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In Ancient Greek, there are basically two words for love: philia and eros. The first of these expresses fondness and affection, and can be applied to anything from lovers and friends to tastes and attitudes. The Greeks used philia to indicate preferences of any kind - even sartorial or political - and also used compounds with philia to express ideas like ambition (philotimia, "love of honour"), industriousness (philoponia, "love of work") or hospitality (philoxenia, "love of strangers"). Some of these terms survive even in the English language - for instance in the study of philology ("love of words") or philosophy ("love of knowledge"), or in the act of philanthropy ("love of human beings").
The second word, eros, is personified in the child of Aphrodite, and while it can mean romantic love in the broader sense, it tends to imply physical attraction, desire, and lust. This word is applied mainly to the specific context of relationships between humans; ancient "erotic" texts are usually about the eros that leisure-class men felt towards handsome boys. Like our concept of lust, eros did not imply or require philia. In an ideal relationship, the two would go together, but the Greeks recognised that they all too often did not.
The problem faced by modern translators and scholars is that philia doesn't quite match what we tend to call "love" - it is not exclusive to a romantic context, and seems to be infinitely malleable and universally applicable. Meanwhile eros, the alternative, does have the right contextual connotations, but it doesn't quite express the whole breadth of physical and emotional attachment that we consider to be included in the word "love". There are only these two partial terms, with our notion of love sitting somewhere in the overlap between them. There isn't any word in Ancient Greek that precisely describes this space.
This lack of a single well-defined and recognisable term makes a lot of individual cases open to interpretation. It's this vagueness that feeds endless controversies over Greek homosexuality and pederasty, the nature of marriage, the role of prostitution in Greek society. Eros - is it love, or only lust? Philia - is it love, or only friendship? These things will never be entirely clear - and all because the Greeks gave love a bad name.
Here’s a groan-inducingly literal one for you all.
Medieval scribes made mistakes all the time – it came with the territory. It’s no surprise that names often got muddled up, as people sometimes played fast and loose with the spelling of their own names. Historical names, which played by their own etymological and phonological rules, were particularly treacherous. Classical names, for those scribes without a working knowledge of Latin and Greek, could prove a real nightmare. Classical names in widely disseminated and recopied texts, in which every scribe had an opportunity to bungle it and pass on their error in the world’s slowest and most canonical game of Telephone, might do anything.
Which I suppose must account for the fact that in no less than 13 surviving manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales the words ‘O Cupid...’ are written as ‘Occupied...’.
Talk about giving Love a bad name?!
Early Modern Jesuits were often concerned that love would give them a bad name, or at least sex -- discouraging and punishing excessive familiarity between Jesuits and their women benefactors or between Jesuits and nuns/beguines, excessive familiarity between teachers and their students, and so on. But there was evidently some anxiety about same-sex improprieties between Jesuits as well.
One of the Jesuit brethren went into the lavatory, and he got ready and undressed himself with less care and more haste than was proper, when someone else, who was already inside, saw him like that, he gave him a spank on the buttocks. This happened before I arrived in Rome. Our Father Ignatius told me about it, and I clearly grasped from the way he told the story that it was nothing more than a prank, but he said that only because of this he had ordered him to be dismissed at once.
Or, in another instance:
[a] brother who was washing the feet of a sick man; he put his hand a little higher than was necessary. The sick man was a foreign Brother, whom he had not known or had any familiarity with previously, which might have given rise to some suspicion that the act was ill intentioned. Nevertheless, as soon as our Father [Ignatius] heard of it, he ordered him to be expelled. The fathers came to him and begged him insistently to punish him in some other way, but not to expel him completely. The Father was not willing, but finally, after many requests, he granted them that he should be allowed to make a pilgrimage…
So, pretty rigorous about no contact between men that was even potentially suspect. Intense friendships were fine, and in fact I suspect they thrived among confrères, between the culture of scholarly work and letter-writing and the level of separation between Jesuits and their birth families. But don't even think about getting fresh, or you're toast. Don't touch anybody's face, especially not during a lecture. (Okay, this one's fair -- descriptions of teacher behavior toward students that precipitated disciplinary action during the 16th and 17th centuries are pretty untoward.) If you're struggling with erotic desire, don't look at anybody and mentally categorize them as good-looking or bad-looking. In fact, if you're struggling with erotic desire, maybe don't look at anybody at all if you can help it. Save all your tender, tremulous, aching, ardent, amatory thoughts for Jesus, where they belong.
But the Society of Jesus wasn't always as rigidly no-homo unromantic as it might be. Late 17th century French Jesuits wrote poetry praising perfectly complementary yet agonizingly chaste same-sex friendship between youths. Jacques Vaniére wrote a whole series of eclogues on friendship inspired by the loss of a beloved confrère:
I had collected such sweet fruits from his friendship that, when I found I could barely call my spirit away from them, I decided to write about friendship itself, and to console the pain I had experienced from the death of my friend with the memory of that very friendship. Therefore, reader, you can take as true that which I have recorded about my dearest comrade [one Father Aribat] under the name of Aegon in this final eclogue; in the others I did not intend to indicate anyone [in particular] but merely to adorn my eclogues with made-up examples and to relieve the tedium of instruction. (trans. Yasmin Haskell)
And Ovid's advice on getting along with your girlfriend was freely reinterpreted by Jesuit students into advice for young men getting along with their guy friends. Write persuasive letters! Send him praise and presents! Find out how he really feels about you! There's a little bit of a dating-advice-column vibe there -- for more on spicy 18th century Jesuit poetry, read Yasmin Haskell's "Arts and Games of Love: Genre, Gender and Special Friendships in Eighteenth-Century Jesuit Poetry". In fact, read anything by Yasmin Haskell if you have the chance.
But… chastity is an ideal plenty of Jesuits fell short of. Missionaries who took wives, native or otherwise, could look forward to being relieved of their position and likely being drummed out of the Society altogether. (Missionaries who did not take wives could look forward to being razzed for it by the people they were trying to convert, especially in New France.) But in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries there's a couple high-profile scandals involving Jesuits breaking their vows with women, and a fair share of dastardly Jesuits with worldly designs on their sexy female pupils turn up in pornography with an anti-clerical bent during this same period. (Who wants to buy me a copy of The Amours of Sainfroid and Eulalia?) And now if you want a hot priest character for your book/movie/dating sim/etc. a Jesuit is probably your guy.
the historical Ladislao Gutiérrez as represented in María Luisa Bemberg's 1984 movie Camila -- young, politically active, progressive, and handsome, but ultimately doomed when his clandestine affair with aristocratic heiress Camila O'Gorman escalates to an elopement in 1840s Argentina. Politics, class, and religion collide, and ultimately both Gutiérrez and the pregnant O'Gorman are executed by firing squad.
the historical Urbain Grandier as represented in Ken Russell's 1971 The Devils -- as sexy as this movie can be said to be! Grandier was accused of witchcraft, fornication, and corrupting an entire convent full of Ursuline nuns, and subsequently tortured and executed. If you take Russell's word for it, every single Ursuline nun in France was a total babe.
the fictionalized, tragically horny Father LaForgue as represented in the 1991 film Black Robe, who struggles with his celibacy in 1634 New France, now Quebec.
the completely fictional Andrew Kiernan in the 1999 film Stigmata -- played by vintage Gabriel Byrne, so you know he's sexy. He investigates an apparently inexplicable case of you-know-what, uncovers secret evidence of a cover-up orchestrated by the Catholic church, and carries around Patricia Arquette wrapped in a bedsheet.
in a depressing and perverse sort of way, doomed missionary Emilio Sandoz from Mary Doria Russell's 1996 novel The Sparrow. Sandoz' torture on the planet Rakhat echoes the experiences of some Early Modern Jesuits in New France, particularly the mutilation of the hands, but his experience of sexual slavery is meant to suggest a science fiction first-contact scenario where Earth's humans are the victims of imperial violence rather than the imperialists.
(Hey, do we know what religious order the guys from Vatican Miracle Examiner belong to? Finally, a truly nuanced depiction of Catholic religious phenomena.)
Halfway through writing this, I realized this also fits under this week's theme of Law!
I can never forget this sordid straight-from-the-tabloids story from 18th century Northern Japan:
[...] a 1714 incident from Sendai domain (Miyagi prefecture). Tanakaya Kiemon, whose name suggests that he was a merchant or artisan, had been "diverting himself in nanshoku" with his servant (genin) Gonpachi. This situation aroused the envy of Kiemon's wife, who requested that she, too, be allowed to share in Gonpachi's favors. Kiemon agreed to send Gonpachi to her bed, but, after the relationship was consummated, had a change of heart—out of jealousy for whom? one wonders—and locked her up on the pretext that she was mentally deranged (ranshin). Authorities investigating the situation found the wife to be sane, but guilty of adultery (fugi), an act they deemed inexcusable "even if the husband had permitted it." The adulterers, both wife and servant, were thus banished to the isle of Aji. Kiemon, on the other hand, received the nominally lighter sentence of exile north of the Kitakami River despite the fact that he was deemed responsible for abetting his wife's infidelity and had misrepresented the situation to authorities.
- p.126, Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950
I can't say how these respective sentences would have played out. Being banished to a northern island, certainly to heavy labour, is horrific, but Pflugfelder's use of "nominally lighter sentence" suggests the instigator of the whole incident also suffered. Northern exile in the far north of Sendai is no picnic. But as a modern reader, it's striking that the male instigator of the whole situation got off the easiest.
Women's adultery in Edo Period discourse was a breach of the fundamental order of society, akin to treason. No matter the circumstances, there should be harsh punishment. The shogunate mandated the death penalty for adulterous women and their partners in shogunate-controlled regions. Fortunately for the woman in this story, the 18th century domains, including Sendai, increasingly moved away from the shogunate’s example. The penalty for adultery in Sendai in 1714 was still supposed to be beheading, no matter the circumstances, so this sentence of banishment was an act of leniency. In 1726, Sendai domain formalized the practice by adding banishment as a potential punishment for adultery.
To a modern eye, it’s all still very horrific. So, it’s a bit of a relief to turn to the actual practice of common people and local officials, who usually paid no attention to these high-level moral and legal pronouncements. Despite laws demanding the death penalty, adultery for most peasants was a rift between families, to be resolved by apologies and official negotiations for a reconciliation, or failing that, a divorce. In contrast to the awful story with which I opened this comment, here’s an Edo Period adultery story that made me laugh, related in Amy Stanley’s article, referenced above.
In 1863, a peasant woman named Sono ran off with her lover Tokutaro, taking her husband Kansuke’s clothes. The parents of the adulterous couple sent apologies to Kansuke’s family, promising their children’s future good behaviour. Tokutaro would keep away from Sono, while
Sono's father promised that his daughter would bring back the stolen clothes and return to Kansuke's household. If she ever ran off again, Kansuke would be free to divorce her. Apparently, Sono's initial act of adultery and theft was not sufficient grounds for divorce. Sono's father thought that Kansuke had the responsibility to remain married to his daughter, even if she was an adulteress. (p. 328)
Kansuke’s family finally agreed to a reconciliation instead of a divorce. Stanley sums up the whole affair:
By apologizing for her behavior and guaranteeing her future good conduct, a father could shield his daughter from the consequences of her behavior. In Chikamatsu's plays, the adulteress's father was often the first to lead the charge against her, and in cases of adultery among samurai in Okayama, fathers sometimes took responsibility for murdering their faithless daughters. In contrast, Sono's father simply agreed to apprehend his daughter if she stole any more clothes. (p.329)
Well if there's one thing pirates are deserving of it's their lustful reputation and sometimes they committed extreme sexual harassment and rape. Henry Morgan, one of the most famous buccaneers, was personally accused of this after his sack of the city of Panama in 1671 in a book published in Dutch in 1678 by a man named Alexandre Exquemelin who had been a surgeon with the buccaneers and claimed to have been an eyewitness to these events.
However, despite being guilty of blatant piracy among many other things, Henry Morgan had by the time the book was published been acquitted and actually knighted by Charles II of England in 1674, who then made him the new colonial governor of Jamaica. When the first English translation of Exquemelin's book, called The Buccaneers of America, was published in 1684, Henry Morgan used his influence to sue two of the English publishers for libel and win, getting £200 pounds from each (equivalent to something like $40,000 today). Some of the most egregious accusations against Morgan were temporarily removed, but he died in 1688 and later editions let the original text creep back in.
Here is the relevant excerpt translated from the original 1678 Dutch edition of De Americaensche Zee-Roovers about Morgan's very coercive attempts to woo and bribe a captured married Spanish woman into having sex with him. Also keep in mind that Henry Morgan himself was married to his cousin Mary Elizabeth Morgan at this time, but clearly that didn't concern him.
They committed many more such cruelties. They showed little mercy, even to the monks, and would have shown none but for the hope of extracting money from them. Nor did they spare the women, except for those who yielded themselves completely. The rovers had a way of dealing with those women who held out. They would let them leave the church, which was being used as their prison, as if giving them a chance to go wash themselves -- but once a woman was in their hands they would work their will upon her, or beat her, or starve her, or similarly torment her. Morgan, being the general, should have set a better example, but he was no better than the rest. Whenever a beautiful prisoner was brought in, he at once sought to dishonor her. Let me, while on this topic, tell of a woman so steadfast her name deserves to live.
The buccaneers, returning from the sea, had brought prisoners with them from the islands of Tobago and Tobagilla, among others the young and very beautiful wife of a rich merchant. I shall not dwell on her beauty, more than to say that no lovelier woman could be found in all Europe. Her husband had gone to Peru on business, as is the custom in those parts, and, taking her valuables, this woman had fled with some of her friends.
The moment Morgan noticed her, he ordered them to put her apart from her friends, alone in a room with a female slave, though the lady wept and begged she might stay with those she knew. Morgan let her have everything she might need, and at mealtime sent her a dish or two from his own table, even though he had given her a slave girl to cook for her.
The woman at first put all this to Morgan's credit, and was much surprised, concluding that the buccaneers could not be so evil as she and many other Spanish women had supposed. ...
Each day Morgan took a stroll into the church where the prisoners were held, and made a point of looking in at the lattice of the room where this woman was kept apart. He would greet her, and sometimes chat, for he spoke good Spanish. He also began to allow her friends to visit her. For three days this went on; then he sent a message, asking her to consent to her own dishonour, and afterwards made a similar demand directly, in person, giving her at the same time several previous jewels.
The lady, as chaste as she was well-bred, thanked him and admitted she was in his power, but said that from the first she had noticed his great personal courtesy toward her, which she hoped would not decrease. She found it hard to believe he had violent intentions, as it ill became a leader who wielded real power to make such demands on one whose life was in his hands.
These civil words could not cool Morgan's inflamed lust. He besought her all the more vehemently, promising to give her back the value of all she had lost, in the form of jewels. She had for her part used every turn of phrase she could think of, but Morgan would not leave her in peace. So persistently did he badger her that at last she felt obliged to tell him he would have to let her soul go free before he could work his will on her body, since she would never give in so long as she lived. After telling him this she kept silent and would say no more.
This woman's refusal so enraged Morgan that finally he had her locked up in another room, alone, and forbade the others to go near her. Her clothes were taken away, and each day she was given so little to eat she was almost dying with hunger. Yet this did not weaken her resolve; every day she prayed to God that if it so pleased him to inflict this punishment upon her, he would give her the strength to resist Morgan's violence.
Morgan had this woman tormented in this way on the pretext that she had been in touch with the Spaniards, and had sent out a slave with several letters. I would never have believed a woman could be so steadfast, had I not myself seen her and spoken with her. Once or twice I helped by bringing her food, though this had to be done on the sly. Later in my narrative I shall speak once more of this woman, telling how misfortune dogged her, not only amidst enemies, but also with her friends.
...
Next morning they were on the march again, and the weeping and wailing began afresh. One party of buccaneers marched in front, the prisoners were in the middle, and the rest of the rovers brought up the rear. The woman of whom we have spoken was made to march by herself between two buccaneers, suffering great discomfort from the heat of the sun and difficulty of the path -- as did many of the ladies, not being accustomed to such hardship. But Morgan did not prevent his men from giving a helping hand to the women, with the single exception of this unfortunate lady. (I call her unfortunate, and not without reason, for it seemed that ill-luck followed her everywhere.)
She had instructed some monks of her acquaintance, whom she trusted, to fetch money from a certain place to pay her ransom. Instead of using it for this purpose, they released some of their brethren with the luckless woman's money. If the truth had not been revealed by a slave, who was bringing her letter, Morgan would have carried her off to Jamaica. However, when the buccaneers saw for themselves that the money really was for the lady's ransom, they let her go and seized the monks.
For a while, the official stance of the Taiping government was that everyone was a brother or sister through Jesus, making any sexual or romantic thought literally an act of incest.
The consequences that derived from this belief were... interesting, to say the least. Between 1853 and 1855, men and women were supposed to occupy separate quarters of the Taiping capital at Nanjing to avoid intermingling, but the ban went even more extreme than that. To appropriate a quote from The Mikado, "The youth who winked a roving eye | Or breathed a non-connubial sigh | Was thereupon condemned to die". Yes, you could literally be condemned to death for flirting, at least according to the 天條書 (Tiāntiáoshū) (1852). Gilbert and Sullivan don't seem so absurd now, eh?
However, it's clear that there must have been some divide in opinion, if not indeed self-contradiction, between the Taiping's senior leadership over the role women were supposed to have. At both the start and end of the war, women served in the Taiping forces in substantial quantities, the memoirist Augustus Lindley claiming that women made up 25% of Taiping troops – presumably at the start because Hakka women worked in the fields and did not bind their feet, making them viable warriors, and at the end because the practice had been banned and so more able-bodied women were available. However, the Taiping kings generally maintained sizeable harems, and it appears that a great degree of servility was demanded in Hong's case. Yang Xiuqing, on the other hand, had some women in Hong's court bureaucracy dismissed, according to Volume II of the 天父下凡詔書 (Tiānfù xiàfán zhàoshū), published some time between 1852 and 1854, but maintained a woman, Fu Shanxiang, in the position of chancellor until some time before his death, and had her capital punishment for drunkenness remitted, and had a harem of his own (while preaching the virtues of abstinence for commoners).
Aside from that digression, it's clear that the policy of segregation could not be maintained, given that by 1856 it had been quietly rescinded. Unsurprisingly, the Taiping leaders had never come across the Lysistrata.
