cowgirl

My (at this point future) wife is currently writing her dissertation that involves late antique rhetoric and theology and their view of women. To avoid going crazy dealing with medieval Latin, she regularly switches to reading more theoretical or similarly themed works. I am not sure it works as a distraction, because theoretical works give her migraines (which, you know, makes sense) and similarly themed works often just end up pissing her off. She then shares her annoyance with me (and now with everyone as well) and then I get pissed too, because goddammit, some people...

A case in point, yesterday's distraction: Bettany Hughes' Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore. In chapter 20 on p. 144 (the 2005 Jonathan Cape edition), in her discussion of the salacious description of Helen's - alleged - sexual practices in Joseph of Exeter's De bello Troiano (3.330-338), Hughes makes the following statement:

"When Joseph was writing in the 12th century, it was considered a sin for women to be on top during intercourse. Anything other than the ‘missionary position’ was unnatural because it made the woman physically superior; it was the mark of a whore and was thought to pervert the course of semen."

This gave both of us a pause. Neither of us is a medievalist proper, but both of us know enough of medieval theology, canon law and church history to be extremely suspicious of such sweeping statements. So naturally, we both strained our eyes to check the citation, only to find that there is none. The next paragraph cites a different text, Alain de Lille's Liber de planctu Naturae ([0431D]), in which Helen is blamed for Paris' homosexuality. Hughes then goes on to discuss penances for 'unnatural' sexual positions, but again, only in generic terms and no citations are given for this particular sin. Adultery is mentioned with reference to Canones Theodori and Payer's book on sex in the penitentials, but nothing on sexual positions. At the end of the paragraph, Hughes repeats her claim, with even more detail (p. 145, emphasis mine):

"In the 11th century, St Peter Damian preaches a required period of twenty-five years fasting and penance for married couples over the age of twenty who have indulged in ‘deviant’ sexual positions. These ‘bestial acts’ and ‘whorish embraces’ were thought to lead to all kinds of human misery; one late medieval theologian went so far as to say that God had sent the biblical Flood because he’d espied a couple having sex with the woman on top.¹⁰"

This time, there is a citation, hidden behind endnote no. 10: 

Brundage (1993), 87

i.e. 

Brundage, J. A. (1993) ‘“Let Me Count the Ways”: Canonists and theologians contemplate coital positions’, in J.A. Brundage (ed.), Sex, Law and Marriage in the Middle Ages. Aldershot, Hants: Variorum.

This volume being a collection of Brundage's papers, the citation comes from Brundage's seminal (so the clanker Google keeps pushing tells me) paper of the same title published in 1984 in Journal of Medieval History. The page numbering remains the same, so let us now turn/scroll to p. 87 in Brundage 1984 and...

Well, here's the thing: p.  87 in Brundage 1984 discusses specifically changes to theology of coital positions. It contains 3 specific claims:

1. "The evidence seems to show that late medieval society had reached no general consensus concerning the seriousness of deviations from conventional marital sexual behavior. There seems to have been a popular belief, on the one hand, that whatever their personal peculiarities, the sexual relations of married couples were by definition without sin..."

2. "A few late medieval theologians adopted a moderate view of sexual transgressions within marriage. Marcus von Weida, for example, maintained that sexual sins in marriage were common but not serious enough to require confession and formal penance. Those guilty of such sins, Marcus taught, could earn forgiveness simply by blessing themselves with holy water, saying a pater noster, or giving alms."

3. "Others saw the matter quite differently; and a few of the major moral writers of the Reformation period considered non-standard coital positions a heinous kind of “unnatural” sex. After all, one of them remarked, it was the practice of having sexual intercourse with the woman on top that caused God to send the Biblical flood (Romans 1.26-7) - a drastic cure for this perversion (Lindner 1929: 162)."

If you pay close attention, you will notice that Brundage's claim 1 indirectly contradicts Hughes' claims about some sort of consensus in medieval Christianity - or at least in the 12th century - regarding sexual positions. Brundage's claim 2 undermines it further: if there is indeed such a thing as a sin relating to sexual positions within legally and theologically sanctioned marriage (at least in the 15th-16th century, at Marcus von Weida's time), it is far from "the mark of a whore ... pervert[ing] the course of semen", as Hughes' insists.

And finally - and more importantly - there is no trace of the "one late medieval theologian" whose opinion she relies on. Brundage's claim 3 contains the story of the flood sent by God as punishment for the sin of cowgirl recounted by Hughes, so maybe Brundage's source is where we can find this theologian. Lindner 1929 refers to Dr. Dominikus Lindner's Der usus matrimonii: Eine Untersuchung über seine sittliche Bewertung in der katholische (sic Brundage) Moraltheologie alter und neuer Zeit, so off to p. 162 we go and... nothing. This page concludes book's section 3 on high and late Middle Ages and contains the same description of Marcus von Weida's teachings summarized in Brundage's claim 2. No flood, no cowgirl, nothing.

So to sum up: Hughes makes a claim about a medieval Christian practice and supports it by a reference to "one late medieval theologian" which is in turn supported by a citation to Brundage. The place in Brundage contains the same story Hughes narrates which is supported by a citation of Lindner which, however, does not contain anything even remotely relevant.

I wish I could say this is a uncommon occurrence. It is not. I can't count the times I followed a footnote or endnote in an academic work - or hell, even a popular work - only to find out that this source says nothing even remotely close to what the author claims it does or that it even contradicts it directly. But bulbul, you may retort, people make mistakes, surely we should be more forgiving and less nitpicky. To which I reply, who are you and how did you get in my house, and also, not these kind of mistakes and maybe people who make these kinds of mistakes should not have publishing contracts and endowed chairs.

But what makes it even worse is what this says about the work before us, i.e. Bettany Hughes' Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore. Chapter 20 where this can be found is one of 44 and the only one that directly addresses Helen's alleged sexual transgressions - the chapter title is literally "Helen the Whore". In this chapter Hughes argues that 

"...after the 2nd century AD, in an increasingly Christianised world, the notion of ‘Helen the wanton’ takes firm hold. She becomes typecast not simply as a wilful woman but as a tart."

Her main evidence is Joseph of Exeter's poem and Dante and then... nothing, at least for the Middle Ages; the remaining sources are early modern, late 16th century. And even the argument is weak: Joseph's text hinges on the interpretation of the word 'incumbens' which, according to Hughes (in footnote 6 on p. 143):

"supports either the notion of Helen being ‘on top’ or of her pressing into Paris’ body." 

Hughes obviously chooses the former interpretation and then proceeds to make the claim about how cowgirl was this horrible sin in the Middle Ages which she then completely fails to support, as shown above. In the course of the attempt, she

• cites irrelevant material (adultery is not the same as the horrible sin of cowgirl) 
• gives one source (11th century Peter Damian) without any citation 
• fails to check her sources
• possibly confuses what her sources say (I think that the "one late medieval theologian" she refers to is Marcus von Weida based on her misreading of Brundage 1984: 87)
• thinks it is completely fine to use an unnamed "late medieval theologian" as a source
• and thinks she can cover one entire aspect of the reception of a literary figure in one entire period of human history in 5 pages

It's the last part that is infuriating. But then again, it makes sense: I would expect nothing less from a classicist than to dismiss all of Middle Ages as a single unified period where all the people thought the same, believed the same, and were just a bunch of ignorant superstitious yokels anyway.

Wait, what is that? "[Hughes] graduated with a degree in ancient and modern history." 

So careless and lazy, then. 

mesolect

In the introduction to his Urban Jamaican Creole: Variation in the Mesolect (Benjamins 1999), Peter L. Patrick writes (emphasis and annotation mine):

Accordingly, creolists have often focused on ‘folk speakers’: people living traditional lives in rural areas, especially the elderly, who are usually the best source for archaic speech (Kurath 1949: 7ff). Their conservative varieties, called basilectal, are idealized and opposed conceptually to the most standard local speech, characteristically used by people at the top of the social scale, which is known as the acrolect. Varieties intermediate between the two are referred to as the mesolect; and the scale along which all these are ranged, as the creole continuum. Many creolists have until recently been primarily concerned with describing and analyzing the basilect, which is typically idealized as “the creole” in opposition to everything else — for example, Jamaican Creole as opposed to Jamaican English (the acrolect conceived as a dialect of international English). (Patrick 1999:5) 

I was somewhat stunned to read these words, not because I learned anything new, quite the opposite: these 11 lines (in the physical book) perfectly summarize a problem I have been trying to wrap my head around for the last two or three years. Except where Patrick speaks to and about creolists, my problem involves Arabic varieties and Arabic dialectologists. Disregarding the issue of the creole continuum, Patrick's diagnosis fully applies to a large portion of research in Arabic dialectology:

• focus on elderly rural speakers
• focus on archaic varieties/features
• the idealization of said archaic varieties as "the dialect"

Don't believe me? Then consider the following passage from a recent description of an Arabic variety of ... Well, I don't want to put the authors on the spot and also I am writing a commissioned review of the book, so names shall be changed to protect the not-entirely-innocent. Let's call the rural town Ayn Wadi and the country Watan, the book would then be titled The Dialect of Ayn Wadi (Watan) (emphasis mine):

The major data collected during the field research are free speech audio recordings of improvised narratives about customs and activities in the town. Many informants I tried to work with were unable to narrate facts and stories in front of a recorder without mixing the local dialect with standard Watani. With these informants, I could only check lexemes without recording them to verify the recorded data with a broader spectrum of speakers. All the speakers were over 50 and many recalled the dialect spoken by their parents. The younger generation represented by youths and children were only briefly interviewed and they seemed to preserve only a few of the archaic features..."

It's all there: elderly speakers, archaic features, and the idealization of varieties spoken by elders as THE dialect of Ain Wadi. Only data from speakers over 50 is taken into account and on top of that, all the texts in the book were produced by people in their late 70s and early 80s. And then they are exactly what you would expect if you have ever read any description of an Arabic variety: memories of the old world, religious traditions and holidays, and traditional crafts.

Now there is nothing wrong with collecting spoken data from elders, far from it; there should be thousands upon thousands of field researchers armed with RØDE Wireless GO III doing exactly that all over the world. The problem here is that if you discount all the speakers younger than 50 - many of whom, nota bene, report not on their language, but on the language of their parents - is the variety you describe really the dialect of Ayn Wadi? No, of course not. Such research is not only misleading at best and disingenous at worst, but also - and this is far more important - constitutes a missed opportunity. Variation within the dialect could have been studied in multiple dimensions,  the contact between the local dialect and standard Watani or even between the local dialect and the other varieties spoken in the immediate area could have been examined, and of course we could have so much data on the speech of young people in a complex linguistic landscape, not to mention data on standard Watani (if there even is such a thing). But alas, speakers were apparently turned away (or, worse, their data was discarded) because they did not "preserve... the archaic features". That is less than ideal for the field, not to mention a questionable use of the money provided by whatever funding mechanism financed the research.

Don't get me wrong, this is not how things are done everywhere in Arabic dialectology and The Dialect of Ayn Wadi (Watan) is not a bad book. It is, however, a perfect example of one way of doing Arabic dialectology, a way that we should leave behind for good.

fry

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming for an announcement. My colleague and friend Hiram Smith (Bucknell University) has written a book for popular audiences titled "Wassup, My Nigga: The Hidden History of a Controversial Word". As the name may suggest, the book tackles the history and the sociolinguistics of the n-word(s?) within the context AAVE, as well as outside of it. The book is now available for pre-order in all the usual places and will be available in September this year.

The book has already received a glowing recommendation from John R. Rickford, one of the preeminent experts on AAVE. In light of this, y'all probably dgaf as to what I have to say, but since I've read the book (more accurately, a draft of it), I will say it anyway: the book does an excellent job discussing the word, its history and the fine points of its usage  in a very entertaining way, using recent examples from media and tapping into current discourse. What I like even more about the book is the metadiscussion Hiram engages in, where he considers not only the role of linguistics can and should play in the discussion of - shall we say - sensitive matters of language, but specifically on the role of native, i.e. African American, linguists in this discussion. As someone who is white as could be and also works on creoles, this is a topic I am quite sensitive to and I very much appreciate Hiram's insights.

With Hiram's permission, I am reposting here an overview and the table of contents.

Oh and in case you were wondering about the title of the post, it comes from this scene from episode 2x11 of the cartoon TV show The Boondocks that perfectly illustrates some of the complexities the book addresses.