Or if you prefer your poetry heartfelt, what about the work of the Frenchwoman Camille de Morel, who mourns her sister:
Lucrece, why did you leave the earth alone,
To ascend into heaven, why did the fates give this to you without me?
You who were once the sweet solace of my sad mind,
My darling, and half of my soul ...
Above all, dead sister, it is my grief to remember
You used to cultivate the sacred gifts of the divine Muses,
It is my grief to remember, since I lack you, my dear,
And what you are in your excellence, so swiftly snatched.
But it helps to remember, since a person who lived without sin
Lived long, and does not know how to die." (p. 193)
Starting in republican Rome, Stevenson makes a case for groups of women poets in the Ancient city as more established, and establishment, figures than they are commonly portrayed. (I've already posted on the aristocrat Sulpicia and her relationship with her lectrix.) Male scholars have been inclined to assume that the women poets of whom we know, such as this Sulpicia (there were other later ones), were no more than educated courtesans (directed, surely, by the predjudices of their own times).
Instead Stevenson presents an image of a rich, aristocratic, respectable young woman from an educated family - her father having a literary reputation for translating Greek verse. So, Stevenson says: “Sulpicia insists on her control over the relationship [in a love poem], where her male counterparts insist on their lack it it ... she makes no claim to be either sexually libertarian or even socially independent .. she never implies that she has had lovers in the past, threatens to take another lover, or suggests that she might be unfaithful." (p. 41.)
Then, through the Christian period, Stevenson, through her writers from within and without convents across the continent, provides a sensible, nuanced discussion of the way in which the walls that surrounded nuns were sometimes a prison, sometimes a welcome protection. But whichever was the case at a particular time and place, Stevenson shows the nuns doing their best to improve their condition. Hildegard of Bingen, one of her best-known characters, who'd begun to see visions at the age of three and went on to produce "a prodigious oeuvre in cosmology, ethics, medicine and mystical poetry". Hers was also a political mind, moving her nunnery to a more independent position, away from the close supervision of male clerics by asserting she had been forbidden by God "to utter or write anything more in that place". Pressure from her extensive international following did the rest.
Article comments