But he too had prejudices, he too was far from ideal. ‘Woman’, he declared once, ‘is the refuse of the world’ so that ‘noble men will put her aside, only the vile will enjoy her’. Elsewhere he compared the female to a twenty-hooded serpent, and ‘if she stings one’, he warned, ‘there is no chance to survive’. But we can try and console ourselves that perhaps this streak of misogyny (offset though it was with contradictory verses where he is less suspicious of women) was a reflection of his age,
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