Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/120

98 the epithalamic apparatus, though stripped of its sacred character, nevertheless kept its importance as the main element in the nuptial feasts, thriving there more freely than ever. Licentious expression and gross symbolism were essential to it. The Church was powerless to bridle them. Neither Catholic discipline nor Reformed Puritanism could do away with the quasi-publicity of the marriage-bed, which remained in vogue well into the seventeenth century.

It is therefore from an ethnological point of view, as survivals, that we have to regard the mass of obscenities, equivocal sayings and lascivious symbols which we meet in the civilization of the Middle Ages. They were the remains of mysteries that had degenerated into games and amusements. Evidently the people of that epoch did not feel that, in taking pleasure in them, they were infringing the prescriptions of the courtly code; they felt themselves on different soil where courtesy was not current.

It would be an exaggeration to say that in erotic literature the whole comic genre was derived from the epithalamium. Certainly the indecent tale, the farce and the lascivious song had long formed a genre of their own of which the forms of expression were liable to but little variation. Obscene allegory predominates; every trade lent itself to this treatment; the literature of the time abounds in symbolism borrowed from the tournament, the chase or music; but most popular of all was the religious travesty of erotic matters. Besides the grossly comic style of the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, punning with homonymous words like saint and seins, or using in an obscene sense the words for blessing and confession, erotic-ecclesiastical allegory took a more refined form. The poets of the circle of Charles d’Orléans compared their amorous sadness to the sufferings of the ascetic and the martyr. They call themselves “les amoureux de l’observance,” alluding to the severe reform which the Franciscan order had just undergone. Charles d’Orléans begins one of his pieces: