The Tongue of the Fathers: Gender and Ideology in Twelfth-Century Latin

Church History, Sept, 2000 by Lesley Smith

The Tongue of the Fathers: Gender and Ideology in Twelfth-Century Latin. Ed. by David Townsend and Andrew Taylor. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. vi 218 pp. $37.50 cloth.

In comparison with its vernacular cousins, Latin--both language and literature--has had little attention from proponents of gender studies as an approach to texts. Lucky Latin! one might somewhat mischievously cry; its scholars have got better things to do. Does the fact that vernacular texts were more often for, and even by, women make them targets where Latin texts are not? Or do Latin texts have more to say for themselves than vernacular ones? Or perhaps, as the editors speculate in their introduction, the relative difficulty of Latin as a language keeps its scholars to a small cohort, tightly focused on a common set of questions and approaches, of which gender, in any but the philological sense, is not one. But of course, Latin is gendered in that every single noun must be masculine, feminine, or neuter, and this gives reading the language a dimension that mother-tongue speakers of English can appreciate only in part. And beyond the linguistic, so the argument goes, the texts in which the Latin of the Middle Ages was employed are gendered male, patristic if not patriarchal, and preservative of a tradition in which the masculine was effortlessly and unarguably superior, so that "Medieval Latin, in short, is the Tongue of the Fathers" (1).

It is the editors' aim to question whether this last statement is true and to do so by careful attention to the Latin of the texts. They have assembled a collection of seven essays: Andrew Taylor on "Abelard and the Violence of Dialectic"; Marilynn Desmond on "Rhetorical Subjectivity and Sexual Violence in the Letters of Heloise", Alcuin Blamires on "Gender Polemic in Abelard's Letter on The Authority and Dignity of the Nun's Profession"; Claire Fanger on "Gender and Cosmogony in Bernard Silvestris's Cosmographia"; Joan Ferrante on "Hildegard, her Language and her Secretaries"; David Townsend on "Sex and the Single Amazon in Twelfth-Century Latin Epic" (in fact, the Alexandreis of Walter of Chatillon); and Bruce Holsinger on "Desire, Death and the Second Crusade in Bernard of Clairvaux's Sermons on the Song of Songs." The essays fall into two loose groups, leaning toward the "historical" and the "literary" respectively. From my viewpoint as a historian (albeit one who works on the interpretation of texts), the "historical" cache seemed stronger and more interesting than the "literary," although I am aware that this may be a simple matter of my own bias. Nevertheless, many of the "historical" essays are freer of that technical "English within English" that makes so much literary scholarship unpleasant to read; those contributors who make their points with clarity and simplicity read more convincingly, to me at least. Ironically, by using this kind of neologistic vocabulary and syntax, the introduction, for example, creates just the sort of elite tradition, in which only initiates can participate in a circle of understanding that it is setting out to investigate.

However, I do not mean to give the impression that the book is not worthwhile, mostly enjoyable, and learned. Even when I found myself taking issue with an essay, it was generally over a thoughtful point. If I cannot agree with Marilynn Desmond that Heloise's education had left her irretrievably and inevitably (it would seem) "immasculated"--for to agree would be to let go of the individual and particular person in favor of a generalized and theoretical product--nonetheless, I wished I could hear the debate she might have with Joan Ferrante on the "immasculation" (or otherwise) of Hildegard. And her quotation from Walter Ong that Latin was "a sexually specialized language, used almost exclusively for communication between male and male" (39), made me wish that the book had room for questions of ecclesiastical orthodoxy and heresy as well as gender issues, for clergy and laity, though in many cases all male, were rarely, in any meaningful sense, speaking the same language.

I especially enjoyed the essays by Blamires, Ferrante, and Taylor. Taylor is good on the limitations of dialectic, and his suggestion that Bernard misunderstood these limits (though, faced with Peter Abelard, he had good reason) rings true. His section (24) on the nature and paucity of the Latin needed for dialectical debate is useful and makes sense of this part of the schools as pseudowarfare indulged in by adolescents, the militaristic video games of the twelfth century. He gives a real sense of just how boring much of what Abelard was caught up in teaching would have been.

Ferrante uses an investigation into Hildegard's use of male secretaries to produce thoughtful and striking insights into her mental world: "For Hildegard, Latin is not the language of the patriarchy, of the Fathers and the Church hierarchy; Latin is the language Hildegard of Bingen shares with God" (102). How it was that Hildegard felt so extravagantly able to obey the call of God to write it all down is a matter for debate. If we take her word that she was unlearned, then perhaps she had never been immasculated by her education; but she must have got it from somewhere, and it would certainly have suited her purposes better to claim that she was an empty, vessel merely passing on what God told her than to be seen as a tutored woman doing a man's work. Ferrante's account of the certainty with which she directed her scribes only adds to our picture of Hildegard as an extraordinary woman.