English 83

There seems to be quite a divide between virginity expectations for women and men in the Arthurian tales. How many times have daughters of lords been offered to knights before being married to them? Virginal women or not virginal does not seem to be very important in Arthuriana, even adultry is questionably maybe OK within the context of courtly love. Yet Galahad is better than all the other knights because he is a virgin!!??

The text even calls him a “clean maiden” (with a footnote that this means a “chaste man”) and attributes such attributes as meekness to him, which is usually how women are described at this time (109). There seems to be a divide between this and the overwhelming evidence of most of the Arthurian world treating sex rather freely. From the beginning its not that Galahad is a great heroic knight, rather he “heard mass” and is called a “very (true) knight” and “a clean virgin above all knights, as the flower of the lily in whom virginity is signified. And thou art the rose which is the flower of all good virtue, and in the color of fire” (101). If I didn’t know that he was a guy, that description would have made me think he was a woman! Is it so very common for men to be comparad to lilies and roses during this time? Perhaps it is a political dig of sorts on the War of Roses (1455-1461) and taking the side of the ‘rose’ that is “the color of fire” (i.e. supporting the Lancaster house). Certainly it has been discussed that there is a somewhat similar mixture of gender roles in SGGK because of his shield and other references to his inner devotion to the Virgin Mary. Does anyone else find this knightly virginity strange in the face of how women have mostly been treated in Arthuriana?

My best guess is that Galahad reflexes the monastic movement that became popular in Europe during the Medieval Ages. Monks were expected to be warriors for God and absolutely chaste and pure. Yet Malory was writing in the fifteenth century when such stories as The Decameron are being written about monks having sex with women and being applauded for doing what comes naturally to men. This is after the decline of the Church and the Babylonian Captivity and the Great Schism from 1378 to 1417, where at one point Europe ends up with 3 popes. Its hard to believe that Malory would choose to so focus on Galahad’s virginity when in 1509 England will be getting the notorious Henry VIII as king. Perhaps Malory is trying to capture the religious feelings of salvation and monasticism that were more prevailant a couple hundred years before he was writing.

 Perhaps Malory is responding to the growing capitalistic tendencies in Europe at this time by yearning for the past. Certainly his writings are quite different from say this poem by Niccolo de’ Rossi, a nobleman from Treviso, who after earnign his doctorate and becoming a cleric, before dying in 1348:

Money makes the man,

Money makes the stupid pass for bright,

Money buys the treasury of sins,

Money shows;

Money buys the pleasure-giving women,

Money keeps the soul in bliss,

Money puts the plebe in high estate,

Money brings your en’mies down.

And every man seems down without it,

Which even opens, if you want, the doors of paradise.

So wise he seems to me who piles up

What more than any other virtue

Conquers gloom and leavens the whole spirit.

 

From Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination. City-States in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 80-81.