As the brilliant twelfth-century poem About Three Young Women {De tribus puellis} indicates, medieval Latin literature appreciated men as distinctively male human beings. The most learned and perceptive men in medieval Europe didn’t believe that women are necessary to civilize and ennoble men. Yet overcoming prejudice against men’s gender-distinctiveness has never been easy. Composed between the fourth and the ninth centuries, the poem About a Rustic {De rustico} superficially suggests a rustic man’s inferiority to an elite, urbane man. In De rustico, the urbane man wildly and crudely demeans and dehumanizes the rustic man using masculine stereotypes from Verses for Pan {Versus Panos}. The twelfth-century dialogue About Clerics and a Rustic {De clericis et rustico} presents a self-centered rustic as shrewder than elite clerics and equally cultured. Today, young men who reject men’s burdensome gender responsibilities are disparaged as being afflicted with the “Peter Pan syndrome” and “failure to launch.” With their unity in diversity, all men are as fully worthy of love as the rustic men in De rustico and De clericis et rustico.
