of Gargantua’s paternal injunction to his son: men and women married for the sake of continuing their heritage through procreation, which means that sex and pleasure for them were completely incorporated into the official structure of economic exchange and its functioning, such that the “proper” usage of the male member should be confined to a man’s marriage for the sake of having children. While Panurge’s response seemingly flips Pantagruel’s argument on its head, it nevertheless situates the male body upon a grid of practices that constitute a certain performance of masculinity: Je trouve vostre raison bonne et bien fondée. Mais que diriez vous, si ceste exemption leurs estoit oultroyée, pour raison que tout le decours d’icelle prime année, ilz auroient tant taloché leurs amours de nouveau possedez, (comme c’est l’aequité et debvoir) et tant esgoutté leurs vases spermaticques, qu’ilz en restoient tous effilez, tous evirez, tous enervez, et flatriz ? Si que advenent le jour de bataille plus tost se mettroient au plongeon comme canes, avecques le baguaige, que avecques les combatans et vaillans champions on lieu on quel par Enyo est meu le hourd, et sont les coups departiz. Et soubs lestandart de Mars ne frapperoient coup qui vaille. Car les grands coups auroient ruez soubs les courtines de Venus s’amie (370). [I think your reason is sound and well founded. But what would you say if this exemption were granted them for the reason that, in the course of this first year, they would have thumped their newly-won ladyloves so roundly (as is their rightful debt and duty), and so drained their spermatic vessels, that it left them all bedraggled, all unmanned, all enervated and drooping, so that when the day of battle came they would sooner take a dive like ducks than stand up with the fighters and valiant champions in the place where Enyo stirs the mêlée and the blows are handed out, and under the banner of Mars that would not strike one blow worthy of the name? For the great blows would have landed under the bed-curtains of his ladylove Venus (276).]

Here Panurge cites a stereotypical correspondence that was an integral part of the masculine mind of the Renaissance: a noble man’s primary activities were to know how to make war and to make love. Rabelais hence reactivates an ancient topos

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that his learned contemporaries would have recognized immediately, i.e., that of the Homeric juxtaposition of Mars and Venus as lovers, with the god of war being weakened by his relationship with “the laughing goddess.” This mythological reference is, however, merely a re-transcription of a comic figure that was present throughout the literature of the Middle Ages, which we saw repeatedly in the last chapter. Within this textual tradition, the bedroom was a metaphorical battlefield, and a certain kind of man had to know how to save his strength for the latter by not indulging in the excesses of the former. The transcription and transmission of this intertextual figure by men was an integral part of the performance of their gender throughout the Renaissance. Another puzzling question remains, however: why would a character who previously was so “invested” in his codpiece, and whose very identity seems to have depended upon the equation of his being with this artificial appendage, have decided not to wear it any longer at the same time that he pronounced a sophisticated encomium to its importance as part of a man’s military armor? It could be that the simple catalyst of a statement made by Panurge at the end of chapter 7—“la braguette est premiere piece de harnoys pour armer l’home de guerre” (373) [“the codpiece is the first piece of the harness to arm the warrior” (279)]—generates a verbal improvisation in which Rabelais produces a taxonomy and cosmography, written in imitation of Galen, on the importance of codpieces in nature, which quickly becomes a parodic revision of the Genesis story of the Fall of Man. Duval has remarked that here Panurge’s paradoxical praise of codpieces is based upon Erasmus’s comment on the maxim Dulce bellum inexpertis in the Adagia (The Design, 53). Within the procedures of these multiple references, the book once again displays the extent to which the male member, and the visible sign in which it was encased, were the generative figures for masculinity’s development as an essentially discursive, hermeneutic, and intertextual phenomenon. In other words, a certain mode of reading and writing that characterized the Renaissance was virtually inconceivable without the concept of masculinity, and vice versa. This is perhaps the most extreme consequence of the thesis that I am defending here, which is most radically evident in the Tiers Livre: among all of its material manifestations, Renaissance masculinity for a wide range of literate men existed most authentically in a specific mode of reading, writing, and speaking. Returning, then, to Panurge’s original transformation of his outward appearance as a man, the character announces his intention to marry as follows: Au lendemain Panurge se feit perser l’aureille dextre à la Judaique, et y atacha un petit anneau d’or à ouvrage de tauchie, on caston duquel estoit une pusse enchassée. Et estoit la pusse noire, affin que de rien ne doubtez. C’est belle chose, estre en tous cas bien informé. La despence de laquelle raportée à son bureau ne montoit par quartier gueres plus que le mariage d’une Tigresse Hircanicque, comme vous pourriez dire .600 000. malvedis. De tant excessive despence se fascha lors qu’il feut quitte, et depuis la nourrit en la façon des tyrans et advocatz, de la sueur et du sang de ses subjectz. Print quatre aulnes de bureau : s’en accoustra comme d’une robbe longue à simple cousture : desista porter le hault de ses chausses : et attacha des lunettes à son bonnet. En tel estat se praesenta davant Pantagruel : lequel trouva le desguisement estrange, mesmement ne voyant plus sa belle et magnificque braguette, en laquelle il souloit comme en l’ancre sacre constituer

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son dernier refuge contre tous naufraiges d’adversité. N’entendent le bon Pantagruel ce mystere, le interrogea demandant que praetendoit ceste nouvelle prosopopée. « J’ai (respondit Panurge) la pusse en l’aureille. Je me veulx marier » (371–2). [On the morrow Panurge had his ear pierced Judaic style and fastened in it a little gold ring with silver thread inlay, in the bezel of which was set a flea. And the flea was black, so that you may have no doubt about anything (it’s a fine thing to be well informed in every case), the expense for which, as reported to his bureau, each quarter amounted to hardly more than the marriage of one Hyrcanian tigress, as you might say 600,000 maravédis. At such excessive expenditure he grew angry when he was quit, and afterward fed it in the fashion of tyrants and attorneys: on the sweat and blood of his subjects. He took four ells of bureau; dressed himself in it as a long gown with a single closure; left off wearing his breeches; and attached spectacles to his bonnet. In such a state he presented himself to Pantagruel, who found the disguise strange, especially no longer seeing his lovely magnificent codpiece, in which, as in a holy anchor, he was wont to constitute his last refuge against all shipwrecks of adversity. Since the good Pantagruel did not understand this mystery, he questioned him, asking what this new disguise meant. “I have a flea in my ear,” said Panurge. “I want to get married” (277).]

At the beginning of this passage, the narrator ironically casts doubt on the idea that the meaning of this particular detail of the character’s costume, the “puce en l’oreille” [“flea in his ear”], is perfectly clear to his readers; nevertheless, scholars working in our era have managed to unpack what this peculiar emblem must have meant to male readers of the period. Once again, Rabelais’s irony concerning knowledge that was apparently obvious to his male readers signals a kind of homosocial bonding that is a constant feature of this text. This single emblem concentrates within itself some of the most important attributes of masculinity, which were already announced in the opening chapters of the work. Panurge’s announcement of his intention to marry is crystallized in the figure of the hyperbolically expensive gold earring with its embedded black flea, which he wears as a symbol of his desire to transform his status as a man. Secondly, according to many scholars, the black flea inlaid in the gold earring that Panurge decides to wear from this point forward is an iconographic representation of the problematic relation that obtains between physical desire and the institution of marriage. The meaning of the proverbial expression “avoir la puce à l’oreille” [“to have a flea in one’s ear”] in Rabelais’s historical context has been explained in detail by Daniel Russell,21 and is commented upon by Demerson in his 21 “In short, Panurge’s ‘pusse en l’aureille’ would seem to be a sign both of his sexual desire and of an accompanying uneasiness or anxiety. The piercing of his ear ‘à la Judaique’ is a sign of perpetual servitude, but also of voluntary servitude. And I see no satisfying way of choosing any one possible rebus-reading of the complex sign in preference to another. But as a device, it does contain some message about Panurge. Perhaps the reader should simply refrain from choosing and let the various resonances of this complex image all remain in play. Then one begins to see a prefigurement of the dilemma which dominates Panurge’s quest in the Tiers Livre, the dilemma which results from the combination of Panurge’s sexual desire with his uneasiness, anxiety or fear. The mixture of anxiety and desire has led him to accept, in principle, the servitude of marriage, but he hesitates before the act because of a counterbalancing uneasiness which is also related to cuckoldry. A circular dilemma takes shape as the fear of he who cuckolds is replaced by the fear of he who is susceptible to being

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notes as follows: “...au 16e siècle, avoir la puce à l’oreille signifiait être obsédé de désirs sexuels; Panurge déclare donc emblématiquement qu’il est serviteur de sa concupiscence” (118, note 1) [“In the sixteenth century, having a flea in one’s ear signified being obsessed by sexual desires; Panurge thus declares emblematically that he is the servant of his concupiscence”]. Mireille Huchon describes the visual “rebus” of the flea in a similar manner (1382). Fascinatingly, then, the gold earring with its black flea is a popular proverb that becomes an actual object that Panurge wears as a visual signifier of his condition. Throughout the literature we have been examining, men have to make themselves visible to other men in a form that can be recognized as signifying masculinity. More importantly, the character constructs his public identity as a visual text that can and must be read by other men, both for the sake of his own marital project, and for the sake of bonding with the other men who will supply answers to his fundamental question concerning the masculine subject role he is called upon to play in the social realm. Panurge’s harangue in response to Pantagruel’s query provides evidence of the mediation of his gender through speculative descriptions of the male anatomy and its place in the larger cosmos. In the historically specific, intertextual version of the universe that Panurge evokes, (a certain idea of) the male member is the source of all activity and the principle of its organization. As in the first apologia to contracting debts, in the second paradoxical encomium of codpieces as the primary element in male armor, the penis and the testicles assume an inordinate importance that takes the form of a hyperbolic catalogue. As we have already seen, the conclusion of the earlier speech is the pun on the idea of the duty or debt (devoir) of marriage, which Rabelais plays upon by substituting the monetary sense for the moral one: the duty that a man has to pay after he is married is, in Panurge’s upside-down world, a debt that he has contracted through his extravagant expenditures, and a physical, genital necessity, rather than a moral obligation that he owes to his spouse. What we have not remarked in the earlier speech is his comment on the medical properties of la sauce verte [green sauce], which foreshadows so many other catalogues that will appear in the work, and echoes similar enumerations from the earlier works. Panurge subjects the proverbial expression “manger son bled en herbe” [“eating wheat in the blade”] that opens the chapter to a series of variations, one of which puns on the notion of the greenness of the still sprouting wheat that has yet to be harvested: De bled en herbe vous faictez belle saulce verde, de legiere concoction : de facile digestion. Laquelle vous esbanoist le cerveau, esbaudist les espritz animaulx, resjouist la veue, ouvre l’appetit, delecte le goust, assere le cœur, chatouille la langue, faict le tainct clair, fortifie les muscles, tempere le sang, alliege le diaphragme, refraischist le foye, desoppile la ratelle, soulaige les roignons, assouplist les reins, desgourdist les spondyles, vuide les ureteres, dilate les vases spermaticques, abbrevie les cremasteres, expurge la vessie, enfle les genitoires, corrige le prepuce, incruste le balane, rectifie le membre : vous faict bon ventre, bien rotter, vessir, peder, fianter, uriner, esternuer, sangloutir, toussir, cracher, vomiter, baisler, mouscher, haleiner, inspirer, respirer, ronfler, suer, dresser le virolet, et mille autres rares advantages (359–60). cuckolded.” Daniel Russell, “A Note on Panurge’s ‘pusse en l’oreille,’” Études rabelaisiennes XI (1974), 83–7, here 87. Cf. Reeser, Moderating Masculinity, 140–41.

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[From wheat in the blade you make nice green sauce, simple to concoct and easy to digest, which refreshes your brain, cheers your animal spirits, rejoices your sight, opens up your appetite, delights your taste, fortifies your heart, tickles your tongue, brightens your color, strengthens your muscles, tempers your blood, revives your diaphragm, freshens your liver, unstops your spleen, relieves your kidneys, purges your bladder, lulls your loins, limbers up your vertebrae, empties your ureters, dilates your spermatic vessels, tightens up your cremasters, cleans out your bladder, fills up your genitals, straightens your foreskin, encrusts your gland, erects your member, gives you a good belly, makes you do things well: belch, fizzle, fart, shit, urinate, sneeze, sob, cough, spit, vomit, yawn, blow your nose, puff, inhale, breathe, snore, sweat, get your pecker up, and myriad other rare advantages (266).]

Rabelais might be called the poet of purgation, since large sections of his text contain verbal improvisations of this kind that are inspired by medical discourse (we remember that the Tiers Livre is signed by “François Rabelais, Docteur en Médecine”). Although it included numerous advances with respect to its medieval counterpart, Renaissance medicine still had little at its disposal beyond a control of the patient’s diet that was usually intended to effect different kinds of purgation and evacuation.22 This practice generated a discursive domain that was richly exploited for metaphorical purposes by all of the important Evangelical writers of the period, including Erasmus and Luther.23 Rabelais is among this group, which means that the poetics of evacuation perhaps should be read allegorically, as Duval and Persels have. What has not been remarked, however, in reference to these particular passages is the importance of the male member in them. Specifically, these sequences associate urination with the image of the erect male member, which the text will later scandalously link to the idea of truth in interpretation. The culmination of Rabelais’s outrageous rhetorical exercises is often precisely the “carnivalesque” image of the erect phallus, the importance of which Gaignebet has examined at length. The preceding passage repeats this figure twice in two slightly different catalogues. The first is a series of verbs in the present tense with a corresponding list of organs that are the objects of these verbs, and which concludes with “enfle les genitoires, corrige le prepuce, incruste le balane, rectifie le membre.” The second is a series of infinitives which concludes with “dresser le virolet,” a euphemism for the male erection drawn from a military register (according to Cotgrave, a “virolet” is “an arrow-head… a sword with an indented edge… a piercer”). Panurge is a perfect embodiment of the extremes to which the masculinity that was characteristic of this literary context could be taken, since for him, in this passage and elsewhere, the male erection represents the end point of diverse types of activities (domestic, professional, medical, bellicose, scholarly, rhetorical), all of which use the figure of the phallus as a model for their culmination. I will explore a particularly striking 22 See my “Dr. Rabelais and the Medicine of Scatology” in Jeff Persels and Russell Ganim, eds. Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies in Scatology (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 24–37. 23 See Jeff Persels, “‘Straitened in the Bowels,’ or Concerning the Rabelaisian Trope of Defecation,” in Études Rabelaisiennes 31 (1996): 101–12.

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example of this phenomenon in detail later in this chapter. The second repetition of the phallic figure is in the praise of codpieces that is perhaps the most important part of Panurge’s response to Pantagruel’s query concerning his new uniform. If the first sequence concentrates on the “thing-initself” of the masculine imaginary, the second pronounces an extended meditation on the signification of its diverse external coverings in the masculinist cosmos. Chapter VIII, “Comment la braguette est premiere piece de harnois entre gens de guerre,” transcribes an extended false genealogy of the braguette as perhaps the ultimate signifier of warfare, and hence of its importance for the performance of masculinity. For Panurge, the removal of his braguette signifies at least two things: first, that he is rejecting the realm of Mars for that of Venus, since in his version of the world, the codpiece signifies the “arming” of the male body for war: “Je suis las de guerre : las des sages et hocquetons. J’ay les espaules toutes usées à force de porter harnois. Cessent les armes, regnent les Toges!” (373). [“I’m tired of war, tired of buff coats and foot soldiers’ cassocks. My shoulders are all worn down from wearing harness. Farewell arms, hail togas!” (278)]. As Huchon informs us, “cessent les armes, regnent les Toges” cites the “célèbre exclamation par laquelle Cicéron, De officiis, I, xxii, 77, appelle de ses vœux la prééminence de la paix sur la guerre” (1383 n. 5) [“the famous exclamation by which Cicero, in the De officiis, I, xxii, 77, expresses the preeminence of peace over war”]. Secondly, the braguette’s elimination and Panurge’s donning of burlap also mean that he is “burning with desire” to have sex with his hypothetical wife, which repeats the concupiscence motif figured in the gold-encrusted black flea: “Voiez vous ce bureau? Croiez qu’en luy consiste quelque occulte proprieté à peu de gens congneue. Je ne l’ay prins qu’à ce matin, mais desjà j’endesve, je deguene, je grezille d’estre marié, et labourer en diable bur dessus ma femme, sans craincte des coups de baston” (373). [“Do you see this bureau ? Believe me, in it consists some occult quality known to few people. I put it on only this morning, but already I’m wild, I’m unsheathing, I’m sizzling to be married and go to work like a brown devil upon my wife, with no fear of sticks or a beating” (278).] As we have already seen, the fabric out of which Panurge makes his new clothes is a reference to three things at once: first, the idea of accounting and money, which is reactivated here in the claim that as a married man Panurge will be a “grand ménager” [“great householder”]; second, it also recalls the series of debauched Franciscan monks whose antics are prominently figured in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, since bureau was their official uniform; thirdly, the form of his new vestments is an allusion to Classical Antiquity, which is crystallized in the citation of Cicero. Rabelaisian hybridity thus operates simultaneously at least on these three different levels: consistent and constant allusions to the work’s own development; a profound engagement with the comic legacy of the vernacular comic literature of the late Middle Ages; and an equally profound reactivation of Classical literature from Antiquity. The opposition between Mars and Venus, war and peace, belligerence and domesticated sexual desire continues, then, in the parodic cosmology that outlines the genealogy of the braguette as a part of masculine armament. Within this warped version of the universe, Panurge establishes a parallel between the way in which nature “arms” the generative parts of plants and the human “arming” of the male genitals with the codpiece in the postlapsarian world. The idea of the bodily passage

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of “wealth” from generation to generation that we examined in the opening chapters is repeated here in yet another hyperbolic catalogue: Voyez comment nature voulent les plantes, arbres, arbrisseaulx, herbes, et Zoophytes une fois par elle créez, perpetuer et durer en toute succession de temps, sans jamais deperir les especes, encores que les individus perissent, curieusement arma leurs germes et semences, es quelles consiste icelle perpetuité, et les a muniz et couvers par admirable industrie de gousses, vagines, testz, noyaulx, calicules, coques, espiz, pappes, escorces, echines poignans : qui leurs sont comme belles et fortes braguettes naturelles. L’exemple y est manifeste en Poix, Febves, Faseolz, Noix, Alberges, Cotton, Colocynthes, Bleds, Pavot, Citrons, Chastaignes : toutes plantes generalement. Es quelles voyons apertement le germe et la semence plus estre couverte, munie, et armée, qu’autre partie d’icelles. Ainsi ne pourveut nature à la perpetuité de l’humain genre. Ains crea l’home nud, tendre, fragile, sans armes ne offensives, ne defensives, en estat d’innocence et premier aage d’or, comme animant, non plante : comme animant (diz je) né à paix non à guerre : animant né à jouissance mirificque de tous fruictz et plantes vegetables, animant né à domination pacificque sus toutes bestes. Advenent la multiplication de malice entre les humains en succession de l’aage de fer, et regne de Juppiter, la terre commença à produire Orties, Chardons, Espines, et telle autre maniere de rebellion contre l’home entre les vegetables : d’autre part, presque tous animaulx par fatale disposition se emanciperent de luy, et ensemble tacitement conspirerent plus ne le servir, plus ne luy obeir, en tant que resister pourroient, mais luy nuire scelon leur faculté et puissance. L’home adoncques voulent sa premiere jouissance maintenir et sa premiere domination continuer : non aussi povant soy commodement passer du service de plusieurs animaulx, eut necessité soy armer de nouveau (374–5). [See how nature, wanting to perpetuate and continue to all successive ages the plants, trees, shrubs, herbs, and zoophytes once created by her without the species dying out, even though the individuals perish, carefully armed their germs and seeds, in which this perpetuity consists, and protected and covered them, by admirable ingenuity, with husks, sheaths, hulls, pits, tiny skins, shells, ears down, bark, prickly spines, which are for them like fair strong natural codpieces. Examples are manifest in peas, beans, string beans, walnuts, clingstone peaches, cotton, colocynths, wheats, poppies, lemons, chestnuts, generally all plants in which we clearly see that the germ and seed is more covered, protected, and armed than any other part of them. Not thus did nature provide for the perpetuation of the human race, but created man naked, tender, fragile without either offensive or defensive arms, in a state of innocence and original golden age, as an animal, not a plant, as an animal, I say, born to peace not to war, an animal born to wondrous enjoyment of all fruits and vegetal plants, an animal born to peaceful domination over all beasts. When there came the multiplication of malice among humans that succeeded the iron age and Jupiter’s reign, the earth began to produce nettles, thistles, thorns, and such other kinds of rebellion among vegetables against man; moreover, almost all the animals, by fated disposition, emancipated themselves from man and tacitly conspired together to serve him no more, obey him no longer in so far as they could resist, but harm him acording to their capacity and power.

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Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature Thereupon man, wanting to maintain his original enjoyment and continue his original domination, also being unable conveniently to do without the service of several animals, had the need to arm himself anew (279–80).]

Despite the fact that humans here supposedly imitate nature, men are the model for the way in which nature “arms” itself for the sake of its continuation from generation to generation. This passage activates an extensive metaphorical field that catalogues numerous analogous objects for both the genitals and the “natural” codpieces with which nature shields them from predators. In this sense, Renaissance thought seems to have conceived of the natural realm as a world of ideas that reproduced or represented men’s relations to their own anatomy, which was inevitably mediated by masculinity as an intertextual, conceptual matrix. Curiously, according to this account, the prelapsarian world of human innocence and nakedness already exhibited the defensive strategies that were typical of mankind’s condition after the Fall. Typically, for Panurge, the point of intersection between the human and natural realms is to be found in the genitalia. If we consider Rabelais as one of the champions of Renaissance humanism, the definition of the human in this passage is essential to an understanding of his work. This type of Evangelical humanism exhibits a powerful nostaliga for an idyllic origin that is part of the Judeo-Christian imaginary, but the experience of which is to be had only in the pages of the sacred book. Since the “normal” (if not the “natural”) condition of men is to be constantly at odds with one another, this peaceful place in which the male member did not require protection could only be a fantasy world of “admirable” pleasure and pleasurable dominance. Humanism is hence partly the desire for this fantasy, at the same time that it is a recognition that what constitutes the human is precisely the “malice” that ended the naked jouissance of the Garden. As a result of this primordial malevolence, the vegetable world that was the source of infinite pleasure sprouted prickly, phallic objects, which necessitated the arming of the male body as a means of continuing man’s domination and pleasure within nature. Beyond its nostalgia, this depiction of nature is also a kind of masculinist pornography, in the sense that it conceives of the world and its history in terms of genitalia, their protection, the means of their penetration, and the domination of other bodies as the ultimate, theologically-sanctioned pleasure. This version of nature’s pre-history and golden age is an integral part of patriarchy, and the innumerable texts in which it has been transmitted to us constitute an intertextual corpus in which masculinity as a hegemonic concept was continuously being elaborated and reinforced. The fact that Panurge feels compelled to tell precisely this story as an explanation of his own body as it is presented in external signs that must be read and understood by another man to whom he presents himself signifies eloquently enough that his gender is mediated precisely by the telling and retelling of this kind of foundational, masculinist myth. For men throughout the course of centuries, the story of the human was this way of conceptualizing the male body within a textually transmitted version of nature and the cosmos, which transposed masculinist homosocial relations to an imaginary conceptual realm that men accepted as the world itself. Panurge ends his harangue with a parody of Galen, which also makes reference to the Biblical story (here attributed to Moses) in which Adam covers his genitals with a fig leaf (Gen. III:7):

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Considerez (dist Panurge) comment nature l’inspira soy armer, et quelle partie de son corps il commença premier armer. Ce feut (par la vertus Dieu) la couille, et le bon messer Priapus, quand eut faict ne la pria plus. Ainsi nous le tesmoigne le capitaine et philosophe Hebrieu Moses, affermant qu’il se arma d’une brave et gualante braguette, faicte par moult belle invention de feueilles de figuier : les quelles sont naïvfes, et du tout commodes en dureté, incisure, frizure, pollisure, grandeur, couleur, odeur, vertus, et faculté pour couvrir et armer couilles… Doncques ne fauldra dorenavant dire, qui ne vouldra improprement parler, quand on envoyra le franc taulpin en guerre, « Saulve Tevot le pot au vin », c’est le cruon. Il fault dire, « Saulve Tevot le pot au laict », ce sont les couilles : departez tous les diables d’enfer. La teste perdue, ne perist que la persone : les couilles perdues, periroit toute humaine nature. C’est ce que meut le gualant Cl. Galen. lib. I. de spermate, à bravement conclure, que mieulx (c’est à dire moindre mal) seroit, poinct de coeur n’avoir, que poinct n’avoir de genitoires. Car là consiste comme en un sacre repositoire le germe conservatif de l’humain lignage. Et croieroys pour moins de cent francs, que ce sont les propres pierres, moyenans les quelles Deucalion et Pyrrha restituerent le genre humain aboly par le deluge Poëtique. C’est ce qui meut le vaillant Justinian lib. 4. de cagotis tollendis, à mettre summum bonum in braguibus et braguetis (375–6). [“Consider,” said Panurge, “how nature inspired him to arm himself, and what part of his body he first began to arm. By God’s power, it was his balls, And Priapus, that good signor, When he had done, asked her no more. Thus testifies the Hebrew captain and philosopher Moses, affirming that he armed himself with a fine gallant codpiece, by most lovely invention made of fig leaves, which are natural and completely suitable in stiffness, indentations, embossing, polish, size, color, odor, virtues, and ability to cover and arm ballocks… So henceforth we must not say, unless we want to speak improperly, when we send the franc-taupin off to war: ‘Stevie [Tevot], save the wine-pot,’ (that’s the noggin): we must say: ‘Stevie, save the milk-jug,’ that’s the balls, by all the devils in hell! The head lost, perishes only the person; the balls lost, would perish all human nature. That’s what impelled the gallant Cl. Galen, in Book I On sperm [De spermate], to conclude that it would be better (that is, less bad) to have no heart than to have no genitals. For there, as in a sacred repository, consists the preserving germ of the human line. And for less than a hundred francs I’d be ready to believe that those are the very stones of which Deucalion and Pyrrha restored the human race, abolished by the deluge fabled by the poets. That’s what led the valiant Justinian, in Book 4 De cagotis tollendis [On the elevation of hypocrites], to locate the supreme good in shorts and codpieces [summum bonum in braguibus et braguetis]” (280–81).]

The primacy of the male private parts in this imaginary textual realm serves as a model for the way in which masculinity works both as a generative concept and as a progression of material and hence intertextual manifestations. This process is authorized by a sacred text that represents key patriarchal figures (God, Adam, Moses), and is reinforced by a citation of a canonical text on the body’s functioning that was one of the unavoidable references of Renaissance medicine. While it could be argued that Rabelais’s text is “merely” parodic in this passage, and has no serious intentions beyond that of serving as a counter-example, it is nonetheless significant that Panurge’s declamations always venture into the same symbolic territory, i.e., that of the phallus and its varied materializations. From this perspective, the elements of Panurge’s comic harangue are telling. The

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first of these after the allusion to the Biblical text is the amplification of the image of the fig leaf as codpiece, which takes the form of a catalogue. This enumeration is also a categorization or a breaking down of the object into its constitutive material qualities: size, color, texture, hardness, odor, etc. Since the first part of the body that was “armed” by God himself was the penis (the text does not mention the covering of Eve’s private parts, which is a significant omission), Panurge takes another intertextual detour through Galen to proclaim that his citation of a popular proverb needs to be transformed so that it refers to the testicles (the pot au lait) and not to the head (the pot au vin). Remarkably, the deformation of the wine into milk here repeats two figures that were presented at the beginning of the text: Diogenes’ cask, which becomes an enological signifier in this text, activates the Bacchic theme that is a constant of Rabelais’s work, while the milk that here serves as a metaphor that becomes a metonym (milk=testicles=sperm), recalls the mother’s milk that transferred the wisdom of the prince to his subjects in chapter 1. Even in its parodic state, Latin as the authoritative language, which appears here in both serious and satirical titles, as well as mock citations, authorizes the burlesque proclamation of what is, for Panurge, the supreme good: the distillation of masculinity in the fantasy images, proverbs, intertextual references, and micro citations that focus obsessively on the male member and its role in propagation. The braguette hence functions as a multi-faceted symbol of the following elements of masculinity: a textually mediated relation of the masculine subject to his own anatomy; the attribution of primary importance to the functioning of this anatomy in the elaboration of social structures and their underlying myths; the development of intellectual and philosophical processes concerned with describing the material manifestations of texts that signify these functions, which men are required to transmit to one another and from generation to generation as part of the performance of their gender. Panurge’s Castration Complex Chapter 12 of the Tiers Livre, which presents the first in the series of methods by which Panurge attempts to know the truth of his future as a husband, describes conflicting interpretations of passages that Pantagruel has chosen at random from Virgil. After Pantagruel’s predictable interpretations of these (after the third passage, he proclaims: “Vous serez coqu, vous serez batu, vous serez desrobbé” (387) [“You will be a cuckold, you will be beaten, you will be robbed” (292)]), Panurge responds with a virulent tirade against the figure of the ultimate sexual predator, the protean Jupiter in his multiple metamorphoses as rapist: Il [Jupiter] pourroit cent et cent foys se transformer en Cycne, en Taureau, en Satyre, en Or, en Coqu, comme feist quand il depucella Juno sa Sœur : en Aigle, en Belier, en Pigeon, comme feist estant amoureux de la pucelle Phtie, laquelle demouroit en Aegie : en Feu, en Serpent, voire certes en Pusse, en Atomes Epicureicques, ou magistronostralement en secondes intentions. Je le vous grupperay au cruc. Et sçavez que luy feray? Cor bieu ce que feist Saturne au Ciel son pere. Senecque l’a de moy predict, et Lactance confirmé. Ce que Rhea feist à Athys. Je vous luy coupperay les couillons tout rasibus du cul. Il ne s’en fauldra un pelet. Par ceste raison ne sera il jamais Pape, car testiculos non habet (386).

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[He [Jupiter] might transform himself a hundred and another hundred times into a swan, a bull, a satyr, into gold, into a cuckold [“cuckoo” would be better here], as he did when he deflowered his sister Juno, into an eagle, into a ram, into a pigeon, as he did when he was in love with the maiden Phthia, who lived in Aegium; into fire, into a snake, indeed into a flea, into Epicurean atoms, or magistronostrally into second intentions. I’ll hook him with my crook. And do you know what I’ll do to him? ‘Odsbody! what Saturn did to his father Heaven, Uranus (Seneca has predicted it of me and Lactantius confirmed it): what Rhea did to Atys. I’ll up and cut his balls off right flush with his tail, not a hair’s breadth less. For that reason he will never be pope, for he has no testicles (291).]

Panurge’s dread of figurative castration assumes Olympian proportions here as the violent threat to castrate any offending male who tries to cuckold him. The character thus incarnates one of the primary variations of the cuckold figure, present throughout the voluminous literature devoted to the subject of adultery: when he is not being abused as the butt of other people’s jokes, the cuckold is intent upon castrating his rivals. As we saw in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, violent vengeance against sexual transgressors often involves literal castration in the serious variants of the cuckold tale. The rival of Panurge as potential or probable cuckold here is a formidable one, since the figure of the male predator is apotheosized here. As Jeanneret has pointed out, “Selon le Tiers Livre, Jupiter « belina (saillit comme un bélier) la tierce partie du monde, bestes et gens, fleuves et montaignes » (Chap. 12): étrange vision du dieu devenu taureau qui, en violant la jeune fille, fait l’amour à un continent entier” (“La Sémiotique,” 342) [“According to the Tiers Livre, Jupiter ‘rammed (covered as a ram does) a third of the world, beasts and people, rivers and mountains’ (Chap. 12): this is a strange vision of the god as a bull who, in raping the young woman, makes love to an entire continent”]. Jupiter doesn’t “make love” here, he rapes Europa and every other nymph he can trap in his various guises. In these passages, the male becomes all things in order to violate the world, which becomes female for his increased pleasure. As in the cosmology we examined in the last section, this active, positive side of masculinity traverses the entire animal domain from reptiles, to mammals, to birds of prey, to insects. From the point of view of this masculinist imaginary, one is either on the giving end or on the receiving end of an indefatigable and primary male urge that figures the world in terms of its insatiable needs. Panurge’s reaction to threats from his imaginary rivals is of a violence that can be satisfied only by their complete emasculation, which is sometimes the case in stories of cuckold revenge. According to Jeanneret, this eruption of a mythological/animal violence in the text is evidence of a “savage semiotics” that is characteristic of Rabelais’s work, in which meaning escapes the control and intentions of the characters as well as those of the author himself, resulting in a “return of the repressed” that lends an “unsettling strangeness” to this text. In Jeanneret’s reading, which is based on Freud’s famous article on the uncanny, the problem of writing what one means, and having the reader interpret it correctly, which occupied Rabelais’s attention in his famously ambiguous prologue to Gargantua, and which is one of the major themes of the Tiers Livre, goes well beyond simple semantics. Jeanneret reads Panurge’s reaction here in terms of a dread of castration coupled with a complementary desire to castrate (“La Sémiotique,” 342). If we read the passage against the backdrop of a long tradition of adultery stories, however, it becomes evident that Panurge’s

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behavior is also consistent with the early-modern codified understanding of the cuckold figure, which comes to us essentially in literary texts. Panurge vacillates with his characteristic ambivalence between the two primary positions of the cuckold that I have already described. Rabelais rewrites the figure, however, in the codified language of the Renaissance, which required reinterpretations of standard characters in the identifiable disguises of Classical mythology. The cuckold in this context is thus both Rhea and Athys, both castrator and castrated, without necessarily representing an explosive return of the repressed. The masculine figures who populate Rabelais’s imaginary world ambulate among several subject positions that are predetermined for them by Church conventions, civil laws, literary traditions, and medical discourses concerning the functioning of their bodies. Thus while a psychoanalytic reading of Panurge’s evident “castration complex” is compelling, it addresses only a portion of the text’s significance, which unfolds in a vast intertext of stories about cuckoldry, complemented here by Rabelais’s grotesque version of Renaissance learning. The sheer number of references in the above passage is astounding, and takes the reader far beyond the domain of the psychoanalytical into the realm of an almost incomprehensible erudition, which generations of philologists have explicated for us. When he is faced with a dangerous situation, Panurge always takes refuge in word play and an almost aleatory series of references that work on a number of different levels. If we examine their structure in this passage, we arrive at some curious conclusions. The first segment of Jupiter’s transformations—swan, bull, satyr, gold, cuckoo—ends with the absurd figure of the bird whose name came to signify the cuckold himself. The series of the god’s violent conquests of female figures is abruptly overturned by the resonant “Coqu” at its end, which is associated with the incestuous relationship between Jupiter and Juno. Demerson comments on this passage as follows: “Jupiter se transforma en cou-cou parce qu’il n’osait « ouvertement demander à sa propre soeur de coucher avec elle » selon Conti; on sait qu’il se métamorphosa en aigle pour enlever le beau Ganymède” (156, note 18) [“Jupiter transformed himself into a cuckoo because he did not dare ‘openly to ask his own sister if he could sleep with her’ according to Conti; we also know that he was metamorphosed into an eagle in order to carry off the beautiful Ganymede”]. At this point, the text reaches the culminating moment when the figure of the rapacious patriarch is inverted at the end of the first mythological sequence with the word “Coqu,” which Frame translates as “cuckold,” but which would be better rendered here as “cuckoo,” the actual bird, famous for laying its eggs in other birds’ nests, and which, by means of an interesting comic transposition, gave its name to the figure of the betrayed husband. The rapacious male urge is thus another manifestation of the cuckold as buffoon, who masks his other personification as the castrating, murderous avenger. There are still other strange echoes and subtexts in this most complex of passages. During its third sequence, Panurge describes the potential transformations of Jupiter into a fire, a serpent, a flea, Epicurean atoms, and second intentions. The first striking detail of this enumeration is that of the flea, which recalls the beginning of Panurge’s own transformation, when he proclaimed to Pantagruel that he had “la pusse en l’aureille” (372). The flea in the earlier passage was a highly ambiguous and multiple

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sign that signified contradictory elements of Panurge’s character: the unbounded nature of his physical desires, which recalled those of the female figures from the Cent nouvelles nouvelles; his quest to find out whether or not he should marry, which transformed him into the ridiculous figure of the potential cuckold, and subjected him to a life of “voluntary servitude”; his wish to present himself in public as a “bon mesnaiger,” when in fact he was a character devoted to expenditure. In fact, in a maneuver of extraordinary subtlety, the juxtaposition of Zeus as a shower of gold and the flea repeats the rebus of Panurge’s gold earring that we discussed above. In a text full of emblematic structures, then, the flea is one of the most ambivalent ones, symbolizing the strange odyssey on which Panurge has embarked. Moreover, the flea is also embedded in an extraordinary phonemic play within the text: Jupiter first “dépucella Juno sa soeur,” then he was in love with “la pucelle Phthie,” before himself being transformed into a “puce.”24 It is apparently not fortuitous, then, that the flea is later re-introduced as one of the many manifestations of Jupiter as the omnipresent male urge that rapes everything in sight. Once again, Demerson informs us that Rabelais has deformed his mythological sources in this passage: “Le mythographe Giraldi termine ainsi la liste des métamorphoses de Jupiter: « Pour sortir des bornes de l’ignominie, il se transforma en une imperceptible petite fourmi afin de rendre mère en Thessalie Clytoris fille de Myrmidon »” (156, note 20) [“The mythographer Giraldi ends the list of Jupiter’s metamorphoses in this way: ‘in order to escape the bounds of ignominy, he transformed himself into an imperceptible little ant in order to inseminate in Thessaly Clitoris the daughter of Myrmidon’”]. The forcefulness of the patriarch’s desire traverses the entire animal realm, and enters the most hidden of spaces in the most unexpected forms. Rabelais transforms the ant of classical mythology to the emblem that is ripe with connotations within the symbolic world of his own work. Moreover, the subtext of this passage, as it is explicated by Demerson, reveals the object of desire that is normally hidden from the masculine gaze: the nymph Clytoris personifies the name that has been given to the female genitals, which are rarely mentioned in the texts on cuckoldry, with the exception of the third and forty-ninth of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, in which the female genitals are named simply as a woman’s “devant.” While Rabelais himself probably had no knowledge of this part of women’s anatomy, the intertext that his work activates consistently concerns a seductive, probing, secretive, rapacious, and one might even say genital relationship of men to women that is accentuated by Rabelais’s grotesque comic procedures.25

24 I wish to thank Tom Conley for pointing out these phonemic resonances to me. 25 Rabelais’s probable ignorance of the clitoris was pointed out to me by the external readers of Entre hommes, eds. Todd Reeser and Lewis Seifert (forthcoming: University of Delaware Press), whom I thank for their expertise. On the discursive difficulties of describing women’s genitals within what he calls the “one-sex model,” see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 96: “[In anatomical and medical discourses], there was in an important sense no female reproductive anatomy, and hence modern terms that refer to it—vagina, uterus, vulva, labia, Fallopian tubes, clitoris—cannot quite find their Renaissance equivalents.” See also Laqueur’s description of Renaldus Columbus’s “discovery” of the clitoris in 1559 on pages 64–6.

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In a Christian context, the serpent into which Jupiter was transformed before becoming a flea evokes the wiles of Eve in the garden, and hence women’s propensity to trick men, which is one of the topoi of the clerical literature. Just as the bull becomes a cuckoo, in another strange transformation the serpent becomes a flea, signifying a shift from one side of masculine subjectivity to its complementary half, from the dread of women’s wiles, to the secretive desire to probe their most secret parts. The fantastical male body assumes almost any form in order to project itself into the hidden regions of the space under its surveillance, especially when this space is the purely imaginary and referential one of the intertext. Faced with his polyvalent dread, desire, and condemnation of his image of woman, Panurge as masculine subject flees to the delectation of the abstract world of erudition, resulting in the masculinist homosocial game of quotation and interpretation in which he and Pantagruel engage throughout the Tiers Livre. Here the ubiquitous force of Jove’s desire is transformed, after all of its metamorphoses in Panurge’s discursive performance, into the abstract concept of the atoms, which Demerson informs us was a subject of debate among sixteenth-century scholars. Finally, Panurge refers to the minutiae of Scholastic thought by transforming the masculine urge into “second intentions,” which Demerson calls “des attributs accidentels de l’objet, donc des abstractions” (156, note 23) [“The accidental attributes of an object, thus abstractions”]. Mireille Huchon’s description is more precise: “Les secondes intentions, dans la logique scolastique, s’opposent aux premières « comme la pensée de la pensée d’un objet s’oppose à la pensée de cet objet »... (1265, note 5) [“In scholastic logic, second intentions are opposed to first intentions in the same way that ‘thought about the thought of an object is opposed to thought about that object itself’”]. In other words, the abstract subtext of Rabelais’s work might read as follows: masculinity is a function of the perception of gender difference, which is transposed into a millennial literary and mythological tradition that represents women to men’s minds. To use Huchon’s formula, masculine thinking about women’s bodies as objects of desire is “thought about the thought of an object,” which means that women as figures will always be displaced into the ever accumulating domain of masculinist texts and discourse. The polymorphic urge that manifests itself as masculinity exists within this unstoppable forking and reforking of words, which men in this context were called upon to produce in the performance of their gender. When faced with the threat that women will escape his control, Panurge retreats into this textual domain, while his discourse becomes a violent affirmation of himself as a virile male. As in this case, texts in the Renaissance often engage in this kind of configuration and propagation of masculinity, while conversely masculinity is or means this kind of textual practice. If masculinist thinking about women may be construed as a kind of “second intention” that is at least twice removed from what one might conceive of as the “real” feminine, male characters in Rabelais seem to refer to the male member as a thing in itself having the ambivalent characteristics to which I have already referred. Its virility must either be affirmed and boasted about, or the threatening virility of other men must be seized upon and excised brutally, as Panurge proclaims at the end of his tirade. The switch back to Latin at the end of the passage, with its explicit reference to the papacy, reveals that these primary and complementary aspects of masculinity

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are almost always displaced and detoured into a certain mode of textuality. In the hybridity of Rabelais’s text, the figures of mythological male patriarchs—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus—are conflated with that of the Catholic patriarch through the authoritative proclamation in Latin, testiculos non habet, which refers, as Demerson remarks, to the impossibility that a woman could assume this position of male authority (413). The possibility, the threat, and the reality of castration always exist for these characters, but only displaced into legend, discourse, stories, authoritative pronouncements, jokes, and blustering threats that never come to fruition. Ultimately, masculinity in the Renaissance entails this continuous displacement of an imaginary male anatomy into this potentially infinite intertext of stories about men and their relations to women. The Cuckold’s Horns as Cornucopiae The most ubiquitous and recognizable symbol of the cuckold is that of the animal horns that sprout from his forehead. By the time Rabelais wrote the Tiers Livre, this symbol was already so well-known and over-used that the author could barely avoid making reference to it. The work transforms the symbol, however, in the sense that the cuckold’s horns assume a much larger meaning that one might associate with the comic practices of public festivals. As Claude Gaignebet has amply demonstrated, the figure of the cuckold was at the center of popular feasts, notably that of Saint Blaise, which celebrated agricultural fecundity by displaying ancient phallic and anal symbols. From this point of view, the cuckold’s horns would be a substitute for and a kind of dream displacement away from the carnival image of the fool who celebrates the feast wearing a cap with an erect phallus strapped to it. As we have already seen, the newly-attired Panurge of the Tiers Livre is a clear reference to the fool as cuckold as he was represented iconographically in the public feasts. This image of the cuckold/fool that is synonymous with religious feast days is irreducibly ambivalent, combining the positive and negative elements that Bakhtin discerned in the carnivalesque, which I have also attributed to the cuckold throughout this study. The horned cuckold is also linked with the hoofed animals of agriculture and of the hunt, which means that in the Renaissance he is connected to the ancient story of Actaeon, transformed into a stag when he had unwittingly seen the goddess Diana naked. The cuckold is thus continuously hunted, berated, abused, and beaten, which is evident from his manifestations in popular festivals. In this sense, the horns on his head are also reminiscent of the ancient mythological beings, such as the centaurs, that were characterized by overabundant (masculine) drives, and were related to the cult of Dionysus. It could be, therefore, that the cuckold’s horns are also little phalluses sticking out of his forehead, which display his fecundity, as well as the idea that he is hunted and tracked by others, both male and female, since the cuckold is the butt of all jokes and abuse during festivals that honor him as a parodic “god.” Like Panurge with his “pusse en l’aureille,” the cuckold is a horny being, in the modern sense of the word, which means that his horns are also manifestations of an indefatigable drive toward a festive abundance. These diverse echoes and connotations of the cuckold figure may be examined

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in chapter 14 of the Tiers Livre, in which Panurge’s dream about his cuckold’s horns is subject to various interpretations. The figure of the horns is introduced in the first version of the dream, with Panurge describing its typical ambivalence: Elle [sa femme] ... me faisoit deux belles petites cornes au dessus du front. Je luy remonstroys en folliant qu’elle me les debvoit mettre au dessoubz des oeilz, pour mieulx veoir ce que j’en vouldroys ferir, affin que Momus ne trouvast en elle chose aulcune imperfaicte et digne de correction, comme il feist en la position des cornes bovines. La follastre, non obstant ma remonstrance, me les fischoyt encore plus avant (393). [She [his wife] made me two pretty little horns over my forehead. In the midst of our play I was remonstrating to her that she should put them above [here Frame mistranslates: “below” is correct] my eyes, the better for me to see what I’d like to butt with them, so that Momus should not find in such a thing anything imperfect and worthy of correction, as he did in the placement of bovine horns. The wanton, notwithstanding my remonstrance, kept fixing them even further forward on me (297).]

This raising and lowering of the horns in the dream corresponds to the movement of the symbol from the realm of the invisible to that of the visible. As in earlier passages, this scene leads the reader into the intertext of Greek mythology. According to Demerson, the Momus mentioned by Panurge here is the son of Sleep and of the Night, who criticized the gods for the works they had done. “Neptune ayant faict un taureau, Lucian dit qu’il reprenoit l’ouvrier du taureau de ce qu’il ne luy avoit plustost mis les cornes au devant des yeux” (174, note 3). [“Neptune having made a bull, Lucian says that he [Momus] reproached the maker of the bull for not putting his horns before his eyes.”] This reference evokes all of the connotations surrounding the figure of the bull in the ancient myths, to which Panurge had already referred in his commentary on Pantagruel’s interpretation of the passages from Virgil. Characteristically, the work exhibits a propensity to shift the reader continuously from one context of meaning to another, both within itself and in the intertext. In the earlier passage, the bull was one of the metamorphoses of Jupiter as he raped Europa, with the well-known tragic consequences of this act in the family of Minos. As a symbol for rape and incest, the bull here connotes the concupiscence that many critics have seen at the core of Panurge’s character, which is the driving force behind his quest. Just as the horns migrate from upper to lower and back again on the surface of his dream body, so the figure of the bull as a signifier of brutal masculinity roams the intertext. After Pantagruel’s usual interpretation of this dream, Panurge responds with vehemence: “Au rebours (dist Panurge) mon songe presagist qu’en mon mariage, j’auray planté de tous biens, avecques la corne d’abondance” (394) [“‘The other way around,’ said Panurge, ‘my dream presages that in my marriage I’ll have all goods in plenty together with the horn of abundance’” (298)]. Appropriately, Panurge’s metaphor is an agricultural one, and there can hardly be a doubt as to the signification of the “horn of abundance” to which he refers. In the shifting semantic world of this text, the phallus can be a horn that is used to plant seeds, and this mixing of metaphors is entirely appropriate to Rabelais’s idiosyncratic usage of literary language. The underlying meaning of these semantic shifts might be summarized in the following, rather strange statement: the cuckold has animal horns that are also

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horns of plenty that he uses to plant the seeds of his phallus. These three aspects of the primary symbol of the cuckold—animal horns/cornucopia/phallus—cannot be separated from one another, as a consequence both of the Tiers Livre’s own signifying procedures, and because of the nature of the cuckold figure as it is revealed to us in the practices of popular festivals. In the celebrations of the feast of St. Blaise and the souffle-à-culs [literally, the “ass blowers”] examined by Gaignebet, the cuckold is displayed through multiple characters who participate in the parade.26 The cuckold is represented by a man riding backward on a donkey or an ass, but his meaning is also determined by the attendants who surround him: the masked figure who leads the donkey through the crowd; the donkey itself, personification of the beaten animal; and finally the masked figure who follows the donkey, wearing a nightshirt with his rear exposed, and blowing air into the backside of the animal with his bellows. The festive display of the cuckold includes all of his multiple aspects: as beaten and berated animal; as the trickster figure who leads the cuckold to his ritual mutilation; as the sexual predator who metaphorically “gives it” to the cuckold “from behind” by seducing or even raping his wife. In the Tiers Livre, Panurge displays these same polyvalent characteristics, which are derived not only from the figure of the cuckold as it was known from popular festivals, but also from the vast intertext of adultery stories which includes those of ancient Greek mythology. The continuation of the dream sequence confirms this idea of the character. In the following paragraph, Panurge continues his interpretation of the dream as follows: « Vous dictez que seront cornes de Satyres. Amen, amen, fiat, fiatur, ad differentiam papae! Ainsi auroys je eternellement le virolet en poinct et infatiguable, comme l’ont les Satyres. Chose que tous desirent, et peu de gens l’impetrent des cieulx. Par consequent, coqu jamais. Car faulte de ce est cause sans laquelle non, cause unicque, de faire les mariz coquz » (394). [“You say they’ll be satyr’s horns. Amen [to that], amen, fiat, fiatur, ad differentiam papae! Thus I’d eternally have my gimlet at the ready and indefatigable, as the satyrs have. A thing that all men desire, and few are granted it by the heavens. In consequence, a cuckold never, for the lack of that is the cause sine qua non, the sole cause of making husbands cuckolds” (298).]

The Latin phrase in which Panurge rejoices at the satyr’s horns that he is being given is translated as follows in the Demerson edition: “Amen! Amen! faites ceci! faisez [sic] cela! pour ne pas causer comme les bulles papales!” (177) [“Amen! Amen! Do this! Does that! In order not to speak as papal bulls do!]. The reference to the Pope here recalls the earlier passage in which another misused Latin phrase underlines the phantasmal link between the male anatomy and the gender assigned to men. Faced with the threat of figurative castration, Panurge responds with a proclamation of male potency that is one of the bedrocks of his gender. Here the lowering of the cuckold’s horns from the forehead to the genitals is completed via the figure of the satyr, itself a symbol of an unbridled male sexual urge. The animal horns are transformed into the cornucopia, signifying in turn the phallic fecundity of the character that Panurge 26 See the images of the souffle-à-culs in A plus hault sens, II, 58–61.

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believes to be at the heart of a “normal” marriage.27 In this context, however, there is nothing normal about desire within marriage, as the intertext of the Greek myths makes clear to us in the sexually “dysfunctional” family of Minos. In an astounding “move” that is typical of Rabelais’s narrative discourse, the transformation and displacement of the horn symbol is self-consciously nuanced by Panurge himself in the middle of the chapter: Vous (pardonnez moy si je mesprens) me semblez evidentement errer interpretant cornes pour cocuage. Diane les porte en teste à forme de beau croissant. Est-elle coqüe pourtant ? Comment diable seroyt elle coqüe, qui ne feut oncques mariée ? Parlez de grace correct, craignant qu’elle vous en face au patron que feist à Acteon. Le bon Bacchus porte cornes semblablement : Pan : Juppiter Ammonien, tant d’aultres. Sont ilz coquz ? Juno seroit elle putain ? Car il s’ensuivroyt par la figure dicte Metalepsis. Comme appellant un enfant en praesence de ses pere et mere, champis ou avoistre, c’est honestement, tacitement dire le pere coqu, et sa femme ribaulde. Parlons mieulx. Les cornes que me faisoit ma femme, sont cornes d’abondance, et planté de tous biens. Je le vous affie. Au demourant je seray joyeulx comme un tabour à nopces, tousjours sonnant, tousjours ronflant, tousjours bourdonnant et petant. Croyez que c’est l’heur de mon bien. Ma femme sera coincte et jolie : comme une belle petitte Chouette. Qui ne le croid, d’enfer aille au gibbet. Noel nouvelet (394–5). [You (pardon me if I’m mistaken) seem to me evidently to err in interpreting horns as cuckoldry. Diana wears them on her head in the form of a fine crescent. Is she therefore a cuckold? How the devil could she be a cuckold, who was never married? For mercy’s sake, speak correctly, for fear she may make you some horns on the model of those she made for Actaeon. Good old Bacchus likewise wears horns. Pan, Jupiter Ammon, so many others. Are they cuckolds? Could Juno be a whore? For this would follow by the figure called metalepsis. Just as calling a child, in the presence of his father and mother, champis or avoistre [two words for ‘bastard’], that amounts to saying civilly, tacitly, that the father is a cuckold and the mother a strumpet. Let’s speak more nicely. The horns my wife was making me are horns of abundance and of plenty of all goods. I pledge my faith on it. Furthermore, I’ll be joyful as a marriage drum, always sounding, always snoring, always buzzing and farting. Believe me, that’s the luck of my good fortune. My wife will be dainty and pretty as a lovely little owlet. Anyone who doesn’t believe it, off to the gallows straight from hell, while we sing Noel, Noel (298).]

Panurge demonstrates both his erudition and his familiarity with standard tropes by describing what he considers an incorrect method for interpreting a given figure, the metalepsis. Here the character seems to personify the bad reader, who interprets precisely by making wild metaleptic shifts and links, for example between “corne” and “corne d’abondance” (see Gargantua IX on this), while Pantagruel’s long correction of Panurge’s interpretative abuse is meant to illustrate a more learned mode of reading. Nevertheless, and as is always the case in the Tiers Livre, Panurge’s parodic vitriol reveals something essential about the semantic and rhetorical structuring of Renaissance masculinity. In a state of anxiety provoked by the mere possibility of his 27 On the problematic nature of sexuality’s place in marriage for the study of masculinity in the Tiers Livre, see Reeser, Moderating Masculinity, Chapter 3, 121–50. See also Leushuis, “Rabelais et la fécondité du mariage,” which is chapter III of Le mariage, 153–205.

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inadequacy in his relations with women, the masculine subject in this context takes refuge in a willfully distorted version of the intertext. It is within this distortion, which is metaleptic in nature, that one may find this type of masculinity’s abstract structure. A metalepse is a kind of metonymy in which, for example, one substitutes an effect for a cause, as Nicole Ricalens-Pourchot explains it: “on fait entendre le conséquent (= je m’en vais) par la cause (= je vous dérange) [dans l’expression] ‘je ne veux pas vous déranger plus longtemps.’” [“one signifies the effect (= I’m leaving) by the cause (= I’m bothering you) [in the expression] ‘I won’t bother you any longer”].28 The metaleptic substitution of “corne d’abondance” for “cornes de cocu,” which is Panurge’s survival strategy, propels him into a consideration of the Classical intertext in which this re-orientation of the cuckold’s symbol is justified by the appeal to authoritative figures. In this sense, masculinity in this context is often a mode of bad interpretation, which Pantagruel tries to correct on the basis of more “rational” readings. There is, however, nothing rational about the various strategies by which men assume or adopt their gender, especially when they perceive it to be threatened in some way, as Panurge does throughout the work. As Leushuis pointed out, Panurge’s consistent reactions to threats to his virility structure the Tiers Livre as the discursive program of masculine fecundity’s declamation.29 On Skinning and Undressing as Interpretation: The Phallus as Truth Marcel Tetel has read chapters 16–18 of the Tiers Livre, which describe the protagonists’ visit to the Sibyl of Panzoust, as embodiments of a dialectical procedure that was an integral part both of Renaissance rhetoric in general and of Rabelais’s discursive practices in particular. According to Tetel, Pantagruel embodies the principles of rhetorica precisa and oeconomia, while Panurge personifies the opposing positions of rhetorica perpetua and copia. Far from giving priority to either of these opposites, Rabelais’s work seems to indicate that correct interpretation and understanding require a continual alternation between them. Tetel concludes that the “marriage” sought by Panurge throughout the text is, from an allegorical perspective, a spiritual union with Dame Rhetoric herself.30 Rabelais puts this rhetorical opposition into play

28 See Nicole Ricalens-Pourchot, Lexique des figures de style (Paris: Armand Colin, 1998), 10. 29 “…un langage fertile et cornucopien facilite, lui aussi, la transmission idéologique de la fécondité matrimoniale. À cet effet, nous étudierons le rôle de Panurge en tant que ‘producteur’ de ce langage” (Le mariage, 185). [“… a fertile and cornucopian language facilitates as well the ideological transmission of matrimonial fecundity. In this regard, we will also study the role of Panurge as a ‘producer’ of this language.”] As Leushuis points out, Terence Cave also famously discusses this relationship between the topos of fecundity and the production of language in the Renaissance in The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 184–7. 30 Marcel Tetel, “Rabelais et Lucien: de deux rhétoriques.” in Raymond C. La Charité, ed. Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays on His Art (Lexington: French Forum, 1986), 127– 38, here 132.

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by drawing the reader into a classical intertext, Lucian’s Master of Rhetoric, in which the contrast between these two styles of discourse (Panurge versus Pantagruel, wine versus oil) is brought to the fore in metaphorical terms as the difference between two paths for traversing a landscape, one narrow and beset on all sides by thorns, the other wide, green, and clear (Tetel, 129). This idea of discourse as a mode of traveling and a spatial quest to reach a desired end is entirely appropriate to the spatial displacements of the characters from one interpretative locus to another, revealing the extent to which these chapters constitute an allegory of reading. As meticulous as Tetel’s interpretation may be, however, it deals with Panurge only as a manifestation of Rabelais’s usage of this character as a medium for the transmission of his own learning, and as a comic mask. It does not examine the phallic and corporeal elements that are at the heart of Panurge’s character, which are highlighted in these chapters by references to ancient Latin intertexts. Panurge might be described as the ultimate “literary” embodiment of the cuckold in that he becomes obscenely phallic at the same moment that Rabelais uses him to demonstrate his most recondite erudition. This manifestation of Rabelais as a voracious reader and thinker in and through Panurge the phallic avenger hyperbolically re-enacts the characteristics of the cuckold figure as we described them in the novella tradition. The fundamental multiplicity of this literary discourse thus includes a peculiar correspondence between displays of erudition and what one might call a blatant phallicism, which includes the fears, fantasies, and anxieties shared among men in a textual form that are the constitutive elements of the kind of masculinity that I have been examining here. In this sense, for Rabelais, both citing Roman poets and writing about Panurge’s potential cuckoldry participated in the elaboration of masculinity within an intertextual practice that stretched from Antiquity to the Renaissance. The movement from oeconomia to copia, and from erudition to the praise and affirmation of the male private parts in these chapters begins with Pantagruel’s concise interpretation of the Sibyl’s laconic poem, of which Frame gives us a marvelous translation: T’esgoussera De renom. Engroissera, De toy non Te sugsera Le bon bout. T’escorchera, Mais non tout (404). [Husk or shell She’ll undo; Pregnant swell, Not with you. Suck a spell Your sweet tip; Flay you well, Save a strip (307).]

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There is a semantic overlap in two of the key terms of this passage that helps to explain the chapter’s subsequent development. “Desrober” originally meant “to relieve one of one’s clothes,” as in the English “to disrobe.”31 In this context, however, it signifies specifically to rob, and by a familiar reversal remarked by Freud in “The Uncanny,” “dérober” in modern French means “prendre furtivement” [“take furtively”], and, by extension, “masquer, cacher, dissimuler” [“mask, hide, dissimulate”], and even, when speaking of things, “empêcher de voir, masquer à la vue” [“to keep from seeing, to mask from sight”].32 In other words, this term, which is derived from the Old German rauben, translated by the editors of the Petit Robert as “dépouiller,” “to skin,” includes a spectrum of meanings ranging from revelation to hiding, from uncovering to concealing from view. This coexistence of contradictory connotations in the term “dérober” embodies the rhetorical strategies that many scholars have explicated in Rabelais’s work, which both reveals and obscures, openly steals from other texts and furtively hides references in the dense fabric of its own discourse. I would argue that in the chapters on the Sibyl of Panzoust, and especially in Panurge’s reading of her poetic pronouncement, Rabelais comments on the relation between interpretation and the construction of masculinity, writing in an obscene code based on the physical characteristics of the male member. In other words, the image of the erect penis is a signifier of what the masculine subjects of this context almost invariably are called upon to identify as the authentic being of their gender, and is hence a symbol for the truth that many men of this period had to read in virtually all texts, i.e., a proof and manifestation of their own virility. The verb “écorcher” echoes the sense of its counterpart “dérober,” signifying “to flay” or “to skin,” but by extension also “to beat” or “to do damage unto, even morally speaking.”33 In both of these terms there is thus the idea of uncovering an exterior in order to reveal an interior, whether by violent or dishonest means, and whether directed at the body itself or at the clothing or skin that envelopes it. There are thus three levels discernable in this passage which are typical of Rabelais’s poetics: on the literal level, the acts of undressing, skinning, flaying, beating, robbing, and hiding, which are the stock-in-trade of the charlatans and tricksters who populate the comic literature at the foundation of Rabelais’s works, which serves as an imaginary context that gives meaning to often incomprehensible series of actions; on the figurative level, the readerly act of getting to the interior or the proverbial “marrow” of an object to discover its truth, i.e., the process of interpretation, which inevitably involves finding what the text has hidden within various masks and skins;

31 “Desrober—Act., ôter la robe.—Réfl., ôter sa robe, se déshabiller.—Desrobé, part. passé, dont la robe a été enlevé.” Frédéric Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1963), II, 643. 32 Josette Rey-Debove and Alain Rey, eds., Le nouveau petit Robert (Paris: Dictionnaires le Robert, 1993), 605. 33 “Écorcher.—Dépouiller de sa peau (un corps) ... Blesser en entamant superficiellement la peau ... faire mal moralement.” (Alain Rey, ed. Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (Paris: Dictionnaires le Robert, 1992), I:654.) [“To flay: to strip (a body) of its skin … to wound by cutting superficially into the skin …. to hurt morally.”]

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finally, Panurge’s act of interpretation reveals a problematic investment of the male body with phantasmic qualities that are the core of his gendered subjectivity, while at the same time this conception of the male sex is predicated upon a certain practice of interpretation, which itself embodies and abstractly allegorizes this construction of a troubled masculinity. This last allegoresis is perhaps the most extreme example of the defining textual procedures of Rabelais’s work, since the most exquisite of learned activities is communicated here to a select few readers using the most obscene and even pornographic of images. The reading of the Sibyl’s poem is accomplished in a violent language that activates the ideas of undressing, beating, stealing, skinning, and flaying, and culminates in a graphic description of a sexual act, which is embedded in a mock-Biblical cosmology similar to the ones that we have already scene, detailing the genealogy of masculine-feminine relations, and their significance for the performance of the male gender. The literary and historical precedents and models that Panurge employs parodically to accomplish his own interpretations serve as an intertextual medium in which this type of masculinity is grounded. This kind of masculinist reading always arrives at the same conclusion in its movements from one level of meaning to another: that the truth of masculinity has to be the unquestionable discursive affirmation of itself as an indefatigable virility in the face of all opposition, whether this comes from women or from a man’s own reason, represented here by the princely figure of Pantagruel. Panurge as reader approaches the fourth strophe of the Sibyl’s poem in accordance with the linguistic ambiguities inherent in the key terms that Rabelais chose as the foundations of his passage. In response to the Sibyl’s “T’escorchera/Mais non tout,” (404), which Pantagruel interprets negatively, Panurge offers a parodic cosmology in which women are, predictably, blamed for the “evil” intentions that inspire them to act against men, an attitude toward women that was the trademark of clerical, misogynist literature. His reading takes a decidedly anti-feminine turn that celebrates the phallus and the masculinist conception of its necessary usages, which is the safe haven to which Panurge retreats whenever he feels threatened by the imagined certainty that he will be deceived by his future wife. After his hyperbolic reading of the third strophe, which is an encomium to the imaginary male virility that is one of the hallmarks of the cuckold literature, Panurge launches into his parodic derivation of the Sibyl’s usage of the verb “écorcher”: Les femmes, au commencement du monde, ou peu aprés, ensemblement conspirerent escorcher les homes tous vifz, par ce que sus elles maistriser vouloient en tous lieux. Et feut cestuy decret promis, confermé, et juré entre elles par le sainct sang breguoy. Mais ô vaines entreprinses des femmes, ô grande fragilité du sexe feminin. Elle commencerent escorcher l’home, ou gluber, comme le nomme Catulle, par la partie qui plus leurs hayte, c’est le membre nerveulx, caverneulx, plus de six mille ans a, et toutesfoys jusques à praesent n’en ont escorché que la teste. Dont par fin despit les Juifz eulx mesmes en circuncision se le couppent et retaillent, mieulx aymans estre dictz recutitz et retaillatz marranes, que escorchez par femmes, comme les aultres nations. Ma femme non degenerante de cest commune entreprinse, me l’escorchera, s’il ne l’est. Je y consens de franc vouloir, mais non tout : je vous en asceure mon bon Roy (407–408).

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[The women, at the beginning of the world or soon after, conspired together to flay the men alive completely, because the men wanted to lord it over them everywhere. And this decree was promised, confirmed, and sworn among them by the holy blood of the Goose. But O the vain undertakings of women! O the great frailty of the female sex! They began to skin man, or flay him [gluber] as Catullus puts it with the part they most delight in, that’s the muscular, cavernous member, over six thousand years ago, and yet they still have got only to the head of it. Whereat, out of spite the Jews in circumcision cut and trim themselves, preferring to be called snipped and shorn marranos, rather than skinned by women, like the other nations. My wife, not degenerating from this enterprise, will flay it for me if it isn’t so, I freely consent to this, but not all, I assure you, my good king (310).]

Despite its evident comic intentions, Rabelais’s text could hardly be more obscene. As is usually the case in his mock genealogies and cosmologies, especially concerning women, the text becomes violent in its focus on the male genitals and their role in men’s relations with women. In Rabelais’s works, there is a curious concatenation of the ideas of genesis and castration, birth and figurative death, which Bakhtin remarked as one of the work’s “cosmic” elements. Here the birth of the world coincides with women’s phantasmic desire to skin and emasculate men. But for Panurge, of course, this emasculation by skinning can only mean two things: first, the transformation of this process to its opposite, that is, the demonstration of male virility; second, the act of skinning in this case is in fact a revelation of the core and the interior of the male, which is the truth of his being. He is terrified of (being outperformed by) women, and he responds to this fear by putting his virility on display as the emblem of the erect phallus. Thus, to put it in the crude terms that Panurge employs here, the male erection is the symbol for the moment when interpretation attains its goal, and the true meaning of a text is revealed. Rabelais uses the topos of women’s desire for the male member, which reappears often in the comic literature of the period, to propel the reader into one of the most graphic of Latin intertexts, the poems of Catullus. As all of the Tiers Livre’s editors have remarked, the poem cited here is number LVIII, which reads as follows: Gaeli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa Illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam Plus quam se atque suos amavit omnes, Nunc in quadriviis & angiportis Glubit magnanimos Remi nepotes.34 These pithy lines, and especially the verb “glubere” to which Rabelais refers, have been translated in diverse ways by different editors. Guy Lee reads the term quite literally, rendering the last two verses as follows: “[Lesbia] At crossroads now and in back alleys/ Peels great-hearted Remus’ grandsons.”35 While this translation does 34 Gaius Valerius Catullus, Poésies de Catulle, tr. Eugène Rostand (Paris: Hachette & Co., 1882), 136. 35 Gaius Valerius Catullus, The Poems of Catullus, tr. and ed. Guy Lee (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 55.

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not make much sense—what does it mean to “peel” someone?—it evidently fits the original sense of the verb, which is almost identical to that of “écorcher,” but which has much more specific and vegetative connotations: “glubere” signifies literally “to deprive of its bark, to bark, peel,” or, in a passive sense, “to cast off its shell or bark.”36 An even more literal translation of the key verses would thus be “Now at crossroads and in back alleys,/ [Lesbia] peels the bark from the great-hearted grandsons of Remus.” In contrast, Carl Sesar reads the last verses much more with an eye toward making sense of them: “[Lesbia] now works streets and back alleys/ Groping big-hearted sons of Remus.”37 It is clear that “glubere” means to skin, to strip off, to flay, and to peel, much as “écorcher” does, but there is little doubt in both cases that the verb was also used to describe a certain kind of sexual act, which depended upon the natural characteristics of the male anatomy. More specifically, and as Panurge points out, the verb was used to refer to a “sex act” performed on an uncircumcised man. From this point of view, then, Panurge reads the Sibyl’s poem by “peeling back its bark” in a rather phallocentric way, just as Lesbia “peels” or “flays” or “barks” the foreskins of her clients in Rome’s back alleys. It is clear that Catullus meant to indicate a state of male arousal by using the metaphor “barking” or “peeling.” Panurge thus describes the moment of truth in interpretation here in graphic terms that transcribe or transpose to a phallic register the usual metaphors of reading that appear in Rabelais’s text. Textual truth becomes evident when the tree is stripped of its bark, revealing the wood; when the dog breaks the bone to suck on its “substantific” marrow; when the glans leaves its hiding place in the foreskin to reveal itself to the desirous woman/whore/beloved who evokes this reaction. All of these allegories of reading and writing are in play simultaneously in Rabelais’s text, but they are especially evident at this crucial point of the Tiers Livre. For the masculine subject who inscribes these lines, however, this moment of truth is the most problematic of all, when he becomes most vulnerable, and turns on the object of his desire in order to attack, since his engendering as masculine is predicated on (his conception of) his relation to (his conception of) woman in the patriarchal social imaginary that interpellates him as such, and on his idea of his body’s function within a phantasmic libidinal economy, which requires that the moment of truth be equivalent to the moment at which literal male desire physically and visually makes itself apparent. In the figure of Lesbia who “gropes” the grandsons of Remus in the Roman back alleys, we see the familiar face of the insatiable woman who haunted the clerical literature written by men on sexual relations, in both its comic and serious variants. Lesbia is reincarnated, in a sense, in the character of the wife from tale 91 of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, who is described as follows: “...ung gentil compaignon me fist ung joyeux compte d’un homme maryé, de qui la femme estoit tant luxurieuse et chaulde sur potage et tant publicque, que a paine estoit elle contente qu’on la cuignast en plaines rues avant qu’elle ne le fust” (Conteurs français du seizième siècle, 319). 36 Charlton Lewis and Charles Short, eds., A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1883), 818. 37 Gaius Valerius Catullus, Selected Poems of Catullus, tr. Carl Sesar (New York: Mason & Lipscomb, 1974), 58.

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[“… a good fellow told me a funny story about a married man whose wife was so luxuriant and so hot in her soup [!] and so public about it that she was barely satisfied even if she got banged in the middle of the street.”] This female figure is a kind of roaming public predator, who is ambivalent in the sense that she satisfies a male desire that is itself unbounded, at the same time that she “breaks the heart” of the man who wants to possess her to the exclusion of all others. While the concept of romantic love is foreign to texts such as the Cent nouvelles nouvelles and the Tiers Livre, except as a figure to be mocked ironically, the masculinist conception of women that these texts represent is virtually identical to that of Catullus’ poem. This figure of the “eternal feminine” reveals what should be hidden; she makes public that which should remain private; she brings out into the collective domain that which should be restricted to the domicile of marriage—the possibility that men may be inadequate, dominated, out of control. In other words, her activities and her character are summarized fairly well in the verbs “écorcher” and “dérober” that we have seen: she is furtive, stealthy, and always seeks to have what is not hers. She wants to skin men, to turn them inside out, to unclothe them, all for the sake of satisfying her concupiscence (strangely projected into Panurge), which leads men astray. Upside-down, inside-out, undressed, skinned, peeled, flayed, turned-around backwards, betrayed, beaten, and ultimately cuckolded—this is how a certain kind of neurotic early-modern man was depicted in his relations with his own phantasmic representations of women, at least if we are to take the comic literature from this tradition as a source of information on the subject.38 There is another subtext in these fascinating chapters that reveals another side of Rabelais/Panurge that is quite different from what one would suspect from the outrageous and confidently obscene surface of the text. After Panurge’s irate refutation of Pantagruel’s interpretation of the Sibyl’s poem, Epistémon offers the following gloss: Vous (dist Epistemon) ne respondez à ce que le rameau de laurier nous voyans, elle consyderant et exclamante en voix furieuse et espovantable, brusloit sans bruyt ne grislement aulcun. Vous sçavez que c’est triste augure et signe grandement redoubtable, comme attestent Properce, Tibulle, Porphyre philosophe argut, Eustathius sus l’iliade Homericque, et aultres (408). [“You,” said Epistémon, “are not responding to the fact that the laurel branch, under our eyes, with her observing and exclaiming in a frightful frenzied voice, was burning without any noise or sputtering at all. You know that this is a sad augury and a vastly redoubtable sign, as is attested by Propertius, Tibullus, Porphyry the subtle philosopher, Eustathius on Homer’s Iliad, and others” (310).]

A burnt laurel is referred to only once in Propertius’ works, in a poem that is not included in all of the major Latin editions of the poet’s work, considered to be one 38 We recall here that the chevauchées [parades] of the Abbeys of Misrule throughout Renaissance France almost invariably ended with the display of the town’s “martyrs,” that is, the fantasy parade of husbands beaten by their wives. For example, the account of the Chevauchée de la coquille from Lyon in 1566 ends with a catalogue of men who wound their way through the city streets during the festivities pretending to be beaten by their wives.

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of the most corrupt among the Roman elegists. Poem 28B of Book Two begins with the following strophe: Deficivnt magico torti sub carmine rhombi, et iacet exstincto laurus adusta foco; et iam Luna negat totiens descendere caelo, nigraque funestum concinit omen auis. Una ratis fati nostros portabit amores caerula ad infernos uelificata lacus.39 If this is indeed the passage to which Epistémon is referring, it provides a striking contrast to the general tenor of the surface or exterior of the text. In the midst of a work that is singularly obsessed with omens, portents, and prognostications of all kinds, the reference to Propertius’ poem seems to proclaim the futility of trying to foretell the future through the interpretation of diverse signs, once the inevitability of what is going to happen is evident in every sign that presents itself, as is the case throughout Panurge’s quest. Here the poet is convinced that his beloved, Cynthia, is going to die, and all of the external signs confirm his worst fears. This is the moment after interpretation has been exhausted, and there is nothing left but to wait for that which will invariably take place. When faced with this fear of his inability to bear the loss of his beloved, the speaker of Propertius’ poem enters a domain in which all signs are emptied of their significance: iacet exstincto laurus adusta foco, the signifier of victory lies in ash by the hearth. Given this ultimate disintegration of the symbol of Apollo, and hence of the Sibyl of Cumae herself with her hundred voices, the male poet has nothing left but the strength of his own discourse as a kind of magical incantation, much as the typical reaction of Panurge to the threat of loss and his own figurative castration is a flow of vituperative language. The masculine persona that appears in these pages thus is duplicitous and hybrid in multiple ways, but here at least he demonstrates a remarkable consistency in his different guises. When confronted with his anxious desire for the female, he seeks comfort and knowledge in signs; when these signs do not offer him the response that he wants, which would confirm him in the safety of his gender identity, or when these signs are emptied of their significance, he constructs a fantasy world for himself by manipulating language and poetic discourse. And, as Rabelais’s pun earlier in the chapter makes clear, this discursive construction of a masculine identity is provoked by a problematic glimpse of a feminine icon: “le trou de la Sibylle” [“the Sybil’s hole”], the defining characteristic of the female, perceived as an incomprehensible void and emptiness, and as an object of scorn that must be bombarded by an hysterical masculine outburst of speech, transcribed as the Rabelaisian text itself. 39 “Stilled is the magic wheel that whirred to incantation,/ Charred lies the laurel on a burnt-out hearth,/ The moon refuses yet again to fall from heaven,/ And the night-bird screeches a fatal warning./ One ship of doom shall ferry both our loves/ Under blue sails on the lake below.” Propertius: The Poems. Tr. Guy Lee (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 61. The Latin text is from H.E. Butler and E.A. Barber, eds. The Elegies of Propertius (Hilesheim: Georg Olms, 1964), 66.

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Blasons du corps masculin: the Discourse of Male Bonding The Tiers Livre reaches its most extreme point of incomprehensibility in chapters 26–28, in which Panurge and Frère Jean exchange long catalogues of epithets on the male private parts. This manner of nominalizing and exposing the male genitalia involves the characters in a ritual of male bonding that was an essential part of the cuckold literature as we know it from the Cent nouvelles nouvelles. The elements of this ritual are all too familiar: an exaggerated account of potency on the part of one man who denies this same potency to other men; a phantasmic over-estimation of women’s desire for sex; a menacing threat to other men who wish to usurp a man’s sexual rights to a certain woman or women; a call to other men to share the suffering caused by women’s supposedly unbounded need for sex, which leads both to a shared understanding of women’s insatiable nature, as well as to a bond between men that is based on what is perceived to be the inevitable sharing of women’s bodies. Just as the infamous blasons du corps féminin united a group of male poets through a fetishized conception of the female body, Rabelais’s version of this timeless masculinist practice establishes a link between two male characters that offers us a complementary version of the blasons du corps masculin, based upon an equally fetishized male body: that is, a body that is constructed on the foundation of the genitalia, and the role that they play not only in procreation, but also in the genesis of a social order that is inscribed within the sacred, male-dominated, yet imaginary corporeal hierarchy that we have seen repeatedly. In other words, the massive catalogues devoted to the couillons involve the text’s protagonist in the discursive display of his identity as a masculine subject, meaning that the positive and negative values attributed to the genitalia in the two catalogues depend upon Panurge’s implicit understanding of himself as a gendered being, who defines himself as such in relation to his phantasmic conception of women.40 The scene of bonding between Panurge and Frère Jean occurs at a pivotal moment in the work. The protagonist’s quest for diverse means of prognostication has apparently reached an impasse with the hyperbolic enumeration of methods for foretelling the future that is personified in the character of Herr Trippa, who “par art de Astrologie, Geomantie, Chiromantie, Metopomantie, et aultres de pareille farine il praedict toutes choses futures” (427) [“by the arts of astrology, geomancy, chiromancy, metopomancy, and others of the same ilk, he predicts all things to come” (327)]. At his wit’s end, Panurge calls out to his monastic companion, posing the eternal question that is the motivating force behind the entire work. If we consider the work simply from a structural perspective, chapter 26 is precisely the half-way point of its 52 chapters.41 The framework for the bonding of the two male characters

40 Reeser argues that “the construct of Renaissance marriage attempts to moderate masculinity by constructing the wife as an embodiment of antimoderation, to whom the man can oppose himself” (Moderating Masculinity, 125). 41 While Duval sees the “word” of the poem of Raminagrobis in chapter 21 as the conceptual center of the series of consultations, and hence as the structural lynchpin of the entire work, it is clear that the sequence of male bonding in chapters 26–28 is the physical center of the work. See Duval, The Design, chapter 6.

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is cosmological and eschatological, as Frère Jean’s response to Panurge’s question makes clear. One of the remarkable features of his address is that its opening gesture is a figurative and extended equation of the masculine subject with his sexual organs, catalogued in an astounding number of different attributes from different categories, ranging from merely physical ones (“... couillon plombé, c. feutré, c. madré, c. de stuc ...” (432) [“… Leaded ballock, Felted ballock, Shrewd ballock, Clay ballock…” (331)]), to those that describe its absurd capabilities (“c. brandif, gérondif, actif, vital, magistral, monachal, subtil ...” (433) [“… Lusty, Gerundive, Active, Vital, Magisterial, Monkish, Subtle ballock” (334–5)]), to anthropomorphic ones (“c. ronflant, pillard, hochant” (435) [“…Snoring, Thieving, Nodding ballock” (336)]), to simply impossible and even “surreal” attributions (“c. Latin... c. d’algebra.... c. courtoys” (432–3) [“Latin ballock… Courteous ballock … Algebraic ballock …” (334–5)]). In other words, while the monk’s enumeration of these attributes may seem quite random, it nevertheless reveals that men’s testicles can virtually take on the form of all things, which means that, in a sense, men’s discursive considerations of their own anatomy, and consequently of their gender, constantly verge on engulfing the entire universe. The etymological link of the testicles to the idea of testimony and witnessing, which exists in both English and French (témoin is derived from the Latin testimonium, from testis) highlights the relation between the physical characteristics of male anatomy and the notions of truth and authenticity that structured the conceptual world of these early modern men. Following this rambling consideration of the myriad possible functions of the male genitalia, Frère Jean squarely situates the generative power of these organs in a sacred history of the world, that leads from Genesis to the Apocalypse: « Marie toy, de par le Diable, marie toy, et carrillone à doubles carrillons de couillons. Je diz et entends le plus toust que faire pourras. Dés huy au soir faiz en crier les bancs et le challit. Vertus Dieu à quand te veulx tu reserver? Sçaiz tu pas bien, que la fin du monde approche? Nous en sommes huy plus prés de deux trabutz et demie toise, que n’estions avant hier. L’Antichrist est desjà né, ce m’a l’on dict. Vray est que il ne faict encores que esgratigner sa nourrisse et ses gouvernantes : et ne monstre encores les thesaurs. Car il est encores petit. Crescite. Nos qui uiuimus. Multiplicamini. Il est escript. C’est matiere de breviaire. Tant que le sac de bled ne vaille trois patacz, et le bussart de vin, que six blancs. Vouldrois tu bien qu’on te trouvast les couilles pleines au jugement ? dum uenerit judicare » (434–5). [“Get married, in the devil’s name, get married, and carillon me double carillons of ballocks. I say, and I mean, as soon as you can do it. By this evening have the banns announced and get the bedstead ready for action. Power of God, until when do you want to hold back? Don’t you know very well that the end of the world is coming near? Today we’re two rods and half a fathom nearer to it than we were yesterday. The Antichrist is already born, so I’ve been told. True it is that he still does nothing but scratch his wet nurses and governesses, and he isn’t yet displaying the treasures, for he’s still little. ‘Crescite. Nos qui vivimus, multiplicamini [broken Latin: ‘Increase. We the living, and multiply’] (so it is written in breviary matter), as long as a sack of wheat isn’t worth three patacz, and a puncheon of wine only six blancs. Would you really want to be found with your ballocks full at the Last Judgement, ‘dum venerit judicare [when He shall have come to judge’?” (336)]

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The monk’s deformation of sacred and quasi-sacred beliefs and texts is motivated by a fundamental fiat that is at the core of Biblical discourse, and which appears here in a pseudo-macaronic citation of the Bible. The fundamental imperative that the male anatomy be used to procreate is inscribed here between the two ends of Christian cosmology, stretching from the need to “be fruitful and multiply” of Genesis to the always imminent coming of the Antichrist and the Last Judgment. Aside from the cosmological positioning of a primary male imperative, which is sanctioned by its ubiquitous importance in the sacred order, there are other echoes in this passage of the work’s major themes. The first is the explicit connection of the sacred imperative to procreate with eating and drinking, symbolized in the wheat and the wine that appear in the passage immediately after the Biblical citation. Frère Jean’s mutation of this text is seemingly joined to a conditional clause: “Let us be fruitful and multiply as long as wheat and wine are available in abundance.” While these two staples of the Mediterranean diet are also holy signifiers in themselves, here they have other, more “cosmic” connotations: wheat and wine are associated with the harvest, and hence with the notion of copia that is the emblem of both Panurge and of the work as a whole. The conditional relation of procreation and abundance is also connected here to the idea of economy, since Frère Jean states explicitly the prices of bread and wine. The functioning of the entire social world in this view is hence predicated on the “proper” functioning of the male genitals, which owe a “debt” to the rest of the body that must be “paid” through procreation, as we have already seen. Similarly, a man’s debt to nature, society, and even God has to be paid by making sure that, as Frère Jean puts it so crudely, he does not die without spreading as much of his “seed” as possible. Hence the passage exhibits a temporal, social, and cosmological paradigm that is centered on the male private parts, whose discursive and intertextual configuration serves as a model for the rest of the universe. The world begins with the injunction to mate and reproduce, and ends in a final judgment in which a man’s acquiescence to this command will be physically examined by God. Thus when a masculine subject who is seen as the center and foundation of the cosmos falls victim to intellectual, physical, and even metaphysical doubts concerning his role in it, the world around him mutates into insoluble dilemmas: in these chapters, the sound of the bells ringing out either “marie toy, marie toy” (434) or “marie poinct, marie poinct” (442).42 It should be remarked that the sound of the bells tolling is yet another manifestation of the ubiquitous couillons that dominate these chapters, since Frère Jean tells Panurge to “carrillone[r] à doubles carrillons de couillons.” In a stunning example of the ways in which phonetic effects generate imaginary and conceptual associations in

42 According to Bernd Renner, the kind of undecidability expressed by Frère Jean’s contradictory imperatives illustrates Lucian’s influence on the Tiers Livre, and highlights one of Rabelais’s primary messages: “…l’impossibilité d’inscrire des réponses définitives dans le texte et, par conséquent, l’ultime démonstration d’une ouverture dialogique radicale et perpétuelle [de l’oeuvre].” [“…the impossibility of inscribing definitive responses in the text, and consequently, the ultimate demonstration of a dialogical opening [of the work] that is radical and perpetual.”] “‘Ni l’un ni l’autre et tous les deux à la fois:’ le paradoxe Ménippéen inversé dans le Tiers Livre de Rabelais.” Romanic Review 97, no. 2 (2006); 153–68, here 167.

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the similarity of “carrillons” and “couillons,” the bells swinging back and forth are the testicles swinging back and forth in this genital version of the wheel of fortune, between good and evil, right and left, male and female, masculine and feminine, salvation and damnation, beginning and end. Faced with his metaphysical doubt, Panurge is thus advised by his friend to behave according to a masculine code that is both scatological and sacred. The second part of his advice concerns the necessary usage of the male anatomy, which must be continuous: “Si continuellement ne exercez ta mentule, elle perdra son laict, et ne te seruira que de pissotiere : les couilles pareillement ne te serviront que de gibbessiere... Pourtant fillol, maintien tout ce bas et menu populaire Troglodyte, en estat de labouraige sempiternel” (436). [“If you don’t continually exercise your tool, it will lose its milk and serve you only as a game pouch… Therefore, son, keep all those low-born troglodyte common folk in a state of perpetually plowing the soil” (337).] As in earlier chapters, the text repeats the displacement of the mother’s milk from women’s bodies to men’s genitals with which the work opens (see my analyses of chapters 1 and 8 above). This motif is repeated a sufficient number of times in the Tiers Livre that it functions almost as a topos in the work.43 In this sequence, the represented body becomes a topographical surface that may be read allegorically. Frère Jean’s interrogation of Panurge’s potency results in a predictable response from the protagonist, which summarizes some of the main elements of male bonding: « Et quand ma femme future seroit aussi gloutte du plaisir Venerien, que fut oncques Messalina, ou la marquise de Oinsestre en Angleterre, je te prie croire, que je l’ay encores plus copieux au contentement. Je ne ignore que Solomon dict, et en parloit comme clerc et sçavant : depuys luy Aristoteles a declairé l’estre des femmes estre de soy insatiable : mais je veulx qu’on saiche que de mesmes qualibre j’ay le ferrement infatiguable. Ne me allegue poinct icy en paragon les fabuleux ribaulx Hercules, Proculus Caesar, et Mahumet, qui se vente en son Alchoran avoir en ses genitoires la force de soixante guallefretiers. Il a menty le paillard. Ne me alleguez poinct l’Indian tant celebré par Theophraste, Pline, et Athenaeus, lequel avecques l’ayde de certaine herbe le faisoit en un jour soixante et dix fois et plus. Je n’en croy rien. Le nombre est supposé. Je te prie ne le croyre. Je te prie croyre (et ne croyras chose que ne soit vraye) mon naturel le sacre Ithyphalle messer Cotal d’Albingues, estre le prime d’el monde » (436–7). [“And even if my future wife should be as gluttonous for venereal pleasure as ever was Messalina or the Marchioness of Winchester in England, I beg you to believe that mine is even more copious for contentment.

43 On the idea of the “fungibility” of bodily fluids (milk, semen, blood) that unite both male and female bodies in a persistent “one-sex model” throughout the early-modern period and the Renaissance, see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex, 64–113. I thank the outside reader of Ashgate for this reference. See also Kirk Read, “Mother’s Milk from Father’s Breast: Maternity Without Women in Male French Renaissance Lyric,” in Kathleen Perry Long, ed., High Anxiety: Masculinity in Crisis in Early Modern France (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002), 71–92.

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44

“I am [not] unaware of what Solomon says [Proverbs 30.15–16], and he spoke about it as a cleric and as one who knew. Since his time, Aristotle has declared that woman’s nature is in itself insatiable; but I want it known that I have an indefatigable weapon of the same caliber. Don’t hold up to me as models those fabulous wenchers Hercules, Proculus, Caesar, and Mahomet, who boasts in the Koran that he has in his genitals the strength of sixty ship-calkers. He lied, the lecher. Don’t tell me about the Indian so celebrated by Theophrastus, Pliny, and Athenaeus, who, with the aid of a certain herb, used to do it seventy times and more in one day. I don’t believe a word of it; the number is suppoditious [sic]. I beg you not to believe it. I beg you to believe (and you won’t be believing anything that isn’t true) that my nature, my sacred Ithyphallus, Messer Thingumajig of Albinga is the prime del monde” (338–9).]

Panurge repeats the configuration of attributes that are part and parcel of male bonding to this day: the indubitable idea of woman as insatiable, legitimated by an appeal to authorities such as Solomon and Aristotle; the equally indubitable fact of the masculine speaker’s own virility; the affirmation that, despite men’s tendency to exaggerate in this regard, the member with which the speaker is endowed is indeed the genuine, legendary article. The most important element of this conventional affirmation of virility for my purposes is the fact that it is based on an extensive and extraordinary erudition, in which Panurge refers to a massive intertext ranging from the Bible, to the Koran, to the standard texts that comprised Renaissance learning, to the misogynist works of Theophrastus. The most fascinating detail of this male bonding sequence is, however, the moment when Frère Jean glances at his companion’s face and reads it as an allegorical landscape on which a troubling truth of masculinity is revealed, which Panurge will deny to his last breath: « Ta barbe par les distinctions du gris, du blanc, du tanné, et du noir, me semble une Mappemonde. Reguarde icy. Voy là Asie. Icy sont Tigris et Euphrates. Voy là Afrique. Icy est la montaigne de la Lune. Voydz tu les paluz du Nil? Deçà est Europe. Voydz tu Theleme? Ce touppet icy tout blanc, sont les mons Hyperborées. Par ma soif mon amy, quand les neiges sont es montaignes : je diz la teste et le menton, il n’y a pas grand chaleur par les valées de la braguette » (438). [“Your beard, by its shadings of gray, white, tan, and black, seems to me a world map. Look here: there is Asia; here are Tigris and Euphrates. There’s Africa; here are the Mountains of the Moon. Do you see the marshes of the Nile? on the near side is Europe. Do you see Thélème? This sheer white tuft is the Hyperborean Mountains. By my thirst, my friend, when the snows are in the mountains, I mean by that the head and chin, there’s not much heat in the valleys of the codpiece!” (339–40).]

Here the male anatomy is associated with the entire known world, when Panurge’s beard, the symbol of sexual difference and masculinity, becomes a topographical map of the male body’s desires and its potentially fatal inadequacies. This is the “dark side” of this masculine institution, which functions by means of paradoxically incompatible yet complementary oppositions, as does the whole of the cuckoldry

44 Frame’s translation seems erroneous here.

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apparatus, and the Tiers Livre itself, which is so endebted to the generic conventions of the Menippean paradox, as Renner has demonstrated. One man’s belief in his own virility is constantly encouraged and incited by other men, who in turn also constantly challenge him in terms of the appropriateness of his gender performance to a pre-established code. Inevitably in this context, this challenge results in a relation between men that traverses an intertextually-motivated fantasy version of women’s bodies, which the cuckold must ultimately accept as the paradoxical proof both of his sexual potency and of his inadequacy, and as the medium of his friendships with other men. Frère Jean summarizes this cuckold’s logic in a pithy, pseudo-Scholastic series of syllogisms, which directly precedes the second, negative catalogue of scatological epithets applied to the testicles: Il n’est (respondit Frère Jan) coqu, qui veult. Si tu es coqu, ergò ta femme sera belle : ergò tu seras bien traicté d’elle : ergò tu auras des amis beaucoup : ergò tu seras saulvé. Ce sont Topicques monachales. Tu ne en vauldras que mieulx, pecheur. Tu ne feuz jamais si aise. Tu n’y trouveras rien moins. Ton bien acroistra d’adventaige. S’il est ainsi praedestiné, y vouldrois tu contrevenir? diz, Couillon flatry, etc. (439). [“Not everyone,” replied Frère Jean, “is a cuckold who wants to be. If you’re a cuckold, ergo your wife will be beautiful, ergo you will be well treated by her, ergo you will have friends aplenty, ergo you will be saved. These are monastic topics. You’ll be a better man for it, you old sinner. You never had it so good. You won’t lose a thing by it. Your property will grow even more. If it is predestined thus, would you want to contravene it? Say, withered ballock, etc.” (340).]

From this point of view, the cuckold simply has no choice but to accept the “truth,” which one could write in a series of apodictic statements, as the monk does here, all of them drawn from the intertext of masculinist literature: all women are insatiable; all men are inadequate to women’s appetites, though they will proclaim the superlative nature of their own virility; by becoming a cuckold, a man establishes tacit bonds and friendships with other men; these bonds lead to increased wealth; this nature of things is predestined and sanctioned by the cosmic and sacred order, which is reproduced on an individual scale as a man’s own anatomy, which must conform to a pre-ordained model of fecundity, resulting in a male bonding that is generated by continuous anxiety about the inadequacy of the male sex. Within the bombast and the loud “clanging” of this masculinist discourse, one thus finds an anxious core that is motivated by a nervous masculine gaze that continuously looks at its own sexed body through the refracting prism of its fantasy conception of women. In other words, the Tiers Livre gives a rather outrageous form to the ideological paradigm that we derived from the official documents of the long Middle Ages, transcribing a distorted perception of the male body that blurs the boundaries between positive and negative affirmations of its potency, and even verging at times on “feminizing” the tireless virility of male bodies, transforming their semen into milk. As such, the work is a burlesque synthesis of centuries of masculinist thinking about the role of gender difference in the performance of men’s identities, which rely on male homosocial friendships that are philosophically mediated by volumes of texts and intertexts.

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Rondibilis and the Medicine of Misogyny Chapters 31–33 of the Tiers Livre, in which Rondibilis offers medical advice to Panurge, summarize a certain kind of masculinist thinking about the female body that was deeply rooted in Ancient and sixteenth-century medical texts. From the point of view of this obsessive masculine imaginary, the domain of women was irreducibly other, strange, incomprehensible, animal. Woman was impossible to contain or to comprehend within this masculinist order simply because she did not fit its parameters. She was irrational in the domain of the rational; animal in the domain of the human; garrulous in an order of imposed silences; profane in the sacred masculine hierarchy; natural in the realm of the cultural. Despite the uncertainty with which it afflicted the men of this context, the image of woman also generated the kind of paradoxical certainty with which we are already familiar. As Rondibilis puts it, this image makes men sure of at least one thing: Havre de Grâce (s’escria Rondibilis) que me demandez vous? Si serez coqu? Mon amy je suys marié, vous le serez par cy aprés. Mais escrivez ce mot en vostre cervelle avecques un style de fer, que tout homme marié, est en dangier d’estre coqu. Coqüage est naturellement des apennages de mariage. L’umbre plus naturellement ne suyt le corps, que Coqüage suyt les gens mariez. Et quand vous oirez dire de quelqu’un ces trois motz : « Il est marié », si vous dictez : « Il est doncques, ou a esté, ou sera, ou peult estre coqu » : vous ne serez dict imperit architecte de consequences naturelles (452–3). [“Heaven of Mercy!” exclaimed Rondibilis, “What are you asking me? Whether you’ll be a cuckold? My friend, I am married; you will be after all this. But write this dictum in your brain with an iron stylus, that any married man is in danger of being a cuckold. Cuckoldry is naturally one of the attributes of marriage. The shadow follows the body no more naturally than cuckoldry follows marriage. And when you hear said of anyone these three words: ‘He is married,’ if you say: ‘Then he is, or has been, or will be, or may be a cuckold,’ you will not be called an inexpert architect of natural consequences” (355).]

The good doctor describes this type of masculine paranoia using a particularly apt figure, that of a “word” written in the male brain with an iron stylus. One could say that Renaissance masculinity itself is a series of texts and discourses about women, both serious and comic, that were indelibly inscribed in men’s minds, or whose repeated inscription constituted masculine consciousness as such. In the Tiers Livre, the authoritative characters, such as Dr. Rondibilis, accept that this idea of the feminine leads to a kind of necessary masculine powerlessness. Men will ineluctably not be able to control that which they know to be uncontrollable, the body of woman. Yet, as we saw in Frère Jean’s advice to Panurge, and as will be confirmed further in the Rondibilis episode, this apparent weakness is the foundation of men’s strength, since it necessitates the bonds and friendships among them, both within the surveillance of women’s bodies, and in the sharing of those bodies when masculine vigilance inevitably fails. We have seen repeatedly the various bonds among men that are predicated upon a fantasy conception of woman. Yet, to this point, the Tiers Livre has not focused its attention on the texts that transmitted this historically-contingent idea of the feminine. This lacuna is more than filled by the Rondibilis episode. Just as masculinist

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homosocial behavior has its salient material and procedural characteristics, so the notion of the feminine that is one of its abstract foundations may be described point by point. The primary understanding shared by men about women concerns the nature of the female sex, which Rondibilis describes as follows: Mon amy (respondit Rondibilis) Hippocrates allant un jour de Lango en Polystylo visiter Democritus le philosophe, escrivit unes letres à Dionys son antique amy, par les quelles le prioit que pendent son absence il conduist sa femme chés ses pere et mere, les quelz estoient gens honorables et bien famez, ne voulant qu’elle seule demourast en son mesnaige; ce neantmoins qu’il veiglast sus elle soingneusement et espiast quelle part elle iroit avecques sa mere, et quelz gens la visiteroient chés ses parens. « Non (escrivoit-il) que je me defie de sa vertus et pudicité, laquelle par le passé m’a esté explorée et congnue : mais elle est femme. Voy là tout » (453).

[“My friend,” replied Rondibilis, “Hippocrates, going one day from Lango [Cos] to Polystylo [Thrace] to visit the philosopher Democritus, wrote a letter to his old friend Dionysius, in which he asked him, during his absence, to take his [Hippocrates’] wife to her parents, who were honorable people of good repute, not wanting her to stay in her house alone; nevertheless, asking him to watch over her carefully and take note of wherever she went with her mother and what people should visit her at her parents. ‘Not,’ he wrote, ‘that I don’t trust her virtue and modesty, which from times past has been made clear and known to me; but she is a woman, that’s all’” (355).]

The fraudulent knowledge of the feminine at the heart of this type of masculinity begins with a tautology: women will be women. There are two crucial elements of the anecdote that Rondibilis recounts. First is the the citation of Classical texts, the hallmark of Humanist thinking in the sixteenth century, through which Rondibilis authenticates and authorizes his statement concerning women by appealing to an authoritative source, as if to say that the “truth” he is about to communicate to his male listeners is derived not only from his own experience of the world, but also from the preserved wisdom of the ancients. Renaissance writers were required to demonstrate their knowledge of a large body of texts from Antiquity. The physical relations between men and women were predicated not only on the exigencies of distributing and maintaining material wealth through the institution of marriage, but also on the relations of men to other men that were promulgated through the maintenance and re-reading of both canonical texts and secondary didactic literature. While the sixteenth century is characterized by a transformation of practices of reading, writing, and printing, this revolution of textual technologies continued a specific knowledge about women that was at the heart of a venerable intertextual tradition that interpellated men as gendered subjects. The second key element of this passage is the network of relations that the masculinist description of women establishes among men, both on the historical level of the citation, and on the present level of Rabelais’s text. In his anecdote, Rondibilis cites canonical names, most notably the “father” of medicine himself, Hippocrates. Yet, his knowledge of the medical patriarch’s words is second-hand and of a dubious origin. “As Hippocrates, who was going to visit his friend the philosopher Democritus, wrote in his letter to his friend Dionysius”—this round-about method of

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setting up a misogynist affirmation incarnates quite well the structure of knowledge that is the basis of male homosocial relations. Part of masculine friendship, in the exemplary past of the Greeks and Romans, as in Renaissance France, was the need and the desire of men to call upon other men to participate in the surveillance of insatiable women, even those who appeared to be “virtuous,” i.e., those who adhered to patriarchal norms of behavior. Despite its Classical references, this scene merely reproduces the motif of the absent husband that is so familiar to us from the Cent nouvelles nouvelles: when a husband’s eyes are not present so that he may spy upon his wife, his male friend’s eyes must act as a substitute for him. In the anecdote that Rondibilis cites, Hippocrates’ apocryphal letter expresses his desire that his wife be spied upon by his friend Dionysius. In this type of homosocial literature, as in the Digest of Justinian, the letter at times serves as a presence that fills the void of a male absence, engendering a textual link among men that transposes the material relation existing among them. The image of the Father of Medicine who writes a letter to one of his friends while going to visit one of the Fathers of Philosophy, asking the friend to watch over the “virtue” of the Doctor’s wife, is thus a miniature embodiment of the intertextual structures within which early-modern masculinity developed and was transmitted. Rondibilis shifts his focus to a more conventional tale of the feminine that we have already seen, which outlines the scopic imaginary that these men expressed obsessively in mythic, masculinist cosmographies: Mon amy le naturel des femmes nous est figuré par la Lune, et en aultres choses, et en ceste : qu’elles se mussent, elles se constraignent, et dissimulent en la veue et praesence de leurs mariz. Iceulx absens elles prenent leur adventaige, se donnent du bon temps, vaguent, trotent, deposent leur hypocrisie, et se declairent : comme la Lune en conjunction du soleil n’apparoist on ciel, ne en terre. Mais en son opposition, estant au plus du Soleil esloingnée, reluist en sa plénitude, et apparoist toute, notamment on temps de nuyct. Ainsi sont toutes femmes femmes (453). [My friend, the nature of women is represented for us by the moon both in other respects and in this one: that they hide, dissimulate, and constrain themselves in the sight and presence of their husbands. In the absence of these, they take their advantage, have themselves a good time, gad about, trot about, lay aside their hypocrisy, and declare themselves, even as the moon does not appear in heaven or on earth in conjunction with the sun, but only in opposition to it, when at her greatest distance from the sun, she shines forth in all her plenitude and appears full, especially at nighttime. Thus are all women women (355).]

This celestial description of gender difference situates us firmly in ancient mythology and philosophy, which insisted on the correspondence between sunlight and understanding. For the Greeks and the Romans, the semantic domain associated with sun, light, and brightness, and by extension with understanding and reason, was personified in myths about the most important of the male gods, such as Apollo himself.45 From this perspective, the “virtue” of women depends upon the presence and absence of men: woman is a void who has meaning in the masculine order only when she is within the visual field of men, which imposes sense on everything. 45 Jacques Derrida described this metaphorical register of knowledge in “La mythologie blanche,” Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972), 247–324.

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To use the mixed metaphors that are typical of Rabelaisian discourse, the male gaze is a dissecting tool that penetrates deeply into the female anatomy in order to describe its constitutive parts. Hence the realm of masculinist reason, associated with light, the visual, and the upper part of the erect body, sees the “truth” of the female body, which women themselves are unable to see, and which subjects them to irrational, animal, and “lower bodily” desires. This Platonic mode of understanding situates women within the hierarchy of a cosmos that centers on men and their role as rational progenitors of the species, which Panurge himself echoes on several occasions in the Tiers Livre.46 In this cosmology, women, being closer to animals, are more susceptible to the “sting” of their uterus, which is the root and cause of their supposed flightiness and irritability, while men are able to master the procreative animal within them by using their reason. The Platonic source text for Rabelais’s parody visually dissects the female body yet sees nothing but the masculinist stereotype of women, who are reduced to the level of animal urges. In his continuation of this intertext, Rabelais’s description of the female body conforms to the “economy” of fluid or “humoral” movements that was typical of early medical theories, and to which Panurge had already referred in his description of the “debt” that the male testicles “paid” to the rest of the body through ejaculation and procreation. Rondibilis continues his discourse as follows: Quand je diz femme, je diz un sexe tant fragile, tant variable, tant muable, tant inconstant et imperfaict, que nature me semble (parlant en tout honneur et reverence) s’estre esguarée de ce bon sens, par lequel elle avoit créé et formé toutes choses, quand elle a basty la femme. Et y ayant pensé cent et cinq foys, ne sçay à quoy m’en resouldre : si non que forgeant la femme, elle a eu esgaurd à la social delectation de l’home, et à la perpetuité de l’espece humaine : plus qu’à la perfection de l’individuale muliebrité. Certes Platon ne sçait en quel ranc il les doibve colloquer, ou des animans raisonnables, ou des bestes brutes. Car Nature leurs a dedans le corps posé en lieu secret et intestin un animal, un membre, lequel n’est ès homes : on quel quelques foys sont engendrées certaines humeurs salses, nitreuses, bauracineuses, acres, mordicantes, lancinantes, chatouillantes amerement : par la poincture et fretillement douloureux des quelles (car ce membre est tout nerveux, et de vif sentement) tout le corps est en elles esbranlé, tous les sens raviz, toutes affections interinées, tous pensemens confonduz. De maniere, que si Nature ne leurs eust arrousé le front d’un peu de honte, vous les voiriez comme forcenées courir l’aiguillette plus espovantablement que ne feirent oncques les Proetides, les Mimallonides, ne les Thyades Bacchicques au jour de leurs Bacchanales. Par ce que cestuy terrible animal a colliguance à toutes les parties principales du corps, comme est evident en l’anatomie (453–4). [When I say woman, I mean a sex so fragile, so variable, so mutable, so inconstant and imperfect, that Nature (speaking in all honor and reverence) seems to me to have strayed from that good sense by which she had created and formed all things, when she built woman. And, having thought about it one hundred and five hundred times, I don’t know what to conclude, unless that in creating woman she had regard more to man’s social delectation and perpetuation of the human species than to the perfection of individual femininity. Certainly Plato does not know in what category he should place them, that of reasonable animals or that of brute beasts. For Nature has placed in their body, in a 46 See Plato, Timaeus 90–91, in Plato, Dialogues of Plato, tr. Benjamin Jowett (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 476.

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secret place inside, an animal, a member, which is not in men, in which are sometimes engendered certain salty humors, nitrous, boracic, acrid, biting, tearing, bitterly tickling, by whose pricking and painful titillation (for this member is all nerves and acutely sensitive), their entire body is shaken, all their senses transported, all desires internalized, all thoughts confused, so that if Nature had not sprinkled their foreheads with a little shame, you would see them, as if beside themselves, chasing the codpiece [l’aiguillette], more frightfully than ever did the Proetids, the Mimallonids, or the Bacchic Thyades on the day of their Bachanals, because this terrible animal has connections with all the main parts of the body, as is evident in anatomy (356).]

Here the text parodies a number of Classical and early-modern texts, ranging from the works of Plato, Galen, and Hippocrates to those of Tiraqueau and Erasmus.47 As in the rest of the Tiers Livre, this passage’s hyperbole is intentionally overblown, making it evident that Rabelais’s work is a satire. If I have not insisted upon the satirical nature of the text to this point, it is because it is obvious from the opening description of the Diogenic tonneau that Rabelais constantly rewrites Classical and learned topoi in his own characteristically parodic discourse, a fact which has often been used in his defense. Here, for example, the writer apparently transcribed ancient and ubiquitous “truths” about women in jest. Hence it might be risky for one to say that this parodic yet horrific passage provides definitive proof of the writer’s own misogyny; on the other hand, however, one would not be unjustified in claiming that his rewriting of anti-feminine anecdotes seems to intensify their misogynist bias.48 The sources of this passage in Ancient philosophy and the Renaissance practice of medicine reveal a subtext in which masculinist rationality is virtually contingent upon the irrational and insatiable desires of women’s “animal” nature. It is clear that “animal” in the context of Ancient philosophy signifies “that which moves of its own volition,” so that the uterine animal within women is in theory beyond the domain of the will and hence of the all-governing principle of reason. Nevertheless, the female body needs to be “fed” by what is ultimately the “fruit” of the male intellect, if one accepts the Platonic version of the male body that we find in the Timaeus: And we should consider that God gave the sovereign part of the human soul to be the divinity of each one, being that part which, as we say, dwells at the top of the body, and inasmuch as we are a plant not of an earthly but of a heavenly growth, raises us from earth to our kindred who are in heaven. And in this way we say truly; for the divine power suspended the head and root of us from that place where the generation of the soul first began, and thus made the whole body upright... 47 See Huchon’s notes on this passage, 1426–7. 48 Alice Fiola Berry explicates this type of critique in “‘Written in the Mind with an Iron Pen’: The Failure of Misogynistic Cliché in the Rondibilis Episode of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre (31–34).” French Studies XLIX:3 (July 1995), 275–82. In contrast, Leushuis argues that the “misogyny” of Rondibilis should not lead us to conclude that Rabelais himself held the same attitude, since the character is merely quoting conventional medical opinions concerning the functioning of women’s bodies (Le mariage, 166–7). On the other hand, Screech writes, somewhat problematically, “it seems that one can assume that Rondibilis represents Rabelais’s opinions on Panurge’s problem, seen from a particular point of view: the Natural. His conclusions are so evidently in accord with Rabelais’s general ethical notions” (The Rabelaisian Marriage, 101).

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Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature Of the men who came into the world, those who were cowards or led unrighteous lives may with reason be supposed to have changed into the nature of women in the second generation. And this was the reason why at that time the gods created in us the desire of sexual intercourse, contriving in man one animated substance, and in woman another, which they formed respectively in the following manner. The outlet for drink by which liquids pass through the lung under the kidneys and into the bladder, which receives and then by the pressure of the air emits them, was so fashioned by them as to penetrate also into the body of the marrow, which passes from the head along the neck and through the back, and which in the preceding discourse we have named the seed. And the seed having life, and becoming endowed with respiration, produces in that part in which it respires a lively desire of emission, and thus creates in us the love of procreation (Plato, tr. Jowett, 476).

Since men are associated with the high and the spiritual, women are inevitably linked to the low and the animal, which is why Plato asserts that the effects of the procreative animal or organ are much more pronounced in women than in men. Here as in Rabelais’s text, the movement of liquids in the body has a cosmic and intellectual significance. The production of semen must necessarily be connected with the movement of the humors from the head, the seat of spirituality and source of life, by which the male principle, reason, communicates with the animal/female in order to produce the next generation of beings divided into males and females according to their proximity to the realm of the spirit. To use Plato’s metaphors, which Montaigne echoed in “De l’oisiveté,” woman is the field where the seed of the male spirit is sown, bringing forth “animals unseen by reason of their smallness and without form” until they are “finally brought out into the light” (476). Thus when the animal/field of the uterus is fed/sown with the food/seeds of the male body, which ultimately issue from men’s heads, this female darkness produces the light of yet another generation. Rabelais’s revision of this Platonic anatomical cosmology repeats many of its primary features, replacing the agricultural metaphor with a mixed digestive and economic one. Rondibilis continues: [Je] vous diray que petite ne est la louange des preudes femmes, les quelles ont vescu pudicquement et sans blasme, et ont eu la vertus de ranger cestuy effrené animal à l’obeissance de raison. Et feray fin si vous adjouste, que cestuy animal assovy (si assovy peut estre) par l’aliment que Nature luy a praeparé en l’home, sont tous ses particuliers mouvements à but : sont tous ses appetiz assopiz : sont toutes ses furies appaisées. Pourtant ne vous esbahissez, si sommes en dangier perpetuel d’estre coquz, nous qui n’avons pas tous jours bien de quoy payer et satisfaire au contentement (455). [I will say to you that no small praise is due to upright women, who have lived chastely and blamelessly, and have had the virtue to bring this frenzied animal to obedience, to reason. And I will conclude if I add this, that when this animal is satiated (if satiated it can be) by the food that Nature has prepared for it in man, all its individual motions have reached their goal, all its appetites are put to sleep, all its furies pacified. Therefore don’t be astonished if we are in perpetual danger of being cuckolds, we who do not always have in abundance the wherewithal to pay it off and satisfy it to contentment (356–7).]

If we combine the Platonic and Rabelaisian versions of this ancient, misogynist myth, we might say that ravenous woman must constantly eat the food of reason

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that may be given to her only by men’s bodies. In the comic deformation of this “scientific” explanation, the cuckold’s anxiety is produced by his fear that his body will be insufficient to the insatiable demands of women, resulting in a double-bind from which the future cuckold will be unable to escape. Woman as animal can be fed and satisfied only by men, but every man is by his nature incapable of feeding her sufficiently, or of paying the bodily debt that he owes her. All of these terms repeat the major motifs of the Tiers Livre and of the comic cuckold literature that is its semantic context. This dual phantasm of female insatiability/male insufficiency is in fact that which generates masculinist cosmologies and mythologies of gender difference, such as the final allegory that ends the Rondibilis episode. According to this “myth” of cuckoldry,49 the cuckold god was left without a feast, since he was absent from Jupiter’s distribution of the days. To make up for this oversight, Cuckoldry’s feast day was shared with that of another goddess: Sa feste feut, pource que lieu vuide et vacant n’estoit en tout le calendrier, en concurrence et au jour de la Déesse Jalousie : sa domination, sus les gens mariez, notamment ceulx qui auroient belles femmes : ses sacrifices, soubson, defiance, malengroin, guet, recherche et espies des mariz sus leurs femmes. Avecques commendement riguoureux à un chascun marié, de le reverer et honorer, celebrer sa feste à double : et luy faire les sacrifices susdictz. Sus peine et intermination, que à ceulx ne seroit messer Coqüage en faveur, ayde, ne secours, qui ne l’honoreroient comme est dict : jamais ne tiendroit de eulx compte : jamais n’entreroit en leurs maisons : jamais ne hanteroit leurs compaignies : quelques invocations qu’ilz luy feissent : ains les laisseroit eternellement pourrir seulz avecques leurs femmes sans corrival aulcun : et refuyroit sempiternellement comme gens Haereticques et sacrileges... (457). [His festival was (because there was no empty and vacant spot in the whole calendar) in competition with the goddess Jealousy and on the same day; his dominion, over married men, especially those who should have beautiful wives; his sacrifices, suspicion, mistrust, surliness, lying in wait, investigation, and spying by husbands on their wives, with a rigorous recommendation to each and every man to revere and honor him, celebrate his festival twofold, and make him the aforementioned sacrifices, on pain and prescription that to those who would not honor him as is said, Messer Cuckoldry would not offer aid, or help, never would he take account of them, never would enter their houses, never would frequent their companies, whatever pleas they might make to him but would let them rot away eternally alone with their wives, without any rival, and would shun them forever as heretic and sacrilegious folk … (359).]

Men who define their gender within this paradigm have two options: to become obsessed by their jealousy of their wives’ imagined infidelities, or to ignore their wives’ potential indiscretions. In the first case, the text states that the god of Cuckoldry will always grace the husband’s house with his presence. The second case, however, may perhaps even be worse, if we are to interpret from the overt wording of the

49 Berry points out that this myth is based on an “Aesopian fable recounted by Plutarch” in the “Consolatio ad Apollonium, XIX, 112” (“Written in the Mind” 277, 282 n. 13).

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passage. The husband who trusts his wife will never become a cuckold, meaning that he will “rot” alone with her in his house, with no male friends/rivals with whom he may bond. In other words, this text simply repeats Frère Jean’s syllogism, which we have already seen: “Si tu es coqu, ergò ta femme sera belle : ergò tu seras bien traicté d’elle : ergò tu auras des amis beaucoup : ergò tu seras saulvé” (439). [“If you’re a cuckold, ergo your wife will be beautiful, ergo you will be well treated by her, ergo you will have friends aplenty, ergo you will be saved” (340).] The masculine subject of this literature is virtually obliged to enter the speculative and intertextual realm of cuckoldry if he wishes to belong to the patriarchal order. Otherwise, he will live out his life in the relative solitude of his domus, populated only by his real wife, who probably bears no resemblance to the wife of his fantasies. Cuckoldry makes the husband in this context enter a world of surveillance, suspicions, inquests, and espionage, which play themselves out in a visual domain that is a model for the textual domain. The act of reading this imaginary woman is thus akin to the act of reading itself, and the cuckold is essentially a being who is engendered as masculine by his need to read the text of woman as the story of his own anxious and inadequate gender, which he constantly repeats and rehearses both to himself and to the other men with whom he must maintain a series of relationships. The Resistance to Reading Gender According to Huchon, the Tiers Livre represents Rabelais’s participation in many of the important debates of the Renaissance, which were given a decisive impetus by Erasmus’s re-reading of Classical literature. Huchon’s “notice” to her extraordinary edition of the text details the mixture of genres, forms, references, and topics that constitutes this singularly polymorphous work.50 From this perspective, the Tiers Livre is an imitation of Lucian’s peculiar mixture of dialogue and comedy; a condemnation of philautie or self-love in the tradition of Erasmus; a philosophical representation of the figure of the apophtegme or sage, incarnated here as Pantagruel; a rhetorical exercise focused on the figure of the paradox, a word which appears for the first time in French in this work; and, as Duval noted in detail, an apologia of Pauline caritas combined with the praise of folly “in the eyes of the world” that marked evangelical wisdom. Read in this way, the work appears to contain a mixture of styles and forms that seems quite peculiar from a modern point of view, but which was characteristic and perhaps even constitutive of Humanist thinking in the Renaissance. Like most scholars, Huchon implies that the primary subject matter of the text, marriage and the social implications of men’s relations to women, was only of minor importance when compared to the primary Pauline and Evangelical message of the work. Others, like Bernd Renner, have emphasized the influence of Lucian and Erasmus on the text, while speaking little of its actual content. I myself have argued elsewhere that Rabelais’s persistent misogyny may be excused somewhat by the fact that his generic practices were derived from an historical and literary context in which misogyny

50 See Huchon, 1341–56.

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51

was the norm. In other words, with noteworthy exceptions, most sixteenth-century scholars seem to argue that although Rabelais wrote atrocious things about women, he is to be forgiven because his misogyny was not the most important point of his work, or was not all that relevant to his primary subjects.52 In contrast, my goal here has been to describe intertextual masculinity in the Tiers Livre as a set of textual practices through which men bond with one another and structure hetero-normative masculine identities by representing woman as the definitive other. This fundamental masculinist “move” could and should be read as one of the fundamental gestures of the Renaissance, which, along with the imperialism and colonialism of Humanism that Freccero remarked in her introduction, has remained largely unexamined. Following Abel Lefranc, Huchon notes that Rabelais has been read as one of the primary antagonists of women in the legendary querelle des femmes that reached one of its apogees in the sixteenth century: Toutefois, le Tiers livre a été reçu comme une pièce de la querelle des femmes au milieu du siècle. En témoigne le titre de l’œuvre satirique, La Louenge des femmes. Invention extraite du commentaire de Pantagruel sur l’Androgyne de Platon, 1551 ; et François Billon, dans Le Fort inexpugnable de l’honneur du sexe feminin, publié en 1555 mais rédigé avant 1550, prend violemment à partie l’antiféminisme du Tiers livre et ces « morfonduz pantagruelistes » que sont les vilipendeurs du sexe féminin, faisant de Rabelais leur chef de file (1350). [Still, the Tiers livre was received as part of the argument concerning women in the middle of the century. Evidence of this is the title of the satiric work, In Praise of Women: an Invention Drawn from Pantagruel’s Commentary on the Androgyne of Plato, 1551; and François Billon, in The Impregnable Fort of the Honor of the Feminine Sex, published in 1555, but written before 1550, objects strongly to the anti-feminism of the Tiers livre and those “frustrated Pantagruelists” who are the vilifiers of the feminine sex, making of Rabelais the leader of their movement.]

In short, there is no denying that Rabelais was a misogynist, despite the relative freedom and equality that his imaginary utopia granted to women in the famous description of the Abbaye de Thélème. More importantly for my purposes, his “anti-feminism” was an integral part of a textual tradition that was essential to the configuration of masculinity in this historical context, and to which Rabelais was one of the most important contributors. To put this point as strongly as it can be phrased, it is no accident that the third of Rabelais’s books is squarely focused on misogynist themes that can serve as the basis of rhetorical exercises: on the contrary, woman as a “topic” of discourses within which men performed their gender assumed one of its most forceful and canonical expressions in this work. 51 See my article “Un bon esmoucheteur par mouches jamais esmouché ne sera: Panurge as Trickster” Romanic Review 88, No. 4 (1997), 519–28. 52 Carla Freccero noted the absence of attention to women in Rabelais as follows: “A retrospective reading of this book suggests to me further explorations of the Rabelaisian text that follow changing critical currents in the academy and have not, as yet, been fully charted. The place of ‘woman,’ as figure and as referent, is here alluded to but not analyzed in depth… Current scholarship on Rabelais and on the Renaissance too often colludes in the deliberate elision of this other half of humanity” (Father Figures, xi).

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Chapter 34 of this text provides us with some of the most striking examples of how the male characters in Rabelais’s imaginary world bonded with one another and thus enacted their gender simply by activating textual stereotypes of women. Still in the middle of the Rondibilis episode, Carpalim opens the dialogue of the chapter by providing one of the most succinct formulations of the importance of women’s vilification to masculinist texts: On temps (dist Carpalim) que j’estois ruffien à Orleans, je n’avois couleur de Rhetoricque plus valable, ne argument plus persuasif envers les dames, pour les mettre aux toilles, et attirer au jeu d’amours, que vivement, apertement, detestablement remonstrant comment leurs mariz estoient d’elles jalous. Je ne l’avois mie inventé. Il est escript. Et en avons loix, exemples, raisons, et experiences quotidianes. Ayans ceste persuasion en leurs caboches, elles feront leurs mariz coquz infalliblement par Dieu, sans jurer, deussent elles faire ce que feirent Semyramis, Pasiphäé, Egesta, les femmes de l’isle Mandés en Aegypte blasonnées par Herodote et Strabo, et aultres telles mastines (458–9). [“At the time,” said Carpalim, “when I was running a bawdy house in Orléans, I had no more valuable rhetorical trick or more persuasive argument for the young ladies to draw into my nets and lure them into the sport of amours than pointing out to them vividly, manifestly, how their husbands were jealous of them. I certainly hadn’t invented this: it is written up, and we have laws, examples, reasons on the subject and daily experiences of it. Having this persuasion in their noggins, they will infallibly make their husbands cuckolds, by God (no swearing intended)! even if they had to do as did Semiramis, Pasiphae, Egesta, the women of Mendes Island in Egypt, whom Herodotus and Strabo hold up to our blame, and other such bitches” (360).]

Thus begins yet another spectacular scene of male bonding in this most homosocial of texts. In fact, the idea of masculinity as spectacle is crucial to a reading of this chapter, which literally stages the intertextual procedures within which men interpellated one another as masculine subjects. As we have seen repeatedly, one of the primary stories through which men bond with other men is that of the seduction of women. In this gathering of male characters, Carpalim offers a version of a wellknown story, that of the mature man who remembers fondly the wild times of his youth when he was an adept seducer of women, noting that masculinist seduction is essentially rhetorical. Moreover, storytelling among learned men continuously cites a vast intertext, which confirms men in their everyday experience of women by mediating that experience through a series of rhetorical and discursive conceptions of the feminine. For the men of Rabelais’s cultural milieu, erudition amounted to an invocation of this concept of authority, which was anchored in a gender-biased history of Western literature that characterized women as inevitably wanting that which men withheld from them. Chapter 33 ends with a Biblical reference, which claims that Eve “à poine eust jamais entré en tentation de manger le fruict de tout scavoir, s’il ne luy eust esté defendu” (458) [“Eve would hardly have entered into temptation to eat the fruit of all knowledge, if it had not been forbidden her” (359)], resulting in the formulation of the following maxim or sentence that encapsulates this kind of masculinist wisdom, expressed in the voice of the Devil (le Tentateur): “il t’est defendu, tu en doibs doncques manger: ou tu ne serois pas femme” (458) [“It

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is forbidden you, so you must eat of it or you would not be woman” (360)]. Similarly, Carpalim begins Chapter 34 by citing a catalogue of the canonical examples of women’s “bestial” desires drawn from the Classical intertext (Pasiphaë, Semiramis, Egesta), in which men were depicted as violent, rapacious animals, as we saw in the figure of Jupiter, the male patriarch, that runs throughout the text. Chapter 34 thus traces out for us the itinerary of the kind of exemplary thinking that is characteristic of the structuring of masculinity in Rabelais’s historical and literary context. Its first stage is Carpalim’s declamation of one of the core maxims of the cuckold literature, which was also reaffirmed in Rondibilis’s advice to Panurge: women will cuckold their husbands if the latter are jealous of their wives. Jean Céard has remarked on the importance of declamation to the overall structure of the Tiers Livre.53 The entirety of the text is a discursive performance that declaims a certain kind of masculinity, requiring a particular kind of masculine audience in order to be understood as such. The dynamics of this elocutionary structure of the male gender are reproduced in miniature in this chapter. Moreover, Carpalim’s apodictic introduction establishes a link between this kind of masculinist declamation and the ancient practice of citing examples in order to support the truth of the speaker’s affirmations. Masculine identity is hence a kind of exemplary entity that continuously has to be situated in reference to an enormous body of canonical examples, while its “positionality” in reference to this intertext has to be proclaimed to an all-male audience that is already convinced of the truth of its claims. For the men of this context, the discursive sharing of a conventional comic critique of women was perhaps one of their ultimate pleasures. The second speaker of the chapter, Ponocrates, follows the first misogynist maxim with a second one (women cannot keep secrets), followed by an exemplary anecdote, based on a “true” story, that might be summarized as follows. The nuns of the real convent of Fontevrault, the name of which Rabelais transforms into “Coingnaufond,” which means “Knocking, leacherie, Venerie,” according to Cotgrave, asked Pope John XXII if they could confess their sins to each other, since they had certain “secret imperfections” that they would be too embarrassed to confess to men. The Pope tells them that he will grant their wish, leaving them with a little box that he forbids them to open, “sus poine de censure ecclesiasticque et de excommunication eternelle” (459) [“on pain of ecclesiastical censure and eternal excommunication” (360)]. Predictably, “La defense [d’ouvrir cette boite] ne feut si tost faicte, qu’elles grisloient en leurs entendemens d’ardeur de veoir qu’estoit dedans” (459) [“No sooner was this prohibition made than their brains were sizzling with eagerness to see what was inside” (360)]. In short, when the Pope returns to the convent, he finds that the nuns have opened the box and that the little bird he had placed within it had flown away. He proves to the women through this exemplary trick that they will not be able to keep the secret of their confessions, and hence forbids them to confess their sins to each other. This anecdote is an allegory of the ways in which knowledge is deprived to women. Men keep secrets from women, restricting knowledge within spaces to which women have no access; when women do gain access to these restricted zones, men will tell them that they should not have tried to penetrate areas that 53 François Rabelais, Le Tiers Livre, ed. Jean Céard (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1995), x.

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were off limits to them.54 The image of the little bird trapped in its box which flies away when women who are forbidden to open it are unable to obey this interdiction clearly recalls the Pandora myth of ancient mythology, which mirrors the image of Eve mentioned earlier. For the male characters gathered together in these pages, women’s uncontrollable desire to know what men think they should not know is the primary cause of the problems that plague the human race, and serves as a pretext for an institutionalized masculinist hierarchy that continuously threatens women with censure and excommunication if they disobey its rules. We need to backtrack for a moment, however, to see precisely what secrets the women who are described here want to keep from the men in positions of authority who will not allow them to do so: —Vrayment (dist Ponocrates) j’ay ouy compter, que le Pape Jan .XXII. passant un jour par l’abbaye de Coingnaufond, feut requis par L’Abbesse, et meres discretes, leurs conceder un indult, moyenant lequel se peussent confesser les unes es aultres, alleguantes que les femmes de religion ont quelques petites imperfections secretes, les quelles honte insupportable leurs est deceler aux homes confesseurs : plus librement, plus familierement les diroient unes aux aultres soubs le sceau de confession. « Il n’y a rien (respondit le Pape) que voluntiers ne vous oultroye, mais je y voy un inconvenient. C’est que la confession doibt estre tenue secrette. Vous aultres femmes à poine la celeriez » (459). [“Really,” said Ponocrates, “I’ve heard that Pope John XXII, when he passed one day through the abbey of Thrustitindeep [Coingnaufond], was asked by the abbess and some discreet nuns to grant them an indult by means of which they could confess to one another, alleging that religious women have a few little secret imperfections, which constitute an unbearable shame for them to reveal to their male confessors: they would reveal these more freely and more familiarly to each other under the seal of confession.55 “‘There is nothing’ said the pope, ‘that I won’t gladly grant you. But I see one problem in it, which is that confession must be kept secret. You women would have a hard time concealing it’” (360).]

What passes here for logic is an example of the casuistry that is at the heart of a certain kind of masculinity. “Since women are unable to keep secrets,” the passage seems to say, “they must reveal the secret ‘imperfections’ of their bodies to men, who are better able to maintain the secrecy of those imperfections.” In other words, masculine power in this context makes it virtually impossible for women to keep even the most intimate knowledge of their own bodies from men, while the injunction of this impossibility results in the institutional slander that the Pope voices as the

54 For an in-depth discussion of the millennial practices in which men kept secrets from women as part of a more general masculinist hierarchy of power, see Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), especially Chapter 3, “Men’s Ways of Knowing,” 93–134. I thank the outside reader of Ashgate for this reference. 55 The passage in italics is missing from Frame’s text, and appears in my own translation.

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maxim that structures this exemplary narrative. The masculinist cynicism declaimed here might thus be characterized as follows: “we men will not allow you women to hide from us even the most intimate details of your own bodies; hence, you must be naturally incapable of maintaining this kind of information in private, due to the intrinsic weakness of your sex; as a consequence, you must reveal this knowledge to us, so that we may keep you safe from your own selves.” In this light, we may perhaps understand why Rabelais transformed the name of the real convent, Fontevrault, in which the nuns were in fact given the right to confess their sins to their abbess,56 to “Coingnaufond.” As we saw in the chapter on the Sybille de Panzoust, the idea of a secret region of the female body to which men would have no access—un petit “coin au fond” de leurs corps, a little corner hidden at the bottom of their bodies, which is a place that men must “coigner,” “to wedge, drive hard, or knocke fast in, as with a wedge,” according to Cotgrave—is extraordinarily troubling to this period’s men, who confront the anxiety it produces in them by bonding with each other through the declamation of misogynist jokes and anecdotes. Rabelais’s text is largely a transcription of the collective, jocular attitude that men in his milieu seemingly adopted vis-à-vis their idea of women. Chapter 34 is a literal staging of how this attitude played itself out in the verbal exchanges among men as the spectators and performers of their gender, which was contingent upon their elaboration of the feminine as a conceptual other. At the end of the anecdote, an anonymous voice apparently salutes Ponocrates, the narrator of the Pope’s story, and brings to life an extraordinary group of men, among whom Rabelais himself is named for the only time in the body of the text itself: —Monsieur nostre maistre, vous soyez le tresbien venu. J’ay prins moult grand plaisir vous oyant. Et loue Dieu de tout. Je ne vous avois oncques puys veu que jouastez à Monspellier avecques nos antiques amys Ant. Saporta, Guy Bouguier, Balthasar Noyer, Tollet, Jan Quentin, François Robinet, Jan perdrier, et François Rabelais, la morale comoedie de celluy qui avoit espousé une femme mute (459–60). [“Our master, Sir, a most hearty welcome to you. It gave me great pleasure to hear you, and I praise God for everything. I hadn’t ever seen you since back at Montpellier, when with our old friends Ant. Saporta, Guy Bouguier, Balthazar Noyer, Tolet, Jean Queutin, François Robinet, Jean Perdrier, and François Rabelais, you played in the moral comedy of The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife” (361).]

Céard’s notes highlight the perplexity produced by this sudden intrusion of a firstperson voice that is neither that of Ponocrates nor that of the external narrator: “Qui parle? Est-ce bien Ponocrates? La fonction de cette réplique est seulement d’introduire le rappel de la comédie de ‘la femme mute’ en remémorant les circonstances de sa représentation” (Céard 326 n. 6). [“Who is speaking? Is it indeed 56 “Les religieuses de l’abbaye de Fontevrault auraient eu la possibilité de se confesser à leur abbesse avant de recevoir l’absolution d’un prêtre” (Huchon 459 n. 8, 1429). [“The nuns of the Abbey of Fontevrault would have had the possibility of confessing to their abbess before receiving absolution from a priest.”] In the first edition of the Tiers Livre (Paris: Christian Wechsel, 1546), 242, the name of the abbey appears as “Fonsheurault,” and is changed in later editions to read “Coingnaufond.”

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Ponocrates? The function of this quoted speech is merely to introduce the reference to the comedy of ‘the mute woman’ while remembering the circumstances of its representation.”] Since this disembodied voice addresses itself to the person who just told the preceding story and expresses its pleasure upon hearing this tale, we can assume that it does not belong to Ponocrates. What is being declaimed here is the master argument of masculinist hegemony, and the pleasure that the masculine subject feels upon hearing it expressed in the form of its myriad laws, examples, and reasons, as Carpalim says at the beginning of the chapter. This second intrusion of the “real” into the delirious fantasy realm that is the Tiers Livre is quite striking. The true story of the nuns of Fontevrault, transformed here into the phantasmic tale of masculine ingenuity that triumphs over feminine weakness, is followed by the true story of François Rabelais and his classmates in medical school, who staged the farce of a husband and his mute wife.57 Woman as “subaltern” in the late medieval imaginary is often described in terms of her capacity or incapacity to speak. We recall the exemplum from Jacques de Vitry that we discussed in chapter 1, in which a querulous woman had her tongue cut out by her husband because she contradicted him too often and too well. From this perspective, we know that for the men of this historical context, a woman who spoke undoubtedly would voice criticisms of her husband, which meant that she had to be silenced in the same way that she had to be enclosed within the domicile of her marriage. Even in what we may assume to be the real, historical world of Rabelais himself, whose existence is verified here by the usage of names of identifiable individuals, one of the “pleasurable” activities of these men was precisely the staging of a farce that repeated and displayed the fantasy images of women that dominated the masculinist conceptual world. One might object that these medical students were simply “boys being boys,” and that their thespian endeavors were merely a form of “comic relief” from their studies. Yet, one is perplexed by several questions that this staging of women’s silence raises: why do certain kinds of men, such as these, always turn to a degradation of the image of women as a means of having fun? Why does this degradation have to be declaimed and performed before an audience of other men? Why is this performance remembered later with such fondness and nostalgia? Finally, why do Rabelais scholars simply remark on the fact that such performances did in fact take place, and that Rabelais “se plaît” [in this case, amuses himself] by mentioning his own role in the eternal spectacle of gender degradation? The next speaker, Épistémon, voices a similar kind of masculinist pleasure while recalling the details of the farce at which he himself was one of the spectators:

57 “On sait que les étudiants de Montpellier aimaient à donner des représentations théâtrales, mais on ne connaît celle-ci que par ce passage. Rabelais se plaît à mentionner les amis et camarades auxquels ce spectacle l’associa ; tous étaient étudiants à Montpellier en même temps que lui” (Céard 326, n. 7). [“We know that the students of Montpellier liked putting on theatrical works, but this particular work is known only from this passage. Rabelais enjoys [or amuses himself by] mentioning his friends and comrades who came together in this play; all were students at Montpellier at the same time as he was.”] Cf. Huchon 460 n. 1, 1429.

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—J’y estois (dist Epistemon). Le bon mary voulut qu’elle parlast. Elle parla par l’art du Medicin et du Chirurgien, qui luy coupperent un encyliglotte qu’elle avoit soubs la langue. La parolle recouverte, elle parla tant, et tant, que son mary retourna au Medicin pour remede pour la faire taire. Le Medicin respondit en son art bien avoir remedes propres pour faire parler les femmes : n’en avoir pour les faire taire. Remede unicque estre surdité du mary, contre cestuy interminable parlement de femme. Le paillard devint sourd par ne sçay quelz charmes qu’ilz feirent. Sa femme voyant qu’il estoit sourd devenu, qu’elle parloit en vain, de luy n’estoit entendue, devint enraigée. Puys le Medicin demandant son salaire, le mary respondit qu’il estoit vrayement sourd : et qu’il n’entendoit sa demande. Le Medicin luy jecta on dours ne sçay quelle pouldre, par vertus de laquelle il devint fol. Adoncques le fol mary et la femme enragée se raslierent ensemble et tant bastirent les Medicin et Chirurgien qu’ilz les laisserent à demy mors. Je ne riz oncques tant, que je feis à ce Patelinage (460). [“I was there,” said Epistémon. “The good husband wanted to have her speak. She did speak, by the skill of the doctor and the surgeon, who cut off a restricting cord under her tongue. With her speech recovered she talked and talked, so much that her husband went back to the doctor for a remedy to shut her up. The doctor replied that he had indeed in his craft remedies to make women talk, but none to shut them up; the only remedy for this interminable talking by his wife was deafness in the husband. The rascal became deaf, though I know not what spell they cast. His wife, seeing that he had become deaf, that she was talking in vain, he wasn’t hearing her, went mad. Then, when the doctor asked for his fee, the husband replied that he really was deaf and couldn’t hear his request. The doctor cast over his back some powder or other by virtue of which he went crazy. Thereupon the crazy husband and the mad wife joined forces together and beat up the doctor and surgeon so badly that they left him half dead. I’ve never laughed so hard as I did at that crazy farce” (361).]

Until well into the twentieth century, one of the standard elements of comic theater was a good beating: think of the films of Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers, or the Three Stooges. We have already seen that the figure of the cuckold was often subjected to physical and verbal abuse as he was paraded through the streets during the celebration of diverse feast days. From the scene that Épistémon describes, one might argue that all of the characters were victims of abuse and degradation in the play put on by Rabelais and his friends, and that the only character in the play who is restored to her “natural” state by medical science is the mute wife, who speaks by means of a surgical intervention. The problem with this argument would of course be that the figure of the wife here merely reproduces yet another masculinist stereotype of women, i.e., that they speak too much, and that their language drives men mad. The farce thus inverts one of the canonical topoi of the exemplary literature: the act of cutting here enables the woman’s speech, instead of making her incapable of criticizing her husband, as in Vitry’s exemplum. The idea that women’s speech drives men mad is reinforced by two details in the farce: first, that the “interminable parlement de femme” forces the husband to ask for a second “cure” for his wife which is well beyond the capacities of the doctors; second, that the deafness of her husband drives the woman herself mad, since no one listens to her language. Finally,

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the pleasurable laughter that Epistemon describes mentions an important comic intertext, the Farce de Maître Pathelin. In a gathering of learned men, who display their familiarity not only with medical procedures,58 but also with a certain corpus of comic literature, the central joke that allows them to share a specific kind of pleasure is built upon an exemplary, pejorative topos of women. This type of exemplary thinking and the knowledge it transmits are crucial to men’s gender identities. In order to perform their masculinity, men in Rabelais display their erudition to other men within a process of constant references, demonstrating that knowledge itself for them consists of this mode of working and reworking stereotypical images of femininity that become canonical and authoritative through a consistent practice of citation. Finally, the comfort and familiarity that men experience by staging the spectacle of their gender is expressed as laughter in the Tiers Livre, as the intervention in this dialogue of Épistémon, whose name signifies knowledge, makes clear. In one of the most astonishing passages in all of Rabelais, the name of the author himself appears in this chapter’s description of a misogynist farce that the medical students of Montpellier performed. Moreover, the theatrical production leads to a parallel performance of a certain kind of medical knowledge at the end of the chapter, when Panurge finally interrupts the series of anti-feminist exempla in order to draw a conclusion from the advice he has received from Rondibilis (“…que je me marie hardiment, et que je ne me soucie d’estre coqu” (460) [“…I should boldly marry and not worry about being a cuckold” (361)]. The end of the chapter, however, consists of yet another discursive exchange among the male characters that is accompanied by an economic one: —Si ma femme se porte mal: j’en vouldrois veoir l’urine, (dist Rondibilis) toucher le pouls: et veoir la disposition du basventre, et des parties umbilicares, comme nous commende Hippo. 2. Apho 35 avant oultre proceder. —Non, non, (dist Panurge) cela ne faict à propous. C’est pour nous aultres Legistes, qui avons la rubricque, De uentre inspiciendo. Je luy appreste un clystere barbarin. Ne laissez vos affaires d’ailleurs plus urgens. Je vous envoiray du rislé en vostre maison. Et serez tous jours nostre amy. » Puis s’approcha de luy, et luy mist en main sans mot dire quatre Nobles à la rose. Rondibilis les print tresbien : puys luy dist en effroy comme indigné. « He, he, he, meschantes gens jamais je ne prens rien. Rien jamais des gens de bien je ne refuse. Je suys tousjours à vostre commendement. —En poyant, dist Panurge. —Cela s’entend », respondit Rondibilis. (461) [“If my wife is ill [or ‘if my wife behaves badly’], I’d want to check her urine, feel her pulse, and examine the condition of her lower belly and umbilical parts, before going any further, as Hippocrates orders us to do, Aphorisms Book 2, no. 35.”

58 The “procedure” that Epistemon mentions is described by Céard as follows: “[Encyliglotte:] excessive brièveté de ‘l’attache nerveuse (dite vulgairement le filet) qui retient’ la langue (A. Paré, XV, 30, in Oeuvres, éd. Malgaigne, t. II, p. 455)” (Céard 326 n. 8). [“Encycliglottis: excessive shortness of ‘the nervous attachment (called vulgarly the string) that holds back’ the tongue (Ambroise Paré, XV, 30, in Works, ed. Malgaigne, v. II, p. 455).”]

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“No, no,” said Panurge, “that’s not the point. That’s for us jurists, who have the rule De ventre inspiciendo. I’ll fix her a mighty enema. Don’t abandon your more urgent business elsewhere. I’ll send you some rissoles to your house, and you’ll always be our friend.” Then he went up to him, and, without a word, slipped into his hand four rose nobles. Rondibilis took them all right, then said in alarm as if indignant: “Heh, heh, heh! Sir, you didn’t need to. Many thanks all the same. From wicked people I never accept anything. From good people I never refuse. I’m always at your service.” “For pay,” said Panurge. “That’s understood,” said Rondibilis (362).]

This masculinist mode of “doing business” always ends with these kinds of gestures: handshakes, slaps on the back, expressions of good will, money slipped from hand to hand. In the company of “good” men, the relation is also “lubricated” by gifts of the kind that Panurge mentions here: in Rabelais’s world, fatty foods sent to a man’s domus are a sign of the utmost affection. The explicit subtext of this masculine homosocial realm, however, is the idea that men are responsible for the inspection of women’s private parts, as two different kinds of canonical texts instruct them to do. Panurge complements his explicit reference to Hippocrates with an implicit reference to the Digest, as both Céard and Huchon make clear.59 The rapport among men in Rabelais often takes the form of a verbal sparring match in which dictums that define the professional expertise of each man are tossed back and forth between them. 60 The deformation and degradation of well-known maxims and proverbs that

59 “… [de ventre inspiciendo] Titre du Digest, XXV, 4, qui signifie “De la constation de la grossesse,” mais dont Panurge change le sens ... pour l’accommoder à son propos” (Céard 328 n. 15). [(“de ventre inspiciendo) Title of the Digest, XXV, 4, which means ‘on the establishment of pregnancy,’ but Panurge changes its meaning… in order to adapt it to his purpose”]; “Voir Digeste, XXV, iv, De uentre inspiciendo custodiendoque partu, où il est traité de la grossesse de la veuve et de la légitimité de l’enfant à naître …” (Huchon 461 n. 3, 1429). [“See the Digest, XXV, iv, De uentre inspiciendo custodiendoque partu, which discusses the pregnancy of widows and the legitimacy of the children to be born …”] 60 Shortly before their final bonding sequence, Panurge and Rondibilis exchange the following verses: “Stercus et urina Medici sunt prandia prima/Ex aliis paleas, ex istis collige grana. —Vous prenez mal, (dist Rondibilis) le vers subsequent est tel: Nobis sunt signa, uobis sunt prandia digna” (Huchon 460). [“Stercus et urina Medici sunt prandia prima/Ex aliis paleas, ex istis collige grana. ‘You’re misquoting,’ said Rondibilis, ‘the next verse is as follows: ‘Nobis sunt signa, uobis sunt prandia digna.’”] Céard explains this exchange as follows: “Le premier de ces deux vers vient du Régime de l’École de Salerne, décrivant les inconvénients de la pratique médicale (“Excrément et urine sont les premiers mets des médecins”): les juristes l’utilisaient pour railler les médecins … De là la réplique, classique, de Rondibilis, qui répond à Panurge comme les médecins le faisaient aux juristes: “Pour nous, ce sont des signes; pour vous, des mets mérités” (Céard 328 n. 12). [“The first of these two verses comes from the Regimen of the Medical School at Salerno, describing the inconveniences of medical practice (‘Excrement and urine are the first foods of doctors’): jurists used to use these to make fun of doctors … from which comes the classic reply of Rondibilis, who responds to Panurge in the way that doctors do to jurists: ‘for us, they are merely signs; for you, they are the food you deserve’”].

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defined professional classes of men is a standard technique of parodic literature which Rabelais can rarely resist. After the affectionate exchange of insults between the two men, which relies upon their having attained a certain level of erudition within their respective fields (according to Huchon, “Panurge rappelle sa formation juridique” (461 n. 2, 1429) [“Panurge reminds us of his juridical training”]), and which relies upon a rather sophisticated series of references to a masculinist intertext, the final gesture of the chapter repeats what we have already seen in the exemplum of the Pope’s visit to the convent of Fontevrault: the privileging of information that is constitutive of masculinist hegemony in this context relies upon the surveillance, control, restriction, and scientific examination of the female body, especially its private, reproductive parts. Is the fact that the female body is present in the second discursive exchange between Panurge and Rondibilis simply incidental? Is their focus on the “lower material bodily stratum” of women in this dialogue merely an echo of the scatological bantering in the first part of the sequence, reinforced in Panurge’s scandalous claim that he is going to administer a “violent enema” to his wife if she is unfaithful to him? The usual excuses for Rabelais’s rather consistent misogyny, especially in this text, can be invoked here to exculpate him: that medieval and Renaissance comedy are frequently misogynist; that the image of woman that is evoked here is really not the point—what matters is the flippant erudite exchange between the two characters; that Rabelais throughout this chapter is making a mockery of a certain kind of exemplary thinking that instructed men in the wiles of women. It seems to me, however, that the most ethical means of dealing with this misogyny is simply to recognize that a consistent misrecognition, slandering, and conceptual violence against women was an integral part of the way in which masculinity elaborated itself in textual terms, and that Rabelais’s works are clearly inscribed within this kind of masculinist textual practice, which had important consequences for the exercise of power throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.61 Reading these works from the perspective of gender studies is important since it allows one to explicate the strategies and techniques through which masculinities were historically constructed, perhaps with the goal of liberating ourselves from these kinds of injust hegemonies, which were propagated among men through the transmission of a vast intertext over the course of centuries.

61 Queer theory is useful in describing these consequences. In Queer/Early/Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), Carla Freccero notes that the “heteronormativity” of the kind that I have examined here participates in “the construction of the nation-state from its inception” (52) in early-modern Europe, meaning that the obligatory performances of genders and sexualities that one sees in comic texts such as the Tiers Livre were implicated in a collective, proto-nationalist exercise of power that was gender assymetrical. See especially her chapter 4, “Queer Nation,” 51–66.

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Conclusion: Bridoye, Triboullet, and the Patriarchal Voice of the Law Although it has been read as an apologia of Pauline caritas, Evangelical fervor, and even neo-Platonic thinking, the Tiers Livre is the most enigmatic and puzzling of Rabelais’s works.62 Here I have argued that the text examines the generation of masculine subjectivity within multiple and complex intertextual procedures. Although one might disagree about its transcendent message, there can be no doubt that its explicit subject matter is a man’s role within the institution of marriage, and the authoritative sources of knowledge about how a man should determine and define his place within the domestic household. This gender role within the domus is a function of the larger set of relations that obtain among men, which were delineated over the course of centuries in countless legal, pastoral, historical, medical, and literary works. Since the kind of masculinity that I have been studying is the performative spectacle of reading and writing this intertext, the characters of the Tiers Livre seem continuously to stage this performance, which is contingent upon a certain understanding of and relation to a canonical body of texts. At its end, however, the work explicitly affirms the priority of a particular patriarchal discourse: Gargantua’s enunciation of his desire that his son should marry a woman of his father’s choosing. The increasing madness of Panurge’s quest is thus abruptly suspended by an authoritative paternal voice, which launches into a tirade against clandestine marriages, which was one of the most topical problems of the period, addressed by Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, and Shakespeare.63 This abrupt end of Panurge’s search provides a definitive answer to his primary question (“Dois-je me marier?”), and highlights the absence of the most important authority figure throughout the series of consultations that constitutes the text. In a final contrast between him and Panurge, Pantagruel does not have to wonder if he should marry, since it is his father Gargantua who announces marriage as a patriarchal imperative, immediately after the work’s final consultations with a philosopher and a judge are juxtaposed with the figure of Triboullet the fool. There are thus two complementary modes of masculinity presented in the text: the first confronts the male protagonist with the dilemma of knowing which source of knowledge he should accept as the definitive foundation of his gender identity; the second pronounces apodictically the course of action that a man must follow in order to be recognized in gender terms by the most important man in his life, his father. While most of Rabelais’s book is precisely about the contingency of the former, individual, intertextual mode of determining one’s gender, the abrupt interposition of Gargantua as “father figure” brings that uncertainty to an end for the text’s co-protagonist. 64 62 “Si Michel Butor a raison d’écrire que « l’œuvre de François Rabelais est probablement la plus difficile de la littérature française, » le Tiers Livre, au centre de cette œuvre, peut à bon droit être considéré comme sa part la plus déroutante.” [“If Michel Butor is correct when he writes that ‘the work of François Rabelais is probably the most difficult one in French literature,’ the Tiers Livre, at the heart of this work, may justifiably be considered its most disconcerting part.”] Oumelbanine Zhiri, L’extase et ses paradoxes: Essai sur la structure narrative du Tiers Livre (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1999), 7, my translation. 63 Huchon’s explanatory note, 1446–7. 64 See Freccero, Father Figures, 162–7, for a discussion of Gargantua’s

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The concluding chapters trace a complex itinerary that the masculine subject must follow in order to heed the call of the paternal voice and to assume his proper social role. This most stylistically radical of writers hence inscribes a moral conclusion to his text that could hardly be more conservative, which concords precisely with the nature of conventional gender identities that tend toward the maintenance of themselves as stable entities. As many scholars have noted, the Tiers Livre is a kind of epistemological travel narrative, and the trip that the characters undertake is from one category of knowledge to another, from random divination to supposedly scientific certainty. In the case of the judge Bridoye, who has been put on trial for randomly deciding the outcome of his trials using various kinds of dice, Rabelais subjects the ideas of knowledge, judgment, and interpretation themselves to scrutiny and ridicule. As the longest sustained scene in the work, occupying the entirety of chapters 39–43, the Bridoye sequence differs from the other consultations in that the judge does not give Panurge any advice whatsoever; rather, these chapters highlight the difficulty and perhaps even the impossibility of judging for oneself simply on the basis of reading and interpreting texts. Fittingly for my purposes, two of the sources cited the most often by Bridoye are Justinian’s Digest and the Decretals of Gratian. From a famous gloss of the latter text, the judge decides that it is fitting to use dice in order to decide the outcome of trials. When asked what kind of dice he uses, Bridoye responds with an incomprehensible series of references. Luckily for us, scholars of the stature of Céard translated the meaning of his system of references: Bridoye allègue successivement le Décret de Gratien, cause XXVI, quest. 2, canon « Sors » ; le Digeste, XVIII, 1 (De contrahenda emptione), 8, et XV, 1 (De peculio), 51. La glose de Bartole sur ce dernier texte commence par ces mots : « Dubius est litis euentus » ; douteuse, l’issue d’un procès dépend de la fortune. Bridoye entend littéralement l’expression d’alea iudiciorum et, traduisant par « les dez des jugemens », il juge au moyen de dés. (Céard 368 n. 7)65 [Bridoye refers successively to the Decretals of Gratian, cause XXVI, question 2, canon “Chance”; the Digest, XVIII, 1 (De contrahenda emptione), 8, and XV, 1 (De peculio), 51. The gloss of Bartole on this last text begins with these words: ‘Dubius est litis euentus,’ when in doubt, the verdict of a trial depends on chance. Bridoye understands literally the expression alea iudiciorum, and, translating it as “the dice of judgments,” he judges by means of using dice.]

As is always the case in Rabelais, the text works here on diverse levels at the same time. As Céard points out, Rabelais’s characters can rarely resist word play, which means that Bridoye’s entire procedure is determined by a literal reading of a figurative expression meant to designate the aleatory results of cases in which the final judgment is ambiguous. This notion of the “perplexity” of human judgment in the face of difficult decisions describes rather well Panurge’s own difficulty throughout the intrusion into the narrative at this point, and of its “genealogical” implications. See also Leushuis, Le mariage, 163–4, which describes the relation between Gargantua’s “harangue” and the debates concerning clandestine marriage in the Renaissance. 65 Cf. Céard 368 n. 5, in which he explains the systems of reference used by Bridoye throughout these chapters.

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work, and becomes the major theme of discussion among the characters at the end of the Bridoye sequence, just before the final consultation with the fool Triboullet, and Gargantua’s concluding apologia in favor of paternal authority. Secondly, then, the question of the authority for making judgments is brought to the fore here and parodied. Bridoye is evidently a bad reader, but this doesn’t keep him from unloading a dizzying series of references on his listeners, the other judges who have called into question one of his judgments. Precisely because he is incapable of interpreting the formidable number of texts he has read, Bridoye bombards the men whom he is supposed to convince of his innocence with faulty references and incorrect interpretations of them. These chapters of the Tiers Livre are hence completely consistent with the critiques of “Scholastic” thinking that Rabelais presented in the earlier books, and present a mode of reasoning that is in stark contrast to Pantagruel’s princely pardon of the judge in chapter 43 and his subsequent comment on the difficulties of human judgment, which we will examine in a moment. Like the Sophist preceptors of Gargantua, who are satisfied with rote repetition, Bridoye simply repeats standard references without having the capacity to think about what they actually mean. This method is in fact described in his response to the question of how he proceeds when presented with a new case: Je fays comme vous aultres messieurs, et comme est l’usance de judicature... Ayant bien veu, reveu, releu, paperassé et feueilleté les complainctes, adjournemens, comparitions, commissions, informations, avant procedez, productions, alleguations, etc…. et aultres telles dragées et espisseries d’une part et d’aultre, comme doit faire le bon juge... Je pose sus le bout de table en mon cabinet tous les sacs du defendeur : et luy livre chanse… Cela faict, je pose les sacs du demandeur, comme vous aultres, messieurs, sus l’aultre bout… Pareillement et quant et quand, je luy livre chanse. —Mais (demandoit Trinquamelle) mon amy, à quoy congnoissez vous l’obscurité des droictz praetenduz par les parties playdoiantes ? —Comme vous aultres messieurs, (respondit Bridoye) sçavoir est, quand il y a beaucoup de sacs d’une part et de aultre. Et lors je use de mes petiz dez, comme vous aultres messieurs, suyvant la loy… J’ay d’aultres gros dez bien beaulx et harmonieux, des quelz je use, comme vous aultres messieurs, quand la matiere est plus liquide, c’est à dire, quand moins y a de sacs (475–6, my ellipses). [“I do as you gentlemen do, as is the practice in judicature… Having well seen, reviewed, read, reread, papered, and leafed through the complaints, summonings, appearances, commissions, inquests, preparatories, statements, allegations, etc… and other such goodies and spices from one part and the other, as a good judge must do … I set at one end of the table in my study all the defendant’s sacks and shoot for him first, as you gentlemen do… That done, I set the plaintiff’s sacks, as you gentlemen do, on the other end… Likewise, and at the same time, I shoot for him.” “But, my friend,” asked Trinquamelle, “how do you recognize the obscurity of the claims of the litigating parties?” “As you gentlemen do,” answered Bridoye, “to wit, when there are many sacks on one side and on the other. And then I use my little dice, as you gentlemen do, pursuant to the law… I have other, big dice, very handsome and harmonious, which I use, as you gentemen do, when the matter is more liquid, that is to say when there are fewer sacks” (376–7).]

These hyperbolic catalogues (which I have shortened considerably) and distorted

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legal references (which I have deleted here) must have seemed quite hilarious to Rabelais’s learned contemporaries. Nevertheless, this parody might be read as being very serious, since its denunciation of this spurious method of judgment implicitly argues for a more rational and studied mode of making decisions. This sequence thus highlights the contingency of individual judgment in general, especially in cases that are “ambigues, intrinquées, perplexes et obscures” (487) [“ambiguous, intricate, entangled, and obscure” (390)], as Épistémon puts it at the end of chapter 43. As in the example recounted by Pantagruel in chapter 44, which reformulates the procedures used by Bridoye to make decisions, judgment in the most difficult and ambiguous of cases can only be deferred indefinitely, since the human mind is inadequate to the task of resolving such dilemmas. For this reason, the judge’s recourse to dice is every bit as effective as the use of the human faculty for arbitration or adjudication, since both may only guess at what decision would result from a more divine form of wisdom. The depth and density of the Bridoye episode provides an extensive allegory for an historical situation in which men and women were given, perhaps for the first time, the possibility of choosing their own spouses. From the point of view of Rabelais and other learned writers of the Renaissance, this possibility could only be equated with pure folly, since individual choice without parental participation and consent could lead only to disasterous marriages, as in the case of Rolandine’s unauthorized union with “le bâtard de bonne maison” in tale 21 of the Heptaméron, or in the case of Romeo and Juliet in Shakespeare’s famous tragedy. While Rabelais seemingly concludes the Tiers Livre with a fervent apologia in favor of paternal will versus individual choice, his work also inscribes an intellectual ambiguity that is a hallmark of Renaissance thinking concerning masculinity. The final chapters of the work thus delineate the epistemological itinerary that the masculine subject must follow in order to assume the position and the social role made available to him by the fact that he is his father’s son. The first and longest stage of this trajectory is contained in the entirety of the text up to this point, and is recapitulated in the Bridoye sequence: i.e., the masculine subject has to undergo a lengthy initiation in the process of reading and interpreting a massive amount of texts concerning the matter at hand before arriving at the conclusion that his judgment is simply incapable of making the most fundamental decision of his life as a man. There are two elements within this sequence that underline the importance of the idea of women in this process. Bridoye responds as follows to the question as to why he waits so long before throwing his dice in order to judge a given case: Nature d’adventaige nous instruict cuillir et manger les fruictz quand ilz sont meurs. Instit. de re. di. § is ad quem. et ff. de acti. empt. l. Julianus. Marier les filles, quand elles sont meures. ff. de donat. int. vir. et uxo. l. cùm hic status. § si quia sponsa. et 27 q. I. c. Sicut dict gl. Iam matura thoris plenis adoleuerat annis Virginitas, Rien ne faire qu’en toute maturité… (479). [Moreover, Nature teaches us to pluck and eat fruits when they are ripe, ‘Instit. de re. di par. is ad quem, et ff. de acti. empt., 1. Julianus,’ to marry off girls when they are ripe, ‘ff de donat. int. vir. et uxo., 1. cum hic status, par. si quis sponsa., et 27. q., j., c., Sicut’ says ‘gl’: Jam matura thoris plenis adoleverat annis/ Virginitas [By now the maidenhood, fit for the marriage bed/ For years enough had ripened], to do nothing except in full maturity… (379–80).]

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These references, notably to Justinian’s laws concerning the age of maturity at which young girls may marry, and to Gratian’s Decretals, are extraordinarily dense, and require, once again, scholars of the stature of Céard in order to be understood (Céard 380 n. 19). What is important here for my argument is the role that the concept of the female body plays in the intertextual elaboration of masculine subjectivity. For the men of this historical context, the idea of “ripe fruit” corresponds metaphorically to the “ripeness” of women’s bodies. A young girl is ready for marriage not when she matures intellectually, but when her “virginity is fully developed for marriage,” as Céard notes in his translation of the Latin gloss of Gratian. In other words, “ripe” masculinity of the kind that Rabelais is describing here at the end of the work requires a lengthy development that is unthinkable without the constant intertextual detours that the masculine subject must follow, and without the exemplary images of women’s bodies that are elaborated consistently throughout the masculinist intertext. A second exemplary image of woman drawn from the Humanist intertext appears in Pantagruel’s lengthy comment on the “perplexities of human judgment” in chapter 44. Here Rabelais cites a primal scene from Antiquity of the kind that fascinated the writers and readers of the Renaissance. A widow who has a son named A.B.C. marries another man, and has a son with him named F.E.G. When this son grows up, he and his father kill A.B.C. In despair and rage, the woman has both her husband and F.E.G. killed. When she is brought before justice, the woman confesses, claiming “that by right and by reason she had killed them” (390). The judges who are charged with determining the woman’s guilt or innocence in the case are so perplexed that they arrive at the following conclusion: “…tant grande leurs sembloit la perplexité et obscurité de la matiere, qu’ilz ne sçavoient qu’en dire ne juger. Qui eust decidé le cas au sort des dez, il n’eust erré, advint ce que pourroit (488–9). [“…the perplexity and obscurity of the matter seemed to them so great that they didn’t know what to say or judge about it. If anyone had decided the case by the chance of dice, he would not have been wrong, come what might” (390–91).] When faced with the necessity of judging the guilt or innocence of this woman, the human mind is simply incapable of making a decision, and could just as well trust her fate to providence or chance, which, in the opinion of Épistémon in the comment that follows Pantagruel’s story, often amount to the same thing. As he says of Bridoye, …soy deffiant de son sçavoir et capacité : congnoissant les antinomies et contrarietez des loix, des edictz, des coustumes et ordonnances… [il] se recommenderoit humblement à Dieu le juste juge : invocqueroit à son ayde la grace celeste : se deporteroit en l’esprit sacrosainct, du hazard et perplexité de sentence definitive : et par ce sort exploreroit son decret et bon plaisir que nous appellons Arrest (489). […mistrusting his knowledge and capacity, knowing the inconsistencies and contradictions of the laws, edicts, customs, and ordinances… [he] should commend himself to God the Just Judge, call celestial grace to his aid, and trust himself to the Sacrosanct Spirit for the hazard and perplexity of a definitive judgment, and by that chance should explore its decision and good pleasure, which we call a verdict (391).]

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Hence the contingency of individual decisions may be motivated by divine inspiration, especially when one humbly recognizes the incapacity of human judgment in comparison to the enormity of God’s grace, which is figured here paradoxically as the chance roll of the dice. Panurge seems to make this same kind of wager throughout his quest for random responses to his question, while Pantagruel insists upon the intervention of divine judgment in the perplexity of human affairs. Panurge and Pantagruel finally reach a point at which their distinct modes of interpretation result in two different attitudes concerning the departure that makes the ending of the Tiers Livre an open one. As is always the case in the consultations that make up the bulk of the work, the two protagonists disagree as to how the final meeting with the fool Triboullet should be interpreted. In one of the most famous phrases in Rabelais, Panurge decides that the final gesture that the “morosophic” fool offers him is the most significant: —Il m’a rendu en main la bouteille. Cela que signifie ? Qu’est ce à dire ? —Par adventure (respondit Pantagruel) signifie que vostre femme sera yvroigne. —Au rebours, (dist Panurge) car elle estoit vuide. Je vous jure l’espine de sainct Fiacre en Brye, que nostre Morosophe l’unicque non Lunactique Triboullet me remect à la Bouteille. Et je refraischiz de nouveau mon veu premier, et jure Stix et Acheron en vostre praesence, lunettes au bonnet porter, ne porter braguette à mes chausses, que sus mon entreprinse je n’aye eu le mot de la Dive Bouteille (494). [“He gave me back the bottle into my hand. Now what does that signify? What is the meaning of that?” “Peradventure,” replied Pantagruel, “it signifies that your wife will be a drunkard.” “On the contrary,” said Panurge, “for it was empty. I swear to you by the backbone of Saint Fiacre in Brie that our morosophe [sophomore], the unique but not lunatic Triboullet, is sending me back to the bottle. And once more I refresh my first vow, and swear by Styx and Acheron, in your presence, to wear spectacles on my bonnet and wear no codpiece on my breeches until I have got the Divine Bottle’s word about my project (396).]

What the meaning of this quest for the “word” of the divine bottle may be is anyone’s guess, and has been subject to all kinds of speculation. As I have argued elsewhere, the bottle evokes the entire oenological register in Rabelais, which signifies many things, ranging from drunken inspiration, to word play, to a kind of “Bacchic” epistemology in which transcendent truths assume immanent, grotesque forms.66 Ultimately, Panurge represents a mode of thinking that seeks certain knowledge expressed in a language that no longer requires the incessant displacement of intertextual references and erudite interpretations. Appropriately, Rabelais’s text defers the discovery of this kind of word, since the quest for the Dive Bouteille is displaced beyond the end of the work. In other words, Panurge interprets the fool’s gesture as proof that the exact and true response to his initial question is “out there” somewhere, and that it is his duty as a certain kind of man—one who has removed his braguette and who wears his spectacles on his bonnet—to seek out the exact words of this answer to the question of his masculine identity. In contrast, Pantagruel interprets the fool’s gestures in chapters 45 and 46 in terms of the incessant series 66 See my article, “French Renaissance Literature and the Problem of Theory,” 31–2.

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of references and examples that constitutes the intertextual foundation of a more conventional masculinist identity. This latter character’s response to Panurge’s question is thus unequivocal. The constitutive maneuver of masculinity is to be found in two domains, the first being the body of authoritative texts whose constant citation is one of the primary acts in the performance of the masculine gender, the second being the recourse to the authoritative voice of the father, which eschews interpretation, and merely enunciates a rather severe version of patriarchal law, as Gargantua does at the end of the work. Hence the end of the work in fact inscribes three different masculinities, the first as a quest for a definitive version of itself in a discourse that forever escapes it, the second as an incessant practice of interpreting an enormous body of texts, the third as an authoritarian proclamation of the primary social practice that constitutes its being. One might be tempted to read this third mode as the final resolution of the aporias that were highlighted and discussed throughout the text: at some point, after weighing all of the evidence at hand, human (i.e., in this context, masculine) judgment in its perplexity has to make a somewhat arbitrary or even aleatory decision, and affirm the priority of one version of the facts at the expense of all others. Gargantua’s hyberbolic harangue at the end of the Tiers Livre could be read in these terms. Its first stage is the expression of the patriarch’s will that his son marry: …je vouldroys que pareillement vous vint en vouloir et desir vous marier. Me semble que dorenavant venez en aage à ce competent. Panurge s’est assez efforcé rompre les difficultez, qui luy pouvoient estre en empeschement. Parlez pour vous (496–7). […I’d like to see you too come to the will and desire to marry. It seems to me that from now on you are coming into the age suitable for it. Panurge has striven enough to break down the difficulties that could have been an obstacle to him. Speak for yourself (398).]

Pantagruel’s response to this paternal wish is telling, and highlights the extraordinary difference between masculinity as obedience to a patriarchal fiat, and masculinity as an expedition in search of a definitive answer to the question of its own being: —Pere tresdebonnaire (respondit Pantagruel) encores n’y avoys je pensé, de tout ce negoce : je m’en deportoys sus votre bonne volunté et paternel commandement. Plus tost prie Dieu estre à voz piedz veu roydde mort en vostre desplaisir, que sans vostre plaisir estre veu vif marié. Je n’ay jamais entendu que par loy aulcune, feust sacre, feust prophane, et barbare, ayt esté en arbitre des enfans soy marier, non consentans, voulens et promovens leurs peres, meres, et parens prochains. Tous Legislateurs ont es enfans ceste liberté tollue, es parens l’ont reservée (497). [“My very kind father,” replied Pantagruel, “I hadn’t yet given it a thought. I was referring all that business to your goodwill and paternal command. I pray to God rather to be seen stone dead for having displeased you than without your pleasure to be seen alive and married. I have never heard that by any law whatever, whether sacred or profane and barbarous, it has been up to the fancy of children to marry when their fathers, mothers, and close relatives did not consent, will it, and promote it. All lawgivers have withheld this freedom from children and reserved it for the parents” (398).]

Thus Rabelais introduces Gargantua’s lengthy and vitriolic comment on the question

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of clandestine marriages. As Céard notes, Pantagruel’s claim ignores the fact that “…le droit canonique n’exige pas le consentement des parents et … un mariage est valide si les seuls conjoints sont consentants” (Céard 436 n. 4). [“Canon law does not require the consent of parents and… a marriage is valid if only the partners consent to it.”] In fact, Gargantua’s response to his son will be a vilification of precisely this canon law that allowed priests (referred to here as “Taulpetiers,” as in “taupes” or “moles,” those who work in darkness and secrecy) to marry individuals who desired to do so without the consent of their parents. Pantagruel also establishes an opposition between adherence to paternal will and death, echoing an idea from the work’s opening chapters: just as subjects receive their very life from the benevolence of their monarch, so does a son flourish by following the dictates of paternal wisdom. Gargantua repeats this same antithesis when he proclaims that fathers would rather be dead than see their daughters married to men who are not of their choosing. Curiously, then, the pole of this fatherly choice shifts from the masculine to the feminine, and Gargantua focuses his entire exposition on the possibility that daughters will not obey their fathers if the law of clandestine marriages is allowed to function: Moyenantes les loigs dont je vous parle, n’est ruffien, forfant, scelerat, pendart, puant, punais, ladre, briguant, voleur, meschant, en leurs contrées qui violentement ne ravisse quelque fille il vouldra choisir, tant soit noble, belle, riche, honneste, pudicque que sçauriez dire, de la maison de son pere, d’entre les bras de sa mere, maulgré tous ses parents : si le ruffien se y ha une foys associé quelque Myste, qui quelque jour participera de la praye (498). [By means of the laws I’m telling you about, there is no scoundrel, rogue, criminal, gallows-bird, stinking, putrid, leper, robber, villain in their countries, who may not violently snatch away whatever girl he may want to choose, however noble, beautiful, rich, modest, decent you could possibly say, from her father’s house, her mother’s arms, in spite of all her relatives, if the scoundrel has once taken on with him some priest who will some day participate in the booty (399).]

Whatever Rabelais’s intention may have been in writing this harangue, it is clear that Gargantua employs a number of conventional rhetorical techniques in order to move and to persuade his listeners. Characteristically hyperbolic catalogues appear on either side of the opposition between negatively marked suitors and positively marked daughters. Moreoever, Gargantua compares the figure of women’s bodies being violently attacked by men to the siege of a city, reactivating a familiar topos that appears throughout the nouvelle literature: “Feroient pis et acte plus cruel les Gothz, les Scythes, les Massagettes en place ennemie, par long temps assiegée, à grands frays oppugnée, prinse par force ? (399) [“Would the Goths, the Scythians, the Massagetae do worse, and any more cruel act in an enemy site long besieged by them and assaulted at great costs?” (498)] In the usage of this figure, we note that the female body occupies a particular place within the logic of masculinist exemplarity: i.e., as Gargantua puts it here, that of la place assiégée. Moreover, the staging of this siege is literally put on as a spectacle that divides an imaginary public space between inside and outside, native and foreign, healthy and diseased, beautiful and ugly, friends and enemies:

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Et voyent les dolens peres et meres hors leurs maisons enlever et tirer par un incogneu… leurs tant belles, delicates, riches et saines filles, les quelles tant cherement avoient nourriez en tout exercice vertueux, avoient disciplinées en toute honnesteté : esperans en temps oportun les colloquer par mariage avecques les enfans de leurs voisins et antiques amis nourriz et instituez de mesmes soing, pour parvenir à ceste felicité de mariage, que d’eulx ils veissent maistre lignaige raportant et haereditant non moins aux meurs de leurs peres et meres, que à leurs biens meubles et haeritaiges. Quel spectacle pensez vous que ce leurs soit? (498) [And do the grieving fathers and mothers see dragged out of their houses by a stranger… their ever so lovely, delicate, rich, and healthy daughters, whom they had brought up so fondly in all virtuous practices, hoping at an opportune time to unite them in marriage with the sons of their old friends and neighbors, (also) born and brought up with the same care to arrive at that felicity of marriage, that they should see born lineage related and inheriting no less the ways of their fathers and mothers than their goods, furniture, and inheritances. What sort of spectacle do you think this is for them? (399)]

Here the primary antithesis of masculine and feminine is mediated by the series of other oppositions that I have just mentioned, as well as by the idea of familial heritage that is at the heart of the question of clandestine marriages. The obsessive visual control that fathers must exercise over their daughters is necessary precisely because the family’s wealth must pass through her as medium of exchange. Just as her marriage to a chosen partner must be a communal spectacle, so the transgression of her clandestine marriage to an interloper would be a tragic public spectacle in Gargantua’s exemplary manipulations: “Ne croyez leur dueil et lamentations estre moindres, que de Cerés, quand luy feust ravie Proserpine sa fille : que de Isis, à la perte de Osyris : de Venus, à la mort de Adonis, etc. (498). [Do not think that their grief and lamentations are lesser than those of Ceres when her daughter Proserpina was ravished from her; than those of Isis at the loss of Osiris; of Venus at the death of Adonis, etc. (399–400).] This long series of canonical examples, all of them drawn from the Classical intertext, and which I have shortened considerably here, render Gargantua’s harangue so exaggerated as to be ridiculous. Nevertheless, they prepare the reader and the monarch’s listeners for the key example to be used in this discourse, which is drawn from Genesis 34, and inscribes what is perhaps the most normative and violent version of masculine orthodoxy to be found in Rabelais: Aultres ont eu l’esprit plus Heroïcque, et à l’exemple des enfans de Jacob vengeans le rapt de Dina leur soeur, ont trouvé le ruffien associé de son Taulpetier clandestinement parlementans et subornans leurs filles : les ont sus l’instant mis en pieces et occis felonnement, leurs corps aprés jectans es loups et corbeaux parmy les champs. Au quel acte tant viril et chevalereux ont les Symmystes Taulpetiers fremy et lamenté miserablement, ont formé complainctes horribles, et en toute importunité requis et imploré le bras seculier, et Justice politicque, instans fierement et contendens estre de tel cas faicte exemplaire punition. Mais ne en aequité naturelle, ne en droict des gens, ne en loy Imperiale quelconques, n’a esté trouvée rubricque, paragraphe, poinct ne tiltre par

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Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature lequel fut poine ou torture à tel faict interminée : Raison obsistante, Nature repugnante. Car homme vertueux on monde n’est, qui naturellement et par raison plus ne soit en son sens perturbé, oyant les nouvelles du rapt, diffame, et deshonneur de sa fille, que de sa mort. Ores est qu’un chascun trouvant le meurtrier sus le faict de homicide en la personne de sa fille iniquement et de guet à pens, le peut par raison, le doibt par nature occire sus l’instant, et n’en sera par justice apprehendé (499). [Others have had a more heroic spirit, and on the example of Jacob’s sons avenging the rape of their sister Dina [Genesis 34], have found the libertine, in company with his molecatcher, clandestinely soliciting and suborning their daughters; they have cut them to pieces and furiously killed them on the spot, later throwing their bodies to the wolves and crows amid the fields. At which most manly and knightly act the mole-catching confriars trembled and lamented miserably, fashioned horrible complaints, and with all importunity begged and implored the secular arm and civil justice, insisting fiercely and demanding that for such cases exemplary punishment be exacted. But, neither in natural equity, nor in the rights of man, nor in any imperial law whatever, has there ever been found a clause, paragraph, point, or title, by which any penalty or torture was prescribed for such an act, for reason would oppose this, nature find it repugnant. For there is not a virtuous man in the world who would not naturally and by reason be more perturbed in mind, hearing the news of his daughter’s rape, defamation, and dishonor, than by that of her death. Now it is a fact that each and every man, finding, the murderer wickedly and treacherously in the act of homicide upon the person of his daughter, by reason may, by nature should, slay him on the spot, and will not be apprehended by the law for it (400–401).]

So here it is, what one might call the “core” of a certain kind of patriarchal masculinity in the Renaissance, expressed with an oratorical exuberance and excess that was typical of the period, and supported by exemplary arguments drawn both from Greco-Roman Antiquity and the Bible. Gargantua’s insistence on the legality of such a violent act highlights an important aspect of my argument. If the law is a means of mapping out the appropriate actions of differently gendered bodies in both public and domestic spaces, it is clear that masculinity itself is a certain relation to this idea of “appropriateness,” since there is no law capable of legislating against the kind of “noble virility” that constitutes the virtue of a man as he is supposed to be according to both “nature” and “human reason” as he perceives them to be. The clarity and dogmatism of Gargantua’s proclamations contrast strongly with the long and subtle exposition of the “perplexity” of human judgment in the Bridoye sequence. This final, authoritative discourse of the text seems to proclaim that the multiplicity of legal texts, which lead to uncertainty in the most difficult cases, as when questions of family honor lead both men and women to transgress, must be set aside in favor of the truth value of canonical examples of constitutive and performative gender acts, which here are described as primitively violent. If we take Gargantua’s harangue as the virtual end point of the text, since the praise of Pantagruelion is an incomprehensible enigma, the Tiers Livre concludes with a fundamental contradiction and ambiguity. Masculinity is both a certain intertextual perplexity that must rely on chance, inspiration, and divine grace in order to act, at the same time that it must be the suspension of this perplexity, and the imposition

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of a dogmatic version of itself that is performed as a declamation before other men who must receive and understand it as such. Whether the male gender is understood as a continuous, perplexed displacement among a potentially infinite series of texts, or as an apodictic proclamation made by a patriarchal voice, its essential elements reside in the transmission of codified and canonical forms of knowledge among men as messages that they must send and receive among themselves in the performance of their gender.

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Chapter 4

Toward Unstable Masculinity in Brantôme’s Recueil des dames Introduction Pierre de Bourdeille, Seigneur de Brantôme, was one of the most prolific memorialists and historians of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Of his enormous output, only the Recueil des dames is well known and readily available in twentiethcentury editions.1 Most of his numerous volumes are devoted to the lives of the illustrious noblemen of France, though the Recueil is dedicated to the country’s most noteworthy noble women and to the “gallant” ladies, such as the ones I will examine here, who “made love and cuckolded their husbands.” While most of Brantôme’s work described men and the quintessentially “masculine” activity of warfare, his texts have elicited attention in recent years in the United States primarily because of the documentary value of his writings about early-modern women, particularly concerning their sexuality. In France, in contrast, studies of Brantôme are focused more on the memorialist as a chronicler of the “grands personnages” of his historical period. For example, a recent volume of essays emphasizes the access to powerful relations granted to Brantôme by his acquaintance with the great women of his day, particularly Marguerite de Valois.2 These studies also insist that, as Sylvie Haaser writes, “Brantôme a grandi dans un milieu essentiellement féminin. C’est sous la bienveillante attention de plusieurs femmes que le jeune Pierre de Bourdeille fait son apprentissage.” [“Brantôme grew up in a milieu that was essentially feminine. It is under the benevolent attention of many women that the young Pierre de Bourdeille accomplished his apprenticeship.”]3 Despite this recognition that the memorialist’s writing and storytelling was greatly influenced by his contact with the great women of the Valois court, much of the critical attention paid to his work has been in terms of his activities as a man and a soldier, which dominated his career.4 1 For an overview of Brantôme’s career and publications, see Dora Polachek, “A la recherche du spirituel : l’Italie et les Dames galantes de Brantôme.” Romanic Review 94, no. 1–2 (2003): 227–43. 2 Françoise Argod-Dutard and Anne-Marie Cocula, eds., Brantôme et les Grands d’Europe (Bordeaux: Éditions du Centre Montaigne de l’Université de Bordeaux 3, 2003). 3 Sylvie Haaser, “Brantôme le confident-poète: Marguerite de Valois, Marie Stuart, Élizabeth de Valois,” in Brantôme et les Grands d’Europe, 111–22, here 112. 4 See for example Hélène Germa-Romann, “Les Gentilshommes français et la mort selon Brantôme.” Nouvelle Revue du XVIe Siecle 13, no. 2 (1995): 215–38; Anne-Marie Cocula, “Des Héros sans gloire: Les Grands Capitaines des guerres de religion vus par Brantôme.” Nouvelle Revue du XVIe Siecle 12, no. 1 (1994): 79–90; Anne-Marie Cocula,

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The texts contained in the Recueil des dames are written from a distinctly masculinist and “courtly” point of view, and, as Will Fisher puts it, “The Lives of the Gallant Ladies is meant to inform (and no doubt titillate) male courtiers about their female counterparts.”5 As I have been arguing here, whenever men write about women in this way, especially for the benefit of other men, they are invariably writing about the structure and the performance of a particular version of their gender, which is associated precisely with the class of men who are able to read and write. Brantôme spends a great deal of time describing a topos that dominates masculinist homosocial discourses, i.e., that of the woman whose sexual desires overwhelm her body and cause her to seek lovers outside of her marriage. His work surpasses its predecessors, however, in that he ventures into the unexplored territory in which the men he describes have “illicit” desires for forbidden regions of women’s bodies, and even for other men. It also takes a long look at the problem of Lesbian love, a topic that was never broached in the other texts on cuckoldry that we have examined.6 On the whole, Brantôme’s mode of storytelling, based on exemplary texts from Antiquity and from Italy, and on stories he heard from other men during his numerous travels, configures a masculine subject position that is determined precisely by the textual practice of compiling these stories and anecdotes, by their transcription for the purpose of dedicating them as a discourse destined for the reading pleasure of another man, and by the expression of opinions about different, possibly “perverse” sexual practices as “others” that help to define his own sexuality, which, from the point of view of the texts we have been examining, is somewhat unstable, and becomes increasingly so as the work progresses. This instability is an important element of Brantôme’s work, and represents an interest in what might be called sexual “deviance” and “perversity” that distances the writer from the others we have examined here. His exploration of this relatively new territory begins on what by now is familiar ground for us. As was so often the case in early modern literature, Brantôme’s text is an act of service performed for the benefit and pleasure of a noble superior, the Duc d’Alençon, to whom the author writes in the text’s opening gesture: Monseigneur, d’autant que vous m’avez fait cet honneur souvent à la Cour de causer avec moy fort privement de plusieurs bons mots et contes, qui vous sont si familiers et assidus qu’on diroit qu’ils vous naissent à veuë d’œil dans la bouche, tant vous avez l’esprit grand, prompt et subtil, et le dire de mesme et très-beau, je me suis mis à composer ces discours tels quels, et au mieux que j’ay peu, afin que si aucuns y en a qui vous plaisent, vous fassent autant passer le temps et vous ressouvenir de moy parmy vos causeries, desquelles m’avez honnoré autant que gentilhomme de la cour (236).

“Brantôme: L’Homme de guerre face aux guerres de religion,” in Gabriel Pérouse et al., eds., L’Homme de guerre au XVIe siècle (Saint-Etienne: Univ. de Saint-Etienne, 1992), 155–65. 5 Will Fisher, “Gabrielle’s New Clothes: Cultural Valuations and Evaluations.” Textual Practice 12, no. 2 (1998): 251–67, here 258. 6 In a paper read at the RSA convention in 2007, Gary Ferguson discussed precisely the “other pleasures” that Brantôme explores in his discussion of lesbian love, which is modeled on Lucian. This work will be incorporated into his book, Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, Gender, Culture (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, forthcoming).

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[My Lord, since you have so often honored me at court by speaking with me intimately about several jokes and tales, which are so familiar and habitual to you that one would say that they are born in your mouth as soon as you see them with your eye, I took it upon myself to compose these discourses such as they are, and to the best of my ability, so that if there are some of them that are pleasing to you, they will help you to pass the time and to remember me in your conversations, with which you have honored me as much as any gentleman of the Court.] 7

The historical context within which the Recueil des dames was written is immediately brought to life by the mere mention of the identity of Brantôme’s interlocutor. François, the duc d’Alençon and brother of the reigning King Henri III, died in 1584, shortly after Brantôme wrote his Deuxième livre des dames, and dedicated it to him.8 This illustrious name brings to mind a tumultuous court that was torn by dissension throughout the civil wars. Brantôme’s brief dédicace is one of the best formulations of a fundamental fact of intertextual masculinity in this context, which remains remarkably constant despite the tragedies of the wars: written stories of cuckoldry have the character of an intimate conversation that takes place among men, as part of their figurative or even literal love for each other, and their desire to please each other through discourse. As we will see in a moment, this kind of mutual confession had to profess to and give examples of an exaggerated virility, while it often had to take into account the occasional inadequacies of that virility caused by the vagaries of weather, temperature, and anatomy. This fantasy version of the ubiquity and force of a primary male urge is the basis for a narrative economy, which interpellates men who perform their gender within a highly codified discursive practice and display. The relation between what these men took to be the biological “truth” of the male body and its various cultural manifestations within stories about its functioning forms the intertext in which masculinity exhibits and transmits its being. It could be that the increasing instability of the normative version of this being is a consequence of the particularly unstable historical context in which Brantôme wrote. While this kind of speculation is well beyond the scope of my argument, the influence of courtly practices under the enigmatic figure of Henri III on the kinds of stories that men told one another and transcribed for their mutual pleasure should be kept in mind throughout the following consideration of the memorialist’s version of the timeless story of cuckoldry. Number and the Proclamation of Masculinity Brantôme begins “Sur les dames qui font l’amour et leurs maris cocus” (“On Women who Make Love and Their Cuckolded Husbands”), which is a major section of Le Recueil des dames, with a series of topoi that are the foundations of cuckold 7 Pierre de Bourdeille, Seigneur de Brantôme, Recueil des Dames, poésies et tombeaux, ed. Étienne Vaucheret (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1991), 237. All page references are to this edition; all translations are mine. 8 On the date of the work’s composition and its posthumous publication, see Polachek, “A la recherche,” 228, and Robert Cottrell, Brantôme, The Writer as Portraitist of his Age (Geneva: Droz, 1970).

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literature: the fantasy of masculine virility, which works in combination with the myth of women’s insatiability; the idea that writing about eternally virile men and equally receptive women is potentially infinite; and the simple affirmation that opens the text, which is a constant of this type of story from its beginnings: “ce sont les dames qui ont fait la fondation du cocuage” (237) [“it is women who have built the foundations of cuckoldry”]. While Brantôme’s text is episodic, it is nevertheless organized around several key themes. The first of these is the notion that the finite art of writing is somehow inadequate to the task of describing the infinite tricks of women, the insatiable sexual appetites of men, and the virulence of the cuckold’s unjust jealousy: Je sçay bien que j’entreprens une grand’oeuvre, et que je n’aurois jamais fait si j’en voulois monstrer la fin; car tout le papier de la Chambre des Comptes de Paris n’en sçauroit comprendre par escrit la moitié de leurs histoires, tant des femmes que des hommes. Mais pourtant j’en escriray ce que je pourray, et, quand je n’en pourray plus, je quitteray ma plume au diable, ou à quelque bon compagnon qui la reprendra; m’excusant si je n’observe en ce discours ordre ny demy, car de telles gens et de telles femmes le nombre en est si grand, si confus et si divers, que je ne sçache si bon sergent de bataille qui le puisse bien mettre en rang et ordonnance (237). [I know that I am undertaking a large task, and that I would never finish with it if I wanted to show the end of it; for all of the paper in the Accounting Office of Paris would not be able to hold in writing even half of the stories concerning both women and men. Nevertheless, I will write as much as I can, and when I’m unable to continue, I’ll throw my pen to the devil, or to some good fellow who will take it up, apologizing if I observe in this discourse neither order nor structure, since the number of such people and such women is so large, so confused, and so diverse, that I know of no military sergeant who would be able to put them in line and order.]

The story of cuckoldry is something about which many of the male writers of this period had to give an account, for the complex reasons that I have been discussing. Men who were interpellated as masculine subjects felt compelled to examine the fact of this interpellation within their “literary” endeavors. These authors thus seem to have been obligated to recount, to give an account of, or simply to count the myriad faces and facets of their (often phantasmic) relations with women within the confines of marriage. Given these necessities, the idea of number is fundamental to the complex of themes and motifs that constitute cuckoldry, and hence to this comic face of masculinity. Brantôme thus underlines an important paradox that is at the heart of this type of literature, which may be an important element in the definition of the early-modern period itself: men were interpellated as men in this historical context by the necessity of taking and giving accounts of women’s tricks, containing them within limits, and even simply of counting them. At the same time, as gendered subjects, these men recognized the impossibility that such a task could ever be accomplished. Men performed their gender in this context, at least in part, by attempting to contain that which they recognized as uncontainable, and to give order to that which they defined as intrinsically disordered: the feminine as a radical other in relation to which men were obligated to structure their own identities. Given the aporia generated by these

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paradoxes, a writer such as Brantôme who approaches the overwhelming phenomenon of cuckoldry allows his pen or quill, the bird feather being appropriate to the hand of the masculine subject as eternal would-be cuckold, to move seemingly at random over the page, in the hope that he will be able to grasp the incomprehensible object through which his identity is mediated. The cuckold’s story is thus characterized by accumulation and addition, and by a certain taste, characteristic of the Renaissance, for catalogues and enumerations that are often expressed in the metaphorical register of economy and exchange. This “accrual” of stories to the narrative “account” that is the text runs parallel to an imaginary perception of the male body as an inexhaustible source of potency that will always perform hyperbolically when it is called upon to make a “deposit” to this “wealth” of stories and, within the stories themselves, to the “store house” of the female body. In fact, “Sur les dames qui font l’amour et leurs maris cocus” is essentially an enumeration of different kinds of cuckolds and adulteresses derived from other contemporary texts, from anecdotes or stories Brantôme heard or witnessed, or from examples taken from Classical sources. But the most important things to be catalogued here, in this manual of infidelity, are the types of women who betray their husbands, and the husbands themselves, who at times assume a frightening aspect. This figure of outraged masculinity is coupled with its usual comic face, which rests upon a material and physical foundation: the exaggerated, phantasmic virility and fecundity of the male body, which generates a series of metaphors for the male function in sexual relations in Brantôme’s text. As in the case of Panurge, however, the menace of impotence and castration often undermines these macho fantasies, when the discursive promise of an overabundant male sexuality cannot be kept:9 Une autre Dame devisant d’amour avec un gentilhomme, il luy dit, entre autres propos, que s’il estoit couché avec elle, qu’il entreprendroit faire six postes la nuict, tant sa beauté le feroit bien piquer. « Vous vous vantez de beaucoup, dit-elle. Je vous assigne donc à une telle nuict. » À quoy il ne faillit de comparoistre; mais le malheur fut pour luy qu’il fut surpris, estant dans le lict, d’une telle convulsion, refroidissement et retirement de nerf, qu’il ne put pas faire une seule poste (239). [When another Lady was speaking of love with a gentleman, he said to her, among other things, that if her were to sleep with her, he would take it upon himself to ride six relays during the night, so much would her beauty spur him on. “That’s quite a boast,” she said, “I’ll meet you then on such and such a night.” He of course did not fail to arrive at the assignation; unfortunately for him, when he was in bed with her, he was surprised by such a spasm, coldness, and shrinking of his nerves that he couldn’t ride even one relay.]

Promising to “change horses” at least six times during the course of the night, this “horseman” does not manage to mount even one. This deflection of the scene of 9 On the status of impotence in France in the second half of the sixteenth century, see Patricia Parker, “Gender Ideology, Gender Change: The Case of Marie Germain.” Critical Inquiry vol. 19, no. 2 (Winter, 1993), 337–64. According to Parker, “… an obsessive preoccupation with male impotence… reached almost epidemic proportions in France in the years between 1580 and 1595” (345). I am grateful to the outside readers of Ashgate for this reference.

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impotence into an equestrian metaphorical register is typical of literary discourse in this context, as we saw in the consistent use of military metaphors to describe sexual encounters. The threat of impotence, however, which almost always presents itself when the actual moment of intercourse arrives in these texts, is transferred to the level of boasting after the fact, which is a particularly pertinent example of the extent to which the enactment of masculinity in literature is often nothing more than “the ‘taking up’ of an enunciative position,” as Homi Bhabha phrased it.10 In other words, in the context of the texts I have been examining, the masculine speaker or writer is obliged to adopt the discourse of hyperbolic potency when considering the act of intercourse, especially when he is speaking or writing for an audience of his similarly-gendered peers. Consider the case of a certain gentleman whom Brantôme describes, using his name and affiliations in order to lend greater veracity to his story, and to contrast it to the tale of impotence I have just cited: Ce gentilhomme fust esté fort heureux s’il fust esté de la complexion du grand Protenotaire Baraud, et aumosnier du Roy François, que, quand il couchoit avec les Dames de la Cour, du moins il alloit à la douzaine, et au matin il disoit encor : « Excusez-moi, madame, si je n’ai mieux fait, car je pris hier medecine. » Sur ses vieux ans, cette virile et venereique vigueur luy defaillit; et estoit pauvre, encor qu’il eust tiré de bons brins que sa piece luy avoit valu; mais il avoit tout brouillé, et se mit à escouler et distiller des essences : « Mais, disoit-il, si je pouvois, aussi bien que de mon jeune aage, distiller de l’essence spermatique, je ferois bien mieux mes affaires et m’y gouvernerois mieux » (240). [This gentleman would have been very happy if he had had the constitution of the great notary Baraud, who was the chaplain of King François I, who, when he slept with the ladies of the court, did it at least a dozen times a night, and in the morning he would still say, “excuse me, madam, if I didn’t do better, but I took some medicine yesterday.” When he was an old man, this virile and venereal vigor failed him, and he was poor, even though he had made quite a bit of hay by using his piece; but he had squandered everything, and was left to distilling some essences. “But,” said he, “if I could distill the spermatic essence as well as I did in my youth, my business would be going much better, and I would handle myself better.”]

The narrative phenomenon of cuckoldry follows its own peculiar logic: the obsession literally with counting the number of orgasms of which a man was capable during one night of seduction gives way, in old age, to another kind of counting that is much more banal and economic in nature. In fact, the “wealth” of this narrative tradition is allegorized here as a “distillation” of a “spermatic essence,” resulting in riches that were circulated from man to man in a narrative form. As we saw at the beginning of the Tiers Livre, the movement of fluids from one body to another was often conceived of in hierarchical and economic terms in the Renaissance, and also as a metaphor for the passage of wisdom from an enlightened male figure to his subjects via the mediums of women’s bodies. As such, the cuckold literature is a material support 10 Homi K. Bhabha, “Are You a Man or a Mouse?” in Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson, eds., Constructing Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 1995), 58.

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that calls upon men to be men by enforcing the circulation of certain kinds of stories about both male and female bodies, which runs parallel to a stratified circulation of wealth figured allegorically in the sexual functioning of bodies. Masculinity in the early modern period is thus constituted as a certain mode of speaking about differently sexed and gendered bodies, while individuals who are engendered as masculine must give a narrative account, for the pleasure and entertainment of other men, of this difference and its consequences. Men in this context structured their gender in relation to this seductive art of masculinist, homosocial storytelling, which generated volumes of discourse in which the material “being” of masculinity may be sought. Marital Vengeance as Royal Spectacle and Display Les Dames galantes lets loose the contained violence of the earlier texts I examined, to such an extent that parts of Brantôme’s work are mere catalogues of the ways in which jealous husbands killed their wives. In all of these crimes, there is an element of display that is fundamental to the structuring of masculinity in this context. In the “real” world described by Brantôme, enraged cuckolds go out of their way in order to show the inevitable spectators of their marriage that they know about their wives’ deceptions, and that they have acted to avenge the offense to their family honor. As a narrative form, the tale of the cuckold functions by dividing the visual domain into that which some characters (the wife, her lover, her friends and accomplices) can see, while others (essentially, the cuckold) perhaps see the same things while being inexplicably blind to them. In contrast, in the narrative account of real cuckoldry that Brantôme provides for us, the conclusion toward which the story develops seemingly necessitates a visual publication of the fact of infidelity. More specifically, the idea that the wife has been unfaithful to her husband must be rendered publicly visible through a form of iconic representation. Brantôme tells the extreme story of a wife and her lover who were caught in the act by her husband: ...s’estans tous deux concertés à la jouissance et le mary l’ayant descouverte (par le moyen que je dirois, mais le conte en seroit trop long), voire couchez ensemble dans le lict, les fit tous deux massacrer par gens appostez; si que le lendemain on trouva ces deux belles moitiés et creatures exposées estendues sur le pavé devant la porte de la maison, toutes mortes et froides, à la veuë de tous les passans, qui les larmoyoient et plaignoient de leur miserable estat (244). […both of them having agreed upon their mutual pleasure, which the husband discovered (by means that I would tell you, but the story would be too long), and when they were in bed together, he had both of them killed by hired hands; on the following day, these two complementary halves and creatures were exposed, spread out on the pavement in front of the door to the house, dead and cold as they were, in plain sight of all passers-by, who cried over and lamented their miserable state.]

The symbolic space where the bodies of the murdered lovers are displayed signifies the point at which the civic and domestic spheres intersect and are differentiated. Here at the threshold between the social realm and domus, the bodies of the dead

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lovers symbolize the indignation of the husband whose being as such had been transgressed by his wife’s actions. The murderous act that transforms the wife and lover into corporeal icons is another instance of the masculine subject “taking up the enunciative position” of masculinity in its most extreme form, with this type of mortal violence signifying the ultimate visible display of the male gender. Another anecdote from this part of the text explores some of these same visual motifs, which underline the necessity of translating the masculine subject’s revenge into bodily icons that may be displayed in the civic realm: Un autre [homme] de par le monde tua sa femme en pleine Cour, luy ayant donné l’espace de quinze ans toutes les libertez du monde, et qu’il estoit assez informé de sa vie, jusques à luy remonstrer et l’admonester. Toutesfois une verve luy prit (on dit que ce fut par la persuasion d’un grand son maistre), et par un matin la vint trouver dans son lict ainsi qu’elle vouloit se lever, et ayant couché avec alle, gaussé et ryt bien ensemble, luy donna quatre ou cinq coups de dague, puis la fit achever à un sien serviteur, et après la fit mettre en litiere, et devant tout le monde fut emportée en sa maison pour la faire enterrer. Après s’en retourna, et se presenta à la Cour, comme s’il eust fait la plus belle chose du monde, et en triumpha. Il eust bien fait de mesme à ses amoureux; mais eust eu trop d’affaires, car elle en avoit tant eu et fait, qu’elle en eust fait une petite armée (243). [Another man from somewhere killed his wife at court, having allowed her all the freedom in the world for more than fifteen years, and having been well informed of her life, about which he warned and reprimanded her. In the end, he was piqued (it was said that he was persuaded to do so by his master), and one morning he went to her bed as she was waking up, and having lain down with her, and laughed and fooled around with her, he stabbed her four or five times, and then had one of his servants finish her off. Afterward, he had her placed on a litter, and in front of everyone she was carried to her house to be buried. This man returned afterward to court, as if he had done the most beautiful thing in the world, and boasted about it. He would have done well to do the same to her lovers, but he would have had too much work, because she had had so many of them, that they would have formed a little army.]

The violence of the marital situation here is blatantly figured in the form of the husband who stabs his wife at the same time that he takes his pleasure with her in bed. As in the last anecdote, the murder provokes a kind of procession, in which everyone is forced to look upon the passing body of the deceased adulterous woman in its litter as a sign of masculine power’s ability to strike and kill. The masculine subject who transcribes these pages evokes the familiar figure of women’s insatiable desire, which also takes the stereotypical form of a military metaphor. The most telling moment in this section of Brantôme’s work involves a story of king François I, which demonstrates that the operation of power through display and spectacle traverses the entirety of the kingdom, from its head down to the very ground from which the king’s subjects are forced to extract their tributes: J’ay ouy parler que le Roy François une fois voulut aller coucher avec une Dame de sa Cour qu’il aimoit. Il trouva son mary l’espée au poing pour l’aller tuer; mais le Roy luy porta la sienne à la gorge, et luy commanda, sur sa vie, de ne luy faire nul mal, et que s’il luy faisoit la moindre chose du monde, qu’il le tueroit, ou qu’il luy feroit trencher la teste; et pour cette nuict l’envoya dehors, et prit sa place.

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Cette Dame estoit bien heureuse d’avoir trouvé un si bon champion et protecteur de son con, car onques puis le mary ne luy osa sonner mot, ains luy laissa du tout faire à sa guise. J’ay oüy dire que, non seulement cette Dame, mais plusieurs autres, obtindrent pareille sauvegarde du Roy. Comme plusieurs font en guerre pour sauver leurs terres et y mettent les armoiries du Roy sur leurs portes, ainsi font ces femmes celles de ces grands Roys, au bord et au dedans de leur con, si bien que leurs marys ne leur osoyent dire mot, qui sans cela, les eussent passez au fil de l’espée (246–247). [I heard that King François once wanted to sleep with a lady of his court with whom he was in love. He found her husband brandishing his sword in order to kill her, but the King held his [sword] up to the husband’s throat, and ordered him, on threat of death, not to hurt her, and that if he did the least thing to her, that he, the King, would kill him, or that he would have him beheaded. That night, the King sent the husband out, and occupied his place. This lady was quite happy to have found such a good champion and protector of her cunt [con], since her husband never again dared to say a word, and thus left her do whatever she wanted. I heard that not only this Lady, but several others obtained a similar safeguard from the King. As many people do in wartime to save their land, placing the coat of arms of the King on their doors, so do these women do with those of the great Kings, placing them around and inside of their cunts, such that their husbands never dare to say a word to them, while otherwise they would have put them to the sword.]

The emblem of the king’s power protects households from the violence of war. This visual manifestation of power comes figuratively to invade the most private parts of women’s bodies, and to involve them in the violent struggle among men that constitutes masculinity. In the context in which Brantôme wrote, dominated by wars and civil conflicts, masculinity sought its identity through the display and spectacle of power by staking out its territory and its claims around women’s bodies, and especially around the privileged object of masculinist heterosexual desire, which Brantôme names repeatedly here. In other words, in this context, masculinity is described using the metaphorical register of warfare: the masculine is that which surrounds the body of woman, imprisons her within the domicile of marriage, defends her against all assaults, or assaults her from every angle, and displays its relation to her in signs and symbols that configure its relation to the public, social realm, and to other men who are attempting to define themselves in the same way. Masculine subjects as such exist within this struggle and interplay of multiple forces, which have a material existence that is mirrored in diverse series of symbols, icons, and emblems in the visual domain. But by far the most interesting moment in this passage is the metaphoric description of the king’s private parts. The function of armoiries or coats of arms was to represent visually the nature and importance of a noble person, while emblems and coats of arms were essential to Renaissance thinking about personal, and especially noble identity. Here Brantôme establishes a parallel between households that display

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the king’s coat of arms in order to protect themselves from being destroyed in times of war, and adulterous women who display the king’s “arms” in and around their vaginas in order to protect themselves from their jealous husbands. This comparison is extraordinarily suggestive on a number of levels. The first concerns the consistent equation of marriage, sex, and war in the obsessive masculine mind of the period. The second involves the king’s iconic representation and its power to halt the normal course of events. The third and most amazing implication of this comparison is the idea that masculine and feminine are still firmly based on their biological relationship to physical penetration, at the same time that this material fact is lost in the play of signification that the passage puts in motion. In this sense, within the masculinist imaginary, the vagina is at once the physical space that must be both penetrated and protected from penetration, but it is also the house or home that must be ravaged and/or protected by the display of royal arms, as well as the domicile of a marriage that must be compromised and/or maintained intact. Similarly, the penis is both a physical object and a medium of display. The royal penis is thus literally transposed to the realm of spectacle, or has its very being within the visual register. While the Ancient Romans had no qualms about parading giant phalluses in public, the French Renaissance kings who wanted to model themselves on the Ancients could display the phallic foundation of their power only in a series of substitutes. For the Renaissance man, then, this signifier of masculinity displayed itself and hence existed in a set of substitutes: the coat of arms, the household, the marriage bed, the battlefield, the wife’s body, the iconographic display of vengeance, and the synthesis of all these, the account and recounting of the cuckold’s tale, which tells the story of how the literal penis becomes the symbolic object (or the phantom presence) that surrounds, penetrates, and protects women’s bodies. The display of a household’s coat of arms is virtually equivalent to the figurative display of the phallus that Brantôme describes in and around the private parts of the woman who is imprisoned in that household. Masculinity in this context is thus both a function and an effect of this literal and metaphorical display, which means that men could be recognized as such by other men—and their being as interpellated, masculine subjects depends upon this recognition—only if the female body as icon were exhibited in these diverse ways, bearing the distinctive markers of the men who continuously “invested” (in) it, in all of the multiple senses of this verb.11 The Topos of Women’s Desire and the Horror of Gang Rape Brantôme describes subject matter from what one might call the “masculine unconscious,” for lack of a better term, that is at times extraordinarily gruesome. A particularly frightening region of this imaginary world manifests itself in all kinds of fantasies and violent acts. As I have already remarked repeatedly, one of the preconceptions of the feminine from a particularly narrow masculinist point of view is the idea that women are sexually insatiable. The importance and prevalence 11 Cf. Stephen Greenblatt’s discussion of emblematic self-representation in the Renaissance in Holbein’s “The Ambassadors” in Renaissance Self-Fashioning From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 17–21.

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of this troubling motif in the literature of the sixteenth century must be noted, since it served as a basis both for comedy and for the tragic events that I examined a moment ago. Brantôme provides us with a late-Renaissance “take” on this theme that is particularly powerful and difficult. His section on the supposed strength of women’s desire begins with a brief catalogue of women about whom he has heard or read who suffered from this “condition.” Brantôme cites a number of examples from the ancient Romans, the most noteworthy of which embodies this topos in a hyperbolic fashion: Valleria Messalina... ne se contentoit pas de le faire avec l’un et l’autre dissolument et indiscretement, mais faisoit profession d’aller aux bourdeaux s’en faire donner, comme la plus grande bagasse de la ville, jusques là, comme dit Juvenal, qu’ainsi que son mary estoit couché avec elle, se derobboit tout bellement d’auprès de luy le voyant bien endormy, et se déguisoit le mieux qu’il le pouvoit, et s’en alloit en plain bourdeau, et là s’en faisoit donner si très-tant, et jusques qu’elle en partoit plustost lasse que saoule et rassasiée. Et faisoit encor pis : pour mieux se satisfaire et avoir cette reputation et contentement en soy d’estre une grande putain et bagasse, se faisoit payer, et taxoit ses coups et ses chevauchées, comme un commissaire qui va par pais, jusques à la dernière maille (253). [Valleria Messalina… was not satisfied simply doing it dissolutely and indiscreetly with one man or another, but she made a profession out of going to brothels in order to have men give it to her, like the biggest slut in town, to such a point, according to Juvenal, that even when her husband had been lying with her, she would sneak off from beside him when she saw him asleep, disguise herself as best as she could, and would go straight to the brothel, where she had men give it to her so much that she would leave exhausted rather than replete or satisfied. And she did even worse things: in order to satisfy herself better and to have the reputation and contentment in her own mind of being a total whore and slut, she would make her lovers pay her, and she would tax each bump and ride like a commissar traveling around the country, to the last link in the chain.]

This woman apparently represented one of the canonical figures of the femme chaleureuse, which was continuously cited and reactivated in masculinist texts ranging from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, as Brantôme remarks in his reference to Boccaccio’s description of Messalina’s astrological predisposition to debauchery (254). He also tells the interesting story of an ancient statue of this woman which was found in Bordeaux, and which presented its viewers with the body type of the overheated woman: C’estoit une fort grande femme, de très-belle haute taille, les beaux traits de son visage, et sa coiffure tant gentille à l’antique Romaine, et sa taille très-haute, demonstrant bien qu’elle estoit ce qu’on a dit; car, à ce que je tiens de plusieurs philosophes, medecins et physionomistes, les grandes femmes sont à cela volontiers inclinées, d’autant qu’elles sont hommasses; et, estant ainsi, participent des chaleurs de l’homme et de la femme; et, jointes ensemble en un seul corps et sujet, sont plus violentes et ont plus de force qu’une seule ... (254). [She was a very large woman, with a beautiful, high waist, handsome features in her face, and a noble, ancient Roman haircut, and her waist was very high, demonstrating well that she was what she was rumored to be; for, according to what I’ve learned from

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Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature many philosophers, doctors, and physiognomists, large women are willfully inclined to be this way, especially since they are she-males [hommasses]; and, being this way, they participate in the heat of both men and women; and, joined together in one body and subject, they are more violent and stronger than a single woman …]

The masculine subject here judges the sexual propensities of the woman he sees simply by interpreting her body type, even if that body is just a statue. The role of the medical texts that Brantôme mentions is a fascinating one. Not only was the preconception of the over-heated woman common currency among men, but it was also explored and supported by supposedly scientific work. Brantôme’s reading of the being embodied in the statue is overdetermined by Classical connotations. The description of large women who are “hommasses,” participating in both genders, reveals the true foundation of this type of masculinist thinking about the female body. Women who are seen to be motivated by a powerful sex drive are, in fact, men who have been transported to women’s bodies. As Marguerite de Navarre described Jambique in nouvelle 43 of the Heptaméron, women who are motivated by lust should be called men, and not women.12 This type of thinking is also dominated by a certain preconception about the nature of men as sexual beings. Women such as Messalina are, therefore, projections of a fantasy image of what constitutes a man as a gendered subject, overdetermined by his insatiable sex drive which is a fantasy that is displaced onto the figure of woman, constituting her as an irreducible other. At the extreme limit of this displacement of masculine identity into its most violent verbal representations resides the abomination of military gang rape. Brantôme’s narrative version of this crime against humanity also displays a kind of “orientalism” that appears sporadically throughout the work. The term “orientalism” applies here, that is, if we consider the Slavic regions of Europe as irreducibly foreign and other to the Western European writers on whom we have been focusing. An inevitable feature of an author’s depiction of cultural others, especially in the context of early modern Europe, is an overestimation of the qualities that define the other as different. In order to conclude his section on masculine violence, Brantôme glances, then, in the direction of Eastern Europe, where a jealous husband inflicts a nightmarish punishment on his adulterous wife: La premiere fois que je fus jamais en Italie, passant par Venise, il me fut fait un compte pour vray, d’un certain chevallier Albanois, lequel, ayant surpris sa femme en adultere, tua l’amoureux. Et de despit qu’il eut que sa femme ne s’estoit contentée de luy (car il estoit un gallant cavallier, et des propres pour Venus, jusques à entrer en jouxte dix ou douze fois pour une nuict), pour punition, il fut curieux de rechercher partout une douzaine de bons compagnons, et fort ribauts, qui avoyent la reputation d’estre bien et grandement proportionnez de leurs membres, et fort adroits et chauds à l’execution; et les prit, les gagea et loüa pour argent et les serra dans la chambre de sa femme, qui estoit très-belle, et la leur abandonna, les priant tous d’y faire bien leur devoir, avec double paye s’ilz s’en acquittoyent bien: et se mirent tous après elle, les uns après les autres, et la menerent de telle façon qu’ils la rendirent morte avec un très-grand contentement du mary; à laquelle il luy reprocha, tendante à la mort, que puisqu’elle avoit tant aymé cette douce liqueur, qu’elle s’en saoullast; à mode que dit Semiramis à Cyrus, luy mettant sa teste dans un vase plein de sang. Voylà un terrible genre de mort! (259) 12 Marguerite de Navarre, L’Heptaméron, ed. Michel François (Paris: Bordas, 1991), 301.

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[The first time that I ever went to Italy, passing through Venice, I was told a supposedly true story about a certain Albanian knight, who, having surprised his wife in adultery, killed her lover. And out of the spite he felt that his wife had not been satisfied [sexually] with him (for he was a gallant knight, and well made for Venus, so much so that he could joust [with his wife or lover] ten or twelve times a night), as punishment, he went so far as to seek out a dozen hearty and ribald fellows, who had the reputation of being well and largely endowed in their members, and very skillful and ardent in their execution [of sex]; he took them, hired them, and engaged them and locked them into a room with his wife, who was very beautiful, and abandoned her to them, asking that they all do their duty, with double pay if they did a good job at it; and they all put themselves near her, one after the other, and treated her in such a way that they left her dead, to the delight of her husband, who reproached her, when she was near death, with loving this sweet liqueur so much that she should get drunk on it; in the same way that Semiramis said to Cyrus, putting his head in a bucket of blood. What a terrible death this was!]

Brantôme’s opening gesture here echoes several distinct branches of literature. The first of these is the rich travel literature devoted to the problematic love/hate relationship between the French and the Italians, which marked the lives of so many French noblemen of the Renaissance. The second is the particular resonance with which the name “Venice” rings on the page: the capricious, sometime ally, sometime enemy of the French forces that invaded Italy; the eastern-most edge of Europe, and last bastion of defense against the Turks; the center of trade in the Mediterranean; the place of a dangerous mixing of cultures; the home of rapacious and cunning nobles adept at making and breaking alliances. In the context of the numerous texts devoted to travel and apprenticeship in Italy, ranging from the Mémoires of the Maréchal de Florenge, to Blaise de Monluc’s Commentaires, to Montaigne’s Journal de voyage, Brantôme’s simple phrase, “the first time I ever went to Italy” conjures up images of a young nobleman, hungry for renown and recognition, who is traveling outside of his region and his country for the first time, and who is amazed by stories he has heard about France’s remarkable neighbor to the southeast. Brantôme’s second phrase, “as I was passing through Venice,” could be translated to read as, “as I reached the limits of the Western world, where almost anything becomes possible.” The third branch is that of the nouvelle literature, in which the promise of verisimilitude is that which invites and captures the attention of the listener/reader: “someone told me a story that he swore was true.” At this point, the experienced reader suspects two things: first, that the story he is about to be told is not true at all; second, that the contents of the story that is about to be told are going to be so outrageous and scandalous as to be unbelievable, even if they are true. Finally, perhaps the most significant detail of Brantôme’s introduction to this tale is the way in which he names its male protagonist: “a certain Albanian knight.” Given the long history of conflict in the Balkans, which continues today, it could be that educated readers in the West in the sixteenth century understood this epithet in pretty much the same way that the editors of the evening news programs understand the Balkans today: once one crosses the Adriatic, the people become more and more belligerent, barbaric, and bloodthirsty as you go East. Here Brantôme thus tells yet another story about an atrocity committed by soldiers against innocent civilians, particularly women, in the endless Balkan wars. In the midst of this military brutality that is unleashed against women, one discerns the foundation of a phantasmal masculine sexuality, which we have already

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remarked countless times before, though perhaps it was not represented before in such a blatant fashion as it is here. There are three semantic domains that overlap in this type of description: the first is the idea of the chevalier or knight himself, which signifies nobility, of course, but which also connotes a certain dexterity and ferocity as a warrior. The second is the idea of the knight from the Balkans, which functions as an intensifier of the elements that define him: if Western noblemen were ferocious, this quality was necessarily multiplied in the imaginary version of these Eastern others. Finally, and most tellingly, is the idea that the good chevalier, and hence the good paragon of masculinity, must be properly endowed for “Venus,” the name of the goddess used here as a prosopopoeia that strangely echoes the name of the “exotic” city in which Brantôme heard the story. In the context of this type of anecdote, the narrator’s concentration may circulate almost at random among these positions. Or, according to a corollary principle of development, if the narrator’s gaze falls within one of these domains—we recall Brantôme’s formula from the dedication of his text to the Duc d’Alençon, “on diroit qu’ils [ces récits] vous naissent à veuë d’œil dans la bouche—it is virtually compelled to tell a story and to be displaced toward one of the others. One of the most fascinating elements of this particular story is the way in which the “bons compagnons” who are hired by the husband embody his own indefatigable prowess as a lover: the “gallant” knight who is able to “joust” ten or twelve times in a night is suddenly replaced by the dozen ribald revelers, all of whom are chosen because of the seemingly hypertrophied nature of the body parts that make them male. Once again, these men seemingly counted the number of times they were capable of having an orgasm and performing sexual acts in one night. Here, this obsession with numbers is incarnated in the figures of the twelve rapists, who transpose and embody the Knight’s sexual capabilities. The mythic quality of this tale becomes evident in these strange numeric obsessions. At the heart of this story of terrible vengeance is an almost psychotic masculine obsession with satisfying women, whom these men see as insatiable. In later sections that I will examine in a moment, Brantôme speaks of the vagina as of a purse that can never be filled up. The economic exchange that takes place here is conceived in terms of this horrifying image: the double pay that the rapists receive is intended to fill the void of the female body, and is funneled, or “distilled,” to use a properly Brantômian image, through the bodies of the men. What Brantôme calls “l’essence spermaticque” is thus economic in nature, as well as being an integral element in the construction of a social persona as masculine: the foundation of the noble knight is the obsessive idea of his physical capabilities as a lover. In other words, the masculinity that takes its revenge here on the woman’s body constructs itself in relation to a spectral and speculative conception of what materially constitutes gender difference: certain physical abilities, the flow and quantity of certain bodily fluids at given times, the ability of receptacles to hold those fluids. Brantôme and his contemporaries apparently took their conception of bodies and the movements of their humors as the basis of gender difference very seriously, to such an extent that the flow of wealth that constituted nobility for them was, in a sense, no different from the murderous flow of semen that could be unleashed against women at any time that they resisted the patriarchal, phallocratic order of marriage. In the most serious anecdotes that he recounts with a terrifying naturalness, Brantôme unmasks the semantic and semiotic

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procedures by which the flow of cash merely repeats in a sublimated form the bodily functioning that subtends it, i.e., the idea of an uninterrupted flow of semen that was one of the major obsessions of the men described in this text. The memorialist hence transposes Panurge’s figure of the corporeal male economy to a much more frightening and murderous register. The Female Body as Object of Surveillance and Display As in the other texts we examined, the structuring of masculine identity and subjectivity in Brantôme’s work also develops according to a visual logic. The fantastical conception of men’s virility, which is based on an overestimation of their bodies’ private parts, had to be made visible in a series of substitutions and supplements, such as arms, warfare, emblems, property, wealth, and, perhaps most importantly, the beauty and seductive appearance of men’s wives, which acted as a lure for other men. As we noted earlier in this chapter, the symbols and signs of masculine virility and power were often displayed around the wife’s body, on the very surface of her body (as her sumptuous garments, and the jewels that she wore), and even, to use Brantôme’s striking formulation, in and around her vagina in extreme cases, or ultimately as her body itself. For men, the female body was thus an imaginary locus at which the various projections of men’s potency had to be exhibited and put into circulation for the visual consideration and consumption of other men. Consequently, would-be hetero-normative masculinity in this context has to be considered as a much larger entity, since it is evident not only in and as the being and body of a given individual, but also as the sets of objects in different categories that surround it: clothing, a coat of arms, a household, other bodies of both sexes and genders, a profession, and so on. The men who were interpellated and engendered upon this conceptual grid of masculinity had to display the bodies of the women who essentially became their property upon their marriage, and who thus served as visual supports for the structuring of the male gender in a scopic economy. Moreover, the masculine domination and penetration of women’s bodies necessarily had to be made public through visible signs, either by flaunting woman as object of desire, or by displaying the symbols of women’s subjugation to masculinist power. Brantôme provides us with numerous examples of these phenomena, accompanied by a commentary in which he strongly disapproves of a practice that was apparently quite common at the time. Husbands often revealed the hidden beauties of their wives to their male friends, as in the following description: Or, pour retourner encor à nos marys prodigues de la veuë de leurs femmes nuës, j’en sçay un qui, pour un matin, un sien compagnon l’estant allé voir dans sa chambre ainsi qu’il s’habilloit, luy monstra sa femme toute nuë, estenduë tout de son long toute endormie, et s’estant elle-mesme osté ses linceuls de dessus elle, d’autant qu’il faisoit grand chaud, luy tira le rideau à demy, si bien que le soleil levant donnant dessus elle, il eut loisir de la bien contempler à son aise, où il ne vid rien que tout beau en perfection; et y put paistre ses yeux, non tant qu’il eust voulu, mais tant qu’il put; et puis le mary et luy s’en allerent chez le Roy (279).

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Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature [So, to return again to our husbands obsessed with seeing their wives naked, I know one who, one morning, as he was getting dressed in his room, showed to a friend who had come to visit him his completely naked wife, spread out across the bed and fast asleep. She had herself removed the covers from her body, since it was very hot in the room, and her husband pulled back halfway the curtain around the bed, so that as the rising sun fell upon her, the friend could look at her comfortably, seeing nothing but complete beauty and perfection, on which he could feast his eyes, not as much as he would have liked to, but as long as he was able to; and then the husband and his friend went to visit the King.]

Brantôme here describes one of the primal scenes of early modern masculinity. The two men are named as “compagnons,” which is a term rich in connotations in its usage in the literature of the period, and goes well beyond the simple designation of “friend” or “companion,” to include “drinking buddy,” but also “substitute in bed,” or “friend who shared sexual favors with women,” as we saw in our analyses from the Cent nouvelles nouvelles. While the act of getting dressed may be simple on its surface, it also involves presenting oneself in public, and here the engendering of these two men appears to be contingent upon the secret that they share as they are preparing to present themselves before the ultimate representative of power.13 As men parade themselves in the most important public places, they are literally “dressed” or “outfitted” in the knowledge that they share among themselves and withhold from women. The image of the sun shining on the naked wife’s body is rich in connotations, since, as we have already remarked, the process of “shedding light” on something is the standard metaphor for the moment when recognition and knowledge have been achieved or attained.14 This passage links the ideas of masculinity, light, understanding, and shared knowledge, while it relegates the female character to the realm of darkness, sleep, ignorance, solitude, and vulnerability, while the text carefully notes that she reveals her own body to the masculine gaze as she sleeps. In another version of this type of anecdote, the tables are turned, and it is the husband who is shown his own wife’s naked body without his knowledge. As Étienne Vaucheret informs us, this true tale was the basis of many tales in Italian, as well as of the first of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles:15 Louis, duc d’Orleans, tué à la porte Barbette, à Paris, fit bien au contraire (grand debauscheur des Dames de la Cour, et tousjours des plus grandes); car, ayant avec luy couché une fort belle et grande Dame, ainsi, que son mary vint en sa chambre pour luy donner le bonjour, il alla couvrir la teste de sa Dame, femme de l’autre, du linceul, et luy descouvrit tout le corps, luy faisant voir tout nud et toucher à son bel aise, avec defense 13 The link between men that is evoked here might be discussed in terms of what Anne Grimaldi-Darken has called “le lien charnel” [the carnal link] that united an entire class of noblemen to one another during the Renaissance, and which she theorizes was in crisis during the period in which Brantôme wrote. What I am calling the instability of masculinity in this context could thus be linked to this breakdown in “traditional” relations among men. See “Le lien charnel et Brantôme,” in Brantôme et les Grands d’Europe (Pessac: Centre Montaigne de l’Université de Bordeaux 3, 2003), 49–63. See also an earlier version of this thesis in Anne Grimaldi, Brantôme et le sens de l’histoire (Paris: Nizet, 1971). 14 See Derrida, “La Mythologie blanche,” in Marges de la philosophie, 249–324. 15 See Vaucheret’s note, Recueil des dames, p. 278 n1, 1279.

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expresse sur la vie de n’oster le linge du visage, ny la descouvrir aucunement, à quoy il n’osa contrevenir, luy demandant par plusieurs fois ce qui sembloit de ce beau corps tout nud : l’autre en demeura tout esperdu et grandement satisfait. Le Duc luy bailla congé de sortir de la chambre, ce qu’il fit sans jamais avoir pu cognoistre que ce fust sa femme (278). [Louis, the Duke of Orleans, killed at the Barbette gate in Paris, did exactly the opposite, being a great debaucher of women at court, and always among the greatest of them; for, when he had a very beautiful and noble Lady in his bed, when her husband happened to come in the room to say good morning to the Duke, the latter covered the head of the Lady, who was the wife of the other man, with a blanket, but revealed her entire body to him, allowing him to look at and touch her as much as he wanted, but forbade him on his life to lift the sheet from her face or to uncover her in any other way, which the husband didn’t dare to disobey, while the Duke asked him several times what he thought of this beautiful, naked body: the other man remained speechless and very satisfied. The Duke allowed him to leave the room, which he did without ever being able to recognize that it was his own wife.]

Brantôme’s seemingly innocent parenthesis here conjoins two of the essential elements of the noble masculinity that is revealed in these texts: the glory of the soldier killed in battle is linked to the notion of predatory masculine debauchery. Moreover, the text connects the indiscretion of this prince with a foundational act that has profound implications for the French people, in a sense, since the relation between Louis d’Orléans and his married mistress results in the birth of a national hero: “Et de cette dame tant grande et de Monsieur d’Orleans, on dit que sortit ce brave et vaillant bastard d’Orleans, le soustien de la France et le fleau de l’Angleterre, et duquel est venuë ceste noble et genereuse race des comtes de Dunois” (279). [“From this eminently noble Lady and the Lord of Orleans, it is said that was born the brave and courageous bastard of Orleans, the rock of France and scourge of England, from whom descended the noble and generous race of the Counts of Dunois.”] In the context of sixteenth century France, a certain kind of masculinity is almost invariably linked to military might, violence, debauchery, and the propagation of these as the core concepts of a privileged “race” of noble men. The domestic friendship between two men of a certain social stature is thus projected onto the scale of an entire people, which gives one a significant insight into the perspective from which Brantôme was writing as a nobleman for whom the constitutive elements of his gender were literally equivalent to his entire world, which extended from the most private spheres into the most public and collective domains. In this regard, our conception of the difference between public and private spheres throughout the early modern period is evidently in need of substantial revision. If we are to judge from this historical account, what we would consider the intimate and personal space of the bedroom was apparently not off-limits to a man’s male friends. The penetration of other men’s eyes into this space seemingly entailed the consolidation or even the “consummation” of the relationship between men that was accomplished via the revelation of the naked female body, and the shared scopophilia of “feeding” upon it with one’s eyes. Brantôme thus repeats the idea he highlighted in the introduction to this section: the luminous object of masculine heterosexual

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desire serves as the basis of a particular type of discursive exchange among men, often giving rise to adultery. This kind of male homosocial conversation thus serves as a supplement to and substitute for desire itself, and is often accompanied by a literal physical inspection of the female body as the basis of this desire: Que dirons-nous maintenant d’aucuns marys qui ne se contentent de se donner du contentement et du plaisir paillard de leurs femmes, mais en donnent de l’appetit, soit à leurs compagnons et amys, soit à d’autres? Ainsi que j’en ay cogneu plusieurs qui leur loüent leurs femmes, leur disent leurs beautez, leur figurent leurs membres et partyes du corps, leur representent leurs plaisirs qu’ils ont avec elles, et leurs follatreries dont elles usent envers eux, les leur font baiser, toucher, taster, voire voir nuës (277). [What shall we say now of some husbands who are not satisfied with the lascivious pleasure and satisfaction that they derive from their wives, but who also inspire the desire for their wives either among their companions and friends, or among other men? I have known many [men] who praise their wives to others, telling them of their beauty, describing their members and body parts, representing the pleasure that they enjoy with their wives, the crazy things that these women sometimes do [in bed] with them; these men even allow their friends to kiss, touch, feel, and even see their wives naked.]

One is reminded of the notorious Blasons du corps féminin, in which the female body is described using precisely the same kinds of verbs by Clément Marot in his famous Blason du beau tétin. Marot describes the direct link that leads from the sight of the object, to the desire to touch it, to the other desire that results from these sensory stimuli: “Quand on te voit, il vient à maintz/ Une envie dedans les mains/ De te taster, de te tenir :/ Mais il se fault bien contenir/ D’en approcher, bon gré ma vie, / Car il viendroit une autre envie.”16 [“When one sees you, it happens to many a man/that a desire comes into his hands/ to touch you, and to take you/ but this is not something a man should do/ for when he gets close to your fire/ he may be overcome by another desire.”] This unnamed other desire is appropriately figured in the French/English cognates envie/envy. In the anecdote of Louis d’Orléans and of the gentleman who reveals his naked wife to his friend while dressing, the other desire is precisely a need to name the female body, and to pronounce a discourse about its constituent parts, which inspire desire, as in the variant from the Cent nouvelles nouvelles. But the act of the men in both of these cases is intended to arouse the envy of the viewer, whose starving eyes “devour” their object, but are unable to fill the emptiness in the “stomach” of their desire. Thus another consistent set of terms characterizes the relationship among men, composed this time of a series of binary opposites: desire versus envy, rivalry versus friendship, revelation versus the keeping of secrets, sharing versus withholding, etc. In fact, envy, spite, and revenge are the themes that dominate this section of Brantôme’s text, and lead us back to a consideration of the sources and nature of the anecdotes that the author recounts. The story of Louis d’Orléans is evidently a true one, as Vaucheret remarks. Its reality, however, serves to confirm the moral truth that Brantôme introduces in another story that precedes this one, which he draws

16 Poètes du XVIe siècle, ed. Albert-Marie Schmidt (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1953), 332.

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from the Classical intertext. The “récit légendaire” of the shepherd Gyges who kills Candaulus, the king of Lydia, after seeing the latter’s wife naked, is recounted by Plato, Herodotus, and Cicero in the ancient world.17 The logical development of Brantôme’s thought in this section hence follows the same procedure that we saw in the last one. The paraphrase of a well-known example drawn from authoritative sources leads to a prolonged meditation on the applicability of its moral lesson (i.e., one should never allow one’s wife to be seen naked by other men, as the text makes explicit further on) to actual events of which one has knowledge from the real world. Hence the work moves from an analysis of an ancient example (Gyges), to a consideration of a counter-example from the recent past (Louis d’Orléans), and finally to the formulation of a maxim derived from the author’s own experience of male friendship: Il ne faut jamais monstrer sa femme nuë, ny ses terres, pays et places, comme je tiens d’un grand capitaine, à propos de feu Monsieur de Savoye, qui desconseilla et dissuada nostre Roy Henry dernier, quand, à son retour de Poulogne, il passa par la Lombardie, de n’aller ny entrer dans la ville de Milan… [Le roi] me fist cet honneur, quand il fut de retour à Lion, de me le dire … (280). [A man should never show his wife naked, nor his lands, his country, and his public squares, as I heard from a great Captain concerning the late Lord of Savoy, who advised and dissuaded our last King Henry who, returning from Poland, and passing through Lombardy, was told neither to go to nor to enter into Milan … [The King] bestowed the honor upon me, when he returned from Lyon, of telling me [this maxim] …]

Renaissance masculinity has its being in diverse performative acts of showing and telling, two of its ontological modes which interact here. Despite Brantôme’s recognition of the “truth” concerning women’s bodies, land, and public squares, men seem to have been overdetermined by their gender in such a way that they could not refrain from sharing the view of their wives’ bodies with other men. What is most interesting in this passage, then, is the interaction between the notion of masculinist authority, the transmission of narrative truths concerning the relationship of men to other men via their wives as mediators, and the concept of property that establishes a parallel between the ownership of women’s bodies and that of land and cities. As part of their normal lives, men in this context were apparently talking continuously to one another about the particular points of this interaction. Furthermore, this discursive exchange seems to have led from one man to another along a kind of chain of command: Brantôme hears from a “great captain,” who hears from the King himself, Henri III, that one should not display one’s wife, one’s land, one’s country. This projection from the intimate to the collective repeats the image of the noble masculine subject traveling to foreign lands, where he learns truths about his own gender performance within the diverse categories of space that “belong” to him. The comparison of women’s bodies to land is a commonplace of Renaissance literature, as we saw at the beginning of the Tiers Livre and in Montaigne’s essay “De l’oisiveté.” Within a section of the text in which this comparison plays a significant part, Brantôme 17 See Vaucheret’s note in the Recueil des dames, 277 n. 3, 1279.

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informs us that he has heard the moral maxim concerning the revelation of women’s bodies from the ultimate masculinist authority himself,18 and that the sharing of this knowledge between them constitutes the conferring of an “honor” upon the author. Just as friendship among men consisted in the sharing of the intimate image of a man’s own wife and the “truth” of her beauty as a form of privileged knowledge, so the relationship among noblemen took the form of a dissemination of discursive “truths” concerning women, which served as metaphors for a hierarchical property system at the material foundation of an aristocratic, masculinist society. Les Dames galantes repeatedly highlights precisely this function of diverse kinds of citation within the intertextual structuring of hetero-normative masculinity. Displaying Virginity The production of masculine heterosexual desire in this context had to be displayed by men to their male friends, via the revelation of the female body and the enumeration of its parts. The virility of the male body also had to be proclaimed discursively in terms of the quality and quantity of its forcefulness. An essential element of this masculinist paradigm was the surveillance to which women were subjected at the crucial moment when they supposedly lost their virginity in the consummation of their marriages. Set against the horrifying backdrop of men’s vengeance enacted against adulterous women, Brantôme here seems to cast a more lenient eye on the wiles by which women deceived their husbands: Que je connois de filles de par le monde qui n’ont pas porté leur pucelage au lict hymenean, mais pourtant qui sont bien instruites de leurs meres, ou autres de leurs parentes et amyes, très-sçavantes maquerelles, de faire bonne mine à ce premier assaut; et s’aydent de divers moyens et inventions avec des subtilitez, pour le faire trouver bon à leurs marys et leur monstrer que jamais il n’y avoit esté fait breche (294). [Lord knows that I know girls everywhere who did not arrive at their marriage bed as virgins; nevertheless, they were well instructed by their mothers, or by other female relatives and friends, who are very wise madams [or female pimps], to put on a brave face at this first assault; they also help themselves through various means and inventions with diverse subtleties, in order to make their husbands find everything all right, and to show these men that the walls of their fortress have never been breached.]

The clash of divergent types of vocabulary here signals the conceptual distance that separates the masculine and feminine domains. In a familiar turn of phrase, Brantôme characterizes women who trick their husbands and the other women who help them as prostitutes and pimps, respectively, while the men who engage in the “assault” or “siege” on the female body as “fortress” are described as “braves et determinez soldats” (294) [“brave and determined soldiers”]. This consistently paradoxical 18 It should be noted that Henri III was a rather unusual embodiment of masculinity, a topic which has been discussed by Kathleen Perry Long in Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), and Guy Poirier in L’Homosexualité dans l’imaginaire de la Renaissance (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1996).

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contrast and concatenation of military and eroticized vocabularies, which is perhaps another instance of the Mars-Venus topos that we examined in the Tiers Livre, is a constant of much early-modern thinking about gender difference.19 Women who acted in the world described by Brantôme tried out various survival strategies in a social context in which their bodies and their identities were required to conform to a particular model overdetermined by codified presentations of visual signs and symbols. This was especially true of the pivotal moment of the nuptial night when the breaking of the hymen had to be verified by witnesses. Brantôme describes this key event in women’s lives in detail, highlighting a consistent motif that runs throughout the cuckold literature: the idea that women will stop at nothing to maintain their sexual freedom from their husbands, with the help of clever men. Brantôme subjects this figure to many variations, as Polachek has noted, concluding that women, like men, used sex as a catalyst of their social relations.20 From a masculinist perspective, because women’s bodies were a function of the visual domain in which men required certain modes of visibility and display both of women and of themselves, women’s attempts to circumvent the functioning of this visual system took the form of “iconic” manipulations: Il y a un autre remede dont ces femmes s’advisent, qui est de monstrer le lendemain de leurs nopces leur linge teint de gouttes de sang qu’espandent ces pauvres filles à la charge dure de leur despucellement, ainsi que l’on fait en Espagne, qui en monstrent publiquement par la fenestre ledict linge, en criant taut haut : « Virgen la tenemos » « Nous la tenons pour vierge. » Certes, encor ay-je oüy dire, dans Viterbe cette coustume s’y observe tout de mesme. Et d’autant que celles qui ont passé premierement par les piques ne peuvent faire cette monstre par leur propre sang, elles se sont advisées (ainsi que j’ay oüy dire, et que plusieurs courtisanes jeunes à Rome me l’ont asseuré elles-mesmes, pour mieux vendre leur virginité) de teindre ledict linge de gouttes de sang de pigeon, qui est le plus propre de tous : et le lendemain le mary le voit, qui en reçoit un extresme contentement, et croit fermement que ce soit du sang virginal de sa femme; et luy semble bien que c’est un gallant, mais il est bien trompé (295). [There’s another remedy that women have thought up, which is to show, on the day after their wedding night, their sheets stained with drops of blood, which these poor girls spill from their bodies after the hard charge of their deflowering, such as one does in Spain, where one hangs these sheets publicly out the window, crying out, “Virgen la tenemos,” “We have a virgin here.” Certainly, I also heard it said that, in Viterbo, this custom is still observed. And since those women who have previously been pricked [as bulls are pricked with pikes in the bull fight] cannot put on this display using their own blood, they thought (according to 19 One of the most famous sixteenth-century treatments of this theme in France is the monumental tenth novella of Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, which examines in detail and critiques the dual roles of noble men as soldiers and lovers, and describes the often tragic consequences of this contradiction both for women and men. I am grateful to the outside readers of Ashgate for reminding me of this canonical treatment of this topos. 20 See Polachek, “A la recherche,” 236–42.

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Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature what I’ve heard, and as several young courtesans in Rome have assured me themselves, in order to better sell their virginity) to stain their said sheets with pigeon’s blood, which is the cleanest blood of all: and the following day, the husband sees it, and is extremely happy as a consequence, and firmly believes that it is the virginal blood of his wife; he also thinks that he is a gallant man, but he is really fooling himself.]

The visual logic of marriage that Brantôme describes entails the phenomenon whereby women’s bodies are surrounded by and invested with the symbols of masculine dominance. Here this scopic imperative receives its most dramatic expression, which must be understood in terms of the interior versus the exterior of the domus, the domestic versus the civic, the private versus the public. However, we have to set aside our modern understanding of these terms in order to read the passage correctly. Judging from this and other texts from the period, the population of a town or community in the sixteenth century seemingly had a right to know that the marriage of two of its members had been consummated. In the early modern period, the publication and exhibition of marriage hence included its most intimate details. Just as the external symbols of power had to be displayed on a house’s exterior, in order to situate it along a grid of power, here an object that belongs to the most hidden recesses of the household and its marriage bed is literally spread out across the façade of the house, both as a sign that the woman has taken up residence within it, and that she herself has been taken possession of within the confines of its walls. Hence the series of inside/outside maneuvers that structures this scene develops in terms of multiple “penetrations:” the bride is brought out of her father’s house and is transported to her husband’s/father-in-law’s house, which she “penetrates;” the husband literally penetrates his wife, supposedly breaking her hymen; the witnesses penetrate the nuptial bedroom, and convey the story of this marital coitus from inside the house to its outside; the story of the deflowering is transformed into the icon of the bloody sheet, which is transported from its hidden interior to the exterior of the house. Within this public, collective, and social display, which is at the material base of a more general power structure, the body of woman and its external signs hence occupied a central position. The closing statement of the preceding passage reveals that Brantôme himself was keenly aware of the fact that the careful construction of the sheet as an icon resulted in an empty signifier of an essentially void practice of masculinity. Apparently, however, the crucial necessity here was that the sequence of steps required for the display of the bloody sheet as icon be carried out, so that its image, which confirmed the husband in his proprietary masculinity, could be imprinted on the mind of a public that had to interact socially with him as a gendered subject. That this identity is nothing more than a sham, a farce, or a bluff, of which everyone is aware, including the husband himself, is dramatized in the compelling story that Brantôme tells as a sequel and conclusion to the anecdote of the bloody sheet: Sur quoy je feray ce plaisant conte d’un gentilhomme, lequel ayant eu l’esguillette noüée la premiere nuict de ses nopces, et la mariée, qui n’estoit pas de ces pucelles très-belles et de bonne part, se doutant bien qu’il deust faire rage, ne faillit, par l’advis de ses bonnes compagnes, matrosnes, parentes et bonnes amies, d’avoir le petit linge teint : mais le malheur fut tel pour elle, que le mary fut tellement noüé qu’il ne put rien faire, encor qu’il

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ne tint pas à elle à luy en faire la monstre la plus belle et se parer au montoir le mieux qu’elle pouvoit, et au coucher beau jeu, sans faire de la farouche ny nullement de la diablesse (ainsi que les spectateurs, cachez à la mode accoustumée, rapportoient), afin de cacher mieux son pucellage derobé ailleurs; mais il n’y eut rien d’executé. Le soir, à la mode accoustumée, le resveillon ayant esté porté, il y eut un quidam qui s’advisa, en faisant la guerre aux nopces (comme on fait communément) de derober le linge, qu’on trouva joliment teint de sang; lequel fut monstré soudain, et crié haut en l’assistance qu’elle n’estoit plus vierge, et que c’estoit ce coup que sa membrane virginale avoit esté forcée et rompuë : le mary, qui estoit asseuré qu’il n’avoit rien faict, mais pourtant qui faisoit du gallant et vaillant champion, demeura fort estonné et ne sceut ce que vouloit dire ce linge teint, sinon qu’après avoir songé assez, se douta de quelque fourbe et astuce putanesque, mais pourtant n’en sonna jamais mot (296). [In this regard I’ll tell the pleasant story of a gentleman who had his little needle all tied in knots on his wedding night, and whose bride was not one of those pretty young virgins from a good background; suspecting that he would be chomping at the bit, she didn’t fail, following the advice of her various governesses, matrons, female relatives, and good girlfriends, to stain her little sheets. Unfortunately for her, her husband was so clogged up that he couldn’t do anything, even when she showed off her charms to their best advantage, and put on the best show possible, especially when they got into bed, where she was neither ferocious nor diabolical (at least that’s what the spectators, hidden as is the custom, reported), so that she could hide better her virginity, which she lost elsewhere; but in short, nothing happened in bed. In the evening, when the resveillon [a celebratory late-night meal] was brought in, as is the custom, there was a joker who planned, while playing the usual tricks at weddings, to steal the sheets off the wedding bed, which were prettily stained with blood; this was quickly shown to the gathering, and the guests cried out that she was no longer a virgin, and that it was by her husband’s act that her virginal membrane had been forced and broken. The husband, who was sure that he had done nothing, but who pretended to be a brave and valiant champion, remained astonished and didn’t understand what these stained sheets meant, but after having thought about it for a while, he suspected that some malicious whore’s trick had been played on him, but he never said a word about it.]

Thus the set of steps that results in the public display of the bloody sheet is structured around an essential secret, which is two-fold. First is the silence surrounding the possibility of impotence, which frames the preceding passage. Secondly, the complementary side of this secret undermining of masculine performance is the public swagger of the male character as the “gallant and brave champion” who assaults the fortress of the female body in order to “capture” its virginity. A striking assemblage of women fills out the center of this anecdote, and is a familiar feature of stories in which men are deceived and betrayed by women. Companions, matrons, relatives, good female friends—all of these women have knowledge of the necessary trick that each woman must learn for the sake of deceiving her husband on her wedding night. If, as we saw in the preceding anecdote, the construction of masculinity in this context is contingent upon the sharing of a visual obsession with women’s bodies as the objects of an obligatory, heterosexual desire, then there is also a complementary sharing of secrets that constitutes an equally phantasmal version of femininity. If

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the figural and literal possession of visual objects of desire structures the gendered subjectivity of men, then the communication and appropriation of the knowledge necessary for the manipulation of visual signs within this masculinist economy of desire is one of the constitutive elements of the feminine within this distorted context. This manipulation of the visual realm has consequences for the entirety of the community that derives its being from the crucial social institution of matrimony. The required role of witnesses to marriage ceremonies, which still exists in the modern world, was evidently much more involved in the Renaissance, if we are to judge from this passage. Witnesses were called upon to observe the literal consummation of the marriage from a suitable hiding place near the nuptial bed. Moreover, since late medieval festivals were incomplete without pranksters and clowns, weddings were no exception. One of the essential roles of the prankster in these revelries is to steal something. Here the “quidam” graciously obliges, stealing the stained sheets and translating their signification into a public proclamation: “here we have a virgin,” which is announced at the moment the woman has supposedly just lost her virginity. In all of the literature that I have considered to this point that relates to cuckoldry, there is no greater demonstration of the extent to which the construction of both genders as signifying phenomena is to be found in a projection of verbal and visual signs. The husband who makes himself seen and heard as a brave soldier who fights a dutiful battle on the field of the bed is nothing but a sham, like his virginal and restrained bride, who knows all of the tricks that supposedly confirm her being as feminine. Much of early modern culture depended upon modes of seeing and being seen, which virtually conferred ontological status on individuals: one was what one was perceived to be through external, visible signs. The cuckold literature reveals that the definition of gender was contingent upon manifestations and manipulations of the visual field as the ground of one’s being as a gendered subject. The Masculine Gaze and Monetary Metaphors for the Vagina The masculine subject inscribed as the first-person narrator of Brantôme’s text describes in detail the dynamics of a concupiscent masculine gaze that surveys female body parts in order to gauge their worth and desirability. In this visual procedure, there is little doubt as to which object most draws his attention: for the men he describes, the purse of a woman becomes the embodiment of everything that is desirable about the female body. In this sense, women’s bodies for this type of man are often metaphors for the economy of (homosocial) desire in which wealth circulates among men through women’s bodies as conduits and loci of economic saturation. When the masculine subjects of this text look at women, they dissect their bodies in terms of both literal and metaphorical purses, as Brantôme does in the section that I will examine here, bypassing all of the usual steps in the seduction sequence to arrive at the core of sexuality for this kind of man. Rhetorically the two semantic domains of sex and money are often so entwined in masculinist literature that terms from one of them inevitably signify terms from the other. This mode of signification is especially prevalent in Les Dames galantes, in which the most

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intimate parts of the female body are displayed using economic metaphors. One of the most striking examples of Brantôme’s peculiar rhetoric describes the relationship between a profligate “grande dame” and the grifter with whom she falls in love, in which the woman’s private parts are described using an impossible mixing of metaphors: Je cognois une grand’Dame, laquelle estant venuë fort amoureuse d’un gentilhomme de la Cour, et luy par consequent jouissant d’elle, ne luy pouvant donner d’argent, d’autant que son mary lui tenoit son tresor caché comme un prestre, luy donna la plus grand’partie de ses pierreries, qui montoyent à plus de trente mille escus; si bien qu’à la Cour on disoit qu’il pouvoit bien bastir, puisqu’il avoit force pierres amassées et accumulées; et puis après, estant venuë et escheuë à elle une grande succession, et ayant mis la main sur quelques vingt mille escus, elle ne les garda quieres que son gallant n’en eust sa bonne part. Et disoit-on que si cette succession ne luy fust escheuë, ne sçachant que luy pouvoir plus donner, luy eust donné jusques à sa robe et chemise. En quoy tels escrocqueurs et escornifleurs sont grandement à blasmer d’aller ainsi allambiquer et tirer toute la substance des ces pauvres diablesses martellées et encapriciées; car la bourse estant si souvent revisitée, ne peut demeurer tousjours en son enfleure ny en son estre, comme la bourse de devant, qui est tousjours en son mesme estat, et preste à y pescher qui veut, sans y trouver à dire les prisonniers qui y sont entrés et sortis. Ce bon gentilhomme, que je dis si bien empierré, vint quelques temps après à mourir; et toutes ses hardes, à la mode de Paris, vindrent à estre criées et venduës à l’encan, qui furent appreciées à cela et recogneuës pour les avoir vuës à la Dame, par plusieurs personnes, non sans grand’honte de la Dame (304–305). [I know a grand Lady, who having fallen in love with a gentleman of the court, who consequently made love to her, since she couldn’t give him any money, especially since her husband hid his treasures like a priest, she gave him most of her jewels, which were worth more than thirty thousand écus. She gave him so much that at court it was said that he could build a house, since he had amassed and accumulated so many rocks and stones; then afterward, when she came upon and received a great inheritance, and she had some twenty thousand écus in her hands, she didn’t hold on to them for long until her gallant lover got his share. People said that if she had not inherited this money, not knowing what else she could give him, she would have given him even her dress and her shirt. Such grifters and parasites should be highly censured for distilling and withdrawing all of the substance from these poor female devils who are so smitten [or hammered upon] and enamored; for, the purse that is revisited so often can not remain always in its proper shape nor in its proper being, like the purse of a woman’s fore-parts, which is always in the same state, and ready for those who want to fish around in it, without speaking [the names of] the prisoners who have entered and left it. This good gentleman, the one who was so endowed with stones, died shortly afterward; and all of his earthly goods, as is the custom in Paris, were sold at a public auction, where several people judged and recognized most of the goods as belonging to the Lady, which brought her not a little shame.]

According to the impossible rhetoric of this masculinist mentality, the vagina is a purse (that is, a repository for wealth), a “hole” for fishermen, whose art is akin to the hunt, and thus requires certain masculine “virtues” (patience, cunning, ferocity), and a prison, where men are held captive during the battles and wars of love. Most of these are standard metaphors that are present throughout the cuckold literature, except for

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the designation of the vagina as a purse, which Brantôme evidently borrows from would-be scientific descriptions of the human body that were prevalent throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.21 The simple phrase, “the vagina is a purse,” summarizes quite well the intersubjective structures, based on gender difference, within which this type of masculine subjectivity is constructed. Moreover, the mixing of metaphors in this passage indicates the extent to which the ideas at the root of this type of subjectivity function by means of a confused and problematic semantic displacement. While Brantôme may condemn the practice whereby lovers “distill” and “siphon off” the substance of their wealthy mistresses, his rhetoric reveals that his account of cuckoldry was conditioned by a culturally-contingent conception of gender difference, which was propagated and maintained precisely by these kinds of imaginary and rhetorical procedures. The image of the auction of the dead man’s goods that ends the anecdote recalls the process by which the facts of private sexual practices were made public in visual signs, often accompanied by verbal proclamations. We recall the stealing of the bloody sheet and the proclamation that accompanied this theft. The auction displays the relationship that united the lady and her lover, while the public sale of what essentially are her goods confirms the idea that wealth circulates and becomes part of the public domain through the “purse” of the woman’s private parts. Brantôme summarizes this position succinctly two pages later, when he repeats the metaphor of the purse: Certainement il est bien raison que, puisque l’homme donne du sien dans la bourse du devant de la femme, que la femme de mesme donne du sien aussi dans celle de l’homme; mais il faut en cela peser tout; car tout ainsi que l’homme ne peut tant jetter et donner du sien dans la bourse de la femme comme elle voudroit, il faut aussi que l’homme soit si discret de ne tirer de la bourse de la femme tant comme il voudroit; et faut que la loy en soit esgale et mesurée en cela (307). [Certainly it is right that, since men give of theirs into the purse of women’s fore parts, so do women give of theirs into men’s purses; but everything in this has to be weighed; for, just as a man cannot throw and give what he has into the purse of the woman as much as she would want, a man must also be so discreet as not to withdraw from a woman’s purse as much as he would like to; and the law must be equal and measured in this regard.]

The opening sentence of this brief but revealing commentary establishes a parallel of giving and receiving that assigns the male and female bodies to the distinct but inseparable semantic domains of economics and sexuality that are in play throughout the text. The passage is couched in abstract terms that affix definite and universal attributes to the two genders, though Brantôme defines their different roles in reference to the same phenomena: man gives of his purse into that of the woman; 21 As Thomas Laqueur remarks, purse was not only an economic term in both English in French, but also an anatomical designation that was applied to both the male and female genitals: “Bourse, for example, Bouchet’s word for scrotum, referred not only to a purse or bag but also to a place where merchants and bankers assemble. As bag, purse, or sack it bridges male and female bodies handily. ‘Purse’ could mean both scrotum and uterus in Renaissance English” (Making Sex, 63–4).

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woman gives of her purse into that of the man. The usage of the expression “du sien” to refer to both male and female here involves the reader in a vertiginous shifting of terms between the two poles of the physical (or genital) and the monetary that frame the passage. In the first sentence of the passage, “le sien” of the male refers to the semen that men “give” to the “purse” of the vagina, while “le sien” of the female is immediately transformed into the idea of the material wealth that women give to their lovers. The second half of the sentence repeats this transition from the figurative to the literal while recalling the topos of the insatiable woman, while at the same time evoking the phantasm of impotence that is the corollary of a supposedly unbounded feminine desire: man cannot give woman as much as she wants because he is physically incapable of satisfying her. The noblemen described here thus had a desire for money that rendered them feminine, at least in terms of Brantôme’s conception of the characteristics that were proper to each gender. His description of gender difference both departs from and adheres to conventional ideas of the distinction between masculine and feminine that were at the heart of cuckoldry as a literary phenomenon. While the root of this generic paradigm in the didactic literature of the Middle Ages conceived of masculine versus feminine in terms of binary oppositions, here both sides of this gender divide manifest a lack of limits that could be associated with the transgressive sinfulness that earlier texts linked to the feminine. If Brantôme’s assessment of this intersubjective relationship seems somewhat more egalitarian than that of medieval clerics, his distinction of the two genders nonetheless repeats biases and stereotypes inscribed consistently in the clerical tradition. That is, women in this context are completely centered on the body as the material basis of exchange between men and women, while men are apparently more fetishistic in Marx’s famous sense of the term: men do not desire women’s bodies as things in themselves, whose value is determined by their usefulness; rather, they desire women’s bodies as substitutes and markers for something else, the possibility for economic exchange with other men that they represent. For a woman, the jewels and money that she gives to her lovers can only be a substitute for what she really wants according to Brantôme: the “money” of semen, which is the only “wealth” that can fill the “purse” of her vagina. From this point of view, women are thus entirely focused on the use value of bodies, which is determined by their function as sexual and reproductive entities. Men, on the other hand, want mainly the symbols of this material, bodily transaction, which are the pierres that Brantôme claims can be used for the construction of what is undoubtedly the city of men, which recalls the stones that Panurge wanted to use to build the city walls of Paris in chapter 15 of Pantagruel, i.e., women’s private parts. This masculinist culture is built, therefore, upon a material foundation that is twofold: first, hetero-normative sexual acts that serve as a basis of cultural and material exchange; second, the transfer of wealth among men that mirrors and fetishizes the trade in women’s bodies. In other words, in the millennial terms we have heard so often, woman is associated with the body, while man is linked to the soul or spirit. A reading of this text, along with Brantôme’s own comments about the anecdotes that he recounts, reveal the extent to which the masculine “soul” is in fact built upon a base material foundation, that of exchange among men, which takes the necessary “detour” of the feminine. In order to display and to maintain what Brantôme describes

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as the basis of a certain kind of masculine subjectivity, men must always defer and displace their gaze toward women, who capture and fascinate them, generating a kind of inevitable masculine blindness to the contingency of men’s own being as gendered subjects. Brantôme concludes his usage of the economic metaphor for the female genitals with an interesting meditation on one of his favorite subjects, the relationship between a woman’s age and her ardor or fervor for amorous pursuits. His thinking develops along several axes of oppositions that are added to the ones we have been examining: ugly versus beautiful, young versus old, liberal versus miserly, ardent versus cold. At the central point of this series of binary oppositions is the masculinist perception of women’s bodies, the usage of their private parts both by men and women, and their metaphorical transformation into economic objects and fetishes. Brantôme invokes standard misogynistic topoi in his development of an argument that exploits rhetorical antitheses in order to prove a primary point: that the masculine evaluation of feminine behavior incorporates the most intimate parts of the female body within an economy based on fetishistic judgments of value. The argument begins with the familiar pejorative evaluation of women in terms of their age and physical desirability for men: Et ce que je dys des jeunes laides, j’en dys autant d’aucunes vieilles femmes qui veulent estre fourbies et se faire tenir nettes et claires comme les plus belles du monde (j’en fais ailleurs un discours à part de cela), et voylà le mal; car, appellent des supplements, et comme estans aussi chaudes, ou plus, que les jeunes : comme j’en ay veu qui ne sont pas sur le commencement et mitan prestes d’enrager, mais sur la fin. Et volontiers l’on dit que la fin en ces mestiers est plus enragée que les deux autres, le commencement et le mitan, pour le vouloir; car, la force et la disposition leur manque, dont la douleur leur est très-griefve; d’autant que le vieil proverbe dit que c’est une grande douleur et dommage, quand un cul a très-bonne volonté et que la force luy defaut. Si y en a-t’il tousjours quelques-unes de ces pauvres vieilles haires qui passent par bardot, et departent leurs largesses aux despens de leurs deux bourses; mais celle de l’argent fait trouver bonne et estroitte l’autre de leur corps. Aussi dit-on que la liberalité en toutes choses est plus à estimer que l’avarice et la chicheté, fors aux femmes, lesquelles, tant plus sont liberales de leurs cas, tant moins sont estimées, et les avares et chiches tant plus (349). [What I have been saying about ugly young women, I would say as much of some old women who want to be furbished and kept as clean and as clear as the most beautiful women in the world (I have a complete discourse devoted to this elsewhere), which is where their problem arises; for, they call on supplements, and they are perhaps as hot, or even hotter, than their younger counterparts: as I have seen women who were raring to go [prestes d’enrager] neither at the beginning nor in the middle of their years, but rather near the end of their days. And it is said that the end in this profession is much more intense than the other two ages, the beginning and the middle, because of their desire; for, the force and the disposition of their lack, of which the pain is very severe for them, in as much as the old proverb says that it is a great pain and shame, when an ass [cul] is more than willing, but the strength is lacking to it. Nevertheless, there are still some of these old hags who lie down on the shingle, and give

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of their generosity out of both of their purses; but the one devoted to money makes the other one, the one of their body, seem tight and good. It is also said that liberality in all things is more to be valued than avarice and cheapness, except when it comes to women, who, when they give more freely of their pussy [cas], the less they are esteemed, while those who are cheap and avaricious are more valued.]

Brantôme’s usage of the term “supplement” here in order to describe the lovers whom older women call to their beds may perhaps be usefully interpreted in the context of the Derridean notion of the supplemental procedures of language. Derrida’s supplement is that distance that separates our representations of things from whatever the things in themselves may be, which remains unknown to us. In other words, our perceptions of objects are always supplemented by signs that refer to those objects, and by mental representations of them.22 The task of filling this absence that certain men perceive to be the defining characteristic of femininity is precisely the problem that Brantôme addresses in this passage. From this perspective, feminine being is determined to be the void of desire, which becomes ever greater as women lose their beauty and the ability to perform sexually to the satisfaction of both themselves and their male counterparts. In the Derridean theory, the crucial dilemma is the classic one of the definition of being in a conceptual system that receives its decisive orientation from the difference between signifier and signified, and between language and the phenomenal world. Brantôme’s text provides an uncanny manifestation of this philosophical aporia, expressed in gendered terms. If the feminine is defined by absence or lack, then the masculine is the supplement that must attempt to fill this void, while the masculine subject “always already” knows that the absence that constitutes the feminine can never be filled. If, from the point of view of philosophy, being is a void, then where does this leave the figure of the usurping lover, who is called upon to supplement the husband in an intolerable marital situation, defined by an essential impossibility? In a sense, the usurping lover is the soul of this situation, in the terms that we saw above. The masculine subject who is neither the body (this role being reserved to women), nor the desire of the body, is interpellated as that which must satisfy an entity that can never be satisfied, especially when this desire becomes more and more insistent as its material basis, the vigor of a woman’s body, deteriorates with age. Brantôme’s text reveals that the domain of the masculine, always construed as the realm of presence, being, light, and reason, became in the cuckold literature a kind of secondary “supplementarity” to a primary absence, especially as it is figured in the two complementary sides of masculine subjectivity that take the form of the cuckold and the usurping lover. Every term of Brantôme’s formulation of this configuration is striking: “car, quand leurs marys n’y peuvent vacquer, les maraudes appellent des supplements” (349) [“for, when their husbands cannot handle them, these sluts23 call on supplements”]. The archaic verb “vaquer” in one sense means literally “to leave vacant,” while in another sense it signifies “to take care of” or “to handle” 22 See Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967), Chapter 2, “Ce dangereux supplément,” 203–34. See also “Le supplément de copule” in Marges de la philosophie. 23 Cotgrave defines a “maraude” as a “roguish hedge-whore, Tinkers-bitch.”

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(Petit Robert, 1360). This double meaning figures the inability of the cuckold both “to leave vacant” the void of his wife’s desire, and to take care of it or to fill it. Faced with this aporia, the wife interpellates the cuckold’s double, the supplement of the young lover, who is equally inadequate to the task of satisfying a woman who here is defined as a “slut,” and whose will literally overwhelms her aging body, once again inadequate to being the “host” of desire’s vehemence. The text thus falls into a kind of infinite regress: the husband is an emptiness who is unable to fill his wife’s constitutive and eternal absence, while the lover merely supplements both the insufficiency of the husband and the void of woman’s desire. The text becomes a metaphorical black hole, sucking all meaning into the dense gravity of its signifying procedures, which vanish into a realm of infinite negativity. Derrida was careful to point out that the term “supplement” is a paradox. An object that is supplemented by something else is both complete, since that which is added to it is meant to complement a prior stage of completeness, while this same object also is lacking something essential, since it stands in need of the supplement. Masculinity from the point of view of Brantôme is fundamentally inadequate to the task of supplementing what it perceives to be women’s desire, which is the basis of its own identity. Within the Derridean scheme of things, the supplement cannot be located or defined or contained within limits, since its being, in a sense, depends upon distance, difference, and deferral: the sign is not the thing in itself, but refers to it, at the same time that it differs from it, and defers to the existence of the object. Similarly, this is where the meaning of masculinity in Brantôme’s world disappears into the density of its semiotic gravity. The male gender is defined only in reference to (its conception of) the feminine; masculinity is hence a double absence that is incapable of becoming the void that can match the void that it characterizes as the essence of the feminine; maleness must supplement an absence that is both complete and incomplete—the feminine as absolute vacuum, and as a fullness of desire that overwhelms women’s bodies and their will. In Derrida’s theory, the existence of the sign is contingent, since it depends upon its reference to the object in order to be understood, while it is also primary, since one’s understanding of objects must necessarily take the detour of the sign. Brantôme’s definition of masculinity participates in this same kind of paradox. The masculine figure as supplement may be understood only in reference to its role as that which, as presence, fills the absence that is recognized as the essential being of woman; on the other hand, woman may be understood only as that which interpellates men as supplements. The logical aporia of gender definitions that characterizes Renaissance thinking, in which each gender must necessarily take the detour of the other gender in order to be understood in itself, reaches its most intense and impossible stage in Brantôme’s text. L’Arrière Vénus One of the most extraordinary cuckold tales that Brantôme retells involves what was conventionally known as “the sin against nature.” Without recognizing its source, Decameron V:10, which itself is a retelling of a story by Apuleius in

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24

The Golden Ass, Brantôme situates his tale in Italy, a country which had powerful connotations for French noblemen throughout the sixteenth century, as we have already remarked. In many texts from the second half of the sixteenth century, Italy has an exotic quality as a place in which almost any kind of remarkable experience was possible for young men. Brantôme’s brief cuckold tale merits being cited in its entirety: Or, voicy encores une autre race de cocus, qui est certes par trop abominable et execrable devant Dieu et les hommes, qui, amourachez de quelque bel Adonis, leur abandonnent leurs femmes pour jouïr d’eux. La premiere fois que je fus jamais en Italie, j’en oüys un exemple à Ferrare, par un compte qui m’y fut fait d’un qui, espris d’un jeune homme beau, persuada à sa femme d’octroyer sa jouissance audit jeune homme qui estoit amoureux d’elle, et qu’elle luy assignast jour, et qu’elle fit ce qu’il luy commanderoit. La Dame le voulut très-bien, car elle ne desiroit manger autre venaison que de celle-là. Enfin le jour fut assigné, et l’heure estant venuë que le jeune homme et la femme estoyent en ces doux affaires et alteres, le mary, qui s’estoit caché selon le concert d’entre luy et sa femme, voicy qu’il entre; et les prenant sur le fait, approcha la dague à la gorge du jeune homme, le jugeant digne de mort sur tel forfait, selon les loix d’Italie, qui sont un peu plus rigoureuses qu’en France. Il fut contraint d’accorder au mary ce qu’il voulut, et firent eschange l’un de l’autre : le jeune homme se prostitua au mary, et le mary abandonna sa femme au jeune homme; et, par ainsi, voilà un mary cocu d’une vilaine façon (350). [Here we have another race of cuckolds, which is certainly more than abominable and execrable before God and men, those who, smitten with some handsome Adonis, abandon their wives to them in order to enjoy them sexually. The first time that I ever went to Italy, I heard an example of this in Ferrara, in a story that was told to me about a man who, enflamed by a handsome young man, persuaded his wife to grant sexual favors to the said young man who was in love with her, and told her to assign him a meeting day, on which she would do whatever the young man wanted. The lady agreed to this heartily, for she was hungry to eat no other venison than this. And when the time came and the young man and the woman were engaged in that sweet business and balancing act, the husband, who was hidden according to plan, suddenly came in. Catching them in the act, he approached his dagger to the young man’s throat, judging him worthy of death for such a transgression, according to the laws of Italy, which are a little more rigorous than they are in France. The young man was obliged to give the husband what he wanted, and they exchanged one for the other: the young man prostituted himself to the husband, and the husband left his wife to the young man; in this way, the husband became a cuckold in a vile manner.]

Abominable and execrable—though this was the worst of all cuckolds, according to Brantôme, apparently young Frenchmen who traveled to Italy still listened to and recounted stories of other men who committed one of the worst transgressions 24 On the sources for this anecdote, see Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon, “Queering History,” PMLA, October, 2005 (Volume 120, Number 5), 1608–17, which provides a useful overview of the recent debates surrounding Boccaccio’s version of the story and its relation to queer theory’s notion of “queering” history.

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against the institution of marriage, the prostitution of one’s own wife, in order to engage in an even worse sin, sodomy performed with a man.25 It is intriguing to note that this “swapping” of stories among men, just like the swapping of the wife that the story describes, was performed in a context in which young noblemen were primarily being trained to become soldiers. In other words, as we have seen repeatedly, storytelling was an integral and important part of the formation of one’s identity as a gendered subject in this context, while the structuring of the male gender in particular was part of a general subjugation to a rigid order of rank. The question remains, however, as to why men would tell each other not only tales of prowess on the battlefield, and on the field of conquest that was the bed of almost any woman, but also this tale of a homosexual seduction that involves a man’s self-inflicted cuckolding, and a kind of male prostitution that was completely absent from the other texts that I have been examining. In other words, why is the story of sodomy a necessary part of masculinity’s structuring within the pedagogical procedure of traveling to Italy, according to Brantôme? There is no simple answer to this question. The decadence that Brantôme describes is almost worthy of an eighteenth-century libertine novel. Every character in the love triangle that the tale depicts is willing to prostitute something for the sake of pleasure: the wife happily agrees to sell herself, so that she may enjoy the young lover, as well as assure her husband’s pleasure with the young “Adonis”; the husband sells his wife so that he may enjoy the male body he so desires; the Adonis himself apparently willingly gives himself to the debauched husband in order to enjoy the body of the wife. Even though the author decries the sinfulness and debauchery of this situation, he nonetheless tells the story in detail, indicating perhaps a transformation in the noble French conception of sex during the four decades separating Les Dames galantes and the Heptaméron. Certainly one of the differences between these two texts is the difference between the genders and characters of their authors: while Marguerite de Navarre was an extremely devout woman of the highest nobility, Brantôme was a nobleman and soldier who was perhaps similar to Hircan, the allegorical representation of Marguerite’s second husband, Henri de Navarre. Nevertheless, even given the violence of the tales that Hircan recounts in the Heptaméron, there is little in the earlier text to equal the sheer debauchery and viciousness of Brantôme’s brief tale of sodomy, cuckoldry, and male-female prostitution, if one excepts the murderous, lust-driven characters of the work’s first tale. The answer to my question should perhaps be sought in the notion of exemplarity that Brantôme introduces at the beginning of the tale, and which he repeats in a passage that I will examine in a moment. The author of the Recueil des dames saw in

25 The critical literature on sodomy in early-modern literature and culture is enormous at this point. Aside from Jonathan Goldberg’s Sodometries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992) and Guy Poirier’s L’Homosexualité dans l’imaginaire de la Renaissance, see also Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), and David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990), for the various debates surrounding Foucault’s epoch-making distinction between sodomy as a juridical category for certain acts versus homosexuality as a type of identity.

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Italy a domain for the instruction of young men, much like his older contemporary Blaise de Monluc, who described his first encounter with France’s southern neighbor as follows: ... il me print envie d’aller en Italie, sur le bruict qui couroict des beaux faicts d’armes quon y faisoict ordinairement. Et en ceste oppinion mondict paire me donna quelque peu d’argent et ung cheval d’Espaigne pour m’en aller en ladicte compaignie : et, sans y fere long séjour, je me mis en chemin pour exécutter mon dessein, remettant à la fortune l’espérance des biens et honneur que je debvois avoir. Et, comme je feuz à une jornée de la maison, je trouvis près Lectore le seigneur de Castelnau, homme vieux et qui avoict longuement praticqué l’Italie. Et, sans me fere cognoistre, m’enquis longuement à luy qu’estoict-ce du pais d’Italie : lequel m’en dict tant de chozes bonnes et grandes et me raconta tant de beaux exemples de guerre, qui s’y faisoint tous les jours, que, sur ce rapport, sans séjourner ni arrester en lieu que pour repaistre, je prins mon chemin droict à Lyon et de là passay le mont Ginebre et m’en allay à Milan, n’excédant encores l’aage de dix sept ans.26 […I wanted to go to Italy, upon hearing the rumors that circulated about the military exploits that were accomplished there normally. As I was of this opinion, my father gave me a bit of money and a Spanish horse that would allow me to go with the said company; and, without stopping for long, I went on the road to execute my plan, leaving to fortune the hope of the goods and the honor that I would acquire. When I was a day’s journey from my home, I found near Lectore the lord of Castelnau, an old man who had traveled often in Italy. And, without making myself known, I asked him at length what this country of Italy was. He told me so many great and good things and recounted so many beautiful examples of [exploits in] war that happened there every day that, on the basis of this report, without staying or stopping anywhere except to eat, I went on the road straight to Lyon, and from there, passed mount Geneva and went to Milan, being not more than seventeen years of age… (my translation)]

A simple parallel unites the vastly different texts that I have cited here. Its first element is the idea that young men traveled to Italy in order not only to see the extraordinary accomplishments of the Italians in art, but also because they had heard stories about the exploits of Frenchmen there both in war and in the bedroom, these two loci that so often work together in the masculine mind of the period. The second element in this parallel is the notion that these stories could serve as examples in a didactic procedure in which young men learned to be men, with all that this gender identification and interpellation entailed: enthusiasm for war; loyalty to a hierarchy and a lord; a predatory attitude toward women; even an appreciation for the eccentricity, otherness, and beauty of Italy. To follow this intertextual logic to its conclusion, then, in the source text, the story of sodomy is a paradoxical joke, which is ignored completely in both the Cent nouvelles nouvelles and the Heptaméron, the two French imitations of Boccaccio’s masterpiece. Brantôme takes up the story, however, not as a joke but as part of a narrative tradition concerning the education of young nobles as men, since the

26 Blaise de Monluc, Commentaires et lettres de Blaise de Montluc, Maréchal de France, ed. Alphonse de Ruble (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1894), 40–43.

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notion of traveling in Italy had such strong pedagogical connotations for several generations of French noblemen in the sixteenth century. The idea and discourse of sodomy was a small but significant part of that education, and figures the ethnic, historical, and sexual “other” of what one must assume to have been a heteronormative (French) masculinity. Within the logic of exemplarity, however, the idea of the example entails and inevitably includes its contrary. The case of an execrable and abominable case of adultery and cuckoldry that Brantôme describes here is undoubtedly intended as a counter example, and perhaps as a warning to men who allow their bodily desires to transcend the bounds of reason, custom, and religion. The moral implication of this tale is that a husband who introduces the “pollution” of an uncontrolled and unbounded desire into his own household brings about the moral downfall and debauchery of others, such as the wife here, and the young page who is willing to prostitute himself for the sake of his own pleasure. In other words, the propagation of a certain morality among men, which is intertwined with the propagation of their masculinity, often involves meditations on immorality that at times seem to eclipse the good and the just. In Brantôme’s work, the counter example often overwhelms the example. Brantôme’s thinking about the subject of sodomy, which is lodged in the unconscious of masculinity as a privileged example and counter-example, moves deftly from positive to negative poles and back again. The counter-example we have just analyzed is followed by a story that presents an intriguing “problem” at its end: J’ay oüy conter qu’en quelque endroit du monde (je ne le veux pas nommer) il y eut un mary, et de qualité grande, qui estoit vilainement espris d’un jeune homme qui aymoit fort sa femme, et elle aussi luy : soit ou que le mary eust gaigné sa femme, ou que ce fust une surprise à l’improviste, les prenant tous deux couchez et accouplez ensemble, menaçant le jeune homme s’il ne luy complaisoit, l’envestit tout couché, et joint et collé sur sa femme, et en jouit; dont sortit le problesme, comme trois amants furent jouissans et contents tout à un mesme coup ensemble (350). [Someone told me that in some part of the world (I don’t want to name it) there was a husband, a very noble one, who was ignobly enamored of a young man who was in love with his wife, as she was with him. Hence it was either that the husband had convinced his wife, or that it was a complete surprise, and he caught the two of them entwined in bed together, but he threatened the young man if he didn’t satisfy him, and invested [or joined27 with] him there where he lay, joined and glued to his wife, and took his pleasure with him; from which arose the problem as to how three lovers were able to come and be satisfied at the same time together.]

The usage of the word “problem” here evokes an entire rhetorical domain in which examples are used as means of investigating and proving theses and hypotheses, as Floyd Gray reminds us.28 If we may think of Brantôme’s text as a rhetorical exercise, in what sense does this anecdote serve as proof of the moral reprehensibility of sodomy, especially when the problem cited at its end concerns the possibility of a 27 Cotgrave includes the following definition of “investir”: “also, to joyne (a word of Horsemanship).” 28 See Gray, Gender, Rhetoric, and Print Culture, 22–3.

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three-way jouissance? Is there anything positive to be found in this story of mutual “contentment”? Brantôme continues his account of sodomy with another example and a moral commentary on it that makes clear the idea that this apparently widespread practice, which occurs in places that must remain nameless, as the text asserts, has been condemned in a long series of legal texts which he will later cite: J’ay oüy conter d’une Dame, laquelle esperdument amoureuse d’un honneste gentilhomme qu’elle avoit pris pour amy et favory; luy se craignant que le mary luy feroit et à elle quelque mauvais tour, elle le consola, luy disant : « N’ayez pas peur; car il n’oseroit rien faire, craignant que je l’accuse de m’avoir voulu user de l’arriere-Venus, dont il en pourroit mourir si j’en disois le moindre mot et le declarois à la justice. Mais je le tiens ainsi en eschec et en allarme; si bien que, craignant mon accusation, il ne m’ose pas rien dire. » Certes telle accusation n’eust pas porté moins de prejudice à ce pauvre mary que de la vie: car les legistes disent que la sodomie se punit pour la volonté; mais, possible, la Dame ne voulut pas franchir le mot tout à trac, et qu’il n’eust passé plus avant sans s’arrester à la volonté (350–51). [Someone told me the story of a Lady who was totally in love with an honest gentleman whom she had accepted as her friend and favorite, but he was afraid that her husband would do something nasty both to him and to her. She consoled him, saying, “don’t be afraid; for, he won’t dare to say a word, fearing that I will accuse him of wanting to use the backdoor Venus on me, for which he could die if I said the slightest word and declared it to be so to the authorities. But this is how I hold him in check and keep him scared, such that, fearing my accusation, he doesn’t dare say anything to me.” It’s true that this kind of accusation would not have been less prejudicial to this poor husband than mortal: for, legislators say that sodomy is punished for one’s will or desire; it is, however, possible that the Lady did not want to use the word outright, and that he had not gone any further than simply wanting to do so.]

The specter of capital punishment for the “crime” of sodomy appears here, and is confirmed by Brantôme’s comment. The text quickly displaces its interest from “homosexual” to marital sodomy, which was condemned in some cases if it existed only as a potentiality. A linguistic reluctance on the part of the wife to name this act parallels the correspondence between the will and the act itself; just as this “sin” should not be desired in the intimacy of one’s mind, so it cannot be referred to using its proper name, which conjures up the Biblical image of divine devastation visited upon those who were “guilty” of this “transgression.” After the seeming frivolity of the “problem” described in the preceding anecdote, the text shifts to the deadly serious register of legal discourse concerning this act. The story of sodomy, which in Brantôme’s text inevitably becomes many stories, thus reveals itself to be an intrinsically intertextual entity that is marked by several significant silences, which are accentuated here in the enforced “silence” of the will, and the refusal of the wife to name the act of which her husband is presumed to be guilty. Moving from the paradoxical and comic realm of the Decameron into

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the domain of a threatening legal discourse, the work takes the obligatory detour of a kind of oral travel literature, in which young men were supposed to increase their stock of anecdotes relating to the structuring of their masculinity. Significantly, Brantôme’s work is one of the first in the narrative tradition of cuckold stories in French to consider “other” kinds of masculinities and pleasures—oral, sodomitic, homosexual—that have been examined in depth in recent critical literature as the symbolic foundations in contrast to which the homophobic, heterosexual, coercive, and normative masculinity that I have been examining here is formulated.29 It is at this point that the section on male-to-male sodomy culminates in the moralizing story of an exemplary young man who embodies masculine virtues when faced with the menace posed by this practice: Je me suis laissé conter qu’un de ces ans un jeune gentilhomme françois, l’un des beaux qui fust esté veu à la Cour longtemps avoit, estant allé à Rome pour y apprendre des exercices, comme autres ses pareils, fut arregardé de si bon oeil, et par si grande admiration de sa beauté, tant des hommes que des femmes, que quasi on l’eust couru à force : et là où ils le sçavoyent aller à la messe ou autre lieu public et de congregation, ne falloyent, ny les uns, ny les autres, de s’y trouver pour le voir; si bien que plusieurs marys permirent à leurs femmes de luy donner assignation d’amours en leurs maisons, afin qu’y estant venu et surpris, fissent eschange, l’un de sa femme et l’autre de luy : dont luy en fut donné advis de ne se laisser aller aux amours et volontez de ces Dames, d’autant que le tout avoit esté fait et apposté pour l’attrapper; en quoy il se fit sage, et prefera son honneur et sa conscience à tous les plaisirs detestables, dont il en acquist une louange très-digne. Enfin, pourtant, son Escuyer le tua. On en parle diversement pourquoy : dont ce fut trèsgrand dommage, car c’estoit un fort honneste jeune homme, de bon lieu, et qui promettoit beaucoup de luy, autant de sa fisyonomie, pour ses actions nobles, que pour ce beau et noble trait : car, ainsi que j’ay oüy dire à un fort gallant homme de mon temps, et qu’il est aussi vray, nul jamais bougre, ny bardasche, ne fut brave, vaillant et genereux, que le grand Jules Cesar; aussi que par la grand’ permission divine telles gens abominables sont redigez et mis à sens reprouvé. En quoy je m’estonne que plusieurs, que l’on a veu tachez de ce meschant vice, sont esté continuez du Ciel en grand’prosperité; mais Dieu les attend, et à la fin on en voit ce qui doit estre d’eux (351–2). [I allowed myself to be told the story that once there was a young French gentleman, who was one of the handsomest men to be seen at Court in a long time, and who, upon going to Rome in order to learn some exercises, as many of his peers did, was looked upon with such a good eye, and with such admiration for his beauty on the part of both men and women, that people practically ran forcefully after him. And there where they knew that he was going to mass or to some other public place where people congregated, no one failed, neither men nor women, to show up there in order to see him. Several husbands allowed their wives to arrange assignations with him at their homes, so that they could show up by surprise and make a trade, the one giving over his wife, and the Frenchman giving himself. For this reason, he decided not to enjoy the love and desires of these women, especially since everything had been arranged and organized in order to trap him, and so he became wise, and preferred his honor and conscience to all detestable pleasures, 29 See Chapter 5 of Gary Ferguson’s Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, Gender, Culture for a discussion of these “other” pleasures in Brantôme. See also Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern.

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for which he received rather high praise. In the end, however, he was killed by his squire. The reason for this is explained in different ways, but his death was really a shame, for he was a very honorable young man, from a good family, and seemed destined for great things, as much from his physiognomy and his noble actions as from this lovely and noble action; for, in the same way that I heard the following truth from a very gallant man of my acquaintance, to wit that no buggerer [meaning sodomite] or “youth kept for sodomy”30 was ever brave, valorous, or generous, except for Julius Caesar, [it is also true] that by divine permission such abominable men are reduced and reproached. For this reason, I am astonished that many men whom one knew to be stained by this wicked vice were maintained by heaven in great prosperity; but God is waiting for them, and in the end one sees what is going to happen to them.]

This remarkable passage describes rather well the surveillance and display that operated in public spaces during the Renaissance, and the extent to which space was saturated by scopic desires and controls. There is also a striking contrast established between the idea of French public space and that of the Italians. The beginning of the passage insists on the Frenchness of the young nobleman, who is noticed at court because of his physical beauty, which is a topos that appears repeatedly in the literature devoted to the description of courtly life, ranging at least from the tenth nouvelle of the Heptaméron to the opening pages of La Princesse de Clèves. The topos of travel to Italy as a pedagogical necessity is also repeated here, with an ellipsis that has important implications: what are the “exercises” that the young man and his peers had to learn, and could he in fact learn anything of moral value in a country that was, as we have just seen, characterized by abominable desire, even in the most canonical of texts that served as the basis of the anecdotes that one learned to tell there? If the young man’s beauty recognized in France provokes the desire that his soul be improved through education in the patrie des arts, in Italy it has quite a different effect, even in the most inappropriate places. Every Italian who sees him, the text tells us, is so affected by his beauty that both men and women wish to force themselves on him, even in Church. The moral decisions that the young man made when faced with the overwhelming public presence of scopic desire, and the traps into which those who were subject to this desire laid for him, make him into a clear exemplum of moral virtue. Brantôme, however, abruptly shifts registers and undermines the normal development of exemplary narrative in the simple sentence, “Enfin, pourtant, son Escuyer le tua” [“finally, however, his squire killed him”], the interpretation of which the author leaves open. The sequence of three elements or narrative events in Brantôme’s text develops as follows: first, the setting up of the anecdote as exemplum; second, the exemplary image is stripped of its didactic value in the affirmation of murder; third, the violent act constitutes the image as an enigma that provokes a flurry of discussions concerning its significance. A significant silence obscures the content of these discursive interventions, when Brantôme juxtaposes the canonical idea of the necessary 30 This is Cotgrave’s definition of “Bardache”—“An Ingle; a youth kept, or accompanied for Sodomie.” Of the numerous terms in middle French for sodomites, Cotgrave also gives as synonyms “bougre” and “bougiron,” which he defines as “A Buggerer, a Sodomite,” and the verb “bougironner,” “To bugger; to commit (horrible) Sodomie.”

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correspondence between external, physical beauty, and nobility of birth and action with the interpretation that one must make of this kind of external image in a courtly, aristocratic setting, and the contrasting stories that inevitably circulate at court concerning the dark “truth” that may underlie such images. By its very nature, the image of masculinity in this historical context is hyperbolic and exemplary, but it is undermined by the “oüie dire” that Brantôme repeatedly mentions in these passages. Hence the visual and the discursive realms operate in conflicting ways in parallel domains: the spatial arena, which is subject to intense scrutiny and surveillance, must present icons, images, and exempla of hetero-normative, noble masculinity as the truth; in contrast, the discursive realm of hearsay and oral narrative is that in which the specter of otherness, personified in the possibility of homosexual sodomy, is given a nebulous form in locations that are intentionally elided (who speaks about these things? Where do they do it?). Brantôme candidly presents sodomy as an alternative truth that is associated with male beauty, and then he denies that same truth using the ambivalent, canonical icon of Julius Caesar, who stands for the heroic side of masculine models drawn from the ancient world. The source of this icon, however, is once again said to be hearsay, but from a privileged source: “ainsi que j’ay oüy dire à un fort gallant homme de mon temps.” The adjective “gallant” is equally significant in its ambiguity: while it may mean simply “noble,” it clearly has sexual and “courtly” connotations as well, which were exploited by Brantôme’s first editors in the Netherlands in order to sell the volume that would first be published as Les Dames galantes.31 Within the “official” process by which men became men through a kind of apprenticeship in the proper way of presenting themselves in public, and in the art of telling stories about their own nobility and masculinity, which virtually required travel to an overdetermined “foreign” land, there was the unofficial story of an “other” masculinity, which circulated in the realm of hearsay, and which is encapsulated in the expression “l’arrière Vénus.” Masculinity in this historical context thus rested upon the foundation of an impossible, “illegal” desire that could not be satisfied, but which apparently was habitually satisfied at the same time, which explains the consistent ambivalence and elision with which it is presented in Brantôme’s text. As we have seen repeatedly, this kind of double-bind and aporia is a characteristic of masculinity and its diverse manifestations throughout the Renaissance. Conclusion: Unstable Masculinity as a Function of Narrative Brantôme’s work carefully documents important elements in the history of late Renaissance sexuality in France. If gender maintains an intimate relationship to sex, to such an extent that one’s gender is at least partly a function or effect of one’s sexuality, then the final section of “Sur les dames qui font l’amour et leurs maris cocus” provides a remarkable testimony of the complexity and diversity of sexual practices during this period. If the Cent nouvelles nouvelles and the Tiers Livre inscribe masculinity as a kind of monolithic yet chimerical structure that is 31 See Polachek, “A la recherche,” 228.

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continuously struggling to impose order on the resistant and disorderly social reality constituted by the relations between men and women, Brantôme’s text accepts the multiplicity and unruliness of both homosexual and heterosexual relations, despite his frequent nods to an authoritative conception of how the genders should be defined in relation to these kinds of object choices. As we saw in the last section, this unruliness was characteristic even of sex within the bounds of marriage, as the desires of the parties to it often transgressed the strict rules that the “official” legal discourses wanted to impose upon it. Brantôme describes one such kind of “other” masculine sexual activity that seems to have been quite common, according to his proclamations. Speaking of sodomy, he writes: Certes, de telle abomination, j’en ay oüy parler que plusieurs marys en sont esté atteints bien au vif : car, malheureux qu’ils sont et abominables, ils se sont accomodez de leurs femmes plus par le derrière que par le devant, et ne s’en sont servis du devant que pour avoir des enfans; et traittent ainsi leurs pauvres femmes, qui ont toute leur chaleur en leurs belles parties de la devantiere. Sont-elles pas excusables si elles font leurs marys cocus, qui ayment leurs ordes et salles parties de derrière ? Combien y a-t’il de femmes au monde, que si elles estoient visitées par des sages-femmes et medecins et chirurgiens experts, ne se trouveroyent non plus pucelles par le derriere que par le devant, et qui feroyent le procez à leurs marys à l’instant ; lesquelles le dissimulent et ne l’osent descouvrir, de peur d’escandaliser et elles et leurs marys, ou, possible, qu’elles y prennent quelque plaisir plus grand que nous ne pouvons penser… (352). [To be sure, of such an abomination I have heard it said that many husbands were quite overcome by it; for, as miserable and abominable as they are, they had intercourse with their wives more from behind than from the front, and only used their wives’ fore parts for the sake of having children; this is the way they treat their poor wives, who have all of the heat of their bodies in those beautiful parts in the front. Are they not to be forgiven if they cuckold their husbands, who like their filthy and dirty backsides? How many women are there in the world who, if they were examined by midwives, doctors, surgeons, and experts, would no more be virgins from the backside than they are from the front side, and would hence take their husbands to court at that very instant? But these women dissimulate and don’t dare to reveal this secret, for fear of scandalizing both themselves and their husbands, or perhaps they enjoy some pleasure in this practice that is greater than we can imagine…]

This extraordinary text contains both the standard legal condemnation of sodomy, as well as an intimation that it was quite common, and kept secret by those who engaged in it, for the sake of avoiding punishment. In a reflection that foreshadows the institutional practices of the nineteenth century, the masculine subject transcribed in these lines reflects upon the possible consequences of a detailed medical knowledge concerning the female body, a theme that runs throughout the work. As I have argued, would-be normative masculinity in the early-modern period exists within and as different kinds of knowledge about women and their bodies. Here, the proliferation of other masculinities resides in different usages of both male and female bodies,

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and the knowledge of the pleasures that both men and women can derive from these procedures and postures. The example of Aretino, which Brantôme cites on the following page, underlines the extent to which these other pleasures and bodies were both problematic and widespread near the end of the sixteenth century: …en quelque mode que le mary cognoisse sa femme, mais qu’elle en puisse concevoir, ce n’est point peché mortel, combien qu’il puisse estre veniel : si y a-t’il pourtant des methodes pour cela fort sales et vilaines, selon que l’Aretin les represente en ses figures; et ne ressentent rien la chasteté maritale … (353). […in whatever way a husband may “know” his wife, as long as she can conceive by it, is not a mortal sin, although it may be a venial sin; nevertheless, there are some methods of doing this that are very dirty and vulgar, according to what Aretino represents in his figures, which show nothing of marital chastity …]

Hence, by this time the “honor” of any given household, based on “marital chastity,” could be undermined by this proliferation of pleasures that was linked to a propagation of knowledge from country to country. As Polachek remarks, the famous cup that Aretino engraved with pornographic figures illustrating possible sexual positions was shown at the French court by the Duke d’Alençon, the male reader to whom Brantôme dedicates his text, which he wrote for the Duke’s pleasure.32 Hence the delight that these men shared in a narrative form was accompanied by a multiplication of the graphic knowledge of “other” sexual pleasures and possibilities. As the scale of this knowledge increased, the breadth of the hearsay that circulated among men also became more extensive, with a consequent increase in the modes of masculinity that could be accepted as normative. An important story that apparently circulated among men at this time, and which became an integral part of their conception of their own gender and its performance, was that which described homosexual sex among women. As we saw above, there are two sources of information concerning these practices. The first is an anecdote from the translation of Lucian’s Devis amoureux, in which a woman describes what her experience was of having sex with another woman (363–4). The second is, once again, a story that Brantôme has heard second-hand from another man who witnessed a scene of Lesbian love while traveling with the enigmatic figure of Henri III: J’ay oüy conter à feu Monsieur de Clermont-Tallard le jeune, qui mourut à la Rochelle, qu’estant petit garçon, et ayant l’honneur d’accompagner Monsieur d’Anjou, despuis nostre roy Henry III, en son estude, et estudier avec luy ordinairement, duquel Monsieur de Gournay estoit precepteur ; un jour, estant à Thoulouze, estudiant avec sondit maistre dans son cabinet, et estant assis dans un coin à part, il vid, par une petite fente … dans un autre cabinet, deux fort grandes Dames, toutes retroussées et leurs callesons bas, se coucher l’une sur l’autre, s’entrebaiser en forme de colombes, se frotter, s’entrefriquer, bref se remuer fort, paillarder et imiter les hommes ; et dura leur esbattement près d’une bonne heure, s’estans si très-fort eschauffées et lassées, qu’elles en demeurerent si rouges et si en eau, bien qu’il fit grand froid, qu’elles n’en purent plus et furent contraintes se reposer autant… 32 See Polachek, “A la recherche,” 231–2.

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Il m’en contoit encor plus que je n’en ose escrire, et me nommoit les Dames. Je ne sçay s’il est vray ; mais il me l’a juré et affirmé cent fois par bons sermens. Et, de ce fait, cela est bien vraysemblable ; car telles deux Dames ont bien eu tousjours cette reputation de faire et continuer l’amour de cette façon, et de passer ainsi leur temps (364–5). [I heard a story from the late Lord of Clermont-Tallard, the younger one, who died at La Rochelle, about when he was a boy, when he had the honor of accompanying the Duke of Anjou, who has since become our King Henry III, in his studies, and of studying normally with him with M. de Gournay as their preceptor. One day, in Toulouse, when they were studying with their said master in his room, when he was seated alone in a corner, he saw, through a little slit in the wall… in another room, two very noble women, with their skirts hiked up and their stockings pulled down, lying down on top of each other, kissing each other like pigeons, rubbing each other, stroking each other, and, in short, moving themselves all over the place, whoring and imitating men; this sport lasted almost an hour, after which they were so heated up and tired, and they became so flushed and sweaty, even though it was cold there, that they could not continue and were obliged to stop and rest… He also told me other things that I don’t dare write, and gave me the names of the Ladies. I don’t know if this is true; but he swore a hundred oaths that it was. And, in fact, this story is quite believable, since the two women he named always had the reputation of making love and continuing to love each other in this way, and of passing their time in such a manner.]

For my purposes, the question as to whether or not Lesbian sex was common at the court of the last Valois kings is perhaps not as relevant as the way in which Brantôme as a masculine subject structures his knowledge of women’s sexuality in and as a certain kind of narrative practice. In the context of the wars of religion, the name of La Rochelle has a particular resonance. The naming of this particularly brutal siege and battle, at which so many noblemen on both sides of the religious conflict died, is certainly not fortuitous. By using this reference, Brantôme underlines the “manliness” of the source of the anecdote he is about to recount, an attribute that is reinforced both by the nobleman’s name, and by his relation to the royal family. As in the earlier travel narratives from Italy, this one describes a young man’s apprenticeship while traveling with other nobles. In a sense, this education was devoted to one thing, that is, the process of accumulating the knowledge that was necessary for boys to become men in a certain conventional sense. It is also evident from this passage that older men frequently spoke with one another about the experiences they had in their youth that formed their identities as gendered beings. As is so often the case in masculinist narratives about formative events, a scene of voyeurism involving a forbidden glimpse of women’s bodies is at the center of the masculine subject’s memory, along with a precise mise-en-scène of how this glimpse was made possible by a male figure of authority. Freudian psychoanalysis would perhaps describe this scene in terms of its traumatic impact on the boy who witnessed it, since the sexual performance of the two women without men would signal the possibility of castration to him. The effect of the story on Brantôme is far-removed from this type of diagnosis, revealing the extent to which early-modern subjectivity and masculinity are quite different from our own biased conceptions of them. What concerns the author most by the end of

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the passage is the verification of a rumor of which he apparently was already aware, since the noble court was a place in which information of all kinds circulated freely and was evaluated continuously by all of the men and women who had access to it. Brantôme hence accepts the truth of the story based above all on the reputations both of the man who told it to him, and of the women who were well known by all. The truth about these two women “who imitate men” is thus important as the basis of a narrative exchange between men, and also reveals certain truths about the nature of their gender identity, as the text’s interpretations of the “facts” of women’s diverse sexualities make clear. One of the most consistent threads to be found in these interpretations is a certain “medicalization” of the discourse that enacts men’s knowledge about women’s bodies, and the ramifications of this information for the performance of masculinity. To this day, the discursive application of knowledge to sexually different bodies is marked by an incomprehensible dissymmetry, with the research into men’s illnesses far exceeding that which studies the specificity of women’s diseases. In the context of the sixteenth century, and as we have already seen in the case of the Tiers Livre, medical knowledge often reactivated the Galenic and Platonic topoi concerning the “animal” nature of women’s bodies. This kind of scientific discourse took the form of the aporia that we have seen repeatedly: it represented a masculinist desire to control what it recognized as an uncontrollable female body, and to have knowledge about what it proclaimed to be the unknowable feminine. For example, Brantôme cites the case of the Duchess of Florence, whose husband had her urine examined on their wedding night in order to prove her virginity: … le soir que le grand Duc l’espousa, et qu’il voulut aller coucher avec elle pour la depuceler, il la fit avant pisser dans un beau urinal de cristal, le plus beau et le plus clair qu’il put, et en ayant veu l’urine, il la consulta avec un medecin, qui estoit un très-grand et très-sçavant et expert personnage, pour sçavoir de luy par cette inspection si elle estoit pucelle, ouy ou non (354). [… on the night when the Grand Duke married her, and he wanted to sleep with her in order to deflower her, he had her urinate first in a beautiful glass urinal, the nicest and clearest one he could find, and having seen her urine, he consulted with a doctor, who was a wise and important expert, in order to know from him by means of this inspection if she was a virgin or not…]

As Jeffery Persels has demonstrated, the examination of urine was a standard practice of medical diagnosis in the Renaissance, and was used to diagnose all kinds of conditions.33 As we saw above, the “diagnosis” of a woman’s virginity was extremely important in the early-modern period, and required various kinds of verification and display. Similarly, the “condition” of women who preferred sexual relations with other women to those with men was described by Brantôme in a pseudo medical discourse. 33 For a detailed discussion of these medical practices, see Jeff Persels, “Taking the Piss out of Pantagruel: Urine and Micturition in Rabelais.” Yale French Studies 110, Fall, 2006, 137–51.

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In general, he characterizes what he perceives to be the diverse tendencies and “humors” of women’s bodies in terms of his conversations with male doctors who have “treated” and “examined” women. Accordingly, the women who engage in Sapphic sex can be cured only if the “wound” in their body is tended to by a man:34 … à ce que j’ay oüy dire, ce petite exercice n’est qu’un apprentissage pour venir à celuy grand des hommes ; car, après qu’elles se sont eschauffées et mises bien en rut les unes et les autres, leur chaleur ne se diminuant pour cela, faut qu’elles se baignent par une eau vive et courante, qui raffraischit bien mieux qu’une eau dormante ; aussi que je tiens de bons chirurgiens et veu que, qui veut bien penser et guerir une playe, il ne faut qu’il s’amuse à la medicamenter et nettoyer à l’entour ou sur le bord; mais il la faut sonder jusques au fonds, et y mettre une sonde et une tente bien avant (365). [… from what I’ve heard, this little exercise is nothing more than an apprenticeship for the sake of getting to the big exercise with men; for, after they get all heated up and horny with each other, their heat does not diminish for that reason, and they have to bathe in fresh running water, which refreshes one much better than still water. I have also heard from good surgeons and seen that, when one wants to treat and heal a wound, one must not waste time treating it and cleaning around it or on its edges; rather, one has to probe it to its bottom, and place a probe and a bandage deep into it.]

As is the case to this day in the masculinist imaginary, this particular man thinks that the cure for the “ailments” that plague women, such as the overabundance of their desire, is for them to be penetrated by a man. Further on, Brantôme repeats this figure in the midst of a long medical description of the importance of different kinds of foods and their aphrodisiac effects in women depending upon the different seasons. The legendary “heat” of women’s bodies from this masculinist perspective can be “cooled” in only one way: Le printemps passé fait place à l’esté, qui vient après et porte avec soy ses chaleurs : et ainsi qu’une chaleur amene l’autre, la Dame par consequent double la sienne; et nul refraischissement ne la luy peut oster si bien qu’un bain chaud et trouble de sperme veneriq (378). [The Spring gives way to the Summer, which comes afterward and brings heat with it; thus as one kind of heat leads the way to another, woman as a consequence doubles her own heat; and no kind of refreshment can cool her off better than a hot and murky bath of venereal sperm.]

In general, then, men in this context base their knowledge of women on hearsay and on their perception of an “official” medical discourse concerning the nature of 34 Gary Ferguson has written extensively on Brantôme’s considerations of lesbianism in his forthcoming Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, Gender, Culture. Ferguson argues that Brantôme’s discussions of lesbians are not only motivated by a masculinist homosocial anxiety of men being excluded from these kinds of relations; rather, he argues that the memorialist is curious about “other pleasures” that are not associated with the “penetrative” obsessions that the writer is describing in the passages I am examining here. I wish to thank Gary for sending me his chapter on Brantôme.

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the opposite sex and its functioning. In still other metaphoric terms than the ones we have already examined, women’s private parts are seen by them as “wounds” or “holes” that require the male member for their health, while men must make sure not to be trapped by a single woman’s passion. The sources of the narratives in and through which men constructed and performed their gender in this context are diverse: there are the stories that men told one another about their apprenticeship in the ways of love and war; the Classical texts they read, such as Lucian’s recentlytranslated Dialogues of the Courtesans, that provided canonical images of different types of women; the medical theories of both the Ancient world and of the doctors they knew in their contemporary world; and finally, the vast reserve of metaphors for speaking about women, which in the following passage take on the form of a constant displacement from image to image that is rather typical of a frenetic masculinist discourse: Aussi, pour en parler franchement, il ne se faut jamais envieillir dans un seul trou, et jamais homme de coeur ne le fit : il faut estre aussi bien adventurier deça et delà, en amours comme en guerre, et en autres choses; car si l’on ne s’asseure que d’une seule anchre en son navire, venant à se decrocher, aisement on le perd, et mesmes quand l’on est en pleine mer et en une tempeste, qui est plus sujette aux orages et vagues tempestueuses que non en une calme ou en un port. Et dans quelle plus grande et haute mer se sçauroit-on mieux mettre et naviguer que de faire l’amour à une seule Dame ? Que si de soy elle n’a esté rusée au commencement, nous autres la dressons et l’affinons par tant de pratiques que nous menons avec elle, dont bien souvent il nous en prend mal, en la rendant telle pour nous faire la guerre, l’ayant façonnée et aguerrie (359). [Also, frankly speaking, one should never grow old in a single hole, and a man with a true heart never did so; one must be an adventurer both here and there, in love as in war, and in other things; for, if one has only one anchor on his ship, if that anchor slips away, one loses it easily, especially when one is in the midst of a storm at sea, which is much more subject to storms and tempestuous waves than in the midst of a calm or at port. And in which sea that is larger and more wide open would a man place himself and navigate than in making love to a single Lady? If she is not already devious at the beginning, we men train her and refine her by so many practices in which we lead her, which result in we ourselves being hurt by her, since we have made her such that she can make war with us, for which we have fashioned her and made her warlike.]

The masculine subject’s relation to women is described here in slowly shifting metaphoric terms. Moreover, one might say that hetero-normative masculinity itself in this context is a kind of discursive vertigo produced by its continuous pursuit of an ephemeral object that constantly eludes a definitive, stable categorization. Given the impossibility of a single definition of women, these men relied on the multiple rumors, stories, narratives, and discourses that they regularly shared with one another. As such, the performance of their gender was perhaps itself inherently unstable, and relied on its numerous others—women who preferred women, men who experienced pleasure differently—in order to construct a network of texts about

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the possibility of masculinity’s own definition. Brantôme’s work represents one of the culminating moments of this inherent instability of the masculine gender, which men continuously have sought to define and to ground over the course of centuries in diverse intertextual and narrative practices that involved men in processes of “subjectivation” by constantly elaborating upon the primary idea of generic and performative “others.”

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Conclusion Masculinity is a concept that is manifested in a series of material practices and procedures. Primary among these for educated Renaissance men were the acts of reading and writing, which were paralleled within oral culture by techniques of telling certain kinds of stories. On the basis of the analyses conducted in the preceding chapters, one could formulate a number of theses concerning the nature of the very specific, historically contingent, and hetero-normative version of the male gender that was elaborated within countless masculinist stories over the course of centuries. In the following catalogue, “masculinity” in the singular refers to this conception, which becomes more and more abstract as the list progresses. This may mean that, historically speaking, this kind of masculinity became increasingly unstable at the end of the sixteenth century, partly as a result of radical transformations in textual practices. I will consider this point as a purely speculative conclusion after discussing the possible ramifications for a definition of masculinity that result from the preceding analyses. From the first chapter’s consideration of official texts, it could be said that Renaissance masculinity was a place marker in a network of gender relations based on marriage as a mode of distributing and maintaining property and wealth. As such, masculinity was positional, and determined subject and gender roles in terms of an individual’s place relative both to objects and to other individuals. Another intriguing way of expressing this point would be to say that masculinity was a “[site] for the production of cultural meaning.”1 In other words, masculinity was a conceptual location that had to be occupied by a given individual in a given way in order for him to produce himself in the social sphere as masculine. In the case of both fictional and actual subjects during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, this production of oneself as masculine often was literally a matter of life or death: a man whose masculinity was recognized as being “other” or “queer” in certain contexts ran the risk of receiving an extreme punishment, especially from men whose identities were completely invested in a supposedly normative, universal (heterosexual) masculinity. The male characters I examined from early modern literature were often compelled to produce themselves within certain spaces as recognizably masculine, or, as in the case of Panurge, to explain their illegibility in gender terms. Normative masculinity often resided within the procedures of visual recognizability. Masculinity was continually elaborated discursively as a concept within a vast legal, medical, philosophical, didactic, and literary intertext. In this sense, it was literally inextricable from the production and reception of certain kinds of texts. Furthermore, it was inherently intertextual, requiring a continuous process of references to other texts and stories in which the idea of being a man was defended, 1 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, eds., Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), x.

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elaborated, illustrated, and presented as normative. Even in collections of stories that have not been read as being explicitly about gender, such as the ones that I examined here, one could contend that the intertextual procedures at work in them were intimately linked to the conceptual structuring of masculinity. As a kind of anxiety that was continuously looking for a stable foundation upon which to construct itself as the basis of identity, normative early-modern masculinity compelled men incessantly to seek out models and affirmations of their gender, and to provide diverse written and oral accounts about the idea of gender difference. As such, it might be identified within or as the continuous process of referencing that constituted intertextuality. As a means of presenting itself, masculinity activated different kinds of discourse (exemplary, legal, medical) that defined both itself and the others (women, “queer” men) in relation to whom it structured its conception of self. Because marriage was identified by the Digest of Justinian with a domus or domicile, and by the necessity that a married woman remain faithful within it, masculinity was defined as the necessary surveillance of this space and of women’s bodies. As feminist theory has demonstrated repeatedly, the male gender was thus characterized by an overdetermined relationship to surveillance and the gaze, while men’s actions were almost always directed towards a manipulation of the visual domain, in which markers of gender identity were continuously judged by others in terms of their value and significance for the hierarchical order that constituted patriarchy. Masculinity was thus a certain relation both to the idea of women’s bodies in space, and to the necessary layout of that space itself. It is a spatial mode of being, or a configuring of both domestic and public space in forms that display bodies engendered necessarily as masculine and feminine. The hetero-normative form of the masculine gender that I have examined maintained a reciprocal and problematic relation to domestic space, which was configured according to the needs of displaying and controlling male and female bodies that had to be read as differently gendered. Gender hence existed partially as a relation to space and to possible actions within it. Space was also invested with forces and desires that differentiated masculine from feminine, giving structure and meaning to interiors and exteriors, as well as to the subjective identities of individuals who operated within them.2 The multifaceted display of masculine “sexuality” was inscribed upon the bodies of women divided into legal categories (virgin, wife, concubine, widow), hence masculinity displayed itself either as this marking and penetration of women’s bodies, or as their confinement through surveillance and the study of “women’s tricks.” Normative masculinity throughout this period can thus be examined not only in the processes of its own constitution, but also in the series of effects that it had on women’s bodies in different spatial categories. According to the Roman and Byzantine laws that were still influential in the Renaissance, marriage was the translation of a certain pietas paterni from one household to another. Masculinity required that this fundamental law of patriarchy be 2 Elizabeth Grosz has studied in detail the relation of gender to constructed space. I thank Juana Sabadell-Nieto for bringing her work to my attention, and for helping me to formulate my ideas in this regard. See Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1995).

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maintained in the literal transportation of women’s bodies from their fathers’ houses to those of their husbands. As we saw in chapter 1, the text of the law stipulated that, at the moment when a woman became a bride, she could be transported thus even in the absence of her husband, as long as the latter was present in the form of a letter signifying his intent to marry. This substitution of the man by a text that inscribed a fundamental masculine will to establish a given social configuration was important to my argument throughout this study. In a sense, masculinity in this context was equivalent to this required presence of a given text in the place of an absent man who was interpellated as masculine partially through his marriage. Masculinity thus existed within this substitution of an authorized text for an absent male body, and was an “intertext” in the sense that it communicated this message by accompanying the female body in its movement from one overdetermined space to another. The historically-contingent version of normative masculinity that has been the focus of this study required certain physical performances of men within domestic and public space. The most extreme example of this phenomenon, the defloratione virginitatis that transformed a woman into a wife according to canon law, was required of a husband, and had to be verified by witnesses either on the wedding night or on the following morning. This performative investment of the domus, and the anxiety that it entailed for men, was often the subject of comic tales and narrative accounts. Moreover, in penance manuals, an entire range of sexual experience was elaborated as a means of defining masculinity as a practice and process. Men had to perform certain acts in specific places and with given individuals, while they desired other acts that were forbidden, or had to present themselves in public as penitents who had transgressed the code of conduct that defined their gender. Masculinity as an abstract concept thus had a material existence in and as this range of practices and acts that were required of men in the public display of their gender. As we saw at the end of the trajectory examined here in Brantôme’s work, the exhibition of visual proof that men had performed acts necessary to their gender identities often displayed only “inauthentic” signifiers, highlighting the extent to which the performance of their gender was unstable and contingent. The location of masculinity as a particular function within space required a “proper” sexual usage of women’s bodies, predicated on a cosmic notion of a man’s place within the divine order. A man’s relations with women in various states (concupiscent, married, single, menstruating, pregnant, widowed) changed his relation to the sacred body and hence his conception of himself as a “proper” man. The male body was thus an imaginary entity that was “mapped” upon a grid of social relations, and in terms of its own usage within the social order. The narrative, legal, and pastoral literature looked at this body and constantly interrogated its relation to pleasure and space: in what places had it experienced pleasure? What parts of other bodies had it penetrated or polluted? How were those other bodies defined by their relations to still other bodies and spaces? Were any others present to witness and provide testimony concerning these acts? In different ways, the texts that I examined here were elaborated as responses to these questions, which configured masculinity as function, process, and place marker within or upon networks of intersubjective relations. If at the beginning of our trajectory the Cent nouvelles nouvelles were obsessed with the literal spaces of sexual transgression—in clothing trunks,

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pigeon coops, dining rooms, at the foot of trees—Brantôme demonstrated a similar preoccupation at its end with where and how bodies came into illicit contact with one another, and using which body parts. In contrast, Rabelais’s work was much more abstract, and was concerned not with the spatial facts of marriage’s abrogation, but with the figural domain that men opened for themselves by interpreting the infinite possibilities of women’s transgressions as they were mapped out in a potentially infinite series of texts to be interpreted. As the Tiers Livre demonstrates perhaps most convincingly, hetero-normative masculinity in the French Renaissance was invariably a homosocial phenomenon that extended from the most mundane aspects of everyday life to the most recondite of learned practices. In their desire to perform their gender, men sought out other men to whom they could tell the story of their relations to women. Moreover, men’s relations to women in the Renaissance apparently required networks of relationships to other men, which were depicted in complex ways in the narrative literature of the period. One might even go so far as to say that the stories one reads from this period are more often than not a putting into narrative discourse of the bonds through which men displayed themselves socially as men to other men. One should not imagine, however, reading from our hyper-critical position at the beginning of the twenty-first century, that men’s relationships to their own gender in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were completely serious and naive. In the comic texts that I have examined here, it was often the case that narrators recounted stories of men’s desires and obsessions while apparently winking at their audience. The narrators of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, not to mention Rabelais and Brantôme, often demonstrated an ironic awareness of and detachment from the stereotypical maneuvers that manifested masculinity in this context, which one might categorize as a set of conventional figures that were performed by men in order to be recognized by other men: the desperate yet codified pursuit of women, the “lover’s complaint,” the cuckold’s obsessive jealousy, the boasting of a phantasmal masculine virility. The recognition of these figures by the men who were the implicit audience of these texts often took the form of mockery inscribed in the texts themselves. I would argue that this manner of ironic bonding with an audience composed exclusively of men, as conscious as it may be of the “constructed” nature of the masculine gender, is itself a requirement in the obligatory performance of that gender. In this context, men had to be able both to invest themselves completely in the factitious construction of their gender, and to comment ironically on the fact of this construction. This paradoxical irony, which supported at the same time that it undercut both the seriousness of masculinity’s self structuring, and the intensity of man-to-man relations via the conduit of narrative, was perhaps one of the most distinctive characteristics of normative intertextual masculinity in the French Renaissance. Masculinity might be conceived of throughout this period as a kind of citation or quotation in both a literal and a metaphorical sense. At times its performance required that an individual literally quote the maxims that established the priority of men over women, as in the following example that we took from the Godefroy dictionary’s definition of the word “engin”: “Si tu viex estre em pais et hom sages sour toutes choses, te garde d’engiens de femme ...” (III:171). [“If you want to be in peace and a wise man above all else, protect yourself from woman’s ingenuity.”] Generations

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of men repeated and transcribed this kind of statement for one another as a means of enacting and transmitting their gender. In certain settings to this day (the men’s locker room, the all-male board room, in bars with their heterosexual male friends), certain kinds of men are required to pronounce certain kinds of sentences which essentially repeat received ideas about gender difference viewed from a masculinist point of view. In a figurative sense, this citation may take any number of forms: the repetition of a standardized behavior (a man who beats or punishes his wife in a fifteenth-century tale is doing what countless generations of men have done before him, as the literature on adultery and marriage attests), the adoption of a pose (a man who struts and postures before a woman he wants to seduce), the display of an attitude toward women, and so on. When a man or male character performs his gender by citing a pre-existing text, he is also “cited” by the text, or receives a citation, in the ambiguous sense of this term: a citation is a prize or “honorable mention” that one receives, but it is also a summons from a court of law, meaning that the citation interpellates the individual who receives and reactivates it. Intertextual masculinity in late Medieval and Renaissance French literature maintains this kind of complex relationship to the men whom it calls into being. Masculinity was a process of subjectivation made possible by networks of masculinist homosocial relations, or simply by the existence of a static, intersubjective configuration of subject positions into and out of which men were forced to circulate. The fact of this circulation, which is akin to the displacement of the subject as signifier in Lacanian theory, often served as the basis for the narrative productions that were an integral part of men’s performances of their gender. In simpler terms, the diverse positions in which a man in this context found himself, and in which he felt called upon to “act like a man,” also compelled him to tell the story of this compulsion to other men. For example, when one of the male characters in the first of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles felt the need to blasonner the naked woman’s body—which was that of his own wife—that his debauched neighbor revealed to him, he was occupying a subject position that was available to men, and in which they performed an aspect of their gender. In this position, men felt compelled to examine women’s body parts, to evaluate their desirability, and to express the fact of this desire to other men. Similarly, when Panurge assured Pantagruel in chapter 18 of the Tiers Livre that his member would always be able to provide his eager wife with sex, or when Brantôme paraphrased Galenic medical theories for his male audience by proclaiming that women needed to be “bathed” in sperm in order to be cooled off, these narrators and characters were taking up enunciative positions that constituted them as a certain type of masculine subject. What I am calling “subjectivation” here is this dual process: the forced displacement of male characters across a network of masculine subject positions, and the narrative account of this displacement which solidified the bonds that united men to one another in the performance of their gender. Masculinity was hence a configuration, through the media of both visual and linguistic signs, of surfaces and spaces, and, to paraphrase Elizabeth Grosz, of the

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male body considered as a surface or space.3 The purpose of this configuration, which was fundamental to the male gender, was the presentation of these signs to a virtual or theoretical point that would constitute the primary position of the masculine subject. As I have already noted, masculinity was a certain relation of this point to the concept of the visual, which meant that the structuring of surfaces and spaces, and of fictional bodies within that space, situated the masculine subject at the panoptical point that was constitutive of his gender. In this context, vision implied possession. The necessity that masculinity be defined by its ability to see everything was hence predicated on the notion that a man became the proprietor of those objects, especially those female bodies, that he saw. In the presuppositional relation that united masculine and feminine, the possibility of constituting a man or male character as a panoptical subject was contingent upon the spatial display of women’s bodies marked as the property of the masculine gaze. In this sense, the configuration of space and surface interacted in fundamental ways with the manifestation of masculinity as scopic desire. As a point of convergence, the idea of the masculine subject gave meaning to all of the other beings who appeared in his field of vision, and especially within the intertext in which he elaborated his own being as discourse, display, possession, and the proprietary marking of other bodies. In other words, the intertext that appears in my title was both a conceptual discursive domain and a visual field, in a metaphorical sense. Individuals interpellated as masculine subjects had to be able to “see” the ways in which space as a textual, semantic field was structured, since their identities as men were contingent upon its reading and recognition. Male characters in narrative configured their gender in visual terms as a panoptical point that they had to occupy in order to perform one of its primary functions, which was described in a vast intertext ranging from the Digest of Justinian, to the exemplary literature, to the nouvelle collections, to the works of Rabelais and Brantôme examined here: i.e., the surveillance of space and the control of bodies within it. In contrast to this visual concern, however, the other aspects of Renaissance masculinity were structured in a much more polymorphous way. The male gender grew in distinct directions from multiple nodes, such as obligatory actions (the surveillance of women’s bodies, the display of physical prowess, the telling of stories about this prowess), modes of speaking (boasting about virility and sexual conquest), forms of knowledge (familiarity with the masculine homosocial intertext), relations to one’s body (insensitivity to pain), etc. Masculinity thus presented itself in protean, ambivalent symbols, that shifted forms unexpectedly from one shape to another. In the nouvelle literature, for example, usurping male characters were associated with diverse animals (rats, asses, dogs), figures (the devil, martyred saints), and social roles (knight, monk, clerk, merchant) that served as substitutes for one another and presented equally diverse connotations and characterizations, in a symbolic and semantic process that rarely stopped for the sake of assigning a stable definition or description. This form of masculinity thus had to be intuited at the point of intersection of multiple and contradictory images or figures that were associated 3 See Elizabeth Grosz, “Lived Spatiality,” in Architecture from the Outside (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).

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with its various nodes. The forms, figures, shapes, and symbols in which masculinity displayed itself were multiple manifestations that all derived their meaning from the intertext concerned with the configuration and elaboration of masculinity as a concept. To summarize, then, this research has led to a series of theses concerning the interpellation of men as gendered subjects in the French Renaissance: masculinity was embodied in recognizable yet Protean figures or icons that continually morphed into other figures; it shaped spaces and surfaces, and configured or projected gendered phantom bodies as spaces and as surfaces; masculinity was a kind of ambivalent quotation or citation that interpellated the subject who cited a vast masculinist homosocial intertext, considered in the broadest possible sense, while the “being” of this subject was inextricably linked to material practices of reading, writing, and retelling certain kinds of stories. Given the increasing complexity of these possible descriptions of masculinity as a concept and a material reality, can it be argued that it was inherently and increasingly unstable in the context in which I have examined it? If my fundamental hypothesis describing hetero-normative masculinity in late Medieval and Renaissance France as a mode of masculinist intertextual citation and dissemination is correct, could it be that the sixteenth century was a decisive moment in the formation of modern masculinity because this century was a crucial point in the development of modern textual practices? Could it be that the male gender in this context became more powerful and polymorphic, and extended its influence into ever more conceptual and material domains, precisely because of the increasing presence and influence of printed texts? These are complex and perhaps even dangerous questions that cannot be answered lightly, and would require a good deal of further research. In conclusion, I would not be the first to argue that the development of the printing press and of the publishing industry in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, and hence in the culture that has been my subject, was crucial to phenomena as diverse as the so-called “rediscovery” of the ancient world, the Reformation, the colonization of the Americas, and the French civil wars of religion. Accordingly, it seems to me quite reasonable to contend that, if one version of masculinity was at least in part a function of textual practices for the literate class of men, the particulars of that function would have been radically transformed by the fundamental shift from the manuscript and oral culture of the Middle Ages to the print culture of the Renaissance, even if this shift involved considerable overlaps that lasted well beyond the end of the century.4 It also seems reasonable to claim that the notion of gender difference would have been definitively altered by the dramatic changes that resulted from the major technological developments that inundated the cultural world of the late Renaissance with printed texts. The research that I have conducted here might thus lead to two contradictory conclusions: first, that masculinity was fragmented, weakened, made more unstable, and perhaps even “queered” by the technical transformations of the century. The controversial figure of Henri III, who appeared in public dressed in outfits that ranged from women’s 4 On the coexistence of print, oral, and manuscript cultures, see Roger Chartier, “Stratégies éditoriales et lectures populaires, 1530–1660,” in Roger Chartier et al., eds., L’Histoire de l’édition française I (Paris: Promodis, 1982), 585–603.

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clothes to penitential robes, might serve as an emblem of this thesis. Does Agrippa D’Aubigné’s inflammatory description of this king in Les Tragiques, which was confirmed in a much milder tone by Pierre de L’Estoile, give us an idea of what this unstable masculinity might have looked like near the end of the Renaissance in France? Aubigné’s poem describes the king as follows: Avoir raz le menton, garder la face pasle, Le geste effeminé, l’œil d’un Sardanapale : Si bien qu’un jour des rois ce douteux animal, Sans cervelle, sans front parut tel en son bal. De cordons emperlez, sa chevelure pleine, Sous un bonnet sans bord, faict à l’italienne, Faisoit deux arcs voutez, son menton pinceté, Son visage de blanc et de rouge empasté, Son chef tout empoudré nous montrerent l’idee, En la place d’un roy, d’une putain fardee…5 [Having a shaven chin, and keeping a pale face, His gestures effeminate, his eye that of Sardanapalus: So much so that one Epiphany day this doubtful animal, Without a brain and without a thought [forehead] appeared thus at a ball, His hair full of strings of pearls; Under a hat without a brim, in the Italian style, There were the two broken arches of his pinched chin And his face plastered with white and red makeup; And his powdered head showed us the idea Not of a king, but of a painted [or made-up] whore.]

Henri III was the center of a storm of publications and pamphlets that attacked and vilified him precisely because his public appearances did not correspond to what his gender performance had to be as a royal embodiment of masculinity. The influence on masculine performance of these new kinds of intertexts, which were part of a burgeoning public sphere that relied heavily on the mass distribution of printed matter, was undoubtedly enormous. Secondly, and in contrast to this first conclusion, it could be that normative masculinity was strengthened by the cultural revolutions caused by the increasing presence of printed matter, becoming more protean, polymorphous, and firmly anchored in all aspects of everyday life. Whichever of these possibilities happens 5 Agrippa D’Aubigné, Les Tragiques, ed. Jacques Bailbé (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1968), 114, my translation. See also Pierre de L’Estoile, Registre-journal du règne de Henri III (Geneva: Droz, 2000), vol. II, 104: “… le roi faisoit tournois, joutes et ballets et force mascarades, où il se trouvoit ordinairement habillé en femme, ouvroit son pourpoint et decouvroit sa gorge, y portant un collier de perles et trois collets de toile, deux à fraise et un renversé, ainsi que lors portoient les dames de la cour.” [“The king went to tournaments, jousts, and ballets and many masked balls where he was usually dressed as a woman, opened his doublet and revealed his chest, where he was wearing a pearl necklace and three linen collars, two of which were ruffs and one which was reversed, such as women at that time wore at court” (my translation)].

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to be true or correct, and both may have been applicable to a certain extent, the Renaissance was a critical moment in the history of masculinity in the West. Furthermore, the notion of a would-be hetero-normative masculinity at this time is inconceivable without a careful consideration of how gender performance interacted with ancient practices of reading, writing, and storytelling, and, later in the century, with the relatively new material facts of printing and publishing. The role of these last two elements in both the possible solidification of modern masculinity, and in its increasing instability as it multiplied into new possibilities for performances, would have to be examined in further research that might take as its model and starting point the intertextual processes that I have examined here. In the final analysis, however, one should insist upon the contingent, perhaps even undecidable nature of gender performance at any given point in history, for the sake of affirming its multiplicity as a priority of our research.

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Index

Adultery and cuckoldry 29–32, 40, 54, 57–8 and the domus 22–3, 26, 30 and exempla 47–54, 58 and fornication 36 and intertext 58, 79, 135 and narrative performance 7–8, 26, 40, 58 and penance 30–31 and sexuality 39–40 as sin 29–31, 34–5, 39 definition of 16, 23–5, 28–31, 34 in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles 58, 79, 81–2, 87–9, 92, 100, 102 in the Decretum Gratiani 26–32 in the Digest of Justinian 23–6 in literature 10, 13, 15, 18, 22, 37–8, 40, 54, 81, 231 in the Recueil des dames 193, 198, 214, in the Registre criminel du Châtelet de Paris 40–47 in the Summa Confessorum 32–40 in the Tiers Livre 115, 129, 135 punishments for 17, 23–5, 39–40 relation to crime 16, 40–47 women and 18, 22–6, 34–5, 38–47 Alençon, François de 182–3, 194, 220 Alfonsi, Petrus 48, 60 Disciplina clericalis 7, 48, 52, 58–9, 62, 70–71, 77–8, 85 Althusser, Louis 4 n7, 4–5, 6n12, 8 Apuleius 210 The Golden Ass 211 Aretino, Pietro 220 Argod-Dutard, Françoise 181n2 Austin, John Langshaw 29, 29n13 Bakhtin, Mikhail 3n5, 133, 141 Blasons du corps féminin 91, 93–4, 145, 198, 231 Blasons du corps masculin 82–4, 111, 145, 160

Beauvais, Vincent de 48 Speculum exemplorum 48 Bédier, Joseph 49 Benvéniste, Émile 101 Berger, Maurice 92n16, 186n10, Berry, Alice Fiola 155n48, 157n49 Bhabha, Homi 186, 186n10 Bible, The 29, 29–30n15, 110, 126–8, 140, 147–9, 160, 178, 215 Boccaccio, Giovanni 7, 37, 47–8, 71, 191, 211n24, 213 The Decameron 7, 37, 77, 210, 215 Body male Christian cosmology and 126 concupiscence and 99 domestic space and 22, 30 inexhaustible 111 male homosocial bonding and see Bonding, male homosocial masculine gaze and 82, 150 medical discourse and see Medicine and medical discourse necessary usages of 33–4, 116, 229 object of desire 212 Platonic cosmology and 155–6 performance of masculine subjectivity and 119, 124, 140 projection into domestic space 132 relation to body of Christ 55 relation to masculine subjectivity 112 substituted by text 229 surface or space 232 virility and potency of 11, 22, 183, 185, 200 female; see also Women, bodies of alternative usages of 219–20 commodified 115 display and 190, 195, 197–8, 200, 228 domestic space and 22, 30 fecundity of 113, 173

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masculine gaze and 82, 94, 145, 204–5, 208, 232 medical discourse and 151, 154–5, 219 medium for masculinist homosocial relations 69, 89, 187 opposed to body of Christ 38 restricted knowledge and 163, 168 sexually unbounded 12, 192, 194, 222 spatial metaphors for 176, 185, 200, 203, 229 surveillance of 11, 168, 195 virginity and 173, 200–203 Bonding, male homosocial 12, 114–15, 121–22, 145–50, 150, 160, 163, 167 n60, 230 Bracciolini, Poggio 37, 71 Facetiae 37 Brantôme, Pierre de Bourdeille, Seigneur de 1–2, 6 n13, 10, 12, 15, 18, 29, 31–2, 47–8, 78, 105, 181–225, 229–32 Les Dames galantes, 1–2, 12, 29, 55, 78, 181–225 Recueil des Dames 181–225 Bray, Alan 85n13 Broomfield, the Reverend F. 33 n21 Butler, Judith 4n8, 5, 6n12, 6n14, 7, 7n15, 79–80n10, 92n16, 93, 93n18, 103, 103n24 Butor, Michel 168–9n62 Caesar, Julius 148–9, 216–18 Calvin, Jean 169 caritas, Pauline 109–110, 158, 168 Carron, Jean–Claude 118n20 Castiglione, Baldessaro 116 n15 Castration 11, 96–102, 128–33, 135, 141, 144, 185, 221 Cato 114 Catullus, Gaius Valerius 140–43 Cave, Terence 137 n29 Céard, Jean 161, 161n53, 163–4, 164n57, 166n58, 167, 167n59, 167n60, 170, 170n65, 173, 176 Cent nouvelles nouvelles, Les 1–2, 8, 10–11, 15, 26, 29, 32, 39, 48, 50–51, 54–5, 57–105, 107, 109, 118, 124, 129,

131, 142–3, 145, 153, 196, 198, 213, 218, 229–31 Tale 1 79–85 Tale 4 66–9, 71 Tale 27 74–9 Tale 37 58–66, 79 Tale 49 91–6 Tale 62 85–90 Tale 64 96–102 Tale 72 54 Tale 88 69–73 Chartier, Roger 233 n4 Chevauchées 3 n6, 79, 117, 143n38, 191 Chobham, Thomas de 10, 33–40 Summa confessorum 10, 33–40 Cicero 124, 199 Cocula, Anne-Marie 181n2, 181–2n4 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 104n25, 227n1 Connell, R.W. 5n11, 18n2 Corpus iuris canonis 15, 26–32 Corpus iuris civilis 15, 19–26 Cotgrave, Randle 77n9, 97n21, 123, 161, 163, 209n23, 214n27, 217n30 Cottrell, Robert 183n8 Crane, Thomas Frederick 49, 49n31, 51–2 Cuckold figure or character 1–4, 6, 9–11, 15, 18–19, 21–23, 25, 32, 35, 40, 43, 49, 51, 57–8, 60–62, 64–7, 71, 73, 78–9, 81–5, 88, 91–3, 95, 113–14, 117–18, 128–31, 133–6, 138, 140, 145, 150–51, 157–8, 161, 165–6, 183, 185–7, 201, 204–5, 209–11, 216, 219 literature 4, 35, 40, 61, 81, 140, 145, 157, 161, 186–7, 201, 204–5, 209 stories 1–2, 9–11, 22, 40, 49, 51, 85, 216 tale 6, 10, 18, 21–22, 43, 82–5, 88, 92, 113, 129, 211 Cuckoldry 1–10, 18, 26, 32, 47, 62, 73, 79, 95, 100, 114, 121–2n21, 130–31, 136, 138, 149, 151, 157–8, 182–7, 204, 206–7, 212, 214 D’Aubigné, Agrippa 234 D’Avray, D.L. 16–17n1, 27n11, 31 Defaux, Gérard 107 Deleuze, Gilles 104n26

Index Demerson, Guy 114, 114n12, 121–2, 130–35 Democritus 152 Derrida, Jacques 10 n19 De la grammatologie 209n22 Le monolinguisme de l’autre 101n22 Marges de la philosophie 153 n45, 196n14 theory of the supplement 209–10 Desire homosocial 79, 85–90, 153, 183, 198, 204–5, 207 masculine or men’s 43, 53–4, 61–4, 68–9, 75, 77, 81, 83, 87, 93–4, 109, 135, 142–4, 149, 153, 182, 195, 198, 200, 203–4, 207, 212, 214, 218–19, 222, 229–32 scopic 8, 79, 94, 97, 203–4, 217, 232 sexual 1, 30, 121n21, 121–2, 124, 131, 156, 182, 189, 200, 203, 218–19 women’s 10–11, 17, 31, 40–47, 51, 58, 68, 74, 91, 109, 141, 145, 154–6, 161–2, 182, 188, 190–95, 198, 207–10, 223 Didactic literature 3–4, 6–7, 9, 19, 48, 51–2, 58, 60, 71, 77, 89, 152, 207, 213, 217, 227 Dionysius 152–3 Display cuckoldry and 133–35, 143 n38 gendered bodies and 5, 12, 40–41, 47, 65, 77, 94, 98, 187–90, 205, 217, 228, 232 gender identity and 85 gendered subjects and 12, 26, 75, 86, 145, 188 masculinity as 12–13, 62, 66, 69, 75, 85, 90, 94, 102, 138, 141, 145, 165–6, 183, 187–90, 207–8, 228–32 oral discourse and 50, 79, virginity and 200–204, 222 wives and 65, 96, 187, 195, 199 Domicile of marriage see Marriage Domus 7, 17, 22, 25, 50–51, 53, 70–71, 81, 84, 87, 90, 101–2, 104, 109–10, 158, 167, 169, 187, 202, 228–9 Dubuis, Roger 49, 57n1

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Duval, Edwin 11 n21, 107, 109–10, 109n5, 112n8, 120, 123, 145–6n41, 158 Economy “libidinal” 142 marriage and 17, 112, 114, 118 masculine homosocial relations and 87–8, 96, 114, 204, 208 narrative 183, 185 of the domus 81, 95, 112, 114, 118 of the male body 12, 147, 154, 195 “scopic” 195, 204 Erasmus, Desiderius 108, 110, 112 n9, 120, 123, 155, 158, 169 Adagia 120 The Education of a Christian Prince 110 Exemplary literature and exempla 4, 10, 15, 44, 47–55, 58–9, 64–5, 75–6, 90, 104, 108, 161, 163, 165–6, 168, 173, 176–8, 182, 212, 214, 216–18, 228, 232 Fabliau 71 Farce de Maître Pathelin, La 166 Feminism 5, 8, 93n18 Feminist theory 1, 2n3, 5, 10 n19, 11, 72, 79–80, 85, 228 Ferguson, Gary 48n28, 182n6, 216n29, 223n24 Ferguson, Margaret 38n24, 91n15 Fetishism 5, 88, 93–6, 109, 145, 207–8 Fisher, Will 182, 182n5 Florenge, Maréchal de 193 Foucault, Michel 3n4, 5, 6n12, 8, 9n18, 32n19, 33n20, 40, 92n17, 212n25 Fradenburg, Louise 5n11 Freccero, Carla 5 n11, 9n18, 107n1, 159, 159n52, 168n61, 169n64, 212n25, 216n29 Freud, Sigmund 5, 6n12, 8, 8n17, 93, 93n18, 129, 131n25, 139, 221 Gaignebet, Claude 5n6, 117–18, 117n19, 123, 133, 135 Galen 120, 126–8, 155, 222, 231 Ganim, Russell 123n22

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Gaze 5, 7–8, 11, 23, 55, 66, 72, 81–5, 92–4, 131, 150, 154, 194, 196, 204–10, 228, 232 Gender difference 2, 10–12, 17, 20–21, 47, 49, 64–5, 102, 132, 150, 153, 157, 194, 201, 206–7, 228, 231, 233 gendered beings 4–5, 6 n14, 10, 13, 24, 26, 69, 72, 145, 221 gendered bodies 5, 7, 64, 72, 82, 103, 178, 187 gendered subjects 12, 23, 32, 84, 109–10, 152, 184, 192, 202, 204, 208, 212, 233 identity 2 n3, 37, 64, 67, 69, 72, 85, 96, 144, 169, 222, 228 male gender role 7–8, 12–13, 35, 55, 57, 66, 102, 107–8, 110, 118, 140, 161, 179, 188, 195, 210, 212, 227–8, 232–3 masculine 7, 12, 15, 37, 40, 48, 90, 96, 108, 116, 175, 225, 228, 230 Germa-Romann, Hélène 181n4 Gesta romanorum 48, 52 Goldberg, Jonathan 3n4, 9 n18, 13, 211n24 Gradowicz-Pancer, Nira, 16n1, 24n8 Gratian, 10, 26–9, 26n9, 31, 36, 38, 170, 173 Decretum Gratiani 26–9, 31, 34, 36–7, 170, 173 Gray, Floyd 32, 32 n18, 40, 112, 112 n9, 214, 214n28 Greenblatt, Stephen 116 n15, 190 n11 Grimaldi-Darken, Anne 196 n13 Grosz, Elizabeth 6, 6n12, 10n19, 11n20, 228n2, 231, 232n3 Guattari, Félix 104n26 Haaser, Sylvie 181, 181 n3 Halperin, David 212 n25 Henri III, King of France 33, 183, 199, 200n18, 220, 233–4 Herodotus 160, 199 Hippocrates 152–3, 155, 166–7 Huchon, Mireille 1n2, 111n7, 122, 124, 132, 155n47, 158–9, 163n56, 164n57, 167–8, 167n59–60, 169n63 Humanism 126, 159

Identity gender 2n3, 37, 64, 67, 69, 72, 85, 96, 144, 169, 212, 222, 228 intertextuality and 72, 84, 122, 228 masculine 3, 5, 32, 62, 70, 75, 93, 96, 112, 120, 144–5, 161, 169, 174–5, 185, 192, 195, 202, 210, 222 noble 189–90 sexual acts and 9n18, 44, 212n25 space and 37 subjective 13, 26 Infamia 23–5, 23 n7 Interpellation 4n7, 8, 12–13, 17–18, 24, 26, 40, 55, 104, 111, 152, 160, 184, 190, 195, 209, 213, 229, 232–3 Intersubjectivity 7, 11, 26, 37, 63, 67, 83–4, 83n12, 94, 96, 98–9, 101–4, 108, 206–7, 229, 231 Intertext Biblical 115 bodies defined in 37 Classical 137–8, 161, 177, 199 comic 165 cuckoldry in 10–11, 62, 130–31 definition of 4–13, 18, 55, 109–10, 149, 227–35 exemplary literature and 64 formulation of masculinity within or as 20, 22, 31, 33, 57, 62, 81, 84, 108, 131–2, 160, 168–9, 183, 227–35 Greek mythology and 134–7, 161 male body in 132–3 masculinist 50, 60–61, 150, 168, 173 of the nouvelle 71–2 Platonic 154, 199 Renaissance learning and 149, 160, 173 Intertextuality comic literature and 71–3, 120 cuckold stories and 88, 158, 183 definition of 3, 6–10, 12, 14, 15–55, 227–35 male anatomy and 122, 126–8, 147 masculinity as 57–59, 61–5, 76–7, 84–5, 100, 104, 107–8, 111–12, 118, 120, 126, 138, 140, 152–3, 159–60, 168–9, 173–5, 178–9, 183, 200, 225, 227–35 sodomy and 213, 215

Index Italy 110, 182, 193, 211–14, 217, 221 Irigaray, Luce 5, 6n12, 10n19, 79, 79n10, 85n13, 85–6 Jeanneret, Michel 116n16, 129 Jourda, Pierre 49, 57n1, 73n7 Justinian 19, 173 The Digest of Justinian, 10, 19–29, 31, 34, 40, 55, 70, 115, 117, 127, 153, 167, 170, 228, 232 Juvenal 58, 191 La Charité, Raymond C. 138 n30 Lacan, Jacques 4n7, 5–8, 6n12, 7n16, 80n11, 83n12, 96, 96n20, 104, 231 Laertius, Diogenes 109, 111, 128 Laqueur, Thomas 131n25, 148n43, 206n21 Lauretis, Teresa de 109n4 Lee, Guy 141, 141n35, 144n39 Lees, Clare A. 102, 102n23 Lefranc, Abel 159 Lesbia 141–2 Lesbian love 182, 182n6, 220–21 L’Estoile, Pierre de 234, 234n5 Leushuis, Reinier, 31–2n17, 108, 108n2, 112n9, 136n27, 137, 137n29, 155n48, 169n64 Levinas, Emmanuel 22n6 Lex Julia 23–4, 23n7 Libro de los exenplos por A. B. C. 48, 59n4, 59–60, 64, 71 Location, idea of 22, 34, 53, 73–6, 218, 227, 229 Lochrie, Karma 32–3n20, 162n54 Long, Kathleen Perry 5n11, 148n43, 200n18 Lorris, Guillaume de 77 Le Roman de la rose 59, 65, 77 Lucian 11 n21, 109, 134, 138, 147n42, 158, 182n6, 220, 224 Devis amoureux 220 Dialogues of the Courtesans 224 How to Write History 11 n21, 109 Master of Rhetoric 138 Luther, Martin 123, 169 Male bonding see Bonding, male homosocial Marot, Clément 198

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Blason du beau tétin 198 Marriage, 1–5, 7, 57 Christian, 27–8, 31 clandestine 169–177 clerical literature and 47–54, 59, 102, 231 debates concerning 40 definition of in exemplary literature 47–54 in penance manuals 32–40 in the Decretum Gratiani 26–32 in the Digest of Justinian 15–26 domestic space and 43, 50, 53, 69, 78, 92, 103, 112, 117, 143, 164, 169, 189, 202, 228 domicile of 21–6, 30, 38–9, 43, 53, 70–71, 78, 93, 103, 112, 117, 143, 164, 189–90, 228 economy and 112, 114–15, 117, 152, 227 marital or conjugal debt 29–31, 114–16, 122, 157 marriage bed 16, 31, 39, 42–3, 53, 68, 172, 190, 200, 202 masculine role in 108, 112, 118, 169, 184, 189, 195, 228–9 narrative fiction and 57, 82 procreation and 115, 119 rhetoric and 108, 112, 137 sexuality and 15–40, 42, 46, 121, 135–6, 136n27, 182, 184, 190, 211–12, 219 social relations and 47, 86, 92, 95, 152, 158, 177, 187, 194, 202, 204, 228–9 subject positions and 100 Masculinity castration and 11, 93, 96–102, 128–33, 135, 141, 144. 185, 221 cosmology and 124, 129, 140, 147, 154–6 cuckoldry and see Cuckold, Cuckoldry definition of 1–13, 26, 90, 94, 102–5, 112, 132–3, 161, 168, 179, 186–7, 189–90, 199, 210, 218, 224–5, 227–35 display and see Display domestic space and 15–32, 43, 47–54, 69, 78, 92, 103, 112, 117, 143, 164, 169, 189, 202, 228 gaze and see Gaze

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interpellation and 4, 8, 12, 26, 40, 55, 184, 213, 233 intersubjectivity and see Intersubjectivity intertextuality and see Intertextuality; Intertext irony as marker of 1, 61, 66–9, 81, 83, 97, 103–4, 108–9, 111, 116, 118, 121, 143, 230 paranoia and 11, 22, 91–2, 151 penis and 122, 128, 190 performance of 5–8, 12–13, 50, 66, 74, 80, 90, 102, 108–9, 119–20, 124, 128, 132, 140, 175, 179, 222, 224, 229, 231 phallus and 96 n20, 117–18, 123–4, 127, 133–5, 137, 140–41, 149, 190 as “rhizomatic” 104 scopic desire or drive and see Scopic desire or drive sexuality and see Sexuality space and see Space surveillance and see Surveillance unstable 181–225 violence and 11, 50, 101, 103, 129, 168, 187–9, 192, 197, 212 Mass, parody of 60–64, 78–9, 89, 216 Matheolus 59, 59 n3 Medicine and medical discourse 11, 111, 115n13, 116, 122–4, 128, 130, 131n25, 151–8, 164–7, 169, 192, 219, 222–4, 227–8, 231 Menon, Madhavi 9 n18, 13, 211 n24 Messalina, Valeria 148, 191–2 Michaud-Quantin, Pierre 32–3n20 Misogyny 11, 48–9, 61, 151–168 Monluc, Blaise de 193, 213 Montaigne, Michel de 12, 12n22, 12n23, 113, 156, 193, 199 “De l’oisiveté” 12, 113, 156, 199 Journal de voyage en Italie 193 “Sur des vers de Virgile” 12n23 Mulvey, Laura 8, 8n17 Mythology, Classical and Ancient 120, 129–36, 153–4, 156–7, 162, 177 Narrative accounts 12, 44, 76, 187, 231 discourse 68, 75, 90, 97, 102, 136, 230

exemplary 163, 217 form 186–7, 220 gender performance and 69, 72, 75, 79, 81, 89–90, 103–4, 108–9, 183, 199, 218–25, 230–32 literature 5–6, 15, 18, 30, 67, 229–30 sexual difference and 13, 15 technology 89, 104, 108–9 traditions 3, 58, 71, 89, 100, 104, 186, 213–14, 216 Navarre, Marguerite de 111, 192, 201n19, 212 L’Heptaméron 54, 64, 172, 192, 201n19, 212–13, 217 Orléans, Louis de 196–9 Panopticon 8, 92n17 Paré, Ambroise 166n58 Parker, Patricia 185n9 Penance 17, 31–40, 53–4, 83 manuals 6, 10, 16, 19, 30, 32–40, 42, 103, 108, 229 Poenitentiale Cordubense, 23n7 Summa confessorum see Chobham, Thomas de Performance castration and 96 discursive and intertextual 84, 99, 102, 108–9, 118, 120, 128, 132, 161, 169, 175, 179, 182, 220, 222, 224, 227–35 gender difference and 11, 60, 140, 150 gender identity and 85, 107, 112 masculinity as 4–8, 12–13, 19, 23–5, 30–31, 50, 54–5, 57, 66, 69, 71, 74, 80–81, 90, 102–4, 108–9, 112, 119–20, 124, 128, 140, 150, 161, 169, 175, 179, 182, 199, 203, 220, 222, 224, 227–35 of medical knowledge 166 of sexual acts 28–9, 31, 52, 88, 221 theatrical 164 Périers, Bonaventure des 51, 67 Pérouse, Gabriel 181–2n4 Persels, Jeff 116n14, 123, 123n22, 123n23, 222, 222n23 Plato 154–7, 159, 199 Poirier, Guy 200 n18

Index Polachek, Dora 181n1, 183n8, 201, 201n20, 218n31, 220, 220n32 Princesse de Clèves, La 217 Propertius 143–4, 144n39 Prostitution 17, 34–5, 37–8, 41, 200, 211–12, 214 Queer theory 9n18, 12–13, 168n61, 182n6, 211n24, 212n25, 216n29, 223n34, 227–8, 234 Quilligan, Maureen 38n24, 91n15 Quintilian 112n9 Quinze joies de mariage, Les 58 Rabelais, François, 9–10, 12, 15, 18–19, 26, 31–2, 40, 47–8, 71, 105, 107–79, 227n33, 230, 232 Gargantua 107n1, 115–16, 116n15, 118, 129, 136, 171 Pantagruel 115–16, 207 Tiers Livre 1, 2, 6, 9, 11, 15, 19, 22, 26, 32 n17, 37, 40, 43, 55, 73, 95–6, 103, 107–79, 186, 199, 201, 218, 222, 230–31 Rancière, Charles M. Bourel de la, 36n23 Rape 16, 24, 34, 134, 178, 190–195 Read, Kirk 148n43 Reeser, Todd 31–2 n17, 108, 108 n3, 112n9, 122n21 Registre Criminel du Châtelet de Paris 10, 40–47 Regosin, Richard 118n20 Relations, masculinist homosocial 6n12, 49, 61, 69, 73 n7, 79, 81, 84–8, 90, 95–6, 103, 114, 121, 126, 132, 150, 152–3, 160, 167, 182, 187, 198, 204, 223n34, 230–33 Renner, Bernd 147n42, 150, 158 Rhizome 104, 104n26 Ricalens-Pourchot, Nicole 137, 137n28 Roman de la rose, Le 59, 65, 77 Roman des sept sages, Le 48 Rouche, Michel 16–17n1, Rubin, Gayle 79–80n10 Russell, Daniel 95, 95n19, 116n15, 117, 121–2, 121n21 Sabadell-Nieto, Juana 5n10, 228n2

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St. Paul 29, 38, 95, 115 Schiesari, Juliana 93n18 Schmidt, Albert-Marie 198n16 Scopic desire or drive; see also Vision and the visual 6, 8, 11, 22–3, 51, 79–85, 87, 97, 153, 195, 202, 217, 232 Scopophilia 8, 8n17, 197–8 Screech, Michael, 31, 31–2n17, 112n9, 155n48 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 5, 6n12, 79, 79n10 Seifert, Lewis 5n11, 131n25 Sesar, Carl 142 Sexuality apparatus of 8 crime and 40–41 early-modern 3 economy and 206 hom(m)o-sexuality 85n13 homosexuality 85–6, 182n6, 212, 212n25, 216, 216n29, 220–21, 223n34 marriage and 15, 20–21, 24, 31, 39, 53, 136n27 masculine 95, 182, 185, 193, 204, 228 “queer” 9n18 relation to gender 104n25 Renaissance 218 social status and 35–6 women’s 11, 83, 181, 220–21 Shakespeare, William 169, 172, 190n11, Söderhjelm, Werner 49 Sodomy 3, 3 n4, 9 n18, 16, 41, 95, 209–19 Space civic or public 7–8, 11, 26, 37, 41, 63–5, 81, 90, 113, 118, 176–7, 187–8, 190, 217, 228–9 configuration of 11, 66, 69–73, 81, 90, 104, 161–2, 190, 232 domestic or private 2–3, 7–8, 11, 23, 26, 29–31, 44, 55, 59, 69–71, 94, 102–3, 105, 113, 118, 178, 197, 228–9 intertext as 132 masculinity as activity within 23–6, 69–73, 85, 90, 94, 96, 102–5, 109, 113, 118, 132, 178, 190, 199, 227–9, 231–3 social 5, 26, 64 surveillance of see Surveillance

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surveying of 26, 69, 71, 94, 104 Stallybrass, Peter 38n24, 91n15 Subject “feminine” 18, 20 gendered 12, 23, 32, 84, 109–10, 152, 184, 192, 202, 204, 208, 212, 233 masculine 5, 8, 11, 17–18, 24, 35, 43, 54, 58, 62, 70, 75, 83, 90, 93–4, 102, 105, 109, 112–13, 122, 128, 132, 137, 142, 145–7, 158, 164, 169, 172–3, 182, 185, 188, 192, 199, 204, 209, 219, 221, 231–2 positions 6–7, 17–18, 23–4, 33, 35, 55, 81, 84, 90, 94, 99, 100–102, 104, 130, 172, 182, 231 women’s 18, 23, 68, 87, 133 Subjectivity 2n3, 6–8, 17–18, 35, 40, 55, 67, 94, 96n20, 102, 112, 118, 132, 140, 169, 173, 195, 204, 206, 208–9, 221 Surveillance domestic space and 7–8, 22–3, 38, 66, 70, 72, 104, 218 masculinity as 2, 6, 17, 19, 22–4, 31, 85–90, 96, 98, 100–102, 104, 114, 118, 132, 151, 153, 158, 168, 228, 232 public and collective 24, 92, 151, 153, 217–18 sex and 3, 9, 218 women’s bodies and 5, 7, 11, 17, 19, 23–4, 43, 50–51, 59, 66, 81, 96, 102, 118, 151, 153, 158, 168, 195, 200, 232 Tentler, Thomas, 29–30, 30n16, 32n20 Tetel, Marcel 137–8 Tiers Livre see Rabelais, François Torre, Ventura de la 48–9 Tournon, André 115n13 Valois, Marguerite de 181 Vaucheret, Étienne 183n7, 196, 198 Vickers, Nancy 38n24, 91n15 Vigneulles, Philippe de 67, 67n6 Violier des histoires romainnes 48, 52, 53n33 Virgil 128, 134 Vision and the visual

masculinity as relation to 5–8, 12, 22, 47, 50, 81–3, 87, 92, 94–8, 102–3, 105, 109, 118, 122, 154, 158, 177, 189–90, 195, 201, 203–4, 206, 218, 227–9, 231–2 visual domain or field 5, 7, 50–52, 92, 104, 153, 158, 187, 189, 201, 204, 228, 232 women’s manipulations of 50–52, 65–6, 86, 95, 153, 201–2 Vitry, Jacques de 10, 48–9, 62–3, 164 Exempla ex sermonibus vulgaribus 10, 48–52, 62 Wheeler, Bonnie 104 n25, 227n1 Women agency of 8, 13, 18, 74–5, 90 bodies of domestic space and 38, 59, 78–9, 81, 91n15, 202, 228 fecundity of 113 illicit regions of 182 marriage and 7–8, 19–26, 115, 173, 229 masculine homosocial relations and 5, 49, 67, 79–80, 85n13, 87, 89, 96, 113, 145, 186–7, 204, 207 masculinist display and 12, 47, 189–90, 195, 201–2, 228, 232 medical discourse and 154–6, 155n48, 222–3 metaphors for 176 performance of masculinity and 23, 35, 67, 78–80, 93–4, 96, 104, 109, 132, 150, 173, 189, 199–200, 203, 208, 221, 229 relation to men’s bodies 148, 192 sexually unbounded 10–12, 17, 22, 37–8, 43, 58, 83, 90–91, 131, 142–3, 145, 148, 191–2, 207, 210, 214 surveillance of see Surveillance ingenuity of 76–8 role in masculinist cosmos 154–7 vagina 131n25, 195 as display space 188–90 economic metaphors for 194, 204–10

Index virginity of 28–9, 90, 173, 200–204, 222 Zemon-Davis, Natalie 3n6, 117, 117 n18

Zhiri, Oumelbanine 168–9n62 Žižek, Slavoj 92n16

253