Jailrespecter gets interviewed on history, feminism and marriage structure
How the middle ages changed everything
1. How would you describe yourself as a scholar?
I am interested in the formation of the nation-state between, approximately, the late 1400s and the early 1800s. In its rhetorical aspect, this formation relied on a vindication of politics over and against religion. It also involved a denigration of the domestic sphere, of women and children, but also of anyone perceived not to be the ideal civic subject. “Rich white male” isn’t a terrible shorthand, although priests and male religious were also perceived to be compromised outsiders. This is not central to my scholarship, but something I often talk about is how misogyny and racism in their modern forms are a product of this early modern deification of politics, not an extension of the Middle Ages. For example, there were almost no witch trials before the early modern era: a few dozen, perhaps, over hundreds of years. In medieval Europe, slavery was illegal and witchcraft was generally believed to be a myth. This changes very quickly in the sixteenth century, and it takes hundreds of years for society to recover. It is still recovering.
2.What got you interested in the history of theology?
My interests have changed quite a bit over the past ten years, since I started grad school, but right now I am interested in natural-law jurisprudence as the medieval equivalent of international human rights law. Earlier this week, I gave a lecture about how slavery and the subjugation of Native Americans were universally ruled illegal during the Spanish Conquest of the Americas, but unfortunately these rulings were only partially enforced, partly because of the greed of the crown and also because a weak papacy was no longer able to enforce international law with selective excommunications. At one point the King of Spain even kidnapped the Pope. So I would say I’m very interested in how theology on the one hand can control the aspirations of politicians and heads of state, but also can be coopted by material power imbalances, which I think happened on a massive scale during the early modern era in ways we’re still struggling to understand. Secular human rights law emerged as a reaction to the failures and cooptation of theology, broadly construed. It was not invented ex nihilo by a bunch of middle-class white men in 1776 or 1940.
3. Say more about the Christianity vs sex cultism.
One book that was revelatory for me was Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium. It showed how medieval apocalyptic movements popped up, particularly in Germany, appearing to offer a pared-down, salutary alternative to the pomp and hierarchy of official Catholicism. In reality these movements showed their true colors very quickly: they were polygamous cults, with the ‘wives’ reserved for the alleged prophet, which typically ended in a Waco-style standoff or a Heaven’s Gate-style mass suicide. At a very different level of society, in the early modern era, I think it’s not inaccurate to characterize Henry VIII’s religious antinomianism and extreme polygamy in a similar light, and, later on, Joseph Smith’s invention of Mormonism and Keith Ranière’s branding of women in what was ostensibly a lifestyle club. To put it bluntly, charismatic men frequently realize that the best way to get a lot of female sex slaves is to start their own religion. I genuinely think that this is a constant of human behavior that will never change, so society needs some kind of mechanism to control it. Obviously cult leaders should be punished, but there are cultural and societal factors that can also make it harder for them to pop up in the first place. The imposition of monogamy is one aspect of it, but removing pressure on women to marry can also improve things. Christianity emphasizes the superiority of virginity to marriage and the lifelong bond of marriage for those who do marry. Setting aside the legal situation, women who have internalized those norms are far less likely to fall for men who try to recruit them into polygamous cults.
4. What are some historical examples that are relevant to the modern kink shamer?
This is the question that I struggled with the most. You can find a lot of sex cultism in the Cohn book I mentioned. One thing I talk about a lot on Twitter is the honor killings of young women in late imperial Rome who wanted to become nuns. This is, essentially, sex cultism taken to the level of the state: if women can’t reproduce for the state, they’re worthless. And, centuries later, in Tudor England (1500s) and Bourbon Spain (1700s) - even in France in the early 1900s - agents of the state were dragging people out of monasteries and convents because of fear that people in religious orders, no more than 1% of the population in any of these cases, were dragging down the birth rate and should be forced to marry and reproduce. There’s something in the social sciences called the “Western European marriage pattern,” which is basically that in medieval Western Europe, where the Catholic Church prevailed over the Orthodox Church, you can observe the following trends: a) women marry late, in the middle or late twenties, not late teens or early twenties b) a large proportion of women, up to one third, do not marry c) the age gap between couples is small or at times even favors the woman. This can be attributed to the Christian valuation of virginity, the absolute prohibition on abortion and infanticide, and the emphasis on the equal dignity of the sexes - as well as the insistence, sealed in by the Council of Trent, that all marriages must be totally free and not compelled by families or parents. I want to emphasize that I am not making some kind of racial argument here. These are cultural practices that emerged from the specific theological beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church. If they survive in secular form in Europe they are on borrowed time. The increasing comfort of our culture with sex work is one sign that they are beginning to fall apart.
5.Say more about prostitution and the church
There has famously been a lot of controversy in the Catholic Church over the feasibility of making prostitution illegal. To be clear, it has always been considered to be a very serious, mortal sin to be a john, while the Church typically considers the prostituted woman less culpable and, throughout the Middle Ages into the present, has preached what a worthy thing it is for a man to marry a prostitute so she doesn’t have to do sex work anymore - this was a huge change from the ancient Roman view, wherein a woman who had engaged in prostitution was permanently stigmatized and forbidden from marrying a respectable man. As I mentioned in a previous answer, the Catholic Church made the prostitution of slaves illegal almost immediately after Constantine. When the Church punished offenders or compelled the secular government to do so, they punished pimps, a practice codified at the Council of Elvira in AD 300. Another way of attacking johns was to deny them a Christian burial and last rites if they died in the brothel, which was a practice throughout the Middle Ages. However, not all Christian commentators have agreed that legal abolition is possible. For the most part, the Church fathers of the late Roman empire encouraged a complete abolition of the sex trade, although Augustine was skeptical that it was possible legally and most of the others were speaking of a reform of general morality rather than a legal campaign. Prostitution had a religious function in Ancient Rome which was particularly offensive to the Church fathers, a visible symbol of the moral bankruptcy of Roman religion, and that along with the rape of slaves was considered to be a higher priority than doing away with the sex trade altogether. However, there is definitely a shift towards more toleration for prostitution in the 12th and 13th century - hence the famous claim by St Thomas Aquinas that prostitution was a necessary evil. During this period, into the early modern period, there was generally less effort to prosecute pimps than there had been in the earlier Middle Ages. However, late medieval preachers pushed back, such as Berthold von Regensburg and Aeneas Sylvius, who became Pius II. Another reason for the proliferation of prostitution during this period was that, as the early modern era approached, the trade guilds made it much harder than it had been for women to maintain a legitimate profession.
6.The usual narrative is that Christianity oppressed women who were allegedly more free in polytheism, how do you counter this?/ Can you say more about Christianity raising the status of women and helping to support consent?
The first question you should be asking when you’re thinking about the status of women under paganism, Roman or Germanic, is “which women?” Slavery was extremely prevalent in both societies, so that a large minority of the population was enslaved at any given time. Aristocratic Roman women had significantly more rights compared to women in other societies but raping a slave or a prostitute (and most prostitutes were slaves) was pretty much unpunishable. Catholic Rome made the sexual exploitation of slaves illegal as soon as Christianity was legalized, and instituted pro-manumission policies that eventually led to the disappearance of slavery throughout Western Europe until AD 1450. Likewise, slavery was extremely common among pre-Christian Germanic tribes. Female slaves were typically forced into sex slavery for chieftains. As in Rome, Christianization first encouraged the better treatment of slaves, then the abolition of slavery. Saint Hallvard of Oslo, born an aristocrat, died defending a slave woman from a lynch mob. Before Christianity, the murder of a male or female slave was regarded as inconsequential, except in terms of value lost by the owner. A slave raped by someone other than the master received no restitution, but the master might receive a payment. Marriage between slaves was not possible - something else immediately changed by institutional Christianity. Even aristocratic women in tribal Germanic societies had fewer formal political rights than Roman women, who had almost none (though that began to change a little shortly before the time of Christ), although Roman commentators romanticized the supposed reverence for witchcraft maintained by tribal leaders. Germanic tribes were more commonly monogamous than some other pagan tribes, but high-ranking men were typically polygamous, while adultery was punished only for women (sometimes by death). Marriage was rarely free and was often conducted by purchase (the husband purchases a bride against her will) or by capture (kidnapping).
What an interesting interview, is this the @jailrespecter on Twitter? I sent a follow request but her tweets seem to be protected unfortunately.