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‘God is more weary of woman than of man’: Reflections on a Text in the Golden Legend

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Richard M. Price
Richard M. Price*
Affiliation:
Heythrop College, University of London
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Extract

The presence of a malodorous taint of misogyny in Christian literature, both ancient and medieval, is a familiar fact that feminist writers, more than male chauvinists, have been keen to push under our noses. What is its explanation? The inferiority of women is a standard theme in male-dominated cultures. Christian literature, for so long the virtual preserve of male celibates, inevitably reflected their anxieties and their need for reassurance. But was there also a genuine theological component, however misconceived, arising from basic Christian convictions about human nature and the moral law?

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 34: Gender and Christian Religion , 1998 , pp. 119 - 127
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1998

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References

1 Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, T. (Leipzig, 1850)Google Scholar, ch. XXXVII, pp. 158–9. This edifying passage was lacking from the text translated by Caxton. My own version makes use of that of Ryan, T., The Golden Legend, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1993), 1, pp. 143–4.Google Scholar

2 Newson, A. and Ringe, S. H., eds, The Woman’s Bible Commentary (London, 1992), p. 40 Google Scholar. Rupert of Deutz (d. 1129) linked the greater length of purification in the case of a girl to a greater flow of blood from the mother (PL 167, col. 802), following a long tradition going back to Hippocrates and Aristotle (Historia animalium, 583a) and paralleled in Rabbinic sources. Similar discrimination between male and female births is to be found in many cultures. See Macht, D. I., ‘A scientific appreciation of Leviticus 12:1-5’, Journal of Biblical Literature, 52 (1933), pp. 253–60.Google Scholar

3 The linking of the Aristotelian and Levitical figures occurs already in Hrabanus Maurus (d. 856), who followed the fifth-century Hesychius of Jerusalem (PL 108, cols 368-70). This link was so well established by the early modern period that the Leviticus text was used as evidence in support of the Aristotelian tradition on the time of animation: see Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, i (Paris 1909), col. 1309.

4 In Leviticum, II.16, PL 167, col. 802. For this commentary see van Eugen, John H., Rupert of Deutz (Berkeley, CA, 1983), pp. 263–5.Google Scholar

5 E.g., Margaret Miles, Margaret, Carnal Knowing (Tunbridge Wells, 1992), ch. 4.Google Scholar

6 De Genesi ad litteram XI.42.

7 PL 164, cols 419–20. Compare St Ambrose, ‘She who does not believe is “woman”’ (Commentary on Luke X.161, with reference to Christ’s address to Mary Magdalene at John 20.15).

8 This becomes still more grossly sexist in W. G. Ryan’s version (n.r, above): Christ ‘willed to endow it [the male sex] with more grace’. But in the Latin (‘ut ampliorem sibi gratiam faceret’) it is Christ, not the male sex as a whole, that receives more grace.

9 Augustine, De diversis auaestionibus LXXXIII, 1.10, cited by Aquinas at Summa Theologica, 3 a., 31.4.

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11 Summa Theologica, la., 93.4.

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13 De generatione animalium, 775a.

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15 Alcuin Blamires, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1992), p. 48.

16 Ibid., p. 120.

17 Ibid., pp. 173–5.

18 Summa Theologica, 1a., 92, 1.

19 B. W. Scholz, ‘Hildegard von Bingen on the nature of woman’, American Benedictine Review, 31 (1980), pp. 361–83.

20 Cadden, Joan, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 202–9.Google Scholar

21 Ibid, pp. 209–27.

22 Chaucer, Canterbury Tales: The Man of Law’s Tale, II.3 59–64.

23 The fashionable holistic interpretation of St Paul was refuted by Gundry, R. H., Soma in Biblical Theology (Cambridge, 1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 Rabbi Simai (sixth century), quoted in Montefiore, C. G. and Loewe, H., A Rabbinic Anthology (London, 1938), p. 314.Google Scholar

25 ‘Feminine unreason usually meant the inability of the higher faculties to control the passions of the flesh’: Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, p. 207.

26 The Ancrene Riwle, trans. Salu, M B. (London, 1955), p. 121.Google Scholar

27 Houghton, W. E., The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven, CT, and London, 1957), pp. 348–53.Google Scholar

28 Ste Croix, G. E. M. de, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London, 1981), pp. 103–11, 418–25.Google Scholar