Practising shame

Female honour in later medieval England

Mary C. Flannery

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526110091
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Practicing shame investigates how the literature of medieval England encouraged women to safeguard their honour by cultivating hypervigilance against the possibility of sexual shame. A combination of inward reflection and outward comportment, this practice of 'shamefastness' was believed to reinforce women's chastity of mind and body, and to communicate that chastity to others by means of conventional gestures. The book uncovers the paradoxes and complications that emerged from these emotional practices, as well as the ways in which they were satirised and reappropriated by male authors. Working at the intersection of literary studies, gender studies and the history of emotions, it transforms our understanding of the ethical construction of femininity in the past and provides a new framework for thinking about honourable womanhood now and in the years to come.

1
Show and tell: shame and the subject of women's bodies

And yf hit fall any man to rede hit, I pray hym & scharge hym in ovre Lady be-halue þat he rede hit not in no dyspyte ne sclavndure of no woman ne for no cause but for þe hele & helpe of hem, dredynge þat vengavns myht fall to hym as hit hath do to oþer þat have schevyd here preuytees in sclauvndyr of hem, vndyrstondynge in certeyne þat þey have no oþer euylys þat nov be a-lyue than thoo women hade þat nov be seyntys in hevyn.

(The Knowing of Woman’s Kind in Childing, Douce Version, 24–31)¹

To begin a book by threatening one's readers seems counterintuitive (not to mention rude). Yet this is precisely what the author of one fourteenth-century Middle English gynaecological treatise chose to do. In the prologue of a text now known as The Knowing of Woman’s Kind in Childing, the passage above (which is not found in its sources) warns any men who might happen to read the treatise not to read it in a spirit of dyspyte (a desire to humiliate someone) or sclavndure (disrespect, contempt) towards women.² Instead, male readers should approach the text with caution, ‘dredynge þat vengavns myht fall to hym as hit hath do to oþer þat have schevyd [women's] preuytees in sclauvndyr of hem’. These readers should not merely be careful – they should be afraid.

Precisely what vengeance might befall an insensitive male reader of this text remains unclear, as does the identity of those ‘oþer’ men foolish enough to expose women to shame and derision. Yet the passage is striking both because of its protective stance towards women and because of the vehemence of its warning to men, features that have made it perhaps the most oft-discussed part of the text in modern scholarship. Why should a gynaecological treatise necessitate such a warning? The answer seems to lie in the prologue's reference to women's preuytees, a term that encompasses both the ‘secrets’ of women's medicine (as they had come to be known by the time Knowing was written) and the secret places of women's bodies – their internal and external genital organs.³ The author of the prologue anticipates that these private matters may well be schevyd – ‘examined’, but also ‘exhibited’ – by men with malicious motives.⁴ As a consequence, at the very moment at which the text is about to embark on an extended project of ‘showing’ and telling about women's bodies, its prologue warns readers of the need for caution and concealment. Reading (and writing) about women's bodies is a risky activity: when it is undertaken out of dyspyte or slavndure, it puts women's reputations and emotions at risk. The fact that the author of this prologue presents the shaming of women as something deserving of vengeance hints at the gravity of these consequences for women. The prologue of Knowing demands that readers not only bear these consequences in mind, but also dread them in sympathy with women. When reading about women's preuytees, the prologue implies, men must be sure to keep those preuytees under cover.

Such gestures of concealing and revealing are characteristic not only of the medieval discourse surrounding the preuytees of women's bodies, but also of the discourse and imagery surrounding what the present book identifies as the medieval practice of female honour. As I will show over the course of this study, the practice of being an honourable woman entailed feeling like an honourable woman by developing a hypervigilance against the possibility of shame, most particularly the prospect of sexual shame. A strong sense of shame, often termed shamefastness in Middle English, was necessitated in part by the unsettlingly embodied nature of female honour, proof of which was thought to reside in those parts of women's bodies which usually remained safely hidden, but which were also most closely bound up with women's allegedly undisciplined, sinful natures. And while the medieval consensus was that a woman's honour was determined primarily by her sexual continence, the difficulty of ensuring or proving a woman's chastity rendered female honour elusive and uncertain. By practising shamefastness, women might practise habits of mind and body that, by interiorizing and exteriorizing a strong sense of shame, could both preserve their chastity and communicate it to others. As this chapter will begin to show, however, practising shamefastness involved women in a bizarre sort of gestural paradox whereby they were expected to make a spectacle of their shamefast concealment and withdrawal, ideally in a manner that seemed effortless and unpractised and which, by its apparent effortlessness, demonstrated their virtue. While the practice of shamefastness was a crucial support for female honour, it should never appear practised.

I begin by using the subject of women's preuytees (or shamefuls, as genitalia might also be termed in Middle English) as a gateway to examining the relationship between shame and the embodied nature of female honour in medieval English culture, focusing on the links between postlapsarian shame and the body in the medieval imagination. I then consider how postlapsarian shame contributed to medieval understandings of pain and shame as universal features of women's experience of childbirth. Finally, I explore how the prologue of one version of the mid-fifteenth-century gynaecological treatise now known as The Sickness of Women, as well as the prologue of Knowing, employ strategies to mitigate the social and emotional risks women faced in exposing their bodies even for the ostensibly innocent purposes of medical diagnosis and treatment. While they perhaps inevitably replicate the gestures of concealing and revealing that distinguish the practice of female honour, these prologues also present women's shamefastness as something deserving of sympathy, respect, and protection. My primary goal is not to make claims about the practice of women's medicine, or even about medieval writing on women's medicine more broadly (although I engage with both subjects), but rather to situate these two specific examples of gynaecological writing within a broader pattern of thinking about women's bodies and women's shame. The prologues of Knowing and Sickness explicitly acknowledge that ‘showing’ and ‘telling’ about women's preuytees potentially risked women's feelings and reputations, and they each make the case that this risk demanded sensitivity on the part of male readers. Both prologues implore their readers to approach the texts they preface with an awareness of how their reading might affect women's honour and women's emotions, a plea that points to some of the ways in which the maintenance of female honour was believed to depend upon a wide network of interlinked practices involving not only women's emotions, but those of men as well.

The matter of women's shamefuls

The idea that the subject of gynaecological ailments might be a cause for female shame or embarrassment is closely bound up with the links between shame and the human body in the medieval imagination. Biblical history reinforced the association between the uncovered male or female body and the experience of shame – although Adam and Eve had initially not felt shame at their nakedness (non erubescant; they ‘were not ashamed’), their first act after their commission of original sin was to recognize their nakedness as something that should be covered.⁵ In his Anglo-Norman poem Le Mirour de l’Omme (c. 1376–79), John Gower cites this moment as an example that the ‘shameless’ prostitute should bear in mind:

Responde, o pute, ne scies tu

Queu part vergoigne est devenu?

De tes parens essample toi,

Q’en paradis se viront nu,

Dont vergondous et esperdu,

Tantost chascun endroit de soy

D’un fueill covry le membre coy.

Mais tu, putain, avoy, avoy!

es tant aperte en chascun lieu,

Sans honte avoir d’ascune loy,

Que je dirray, ce poise moy,

Tu as vergoigne trop perdu.

(Answer, O whore, don't you know where shame [vergoigne] has fled? Look up to your forefathers, who saw themselves naked in Paradise, shameful and distressed, and so each on his own covered his privy member with a leaf. But you, whore, come on, you are exhibited in every corner, feeling neither shame [honte] nor bond with respect to any law; I'll say it, it bothers me, you utterly lost shame [vergoigne].)⁶

As Gower emphasizes, this moment in biblical history was the moment when mankind acquired a sense of shame (vergoigne) and learned to cover ‘le membre coy’ (the privy member). That the prostitute addressed by Gower's narrator exposes hers without feeling shame (sans honte) is a sign that she no longer possesses a sense of shame. As Guillemette Bolens points out in her discussion of this passage, just as a sense of shame was acquired, so too can it be lost, and with it the bodily gestures that demonstrate one's shamefastness.⁷ When this happens, women risk becoming like Gower's shameless prostitute by disregarding ‘[t]he imperative of covering and concealing’ (which, Bolens notes, ‘is also applied to speech’): ‘[t]he hymen must remain covered and the female must stay hidden’.⁸

This familiar narrative of shame's origins presented postlapsarian human nudity as inherently shameful, an idea already latent in the linguistic origins of Old English scamu/sceamu/scomu and Middle English shame in a Proto-Indo-European verb meaning ‘to cover’.⁹ Both Old English and Middle English terms for genitalia bear witness to the longstanding belief that these were the parts of the human body that most urgently needed to be hidden. In Anglo-Saxon England, the word sceamlim (‘shame-limb’) was one of several Old English terms for genitalia.¹⁰ Likewise, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Show and tell: shame and the subject of women’s bodies
• 2 Lessons in shame
• 3 Shame under suspicion, shame under siege
• 4 Death or dishonour: the problem of exemplary shame
• 5 Shamefast Hoccleve and shameless craving
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index