From Hali Meiðhad (“holy maidenhood”) of the Katherine Group (translation into modern English by Huber and Robertson)…
A letter on virginity for the encouragement of virgins.
(1) Of these three states (maidenhood and widowhood, and wedlock is the
third) you may, by the degrees of their bliss, know what and by how much the one surpasses the others. (2) For wedlock has a thirty-fold fruit in Heaven, widowhood sixty-fold. (3) Maidenhood, with a hundred-fold, surpasses both. (4) See then by this: whoever descends into wedlock from her maidenhood, by how many degrees she falls downwards…
(1) “No,” you will say, “it is not at all for that filth. (2) But a man’s strength
is worth a great deal, and I need his help for sustenance and for food.
(1) You say that the wife has much comfort of her husband if they are well-
matched, and either is in all ways satisfied with the other. (2) Yes, but it is seldom seen on earth. (3) Though their comfort and their delight be like this now, what is in it mostly but the flesh’s filth or the world’s vanity, which all come to sorrow and to pain in the end? (4) And not only in the end but always, for many things will anger and annoy them and cause them to worry, and to grieve and to sigh for each other’s misfortunes.
(10) What will the joining between you in bed be like? (11) Even those who love each other best often quarrel in there, though they do not show it in the morning, and often, however well they love each other, they bitterly irritate each other over many nothings when they are by themselves. (12) She must endure his will greatly against her will — however much she loves him — often with great misery. (13) All his foulnesses and his indecent love play however filled with filth they may be (in bed, that is!), she must, will she nill she, endure them all.
Look, blessed woman: once the knot of wedlock is knotted, be he idiot or cripple, be he what so ever he may be, you must stay with him.
(1) But now, say it happens that she has all her desire for a child that she
wishes for; and let us look at what happiness she gets from that: in the conceiving of that, her flesh is at once soiled with that filth (as it has been shown before); in the carrying of it, there is always heaviness and hard pain; in its birth the strongest of all stabbing pains and sometimes death; in its upbringing many a weary hour. (2) As soon as it comes into this life it brings with it more worry than joy, especially to the mother. … (5) And often it happens that that dearest and most bitterly paid for child upsets and grieves his parents the most in the end.
(6) Let us now go further and look at what joy arises thereafter in the carrying of the child, when that offspring in you awakens and grows, and how many miseries awaken at once with that, which work woe enough for you, fight against your own flesh and make war upon your own nature with many miseries. (7) Your rosy face will grow lean and become green as grass. (8) Your eyes will grow dim and will darken underneath, and from your brain’s turning your head aches sorely. (9) Inside, in your womb, a swelling in your belly that puffs you up like a water-skin, your bowels’ pain and stitches in your side, and pain in your aching loins, heaviness in every limb, your breast’s burden of your two paps, and the streams of milk that flow from them. (10) Your beauty is completely ruined with wilting, your mouth is bitter, and all that you chew nauseating. (11) And what food your stomach scornfully accepts (that is, with distaste) it casts out again.
(1) After all this there comes, from that child born in this way, wailing and
weeping which will wake you up around midnight, …
Fairness doctrine alternate perspective:
https://www.purplemotes.net/2019/09/15/joy-sex-medieval/
we live in an age where this:
Cunque manu clausas valvas aperire volebam,
fregit poste seram protinus ipsa Venus.
Venerat illius conductu pulcra puella,
hoscula mille modis que mihi cara daret.
Flora sibi nomen, quia florida sunt sua facta,
gutture mella gerens, mellea verba dedit
rendered into English as this:
Although I intended to open the closed, latched doors by hand,
a Venus herself burst through while I was separating them.
A beautiful young woman approached via that means
to give me loving kisses in a thousand ways.
Flora was her name, and florid were her deeds.
She bore honey in her throat and spoke honeyed words.
gets interpreted this way:
Like most men throughout history, this young man didn’t want to rape the young woman that he loved. The young man’s concern for the young woman’s consent contrasts with how she burst into his bedroom without asking permission:
when the passage is clearly anatomical in reference.
which supports the blogger’s final argument that:
The great ancient poet-philosopher Lucretius provides the answer: women and men must make a true and authentic swerve from dominant delusions. They must live in the day-to-day reality of ordinary life, not in abstract ideology.
Philip, believe science when it says (through evolution) that anyone sensible to such arguments has long since been selected out of the gene pool.
There’s always John Barth (from “Our Story”, the boldly opening, but certainly not the only open and bold, chapter of “The Tidewater Tales”):
https://archive.org/details/tidewatertalesno0000bart/page/n21/mode/2up
“KATHERINE SHERRITT SAGAMORE, 39 YEARS OLD
AND 8-1/2 MONTHS PREGNANT,
BECALMED IN OUR ENGINELESS SMALL SAILBOAT
AT THE END OF A STICKY JUNE CHESAPEAKE AFTERNOON
AMID EVERY SIGN OF THUNDERSTORMS APPROACHING
FROM ACROSS THE BAY,
AND SPEAKING AS SHE SOMETIMES DOES IN VERSE,
SET HER HUSBAND A TASK.
Tell me a story of women and men
Like us: like us in love for ten
Years, lovers for seven, spouses
Two, or two point five. “Their House’
Increase” is the tale I’d wish you’d tell.
Why did that perfectly happy pair,
Like us, decide this late to bear
A child? Why toil so to conceive
One (or more), when they both believe
The world’s aboard a handbasket bound for Hell?
Well?
Sentimentality was it? A yen
Like ours to be one person, blend
Their flesh forever so to speak —
Although the world could end next week
And that dear incarnation be H-bomb-fried?
Maybe they thought that by joining their
(Like our) so different genes — her
Blue-blooded, his blue-collared — they’d make
A blue-eyed Wunderkind who’d take
The end of civilization in his/her stride?
What pride!
Or maybe they weren’t thinking at all,
But (unlike us) obeyed the call
Of blind instinct and half-blind custom:
“Reproduce your kind, and trust them
To fortune’s winds and tides, life’s warmth and frost!”
Perhaps they considered all the above
(Like us, exactly) — instinct, love,
In the world’s decline from bad to worse
In more respects than the reverse —
And decided to pay, but not to count, the cost.
Fingers crossed.
Well:
Tell me their story as if it weren’t ours,
But like ours enough so that the Powers
That drive and steer good stories might
Fetch them beyond our present plight.”
Happy Valentine’s Day!