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Histories of misogyny in Western art and literature invariably linger long over the Middle Ages. There were, of course, many vivid portraits of woman's moral debility prior to the Middle Ages, both in ancient literature (e.g., Medea, Medusa, Clytemnestra, Circe, the Sirens) and in the Old Testament (Delilah, Potiphar's wife, Salome, Herodias). But it is not until the late Middle Ages that we find the classic misogynistic dichotomy: the “celestial” woman versus the “killer” woman. In ancient literature the “good woman” (Antigone, Penelope, Athena) tends to be a rather severe type. By contrast, the good woman of late medieval literature inhabits an altogether different zone of virtue. She is not only morally exemplary, but pure, beautiful, radiant, and loving — a quasidivine being — these traits, and indeed the type itself, being an obvious extension of the contemporary cult of the Virgin. Yet at the same time that woman grew in virtue, so did she grow in vice. Just as there is no more celestial portrait of female goodness than Dante's Beatrice, so there is no more vituperative description of female evil than the Roman de la Rose, written in the same period. Thus flowered the now-decried female duality, the split of woman into opposing and equally unrealistic extremes of blessedness and baseness: the virgin and the whore, the goddess and the shrew, sacred love and profane love.
This phenomenon is usually attributed to the Platonism of early Christianity, its tendency to describe chasmic divisions between the real and the ideal. Presumably, what love we could have on