This is the first issue of this magical weekly newsletter about phallic art.
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Around the year 1230, a French scholar started writing a poem about love and seduction titled The Romance of the Rose [La Roman de la Rose]. Its purpose was to teach people about romantic love. It comes in two parts: the first written by Guillaume de Lorris, and the second written by Jean de Meun.
While the work was popular and influential, not everyone was amused.
The Romance of the Rose, particularly de Meun’s writing struck a nerve with women who disagreed with its depiction of ladies as deceptive, passive lovers, incapable of intellectual activities such as writing. He wrote:
those who do not write with their ‘tools’ […] on those beautiful, precious tablets Nature has made for them […] should suffer the loss of their penis and testicles
‘Tools’ has a literal double meaning: pen and penis.
Jeanne de Montbaston, a 14th century Parisian bookseller and illuminator (meaning the person who decorates book margins), illustrated dozens of copies of The Romance of the Rose, and she didn’t waste her ink drawing subordinate women.
She drew this instead
and this
and this
There are different interpretations of her promiscuous nuns taking ownership of penises. Some think she couldn’t read and that this was a lucky accident. To me, her work goes way further than that; as if she’s saying: women can handle pens much better than you could’ve ever imagined.