De Amore, Game of Thrones, and Imagining Violence in the 12th and 21st Centuries
By Dr. Elizabeth Liendo
In the fourteenth century, Petrarch declared that his writing broke free from ‘darkness’ and put an end to what would later be called the ‘middle period,’ reviving instead the beauty of the Greco-Roman past. In the early-twentieth century, Norbert Elias argued that ‘civilized’ modern society, with its manners and behaviors, marked a stark departure from the medieval past. Most recently, Steven Pinker has claimed that increased empathy, morality, and reason—all of which he claims are post-medieval—have increased and violence has decreased. Despite criticism from scholars, these ideas have colored how many think of the Middle Ages. Popular media like Vikings, The Last Kingdom, or even the neo-medieval Game of Thrones reinforce views of the Middle Ages as ‘bloody and brutal,’ with ‘the two crimes that are, arguably, worse than death—rape and torture—’frequently depicted as ‘common features of the age.’
It is important to challenge this imagined distance between ourselves and our past. Medieval ideas can help explain the origins of modern practices, and we might be surprised to discover significant similarities between our own period and the past. The idea that we have left behind a violent past and transformed our modern society into a civilized new world might ‘promote the idea of progress’ and ‘serve… a purpose in our collective memories,’ as Paul Sturtevant tells us, but it conceals real similarities between the past and the present—especially in how we think of violence. By convincing ourselves that we live in a ‘supposedly-enlightened post-modern age,’ we risk misunderstanding and/or excusing contemporary forms of violence. Instead, we should ask: what can studying violence in the medieval past tell us about our own world? What similarities exist between how we limit violence today and how medieval writers ‘contained’ violence?
In particular, medieval texts can help us understand how modern readers/viewers conceptualize sexual violence and engage with imagined sexual violence on screen and in fantasy (Outlander, Spartacus, etc.). Andreas Capellanus’ De Amore, a twelfth-century treatise on love, reveals a long history of inviting readers/viewers to watch (and even enjoy) fictional scenes of sexual violence. Both Capellanus’ text and these modern shows try to ‘contain’ violence within a fictional world, stressing the fantastical nature of this world and implying that imagined violence has no impact on reality. In doing so, these narratives assume that imagined violence has limits and can be ‘turned off’ at any time—while still hinting that such scenes can be reexperienced at the reader/viewer’s pleasure.
Capellanus’ De Amore gives us a medieval case study of how imagined sexual violence is depicted. The twelfth-century text describes the art of seeking love, considers how to attract and maintain a lover, and imagines eight fictional dialogues between potential lovers. The Fifth Dialogue, sometimes called the ‘Purgatory of Cruel Beauties,’ depicts a nobleman attempting to convince a reluctant noblewoman to accept his love. To do so, he recounts a vision of the afterlife, in which three types of women are punished or rewarded for their behavior in life: good lovers, women who loved too much, and women who refused to love (‘cruel beauties’).
There is very little consensus on the tone, meaning, or intention of De Amore. While earlier generations of scholars read the text straightforwardly as a ‘handbook on courtly love,’ many scholars since argue the advice given in the text is meant to be ironic.[1] Nonetheless, there is significant disagreement on which parts are meant to be ironic, a question unlikely to be resolved soon. I consider De Amore as a bricolage, a series of ideological representations of love and desire that cannot be reconciled into one, unified whole, instead containing elements from disparate contexts like Christian morals, Ovidian literary sensuality, and twelfth-century class dynamics. In this sense, I align with Don Monson’s conclusion that scholarly attempts to ‘simplify or reduce’ the text to one unified reading are ultimately unhelpful.[2] While many emphasize the didactic nature of this treatise (what is it trying to teach the reader?), I argue that De Amore straddles the divide between a practical text (real/applied) and a literary/fictional one (imagined). To fully understand the text, one must pay equal attention to the way that it emphasizes fictionality and allows the reader to imagine and shape the fantasies of love as to the way it attempts to ‘teach’ the reader.[3] The Fifth Dialogue helps us excavate how De Amore invites readers to play through fantasies and fictions of desire.
While the dialogue recounts how ‘good lovers’ are rewarded with beautiful horses and attentive servants, it punishes women who refused lovers on earth with graphic cruelty. The violence suffered by reluctant lovers in this scene, I argue, hints at the threat of sexual violence. The cruel beauties are ‘of outstanding beauty but clothed in the foulest garments utterly unsuited to the nature of the season,’ and they ride ‘sorry, mean horses which were extremely emaciated, heavy footed, without reins and saddles, and which stumbled as they walked.’[4] While this stumbling would be painful to any rider, the punishment takes on a distinctly sexual nature here. The original Latin suggests that not only did the horses ‘claudicantibus pedibus indecentes’ (‘stumbled as they walked’), but also that the women ‘indecentes indecenter equitabant’—a line the translator skips, and which suggests that they ride in an unseemly manner (‘indecentes’). Some scholars suggest this means they are fully astride, rather than sidesaddle (more common for medieval women).[5] The word ‘indecens’ here can mean improper, but its frequent repetition also hints at sexual indecency; this scene thus features beautiful but inappropriately dressed women riding horses in a manner that would deliver painful shocks to their genitalia upon each stumble. Moreover, without reins to steer or stop their horses, the women are denied any control or ability to stop this experience. The metaphor of horseback riding—an image still used today for sex—is subverted from an image of pleasure to an image of pain.
This scene is permeated with images of sexual violence, more of which appear when the ladies reach their destination. Arriving in an arid wasteland, ‘there were everywhere countless bundles of thorns bound together, and through the center of each was drawn a log projecting on both sides of the bundle... At the end of the log stood a man of great strength, holding the end in his hands.’ The women sit ‘on a bundle of thorns, which was always being rotated by the men… so that the women were more painfully scratched by the points.’[6] In an even more explicit metaphor of rape, these men use the log (sometimes translated as ‘pole’) to violently rotate the thorns on which these women are seated, wounding them repeatedly. The text perversely depicts one suffering woman tell the viewer that ‘it is right that we endure this,’ implying that such punishment is deserved for those who reject love.[7]
When the woman hears this story in the Fifth Dialogue, she is terrified; while she does not accept the nobleman’s suit, she nonetheless yields, saying ‘…whether your account is true or false, your narrative of fearful punishment terrifies me.’[8] Seeing her terror, the nobleman ‘give[s] thanks’ to Cupid that the lady has ‘routed your dread mistake.’[9] This exchange suggests that, whatever the nobleman claims initially, he does not need reciprocation to feel satisfied. The dialogue suggests that men can derive satisfaction and pleasure from fantasies of sexual violence and the terror they inspire, implying that terror can also be an effective way to earn a woman’s love and that there is pleasure in imagining violence itself.
Miniature (Morgan M.456 Avis aus roys f80r)
While the De Amore could be read by anyone, the book is framed as being addressed to one specific reader—the narrator’s ‘revered friend, Walter.’ The book begins with the narrator’s ‘affection for you… to… instruct you’ in the ways of love; similarly, the final section of the text ends by exhorting Walter to ‘accept… the salutary instruction I set before you.’[10] Throughout the handbook, the text often addresses Walter, the imagined ‘you’ who receives the narrator’s ‘advice,’ though Walter never speaks or appears in the text himself. In this sense, Walter is a metonym for a reader—a silent but receptive figure who is invited to observe and potentially enjoy the content being provided. The text is thus framed as an invitation to Walter, the student of love, and by extension, the readers themselves, into the fantasy world it creates.[11] Walter and the reader become implicated in the sexual violence depicted in the Purgatory, invited to witness these scenes and potentially enjoy its impact on the noblewoman. Scenes like this suspend reality, allowing Walter and the reader to imagine sexual violence and the suffering of the woman without acting in the scene.
Nonetheless, the text frequently reminds us that this scene is only fantasy and can be ended or suspended at any point. At the beginning of the dream, the nobleman claims, ‘The story goes – and it is true…,’ clearly signaling that the vision is a kind of fiction.[12] Similarly, the nobleman ends the story and contains it within fiction by reminding us that he ‘cast away the crystal rod and returned without harm to my own region.’[13] The verb ‘remeo’ (‘ad propria remeavi’) suggests that one has ‘returned’ from the story into a different world, thereby containing the sexual violence within the vision. The Purgatory is thus encapsulated within further layers of discourse and framing devices, continuously reminding us of its fictionality. The violent sexual sadism of this vision is embedded in an imagined dialogue between two characters, which is one of many dialogues contained within the first Book. In this vein, Monson calls this scene a ‘circular mise en abime’ of discourse, and Peter Allen calls De Amore a ‘fantasy within the bounds of a text, which, though it claims to teach its readers about love in an external world, is fundamentally… meta-literary.’[14] Imagined violence is thus enveloped by multiple layers of fantasy, narrative, and discourse, keeping it separate from the ‘external world.’ By imagining that such fantasies of sexual violence are fully contained within the fictional world, the text encourages the reader to visualize and even enjoy such scenes, since it promises that any pleasure derived is purely hypothetical, not real. This fantasy that sexual violence can be contained in the imagination and kept from reality thus becomes essential to imagining sexual violence.
While our first instincts might be to see this as a morally reprehensible artifact of a primitive age, similar premises underwrite contemporary television shows, which often indulge in long, graphic scenes of sexual violence. The most obvious modern example is HBO’s Game of Thrones (GoT), one of the most watched shows on television during its heyday and still HBO’s most-watched series. Like Capellanus’ De Amore, GoT seemed to center and linger on scenes of rape throughout its eight seasons, even adding rape scenes not originally included in the source novels: Daenerys’ rape on her wedding night (S01E01) or the rape of Cersei next to her son’s corpse (S04E03, depicted as consensual sex in the books). An article from 2015 pithily opines that, while outrage over the amount of rape in GoT was particularly high after Sansa Stark’s wedding-night rape by Ramsay Bolton, ‘“Game of Thrones” has always been a show about rape.’ The show was widely criticized for its reliance on what Myles McNutt termed ‘sexposition’ (plot delivery accompanied by sex) and indicted by critics and senators alike as having a ‘gratuitous’ reliance on rape. One critic even suggested that rape had ‘become so pervasive in the drama that it is almost background noise.’
Nonetheless, these scenes of sexual violence in GoT were also portrayed as titillating, pleasurable, or an excuse for viewers to enjoy nudity. One executive producer of the show reportedly told the director: ‘I represent the pervert side of the audience… and I’m saying I want full frontal nudity in this scene.’ SNL famously parodied the show by suggesting that the reason for so much nudity was because the consultant was a 13-year-old boy. In one interview, actor Stephen Dillane called the sex scenes like ‘German porn,’ and in 2011, a film critic initially justified the graphic sexual nature of the show as ‘illicitness… tossed in’ as ‘a little something for the ladies.’ These interpretations recognize that, like in De Amore, the sexual violence in GoT is a kind of pact between showrunner and audience that invites the viewer to enjoy the pleasure inspired by such scenes.
Moreover, the questionable sense of pleasure inspired by such scenes in GoT is predicated upon the idea that rape in this narrative can be kept fully separate from ‘reality’—either by containing it in a fantastical realm or within the ‘medieval’ past. On one hand, these scenes are ‘set in faraway magic lands’ and a ‘fantasy’ that contrasts with ‘rape in the “real world”’ (as described in one editorial suggesting that people should stop complaining and worry about ‘real rape’). Such emphasis on the fictional nature of GoT seems to reiterate Capellanus’s idea that these narrative rapes are able to be contained; they have no impact on reality and cannot ‘infect’ our lived world. On the other hand, quasi-medieval fantasy dramas have often excused gratuitous violence by arguing that this accurately depicts a lived reality of history. In an interview with George R.R. Martin on whether the show’s depictions of rape concerned him, he stated
I wanted my books to be strongly grounded in history and to show what medieval society was like… 21st century America isn’t egalitarian either. There are still barriers against women. It’s better than what it was… if you’re going to write about war… and you don’t portray [sexual violence], then there’s something fundamentally dishonest.
While Martin acknowledged in this interview that rape still happens today, his emphasis on rape as a defining feature of medieval society and that contemporary society is ‘better than… it was’ still relegates rampant sexual violence to the past, which is imagined to be mostly separate from our contemporary reality. Martin, therefore, does not consider the rape depicted in GoT to have problematic implications for the present; it remains, in his view, contained within the past. The paradox of GoT being considered both ‘fantasy’ (i.e., not real) and history (i.e., real) can be explained by recognizing that either category attempts to contain the violence in GoT and separate it from modern reality.
While most visible in GoT, this kind of sexual violence also appears in other historical dramas. Shows like Spartacus, The Tudors, Vikings, and more have been alternatively lauded and criticized for the way they amplify and depict nudity or sexual violence—and many such shows justify these choices as ‘historical accuracy.’ The similarities between medieval texts like De Amore and modern historical dramas ironically highlight that, despite these shows claiming a complete separation between the modern world and the distant past, there are considerable similarities in the way that sexual violence was imagined then and is imagined now. Whether within fiction or the imagined past, the fantasy of being able to contain narrative violence endures today.
Nonetheless, we must question whether we can truly contain violence in the imagination or whether it threatens to escape. The proliferation of pornography, even mainstream pornography, that features acts of aggression suggests that boundaries between ‘imagined’ sexual violence and the real world are not as watertight as these texts suggest. One 2010 study found that 88% of pornographic scenes analyzed contained physical aggression (usually male on female), and that victims were often portrayed as reacting with pleasure.[15] Another 2020 study of over 4000 heterosexual online porn scenes determined that 45% of them featured one or more acts of physical aggression, with women as the target in 97% of such scenes.[16] Such significant overlap between modern day habits of desire and imagined violence suggests an uneasy blend of fantasy and reality, one in which scenes of violence threaten to cross-over from mere fiction, suspended or ended whenever the author or viewer wishes, into the very-much real world of our sexual desires.
Author Bio:
Elizabeth Liendo is a comparative medievalist, specializing in the intersections between desire, violence, and grief in late medieval literature. She has published on nakedness and masculinity in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, feminizing violence in Marie de France’s Lais, and on Chaucerian medievalisms. In the classroom, she is particularly interested in pedagogies of the global Middle Ages, especially considering a non-Western student population. She is currently an Assistant Professor, Faculty of Literature at Fulbright University Vietnam.
Notes:
[1] Much of this has to do with the disconnect between Books I and II, which claim to give advice on love, and Book III, which rejects earthly love as sinful and problematic. Scholars are divided on whether Books I and II are meant to be serious and Book III ironic; whether Book III is serious and Books I and II are ironic; whether the two halves of the text represent a ‘double truth’ somewhat like the sic et non disputations of the 12th century; or whether the entire book is meant to be humorous or ironic.
[2] Don Monson, Andreas Capellanus, Scholasticism, and the Courtly Tradition (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005), p. 347.
[3] This reading aligns with some recent readers who have attempted to work around the ‘literal’ question of whether the text is true advice or not. In one recent reading, Monson suggests De Amore fails to synthesize multiple traditions, thus remaining ambiguous (Scholasticism), while Toril Moi has suggested that the text has an ideological dimension that moves beyond simply teaching rules for courtly love [‘Desire in Language: Andreas Capellanus and the Controversy of Courtly Love,’ in Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology, and History (New York, 1986)]. Kathleen Andersen-Wyman goes the furthest afield, suggesting that De Amore is not about love at all but instead a critique of institutions that govern love, encouraging readers to question such restrictions [Andreas Capellanus on Love?: Desire, Seduction, and Subversion in a Twelfth-Century Latin Text (New York,: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)]. In particular, I align myself with readers like Peter Allen or Toril Moi who analyze how Capellanus ‘displaces sex into language’ or completes a kind of ‘mapping fantasy or narrative by which the individual subject invents a “lived” relationship with collective systems’ [Peter Allen, The Art of Love: Amatory Fiction from Ovid to the Romance of the Rose (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); Moi 20].
[4] I use Walsh’s translation here: Andreas Capellanus, and P.G. Walsh (trans.), Andreas Capellanus on Love (London: Duckworth, 1982), 1.5.235.
[5] Betsy Bowden, ‘The Art of Courtly Copulation,’ Medievalia et Humanistica 9 (1979): 67-85.
[6] Capellanus I.5.258-63.
[7] Ibid I.5.245-6. The sexual violence of these punishments has been curiously overlooked in many analyses of this episode. Don Monson describes this moment as an ‘apocalyptic vision’ (233); Toril Moi identifies violence and ‘intimidation’ in this dialogue but describes it as ‘verbal sadism’ to recount this tale to one’s beloved, explicitly contrasting this scene with the ‘outright rape’ of the peasant woman later (25). While Betsy Bowden focuses primarily on a dense Latin series of sexual puns, she does characterize the episode as a ‘wet dream,’ notes its sadism, and calls the punishments ‘harsh sexual fantasies’ (70 & 81). However, her comments are brief—only four lines.
[8] Capellanus I.6.118.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid F.I & III.120.
[11] Whether we take the De Amore seriously as advice or as ironic, the framing of the text as ‘advice’ to Walter implicitly invites the reader into this fantasy world; it is then up to the reader to decide whether the participate, enjoy, and take seriously the content.
[12] Ibid I.5.222.
[13] Ibid I.5.273
[14] Monson, 233; Allen, The Art of Love, p. 77.
[15] A.J. Bridges, R. Wosnitzer, et. al., ‘Aggression and Sexual Behavior in Best-Selling Pornography Videos: a Content Analysis Update,’ Violence Against Women 16.10 (2010): 1065-85.
[16] N. Fritz, V. Malic, B. Paul, & Y. Zhou, ‘A Descriptive Analysis of the Types, Targets, and Relative Frequency of Aggression in Mainstream Pornography,’ Arch Sex Behavior 49.8 (2020): 3041-53.
