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Three Medieval Views of Women: "La Contenance des Fames," "Le Bien des Fames," "Le Blasme des Fames"

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The three views of women announced in the title are expressed in three poems written in France, surely by men, sometime before 1328. The texts of the three poems, two in the Francien dialect of medieval Paris and one in Anglo-Norman, are included, along with ample notes and solid English translations. These are not long poems; they are only 176 lines, 96 lines, and 149 lines -- a few pages each. They are all three examples of the 'popular' genre of French poetry called "dit," meaning simply 'saying,' and they are all anonymous. Most of the book in hand consists of two extended essays, the first, by Wendy Pfeffer, addressing their literary structures and linguistic attributes,and the second, by Gloria Fiero, analyzing their historical context, examining the degree to which they represent authentic perceptions of women in the Middle Ages, whose perceptions, and on what basis.

One of the three dits is virulently misogynist. Le Blasme des Fames can be translated 'The Vices of Women.'
Le Bien des Fames counters with 'The Virtues of Women,' and represents a defense of women that most modern feminists will find unsatisfactory, since the chief virtue of women appears to be that the Virgin Mary was one. The third dit - La Contenance des Fames, 'The Behavior of Women' - is perhaps less overtly misogynist than paternalistically condescending. Fiero's essay does a fine job of identifying whose point of view might be exemplified in each poem. Both the attitude of the Church and the general 'scientific' paradigms of the era, based on the authority of Aristotle and Galen, get their share of 'credit' for the disdain for women felt by the educated class, chiefly clerics. By contrast, Fiero suggests, the semi-literate nightly classes and the largely illiterate commoners may have held quite different notions of womanhood. It was, of course, also the age of chivalry, of hyper-idealization.

Here's a sample of Anglo-Norman French, from Les Blasmes des Fames:

Femme est huan esstace,
Le jour se muce, la nuyt est wace.
Femme est funteine desur la veie
Ke tuz receit e tuz avoie;
Femme est marchie de tele nature,
Tut tens bate e tut tens dure;
Femme est taverne qe faute,
Ki ke vienge e qi qe vaute.

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