Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages (The Middle Ages Series) [Illustrated] 9780812249606, 0812249607

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Conduct Becoming

The Middle Ages Series Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor Edward Peters, Founding Editor A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Conduct Becoming Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages

Glenn D. Burger

u n i v e r s i t y of pe n ns y lva n i a pr e s s p h i l a de l p h i a

Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-­4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Burger, Glenn, author. Title: Conduct becoming : good wives and husbands in the later Middle Ages / Glenn D. Burger. Other titles: Middle Ages series. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018] | Series: The Middle Ages series Identifiers: LCCN 2017010471 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4960-6 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Wives—Europe—Conduct of life— History—To 1500. | Wives—Religious life—Europe— History—To 1500. | Sex role—Europe—Religious aspects—Christianity—History—To 1500. | Women—Books and reading—Europe—History—To 1500. | Wives in literature—Europe—History—To 1500. | Conduct of life in literature—History—To 1500. | Marriage in literature— History—To 1500. | Virtue in literature—History—To 1500. | Literature, Medieval—History and criticism. Classification: LCC HQ1147.E85 B87 2018 | DDC 306.872/30940902—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017010471

For Pamela Sheingorn

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Contents

Introduction. Loving, Reading, Acting in a Marrying Kind of Way

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Chapter 1. Laboring to Make the Good Wife Good in the Journées Chrétiennes 33 Chapter 2. Remaking the Feminine

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Chapter 3. In the Merchant’s Bedchamber: Le Menagier de Paris 105 Chapter 4. Affecting Conduct: Feeling Steadfast with Griselda

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Conclusion 191 Notes 199 Works Cited

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Index 253 Acknowledgments 261

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Introduction Loving, Reading, Acting in a Marrying Kind of Way

Systematizing Conduct for Women in the World Caesarius of Heisterbach recounts the following in The Dialogue of Miracles, his early thirteenth-­century collection of exemplary stories. A certain moneylender in Liège dies and his local bishop denies him burial in consecrated ground because of his sinful practice of usury. The man’s wife appeals the decision directly to the pope; for she has heard that man and wife are one, and the apostle Paul said that a believing wife can save an unbeliever. Therefore she happily promises to make up for whatever shortcomings there may have been in her husband and give satisfaction herself to God for his sins. The pope grants her request and the wife shuts herself up in a dwelling she has built beside her husband’s grave. There she devotes herself to alms, prayers, and fasting on her husband’s behalf. Finally, after fourteen years of diligent activity, the wife has a vision of her husband dressed in white. With a joyful face he tells her: “Thanks to God and thee that to-­day I am delivered.”1 Caesarius includes the story in a section devoted to the punishment and glory of the dead, and it is clear that he intends it to teach the value of intercessory prayer in the theology of purgatory emerging in the period. His universalizing moral thus asks an inscribed clerical audience to recognize just how much this good wife stands out as a miraculous exception to “normal” female inconstancy and sensuality and at the same time to move past the accident of gender in order to focus on her exemplary status as a Christian subject. In the century and a half after Caesarius’s Dialogue of Miracles, however, a series of texts emerge that encourage a radically different model for interpreting what the good wife represents. These works make their primary focus a “miracle” left unacknowledged by Caesarius, that is, the exemplary nature of

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the wife’s virtuous conduct and its ability to alter marital and social relations in the world. Caesarius’s good wife of Liège, after all, is able to deploy her own brand of practical theology and persuade the pope to bury her husband in sacred soil because she can exploit the new emphasis on marriage as sacrament formulated by theologians and canon lawyers in this period. Even more amazing, she so perfectly embraces her wifely role within the sacrament that for fourteen years after his death she continues to devote herself to her husband’s well-­being above all else. In Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages, I examine this new genre of writing in order to consider what happens when the good wife moves front and center as an exemplary figure in her own right and becomes the model for what every woman should strive to be. I argue that these new conduct texts for women reconfigure how female embodiment is understood in the period. For while a pervasive medieval antifeminist tradition views the female body as naturally wayward and sensual, signifying an abject identity inimical to masculine reason and self-­ control, late medieval conduct texts for women outline models of feminine virtue that show the good wife as an identity with positive effects in the world. As a genre, late medieval conduct literature for women encompasses a wide variety of narrative forms and extends across a variety of social terrains. The ability of such texts to reach both established aristocratic audiences as well as newly emergent gentry and upper-­level bourgeois groups ensures that the issue of lay female conduct becomes a widespread, Pan-­European phenomenon by the end of the Middle Ages. Whether a royal father’s advice to his daughter, as in Louis IX’s Les Enseignements de Saint Louis à sa fille Isabelle (ca. 1267),2 a Franciscan friar’s exhortation to a queen, as in Durand de Champagne’s Speculum dominarum (ca. 1300) for Jeanne de Navarre,3 or the list of good and bad biblical women in the anonymous Miroir des bonnes femmes (ca. 1280–­90),4 such texts focus on the value of attending to a specifically female conduct across a spectrum of theological, moral, and secular concerns. In Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages, however, I also argue that this discussion of female conduct extends further to include literary texts such as Prudence and Melibee or the Griselda story, as well as explicitly devotional texts such as the journées chrétiennes. The latter incorporate a strongly ethical component into discussions of female conduct by providing a “rule” for the mixed life that allowed laywomen to emulate the devotional discipline of a monk or nun. The former, while sometimes included in conduct texts proper (as in the case of Le Menagier de Paris) or in other literary texts such as the Canterbury Tales or the Decameron, also



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circulate on their own or are incorporated in diverse household manuscript miscellanies. Despite the royal and aristocratic origins of some of the earlier examples of the genre, later conduct texts for women are notable for the variety of class, estate, national, and generic boundaries that they cross. Durand dedicates his original Latin text of the Speculum dominarum to his royal patron, Jeanne de Navarre. But the work is soon translated into French as Le Miroir des dames in order to reach a wider audience, and the French text survives in multiple manuscript copies. Subsequent conduct literature inscribes an even broader, nonnoble audience and includes an increasingly wide range of material to address the different needs of its more diverse audience. In Le Menagier de Paris, for example, a wealthy late fourteenth-­century merchant incorporates recipes and advice about gardening and managing servants along with the more typical devotional and ethical advice in order to educate his young bride and equip her to manage every aspect of her life and that of the upper-­level bourgeois household she controls.5 The popular English poem “What the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter” also assumes a bourgeois context for its lessons in female conduct, and the poem was anthologized in at least one manuscript collection associated with an urban bourgeois or gentry household.6 Another late fourteenth-­century text written by a noble father for his daughters, Le Livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry, despite—​­or perhaps because of—​­its aristocratic provenance, certainly reached beyond its inscribed elite audience since twenty-­one manuscript copies survive, as well as English and German translations and a 1514 printed edition of the French original.7 Unlike earlier romance and fin’amor poetry, or guides such as the Ancrene Wisse that are addressed explicitly to religious women living apart from the world, these new texts imagine female conduct primarily within the context of the married household and the social relations it makes possible. And they imagine their audience explicitly as daughters who will marry, women already married, or widows who once were wives. Thus it is first and foremost the range of interests and activities available to the good woman as wife that holds their interest and not the conduct of courtly lovers or of religious women living as celibate nuns, anchoresses, or beguines.8 These texts move the discussion of the good woman from a strictly theological and clerical terrain, such as we saw foregrounded in Caesarius’s moralizing of his story, onto a lay terrain that thinks through such issues in the context of the fusion of active and contemplative experiences that make up the mixed life of concerned lay subjects in this period. At the same time, medieval conduct texts for women avoid the

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kind of romance erotics that fin’amor uses to conflate aristocratic identity with the universal category of nobility. As these conduct texts explore new possibilities for the kinds of personal and social relations that the good wife might sustain, they put the category of “woman” under intense scrutiny and offer new possibilities for reconceptualizing what it might signify. Because such texts imagine how to be a good wife as necessarily entangled with how to be a good husband, they also move their readers to consider such gendered and sexed identities in dynamic relational terms, together producing a chastened version of male–­female relations that embraces a certain degree of ascesis without having to adopt the model of clerical celibacy. Conduct literature addressed to the good wife thus reshapes how late medieval audiences think about the process of becoming a good person more generally. In doing so, it works to develop and promulgate a sex/gender system radically different from previous clerical or aristocratic models, one capable of providing the foundations for the modern forms of heterosexuality that begin to emerge in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These conduct texts for women are clearly trying to be more than simple courtesy books describing the proper manners, dress, and language necessary for a courtly lady. They do, of course, address such matters, although frequently adapting the question of courtly manners to a wider range of social groupings. But they also regularly take on larger issues of conduct, such as the devotional practice, liturgical observance, and scriptural learning appropriate to a woman, or the correct, ethical way to treat her peers and servants. Systematizing conduct for women in the world, then, paradoxically demands both the perpetuation of codes of behavior that traditionally define the universal for the Middle Ages—​­that is, the celibacy and devotional labor of monastic men and women, or the politesse of noble men, or the refined beauty (both exterior and interior) of the courtly heroine—​­and the translation of such codes onto new social and textual terrains. Addressing female conduct in the broadest way possible, this genre aims—​­as Kathleen Ashley and Robert Clark have argued for medieval conduct literature more generally—​­to produce written texts that systematize a society’s codes of behavior and allow their literate readers to negotiate new sets of social possibilities.9 The logic of conduct literature for women is therefore often divided and self-­contradictory. Such texts can never stand completely outside long-­standing and powerful antifeminist modes of thought prevalent in medieval clerical and lay culture. At the same time, however, they argue that a woman’s nature is inherently capable of self-­improvement. To reconcile this paradox, conduct literature for



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laywomen must continue to practice a certain degree of stabilizing citation from a long-­standing and dominant antifeminist tradition even as such citation occurs in radically different contexts that represent woman’s nature as open to significant self-­improvement. Not surprisingly, perhaps, conduct literature addressed to good wives often brings a stultifyingly repetitive and conservative content that attempts to contain female behavior in oppressive, even violent ways, alongside experiments in narrative form that pragmatically seek to fuse old and new ideologies in innovative ways. Because such texts approach a woman’s nature as something capable of developing and improving in ways comparable to that of a man’s, the good wife is no longer an anomalous eccentric in the sex/gender system—​­as the masculinized saintly virago had been earlier.10 Instead, these texts are instrumental in helping to reshape the status quo of the late medieval sex/gender system. In constructing such a positive representation of woman’s nature and femininity, they provide the good wife with a crucial role in an emerging late medieval/early modern heterosexuality whose foundation lies in the lay married estate and the household it establishes. These texts’ revaluation of female conduct, not surprisingly, consistently defines itself in relation to the authority of the father and husband that God has put in positions of authority in order to guide the good woman. The more the good wife seeks to fulfill her nature as woman, the more she will embrace the self-­restraint that is its defining feature. This model of the good woman willingly submitting to authority reshapes femininity into something to be valued and emulated as a model for right action in the world alongside new forms of masculinity, in stark contrast to how an antifeminist tradition imagined female nature as an inherently abject and wayward form of embodiment to be avoided whenever possible by right-­acting Christian subjects. There are parallels here between such a transformation of female nature and the transformation of the concept of nobility in the period. No longer defined solely in terms of noble blood and inheritance, nobility becomes a character trait that one can learn by carefully emulating one’s betters. And the more its essential nature becomes reconfigured in terms of ethical conduct, the more nobility becomes available as a model to a much wider group of men and women than an aristocracy defined by bloodline or a chivalric identity defined by martial prowess. In this book, I will argue that conduct literature for women provides a similar redefinition of woman and the feminine such that the benefits of chastity can be made available to a much wider group of women than virgins, martyrs, or nuns. Performing the role of good wife according to the textual practices

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encouraged by conduct literature is clearly not a revolutionary practice, but it is powerfully engaged with the changing relationships between the individual and the social in the later Middle Ages. At a time when higher status gentry and bourgeois subjects are increasingly literate readers engaging with a wide variety of vernacular texts, when an increasingly monetized economy is blurring the traditional estate and class distinctions, when urban men and women are often negotiating conflicting demands of feudal and burgess law and custom, conduct literature addressed to the good wife provides a means for its lay readers to negotiate many of these profound changes taking place in their lives by representing the new realities of lay households and their changing relationship with state and ecclesiastical institutions. As I have said, the nature of such a good wife is necessarily articulated in relation to and through the intervention of male guardians—​­clerical advisers, fathers, and husbands—​­who will properly husband her true nature. And conduct literature directed at woman as wife brings devotion to God alongside devotion to husband and father in new and unpredictable ways. The “invention” of the good wife in discourses of sacramental marriage, private devotion, and personal conduct during the long fourteenth century also works to highlight the changes that a more ameliorist account of the laity’s nature more generally might bring about in relations between clerics and laypeople, or between traditionally “lower” social groups and their “betters” such as the aristocracy.11 As the figure charged with the management of the everyday bodies lodged in the lay household, the bourgeois or gentry good wife is a lynchpin in the domestic economy of the household and foundational for its modes of embodiment. Changing the nature of the good wife thus offers a profound opportunity to change the cultural position of the lay household and the lay estate more generally. At the same time, marriage (and the sexual activity it presumes) remains the most obvious mark of the laity’s troubling difference from the enclosed, celibate nature of the original monastic audiences for the forms of spirituality being translated in the later Middle Ages. We might therefore think of the idea of the good wife as a kind of limit case for the efficacy of such a negotiation of lay conduct through a chaste self-­discipline, both highlighting such hybridity and providing a conceptual mechanism capable of managing it. Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages, while attentive to how the real-­life situation of married women is in tension with the representation of a woman’s experience in such texts, is also concerned with what such texts have to say about the fundamental nature of the good wife, its potential for improvement, and its changing status in relation



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to virginity in the social imaginary. For these texts have much to tell us about important changes taking place in the representational politics surrounding the female body in this period. “Woman” may on the surface remain a stable category, one still situated uneasily on the margins of the social, but within that category, the traditionally unequal relationship of married woman and virginity is changing as rapidly and as fundamentally as that of married layman and celibate cleric. Higher-­status women in particular benefit from the general increase in vernacular literacy that takes place throughout the later medieval period and the dramatic increase in the translation of learned culture into vernacular forms.12 It is especially in the literate practices surrounding private devotion that the laywoman, living not in a nunnery or anchorage or beguinage but fully in the world of the married household, can find a space and time where her conduct can most effectively show the full potential of her nature, where the good wife can equal, or even excel, the virgin nun in her excellence as a fully formed ethical subject. Such texts and the practices that they engender open up a space and time for her labor in ways that rework the formerly hierarchized relation of virgin, widow, wife and reconceptualize the good wife’s place in that symbolic imaginary.

Reading Women, the Affective Contract Caesarius situates his good wife of Liège in a social and textual environment quite different from that represented in the conduct texts examined in this book. However much Caesarius’s good wife may draw on the oral resources available to her in order to empower herself as a female and lay subject, the narrative structures Caesarius employs—​­notably a moral that emphasizes the story’s use as sermon exemplum and a narrative frame that represents the collection as an instructive dialogue between a monk and novice—​­underscore just how much real cultural capital rests securely in the hands of a celibate clergy. The conduct texts examined in this book, however, presume both a high level of vernacular literacy on the part of their female readers and an empowering degree of access to certain kinds of Latinate culture. Frequently they are authored by laymen and sometimes are framed as dialogues between husband and wife or father and daughter. These texts also foreground a set of performative reading practices and a kind of affective literacy that provides a way of institutionalizing and universalizing what is individual and exceptional in Caesarius’s exemplum. To do so, conduct literature for women explicitly

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translates the performative reading practices encouraged by late medieval private devotion among the laity to the terrain of secular life and the married household. In the process they enable the transformation of an existing moralized, theological subject formed through the sacrament of confession and private devotion into a new ethically conceived secular subject. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the innovative role played by the reading practices of lay practitioners in the development of private devotion and affective piety. Mark Amsler, for example, has examined how socially situated literacies create subjects and agents in late medieval multilingual manuscript cultures. And the work of Nicole Rice—​­analyzing how Middle English prose guides were developed to adapt professional religious rules and routines for lay readers—​­and Jennifer Bryan—​­considering how the growth of devotional reading created a crucial arena for the making of literate ­subjectivities—​­has explored how the line between religious and lay, author and reader/practitioner blurs during this period. Nor should the public nature of devotional literature—​­the fact that it is produced as institutional knowledge and consumed by individuals manifesting their participation in a group identity as orthodox Christian subjects—​­deny a lively individual, embodied reading experience. Kathryn Smith, for example, has examined how three Books of Hours mediated the devotional experience of their female owners and constructed and confirmed their sense of personal, familial, local, and social identity. And Jessica Brantley has explored how the format of a late medieval Carthusian miscellany reveals connections between the private reading of a meditative lyric and the public performance of civic drama.13 The performative reading practices initiated by late medieval private devotion give the lie to any preconceptions modern readers might have that such didactic literature is inherently a by-­rote, top-­down transmission of dominant ideologies to subaltern subjects. By the end of the thirteenth century, the growing use of newer forms of private, affective devotion first by noble and then by wider groups of gentry and bourgeois laymen and laywomen suggests that such privileged members of the laity have become much more than mere consumers of orthodox ideologies controlled by the clergy. Instead they might better be understood as active agents working in conjunction with clerical forces in the production of orthodox authority and securing their own individual self-­identification through this process. Reading popular devotional texts as diverse as Books of Hours, Walter Hilton’s Mixed Life, or Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ can thus become empowering performative activities for their literate



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high-­status readers, both men and women. As I discuss more fully in Chapter 1, not only are these laymen and laywomen being encouraged to read vernacular texts with comprehension and silently “in their heart,” rather than simply mouthing Latin prayers aloud and by rote, they are also encouraged to manifest that inner experience outwardly to the world through individually developed modes of personal conduct and self-­identification. In other words, the act of reading—​­itself a complex combination of physical text, relationship to space, sense of larger audience not necessarily present—​­is imagined as a kind of performative where the activity of embodied reading itself helps bring about the sought-­for goal. The reader does not need to begin in a state of devotion; performative reading practices themselves allow the material text to function as a kind of “intimate script” that can provide the framework—​­over time and with repeated practice—​­for making a personally felt experience of devotion possible.14 Reading in this way imagines devotion as a performance repeated across time and space; indeed, as the journées chrétiennes discussed in Chapter 1 make clear, such devotional reading often takes place according to set programs that assign devotion to specific times of the day and to certain household and public spaces. This repetition works to instill and ensure the kind of stylization of the body and new relationships with familiar spaces needed to articulate a proper moral and theological subject position for the reader. As material examples of these performative reading practices, we might think here of the new embodiment of prayer in the form of kneeling devotees’ hands folded together in front of them, such as we see in donor portraits in late medieval paintings,15 or of the new fashion of private prayer in side chapels of parish churches or in private oratories throughout the week rather than in the public context of the parish Sunday mass. Or we might turn to the affective practices leading to the invention of compassion in late medieval devotion that Sarah McNamer has discussed, practices she associates in particular with women and feminine experience.16 Or as we will discuss in Chapter 1, a certain display of lack of affect could signify the kind of emotional boundedness needed to register the bodily self-­restraint that conduct texts for women in particular aim to foster in order to remake the feminine. This variable scene of reading, then, cannot be confined solely to the literal words on the page or to the orthodox ideologies ostensibly authoring such didactic literature. In order to be fully realized, such a reader-­centered devotional text requires the performative consent of its reader, a consent manifested initially as the text is absorbed by this protracted reading process into the interiority of the individual reader, and then as that devotional subject in

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process is similarly read by others within her larger social milieu. These new practices of performative reading manifest what Mark Amsler has called “affective literacy,” a term he uses to describe “how we develop physical, somatic, and/or activity-­based relationships with texts as part of our reading experiences.” Performative reading of this kind occurs at the boundaries between inner and outer, the personal and the public, and—​­given the didactic content of such texts—​­the differential power relations of masculine and feminine and clerical and lay: “In this respect, affective literacy, like marginalia and glossing, sites reading as a hinge rather than a conduit. The hinge of reading opens and closes the gap between reader and text, between the skin of the page and the reading body.”17 Rather than simply providing a conduit for dominant ideology to flow from top to bottom, subjecting the powerless, consuming reader to the strictures of a clerically controlled knowledge, affective literacy positions the lay reader as at once consumer and author. The reader is both subjected by the powerful ideologies disseminated through such a process of textualization and at the same time the individualized agent required by those very modes of textualized dissemination.18 An illumination from a deluxe Book of Hours produced for Mary of Burgundy in Flanders in the 1470s vividly and complexly represents the “hinge of reading” generated by this new mode of reader-­centered comprehension literacy (Figure 1).19 Mary figures twice in the illumination. First we see her in the foreground sitting in a private oratory reading from a Book of Hours that she holds in her lap. Presumably this represents the same Book of Hours that the illumination itself is part of. Then, in the background, framed by a window opening from the oratory into the choir of a majestic Gothic church, we see brought to life the inner devotion that such reading with the heart makes possible. On the left, Mary of Burgundy and her ladies kneel before a seated Virgin Mary, center, who holds the Christ Child in her lap. The high altar and its reredos act as a kind of halo for the Virgin, while on the right a priest kneels in adoration. The oratory window as framing device not only brings the two spaces of the painting alongside each other but also works to represent how devotional reading with the heart can itself hinge the bodily and the spiritual together in meaningful contiguity. Certainly, one orthodox mode of interpretation would view Mary’s material act of reading in her oratory as simply a conduit to the inner spiritual space represented in the church interior. Such a movement encourages us to accept the space of lay devotional reading as inherently governed by institutional and ideological forces outside the individual’s control, forces that will

Figure 1. Mary of Burgundy at her devotions; inset, Mary kneeling in front of the Virgin. Book of Hours of Mary of Burgundy, Flanders, ca. 1475. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS Codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 14v.

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necessarily move the individual reader to transcend the particularities of her personal moment of reading. Thus, a series of visual repetitions made possible by the various framing devices set up by the structure of the illumination lead us deeper into the space of the painting in ways that prompt ever more precise moments of similitude. The seated “bodily” Mary of Burgundy in the frame leads the viewer’s eye to the smaller “spiritual” version of her shown kneeling in the left of the inset church space. This identification of an inner and outer Mary in turn encourages us to move from the margins of the inset to finish focused on that other Mary, the Virgin holding the Christ Child, who seems thus naturally and properly to occupy the center of the painting. In doing so, we also end up—​­within the confines of a material church sanctuary—​­centered on its transcendent spiritual form as Ecclesia, that earthly disseminator of divine grace with which the Virgin is so intimately identified. In this way, bringing the bodily Mary of Burgundy alongside her imagined devotional self and her spiritual counterpart, the Virgin Mary, moves us beyond things as they are into a teleological mode of reading that stabilizes temporal and spatial relations in ideologically satisfying ways. But such an orthodox, “clerical” mode of reading is just one possible way of working through the elements of the illumination. Frequently in contemporary paintings when a donor and saint are represented, the saint is depicted as materially much larger and visually more important than the kneeling patrons; indeed the latter human agents are sometimes literally consigned to the margins of the manuscript. Here, however, the representation of Mary of Burgundy’s performative reading practices reverses such clearly hierarchized spatial relations. Even though the Virgin Mary occupies the physical center—​­and as I have been arguing, an orthodox hermeneutic center as well—​­nonetheless the reading Mary of Burgundy in the foreground physically dwarfs the Virgin Mary. Moreover, despite the apparent stasis of Mary of Burgundy’s seated position in the foreground or as diminished marginal figure within the framed vignette, as viewers we return repeatedly to her seated figure, decoding the signs of her presence strewn throughout the foreground frame that occupies the bottom third of the painting.20 So, too, while the objects in the frame simultaneously identify the Virgin Mary and Mary of Burgundy’s chaste piety, their inherent richness in material terms also works to signal Mary of Burgundy’s elevated social position—​­as does the fantasy setting that imagines Mary reading in a private oratory in the heart of a church. These signs of aristocratic leisure and ease keep our interest focused on the material Mary of Burgundy even as we follow a prescribed hermeneutic path that leads us to the physically



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smaller but spiritually more significant Mary of Burgundy portrayed with the Virgin Mary in the church sanctuary. So, too, the ability of the apparently calm foreground to keep our senses and emotions occupied encourages us to reflect on how Mary of Burgundy’s symbolic value in the illumination depends upon the continued labor of her (and our) private devotion. The ambivalences built into the framing devices of the illumination complicate the “hinge of reading” being represented here and actively work to defer any act of “reading as conduit” that would simply reinscribe one ideological, orthodox way of experiencing and interpreting this experience. The open ­window—​­as a frame or hinge representing how and what Mary of Burgundy’s performative reading practices signify—​­figures here the ability of private devotion to open up new modes of agency for lay subjects and points to a fantasy of exceptional access to the core of ecclesiastical culture (represented by the location in the church and the location of Mary of Burgundy alongside the Virgin and Christ Child). At the same time the frame of private devotion puts beside such a model of human exceptionalism the possibility that the means of such immaterial labor are available to a much wider group of devotional subjects than a Mary of Burgundy or Mary, Queen of Heaven, herself. This illumination fantasizes Mary’s private oratory as its own lay version of the traditional monastic cell, just as the laity’s daily reading of Books of Hours fantasizes lay devotion as equivalent to monastic practice. The performative reading practices and affective literacy learned through this new kind of devotional literacy thus provide the secular readers of conduct literature with a powerful model for the new genre. Reading about conduct, like reading devotional texts, can continue and complete a translation process that proceeds from monastic to private lay devotion to the secular and married estate. Just as Books of Hours bring monastic culture into the layperson’s individual experience, so too a conduct text teaching a young wife to realize as fully as possible her role as wife and mother and manager of the domestic sphere of the married household infuses even the most secular aspects of lay life and female identity with the added value of devotion. If lay private devotion brings some of the forms and status of monastic life and identity into the world, this kind of conduct literature and its performative reading practices promise to translate the moral and theological status of lay devotion to secular conduct, converting what might in the past have been imagined simply as attention to matters of courtesy or external manners into a set of practices that can now outline how to develop fully ethical identities for lay subjects active in the world. Similarly, such conduct texts, while often

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beginning as specially commissioned texts for specific noble or royal patrons, are later passed on to other family members or more widely to other social groups, in ways that parallel the widening circles of consumption of individual Books of Hours—​­often produced for a specific patron, but then passed on to close relatives and friends, and in later generations to individuals in social groups far beyond the ambit of the original manuscript. There are, however, important and crucial differences between the performative models developed for devotional reading and those for the reading of conduct texts. The scene of reading for the Book of Hours owned by Mary of Burgundy is imagined ideally as a space that seamlessly hinges the private and public into perfect alignment. Mary’s private oratory opens onto the sanctuary of the church with the Virgin at its center. Private merges with public (the devotional Mary of Burgundy depicted here and the imagined viewer of the illumination who knows her public persona), then with the ecclesiastical (Mary of Burgundy and the priest in the sanctuary), and finally with the celestial (Mary of Burgundy and the Virgin Mary). Other modes of affective piety—​­for example, the kind meant to intensify a compassionate identification with Christ recently discussed by Sarah McNamer—​­bring the devotee’s inner embrace of Christ even more directly and emotionally in explicit contact with the transcendent, heavenly encounter of human and divine recorded in scripture and promised to the Christian subject after her death. Conduct texts for women, however, situate themselves within the hybrid spaces of the late medieval married household. The narrative frames of the Livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry and the Menagier de Paris—​­discussed in Chapters 2 and 3—​­make this explicit: the Livre du chevalier originates in the privacy of the aristocratic enclosed garden and ends with a debate between husband and wife in front of their daughters; the Menagier begins literally in the bourgeois marriage bed itself and ends immersed in the day-­to-­day material needs of that household. Both these texts also emphasize how their production arises out of and depends upon the sophisticated resources of the noble and bourgeois household. The aristocratic author of the Livre du chevalier calls on his personal staff of clerics; the Menagier’s merchant depends upon his own library and its wide range of texts translated into French. The two authors also draw on personal experience and family oral history to augment their more learned written sources. In both cases, then, it is various forms of household knowledge that together provide the basis for the texts, and they represent such household knowledge as the kind that their female readers themselves can access, master, and reproduce. Moreover, their inscribed female audience



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is imagined as reading within normal household spaces and as part of regular daily experience. It may be that these quasi-­private domestic locations also constitute spaces where the good wife or daughter might practice whatever devotional life she finds appropriate to her individual situation, but even when such a location is a side chapel in the local parish church, the conduct text represents it as an extension of her proper domestic sphere. In other words, unlike the representation of Mary of Burgundy’s devotional reading, where the movement of the painting leads one toward that other, transcendent Mary, in the case of the conduct text, scriptural or liturgical reference (such as biblical stories of good women or how to hear mass properly) lead back to the household and the domestic sphere of the good wife. In this sense, rather than performing the moral/theological subject of devotional reading, the performative reading practices of conduct literature for women delineate a more clearly ethical role for its exemplary subject. Similarly, devotional reading practices work to provide the devotee with an emotional skin that works both to give a sense of boundedness for her inner affective religious experiences and to demarcate her to the larger world as a proper devotional subject, while at the same time establishing her comparability to others in an emotional community of like-­minded devotees. Conduct texts for women, on the other hand, emphasize relational modes of subjectification—​­daughters with fathers, husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, household managers with servants and tradespeople, and so on. The literate practices developed by conduct texts thus work to intensify affective connections within the married household. As such, conduct literature read performatively in the ways made possible by a fully affective literacy can provide its readers with the kinds of intimate scripts they need to create new identities that are fully visible within the social. In the case of the good wife, the practices of this attention to conduct in the first instance intensify the flow of affect that the affective contract of sacramental marriage is intended to promote. The reconfigured masculinity and femininity imagined in and through this literature create a productive difference within the conjoined body or one flesh of the sacramental married estate. Such a desire for chastened sex/gender relations thus imagines the good of such marital relations as something more than physical procreation, that is, the production of fully gendered and sexualized, yet still fully ethical, subjects in the good wife and her husband. As such, conduct literature imagines the marriage vow as the initiator of a kind of “affective contract” that is crucial to the continued health of the married estate and the household founded by the marriage vow. It is

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through the management of affect by means of proper conduct of the self and its affective relations within the household that subjects can construct the kinds of emotional self-­presentations to the world that link the self and the social. Moreover, such intensifications of affect and performative reading, while focused explicitly on the good wife, nonetheless imagine improvements of conduct as part of larger affective household and familial networks. They shape male behavior as much as female and imagine gendered conduct as entangling masculine and feminine in unexpected ways. For example, when the Chevalier de la Tour Landry sees his daughters enter the garden of love that he has been reveling in as a courtly lover revisiting youthful experiences with a now dead lady, the presence of three daughters from his current marriage intensifies feeling in surprising ways for the Chevalier. The compassion he feels for them as potential victims of fin’amor and the male objectification of women that is its frequent by-­product now marks the Chevalier not as courtly lover but as husband, father, and head of household.21

Marriage, Sacramental and Companionate To understand the new entanglements created by such an affective contract we must first attend to the profound changes taking place within marriage and the married household in the West during the central and later medieval periods. In particular, we need to consider how new understandings of marriage gave increased importance to the development of marital affection. Beginning in the twelfth century and intensifying through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, there is a renewed emphasis throughout western Europe on marriage as a sacrament. As a result, the gendered and sexualized relations within the late medieval married estate can be reimagined in ways that will allow laymen and laywomen to manifest a self-­restraint and self-­actualization that parallels, or even betters, the chastity of monastics and clerics. By the second half of the fourteenth century, as conduct texts such as the Livre du chevalier and the Menagier demonstrate, this new and widening emphasis on marriage as sacrament, combined with a growing importance of companionate marital relationships for the social and economic life of bourgeois and gentry households, results in a radically different understanding of what it means to be a married man and woman.22 Within such a transformed, couple-­ centered household, new affective reading practices reconfigure how the categories of woman and the married estate signify. Such reading practices can



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provide the kind of generative environment where conduct literature addressed to the good wife can disrupt the traditional hegemony of dominant medieval sex/gender systems (such as celibacy and aristocratic dynastic marriage) and contribute to the invention of a new heterosexuality. Emphasizing the sacramental nature of marriage—​­at least in theory—​ ­ arks a significant change from earlier medieval practice, conceiving of marm riage not primarily as a contract between families to transfer land, belongings, and social status, as it had been throughout much of the early Middle Ages, but instead as a contract between man and woman whose informed ­consent—​ e­ xpressed when they pronounced the words of present consent in the wedding ceremony—​­was the essential marker of a valid sacramental marriage. Until the twelfth century, aside from asserting its right to rule on prohibited degrees of consanguinity, the Western church left the regulation of marriage largely in the hands of families and secular authority. If marriage had value from the early medieval church’s point of view, it was to the extent that it could provide the limited forms of sanctioned sexual activity that would keep laypeople from burning with lust. Early medieval penitential manuals thus focus on regulating sex within marriage as much as possible, thereby limiting the damage that such intimacy between the sexes might bring about.23 Ecclesiastical reformers of the tenth and eleventh centuries focus instead on affirming the superiority of a celibate life of prayer and monastic discipline and on extending those benefits to secular clergy. From the twelfth to the sixteenth century, however, marriage in western Europe undergoes a profound transformation. Beginning with the renewed emphasis on marriage as a sacrament advocated by canon lawyers and theologians in the twelfth century, and disseminated more widely across Europe and among the laity by preachers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the reconfiguration of marriage as sacrament penetrated all levels of western European society by the later Middle Ages.24 The church’s reinvigoration of marriage as a sacrament profoundly changed the scope of married relations and how they were viewed in the world. While procreation remained the first good of marriage, the essence of marriage as sacrament came to be defined by two additional goods—​­that it is constituted solely by the individual choice of its partners (made real in the utterance of the words of consent in front of witnesses) and that once entered into, it is indissoluble.25 Husband and wife, male and female, are thus conjoined as one flesh by their willing, continuing consent to the sacrament. Such a sacramental emphasis on individual consent and indissolubility over time led theologians, canon lawyers, and preachers to

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focus on the estate’s ability to foster marital affection between husband and wife and thereby to an enlarged understanding of how the sacrament was a means of grace: wherein the couple’s relationship expressed the unbreakable bond between Christ and his people and where God’s love became present to the spouses in their total union.26 What constitutes marital affection changes substantially from the late antique to the early modern period, and even within the same time period what the term signifies can vary widely in different discursive registers. Frederik Pedersen notes that in Roman law the term affectio lacked emotional content and largely indicated the will of both parties to transfer ownership of lands and goods: “As such, the word was most often used to emphasise that a spouse had displayed a willingness to allow the legal effects of marriage to come into effect and thus to indicate the quality of will needed to enter into marriage.”27 In later Roman law, however, the term affectio did acquire connotations of affection and dependence; for it was commonly used to signify the nature of a father’s ties to his children or the brotherly love of soldiers toward each other. As John T. Noonan Jr. puts it, “Affection in Justinian seems not simply a legal will but an emotion-­colored intent not far from love.”28 Twelfth-­century canon lawyers such as Gratian in their attempts to delineate the essence of the sacrament of marriage emphasized the emotional content of affectio maritalis and distinguished it from the consent that initiated the marriage contract. Consent for them involved the acceptance of a person as a spouse, while marital affection referred to the quality of the relationship that came into being. The decretals of Pope Alexander III (1159–­81) furthered this process by making marital affection not only a requirement for the establishment of marriage but also a required part of married life that should endure throughout the marriage. If medieval canon law enlarged on Roman jurisprudence by insisting on the necessity of marital affection for a proper marriage and in developing its emotional dimension, it nonetheless failed to provide a clear definition of what marital affection entailed. Michael Sheehan, commenting on the abundant evidence in papal decretals and in local ecclesiastical courts that both men and women often demanded the enforced society of their spouse, notes that this is “an important indication of what some spouses expected of marriage, of what made it desirable and worth defending in court: a sexual partner even though another was preferred, a place in society, shelter and sustenance, etc.” Thus, marital affection seems to have often been used to describe the external aspects of an ideal and “employed against a certain type of



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behavior (excessive correction of a spouse, mistreatment of a spouse, etc.).”29 Beyond that, marital affection in medieval usage frequently described a spouse’s care of the other’s bodily needs. Such demonstrations of affection were often gendered in different ways—​­a husband’s marital affection manifesting itself in his concern to provide food, shelter, and clothing appropriate to their estate, a wife’s, in her concern to provide the appropriate care for her husband’s bodily needs, to care for children and extended family.30 As a legal and conceptual category, then, marital affection operates very differently from medieval fin’amor or modern romantic love. Marital affection first and foremost describes the care for the spouse that should take place—​­indeed, should develop and intensify—​­within the sacramental married state. Thus it is important not to confuse medieval understandings of marital affection with the modern concept of romantic love, just as we should not assume that canon law’s emphasis on consent as the essence of marriage as sacrament would automatically signify for medieval audiences that men and women were suddenly free to marry as they pleased. However, a developing understanding of the importance of the third good of the sacrament of marriage—​­its indissoluble nature (sacramentum)—​ ­led theologians to attach an increasing importance to the emotional dimensions of this goal of increased marital affection. As Aquinas puts it, husband and wife are united not just in a fleshly union but also in a partnership of the whole range of domestic activity. Two tendencies in this clerical redefinition of marriage are noteworthy. First, as David d’Avray points out, for twelfth-­ and thirteenth-­century preachers on marriage: “Love is . . . ​a feeling which belongs to the domain of free will and choice. . . . ​In their view married love was a moral obligation and one which married people could be persuaded by arguments to fulfill.”31 Second, reorienting marriage in terms of individual consent and a growth in marital affection led some churchmen to employ an egalitarian language for such unions. The theologian Guibert de Tournai, for example, pronounces: “There is also a kind of love founded on partnership [dilectio socialis], and that is the love which husband and wife owe each other, because they are equal [pares] and partners [socii]. . . . ​So if you want to get married, marry an equal.”32 Clearly, such an emphasis on the importance of marital affection should not be viewed retrospectively through the distorting lens of modern marriages based on ideals of romantic love and fully equal relationships. Marital affection here more frequently marks an extension of the model of care for one’s spouse to the care of their affective/ethical nature and focuses on attempts to help them remedy failings. Thus a husband’s

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admonishment of his wife’s wayward behavior and, conversely, a wife’s obedient attempts to balance a husband’s errors would both constitute marital affection in such a model based on partnership and mutual obligation. Caesarius’s good wife provides a particularly striking and extreme example of what such an affective and indissoluble contract can achieve when she dedicates herself for fourteen years after the death of her sinful husband to saving his soul from the torments of purgatory. For all these reasons, then, I argue in Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages that we should understand medieval developments in thinking about marriage as a sacrament as having a kind of affective contract at its core. While an earlier Roman legal understanding of affectio maritalis as the simple intention of creating a marriage continues to be felt in a more basic understanding of marital affection as care for the external needs of a spouse, by the later Middle Ages it also coexists ambiguously, and at times uneasily, with a new, deeper, more emotional understanding of what such affective care might entail. Pedersen cites one particularly striking deposition from a fourteenth-­century York ecclesiastical court case where a witness, Emma Munkton, testifies to the validity of the marriage of Simon Munkton and Agnes Huntington. “Emma Munkton describes the marriage,” he says, as a process consisting of a series of steps, from the initial traductio of the woman into the man’s household, through the solemnization of the marriage at the church in front of witnesses to the birth of their son. The information on marital affection—​­which she volunteered to the court without being asked—​­shows that she saw it as the external expression of an internal reality. Her use of the phrase “in so far as this witness could make it out” makes it clear that she was aware that she could not be sure that the external signs of affection actually covered the inner reality of the emotion. In other words, in her use of the term, marital affection consisted of two parts, an inner reality and an outer expression.33 However, as Pedersen also notes, there are relatively few legal cases that demonstrate such a clear sense of marital affection having an emotional dimension. Given the failure of the canonists to clearly define what marital affection consists of, this absence is perhaps not that surprising. And it suggests that we might find clearer definitions of marital affection in discursive terrains such as the conduct texts examined in this book, writing frequently authored



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by laymen and much more directly engaged with the particularities and material facts of the day-­to-­day experience of the married estate. With the canonists’ emphasis on consent and indissolubility as the essence of marriage as a sacrament, and with the possibility of properly controlled sexual relations and an affective contract as its goal, thinking through the consequences of marriage as sacrament turned marriage from an inferior, debased state far below an idealized celibacy into a calling that could put husbands on par with or even above celibate clerics and give sexually active wives the opportunity for a chaste status previously available only to virgin nuns. At the same time, changing economic and social conditions across Europe gave increasing importance to the managerial role that a wife could be called upon to play in the late medieval bourgeois, gentry, or noble household. Even though feudal law generally prescribed the model of femme couverte for wives, that is, considering them without legal agency in their own right and under the economic and legal rule of their husbands, nonetheless, noble and gentry wives were called upon to manage estates in their husbands’ absence and thus needed appropriate education to do so. As Christine de Pizan advises, “Because barons and still more commonly knights and squires and gentlemen travel and go off to the wars, their wives should be wise and sound administrators and manage their affairs well, because most of the time they stay at home without their husbands, who are at court or abroad. They should have all the responsibility of the administration and know how to make use of their revenues and possessions.”34 And the rise of proto-­capitalist economies in the new urban settings of late medieval Europe meant that urban bourgeois subjects often fell under different, more flexible types of burgess law. In addition, there were radically different models of marital property law in effect in different regions of Europe in this period. In a traditional dotal model, inherited from Roman law and found, for example, in much of northern Italy, a woman transmits her dowry from father to husband, who uses it and manages it during the marriage, returning it to her and her male kin in widowhood. In a communal model (the case in much of the Low Countries for nonnoble urban residents) most property was held in common and the surviving spouse, widow or widower, inherited.35 Martha Howell, examining urban bourgeois marriages in Douai, has noted that inheritance patterns favored the surviving spouse over children, highlighting the extent to which the married household was the foundation for a family business and spouses formed a partnership with particular value in the trading economy of this class and region.36 She further argues that it was the proliferation of movable wealth in the period, as

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much as demographics or property law, that put pressure on traditional forms of conjugality to emphasize companionate relations between husband and wife: “Marriages that had once been secured by immovable property now became tools for securing property, and to perform that role they had to be based on something more reliable than the movable assets that were the very source of the new instability. As a result, it was those portions of the population of Europe most dependent on movable wealth that eagerly took up the language of love, the ideal of companionship and friendship, and the notion that marital bonds were deeply personal.”37 It was not just marriage’s sacramental indissolubility, then, that would encourage men and women to choose their future partners carefully. Nor was it simply the exercise of raw power that would persuade such partners to cultivate an increase in marital affection through self-­restraint and self-­control. As a result, the conjunction of a self-­controlled husband and good wife could not only anchor a new household unit but also provide a model for civic society dramatically different from previous aristocratic or clerical ones. David d’Avray has written about the role that preaching played in spreading this new view of marriage across western Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth century. And he notes the development of a complex set of symbolic homologies paralleling the mystical marriage of Christ and the Virgin, Christ and the church, Christ and the individual Christian subject with the sacramental marriage of man and wife.38 But by the later Middle Ages, the married estate also provided the basis for developing a different, more secular set of symbolic homologies to represent ideal state relations, in contrast to prevailing models organized in terms of three estates—​­those who fight, those who pray, and those who work—​­or the different parts of the human body.39 Carolyn P. Collette, for example, in her analysis of the 1395 French play L’Estoire de Griseldis, highlights how that play adapts the Griselda story to emphasize issues of class and authority: “Griselda’s extraordinary patience, constancy, and obedience provides an exemplary pattern for married women of pris that will foster social harmony and happiness. . . . ​The play is interesting in large measure because this articulated motive—​­providing an example of wifely constancy and patience which worthy women would want to follow—​­is tied to social good as much as to marital harmony.”40 And Collette notes that the Griselda story’s popularity in France coincides with a series of political writings, originating in the court of Charles V, that explore “the nature of authority and obedience within the various estates that constitute the larger polity.”41 In her discussion of the importance of marriage symbolism at the fifteenth-­



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century Burgundian court, Margaret D. Carroll points out that later theologians such as Nicholas of Cusa, who had important ties to the fifteenth-­century Burgundian court, argued that just as a marriage is predicated upon a divinely sanctioned consensual bond between husband and wife, so too is a king’s authority predicated upon a divinely sanctioned consensual bond between the ruler and his subjects: “The authority of a superior originates in an elective agreement of voluntary subjection. The nursery of divine power is in the people by virtue of the equal birth of all humans and of their natural equal rights. All power, which originally comes from God, just as it does from man himself, is agreed to be divine when it rises through the common concord of the subjects. . . . ​ Such is that divine marriage, ordained by a spiritual bond, rooted in lasting concord.”42 And “when Philip was installed as Count of Flanders or Duke of Brabant in ‘Joyous Entry’ ceremonies, he and his subjects exchanged such vows. Philip’s subjects officially consented to be ruled by him, while he in turn swore to protect them and their privileges.”43 That by the fifteenth century married relations have become a privileged space to think through state relations, such that a ruler can compare himself to a husband taking on the yoke of leadership as he seeks the consent of his people in marriage, surely depends not just on the development of an extensive marriage symbolism to describe Christ’s relations to the church, to Mary, and to the Christian subject, but also on the kind of reconfiguration of actual husband–­wife relations taking place in the conduct literature this book considers. Indeed, as I argue in this book, conduct literature for women provides a textual milieu equivalent to the fraternal sermons that d’Avray has examined, one that provides a similar boundary-­ crossing medium so that thinking about married relations and the married household could be “mainstreamed” and transmitted across Europe and across social classes in the long fourteenth century, much as fraternal sermons transmitted thinking about sacramental marriage across Europe and from clerical to lay audiences in the thirteenth century. In describing such a development of an affective contract at the heart of sacramental and companionate marital relations, as well as the reconfigured, more egalitarian gender roles made possible by them, and the increasing symbolic importance of the couple-­centered household they could build, Conduct

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Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages further argues that literature addressed to the good wife provides the ground on which to develop a new model of heterosexuality in this period. While not inimical to romantic love or sexual expression, the desire for love of the marrying kind expressed in these conduct texts stands apart from both, expressing a sexuality organized not in terms of drives, lack, or jouissance but more ambiguously as a set of self-­restrained, socially expressed and sanctioned connections: an affective rather than an erotic or feudal contract. If we think of sexuality not simply as a set of sexual acts (or their absence) but rather as the capacity of such acts to define one’s place within the social and thus to define who one truly is, then one might well argue that there is nothing like modern heterosexuality (as we currently understand it) in the Middle Ages.44 When a medieval nobleman married, what mattered was that marriage’s ability to transfer property and produce the heirs needed to maintain family name and landholdings that mattered. A certain kind of sexual activity, obviously, was necessary to provide the offspring necessary to make such a transfer of property happen, just as a certain level of fertility on the part of the wife was necessary to ensure procreation. But neither type of sexual activity identified a husband or wife in terms of their ability to properly mature as sexual individuals as modern Western heterosexuality does. There were dominant sexualities organizing the self-­definition and self-­representation of medieval subjects in the world. The most fundamental, of course, was virginity, coming as it did to organize both monastic and clerical identities and to represent the highest aspirations of the Christian subject in the Middle Ages. Alongside that was the sexuality developed by means of the masculine and feminine subject positions developed through the discourses of fin’amor, defining in complex ways “the noble” as a universal but demarcated place of identification for secular men and women. Neither of these sexualities provides much leverage for loving in the “marrying kind of way.” Medieval penitentials, for example, treat marriage in a “better to marry than burn with lust” manner and are concerned largely with unearthing and punishing the illicit sexual acts that might take place within it. The literature of classic fin’amor generally views marriage as an impediment to the fulfillment of romantic love. If, as I argue in this book, conduct literature for women focuses on the advantages of loving in a marrying kind of way, it does so as a way of shifting emphasis away from sexual acts or an erotics of romance in ways that empower new forms of lay social activity.45 Paradoxically, these texts adapt ascetic models developed to regulate clerical celibacy in order to talk about forms of chaste marital relations that, while sexual, can nonetheless encompass the full range of



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social relations. By showing how both laymen and laywomen can manifest this kind of self-­restraint, these texts can begin to explore the full range of affective relations possible within late medieval sacramental/companionate marriage, its capacity to develop the human as fully as possible in laymen and laywomen. These affective relations can then map new organizations of the social and structure the kind of couple-­centered household suitable for undergirding the institutional structures of late medieval/early modern society. As this book argues, the ability of conduct texts for women to reconfigure femininity allowed for a new authority to be taken up by laymen as husbands and fathers, for the new couple-­centered household established by such marriage to be revalued, and for chaste sexualized identities to be given an authoritative status within the social. The good wife represented in these conduct texts thus straddles a sexual and social divide. On the one hand, she emerges from medieval sexual regimes that emphasize either virginity or aristocratic fin’amor, and marriage as vehicle for the transfer of property, and do not provide space for an individually defined affective contract within marriage. On the other hand, she embodies in her empowering self-­restraint the aspirations of emergent gentry and bourgeois subjects to become part of the ruling hegemony. The heterosexuality that is manifested in these texts’ attention to marital conduct is at once a hybrid, idiosyncratic manifestation of individual will—​­what Karma Lochrie has termed a “heterosyncrasy”—​­and at the same time part of that emerging sex/gender system that will ultimately, in its later sedimented and stratified early modern incarnation, coalesce as a foundation for modern heterosexuality.46 This sexuality of a marrying kind incites a masculine desire to “touch” within the conjoined body of marriage a femininity often vehemently represented in medieval systems of thought as focalizing all of the most abjecting aspects of embodiment—​­lack of control by individual will, unrestrained desire, open bodies, and so on. Some mechanism, therefore, was needed to ensure that the chaste self-­restraint promised by sacramental marriage could be achieved and recognized with a predictable regularity. Since the conjoined body of the married estate brings the masculine and the feminine alongside each other in potentially troubling ways, this late medieval shift to a desiring system organized around husbands and good wives paradoxically depends upon the incitement of desire for counter-­pleasure, that is, for a restrained lay conduct that both emulates and co-­opts the benefits of monastic modes of ascesis. Conduct literature for women, focusing, as it were, on the weak link of marital relations, provided a powerful medium for such a rethinking of gender and sexual relations. For instead of characterizing

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marriage’s entanglement of masculine with feminine as category confusion, and using such a confusion to justify why the married estate should be valued lower than virginity or celibacy, conduct literature for women reimagines heterosexual contact as something encouraging individual perfectability and therefore capable of underpinning a stable social order. The attention to conduct that this book investigates is thus both the culmination of a long process of transformation in marriage and its place in late medieval society and the beginning of a new heterosexuality that will emerge more visibly by the end of the early modern period. As I argue, the newness and innovative power of this transformation of married relations articulated through these conduct texts and their revisioning of female embodiment is in constant tension with the ability of such new forms to provide power-­filled identities for emergent groups in late medieval/early modern society. The tensions present in the late medieval/early modern turn to the conduct of the married estate and the value of the households founded by it as models for the modern state might also provide a different context for understanding the recent (re)turn to marriage within both the left and the right across the West in recent years. If marriage is proving “good to think with” for both gay/lesbian activists and conservative elements within Roman Catholicism and Evangelical Christianity, it may be because the reconfigurations of the lay married estate in the late medieval and early modern period worked so successfully to make it not the location of a troubling sexual activity but the privileged space in which a set of chaste relations and an intensification of marriage as an affective contract could take place. The argument about medieval female conduct and married relations that this book pursues in turn suggests a kind of queer, “preposterous” disturbance of temporality that would bring this book’s destabilized account of late medieval sexuality back to a present that might think itself immune from history.47 I want, therefore, to end with two recent manifestations of contemporary concern for marriage appearing in the New York Times, reading them in terms of the discourses of marital affection that develop out of a medieval sacramental theology of marriage, its use by laypeople to articulate new modes of sexualized and gendered self-­identifications for themselves, and its attention to self-­restrained modes of conduct as a way for laypeople to represent new identities in the world. My first example, from a New York Times Magazine feature, “What They Were Thinking,” shows a father and two daughters dancing at the annual Purity Ball organized by the Evangelical Free Church. The captions below the photograph quote the father, Brenden Wixom, and his fourteen-­year old



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daughter, Tara. In many respects, the father’s comments echo the sentiments expressed by the Chevalier de la Tour Landry as he sat in his garden watching his three young daughters and thinking of the challenges to their virtue that they would face as noble women in a courtly setting. And Brenden Wixom, like the Chevalier, similarly fuses theology, morality, and social conduct to think about the question of female conduct: When the three of us were dancing together, I was thinking that not too long ago, they were just toddlers and now they’re young women. You kind of want time to slow down and be able to relish the moment. We send our kids out into the world, and there’s a battle going on. It seemed like a good idea to give the girls a biblical worldview and help them make a commitment to how they want their life to unfold before a precipitous moment happens. They know about the birds and the bees, but they’re still fairly innocent. When they go to the ball for the first time, it’s a commitment to remain pure and an understanding that it’s not going to be easy. In subsequent years, it’s about recommitting and taking stock of where they’re at and asking their father for support. . . . . . . ​You want your children, and particularly your daughters, to be prepared. But in other ways, the situation Wixom describes is notably different from that of the Chevalier. Wixom here theologizes in ways the Chevalier does not. For the Chevalier what is at issue are two competing versions of “the noble,” a debate rather than a battle, where the outcome is not preordained and where household knowledges are crucial to developing the new, personal scripts that young women need in order to remain pure. By purging the contemporary moment of the very kind of historical sense that attending to female conduct develops in the Livre du chevalier, Wixom engages in a nostalgizing rhetoric that simplifies the social terrain of sex/gender relations to a reductive binary of “the world” versus “the biblical worldview.” And in the process, the contemporary Evangelical Christian married household becomes a reassuring and inviting (for him) safe haven from the world rather than the challenging and productive hinge between the two imagined in medieval conduct texts such as the Livre du chevalier. Wixom’s daughter Tara articulates a performative understanding of conduct strikingly similar to that of medieval conduct texts addressed to women:

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I think of the Purity Ball at the Evangelical Free Church as something I go to yearly to remind myself of the commitment I have made to keep myself pure—​­physically, morally, sexually—​­until I am married. What I really like about my father going is that he is the one that God has put at the head of our household. I’m preparing myself for when I am married, so I think you could call my dad my guinea pig. I’m learning how to serve, respect, love, honor my husband. I practice that by loving, serving and obeying my father. The first year I went, my dad gave me a necklace. This year, he gave me a purity ring, which I wear on my left hand. It is also a reminder.48 But the identity of daughter and future good wife represented to her eschews any acknowledgment or accommodation of hybridity. The symbolic regime established by her father giving her a purity ring brings father and husband, father/husband, and Christ into alignment in ways that the medieval texts, grappling with understanding the ethical possibilities within secular manifestations of the married estate, cannot imagine. Instead, the symbolic regime established by Wixom’s fatherly relations with his daughter imagined here seems more aligned with the intimate scripts developed by celibate medieval religious women when they secure their vocation and identity by marrying Christ. While the practices of a purity ball present points of comparison with the medieval conduct texts examined in this book, most notably its fantasy of the attainment of a pure, secure mode of embodiment for ethical subjects in the world, medieval conduct texts envision the married household as a productive hinge between the individual and the world and the work of conduct as emblematic of the mixed life. The household envisioned here has been retheologized and nostalgically and retrospectively dehistoricized in order to construct a myth of absolute purity battling worldly error. My second example, from the wedding section of the New York Times, features the November 29, 2009, marriage of Stephen Davis and Jeffrey Busch. Despite the rhetoric of equal rights that often occupies the foreground of the gay marriage debate, Jeffrey Busch describes his reasons for suing the state of Connecticut in 2004 to marry Stephen Davis in a language of marital affection that resonates across the centuries in surprising ways with that used by the good widow of Liège: “Marriage is so much more than a collection of rights and privileges. . . . ​Nobody says, ‘Oh I want to civil union you.’ . . . ​ Stephen loves me in the marrying kind of way. He loves me when I’m



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unlovable.” 49 In stepping outside discourses of gay sexuality that would either focus on it as a set of (prohibited, dangerous) sexual acts—​­paralleling the position of medieval penitentials—​­or think solely in terms of a resistant queer erotics, Busch, like many other advocates of gay marriage, articulates instead the benefits that an affective contract might offer. In doing so, he recognizes how any turn to marriage, coming as it does at the end of a long historic arc that has increasingly sedimented marriage and heterosexual privilege as foundational for modern Western social formations, carries with it the charge of heteronormativity. 50 But his evocation of a language of care echoes the focus on marital affection we see in medieval conduct texts. And this language of care allows Busch to construct a narrative for his relationship that stands outside those provided by discourses that would focus on his relations with Davis ­prohibitively—​­as “simply” and unacceptably sexual—​­or in queer oppositional terms—​­as needing to cultivate an alternative queer erotics from such sex acts. Moreover, as the New York Times article makes clear, the domestic household established by such an affective contract is a destablizingly hybrid one: “While some people describe their family as a unit, Stephen Davis and Jeffrey Busch’s family is nowhere near as tidy as that. Theirs is more like a family complex. Mr. Busch, 46, and Mr. Davis, 58, live with their 7-­year-­old son, Elijah Davis Busch, and Mr. Busch’s mother, Iris Busch, in a contemporary home in Wilton, Conn. At their dinner table on any given night you might also meet Monica Pearl, Mr. Busch’s longtime best friend, and her 8-­year-­old daughter, Vita Aaron Pearl. Mr. Busch is Vita’s donor dad or, as Vita’s friends sometimes say, doughnut dad.’”51 Not unlike Caesarius’s good wife, Busch here is performing his own kind of practical theorizing as he adapts discourses of marriage and gay liberation to empower a personal, “on the ground” experiment with marital and social relations. So, too, the narrative here develops an idiosyncratic exemplarity from personal conduct that reshapes both heterosexual and queer discourses to fashion its own language—​­“loving in the marrying kind of way”—​­to bring into being ethical subjects that encompass a tension between innovation and social consolidation. Newly emergent, able to access economic and political power only recently available to them, historically without traditional means of positive or hegemonic self-­representation, all this would readily describe the gay men and women whose coalescence as a social and political force has made possible the increasing power of the gay marriage movement. But these terms also describe medieval men and women of the middling state in relation to traditional power bases in the aristocracy and church, or indeed laymen and women

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more generally in relation to celibate monastics and clerics. It is unlikely that Jeffrey Busch would parallel his situation as a gay man marrying in twenty-­ first-­century Connecticut with that of the usurer’s wife depicted in Caesarius of Heisterbach’s exemplum. Yet there is much in the discourse Busch adopts that a medieval reader might find familiar. The emphasis on personal choice, on the language of marital affection used to define the foundation of their relationship, the focus on children and household relations as the primary “good” established by this “marrying love,” and the implicit distinction of such a self-­denying love—​­“He loves me when I’m unlovable”—​­from more common definitions of gay love in terms of sexual activity or erotic desire all echo in perhaps surprising but substantive ways the discourses of sacramental marriage that increasingly define the late medieval married estate. If the conduct texts examined in this book provide a kind of prehistory of modern heterosexuality, exposing the tension between innovative and conserving that defines the birth of this modern sexuality in late medieval/early modern culture, then these contemporary examples expose a similar tension within recent turns to marriage as exemplary for postmodern sexualities. Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages is about such loving in the “marrying kind of way” and the crucial role that conduct literature for women plays in representing that love in the world. The book begins in Chapter 1, “Laboring to Make the Good Wife Good in the Journées Chrétiennes,” by considering a group of texts that set out to provide a basic framework to organize the layman or laywoman’s day, often by pairing set prayers and devotions with the canonical hours—​­matins, prime, terce, and so on. These texts, which Geneviève Hasenohr has aptly named journées chrétiennes, attempt to provide a “rule” for the mixed life that would allow their lay readers, necessarily involved in the world, the means to emulate the devotional discipline of a monk or nun. Lacking external signifiers of dedication such as the monastic cell or anchor-­hold, the private devotion of the laity must find alternate means of making itself visible to the larger world, usually within the confines of the married household. The journées provide the kind of frame needed to make visible (and repeatable) the performative reading practices that more generally structure private devotion in the later Middle Ages. Markers such as en pensé, de coeur, or en coeur work to establish the immateriality of this labor and to distinguish it from the very obvious material labor that traditionally (if in different ways) defines members of the third estate or the nobility. Successful negotiation of the spiritual discipline offered by the journées provides the good wife with a profoundly empowering opportu-



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nity to be seen to improve upon her nature. Grounding the conduct of her life in this way thus offers her the opportunity to rework her previously marginalized position within a traditional medieval hierarchy of women’s roles founded on the absolute value of chastity within the enclosed life. Chapter 2, “Remaking the Feminine,” turns to texts more commonly thought of as conduct literature, and in particular, to texts such as Louis IX’s Les Enseignements de Saint Louis à sa fille Isabelle, Durand de Champagne’s Speculum dominarum, or Le Miroir des bonnes femmes that are explicitly focused on the conduct of women in the secular world. The chapter considers how, beginning in the late thirteenth century, a new tradition of writing for secular women develops, one focused on systematizing female conduct in ways that imagine a woman’s nature to be just as capable of improvement as a man’s. The chapter examines how such texts work to gender conduct in powerful new ways. While the feminine in these texts is now viewed as capable of a level of self-­restraint and amelioration previously attached only to the masculine, nonetheless, proper female conduct also naturally seeks to fulfill its nature under the rule of a father’s or husband’s authority. The chapter argues that changing the good wife’s nature is intimately connected with the larger project of changing marital relations more generally and discusses, in particular, how the Livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry works to authorize the aristocratic household as a new model for the social. That text’s extensive autobiographical frame moves the Chevalier and his readers from the confines of the courtly garden as traditional location of noble self-­identification in the processes of fin’amor to the noble married household and its invigoratingly productive work of married domestic relations, thereby reframing it as the ideal place in which to develop and nurture a properly ethical form of noble conduct. Chapter 3, “In the Merchant’s Bedchamber: Le Menagier de Paris,” asks what happens when the gendered and sexualized identities of secular conduct texts are “translated” to the very different, hybrid social terrain of an urban merchant’s household. The chapter considers how a household book such as the Menagier explores the value of a more contingent and fluid engagement with space and narrative form in order to formulate new, hybrid modes of self-­identification. For example, the Menagier’s autobiographical prologue tightens our focus so that we remain inside the domestic space of marital relations, concentrated on the voices of the newly married couple within their bedchamber. As a result, we do not view the husband and wife from ready-­ made social or moral perspectives that would immediately and satisfactorily

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place them—​­either positively as the sumptuously and properly clothed couple in Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait are staged in their bedroom, or negatively, as in the divisive bedroom scenes that are the stock and trade of fabliau depictions of married life. The bedchamber is presented here as a threshold or rehearsal space in which the couple can labor to build the productive marriage relationships that will later be taken public and put on display by means of the well-­ordered conduct of the good wife and of the household that she governs under her husband’s authority. The prologue’s bedchamber conversation, like the Menagier more generally, thus works to foreground a lay sexuality articulated in terms of a desire for self-­denial and service to the common good. Chapter 4, “Affecting Conduct: Feeling Steadfast with Griselda,” examines some of the first iterations of the Griselda story, one of the most popular and perplexing medieval accounts of married conduct. The chapter attends to the movement of the story across languages, national boundaries, and class positions in order to understand further how shaping narratives of the good woman—​­as reader, translator, “author”—​­had become by this time one of the most flexible and privileged modes of publicly attending to conduct and thereby signaling the construction of an appropriately ethical subject position. The story’s sudden and intense popularity derives in the first instance from how both Boccaccio’s and Petrarch’s versions focus our attention on marital relations primarily as an affective contract, one in which “owning” affect provides the basis for different understandings of how one secures agency within necessarily unequal power relations. Equally important, Petrarch’s “translation” of Boccaccio’s vernacular Decameron tale does more than just render it into a humanist Latin; it translates Boccaccio’s fabliau-­like account into the language of conduct literature. The chapter finishes by considering the revernacularization of Petrarch’s Latin Griselda taking place in the 1390s. It examine first Philippe de Mézières’s French translation of the Griselda story and its placement in Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage. The chapter argues that Philippe conceives of both Griselda and the Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage as a kind of summa for female conduct. It then ends with Geoffrey Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale and its intensification of affect, one that forestalls “finishing” Petrarch’s story in order to keep the affective identifications of the story “in between” feeling and socialization.

Chapter 1

Laboring to Make the Good Wife Good in the Journées Chrétiennes

The Mixed Life, Late Medieval Conjugality, and New Devotional Practices As we have seen, by the fourteenth century the married estate increasingly signified more than simple renewal of the species or a vehicle for the transmission of dynastic wealth and power. The more marriage gained representational power, the more it could provide an enabling forum in which to assert the conceptual and social significance of those laymen and laywomen who most fully embodied the conjugal ideal. As the following example illustrates, rethinking marriage could also reconfigure in surprising ways how traditional medieval social hierarchies were thought of. While it is common in sermons on the marriage at Cana to assert that marriage is authoritative because it was instituted by God, Andrew Galloway has noted the innovative formulation of an early fourteenth-­century German preacher, Peregrinus of Oppeln, who begins his sermon on the sacrament by commending marriage as a divinely instituted ordo superior to the other religious ordines: “the order of marriage alone has been instituted by God; happy indeed are those who have such an abbot.”1 While presuming a monastic model of community as foundational for the social, such a comparison nonetheless folds sexualized, mixed gender relations into the privileged realm of celibate devotional communities in intriguing ways. This chapter explores how pursuing contemplative forms of private devotion from within the married estate might work to reshape the very nature of good wives and the position of the married laity more generally.

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Alongside this transformation of the married estate in the period there occurred an equally profound rethinking of the traditional distinction between the contemplative and the active life. Both clerics and laypeople increasingly came to value a life that mixed contemplation and activity in the world. Devout laymen and laywomen who successfully embraced the mixed life could now gain the kind of spiritual empowerment previously reserved to the strictly contemplative lives of enclosed monks and nuns.2 Upper-­level bourgeois, gentry, and noble laymen and laywomen who were literate in their vernacular language, and who possessed a certain amount of leisure time and access to private spaces, could access new technologies of private devotion that allowed them to take a proactive role in tailoring their spiritual lives to the particular demands of their social location in the world. Indeed, clerics increasingly challenged such high-­status laypeople to engage in a higher level of contemplative devotion than the laity more generally because of their elevated position in society, thereby upending the long-­standing view of monastics (focused on contemplative labor on behalf of society) as superior to the laity (focused on physical labor on the land or the defense of the praying class). If by the end of the fourteenth century, in K. B. McFarlane’s provocative formulation, “the literate laity were taking the clergy’s words out of their mouths,”3 it was because of the processes of translation and transformation that this new attention to private devotion initiated. As Vincent Gillespie argues, “The fifteenth century witnessed an extensive and consistent process of assimilation by the laity of techniques and materials of spiritual advancement, which had historically been the preserve of the clerical and monastic ­orders. . . . ​Texts which had originally been written for the limited needs of enclosed communities were adapted, translated and quarried to supply the needs of a wider clerical and lay audience, and classics of spirituality from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries enjoyed new leases of life in the fifteenth.”4 What Gillespie highlights here is far more than the direct translation of spefor example, Nicholas Love’s Englishing of cific Latin spiritual texts—​­ Bonaventura’s Meditationes Vitae Christi in The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. It is, in addition, the very “techniques and materials of spiritual advancement, which had historically been the preserve of the clerical and monastic orders,”5 that are also being translated and assimilated: first by enclosed women (anchoresses or nuns who would not have access to the resources of private devotional manuals written in Latin), then by aristocratic and upper-­ level bourgeois and gentry laymen and laywomen, and, finally, more widely by ever larger groupings of the “middling” classes. Furthermore, the handicap



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of limited Latin literacy, which the laity shared with religious women, meant that “the laity, for all their pragmatic literacy (either in Latin or the vernacular), came to occupy a position in the educational hierarchy similar to that which had long been occupied by women religious, [which] partly explains the extensive links and literary exchanges between the laity and such groups in the later middle ages.”6 Just as the shared handicap of limited Latin literacy links laymen and religious women in newly empowering ways, such translation work also links certain good wives, their husbands, and clerics in new modes of interdependent agency. This chapter will try to bring into focus the innovatively gendered and performative reading practices that characterize the new forms of devotion made possible by such a conjunction of vernacular translation and lay spiritual advancement. Translating programs of devotion developed in the monastery and the anchorage to the quite different material conditions of lay life produces a textual culture focused less on the scholarly study of sacred texts following a clerical model of lectio divina, or “divine reading” (that is, a four-­step process of reading, meditating on, praying, and contemplating the words of Holy Scripture), and more on the individual apprehension of the content of vernacular texts and translations as a spur to meditation (what Richard Rolle aptly terms “lukynge in haly bukes”).7 Thus, as Gillespie notes, by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries textual innovations have been developed that recognize the linguistic limitations of their audiences and the impossibility of extensive reading in Latin of patristic sources. And the psalms and traditional prayers, combined with the silent reading of vernacular prayers and texts, provide an alternative discipline for lay devotion.8 At the forefront of this movement was the development of a comprehensive structure for lay private devotion that combined not only the rote recitation of Latin prayers but also the silent reading of vernacular texts and prayers, mental prayer, and sustained meditation. An ability to read vernacular texts or understand vernacular prayers and meditative writing is crucial for such an endeavor, but Latin literacy itself is not. And while this devotional culture remains as intensely performative as the public monastic recitation of the canonical hours, demanding constant, daily repetition of its programs of private meditation, its focus shifts from oral, public performance via the mouth to silent, interior apprehension through the heart. Best known to modern readers are the immensely popular Books of Hours developed during this period, which allowed the laity to reproduce the monastic recitation of devotional offices throughout the day within the

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constraints of a mixed life lived in the world. Medieval monks and nuns were required to recite on a weekly basis virtually all the psalms (in Latin, of course) divided among the seven major daily offices of matins (or “vigils”), lauds (the dawn office), prime, terce, sext, and nones (the shorter “day” offices), vespers (the evening office), plus the short bedtime service of compline. As Eamon Duffy has noted, the psalms, prayers, and hymns in these offices varied considerably with the liturgical seasons and required a complicated set of texts to support these public liturgies. Thus, by the twelfth century, monks and canons were also often obliged to recite shorter groups of psalms such as the Penitential psalms or the so-­called “Gradual” psalms, and some short devotional offices, above all the “Little Hours of the Virgin,” as well as to recite the office for the dead daily in memory of deceased brethren, all this on top of the Office proper. These additional services, like the formal Office, were similarly arranged around the liturgical “Hours,” and were sometimes recited immediately after them. They were, however, far simpler in structure, the texts shorter, the psalms fewer, varying hardly or not at all with the seasons. They might therefore even be recited from memory, but were more commonly written out in small books suitable for use in private rather than in choir.9 It is these simpler, private monastic offices that provide the basis for the collections assembled in lay Books of Hours.10 Equally important are the many meditational programs—​­linking the events in Christ’s Passion to the canonical hours, for example, or focusing empathetic prayer on key moments in the Eucharist—​­that also allowed lay private devotion to expand to fill in as much of the day or night as might be available. Early works of spiritual guidance written by clerics for women lay recluses or anchoresses, such as the Ancrene Wisse, begin a tradition that by the fourteenth century is being translated to lay audiences, when clerics begin to address the specific contexts of lay devotion and the mixed life. Probably the best-­known English work advocating such a path for the laity is Walter Hilton’s Mixed Life, where Hilton explores the value of combining active and contemplative in response to a lay lord who had expressed a desire to pursue a more intense religious practice in his day-­to-­day life. This chapter focuses in particular on a group of texts that explicitly attempt to provide lay readers (especially laywomen) with guidelines for daily living that will help them



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realize a quasi-­monastic, private devotional life. While not Books of Hours, these texts, which Geneviève Hasenohr has aptly named journées chrétiennes, often advocate pairing set prayers and devotions with the canonical hours—​ m ­ atins, prime, terce, and so on—​­as a basic framework to organize the layman’s or laywoman’s day.11 And these texts often assume or explicitly call for the recitation of the liturgies normally included in lay Books of Hours—​ ­especially the Hours of the Virgin or the Hours of the Dead. The focus of the journées, however, is on the intensification and proliferation of an interiorized private devotion over and above the oral recitation of the hours, as much as is possible within the day-­to-­day demands of their secular readers. Such texts attempt to provide a “rule” for the mixed life that would allow the layman or laywoman, despite a necessary involvement in the world, to emulate the devotional discipline of a monk or nun. The journées chrétiennes are not so much a separate genre of devotional literature as they are the textual location that makes explicit what is everywhere implicit in the wider range of private devotional practices: the desire to translate not just bits and pieces of the content of monastic practice but the discipline of monastic life itself in such a way that the cultural capital and status accrued by monastic contemplative labor could be accessed through this new immaterial labor of private devotion on the part of laypeople attempting to lead the mixed life. In doing so, the journées attempt to make visible a time and place where the lay subject can be imagined as capable of reshaping his or her spiritual nature and in the process transforming his or her place in the world. Such texts can be understood, at least in part, as focused on developing, by means of an interior, personally felt, private devotion, the kinds of “intimate scripts” recently analyzed by Sarah McNamer in Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion. There McNamer argues for a new reading of medieval compassionate devotion to Christ as historically contingent, ideologically charged, and performatively constituted emotion, one that was in the broad period she considers (ca. 1050–­1530) insistently gendered as feminine. She suggests that such affective meditations act as “intimate scripts” for their reader/actors, allowing them to perform compassion in the private drama of the heart. “They are,” she notes, quite literally scripts for the performance of feeling—​­scripts that often explicitly aspire to performative efficacy. . . . ​ As mechanisms for the production of emotion, many of the texts belonging to this genre can be categorized as iterations of what

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William Reddy has called “emotives.” [That is,] . . . ​“first-­person, present tense emotion claims” that potentially, but not always, function as performatives; they are “similar to performatives (and differ from constatives) in that emotives do things to the world. Emotives are themselves instruments for directly changing, building, hiding, intensifying emotions, instruments that may be more or less successful.”12 By moving away from an account of emotion as anchored in a preexisting biological fact, to one that emphasizes the social, performative nature of an emotion such as compassion, McNamer challenges the supposed probative force of “emotional authenticity.” Her evidence, she argues, shows that an emotion such as compassion “can indeed be willed, faked, performed through the repetition of scripted words. It is through such manifest fakery, this genre insists, that compassion can be brought into being, can come to be ‘true.’”13 McNamer’s focus on meditational practice as intimate scripts provides a powerful model for thinking about the performative reading practices that the journées help construct. And in doing so it helps us step outside of stultifying descriptions of such didactic literature as simply “ideological” and encouraging a rote reception of external authority. At the same time, as we will see, the journées outline a different set of emotives and a different channeling of affect because they emphasize the production of a universalizing mode of self-­identification through private devotion and because they situate such lay devotional activity within the affective contract of lay married relations and within the daily demands of household life. While certainly attentive to the cultivation of affect within intimate scripts capable of producing the emotion of compassion, the journées also remain focused on the kinds of affective relations that connect the devotee with spouse, family, and household.14 The rules for daily living developed in the journées are particularly interesting because they make explicit how programs of private devotion must engage with the material conditions of lay life—​­both helpful and restrictive—​­if they are to be successful in promoting meditation within the mixed life. They thus concern themselves with the conduct of their readers in the broad sense outlined by Kathleen Ashley and Robert Clark, that is, as “written texts systematizing a society’s codes of behavior.”15 This chapter therefore considers the journées chrétiennes as a type of conduct literature and their literate devotional practices as the starting point for this book’s discussion of the reshaping of the nature of the good wife through such an attention



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to her conduct. Unlike another important mode of clerical communication with the laity in the period, the ad status sermons discussed by David d’Avray and others, this disciplining of the laity is not focused on marriage in an explicit way.16 Nor are the journées chrétiennes—​­and other such texts of private devotion more generally—​­focused only on good wives. But the performative identity that the journées encourage their readers to articulate is constructed from within the hybridity of the mixed life and often explicitly from within the lay married estate. And it is hard to imagine such a translation of monastic discipline to lay groups without the kind of reconfiguration of the married estate and without the economic advancement of many bourgeois and gentry households taking place in this period. It is precisely to these new elite groups, as well as to established noble laymen and laywomen, that these texts are addressed, since these upper levels of the laity have the education and the opportunities for personal space and time to themselves that such rigorous devotion requires. For the good wife especially, successful negotiation of the spiritual discipline offered by the journées chrétiennes provides a profoundly empowering opportunity to be seen to improve upon her nature and thus to shift her previously marginalized position within a traditional medieval hierarchy of women’s roles founded on the absolute value of chastity within the enclosed life. As Hali Meidhed, the thirteenth-­century English guide for anchoresses, so starkly puts it: Yet of these three states—​­virginity and widowhood, and marriage is the third—​­you can tell by the degrees of their bliss which one is superior to the others, and by how much. For marriage has its reward thirtyfold in heaven; widowhood, sixtyfold; virginity, with a hundredfold, surpasses both. See then from this, whoever descends from her virginity into marriage, by how many degrees she falls downwards. She is raised a hundred degrees towards heaven while she keeps her virginity, as the reward proves; and leaps into ­marriage—​­that is, right down to the thirtieth—​­over three score and yet more by ten. Is this not a great leap downwards at one time?17 Instead, the journées chrétiennes promise a rule for devout laypeople that can—​­at least potentially—​­come close to that achieved by those contemplatives living enclosed lives. The devotional labor they espouse would therefore seem to offer a particularly efficacious way to ameliorate the inferior position

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of those women who find themselves unable to withdraw from the world because of their place in the married estate. And compared with her male counterparts, the good wife (or the young girl on her way to becoming a good wife) from a socially and economically privileged location has in certain respects the most opportunities to engage in such private devotion and meditation within the household (and local parish church) spaces that are her “natural” habitat. Whether by means of formal instruction through written texts in the vernacular such as the journées chrétiennes, or more informal oral instruction from confessors and other spiritual directors, or by individual emulation of the examples of others, it is clear that increasingly complex and demanding devotional programs are available to, and sought by, religiously motivated married women of the later Middle Ages. John Sheppey, bishop of Rochester, for example, notes the following in his sermon at the funeral of Joan, Lady Cobham, in 1344: “But lo, in such things this lady was well instructed; for as regards prayers, every day was a feast day with her. For unless there was some greater necessity, on no day would she willingly come down from her chamber or speak with any stranger, until she had said matins and the hours of Our Lady, the seven psalms and the litany, almost every day; and then at Mass, when the priest was silent, she said some private prayers in French and some Paternosters and Hail Marys.”18 While no manuscript associated with Lady Cobham survives, Kathryn A. Smith has argued that, based on Bishop Sheppey’s statement, she “ ‘said matins and the hours of Our Lady, the seven (Penitential) psalms and the litany,’ [and] one may infer that Lady Cobham, like [her contemporaries] Margaret de Beauchamp, Hawisia de Bois and Isabel de Byron, owned a book of hours.”19 Bishop Sheppey’s reference to saying “some private prayers in French” implies that Joan is actually reading them silently as mental prayer, perhaps from her Book of Hours. But whether that also signals a larger program of extensive internal meditation cannot be determined from his brief description. But Joan does appear to be pushing the bounds of traditional lay piety, engaging in a mixed life of activity and contemplation in order to make her devotion more programmatic and quasi-­monastic. By the fifteenth century, however, the kind of daily oral liturgical prayer practiced by someone like Joan is much more often explicitly fused with meditation connected with literate practices that emphasize interior contemplation and mental prayer. Hilary M. Carey, citing Margaret Deanesly’s work on late medieval English wills, notes that the most popular devotional works bequeathed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were contemplative and mystical works



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such as those written by Rolle, Hilton, and Love, rather than those clerical texts aimed at edifying the laity, such as the Manuel des Péchés, which survive in far more manuscript copies.20 The fifteenth-­century examples of Cicely, Duchess of York (and mother of Edward IV and Richard III), and Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, more clearly than that of Joan, Lady Cobham, embody a daily regime that fuses active and contemplative, oral and textual, into a hybrid lay version of a monastic day. As Bishop John Fisher, Lady Margaret’s confessor, notes in his funeral sermon for her: She rose soon after five, and after certain devotions recited the matins of Our Lady with one of her gentlewomen; then recited the matins of the day with her chaplain in her closet; then she heard four or five masses (presumably in her chapel); then followed prayers and devotions until dinner, which was at ten in the morning on “eating days” and eleven on fasting days. After dinner she would go to her “stations” to three altars daily. She recited daily “her dirges & commendacyons” (the Office of the Dead); “And her euensonges before souper both of the daye & of our lady, besyde many other prayers & psalters of Dauyd thrugh out the yere. And at nyght before she wente to bedde she faylled not to resorte vnto her chapell, & there a large quarter of an hour to occupye her in deuocyons. . . . ​ As for medytacyon she had dyuers bokes in Frensshe wherewith she wolde occupy herselfe whan she was wery of prayer.”21 The devotional achievements of late medieval women that have entered the historical register in this way are, not surprisingly, largely those of noble and royal wives who had been widowed for some time before their death and subsequent commendation in funeral sermons. Rather than seeing these activities continuing the traditional hierarchy of female roles, however, we might more usefully see them as the culmination of a project of amelioration that would have started when they were still married. Widowhood provides these good wives not with a distinct identity as a woman but with the opportunity to intensify patterns of behavior that were already under way. Their intensification of devotion after becoming widows allows them not only to emulate a monastic ordo but also to imitate the roles of clerical advisers in the journées. Lady Margaret is justly famous for her ambitious project of translation that enlisted both clerical literacy in Latin and the new resources of print to bring a variety of worthy texts via translation to

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the English people.22 On a smaller scale, Dame Eleanor Hull, shortly after being widowed, translates into English a commentary on the seven penitential psalms and a collection of prayers and meditations on the days of the week, works with which she was clearly familiar in their Anglo-­Norman. Alexandra Barratt has recently discussed in detail Eleanor’s processes of translation in the latter work and notes that “it takes a self-­confident translator to treat one’s original with the freedom she exercises. It is not so much that she omits or adds single words and phrases, as that she excises extensive amounts of Anglo-­ Norman so as to give her text its own distinctive shape, and does not hesitate to abandon it altogether when it has served its purpose. Although she was a faithful translator on the level of the word and the sentence, she apparently made a conscious decision to discard considerable sections of her original and juxtapose two sections that had previously existed quite independently of each other.”23 It is not fanciful, I think, to speculate that years of programmed prayer and meditation as a wife “lukyng in bukes” would have equipped Eleanor and provided the self-­confidence Barratt sees her later evincing as a translator of such books. But in some ways the greatest possibility for change in the status of the good wife lies in the harder to discern ameliorative effects accruing to more average gentry and upper-­level bourgeois wives. And here the journées can be most helpful in thinking through the possibilities for, and consequences of, new forms of agency that might be available through such programs of devotion. As the figure charged with the management of the everyday bodies lodged in the lay household, the bourgeois or gentry good wife is a lynchpin in the domestic economy of the household and foundational for its modes of embodiment. Not surprisingly, then, the journées provide a locus where the role of gender and class in the success of private devotion is addressed more explicitly and fully than within other formats for such devotion.24 Geneviève Hasenohr notes that sermons ad status of the later Middle Ages classify new groupings of men according to “real-­life” categories of labor and confessional manuals try to relate the confessor’s moral questioning to the expectations appropriate to a layman’s new professional estate. But, she points out, both sermons and confessional manuals continue to treat women in purely ideological terms, that is, in the traditionally hierarchized relationship to chastity seen in the early Hali Meidhed example—​­as virgins, chaste widows, or married women. It is, Hasenohr argues, in the journées chrétiennes that we can find evidence of clerical authors grappling most explicitly with the changing social reality of “middle-­” and upper-­class women in the later Middle Ages.25 In her



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discussion of this genre, Hasenohr focuses on those journées where there is textual evidence for a specifically female audience, often married women or unenclosed widows or girls. But it is important to remember that the journées were just as often written specifically for men or addressed to a general audience of laypeople. In this chapter I will be concerned, like Hasenohr, with what happens when these texts come up against the material facts of their readers’ real-­life situations. But it seems to me as important to note what is shared by journées addressed to men or gender neutral in their terms of address as it is to understand what might be exceptional and gendered about the time and space of a woman’s journée. We need also to attend to the ways that these texts might encourage crossing gender and class boundaries as a way of securing agency as devotional subjects and what that might mean in this period for structures of masculinity/femininity, public/private, active/passive, exterior/interior, orthodox/innovative. I want, therefore, to move our consideration of these issues away from a simple concern with individual autonomy or female agency and to consider the larger question of the literate practices bound up in private lay devotion in this period and what that might signify for the rehabilitation of the good wife. For, I argue, changing the good wife’s nature is intimately connected with the larger project of changing marital relations more generally and of authorizing the lay household as a new model for the social.

Mental Prayer and Literate Practice in the Journées The culture of mental prayer, liturgical recitation, and programmed meditation that the journées chrétiennes attempt to inculcate in their lay subjects is bound up with a hybrid textual culture that intertwines Latin and the vernacular in complex ways and that presumes a variety of literate practices. Devotees are instructed to recite the Latin psalms and prayers included in the Offices of the Virgin and the Dead that they have access to through personally owned Books of Hours. Or they are told to recite a Hail Mary or an Our Father before and after devotions. But the journées themselves are usually written in the vernacular and often contain a number of lengthier vernacular prayers and meditations that clearly are intended to be read silently and to be comprehended fully. This devotional culture, then, presumes access to manuscript or printed texts, the ability to read and understand the vernacular, and a familiarity with crucial Latin texts but not Latin literacy itself. In order to

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understand the hybrid nature of the access to textual culture that the journées assume, as well as the ways that such a devotional culture might offer new forms of agency to lay subjects, we need first to understand how such private devotion manifests the profound changes in reading practices that take place in Western Christianity during the central and later Middle Ages. According to Paul Saenger, “the systematic introduction of word separation throughout western Europe in the first half of the eleventh century . . . ​ ultimately permitted the entirely private fusion of the previously public acts of reading and prayer. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the habit of reading silently had devolved from scribes and university scholars to an ever larger portion of the lay population.”26 This meant that an older mode of “phonetic literacy,” where texts were decoded syllable by syllable and pronounced orally, coexisted alongside a newer mode of “comprehension literacy,” where a written text was decoded silently word by word. Thus, oral “readers” of a Latin text, reading in the mode of phonetic literacy, “often had from extraneous sources a general appreciation of the sense of the text, [although] they were not competent to comprehend its precise grammatical meaning. In fifteenth-­century France, to read a Latin prayer aloud or to recite a written text from memory was a pious act that could be performed by many monks and laypeople insufficiently literate in Latin to be able to translate devotional prose or verse phrase by phrase into the vernacular.”27 In contrast, increasing numbers of laity and clerics could read vernacular languages in the newer mode of comprehension literacy, although it was largely clerics who could do so with Latin texts. Books of Hours, as they developed in the later Middle Ages, required of their readers both kinds of reading practices, with the actual liturgical hours recited in Latin and in a mode of phonetic literacy. In addition to psalms and prayers that would be recited orally in Latin in Saenger’s “phonetic mode” of reading, lay Books of Hours increasingly by the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries also included vernacular prayers and meditations and even, as we will see, the occasional journée chrétienne. Books of Hours, then, along with the journées chrétiennes, are texts that incorporate both phonetic and comprehension reading and texts that encourage a mixture of personalized and rote, interiorized and exteriorized, private and public forms of devotion. These texts alternate between Latin prayers that could be read phonetically without full comprehension and vernacular prayers and meditations that are meant to be read silently and intended for full comprehension. As Saenger notes, “major clues to detecting which mode of reading specific portions of a book of hours were designed to serve lie in the rubrics



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that accompanied the texts.”28 This hybridity extends to the mixing of the public and private in its deployment of lay time and space. As we will see, the journées at times advise the recitation of the hours (and accompanying prayer and meditation) in a “private” space such as a side chapel in the devotee’s parish church while listening to a morning said mass; at other times, such devotion is pursued in a private space in the household, whether a separate room after dinner or in the wife’s bedchamber after the household (and husband) have gone to sleep. Although the full comprehension reading of vernacular prayers and meditations is intended to produce an interior, mental prayer that might be thought of as “private,” in distinction to the “public” oral recitation of Latin prayers and offices, such vernacular prayer is not being produced out of the personal imagination of the devotee, but rather the prayers are provided by the clerical guides and meant to be reproduced by all such lay devotees. They are, in short, as much universal and public as they are individual and private. So, too, the ability to engage in interiorized mental prayer and meditation from the heart that is produced by reading with full comprehension marks both an elevating special devotional achievement for its practitioners and an individualistic practice that could be perceived as prideful or solipsistic.29 The hybrid nature of these literate practices thus puts in play a creative tension between such categories as public/private, universalizing/minoritizing, and exterior/interior. Even when a Book of Hours might have been used in a more communal household fashion, read by its owner to his or her family, or to the household, or to a group of like-­minded women, as does seem to have been the case, a similar mixture of oral and silent, public and private, would prevail. For even if the devotee experienced meditation in the vernacular communally and orally, he or she would still be intent on understanding it word for word in a way quite different from the communal oral recitation of a well-­known Latin prayer that the devotee could take in only phonetically. Such meditation, whether transmitted via the oral context of a group reading or read privately in one’s chamber or while hearing mass, would be intended to provoke an interiorized mental activity for which full comprehension was necessary. Indeed, as Books of Hours were more cheaply produced with the advent of print in the fifteenth century and more readily accessible, such a household reading might be a communal act of individual readers each with his or her own copy of the text, as the famous woodcut of Thomas More and family reading together may illustrate.30

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As Saenger notes, a far different kind of mental concentration was required for internal silent prayer, such that the effort to understand textual content that was a distraction in oral prayer becomes the essence of the devotional experience in private prayer. Moreover, the mental concentration required also highlighted the special status of such prayer and its equation with a new elite group of devotees—​­both lay and clerical: “Internal silent prayer reflected a new aesthetic ideal, which equated silence with holiness and viewed all sound, including sermons and singing, as obstacles to the highest levels of spiritual experience. . . . ​To arrive at this state of grace, it was necessary ‘to have understanding in the heart’—​­that is, full mental comprehension of the text of the prayer. . . . ​In the fifteenth century, different modes of praying were clearly deemed appropriate for different levels of society, reflecting to an important degree their respective levels of literacy.”31 This was, furthermore, a literate practice that conferred spiritual and moral status without demanding the level of specialization that clerical authorship in Latin, clerical ordination, or contemplative enclosure required. The literate practices embodied in the devotional practices laid out in the journées make possible new linkages between the laity and the objects of their devotion, between laymen and laywomen, between the laity and the clergy, between textual culture and embodied practice, between public and private.32 The complex network of relationships connecting “author of text,” text, and “reader of text” thus makes possible new forms of imagined community. And literate practices that might seem a static, top-­down, passive consumption form of reception are in fact capable of unexpected forms of self-­expression: The fact that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a significant portion of vernacular prayers could be read silently from small portable codices dramatically affected the relationship between the celebrants and the laity in the performance of the public ceremonies of the Church, particularly the Mass. . . . ​As a substitute for not being able to understand the oral prayers, the practice of private prayer during the Mass, especially at the elevation of the Host, developed. Such prayers were apparently recited softly, from memory, with hands held in the palms-­touching posture. . . . ​The advent of silent reading allowed for a structured and sequential synchronization of the silent prayers or contemplations of the laity with the oral prayers of the celebrants of the Mass. . . . ​In the second half of the century, translations of these Latin prayers and a great variety of



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original vernacular prayers were similarly incorporated into books of hours or circulated separately in small prayer books. They were brought to the Mass not only by the laity but by members of religious orders as well. These fifteenth-­century French books of piety constituted what might properly be termed lay ordinals for contemplation and they contained vernacular prayers for the Mass with rubrics linking them by cues to the apposite oral Latin prayers. Using these books, laypeople with only phonetic literacy in Latin could read with comprehension the French prayers at the appropriate time. The rubrics stating this linkage specified that these vernacular prayers were to be said en pensé, de coeur, or en coeur—​­that is, silently.33 Saenger’s remarks underscore how silence need not equal passive outward observance or mindless orthodoxy, how “private” devotion could have public repercussions, how lay literate practice could chart quite different paths to the ideologically driven ones intended by the clerical authors of texts that the laity accessed, and how such private devotion could thereby cross supposedly essential differences between masculine and feminine, clerical and lay. It would thus be oversimplifying the journées to impose on them a simple model of clerical authorship and lay consumption or to see their use of the canonical hours as establishing a straight homology between the monastic subject and the layman or laywoman, or between the monastic community and the secular married household. Instead, the journées embody a paradox at the heart of these programs of devotion. The cultural capital carried by such practices depends upon an audience recognizing them as significant immaterial labor, of the kind traditionally confined to monastic discipline. Markers such as en pensé, de coeur, or en coeur work to establish the immateriality of this labor and to distinguish it from the very obvious material labor that traditionally (if in different ways) defines the active life of members of the third estate or the nobility. The silence and sober restraint of the devotee is both marker and guardian of the diligent interior activity necessary to make such a meditative program work. At the same time, the immaterial labor of devotion in the case of laypeople living a mixed life coexists with their active material involvement in the world; hence the necessity to address the material conditions of the devotee’s placement in the world. In thinking through such issues, monastic life provides a privileged and already existing model, one where various kinds of manual labor are

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encouraged to forestall a bodily idleness that would interfere with the true immaterial labor of monastic contemplation. But the tension between material and immaterial labor is stronger and less easily resolved in the case of lay discipline and devotion, such that crucial differences of gender and class—​­less relevant in formulating monastic discipline within those more homogeneous communities—​­must be addressed if an appropriate, individually tailored program of devotion is to be developed. We need, therefore, to consider how the complex textual culture that the journées participate in works to open up traditionally hierarchized relations among author, text, and audience. The “community” that emerges out of this new hermeneutic paradigm is at once highly gendered and socially nuanced and at the same time capable of inciting a surprising degree of crossing of gendered and social boundaries.

Traversing Gender and Class Boundaries: Constructive Androgyny in the Journées Much more than Books of Hours, the explicit “business” of the journées consists in addressing the individual circumstances of their readers in order to highlight how, when, and where a program of private devotion and meditation can be inserted into the mixed life of the laity. Questions of audience and of the material conditions necessary to produce such devotion are crucial factors that need to be addressed. As we have seen, the new mode of silent comprehension reading coexists in productive tension with an older mode of oral phonetic literacy in the culture of private devotion of which the journées are part. The hybrid literary practices that such devotion demands and encourages are at the core of the program articulated in the journées. And they are particularly suited to the needs of the mixed life and to the complex forms of agency required by the laymen and laywomen using them. In the first instance, such hybrid literary practices raise particular questions about the audience constructed by these texts, the degree of control exerted by the texts’ clerical authors, and the kind of active consumption required of their lay readers. The gender and social position of the addressee is sometimes clearly inscribed, sometimes not. And there is strong evidence that journée texts inscribed one way in terms of ownership might later circulate with quite different audiences. Nor is such variation in audience necessarily at odds with the intention of the clerical authors. In other words, addressing a text to a woman does not necessarily establish that the author meant his text only to



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address a female audience. And even if a clerical author inscribes his textual guidance as intended for a particular gendered or classed audience, the interventions of later owners or the influence of print could take that guide to audiences quite different from the original one. In general, there are strong parallels with the dissemination of these guides and Books of Hours: a movement from noble and quasi-­religious patrons to upper-­level bourgeois and gentry situations, and then to more widespread dissemination in print by 1500; and a strong association of such texts with female readers and devotees. But the journées, more clearly than Books of Hours, foreground the ways that such devotional practices open up a devotional space and time productively between the traditionally clerical and lay. In order to encourage individually framed structures and to emphasize the importance (and difficulty) of agency through the practice of private devotion, such devotional practices often treat gender and class difference in relational rather than essentializing ways. By imagining their audience in this way, they often cross gender and class lines in new and unpredictable ways. The journées thus offer a particularly explicit and privileged place to witness these processes of self-­formation. Three of the earliest texts examined by Hasenohr provide a fairly basic template for the Christian day that keeps a good part of it free in order for their high status lay practitioners to be able to address the public demands on the time and energies they face. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), MS Arsenal 2059, a Picard manuscript from the middle of the fourteenth century, contains the journée text Comment la personne se doit ordener selonc son estat au sierviche de Dieu. Addressed to a noble audience but ambiguous about gender, Comment la personne se doit ordener was also copied in Les Petites Heures du duc de Berry (Paris, BnF, MS nat. lat. 1804, fols. 13–­15). And it is admirably adapted to the exterior demands of public life on a nobleman’s day, limiting its devotional requirements to the morning and evening and keeping its instructions to generalities that can be adapted to individual circumstances. The devotee is advised to begin the day saying a prayer on rising—​­the text provides a suitable prayer in the vernacular borrowed from the office of prime—​­followed by attendance at mass. When in church “the devotee should say the hours and whatever he/she knows of good and of devotion . . . ​and not indulge in argument or gossip” (fol. 40v; “len doit dire les heures et ce que len seit de bien et de deuotion . . . ​non pas a plaidier ne a gengler”).34 The text provides further advice about how to pray while hearing mass so that “each one should be able to direct his heart to God” (fol. 40v; “cascuns doit auoir son cuer a dieu”). After mass the reader is instructed to go about his business,

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“according to his estate and social status in such a manner that everything he says or does—​­whether in counsel or in judgment or in justice or in grace or in whatever other things—​­should be done according to God’s will and pleasure, for the will of God is our rule.”35 At the time of vespers, when going to bed, the devotee should think about how he or she has spent the day, ask God’s pardon for the mistakes made during the day, and then say the brief prayer borrowed from the office of compline that the author provides. Li Riule de no vie, the earliest French journée that Hasenohr examines, dating from the second half of the thirteenth century and included in a Picard collection of sermons and ascetic and mystical treatises (Paris, BnF, MS Arsenal 2058), is a daily guide probably originally composed for a man on the margins of the world, professing chastity, and in some form of community, possibly a Beghard. Hasenohr speculates that the Arsenal 2058 manuscript itself, based on its occasional use of feminine pronoun reference, would seem to be an adaptation of the original text for a woman, probably a virgin or widow. Li Riule de no vie extends its devotional exercises throughout the day, requiring the recitation of the hours during the day, accompanied by prayers and appropriate meditations. Such thoroughgoing alignment of one’s day with a devotional discipline is outlined in more detail by a text such as Comment on se doit maintenir selonc les heures du jour qui sont continues en la passion Jhesu Crist, which survives in two manuscript versions, London, British Library (BL), MS Royal 16.E.12, and Paris, BnF, MS fr. 15212 (both dating from the fourteenth century—​­although Hasenohr speculates that the text could be as early as the thirteenth). The text provides no clue as to the intended gender or class of its audience. Comment on se doit maintenir selonc les heures du jour brackets the devotee’s day with an examination of conscience, both morning and night, and programmatically couples meditation on various stages of the Passion of Christ with recitation of the Hours of the Virgin. Thus, when saying matins the devotee should think about Christ praying in Gethsemane and set upon by Judas and the Jews; at prime, about how the Jewish masters of the law gave false testimony against Christ; at terce, about Christ brought before Pilate and Herod and how he was dressed as a fool and then beaten and whipped; at midi, or sext, about Christ crucified; at nones, about Christ’s last word; at vespers, about Christ being taken down from the cross, pale and discolored, by Joseph of Arimathea; at compline, about how the precious body of Christ was washed and anointed with precious ointments and put in the tomb, there to be resurrected on Easter Sunday. At the beginning of each canonical hour, the devotee should make the sign of the cross and be brought to compassion



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by the anguish that he or she has caused by his or her sins. At the end of each canonical hour, the devotee should give thanks to God. Each set of meditations and recitation of the hours is accompanied by private prayer seeking God’s forgiveness, and then the recitation of an Our Father. Other than to the canonical hours, there is little reference to a particular time and space—​­for example, a household or church space, or an early morning or late evening time—​­for these meditational practices.36 All three texts, then, even while registering the necessity to attend to gender and class difference in constructing the ideal individualized program of devotion, also encourage individuals from different groups to practice a certain gender and class androgyny when seeking devotional agency and to cross such boundaries by imagining themselves able to use the resources of an other: a woman using a “man’s” text, a man using a “woman’s,” or even more promiscuously, imagining a text suitable for men and women, nobles and bourgeois. A text such as Li Riule de no vie (MS Arsenal 2058) points to the ways that such texts might be intended for a specific audience but at a later date be translated to another. Similarly, such texts as Comment on se doit maintenir selonc les heures du jour (BnF, MS fr. 15212) or Comment la personne se doit ordener (MS Arsenal 2059) underscore the advantages of ambiguity in delineating audience in order to encourage the widest possible use. If Comment la personne se doit ordener was written in terms of the needs of a noble audience, male or female, this may account for its less intense demands in terms of time spent in devotion, its allowance for the demands of worldly duty, especially during the daytime hours. But that same lack of specificity could also make the guide more adaptable over time to a wide variety of future audiences. So, too, the coupling of meditation on the Passion and recitation of the Hours of the Virgin demanded by Comment on se doit maintenir selonc les heures du jour remains a program that could be taken up by a wide variety of laymen and laywomen, as well as enclosed female religious, seeking to be challenged in their devotional life. In the case of another journée text, La Maniere de bien vivre devotement et salutairement par chascun jour pour hommes et femmes de moyen estat, we can chart its complex textual life with greater specificity, illustrating more fully the mobile relationship between author, text, and audience that characterizes the journées chrétiennes. First published in Paris in 1491 by Antoine Caillaut, and the work of Jean Quentin, canon of Notre-­Dame, La Maniere de bien vivre is clearly aimed at the widest possible audience. Indeed, the text’s devotional program might serve as a template for the journée chrétienne as a genre,

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charting a middle ground between public duty to family and earthly responsibilities and private devotion to Christ and spiritual progress. Readers are advised to get up around six in the morning, thanking God for the night’s repose, commending themselves to the Virgin and whichever saint whose day it may be, and praying that God will keep their mortal soul. They are advised, having dressed, to say in their home, if it seems right, both matins and prime. Then they should go to church before having done any temporal work, and in church, during the time taken by a low mass, think about the twenty-­two subjects of meditation provided in the text. But the author makes allowance that, if devotees are not able to stay as long as is needed at church because of some other reasonable demand on their time, they should give thanks to God for his goodness and meditate at home once during the day or night to the best of their ability. When devotees go home they should listen in good peace to their affairs, and in attending to their affairs remember that no suffering in the world is anything compared to the pain of purgatory or the vision of infinite glory. Afterward, they should eat reasonably. One fast day per week is sufficient, and if they think that fasting is not profitable in their circumstances, they should listen to good counsel. Devotees are advised to rest a half hour or an hour after dining and then spend the rest of the day attending to the affairs of the household. Devotees should not forget to say the hours: the first three before lunch, the others after dinner, whenever that is possible. And on feast days they should add the Vigils of the Dead to their devotional program. Devotees should try to think often during the day (and at night if awake) upon what Christ suffered at that point in his Passion. And they should confess to God each day the sins committed that day and should confess weekly to a priest. The text’s adaptability to a wide variety of circumstances can be illustrated by the manner in which it is included in two subsequent compilations: one tending toward greater generalization of audience; the other, to greater individuation. Robert Copland’s English translation of the journée text The maner to lyue wel deuoutly and reuerantly euery day for all persones of meane estate was published in the Prymer of Salysbury Use, one of the most popular early sixteenth-­century printed Books of Hours produced by F. Regnault, the most prominent and prolific printer of Books of Hours for the English market. Nearly five hundred pages in length, the Prymer of Salysbury Use is a compendium of largely Latin devotional material, including the Hours of the Cross, multiple prayers to the Virgin and other saints, the O’s of Saint Bridget, the seven penitential psalms, a litany, the Hours of the Name of Jesus, and



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various cycles of prayer attributed to the fathers of the church. There are brief English titles and summaries of the Latin items, but the journée text is one of only five items in English in the Prymer. The other English texts are prayers to the Trinity and to Christ, The dayes of the week moralysed, and Certayne Questions: What Is Synne with the Ordre of Confession. The maner to lyue wel comes near the beginning of the collection—​­after a calendar in Latin and The dayes of the week moralysed—​­suggesting that the journée text is intended to function as a guide on how to use in a systematic way the diverse meditations, prayers, and liturgical hours collected in this book. Around the same time, Jean Quentin’s journée text is also used as the opening work in a more selective compilation commissioned by a prominent noblewoman of the French court, Anne de Rohan. Paris, BnF, MS Latin 1391 contains: first, Quentin’s La Maniere de bien vivre (fols. 3r–­11r); then prayers by Saint Vincent Ferrer to be said on rising, when going to bed, and when leaving the house (fols. 11v–­13r, subject matter given in French, actual prayers in Latin); verses by Saint Bernard, including a prayer to be said in front of the image of Our Lord (fols. 13v–­20v, subject matter given in French, actual prayers in Latin); and finally, the Hours of the Conception of the Virgin (fols. 20v–­34r). The text of La Maniere de bien vivre included in the Rohan manuscript is largely a word-­for-­word translation of the printed French text, with one notable exception. In the printed version (and in Copland’s English translation), after coming home from church, the devotee is instructed thus: “After you have returned from the church to your home discuss household matters with the members of your household until it is time to dine.”37 The Rohan manuscript, however, fleshes out in detail exactly how the devotee should attend to the needs of her household in ways specific to her gender and class: After you have returned from the church attend in all good peace to your [household’s] affairs: instructing, as much as you are able, in all good conduct your children and all your family, teaching them God’s commandments, the articles of faith and all their belief, and teach them humbly and devoutly and profitably, according to reason, to keep themselves from behaving in a lazy or idle fashion. But have them learn wisdom or devotional exercises relevant to the estate that you would like them to be in. Do not tolerate in your household evil livers such as blasphemers and those who swear by the name of God or the saints, liars, thieves, insulters, vagabonds, of whatever sort. And do not allow yourself to be altered in this as you

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attempt tenderly to show them their evil life so that they can be enlightened and learn the path to penitence and salvation. For if you do not make this your duty then you will be the cause [of their ruin] and consent to their evil ways and be in danger of going with them to perdition.38 The text of the journée is preceded by an illumination of the cross (2r) followed by the illuminated anagram of Anne (“De haan renon”) and the initials “A” and “P” for Anne and her husband, Pierre (fol. 2v). It is followed by facing-­page illuminations of Anne praying in her bedroom to Christ as the Man of Sorrows (fols. 10v and 11r; see Figure 2). The Hours of the Virgin are preceded by a full-­page illumination of Mary in a pink robe with her hands clasped in front of her breast. Above her is God the Father wearing the papal tiara and holding a cross and globe. Surrounding her are seventeen pictures with Latin tags illustrating her various attributes (21r). And at the end of the manuscript (fol. 30r) is a full-­page illumination of the Rohan arms and motto. On folio 1 in a different sixteenth-­century hand are the notes “se que j’aime dure, vive Rohan” and “Cest presentte heure apartient a ma demoiselle Franchois de Rohan. Francoise de Rohan. Symon Daras, demeurant a Paris.” Folio 34v also contains notes indicating that the manuscript belonged to Françoise de Rohan as well as the signature of Symon Daras. These inscriptions indicate that the manuscript passed first to a female relation of Anne’s and then to a non–­family member, the Parisian merchant Simon Daras. We shall discuss at greater length below the performative nature of this compilation and its illuminations. What I would like to highlight here is how the placement of Quentin’s journée in Anne de Rohan’s compilation asserts the articulation of an individual identity as the way to full agency as Christian subject. But it does so in a way that also underscores that such agency will be found by contributing to the common good and by subscribing to a common devotional program suitable for all fully committed Christian subjects. Anne de Rohan’s manuscript vividly displays in its illuminations how the immaterial labor of a woman’s private devotion, as much as a man’s, can contribute to the attainment of that common good. Its ability to make material the immaterial is, of course, a product of the privileged social position Anne occupies, which allows her to commission such a personalized illuminated manuscript, as well as to secure the physical privacy and free time that the picture portrays. But implicit in the programmatic androgyny of the journées more generally is the assumption that the immaterial labor of private devotion



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offers possibilities that the hierarchized positions of material labor do not allow for women (and less traditionally privileged men). Such individuals can thereby successfully express personal agency by means of their labor to contribute to the common good through a program of private devotion. While Anne de Rohan in BnF, MS Latin 1391 is able to assert this agency explicitly by commissioning a personalized book collection for her own private program of devotion, and through illuminations that depict her family coat of arms and her personal devotional space in her private bedroom, such agency asserted through the performance of the private devotional subject is not unique to this manuscript, nor is it untypical of the journée as a genre. Less materially and socially privileged laypeople could attempt similar inscriptions of themselves as agential Christian subjects through the performative reading and devotional practices outlined in the journées, as well as through the leadership roles for the household and its related communities articulated in the journées discussed in the next section. Furthermore, what is represented in Anne de Rohan’s manuscript is not simply or solely “woman’s” devotion or “private” devotion (in the sense of constructing an autonomous and unique individuality). For Anne de Rohan’s path to agency here appropriates for personal use the inscribed public identity represented in the family and conjugal relations inscribed by her arms, as well as the public authority of a printed text such as Quentin’s La Maniere de bien vivre or the generic Latin prayers and liturgies included in her manuscript. Anne’s use of La Maniere de bien vivre here suggestively highlights how a seemingly more public, generic version of Quentin’s devotional text, such as the English translation included in Regnault’s printed Prymer of Salysbury Use, might also have been intended to fulfill such multiple uses. For a text that on the surface might appear very personal could also be mobilized in public ways, and one that seems public might also be put to very personal uses.

Materializing Immaterial Labor: Toward a New Public Sphere I have noted some of the ways that the journées encourage a crossing of social and gender boundaries in thinking about their audience and their own textuality. But what happens when a journée more fully and directly takes on the specific conditions of a devotee’s embodiment and their impact on the time and space of devotion? I turn now to two texts that address upper-­level bourgeois or gentry members of the married estate in gender-­specific ways, and in

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a manner that assumes a high degree of dedication to a program of private devotion, but without the ability to withdraw from worldly involvements (as a widow, anchorite, or beguine might be able to). A comparison of these texts reveals that, rather than essentializing gender in constructing themselves as primarily male or female texts, they point to the kind of social and gender androgyny we have witnessed in other journées, perhaps opening up space for different, more relationally articulated social and gendered identifications as the crucial ones best supported in the affective relations and household structures of the married estate. In doing so, such texts point to some of the ways that Peregrinus of Oppeln’s commendation of the married estate as a divinely instituted ordo where God is the abbot might actually come to be embodied in the world. The Petite Instruction et maniere de vivre pour une femme seculiere (first printed by Jean Jehannot, 1512–­17) fleshes out the basic template we have seen in texts such as Li Riule de no vie (MS Arsenal 2058) and Comment la personne se doit ordener (MS Arsenal 2059) and shows how a program such as that found in Comment on se doit maintenir selonc les heures du jour (BnF, MS fr. 15212) might be woven into the day-­to-­day time and space of the good wife’s devotion. Like those texts, the Petite instruction et maniere de vivre begins by telling its devotee to recite prayers on rising and to eat lightly. As soon as possible, the laywoman is advised to go to church to hear mass. There she should use holy water to make the sign of the cross, turning to Christ and the Trinity, and greeting Mary with some prayer of devotion. Then she should hear mass devoutly from the most secret place possible, turning her face so that she sees no one and no one sees her. At the beginning of the mass she should say her Confiteor, thinking on her sins, especially those she remembers. The text then provides specific biblical characters to identity with each day of the week as a way of humbling herself. Later, if she wants to meditate on the articles of the Passion in the mass, the author directs her to a printed book written by Brother Olivier Maillard.39 If she wishes, she can think about one article of the Passion each day and stop there. But he tells her not to be preoccupied at this time with the oral recitation of the hours, or of prayers such as the Our Father or the Ave Maria, but to think only of Our Lord. Instead he provides her with a weekly pattern for thinking about the Passion during the mass. On Sunday, for example, she can think of Christ on Mount Olivet, on Monday, of Christ at the home of Caiaphas, and so on. Throughout, the author exhorts her to take pains to feel each moment of the Passion profoundly in her heart to the point of tears. And as we have seen,



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he is careful to provide her with detailed instruction about how to achieve this meditative goal. For example, he tells her that each time she sees Christ’s body elevated during the mass, “you should imagine that you see him elevated on the cross, for that is what is represented.” The author then directs: You should then adore him devoutly and say: “Hail savior of the world, or some other appropriate thing.” Then you should say: “O God, the Father Eternal, I present to you the holy sacrifice that your blessed dear child made for you on the tree of the cross, which is represented in this holy Mass. And request of you, because of the virtue of that same blessed and holy sacrifice, that it would please you to pardon me of all my sins and give me the grace to do your holy will in all things. My God may it please you to give me that grace that I might be crucified on the cross of penitence and mortification of my vices and evil inclinations for the love of you.” And when the Agnus dei is said [that is, the response of the congregation after the words of institution and before the host is distributed], say devoutly: “My God, I desire that I receive you in my soul spiritually through your grace: through which I ask you that it please you to live there forever and that you never separate yourself from it.”40 The complex intertwining of literal action (the elevation of the host during the mass) and inward commemoration, coupled with uttered prayers and personal dialogue with God, allows for the possibility of “real” reception of Christ’s body and blood even at a time when the laity would not normally literally receive the host. The text further instructs the devotee to accompany the oral recitation of the hours—​­which can be said before hearing mass or afterward in the church or in the devotee’s house—​­with the private meditations on Christ’s Passion appropriate to each office. In saying matins, she should think about how Christ was on Mount Olivet and suffered in the hands of his enemies; in saying prime, she should think about how he was taken in front of Pilate; and so on. Afterward, she should occupy herself with the affairs of her household. And she should teach her children and servants to fear and love the Lord and make sure that vice and sin will not be found anywhere in her household. When it is time to dine, she should be fearful and praising of Christ for his goodness and remember the dinner he had at this time on the cross. At least once a day she should read one or two leaves from some devotional book for

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the feeding of her soul. At vespers she should say the office devoutly, thinking about how Christ was taken down from the cross. At compline she should think about how he was put in the sepulchre. When it is evening she should retire a little to some secret place and think about her sins and about what she has failed to do that day. In asking Christ’s pardon, she should say an Our Father five times: first for the honor of Christ’s precious feet, second, for his hands; third, for his head crowned with thorns; fourth, for his heart; fifth, for his wounds. Then she should think about her death, hell, and so on. She should confess at least once every fifteen days, having chosen a good confessor. She should fast one day a week, on Fridays, if there is no impediment. And she should receive the Eucharist at least on the four great festivals of the year and on the Feast of the Virgin. The author then goes on to counsel her on how to prepare to receive the Eucharist. He advises the wife to be careful to keep good peace always between herself and her husband and to help to save each other. The text ends with an outline of the great spiritual benefits that will come from a devout reception of Christ’s body in the Eucharist. Such a set of directives should be compared with an early fifteenth-­ century English journée written specifically for a layman (probably either an urban professional or a member of the country gentry). This text is unusual for being written in Latin, but it similarly organizes the Christian day in practical terms for a busy layperson active in the world but intending to lead a full devotional life. Indeed, the text comes with the instruction “Always carry this about in your purse” and is of a size that would make it easy to do so, measuring just 11¾ inches long by 3¾ inches wide. The text’s clerical author (W. A. Pantin argues that it is an Oxford don) instructs the man to rise quickly, make the sign of the cross, and say a brief prayer, before going to church to hear mass. At church he should choose a side chapel and say the matins of the Blessed Virgin “reverently and not too fast.” Like the journées already discussed, this text emphasizes using the time in church for private devotion and reflection. On entering the church, the devotee is to say: “ ‘Lord, it is as a dog and not as a man that I presume to enter your sanctuary. Woe is me. Welawey.’ Then, plucking up some confidence, with Mary Magdalene throw yourself at the feet of the most sweet Jesus, and wash them with your tears and anoint them and kiss them; and if not with your eyes and mouth, at least do this in your heart.” Similarly, if he hears mass, he should “not by any means engage in talk with other people; but while the clerks are singing, look at the books of the church; and on every feast day, look at the Gospel and the exposition of it and at the Epistle. There is a certain Legenda Sanctorum which is very old;



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look at that and especially at the Common of Saints at the end of the book.” After mass, he should “say one fifty of the Psalter of the Blessed Virgin [five decades of the rosary].” Going back to his house he should have nothing else in his heart or mouth except “Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee,” sometimes the whole of it, sometimes only “Hail Mary.” Sitting at table, he should “ruminate in [his] mind those two words, or as far as the middle, or sometimes to the end.” At dinner, let the book be brought to the table as readily as the bread. And lest the tongue speak vain or hurtful things, let there be reading, now by one, now by another, and by your children as soon as they can read; and think of the wicked Dives, tormented in hell in his tongue more than in any other members. Let the family be silent at table, and always, as far as is possible. Expound something in the vernacular which may edify your wife and others. . . . You can make a cross on the table out of five bread-­crumbs; but do not let anyone see this, except your wife; and the more silent and virtuous she is, the more heartily you should love her in Christ. After dinner, he is exhorted to go to “that secret place, and send for William Bonnet or Sir William Timenel or others as you please, and confer with them there until vespers.” Either before or after supper, he should go to his cell and pray. “As the determiners at Oxford do: When you are in bed, go back to the beginning of the day, and look diligently in your heart: if you have done any evil, and there be sorry; if any good, and there give thanks to God, always in fear and trembling, and do not think it certain that you will survive till the morrow.”41 While the succinctness of Pantin’s text, compared to the length of a journée such as the Petite instruction et maniere de vivre, makes detailed comparison difficult, the broad outlines of the daily structure advocated for Pantin’s layman parallel those in the Petite instruction et maniere de vivre for a laywoman: a similar beginning and end to the day, daily attendance at mass, a self-­conscious concern for sequestration and inner mental labor during the mass, the seeking out of friends who will give good advice, a calm and controlled outward demeanor that keeps from the world the inner mental activity that animates the devotee’s day. The most obvious difference, of course, is that the text discussed by Pantin is written in Latin not the vernacular, although

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both texts assume a vernacular literacy that begins in the household during childhood.42 But equally striking is the degree to which Pantin’s text differs from the more accommodating, less demanding and ambitious programs of the journées explicitly addressed to a noble or mixed gender audience. Devotion dominates this man’s day in ways that parallel those journées addressed specifically to women (such as the Petite instruction et maniere de vivre).43 Notable as well is the degree to which, in each text, the layman or laywoman’s devotional program is framed in terms of his or her family. Both texts thereby emphasize how such an individual devotional program of private devotion should work to fit the good husband and wife for leadership roles in the household as well as help to increase marital affection between husband and wife. The husband’s devotion in Pantin’s text should lead him to read from devotional books to his household and as soon as possible involve his children in performative reading practices by having them read to the household. So, too, for the husband in Pantin’s text, the more silent and virtuous his wife is, the more heartily he should love her in Christ. Indeed, in the case of Pantin’s text, if we consider the involvement of the friends mentioned, the devotee’s leadership role will extend to a larger imagined community of like-­minded friends and associates, a role paralleled in texts for women where the good wife is expected to guide the conduct of female children and female relatives. The model of the monastic community is more than a trace element in these texts, but it is one that each text needs self-­consciously to translate by means of its different labor of performative reading “in the heart” onto the new terrain of lay married life. What results is the articulation of a subject position that anchors the household and makes it a fitting model for a community of the mixed life, on the lines of the older monastic community but adapted to be a little state in the world. This is not to say that there may not be ways that instructing a devout laywoman may present additional problems, or particular opportunities, for leading a vivid devotional life while in the world. As we will see below, her location within the household “covered” by the social position of her husband, as well as her role—​­after her husband—​­as manager of servants and family affairs within the household put her in a particular, complex relationship with the domestic and private, as well as with the everyday bodies of the household. But rather than a gendered exceptionalism, we might first note how much the Petite instruction et maniere de vivre shares with Pantin’s guide for a layman and, with that, the fact that women (as laypeople) are being treated with men in similar ways by these clerical authors and share with



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laymen a common set of literate practices to be used to construct an intimate script for a rigorous devotional life in the mixed life.44 Both texts emphasize the complementarity of devotional labor and the business of living in the world, as well as the need to adapt devotional practices to individual context in order to find the balance between public and private that will allow the greatest possible room for expression of prayer in the heart. But compared to earlier clerical valuations of married women (as in Hali Meidhed), the androgyny and the relational approach to gender difference evidenced in these journées are themselves innovative and important, for they implicitly assert that the good wife is not different in kind from the good husband, just as they assert that the good layperson is not essentially different from the cleric. In gendered and nuanced ways, both Pantin’s text and BnF, MS fr. 15212 presumptively assert the ameliorating potential of private devotion to improve upon nature and to raise up the devotee within his or her condition in the world. At the same time, of course, these texts must also come to terms with the different material circumstances that will affect access to this ameliorating privacy, as well as the amount of free time and literal private space available to different classes of people. Gender, however, plays a complex role in negotiating such difference. On the one hand, an upper-­level bourgeois, gentry, or aristocratic good wife might have more time and space for private devotion than a man, whose day might often need to be spent more in the public sphere. On the other hand, the good wife’s location in the household might involve more direct and sustained “low-­level” interaction with the everyday body—​­supervising servants, training children, addressing the material needs of husband and household—​­rather than possible intellectual conversation with like-­minded men and women. The manuscript version of the Maniere de bien vivre assembled for Anne de Rohan, for example, goes into much more detail about how she should attend to her household and also pays much more attention to the need to handle “female” vices of gossip and loud talk than do the other printed French and English versions of the text that are aimed at a wider audience. However, the author of the Petite instruction, as much as Pantin’s text aimed at a male devotee, assumes that the female devotee will have access to vernacular texts that would allow her to follow up on personal interests, such as learning more about the articles of the mass. Both the Petite instruction and Pantin’s “Instructions for a Devout and Literate Layman,” then, provide a similar opportunity for emergent social groups, such as upper-­level, nonaristocratic laymen and married women more

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generally, to labor in a way that carries with it cultural capital in excess of the economic capital that might come from bourgeois work. The male householder of a certain social position can thus demonstrate his acquisition of such cultural capital without needing to mimic aristocratic display or monastic enclosure. And a married woman can benefit from an immaterial labor that does not require access to modes of conduct traditionally assigned to men, other than a certain capacity for solitude and a level of vernacular literacy that a higher-­status married women can muster almost as easily as a man. In both these texts, the attributes of normal life—​­the household and the parish church—​­are all that one needs to engage in these literate practices. The household and the community it subtends thus become foundational in these literate practices, just as the monastery was for earlier immaterial labor. And just as friendship provides the kind of affective bond to intensify monastic community for earlier generations, as in Aelred of Rievaulx’s Spiritual Friendship, so too the intensification of marital affection that such devotion produces bonds together a new kind of community imagined through such household and marital relations.

Feeling Devotional Time and Space: The Boundaries of the New Christian Subject Marriage and the sexual activity it presumes remain the most obvious mark of the laity’s troubling difference from the enclosed, celibate nature of the original monastic audiences for the forms of spirituality being translated in the later Middle Ages. Thus we might think of the idea of “the good wife” as a kind of limit case testing the efficacy of spiritual discipline as a means of taming such hybridity. “Woman” as good wife both makes the case for lay entitlement and amelioration in a particularly striking way and provides the unstable location where such a case stands or falls. Especially for clerical authors the specter of virginity and the monastic ideal always stands ready to return and haunt this new formulation. While there is nothing uniquely gendered about the journées chrétiennes as a genre, the particularities of a bourgeois or gentry wife’s location in the household do necessitate a more intimate contact with the everyday bodies of that household. And this fact does at times force the clerical authors of the journées to engage with the hybridity of the married estate in unique ways. If an upper-­level laywoman’s access to free time alone within the space of the



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domestic promises greater possibility for intense, affective devotion of the kind described by McNamer in Affective Meditation, paradoxically this womanly position also brings these texts’ clerical authors closer to the material specificities of lay life and a gendered/classed existence. And equally paradoxically, the more one can, through such intimate scripts, give voice to a compassionate “I” in the way that McNamer describes, the more open that subject is to possible criticism and the negative effects of lay (and especially female) hybridity. An excessive display of compassion with Christ can bring about a disturbing visibility, where a carefully constructed intimate script may seem disturbingly idiosyncratic to those around one. Unlike husbands, who must spend a major part of their day in the public sphere, the wife’s more enclosed situation and her more intimate relationship with the private and domestic curiously make it possible to imagine her more rigorously adopting a quasi-­ monastic discipline of private devotion throughout her day. Household duties, great and small, thus pose a greater dilemma for the journées chrétiennes aimed specifically at women. While pragmatically acknowledging the good wife’s need to continue to address the many day-­to-­day demands of the household, clerical authors of the journées at the same time try to superimpose on the daily activities of the lay wife the structures of religious time, monastic “labor,” and a spiritual union with her divine spouse. Thus, just as the immaterial labor of monastic spirituality was valued above the real-­life material labor of the peasant, so too a number of the journées chrétiennes advance a quasi-­monastic spiritual labor as the proper duty of the good wife at the expense of the more material concerns of the bourgeois and gentry married household. To varying degrees, these texts urge their readers to let the sacred colonize household time and space so that, as Hasenohr puts it, “secular time is punctuated by religious time” (“Le temps profane est donc rythmé par le temps religieux”).45 And the good wife can thereby provide the ultimate proof of the spiritual goodness possible in the lay mixed life. For example, in the Decor puellarum, a fifteenth-­century spiritual guide for young women, the Venetian John the Carthusian advocates the following engagement with the day: Rise early and, upon waking, bless God and meditate on the mystery of the Trinity. When you get up, cross yourself three times in saying “Benedicamus Patrem et Filium . . .”; while dressing, raise your eyes and mind to Heaven in saying “Agimus tibi gratias . . .”; say your usual prayers and meditate on the attributes of the three

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divine persons; having dressed, coarsely but decently, and put on your shoes, wash your hands and face and comb your hair while praying, with your heart remaining in Heaven, meditating on the creation of the angels, the fall of the bad and the confirmation of the good angels. Immediately thereafter, turn your attention to the housework: wake up the servants, light the fire, sweep, start breakfast, dress the children make the beds, do the laundry, take care of the chickens, etc., while meditating on the celestial hierarchies, the reasons for the damnation of Lucifer, the creation of the world in six days, etc. . . . ​When you sit down at table, meditate on the Nativity; say the Benedicite and make the sign of the cross on the table; while eating the first course, think of the Circumcision; while eating the second, of the Adoration of the Magi; and when you have had enough to eat, meditate on the Massacre of the Innocents and the Flight into Egypt.46 While there are certain similarities to the program outlined for the male devotee in Pantin’s text—​­the instructions for outward involvement in the meal while secretly and inwardly engaging in private devotion, for example—​­for the female devotee here, the sheer volume of demands made by the need to manage the everyday bodies of the household underscores some of the ways that gender might act as a kind of structural limit in thinking about the viability of the practices advocated by the journée. The contrast between the demands of the woman’s material labor of household management and the immaterial labor of the journée’s meditational practices could not be starker. Both remain in high relief in the foreground of the text in a way that does not allow for the latter to easily or effortlessly occlude the former. Only by the most extreme and renunciatory systematization of her day-­to-­day experience, it seems, could the good woman truly be able to “translate” fully the low “vernacularity” of her lay estate into a truer “Latinity” of a quasi-­monastic ordo. And Decor puellarum here records the unstable and mutually constitutive nature of the two modes within the mixed life of this laywoman as much as it charts any movement to a stable and hierarchized relationship between material and immaterial labor. Both the male and female devotees in Pantin’s text and the Petite instruction et maniere de vivre can retire to a “secret place” after dinner. Pantin’s male devotee can also meet with like-­minded friends there and before or after supper retreat to “his cell” to pray. In some of the journées addressed to women,



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however, such access to privacy cannot simply be assumed but must be much more arduously and self-­consciously pursued. For example, in the Tres devot traittié ou epistre tres utile a la personne vivant ou monde et soy voulant garder des grans perilz qui sont ou monde, soit en mariage ou hors mariage (Paris, BnF, MS Arsenal 2176, fols. 86–­141v), the anonymous clerical author suggests not only spending several hours after dinner in contemplation, but offers the following advice: I think, my very dear daughter, that the most profitable hour for you and us [to devote ourselves to contemplation] would be midnight, after sleeping, after the digestion of food, when the labors of the world have been separated and left behind and when also the neighbors will not see us, nor will anyone see us but God, nor will there be anyone who can see our moaning nor the tears and sighs coming from the depths of our heart, nor either our bitter cries, plaints, and laments interrupted by many humble sighs, prostrations, and kneelings, eyes moist, face changing and damp, now red, now pale; nor then can one see us often beat our breast in great contrition, kiss the ground in great and humble devotion, raise our eyes and hands to heaven in great desire, often bend and intertwine our arms as if embracing a lover with great love, stretch our body out on the ground or standing, as on a cross, in great compassion; such things are good to do at a time and place when no one but God may see these things and other similar signs of sweet devotion, which things are greatly required by this prayer and work of grace. Although at any hour and at any time one must, as we have said, be ready and diligent always to train and to raise one’s thoughts to God, nevertheless the special hour is indeed the hour of midnight.47 Here a space for wifely interiority must first be hollowed out from the temporal structure of her day and from the actual space of household life itself and the female body’s place within it in order to be filled up with a personally experienced spirituality. Thus, it is primarily in her bedchamber, which the text imagines without her real-­life husband, where she and her spiritual guide can imagine securing the kind of private, intimate space where the wife can truly encounter Christ, her true spiritual spouse. In this space, time can be experienced in a spiritual way that turns “normal” upside down. The apparent end of the day, the time when the wife is freed from household duties such as

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supervision of servants and children, preparation of meals, and so on, even from the marriage debt to her husband, who is safely sleeping in bed, becomes in a way the real beginning of the spiritual wife’s day. Her dressing table becomes her devotional altar, her prayer-­filled body becomes her highest labor, and devotion to her carnal husband is replaced by devotion to her spiritual spouse.48 In such a moment of apparent clerical triumph over the husband, the text fantasmatically stages the fulfillment of the wife’s spiritual destiny as the achievement of a state of pure privacy that makes possible a conjugal relation with Christ, a relationship whose radically different set of symbolic exchanges both echo the marriage debt between real-­life husband and wife and claim its supersession. A text such as the Tres devot traittié (MS Arsenal 2176) exposes in particularly stark terms a more general dilemma facing the journées, their clerical authors, and lay subjects. On the one hand, their structural model for the ideal Christian day remains that of the monastery and its observance of the canonical hours. On the other hand, the journées are acutely aware of the very different temporal and spatial organization of daily life for their bourgeois and noble readers.49 In a monastic context, however, performance of the canonical hours levels the differences of time and space in order to transcend them, thereby installing such a monastic subject as the fullest manifestation of the universal Christian subject. But the journées also stage the necessity of reconciling such an older model of monastic discipline and labor with a newer model of lay immaterial labor taking place within the individualistic activity of late medieval capitalism. Rather than metaphoric substitution of one for the other—​­as the Tres devot traittié imagines when it substitutes Christ and clerical guide as spiritual husband in place of the excised material one—​­the journées express in their hybrid forms and subjectivities the importance of a model of exchange between conceptual systems as the most productive mode for private devotion. The journées thus posit a fundamental symmetry between lay household domesticity (both as material and ideological phenomenon) and the monastery that is impossible to maintain. While it is tempting to read a text such as the Tres devot traittié as documenting a clerical ideology intent on colonizing lay time and space, as the imagined triumph of a clerical model over the lay, this misses, I think, how this text, like the other journées, can only imagine spiritual perfection at the same time as accentuating the material contexts that will always work to keep a perfect monasticism from happening. Rather than failure, then, such a staging of lay hybridity opens spaces for imagining devotion and the Christian subject in new ways, ones perhaps



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better able to express the potential of the mixed life (and its lay practitioners) to normativize socially innovative literate practices and hermeneutic structures. The residue of the material facts of being a layman or laywoman (bound up in gender, social situation, sexuality, and so on) is never really just a residue (as some of these clerical authors would like). The journées’ refusal—​­or rather the refusal of many of their lay practitioners—​­to leave the conditions of laity behind means that for them, the expression of hybridity is a desired goal not an unfortunate sign of failure. The journées should thus be seen as modeling an exchange between systems rather than witnessing to the successful colonization of lay subjects by a clerical authority. In doing so, the journées make visible a model comparable to late medieval proto-­capitalism, wherein the immaterial labor of the lay devotee creates a surplus that can be deployed by the devotee to establish cultural capital. Moreover, the way that the journées record how devotees are forced to consider multiple, shifting possibilities for what might constitute a good day—​­for some it might involve only an hour of meditation, for others, several, depending upon gender, social class, and physical status—​­also means that “value” here is far different from the fixed arithmetic model of the traditional monastic community (where everyone spends the same amount of time in worship and rote meditation is as valuable as private prayer in the heart) and much more like the new geometric model that Joel Kaye has argued is emergent in this period. He notes: “While the ideal of equality as the proper end of all exchange remained constant over this period, the idea of what actually constituted equality changed as did the models used to describe the process of equalization. The direction of change was from a static, arithmetical model based on knowable values and knowable points of equality to a geometric model of equalization based on approximate values, proportional requital, and variable line-­ranges of adequation; from an equality rooted in individual judgment to an equality viewed as the product of a supra-­personal system.”50 This distinction helps us understand a certain schizoid logic that permeates the journées, especially those directed self-­consciously at women. Even the most extreme, quasi-­monastic colonization of bourgeois time and space, such as that advocated by the Tres devot traittié, cannot leave behind the material facts of temporality and spatiality that instantiate the differences of lay possibilities for individual and communal agency and identity. Midnight may begin the good wife’s spiritual day (as it does for monks in the monastery), but we know also that her “normal” day as wife begins after dawn when the household awakes. The bedchamber may be imagined as a location to encounter her spiritual bridegroom, but a real-­life husband also materially

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inhabits this space whether alive or as a memorialized presence after death. And the bedchamber as the physical center of private relations between husband and wife is in crucial ways at the core of household productivity.51 That clerical ideological control emerges most forcefully at precisely the moments when the hybridity of the good wife’s embodied subjectivity is acknowledged most directly and materially—​­as in the examples quoted from the Decor puellarum and the Tres devot traittié, which underscore the performative nature of what is being imagined, and with that, the possibility for alteration by individual actors and different material situations. The repetitions that these lay journées initiate are not, therefore, limited to the teleological movement that their clerical authors imagine, a movement that would culminate by manifesting the superiority of the spiritual over the material, of the clerical guide over the husband, of interiorized private subjectivity over socially mandated wifely duty. The texts’ interweaving of Latin and vernacular, religious and secular time, their carving out of a new, unstable intersection of public and private as the identity of the good wife (where the presence of the earthly husband must often be occluded, even displaced, in order to uncover that of Christ, the spiritual spouse), also enact the partiality of such attempts at translation and a labor disturbingly and ambivalently neither purely monastic nor purely mercantile. Their simultaneity of reference performs the hybridity of the good wife’s modes of embodiment within the world. And the texts’ performance of materiality reminds us of a different, hybrid identity possible within this married “rule,” an imagined community in excess of the monastic model that might be created through the patterns of devotion performed within this lay bedchamber and household. Such a less assured understanding of the texts’ performativity also suggests a multiple, reception-­oriented sense of “authorship” for these texts and the cultural capital they transmit, as well as a proliferative and less knowable sense of agency that they might make possible. Sarah McNamer’s discussion of the invention of compassion as a new emotion in the Middle Ages is immensely helpful in highlighting how the attention to affective compassionate meditation here might not be the singular sign of an especially devout subject, but rather mark the integral role that the emotions play more generally in the daily regime advocated by the journées. Thus a textual program such as the Petite instruction et maniere de vivre might appear from the outside as an ideologically driven set of demands imposed from above by clerical guides on their lay audience. But the same program of devotion, from the point of view of the lay practitioner, might also function (in McNamer’s terms) as an “intimate script” that allows its practitioners



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personal agency in manifesting a sense of deep interiority to the outside world. If emotion is not simply founded in a preexisting biological condition but exists in the border zone between inner and outer, individual and social, then the performative reading practices called for in texts such as passion meditations and the journées chrétiennes do the crucial work needed to fabricate emotion as a socially recognizable phenomenon, rather than simply calling up preexisting feelings from within. Such emotives produced through the active reading called for by the journées are thus crucial in manifesting the “truth” of the immaterial labor that makes up this new form of lay conduct—​­a devotional labor that reconfigures even as it emulates the traditional forms of immaterial labor associated with monastic devotion.52 I would like, though, to return to the relationships of private and public, inner and outer, that we encounter in texts as apparently diverse as the Petite instruction et maniere de vivre and the Tres devot traittié (MS Arsenal 2176), and ask whether there is not something more than an “intimate script” being written and an emotive other than compassion being developed. Both the author of the Tres devot traittié and the devotee he addresses explicitly orient themselves toward the intensely “private,” “compassionate” end of the devotional spectrum, where the body is encouraged to visibly witness the intensity of the affect being elicited from “within.” Yet they never approach the extreme forms of performatio Christi practiced by the thirteenth-­century beguine Elizabeth of Spalbeek in her cell attached to a chapel in the center of the town. There, Elizabeth, using repetitive dance steps, movements, and rhythmic slapping of her body, acted out the Passion narrative, watched by her mother, sisters, and male clerics. Indeed, Elizabeth played both Christ and his tormenters, even to the point of throwing her own body to the ground and hitting her head against the floor.53 The author of the Tres devot traittié, however, specifically notes that his devotee’s Passion devotion should only happen after some sleep and restoration of the body has occurred (to better prepare the active head of household to take on her tasks in the morning) and only when out of sight of neighbors (lest she be thought proud) and only where God alone can witness the extent to which outer form betrays the inner workings of feeling. This concern for fitting into one’s social context, despite the desire also to intensify the private emotional experience of the devotee, parallels, I think, the admonition in Petite instruction et maniere de vivre that the female devotee choose the most secret place possible in church to hear mass and conduct her private (presumably affective and compassionate) meditation on the Passion, and even there “turn her face so that she sees no one and no one sees her

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face”). So, too, she should feel the pain of Christ’s Passion to the point of tears, but no further. These admonitions are attentive to the twin demands of a good wife seeking a successful private devotional experience. In both texts there is an assumption that a certain intensity of private compassionate affect is necessary, that the regime here is not a “by rote” oral recitation of the offices such as communities of enclosed monks and nuns would follow in their observance of the hours. While such a traditional devotion cannot be achieved while living in the world as laymen and laywomen must, an equally (or more) satisfying private affective devotion can be achieved by laypeople. At the same time, both texts assume the need to delimit the private and affective dimensions of such compassionate involvement. Thus they counter “compassion” with a different sort of emotion, what I would characterize by the Middle English terms “sad steadfastness,” that is, both “soberly wise” and “long-­ suffering and enduring.”54 As an example of this balance between composure and compassion, we might turn to the image of Mary of Burgundy “reading” her Book of Hours discussed in the Introduction. In contrast, for an example of uncontrolled compassion (at least from the point of view of the journées) we might turn to Margery Kempe, whose uninhibited wailing and tears while at mass earn her the contempt and vituperation of her fellow worshippers.55 What the journées encourage for their high-­status devotees is an affective encounter with Christ quite different from that described by Caroline Walker Bynum in Holy Feast and Holy Fast.56 The female religious she describes there choose to take on a bodiliness traditionally associated with the feminine in order to brand that experience as a new, specifically female site in which to encounter the Godhead via the broken humanity of the suffering Christ. In contrast, the journées imagine how the programmatic use of affective devotion by a wide variety of lay subjects, within the normal parameters of their daily lives, allows them to immaterially labor in private devotion as productively as late medieval merchants, gentry, or professionals do materially in the public sphere, by simultaneously “producing” the visible effects of a compassionate outflowing of empathy and a sober, wise self-­ containment, an interiorizing self-­ involvement, and an exteriorizing public face of service. Such a mutually constitutive set of emotives, then, works not just to establish a deep sense of self and a personal relationship to God but also to provide the public means of creating such activity on a larger scale, of forming “emotional communities,” even, perhaps, ultimately “emotional regimes,” from the stylization of the body and the repetition of subject positions made possible by such a successful negotiation of private desire and public pressure. By this I mean the ways that such



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a construction of an immaterially laboring subject—​­no longer celibate, clerical, nor even noble—​­opens up the possibility that a sexualized layman or laywoman, a bourgeois subject and a vernacular reader, can achieve a kind of representational force and a “truth value” previously reserved for the Latinate male cleric or the aristocratic courtly lover. Even more apparently formulaic and restrained journée texts—​­read in the performative way I am describing—​­can be seen as manifesting the complex simultaneity of signification I am arguing for. Anne de Rohan’s version of Quentin’s La Maniere de bien vivre (in Paris, BnF, MS Latin 1391), for example, at first glance looks relatively perfunctory and generic in its devotional agenda. Outlining prayer and devotion during the meditative moments in daily mass, as well as the leisure moments available after dinner and supper, the text explicitly tailors its rule to allow its noble reader to attend to her extensive secular duties. But the manuscript also reveals several features that foreground in complex ways the specificities of Anne’s situation and the influence of her subjectivity in articulating this apparently rote devotional practice. Folio 2v contains an anagram of Anne de Rohan and Pierre de Rohan, her (presumably dead) husband, and folio 30r contains their arms. Folios 10v and 11r form a connected two-­leaf illumination. Folio 10v (Figure 2A) shows Anne in her bedroom wearing a black coverchief and dress and kneeling at a low table with a book in front of her (with a red four-­poster bed and black chest in the background). The whole scene is set within a gold-­columned niche, and the arms of Anne and Pierre de Rohan are featured at the bottom of the page. Folio 11r (Figure 2B) presumably depicts the object of Anne’s devotional reading, showing Christ as the bleeding Man of Sorrows holding a palm branch in his crossed arms. This scene is also set within its own gold-­columned niche. The illumination shows Anne’s bedchamber not as a simple private space (nor indeed the devotions of Anne as simply private). Christ exists in the kind of public spatiality that we would expect in a church setting. Anne, while engaging in the kind of very individual piety espoused by these texts, does so as the representative of a public/private household and as part of conjoined, hybrid married body. But rather than reading this manuscript’s representation of Anne de Rohan as crucially different from more affective accounts of the good wife, such as that in the Tres devot traittié (where its devotee is pictured alone, tingling with desire for her bridegroom Christ, a quasi-­nun by virtue of escaping the wifely and household duties), I think we should instead see these two modes of representation as mutually constitutive of each other, together

Figure 2. A, Anne de Rohan at her devotions in her bedroom (fol. 10v); and B, facing page (fol. 11r), the object of her devotion, Christ as Man of Sorrows. La Maniere de bien vivre devotement et salutairement par chascun jour pour hommes et femmes de moyen estat, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Latin 1391.

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demonstrating a range of possibility within the good wife’s hybridity and its ability to experiment with the real and to undo gender. Anne de Rohan is, of course, a member of the high nobility and thus a far more entitled class of “good wife” than the wider range of bourgeois and gentry examples I have been focused on, and her early sixteenth-­century manuscript comes very near the end of the moment of hybridity I have been describing. Nonetheless, it is interesting in this light precisely for the continuities one can discern between noble and bourgeois, late medieval and early modern, representational strategies and assumptions. One cannot rule out the possibility that similar affective devotional practices might be imagined as taking place beneath the calm exterior of the noble widow represented here. And in this manuscript’s chosen inscription of the lay patron—​­not in the margins or in a physically smaller representation compared to Christ or a depicted saint (as one so frequently finds in illuminations in Books of Hours or in religious painting of the day) but rather full size and central to the visual and devotional project of the book compilation—​­one can see continued the kind of engaged performative reading practice I have been arguing for in these journées chrétiennes. Indeed, this process may be imagined repeating itself across generations of female readers, for on folio 1v a later hand notes the manuscript’s ownership by Françoise de Rohan, and thus by at least one female descendant of Anne. The constant mental effort advocated by some of the extreme examples I have already quoted from should thus be seen as one end of a continuum of choices these texts make available to their various female (and male) subjects rather than the required ideal one must choose but never achieve. Perhaps from the reader’s point of view it is the value of this choosing that is important, inciting and manifesting a labor that, rather than being occluded as spiritual transcendence, is instead celebrated as the achievement made possible by the careful management of the everyday body and the household community that it subtends.

Chapter 2

Remaking the Feminine

Holding a Mirror up to Nature: Systematizing Female Conduct, Constructing a Genre In Chapter 1, I considered how a set of practices focused on the interior life of late medieval religious subjects also depended upon a careful attention to the external conduct and regulation of gendered and classed bodies in the world, in particular, within the time and space of the married household. I discussed how the journées chrétiennes provide the kind of material frame needed to make visible the performative reading practices that structure private devotion in the period. And I attended to the effects of translating texts and sets of practices from a monastic to a lay milieu. Thinking about late medieval devotional practices as a kind of conduct literature helps us discern how such textual activity enables points of contact across different social and linguistic terrains, whether monastic and lay, male and female, or aristocratic and bourgeois. We can thus imagine how the literate practices laid out by the journées chrétiennes provide new ways to express the value and centrality of emergent bourgeois and gentry lay subject positions in this period, especially those of high-­status wives. In this chapter I turn to texts more commonly thought of as conduct literature and, in particular, to texts explicitly focused on the conduct of women in the secular sphere. This may seem to shift our focus away from the private devotional concerns of the journées toward an external social articulation of right conduct. But in approaching such apparently secular conduct literature it is important to guard against overly rigid or anachronistic distinctions ­between “religious” and “secular” (or between “morals” and “manners” or

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“courtly” and “bourgeois”). Instead, we might more usefully think of late medieval conduct literature as a continuum that ranges from those texts that especially emphasize spiritual direction (such as that addressed to wives in the journées chrétiennes) to those focused largely on secular advice (such as the pragmatic attention paid to courtly women’s bodies by Robert of Blois in Le Chastoiement des dames). Within this continuum, textual genres and terrains that might once have been kept separate—​­sermons, exemplary stories, devotional literature, satire, fin’amor texts and practices, the speculum principis, to collections, and wise biblical history, rhetorical manuals, debate, how-­ ­sayings—​­can be brought together to produce innovative, hybrid models for female subjectivity and right action in the world. And the character of “the good wife” that emerges through such textual practices and performative reading strategies—​­neither strictly moral or theological, nor simply secular or courtly—​­thus comes to represent a new ethical subject as universal. An early conduct text, Les Enseignements de Saint Louis à sa fille Isabelle (ca. 1267), echoes the concern we have seen in the journées chrétiennes for a laywoman’s cultivation of a robust private spiritual life in balance with her social and material circumstances. His daughter is exhorted to love God “inordinately” (“sans mesure”)”: “Confess often and always choose confessors who live a holy life and are sufficiently learned so that you can be taught by them all the things that you need to do. And you should live in such a manner that your confessors and other friends are in a position confidently to teach and admonish you.”1 Louis also advises his daughter to seek out opportunities to hear religious services and sermons and to occupy herself with religious subjects: “when you are somewhere private or in church, keep yourself from daydreaming or speaking frivolously. Say your prayers in a peaceful manner, either orally or silently, and, especially during the time that the body of Our Lord Jesus Christ is present in the mass, be even more quiet and more attentive to your prayers.”2 She should bear suffering with resignation and recognize that it is sent for her own good. And she should pity the unfortunate and love all good people—​­lay and religious—​­as well as the poor. If she has a worry, she should consult her confessor or another person in whom she has confidence. At the same time, Louis’s advice also gives detailed attention to the management of the externals of daily life in the world. She should obey her husband and her parents. She should aim for moderation in dress, avoid having robes and jewelry in excess of what is appropriate to her station, and not spend a lot of time on her wardrobe. And Isabelle should make sure that her ladies and other members of her household, with whom she converses



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privately and secretly, will be respectable in every way; she should therefore avoid the company of those with a bad reputation. Saint Louis here takes on the directive we have seen in the journées chrétiennes to mold female nature in terms of an ameliorating spirituality and thus seamlessly to fuse the spiritual and the secular. But what is especially interesting about the Enseignements de Saint Louis à sa fille Isabelle—​­in contrast to the journées chrétiennes—​­is the distinctive role that the Enseignements articulates for its father-­narrator and for the affective bonds established by family life. Saint Louis begins by stressing that his daughter will more likely and easily listen to such advice about conduct because of the love she feels for her father: “Dear daughter, because I know that you will accept more gladly from me for the love that you have for me than you would do from many others, I thought that I would provide you with certain teachings written by my own hand.”3 As David O’Connell notes, Louis was an exemplary father who made sure that all his children, both male and female, were well educated and could read French and Latin. Moreover, at night, “after assuring that they attended compline with him, he would often read to them and tell them stories taken from the Bible before putting them to bed.” Thus “there is probably nothing in the Enseignements that Louis had not already told his daughter orally—​­either individually or as one of a group of his children—​­on some previous occasion.” And the fact that he writes this text to her when she is nearly thirty and long married to Thibaut V, king of Navarre and Count of Champagne, highlights how Louis is here engaged in a larger literary and moral project “to formally codify for her (and perhaps for her descendants as well) those ideas that Louis was anxious to have remembered by posterity.”4 By doing so, he fuses the clerical role of spiritual adviser with the procreative role of the married layman. And by foregrounding the pivotal (and hybrid) position of loving paterfamilias in this way, Louis avoids the problems faced by many of the journée ­authors—​­who must deal with the possible disjuncture between the authority of clerical adviser and husband, or between the inner demands of the wife’s spiritual relations and the outer needs of the secular household that she manages. It is not far-­fetched, therefore, to see Saint Louis enacting in a more explicit fashion the role of paterfamilias described in Pantin’s “Instruction for a Devout and Literate Layman” discussed in Chapter 1, and thereby fusing a more “modern” mode of individualized piety with that of long-­standing clerical and aristocratic norms. In doing so, Saint Louis grafts a newer mode of individualized piety and the family onto older modes of clerical and regal codes of behavior.

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The synthetic authorial role that Saint Louis develops for himself in his text is just one instance of a more general pattern of narrative experimentation defining conduct literature for women as an emergent genre in this period. As we will see, this genre embodies a productive tension between the didactic need to affirm essential truths and the desire for an innovative redescription of gendered and classed positions in the world. And it is in these texts’ ability to develop narrative structures flexible enough to frame embodied action in convincing yet pragmatic ways, as much as in the actual content they include, that conduct literature develops new forms of exemplarity for its female subjects. Similar to its targeted citation of an antifeminist tradition in new contexts, however, conduct literature’s attention to narrative form is simultaneously conserving and adaptive. Its performative reading strategies invoke a normative universality even as they adapt that universalizing mode to give voice to new forms of the social. One of the most popular narrative forms taken up by conduct literature for women is that of the book as speculum or mirror. Throughout the period and in texts with widely varying content—​­from the circa 1300 Speculum dominarum of Durand de Champagne (more popularly transmitted in its French translation, the Miroir des dames), to the anonymous mid-­to late thirteenth-­ century Miroir des bonnes femmes, and to Watriquet de Couvin’s late thirteenth-­ century Mireoir as dames or the anonymous fifteenth-­century Miroir aux dames—​­such a mirroring process encourages an increasingly complex encounter with exemplarity that intensifies individual perception in order to discern an already existing true self that is in sync with an essential sociality. One reason for the turn to the speculum as a particularly appropriate narrative form for women’s conduct literature is the dominance of the speculum principis (or “mirror for princes”) as a genre that, while ostensibly providing guidance to the ruler, also characterizes proper aristocratic conduct as a universal model for secular conduct more generally.5 It would thus seem “natural” for these authors to turn to the speculum model when attempting to outline proper self-­rule for the noblewoman or queen, as in Durand de Champagne’s Speculum dominarum, and in the process authorize noble female conduct as the universal defining the feminine more generally. There may also be other deep structural reasons for conduct literature to turn to the model of the mirror. Sylvia Huot has noted that a pervasive metaphor in medieval writings is the book of the conscience: “This is, by definition, a private sort of book of which the individual subject is both author and reader. . . . ​ The individual human life was commonly figured as a book



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written and edited by the subject, and finally offered up for public reading at the end of time. And individuals, including the laity, were trained to conceive of themselves as books in progress, and to imagine the processes of meditation and introspection in terms of reading, writing, and editing.”6 Thus, Huot continues, “if the individual psyche is already conceived as an internal book, it follows naturally that an external book can serve to mirror it.” 7 The topos of the book as a mirror, not surprisingly, is one of the most widespread in medieval literature, appearing in countless titles. Of course, adapting the speculum as a text that can hold up and reflect the individual psyche of woman has particular innovative force in the context of medieval antifeminist modes of representing female embodiment. We need only think of the ubiquitous and naturalized relationship of idleness and superficial concern for appearance with “woman” and “the feminine” represented in so many medieval texts and images by a vain woman holding a mirror. In Guillaume de Deguileville’s religious poem Le Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, the allegorical character Idleness, daughter of Sloth, exhibits this conjunction of woman, human frailty, and the mirror directly: “I loue better to strike my glooves, to keembe myn hed, to shode me and to biholde me in a mirour than do any oother labour. I wishe after festes and Sonedayes for to rede vanitees, to gadere lesinges togideres and make hem seeme soothe, and for to telle trifles and fables, rede romaunces of lesinges. I am the freend of thi bodi.”8 The focus of conduct literature on mirroring woman as good re-­presents this traditionally clerical, antifeminist trope in challenging ways. Moreover, the good woman and her social relations come into visibility in such literature precisely by means of a careful attention to the body and its interfaces with the social. Discerning one’s true self, these texts maintain, means discerning the truth about an essential sociality into which the self is placed. A number of early conduct texts for women draw in particular on the tradition of the speculum principis as a model for conceptualizing how to advise noblewomen. Texts such as the Speculum dominarum (written ca. 1300 by the Franciscan monk Durand de Champagne for Queen Jeanne de Navarre, wife of Philippe le Bel)9 or the text that Saint Louis writes for his royal daughters work on the assumption that self-­rule will ensure good government more generally, and their format emphasizes the kind of down-­to-­earth advice necessary in the day-­to-­day guidance of a successful ruler. The Speculum dominarum, as its title suggests, adapts the model of speculum principis to that of female ruler. But it also shares with Saint Louis’s direction to the ideal noble daughter a new sense of what can be universalizing about such female

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conduct. Constant J. Mews, comparing the Speculum dominarum to earlier writing providing advice to religious women (such as the Speculum virginum, ca. 1130), notes that Durand’s work “marks a significant shift in the character of religious writing for women, in moving away from a purely interior focus to one that combines spiritual advice with ethical discussion, of a sort traditionally conducted in a scholastic milieu and addressed only to men.”10 The Speculum dominarum is made up of three parts: the first, on the condition of women (the miseries of the human condition, especially those of women; the brilliant prerogatives that come with the title of queen, detailing in practical ways how a queen merits such rewards; the effects of divine grace on women and queens in particular); the second, on the advantages of wisdom; the third, on the queen’s four dwelling places (the exterior being the household in which the queen receives her people; the interior being her conscience, which should be decorated with the same care and luxury as the most sumptuous palace; the inferior being the place of reprobates; the superior being heaven where all the faithful are assured a place). The first section may attend to the kinds of secular concerns that we might initially expect from a speculum principis. But both it and the rest of the text are equally concerned with finding the appropriate balance between interior and exterior, spiritual and secular, that will produce the ideal female subject. As Rina Lahav points out: “Although Durand’s treatise aims at a mystical partitioning of the queen’s soul (or any grand lady’s soul) into four metaphorical houses . . . ​strengthening the soul toward salvation is not its only objective, nor even its most salient. The queen fortifies her exterior house (the kingdom) by helping the king to fight injustices and to rule better, with the effect that she also fortifies her interior house (her own soul). . . . ​Durand’s innovation lies within the traditional frame: the purpose of woman’s life remains the strengthening of her home, but the queen’s way of fulfilling that purpose is uniquely public and consequential.”11 While the Latin text survives in only one manuscript (from 1459), and seems not to have circulated much beyond its original regal audience, a French translation (Le Miroir des dames) ordered by Queen Jeanne was more widely disseminated. That the French translation survives in twelve manuscripts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, all with aristocratic or royal connections, demonstrates the continued attractiveness of Durand’s text for French and Burgundian court circles in the later Middle Ages.12 Between 1526 and 1531 a second French translation was begun (but never finished) by the priest Ysambert de Saint-­Léger; Ysambert dedicated his text to Marguerite de France, queen of Navarre and sister of François I, and her daughters.13



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Like the journées, texts such as Saint Louis’s Enseignements or Durand’s Speculum dominarum adapt discourses about the Christian subject to the circumstances of noblewomen and queens in order to imagine the conduct of secular women as capable in regular and discernable ways of manifesting a universalizing moral and religious ideal. Another contemporary text, the Miroir des bonnes femmes, however, while also adapting models of the seven deadly sins and other religious discourses to the issue of secular women’s conduct, mounts a more complex historicizing argument about the possibility of a redeemed female nature.14 The anonymous Franciscan author of this late thirteenth-­century collection of exemplary stories organizes his book in two parts—​­the first contains thirty-­five exempla of bad women of the Bible; the second, thirty stories of good women from scripture. In each case, the text’s ordering of its examples of exemplary women follows the Bible’s; its discussion of bad women moves chronologically through the Old Testament and then the New, repeating the same pattern in its account of good women. The catalog of Old Testament good women includes:     1. Eve, who was good because God granted her the honor of being discussed in heaven and of being created from man    2. Sara, who was abducted but remained chaste     3. Rebecca, who was blessed with two sons because of her saintly humility, preferred the son who loved God the most, and did not want her son to marry into a house where the Lord’s law was not observed    4. Leah, who gave birth because of her great humility     5. Rachel, who always tried to please her husband    6. Pharaoh’s daughter, who showed mercy to the orphan Moses    7. Rahab, who helped Joshua’s spies    8. Samson’s mother, who was able to bear a child through fasting and abstinence    9. Deborah, who was so pure that God rewarded her with the ability to see the future 10. Ruth, who loved what her husband loved 11. Anna, who was thoroughly pious and blessed with a son, Samuel, through prayer in God’s temple 12. Abigail, who appeased David and thereby showed how a wife should endeavor to protect her husband even though he is wrong

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13. The woman from Thecua who begged for the return of Absalom, and who thereby showed how a good woman should always bring harmony where there is discord 14. Abisag, who brought comfort to David in his old age 15. The Queen of Sheba, who came to Solomon and opened her heart to him in order to seek his wisdom 16. The mother whose child was brought back to life by Elisha 17. Naaman’s maid, who urged the king to see Elisha and have his leprosy cured 18. Tobias’s wife, who did not argue and complain when she was wrongly accused by her maidservant and thereby showed great sense in controlling her anger 19. Esther, a model wife who loved her subjects even though she was a great queen and who cared little for elegant clothing 20. Judith, a model for wives because of her widowhood, penance, and the great intelligence given to her because of her purity 21. Susanna, who refused to be unchaste and who always had confidence in God 22. The courageous mother in Maccabees, who taught her sons to do what is right and who, along with them, refused to break God’s law New Testament good women include: 1. Saint Elizabeth, who was just and who held no grievance against anybody 2. The Virgin Mary, the greatest example of all, who is praised for remaining alone and cloistered as a young girl, for her fear when the angel came to her, for her prudent caution when the angel first said she would be Mother of God, for her deep humility, for her courtesy, and for ready suffering of her sorrows 3. Anna, the prophetess who predicted the redemption of Christ 4. Mary Magdalene, who loved God and listened to him attentively and who purged her sins with tears of contrition 5. The wives of nonbelievers who ministered to Jesus (Luke 8.2–­3) 6. Martha, who received Jesus hospitably 7. The good women who cried while Jesus was going to be crucified (Luke 23.27–­31)



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8. The three Marys, who in their devotion and religion came to Christ’s sepulchre to anoint his body As these lists make clear, the biblical exempla chosen by the Miroir author clearly focus on how these women provide chaste, pure, and humble embodiments of their roles as good wives and mothers. But this kind of list of women tells only half the story. What is especially innovative about the approach of the Miroir compiler is his addition of nonbiblical exemplary material. Each of the scriptural examples is supplemented by material drawn from classical, hagiographical, literary, scientific, and contemporary historical sources. This allows the author to enlarge the reader’s understanding of a particular theme raised by the biblical story in ways that can explicitly relate scripture to the real-­life experience of women who are wives and mothers. In many cases the biblical example provides a straightforward point of comparison with some aspect of a good wife’s behavior. For example, in the case of Abisag, we are told that her story exemplifies how a woman should care for her husband even when his body is infirm. The account of Abisag then calls to mind for the narrator the parallel examples of Roman women who put on black or discolored dress whenever their husbands fell ill and whose love was so great that romances were written about it; of the female animal who loved her mate so much that she stayed with him whenever he was ill or wounded; and of the philosopher who fell ill and saw his wife looking in a mirror to check that she had not lost her looks taking care of him, whereupon he could no longer love her. Or in the case of Ruth, who went to live among her husband’s people and loved what he loved, the author tells the story of a great lady who hated her relatives; these relatives then plotted against her and made her husband grow to hate her. The author then recounts the story of Herodias in the New Testament, who caused her husband Herod to hate his brothers, as well as the example of a great lady in France who made her husband’s relatives love her and then, when princes in the land wanted to disinherit her, her husband’s relatives came to her rescue. Other comparisons may strike the modern reader as more strained. The Miroir’s account of Judith, for example, emphasizes her self-­restrained widowhood rather than the biblical focus on her physical act of vengeance on Holofernes. The narrator praises Judith for her penitential disciplining of the flesh and notes that it was because of her exemplary purity that God gave her the intelligence and strength to kill Holofernes. He adds that after the death

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of Holofernes, Judith, like the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation, humbly acknowledges her gratitude to God by composing a song in his praise. In the case of the woman from Thecua, who pleaded for the return of Absalom (recounted in 2 Samuel14), the author backs up his message that a good woman should always try to bring harmony where there is discord by providing an example from nature—​­that only the lioness can calm the anger of the lion. And the author provides additional parallels that even more specifically emphasize marital relations: Nero would have been much more wicked if his wife had not often appeased him, and God would be much harsher in dispensing justice to sinners if the Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven, did not often intercede. Similarly, in the case of Sara, abducted but remaining chaste because she was protected by God, the parallel stories added by the author hold up the example of a wifely chaste sexuality, not the life of an enclosed female religious (as one might expect from a clerical author): (1) Sara was honored a second time by the birth of Isaac after a hundred years of barrenness; (2) every woman should love her husband above all things after God; (3) once a pagan woman led an army to save her husband; (4) once twelve countesses disguised themselves and took their husbands’ places in prison. As Alcuin Blamires has noted: “More elaborately than most other writers by this date, the author is prepared to notice roles women play in the Bible, and this in itself is of some consequence. But those roles are comprehensively interpreted in support of a husband-­centered ideology.”15 Thus, of the thirty examples of good women provided, at least seven are explicitly centered on the wife’s duty to her husband.16 In addition, ten more focus on female self-­ improvement and service to community in terms of their roles as wives and mothers.17 Indeed, there are really only two examples that focus solely on the spiritual—​­Deborah and Anna—​­and in both cases the parallel, nonbiblical examples provided shift attention to how such spiritual singularity can be achieved by women who are chaste wives, mothers, or widows. Just how much the author of the Miroir imagines the exemplarity of biblical women in terms of the idealized roles for contemporary wives and mothers emerges most clearly and explicitly in how he deals with Saint Elizabeth, mother of the Virgin Mary, and her daughter. The Virgin’s mother provides a neat summary of the good wife: honoring God and her husband and parents, educating her children, and living in harmony with her neighbors. Such concerns reach their fruition in Mary, and the summary of her life lessons provides a template for the movement of the good woman from chaste virgin to productive, chaste wife: women should choose their husbands, not leave home except when



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necessary, fear intimate words from young men, be skeptical, show courtesy, endure tribulation steadfastly, and perform works of charity. But the kind of husband-­oriented philosophy articulated by the Miroir, no more than a God-­oriented one, need not produce simple ideological control of the reading subject. The service performed by the text’s exemplary women requires a purposeful and constantly reiterated engagement with the world. These good women (like the text’s contemporary readers) are busy wives and mothers, educating children, overseeing servants and subjects, intervening on behalf of husbands, striving endlessly to control and organize their mode of embodiment in the world. It is only by actively engaging with the advice given that readers of the Miroir will be able to animate and bring to life the image of the good wife it seeks to embody. We return here to Huot’s observation that medieval subjects were “trained to conceive of themselves as books in progress, and to imagine the processes of meditation and introspection in terms of reading, writing, and editing.”18 Only by re-­forming nature through such a performative set of reading practices concerning conduct—​ ­rejecting “bad” possibilities and embracing “good” ones—​­can one’s true self become recognizable to itself and to the world. In this way, the Miroir provides a historical context for action by placing the scriptural good wife within “real” time and space. The biblical is thereby consistently and complexly interwoven with the contemporary and quotidian, and the relentlessly teleological structure of the text can thus allow for the amelioration of the nature of women by celebrating and repeating the times that women surmount their nature. Other conduct texts in the period work in more material and worldly terms to address the complexity and contradiction of reconciling moral behavior and noble behavior. Robert of Blois’s Chastoiement des dames (or The Ladies’ Instruction), for example, approaches questions of moral conduct and courtoisie for ladies primarily in terms of the proper management of their physical appearance and of their social interactions with the men who surround them.19 This relatively short poem (757 lines long) is divided into twenty parts, and the captions for the divisions give a good sense of the poem’s pragmatic focus on the care of the everyday body of the courtly lady: 1. Care of Her Breast (Ensoignemant de son soin) 2. Care of Her Mouth (Ensoignemanz de sa boiche) 3. Care of Her Gaze (Ensoignemanz de son regart) 4. About Boasting (De vantance)

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    5. About Revealing Her Body (De sa char mostrer)   6. Lesson on How to Refuse Gifts (Ensoignmenz de dons refuser)   7. Instruction About Quarreling (Chastoiemanz de tancier)   8. Lesson on Greeting and Opening Her Mouth (Ensoignemanz de saluer et de soi desboichier)   9. Lesson on How to Cover Pale Color and Bad Smell (Ensoignemant de covrir sa paule color et sa maule oudor) 10. How One Should Act in Church (Comant l’on doit ester au mostier) 11. How to Read the Gospel (Au lire l’avangile) 12. Returning from Church (De la revenue du mostier) 13. About Singing in Moderation (De chanter par raison) 14. How to Keep One’s Hands Clean (De tenir ses mains natemant) 15. Lesson on How to Eat Properly (Ensoingnemant de ester au maingier) 16. Against Lying (Deveemanz de mentir) 17. Concerning Ladies Who Do Not Know How to Conduct Themselves When One Tries to Engage Them in Love (Des dames que ne sevent escondire quant on les prie d’amors) 18. The Lament of Lovers (Li Complainte des amanz) 19. The Response to the Lover (Li Response contre l’amant) Susan Udry has noted how “the enumeration of the lady’s breasts, lips, and eyes” that results from such attention to the lady’s body “resembles the conventional praise of courtly beauties in romance, except that Robert’s description emphasizes male ownership of the female body and its sexual pleasure, rather than its availability.”20 In the section on the care of the breast, for example, only the husband may touch it without the threat of violation for only he has the right to take pleasure in the sexual heat which is sure to follow: “That one may place [his hand] there without violation who takes his pleasure in the rest; whenever he shall wish it, you will suffer it, because you owe him the same obedience that the monk owes to his abbot. For this reason were the breasts enclosed: that no man should place his hand there.”21 A woman who allows her bare breast to be touched by someone other than her husband, on the other hand, is certain to be heated up by that touch as much as the man is, and she will consequently agree to the sexual impropriety that is sure to follow. Robert’s pragmatic approach to woman’s conduct thus exposes a double bind for the female subject at the heart of the day-­to-­day practices of courtliness that he describes. As Udry points out: “Robert’s advice about appearing



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pretty, cultured, and well instructed constitutes a discourse of practical sociability. . . . ​Robert’s overriding concern is with feminine beauty as a means of establishing and maintaining smooth social interactions between members of different classes. His practical-­sounding advice about deodorizing the breath and grooming the body is not presented in the context of making a woman look desirable, but in the context of everyday social interactions of bodies in enclosed spaces. The imagery he uses is not of sensuality, but of beauty as a practical social concern.”22 On the one hand, then, in a secular conduct text such as the Chastoiement female beauty provides the currency for courtly social intercourse, and traffic in women provides the symbolic economy within which courtly masculine subjects can define themselves in productive ways. On the other hand, female beauty is also understood in such a text as an embodiment of the kind of inner purity that will successfully anchor a Christian and patriarchal morality based on the purifying power of controlled sexual relations within marriage. A lady’s beauty must therefore be displayed in ways that are legible as courtly in order to be productively available to men within the discourses of noble masculinity. At the same time, her beauty also needs to signal sufficient self-­restraint and control so that her body—​­properly covered and contained—​­will remain worthy of ownership within a patriarchal feudal system that privileges the rights of fathers and husbands. While Robert also aims for a kind of universalizing discourse about female conduct to emerge from reading and thinking about his poem’s ­advice—​­at the opening of the poem he assures his readers that in the poem they will hear “a good everyday lesson”23—​­such a path to good conduct is thought through in more individually realized and more completely embodied ways. These conflicting demands on female conduct lead Robert to present crucial moral issues alongside what we might otherwise think of as superficial bodily concerns. A lady should not quarrel because it will disturb the beauty of her face. Or gluttony in food or drink will negatively affect a woman’s manners and beauty. So, too, a lady should respond to the man who greets her, but say only a little, because to do otherwise would make her interlocutor think she was badly trained—​­or expose the fact that she has bad teeth or breath. Despite the quasi-­Ovidian, urbane tone of the poem—​­one that alludes to earlier models of advice for courtly behavior such as Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la rose—​­Robert’s poem also attempts to fuse the values of fin’amor with the more renunciatory mode of conduct one finds in contemporary devotional culture. The details of Robert’s advice to young ladies about how to behave in church, how to say one’s prayers au coeur, how not to talk or eat too

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much at meals, all have parallels in the kind of advice given in the more generalized and conventional journées chrétiennes. Thus Robert’s apparent concern only with the externals of behavior and deportment may obscure a concomitant desire to carve out space and time in which the lady can attend to deeper issues of ethical conduct in a manner not dissimilar to that taking place in the superficially very different genre of the journée chrétienne.

From the Garden of Love to the Married Household: Reorienting Noble Desire in Le Livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry In the rest of this chapter I will focus on the late fourteenth-­century Livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry, a text that, more than the conduct literature preceding it, seeks to fuse the two tendencies I have been describing: that is, the treatment of womanly conduct as a practical social concern alongside an ethically inflected approach to womanly conduct as a way of surmounting and improving upon woman’s nature. The Livre du chevalier is one of the best known and most widely reproduced of late medieval conduct books. Its knightly author, the fourth Geoffroy de la Tour Landry, married his first wife, Jeanne de Rougé, sometime between 1352 and 1360. Jeanne, who came from a rich and influential Breton family, brought considerable landed wealth to the already well-­established holdings of the Tour Landry family in Anjou. After her death, sometime between 1383 and 1391, Geoffroy married again, to a rich widow, Marguerite des Roches. From 1350 onward, Geoffroy IV was involved in the various battles of the Hundred Years’ War and by 1380 had the rank of chevalier banneret, a noble rank of some authority and standing. Geoffroy died sometime between 1402 and 1406.24 In 1371, as he notes in his autobiographical preface, he decided to compile a book of conduct for the instruction of his daughters. Jeanne and Geoffroy had at least two sons (Charles and Arcade) and three daughters (Jeanne, Anne, and Marie).25 Marie, who was probably an infant or not yet born in 1371, when Geoffroy began his book, married Gilles Clérembault in 1391 and died without issue before 1400.26 Geoffroy’s elder daughters, Jeanne and Anne, both married sons of Louis, vicomte de Rochechouart, counselor and chamberlain to Charles V of France. Geoffroy’s eldest son, Charles, succeeded his father in the seigniories of La Tour Landry, Bourmont, and La Gallouere and died at Agincourt in 1415. The Livre du chevalier was composed from 1371 to 1372, and by the end of



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the fifteenth century it had become widely known at least across northern Europe. Twenty-­one manuscript copies of the French text survive, and printed editions appeared in 1514 and 1517.27 The work was translated into English twice in the fifteenth century: first anonymously during Henry VI’s reign (extant in an imperfect manuscript from that period), and then by Caxton in a printed edition of 1484. The Livre du chevalier was also translated into German (as Der Ritter vom Turn) by another nobleman, the Marquart vom Stein, ostensibly for his two daughters, and published with fine woodcut illustrations at Basel in 1493. (The German translation had two more printings in the fifteenth century, eight in the sixteenth, and two in the seventeenth.) The only modern edition of the French text is Anatole de Montaiglon’s 1854 edition.28 The work has fared somewhat better in English: the Early English Text Society (EETS) published full scholarly editions of the anonymous translation (in 1868) and of Caxton’s (in 1971).29 Of the secular conduct texts we have discussed thus far, Le Livre du chevalier is the most complexly hybrid both in terms of the types of material it seeks to bring together and in terms of the narrative strategies it develops to shape that material. Nearly three hundred pages in its modern French edition, the Livre du chevalier incorporates a diverse range of material: advice about prayer and fasting; warnings about the dangers of excessive preoccupation with dress, finery, and makeup; examples of good and bad women drawn from the Bible; moralizing tales drawn from contemporary French life, Geoffroy’s own personal experience; and even fabliau plots. As I will discuss at greater length below, the core of Le Livre du chevalier (roughly two-­thirds of its chapters) is drawn from the Miroir des bonnes femmes, and reproduces that text’s structure of biblical stories of bad and good women presented in chronological order. Material from the Miroir is used in the sections of the Livre from chapters 37 to 110 (in Caxton’s numbering; chapters 37 to 112 in the original French).30 As we have noted, the Miroir adds parallel nonbiblical narrative material to develop the themes each good and bad woman raises and to adapt the biblical themes to the issues faced by woman who are wives, mothers, and widows. While Geoffroy follows this model in his incorporation of material from the Miroir, how he does so varies. As J. L. Grigsby notes in his detailed comparison of the two texts, “(1) He sometimes copies an entire chapter almost verbatim. (2) He sometimes expands his source material, tending then to become verbose, but always returns to one or two sentences in the Miroir as points de repère. (3) He characteristically portrays good women more virtuous and more highly rewarded and bad women more wicked and more severely punished

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than they are in the Miroir. (4) He may copy only the first story of a chapter, ending his own chapter at that point or continuing it by inserting some personal anecdote or an exemplum from another source.”31 The content of the chapters that originate with Geoffroy are even more mixed. After an autobiographical prologue describing how he came to his project, the next thirty-­ seven chapters (in Caxton’s translation) provide advice on conduct in religious observance and in daily life. Topics dealt with are: prayer (chapters 2–­5); fasting (6–­9); courtesy and deportment (10–­13); quarreling (14); greed and deception (15); jealousy (16); submissiveness to one’s husband (17–­19); almsgiving (19); the adopting of new fashions in dress (20); behavior at social gatherings (21–­24); attitudes toward the wearing of finery (25–­26); behavior in relation to the service of the mass (27–­34); fornication in church (35–­36). Chapters 111–­12 (and 136) give examples of good women from the Chevalier’s own time. Chapters 113–­21 give advice and comments on matters such as widowhood and remarriage, preserving a woman’s reputation, vanity in dress, and the fate of those who commit fornication and adultery. Chapters 122–­33 describe a débat between the knight and his wife where he attempts to defend the value of fin’amor despite its tendency to encourage the seduction of young girls by unscrupulous young men and where his wife argues (successfully) for the complete rejection of such discourse because of its dubious morality; chapters 134–­36 give further examples of good and bad conduct relative to this discussion. The final section (chapters 137–­44) provides the three pieces of advice given by Cato to his son. The Livre du chevalier is also notable, compared to preceding conduct texts, in developing an extensive narrative frame to structure its discussion: first, in the prologue, which outlines the autobiographical context for the narrator’s decision to write about female conduct, and, second, in the formal débat between Geoffroy and his wife about the value and danger of fin’amor that occurs near the end of the book.32 This autobiographical frame, I argue, provides him with a complex textual location in which to negotiate the hybrid spaces that an attention to secular female conduct creates in the late medieval imaginary. In the process, the Chevalier moves from an older understanding of courtliness in terms of fin’amor and inheritance to a newer understanding of courtliness in terms of the good conduct and social relations arising out of paternal and marital affection.33 In thinking through such issues, I have found Michel de Certeau’s distinctions between “place” and “space” particularly useful, for, more than the public/private binary, they offer a fluid and capacious account of the workings of ideology and temporality in understanding how



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spatiality signifies. A place as de Certeau defines it, “is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. . . . ​The law of the ‘proper’ rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own ‘proper’ and distinct location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability.” A space, on the other hand, “exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities. . . . ​In short, space is a practiced place.”34 While the prologue’s courtly garden setting may initially be understood by the Chevalier as place, leading him to focus nostalgically on past erotic experiences as if they constituted the proper focus of his present activities as nobleman, the appearance of his three daughters, and the consequent compassion he feels for them as potential objects of abuse from young lovers, reorients the Chevalier’s experience of his location as space. Rather than being experienced simply as a garden of fin’amor desire, the Chevalier’s experience of his own domestic sphere enlarges so that he considers his roles as husband, father, head of household, and the larger context of the married household in which this garden is situated. By reorienting the private location of the courtly garden of love outward to consider the proper place of the married household within a patriarchal social imaginary, and by reworking the aristocratic/clerical compact in order to foster greater secular moral agency, the Chevalier’s turn to autobiography and the ethics of female conduct also attempts to reinvigorate an embattled French chivalry during a difficult period in the Hundred Years’ War by articulating a newly embodied, universalizing discourse of nobility.35 The courtly garden as the authorized place of fin’amor is destabilized in the Chevalier’s autobiographical frame by his recognition of his other role as father and the different sense of responsibility that brings to the care of women when imagined in terms of his three daughters. But in the process of thinking through female conduct more generally in the book he comes to write as a result of this experience, the Chevalier can then reconfigure and shape the space of the married household as a new kind of place in which to foster noble behavior. Let us begin by considering in detail the narrative attention that the Chevalier gives to the prologue’s setting and to the autobiographical origins for his

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turn to family and conduct in writing his text. In particular, I want to focus on how the Chevalier figures his location within the courtly garden in ways that construct a new mode of noble identification, one located within the married household and its relations of self-­restrained good conduct. However, the Chevalier begins first by situating the originary moment for his book in that most conventional of courtly settings: springtime in the pleasant shade of a garden of courtly love. To the extent that the Chevalier’s initial description locates the garden as a kind of de Certeauian place, it works to stabilize his own position as noble subject. The Chevalier notes at the beginning of his prologue that he sat there, “gloomy and pensive” (“tout morne et tout pensiz”), until the gay song of birds makes him rejoice a little. And he is moved to remember his own youthful service to fin’amor when Love held him in his service and when he was alternately often very sorrowful and very glad. But the opening words of the prologue also work almost immediately to destabilize such a sense of the garden as a courtly place, locating the current narrating Chevalier and his book-­to-­be very precisely within history: “In the year 1371 . . . ​at the end of April” (“L’an mil trois cens soixante et onze . . . ​à l’issue d’avril”).36 Nor does the account of his devotion to love and lady that follows manage to fix the stereotypical lyrical transcendence of the suffering lover in some eternal now of heightened feeling. Instead it emphasizes the productivity of his long service to such a virtuous lady: “whiche hath knowleche of alle honoure / alle good / and fayre mayntenyng / And of alle good she semed me the best and the floure.”37 For “alle myn euylles haue rewarded me. Sythe that the fayre and good hath gyuen to me” (Caxton, 11; Montaiglon, 1: “tous mes maulx me guerredonna pour ce que belle et bonne me donna”), and as a result, “In whome I so moche me delyted / For in that tyme I made songes / layes. Roundels balades / Vyrelayes / and newe songes in the mooste best wyse I coude” (Caxton, 11).38 The Chevalier is reminded that his lady love—​­“For whome I haue receyued many sorowes and heuynesses” (Caxton, 11; Montaiglon, 1: “dont mainte douleur en ay recue et mainte tristour”)—​­died more than twenty years ago, a fact that might seem to work against such a productive, teleological understanding of courtly love. But the Chevalier’s prologue sutures onto his account of lost love the generically unexpected (yet presumably everyday) appearance of his young daughters in the garden, and with that vision, the tangible reminder that the past twenty years have produced much more than the “sorrow” (“douleur”) and “sadness” (“tristour”) of fin’amor. The unexpected appearance of the Chevalier’s daughters reorients his inherited understanding of courtly time and space, as he comes to recognize



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their pressing need for a program of instruction that will do for them what love service to a virtuous lady did for him in his youth. The scene that follows both mirrors and substantially alters his initial account of fin’amor and the attention to self and conduct that it initiated in the young Chevalier. The appearance of his young daughters now provides the narrative means by which the Chevalier can perform the kind of repetition with difference that the courtly love lyric does not provide, one that will move his discussion of love and conduct in a more teleological fashion—​­toward a successful ending in the present rather than mournful circularity and toward an interiority that can successfully engage with the world rather than a sterile solipsism cut off from the social. Recognizing his daughters’ youth and lack of experience, he realizes that they need a different kind of instruction than traditional fin’amor practices can provide. Instead he cites the teaching by good example and doctrine that a recent queen of Hungary was able to do for her daughters when she wrote a conduct book for them.39 The Chevalier remembers how when he was young, the group of courtiers who were his companions unscrupulously and relentlessly pursued young ladies. And the Chevalier is reminded of how often he debated with those companions, trying to expose their shameful and deceptive ways to them. Since this kind of behavior was rampant in the past, the Chevalier imagines that it must be equally prevalent in the present. Therefore, he decides to write a book that will record the good deeds and manners of good ladies so that they can be honored, and so that after their death their example can be known more widely in the world and emulated. He will do the same for evil women so that their example can be known and avoided. His daughters can then learn to read from such a book, study it to know good and evil, and use such knowledge to avoid evil in their future: “For suche ther be that lawgheth to fore yow / whiche after youre back goo mockyng and lyeng / Wherfor it is an hard thyng to knowe the world that is now present” (Caxton, 12–­13).40 The Chevalier leaves the garden at this point and meets two priests and two clerks from his household; they provide him with the texts he requests, and he then begins composing his book. Thus, despite the Chevalier’s location at the opening of the prologue in a garden of love where self-­ identification takes place in the lyric mode of fin’amor service to the distant lady,41 by the end of the prologue, the garden setting has been re-­presented as a troubling space within a larger married household, registering a need for a more profoundly ethical mode of thinking about proper conduct and woman’s nature. Rather than representing a place where each element is stably situated in its own proper and distinct location, the courtly garden as experienced

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by the Chevalier here represents the intersection of mobile elements that connect it to the married household and a father’s responsibilities, in effect reorienting and temporalizing the garden as space and a practiced place.42 The kind of narrative material that the Chevalier says he turned to in order to compile an instructive text for his daughters, as well as the way that he says he incorporated it into his text, demonstrates a similar inventiveness brought about by the need to represent a father’s responsibilities and the needs of the married household. At the end of his autobiographical prologue, the Chevalier notes that, having decided to make a book of advice for his daughters, “I went oute of the gardyn / and fond in my weye two preestes and two clerkes that I hadde / and tolde to them . that I wolde make a book and an examplayre for my doughters to lerne . to rede and vnderstonde / how they ought to gouerne them self / and to kepe them from euylle / And thenne I made them to come & rede before me the book of the byble. the gestes of the kynges / the cronycles of fraunce and of Englond // and many other straunge historyes / and made them to rede euery book / And dyde doo make of them this book” (Caxton, 13).43 Despite the aura of autobiographical authenticity that this dramatic scene creates, it is likely as much a fiction as the rest of the prologue. The scene that the Chevalier describes dramatizes a familiar s­cenario—​ ­where a literate clergy controls textual culture, and where laymen access such knowledge through essentially passive and delimited acts of patronage and subordinated devotion—​­even while it obscures the real textual origins of the Chevalier’s book. At the same time, the continued intervention of the Chevalier—​­“I wolde make a book,” “I made them to come and rede before me,” “[I] made them to rede euery book”—​­registers the very active role the Chevalier actually takes as reader/compiler in adapting traditional clerical culture to the needs of laymen and laywomen in the Livre.44 As J. L. Grigsby has conclusively shown, the biblical stories of bad and good women that make up the central portion of the Chevalier’s text do not come directly from the Bible but from a source never acknowledged by the Chevalier: the Franciscan-­authored conduct text Miroir des bonnes femmes, discussed earlier in this chapter.45 While the Chevalier keeps some of the nonbiblical exemplary material included with the Miroir’s scriptural women, the Chevalier also adds his own examples and stories. Many of these likely came either from the Chevalier’s own memory—​­from stories heard in actual sermons or from oral tales—​­or from written collections of sermon exempla or fabliaux.46 But some of the Chevalier’s most striking examples and moving stories are clearly drawn from his own personal experience and family history



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(notably the story of Olive de Belleville, widow of his paternal grandfather).47 Moreover, as Grigsby and Anne Marie De Gendt show in their detailed analyses of the Miroir and the Livre, the Chevalier consistently adapts material taken from the Miroir in ways that shift the clerical focus of its Franciscan author to that of a secular husband and father like the Chevalier. For example, the Chevalier borrows the traditional tripartite division of women into virgins, wives, and widows, but without keeping the hierarchical ordering of the three groups to favor virginity at the expense of wives. As De Gendt notes, when the Chevalier speaks of the virgin martyrs (Katherine, Margaret, Christine, Lucy), he focuses on their martyrdom rather than their virginity. And in the chapters devoted to the virtues of the Virgin Mary (Caxton, chaps. 107–­ 110; Montaiglon, chaps. 109–­11), the virginity of Mary—​­stressed by the Miroir author—​­is not commented on by the Chevalier. Thus, for the Chevalier, “all women who respect the demands of their condition seem to have the chance of attaining eternal salvation. . . . ​Chastity thus becomes a virtue that is not only moral but also social.”48 Indeed, the Chevalier at one point even compares a woman’s prowess—​­that is, her attempts to preserve her chastity—​ ­favorably to the martial prowess of a knight.49 And later, he uses Christ’s parable of the pearl of great price to prove that a woman who surmounts the flesh has more merit than a man who does the same thing.50 In similar fashion, unlike the clerical author of the Miroir, who condemns fetes and other social occasions (and extols the virtues of the cloister as a destination for young women), the Chevalier is cognizant of the role noblewomen must play in society. He therefore argues that it is appropriate for noblewomen to take part in fetes and other social occasions, so long as they do so moderately.51 The Chevalier’s calculated incorporation of material from the Miroir highlights how the convenient encounter with the priests and clerks recounted in the prologue functions as a narrative strategy on the part of a patriarchal lay author seeking moral authority. The supposedly real autobiographical prologue therefore needs to be read as a fictionalized narrative vehicle for a more general and self-­conscious social agenda intent on personalizing and historicizing the whole question of conduct. Despite the prologue’s initial preoccupation with a fin’amor focused on an absent lady, its narrative movement re-­presents the time and space of the Chevalier in his courtly garden in such a way as to foreground the productive activity of marital relations, figured in the three daughters who appear to him in the garden while he is thinking about his long-­dead lady love. And by the end of the prologue, when the Chevalier decides to write the kind of conduct book needed to ensure the

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continued nobility of his daughters, the courtly garden is subsumed within a larger household space (to use de Certeau’s term) far less predictable in how “elements are to be distributed in relationships of coexistence,” and one where the law of the proper needs to be developed by individual performative interventions within the social. The fin’amor setting of the Livre’s prologue and the Chevalier’s own history as a lover call to mind earlier conduct literature directed at noblewomen, such as Robert of Blois’s Chastoiement des dames. There, Robert outlines the ways that ladies need to attend to physical appearance, language, and chastity in order to ensure their purity and that of the aristocratic bloodline. In the process Robert blends the moral and the socially expedient and provides the kind of practical advice necessary to balance courtly manners with socially acceptable behavior in the world. But Robert’s universalizing approach expresses morality as the courtly and manifests in its poetic play the very linguistic balance it advocates as the goal of a courtly lady’s personal conduct. It thus keeps the question of conduct at the surface of outward courtly display—​­of language, dress, and figure. The Livre du chevalier echoes Robert of Blois’s emphasis on the value of attending to outward forms in order to systematize “courtliness” in newly productive and universalizing ways. But it does so in conjunction with an emphasis, found in more religiously inflected texts such as the Miroir des bonnes femmes, on the value of attending to the “deep structures” of woman’s nature—​­what makes her fundamentally good or bad—​­in order to understand her social utility as a universalizing force. The Chevalier’s turn to clerical knowledge, especially as it expresses itself in the choice of the Miroir as a source text (with its exempla of biblical good and bad women), brings into play the model of vices and virtues most popularly manifested in the seven deadly sins and their remedies. By fusing the sacred and the secular in this way, the Livre attempts to connect its treatment of female conduct to foundational truths about human nature, emphasizing how a woman’s nature, like a man’s, is both good and bad. Writing woman good, reading woman good, properly emulating the examples provided by other good women, can thus create a textual sense of the noble household as a place in which to think womanly activity in more agential ways than an antifeminist tradition would allow for. The Chevalier’s prologue may begin in what we might initially read as an already known and socialized place, that is, in the familiar landscape of the garden of love. But his account of this particular inhabiting of that place almost immediately foregrounds the garden and the courtly as space, through



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the ensemble of unpredictable, personal movements the Chevalier shows deployed within it. The unpredictability of the “personal movement” that the Chevalier recognizes as a result of the entrance of his young daughters into the garden thus requires a new set of rules for noble conduct that can be at once personally driven and yet also fully social. Clearly a certain degree of female agency is crucial to the kind of discernment of right conduct that the Chevalier is advocating for noblewomen such as his daughters. Since the right conduct of such good women depends upon reshaping nature by intervening in time and space in measured ways, conduct must be thought of as a matter of both surface and depth. It requires finding a way to construct the appropriate framework to contain (and make recognizable) a deep interiority for its noble subjects. Such a framework, the Livre du chevalier argues, can best be produced within the personally ordered spaces of the married household and its modes of self-­identification: first in the book that the Chevalier will write and then in the good daughters and wives that will be produced from the instruction gained by reading his book repeatedly and thoughtfully. The Chevalier’s focus in his prologue on personal experience and on the value of and necessity for individual activity and responsibility is therefore especially interesting. Previous models for conduct that influence the Chevalier, such as the Chastoiement and the Miroir, take pains to signal the variety of kinds of exemplary material that they incorporate in order to point to the universality of their models of female conduct. They thus provide a different kind of performative reading from the Chevalier’s. Both the Chastoiement and the Miroir depend upon the sequential list for their ordering material and the ideological interpellation that it represents. The reader’s willing reiteration of their models for right action will thus ensure the linguistic and other stylization of the body necessary to produce recognizable gender and social difference and proper noble female subjects. The Chevalier’s prologue, on the other hand, foregrounds a different—​­more complex, less easily integrated—​­personal and narrative engagement with the kind of performative reading necessary to secure an authentic self and ground it in the world. What the Livre du chevalier thereby emphasizes is the value of such a holistic attention to conduct as the truest means of forming a discrete interiority for the good woman, one capable of reliably guiding her to choose correctly and to learn to desire properly. The Livre foregrounds the often unspoken background of earlier conduct texts, or what becomes visible only at their interstices, that is, how the interiorized universalizing good produced by the labor of devotion requires a ceaseless repetition of embodied reading practices in individual material contexts

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that are necessarily and obdurately different from one another. That the everyday body of the female subject becomes an integral and creative frame for such a process of performative reading also implies the foundational importance of an embodied understanding of woman’s true nature in creating the whole self that is the desideratum of secular conduct literature. The movement that the prologue enacts—​­from noble fin’amor to clerically inflected conduct literature—​­might be thought of as analogous to the movement taking place in the later Middle Ages from oral recitation of Latin prayers to the silent reading of vernacular prayer and meditation as the means of developing private devotion (discussed in Chapter 1). Fin’amor, as characterized by the Chevalier, is associated with orality and a certain kind of rote repetition. If one has the right model and follows it exactly, such repetition can be ennobling and true. But rote repetition is also open to the danger of manipulation by false lovers and of producing a worryingly superficial embodiment. This is the space in which Robert of Blois’s work operates, and its author’s choice of the medium of poetry rather than prose emphasizes the close relationship to orality that a courtliness based on fin’amor and good manners has. Clearly, for the Chevalier as a youth, and for his daughters now (if properly educated), the way out of such superficiality is through an internalization of courtly conduct as an ethical system that can establish a stable sense of self capable of resisting the destabilizing effects of mere linguistic manipulation and the oscillations of time and space. To achieve this stability in the Chevalier’s present moment, however, requires the intervention of a differently textualized self and the marrying of the lyric and poetic with the narrative and prosaic. It requires a kind of private devotion to self that is nonetheless social; it requires, in short, a self-­restrained affective relationship with others that will find its fullest expression in conjugality and the family it founds.52 Marital relations thus saturate the narrative action of the Livre du chevalier. The most significant alteration that the Chevalier makes to the Miroir as he incorporates its textual material into his book is to move his account of the Virgin Mary out of its chronological location in scripture (and in the Miroir’s order) to the climactic end point of the Chevalier’s list of biblical good women. While in the previous chapter, the Chevalier notes that he has spoken of the foolish and wise virgins of the Bible, here he will speak of the one virgin who has no peer. Yet the Chevalier almost immediately begins a protracted discussion of the Virgin Mary’s integral connection with the sacrament of marriage: “She was chamberere and Temple of God where as the weddynge of



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the deyte and of the humanyte was maade . . . ​[and] God wold that she shold take to her spouse the hooly man Ioseph / whiche was a good old man and trewe / For god wold be borne vnder the shadowe of maryage for to obeye to the lawe and for to eschewe the euylle talkynge of the world / And also for to gyue her companye and gouerne & lede her in to Egypte” (Caxton, 143–­44).53 The Chevalier goes on to highlight other points of comparison between the Virgin and the good wives that his book hopes to produce. Since the angel of the Annunciation found Mary alone within the temple, kneeling, saying her prayers, so too every good woman should be found in devotion and in service to God.54 More surprising, perhaps, is the gloss that the Chevalier gives to the Virgin’s agency in asking the angel how she could be pregnant when she had not had sexual relations with a man. Only when the angel has satisfactorily answered her query does Mary commit to humbly accepting God’s will. As the Chevalier notes approvingly, “She wold fyrst knowe how it myght be / But thus dyd not Eue / she dyd byleue to lyghtely / As this day done many symple wymmen whiche lyghtely byleue the fooles / wherefore afterward they be broughte to doo folye / They enquere not ne behold not the ende to the whiche they shall come / as dyd the gloryous and blessyd vyrgyn Marye / whiche enquered of the Aungel the ende of the faytte or dede / the whiche he dyd announce to her / Thus thenne ought the good wymmen to doo / as men speketh to them of yongthe [i.e., youth] / or of ony other thynge / wherof dyshonoure and blame may come to them” (Caxton, 144–­45).55 Just as Christ’s birth via the Virgin Mary marks the Godhead’s intervention in human history and the beginning of a New Testament about humanity, so too the Chevalier’s discussion here notes how the Virgin’s agential obedience in accepting God’s will marks its own kind of new beginning for the good wife’s nature and conduct. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the Chevalier follows the chapters on the Virgin with his own contemporary French examples of such surpassing virtue in noblewomen—​­the good queen Jeanne of France, the duchess of Orleans, the good countess of Roussillon, and a baroness of Artus (who upon the death of her husband refused to remarry and remained a widow for thirty-­five years)—​ ­as if to mark the continuing presence in history of the kind of reformation of woman’s nature that the Virgin embodies.56 The Chevalier contrasts such marriages grounded in obedience with the ephemeral bonds established by girls who choose to wed against the wishes of their parents and for immediate gratification and pleasure. But the exemplars of wifely goodness that he introduces here, as with the Virgin Mary, emphasize something more than female obedience to an imposed authority. In all such cases the Chevalier emphasizes

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the affective contract at the core of marital relations, the honoring of which, like the Virgin’s interrogative assent to the Annunciation, constitutes the active embrace of a constraint that is, ultimately, the means by which to secure true agency as noble subjects in the world.57 The remainder of the text, all of it the Chevalier’s own material, continues this emphasis on marriage. The chapters immediately following the example of the Virgin Mary58 in various ways outline a rupture between the present moment and the immediate past of the Chevalier’s father’s generation, a rupture that the Chevalier as father and author seeks to suture by providing proper ethical guidance to his daughters and readers. In the past, members of the older generation actively engaged with youthful indiscretion, rooting out bad behavior and inculcating the pursuit of good among young men and women. Such activity produced a milieu in which young ladies accepted the counsel of parents and wise men and chose the virtuous path; in turn, young knights sought to prove themselves worthy of good reputation by chivalric feats of arms and to embrace the proper dress and habits of their class. In the present moment, however, such human guides to good behavior have become far less common; hence the need for texts such as the Chevalier’s. Caxton’s chapter 118 (Montaiglon, chap. 119) might be seen as the corollary of the chapters on the Virgin, comparing the good woman to the pearl of great price—​­an insight that the Chevalier insists (mistakenly) is gospel truth. And he frames his argument here with a defense of marriage as the privileged space for female chastity and achievement. The subsequent three chapters then delineate how the pursuit of superficial attributes of nobility—​­fine clothes, physical beauty, love talking—​­impede the secure possession of the married estate. The Chevalier exposes the folly of such a superficial understanding of nobility in ridiculous terms. An elder sister, for example, loses her suitor to her younger sister because she is so concerned with dressing fashionably that the cold makes her appear deadly pale, and her suitor chooses the younger, warmly dressed sister whose ruddy color signals good health. Similarly, Sir Fulk of Laval dresses for fashion not the cold weather, and his lady directs him to warm up by the fire while she goes off with a warmly dressed, lively suitor. As if to show how the present might be redeemed and come to manifest the kind of interventionist morality that the Virgin and a previous generation of nobility embodied, the Chevalier caps his account of good women with a return to the autobiographical frame and courtly literary mode that began the book, by means of an extended love debate between himself and his wife about the value of fin’amor. The Chevalier attempts to argue that in certain



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cases a lady may love a paramour. His wife, because this debate is taking place in the presence of their daughters and because nothing should be hidden from children, answers: “Therfore I charge yow my fayre doughters that in this mater ye byleue not your fader” (Caxton, 164).59 His wife’s reasoning is twofold: First, being amorous keeps a woman from worshipping God properly and makes her more likely to be tempted in church. Second, gentlemen are so false and deceiving that they want every woman they find; true lovers, on the other hand, keep quiet and do not attempt to woo ladies, so much so that it can be three or four years before they even acknowledge their secret love to their lady. In contrast to fin’amor narratives, which largely ignore the material context for such love—​­remaining in the kind of abstracted “now” that the Chevalier was able to maintain with the lady love of his youth, even after her death—​­the wife’s advice to her daughters remains rooted in the material concerns of present time and space and the everyday difficulties of remaining noble in the world. Thus she encourages her daughters to keep from talking with amorous men or, if they cannot avoid being forced to hear such talk, to call someone over so that they will not be alone with the amorous man. If the daughter does this once or twice, such a man will leave her alone. In response to the Chevalier’s example of an amorous man who really loves his lady and is willing to marry her, the wife acknowledges that all men are not the same. Some will be impressed by the return of affection in the pleasant manner of the woman they love. But others will value less the woman who shows affection back and will think the girl is superficial. Thus, she maintains, there is more risk in responding to love talk than in not responding: “For in certayne they that kepe them symply / and the whiche gyuen noo fayre token or semblaunt to one nomore than to other / ben most preysed / and they be therefore the sooner wedded” (Caxton, 168).60 As her exemplary authority she cites an event from the Chevalier’s own past experience: when a young woman the Chevalier was thinking about marrying ruined her prospects with him by being overly familiar in returning his signs of love, thereby losing his respect.61 When the Chevalier responds by asking whether a woman could not at least “take somme plesaunce of loue” (“prennent aucune plaisance d’amour”) when they are married, his wife allows that they may “make good chere to all worshipfulle men / And more to somme than to the other / that is to wete / to them of gretter name and more gentyl / or els better men of theyr persones / And after that they bere to them worship and honour / And that they synge and daunce before them honourably” (Caxton, 170).62 But women should not

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exceed this kind of regard, for anything more will impede their devotion to God and could easily lead wives to love their husbands less. The Chevalier’s wife follows with a brief outline of the history and practice of the sacrament of marriage. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the debate is in the end resolved in terms that favor conjugality (and the wife’s argument) over fin’amor (and the Chevalier’s argument).63 This final adaptation of the love debate clearly reprises the movement of the opening prologue, similarly forcing the Chevalier and his readers from the endless play of fin’amor to the goal-­oriented moral relations of sacramental marriage and the married household. But important differences should be noted as well. The Chevalier at the end of his book does not return to a lyric isolation focused on an absent and silenced love object. Instead he debates with a very materially present and able interlocutor, no allegorical figure such as the God of Love or Venus, but a marital partner whose moral arguments win the day. No longer the isolated courtly lover of the opening, nor one of the courtly free agents ready to use love talking to seduce young girls that he remembers from his youth, the Chevalier discovers his true nature as part of the conjoined body of the married estate. Thus, unlike the end of the prologue, when the Chevalier must move outside to commission clerics to provide him with his narrative material, here the debate should make clear to him and us that the means for moral wisdom and ethical action lie within. The portrayal of the good wife in the debate makes visible the kind of deep interiority that the book’s narrative has sought for in its fusion of the courtly and the clerical, just as the structure of the debate inscribes the possibility, and value, of a certain degree of female agency and cross-­generational connection between women. But the wife here is also mirroring back a character now properly named as “father” and “chevalier,” to the extent that her nature as good wife demonstrates the effects of the Chevalier’s patriarchal care and activity. She thus demonstrates—​­through this act of affective literacy—​­how her reasoned and active role within their marriage has allowed her to benefit from his exemplary stories, his experience, and his reading (much as the book promises to do for his daughters). In the end, the Chevalier and his good wife are mutually constitutive of a larger set of gendered relations that constitute the conjoined body of the married couple. It is, the Livre du chevalier argues, just such a self-­restrained, mutually regulating, affectively joined couple—​­husband and wife, father and mother, ruler and regent—​­that can truly provide the foundations for a new, vital form of noble subject formation within the confines of the married family and household. The kind of ethical activity that



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the Chevalier and his book set in motion can be reproduced in the present moment by the actions of his family and others reading the book, but it can also be generated by similar activity on the part of future generations of the Chevalier’s family and of more general readers who gain access to his text. Training across generations as the Chevalier imagines through his book at once subscribes to a belief in stable social and epistemological categories, yet considers such categories as they are always already framed through the performativity of identity within a changing social landscape. The Livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry is thus especially innovative among the texts discussed in this chapter in focusing on the importance of a woman’s personal and narrative engagement with textuality in order to form the kind of discrete sense of interiority necessary to embody proper feminine behavior in the world. This shift in emphasis away from an externalized rote repetition to an interiorized personal understanding is manifested in narrative terms by the work’s emphasis on an individually contextualized frame for the recounting of universal models of good female behavior. And rather than sequential organization, the Livre’s narrative method stresses a new dialogic mode of information processing. The text continues a dialogic mode inherited from clerical and secular tradition, but it constructs a new gendered and sexualized model for such interaction. Instead of simply conjuring up the specter of a wayward woman not heeding the “proper” voice of masculine authority (represented by an allegorical visionary figure or the citation of clerical exempla or the patriarchal voice of the law), the Livre imagines properly “masculine” and “feminine” voices in dialogue in ways that lead to joint ethical action arising out of marital affection. We see this most clearly in the impersonated artistry of the staged debate between the Chevalier and his wife near the end of the text. In a way this reprises the voice of the younger Chevalier that was invoked in the preface, a nobleman still intent on holding onto a partial noble past, represented by the discourses of courtly love. That voice of the Chevalier, the wife tells her daughters, must not be obeyed. Instead, here, the feminine speaks a new law of the proper and a new model of noble action in the world that will allow the full good of the feminine to emerge in a way that will in turn elicit a fully proper masculine response. The debate enacts in miniature what the text as a whole has been intent on representing, that is, narrative models that keep masculine and feminine separated in mutually fulfilling and constitutive ways so that they may also work together beside each other in safely contained ways. In doing so, the text also constructs a new place for noble conduct by keeping the courtly garden and the domestic relations of the

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married household properly alongside each other. Thus the courtly erotics of the garden of love no longer subsume or occlude marital relations, but work in sync with them, just as the noble husband/father and wife work in sync to structure the domestic relations of this new social unit. Hence a new relationship between public and private is imagined in the Chevalier’s textualization of a father’s concern for his daughters’ continued good conduct, one that reasserts the continuing universality of noble conduct by reforming its constitutive elements. By reshaping the nature of the feminine as it does, the Livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry also works to reform a French nobility severely challenged by recent English successes in the Hundred Years’ War. The new, mutually constitutive and dialogic relationship between masculine and feminine that the Chevalier imagines possible in the noble married household mark a significant departure from the erotic relationships developed within a long-­standing tradition of fin’amor, but the success of a conduct text such as the Livre du chevalier in reconfiguring the domestic household as a place in de Certeau’s terms also works to maintain the universality of nobility as a category of thought within the rapidly changing social, economic, and political contexts of the later fourteenth century.

Chapter 3

In the Merchant’s Bedchamber Le Menagier de Paris

In Chapter 2 we considered how, beginning in the late thirteenth century, a new tradition of writing for secular women develops, one focused on systematizing female conduct in ways that imagine woman’s nature as fully capable of improvement as a man’s. These texts gender conduct in new and empowering ways. While the feminine is now viewed as being able to achieve a level of self-­restraint and amelioration previously associated only with the masculine, nonetheless, proper female conduct also naturally seeks to fulfill its nature under the rule of a father’s or husband’s authority. There is, as well, an impor­ tant shift in such texts away from requiring a rote repetition of externalized instruction to instilling a personal understanding of right conduct felt “in the heart.” Despite the universalizing discourses adopted by such guides to secular conduct, their emphasis on an embodied and performative reading strategy as essential to the development of proper conduct in the world also demands an attention to individual difference and to the inherent variety of material contexts shaping proper self-­formation. In narrative terms this shift manifests itself in the individually contextualized frames that many of the texts develop in order to make universal models of good female behavior fully visible to a wide range of contemporary subjects. As we saw, among these secular conduct texts Le Livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry is especially innovative in framing conduct in highly personalized terms in order to intensify such performative reading practices. Rather than the simpler mode of sequential organization favored by earlier texts, the Livre’s narrative strategies stress a more complex dialogism as the organizational mode that will work most efficiently in safely containing and separating the masculine and feminine while at the same time

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allowing them to interact in productive ways. The mutually constitutive, yet dialogic, relationship between masculine and feminine that the Livre du chevalier imagines possible in the noble married household thus marks a significant departure from the erotic relationships developed within a long-­standing tradition of fin’amor. The text’s autobiographical frame moves the Chevalier and his readers from the erotic game of fin’amor found in the courtly garden of love to the invigoratingly productive work of married domestic relations found in the noble household, thereby reframing it as the new, privileged place—​­in de Certeau’s use of the term—​­in which to develop and nurture a properly ethical form of lay conduct. Despite the new relationships between public and private that secular conduct texts like the Livre du chevalier make possible, they are still largely expressed through a universalizing discourse of nobility. This chapter asks what happens when the gendered and sexualized identities of secular conduct texts are translated to the very different social terrain of the bourgeois married household represented in Le Menagier de Paris (or The Parisian Household Book).1 Composed around 1394 by an older, wealthy Parisian merchant for his young bride, Le Menagier de Paris attempts to provide a complete guide to every aspect of conduct for the good bourgeois wife and the household she manages.2 Over three hundred pages long in its most recent modern critical edition, the Menagier anthologizes a particularly varied assortment of material: confessional manuals, moral treatises, popular stories and jokes, literary narratives such as the Melibee and Griselda stories, copious recipes and practical information about the smallest detail of daily household management, personal experience and family history, as well as Jacques Bruyant’s 2,500-­line allegorical poem Le Chemin de povreté et de richesse (or The Way and Direction of Poverty and Riches) that is inserted verbatim in the middle of the text.3 In this chapter I argue that the Menagier engages more directly and complexly than the Livre du chevalier with the immaterial labor of the good wife and the hybridity of domestic relations within the married estate. In the process, the Menagier explores the value derived for such hybrid modes of self-­ identification from a more contingent and fluid engagement with space and narrative form. In contrast to the emphasis in the Livre du chevalier’s prologue on the stabilizing power of place in its representations of the courtly garden and fin’amor debate, the Menagier instead foregrounds the relational possibilities inherent in the conjoined body of the married estate in its opening bedroom conversation between husband and wife. Unlike the Livre’s reconfiguration of universalizing discourses of nobility in its attention to female conduct, the Me-



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nagier’s shift to a bourgeois register also encourages a materially specific, nonnoble engagement with gendered embodiment and the material spaces of the married household. The Menagier thus highlights how to work within and through subalternity in order to mobilize the particularities of its subjects’ hybrid situation as a successful mercantile married couple. The narrator’s openness to a wide variety of experiences, including nonelite ones, can be seen in the his apparently magpie incorporation of almost every kind of narrative content as appropriate to the instruction of a merchant’s wife. This chapter will therefore focus on the intensification of narrative experimentation that occurs because of the Menagier’s engagement with hybridity and, in particular, with the very different narrative structures that the text develops in order to explore how agential subject positions might be developed using the language of the other within an epistemology of inequality. More explicitly than previous conduct texts for women, which remain bound up within long-­established discourses of the noble, the Menagier’s narrative experimentation works to make visible the range of subject positions capable of being articulated by such a newly gendered and sexualized way of being in the world. We therefore witness in less constrained forms how attending to the conduct of the good wife has the potential not only to reorder gender categories but also to produce a new proto-­heterosexuality distinct from established medieval sex/gender systems organized around clerical celibacy, aristocratic dynasticism, or fin’amor. If, as Christopher Nealon has noted of current queer critique, we need to read sexuality not as foundational but “as historical, that is, as made out of found materials, secondhand,” then the Menagier has much to offer for such a nonnarrative history of the body.4 To read the text’s account of marital conduct in “straight” medieval terms or through the reductive lens of modern heterosexuality—​­that is, simply as a typical, overtly patriarchal manifestation of modern heterosexuality—​­would miss the profoundly experimental and nonreproductively generative modes of production the text uncovers. It would, in fact, ignore and occlude what is postmedieval about the Menagier (and about many of the discourses circulating through and around the married estate in the late Middle Ages), that is, their manifestation of forms of cultural production that emerge both in sync with and running counter to the logic of existing medieval social and epistemological structures. By postmedieval I do not mean to suggest processes somehow beyond or outside the medieval, thereby inscribing a teleological historicism that reads late medieval difference as necessarily marginal or triumphantly proto–­ early modern. Rather, I want to indicate how the mercantile, conjugal

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sexuality and aesthetic that the Menagier embodies might be as integral to its moment as contemporary clerical and aristocratic cultural production. But unlike those hegemonic medieval modes, the Menagier, through its hybrid blend of mercantile and quasi-­noble lay marriage and quasi-­chastity, instead registers “simultaneously a crisis and an opportunity—​­a crisis in the stability of form and meaning, and an opportunity to rethink the practice of cultural production, its hierarchies and power dynamics, its tendency to resist or capitulate.”5

“And . . . ​And . . . ​And”: Hybridity and the Dialogic in the Menagier Over the past thirty years the Menagier has benefited from renewed scholarly interest in medieval cultural studies and the status of women in the later Middle Ages. The still relatively few, largely feminist scholars engaging with the Menagier as conduct literature for women have tended to focus on the ideological inconsistencies, even contradictions, within its advice to the young wife and the issues of gendered power that they raise. While the husband-­ narrator claims to want a realistic and indulgent relationship with his young wife, whom he characterizes as eminently reasonable and tractable, his text outlines the need for a frequently harsh and exacting control over every aspect of her experience and includes many stories of extreme cruelty meted out by husbands on their troublesome wives. For Georgine E. Brereton and Janet M. Ferrier, the problem is resolved mostly in personalized terms, seeing the husband-­narrator’s attempts to fit traditional stories and mores to the real-­life situation of his young wife as largely vindicating his characterization of himself as an essentially compassionate man truly interested in the well-­being of his spouse.6 Karin Ueltschi, Mireille Vincent-­Cassy, and Christine Rose have, in different ways, focused on the power struggle between husband and wife that the discrepancies in the Menagier’s narrative open up.7 For Vincent-­Cassy the householder’s repeated injunctions about wifely obligations figure a domestic arena in which women might resist; for Rose, “the double-­voice narrator, genial patriarch and threatening tyrant,” inscribes a chilling narrative of Foucauldian surveillance and control of the young wife: “For all its spaciousness and even luxurious, exuberant description of vegetation, its admonitions to kindness to farm animals and servants, and its wealth of culinary delights,



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the governing of a wife in Le menagier de Paris is akin to the cultivation of a garden, the training of a servant, or the keeping of a horse or falcon: enclosure, obedience, pruning, curbing, domination.”8 More recently, Roberta Krueger has offered a different reading of the Menagier’s gendered and classed approach to conduct, situating the text’s cultural politics within the exigencies of contemporary bourgeois self-­identification and reminding us that, despite the Menagier’s autobiographical frame, it remains potentially a work of fiction.9 Krueger writes convincingly of the householder’s “micro-­management of domestic details” as a manifestation of “the enormous attention, labor, and perseverance involved in constructing and maintaining bourgeois status in the late Middle Ages—​­a process described here and in other books of the period as ‘tenir son estat’ [upholding one’s estate]. Piety, dress, house-­cleaning, laundry, animal-­raising, cooking, eating, and domestic relations are all part of an intricate network of overlapping, complementary systems that comprise the habitus and that determine social distinction, in Bourdieu’s terms.” Yet, as Krueger points out, despite the narrator’s best efforts, the text also inscribes disorder—​­whether in the inability of the narrator to manage the organization of his textual material, the “sheer quantity and precision of . . . ​domestic tasks [that] might overwhelm the most earnest manager,” or in its representation of the “myriad material disruptions that threaten bourgeois order.” But “by far the most troubling source of disorder [and conversely, the most satisfying representation of good order] is the wife herself.”10 Krueger thus uncovers a dialogic dynamic structuring the text and offers a more dynamic and open-­ended account of its gendered social relations than that found in earlier feminist analyses: Shadowing the narrative voice that compiles, arranges, and promotes the book with the aim of improving domestic management, another voice fears the power of women to resist male authority and inscribes doubts about the efficacy of written instruction. The author’s professed “melencolie” and his fears that his book may be a burden acknowledge the gap between theory and practice and gesture towards the uncertain space of the reader’s reception. His treatise offers an immensely practical handbook for organizing a prosperous home and attests to the vital contribution of women within the medieval economy. It also poignantly represents the difficulties of organizing social life by the book and of imposing the

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moralist’s will, particularly on the minds of young women. Through its internal contradictions and its portraits of rebellious women, this text opens a discursive space for the reader’s reflection.11 While Krueger does not compare the Menagier with the Livre du chevalier, the internal contradictions she notes in the structure of the Menagier suggest that it fails to achieve the same kind of successful dialogic synthesis that the Livre manages. In the Livre, for example, the “debate” between the Chevalier and wife powerfully represents the certainty of the reader’s reception of the moralist’s will, in the shape of a truly good wife. As Krueger implies, the Menagier’s less successful engagement with the dialogic can be attributed to its resolutely (high-­status) middling, rather than noble, context. While helpfully complicating the text’s relationship with the social, such a view nonetheless remains caught up in a binary logic in which the wife, the text’s narrator, and the Menagier as text can largely only express “the gap between theory and practice.” In this chapter I explore how the Menagier also exceeds such a binary logic and marks something more experimental in narrative form, gendered and sexualized self-­identification, and ideological invention. Krueger and others are certainly right to stress how traditional medieval distinctions between cleric and lay, male and female, spiritual and bodily, as well as the unequal power relations articulated through such binary thinking, continue to be powerful forces in the representational politics of the later Middle Ages. And clearly the Menagier often reproduces the ideological effects of such a binary way of thinking and its naturalization of unequal power relations. For example, when the Menagier adopts a form of advice from one older and wiser to one “naturally” less equipped, the text invokes didactic genres such as the allegorical dialogue and confessional manual, forms of writing that tend to reproduce entrenched ideologies and that thus work to secure the power of established medieval elites (clerical, male, literate, upper class, and such) at the expense of traditionally subordinated groups (lay, female, illiterate, lower class, and such). This space of the dialogic, as we have noted, is something the Chevalier exploits to his advantage in the Livre by reframing the terms of the dialogic within the conjoined body of the noble married couple. In that text, the Chevalier invokes the traditional hierarchies of a dialogic narrative when he takes up the challenge of leaving the erotic relations of courtly love in order to provide needed moral instruction for his daughters. Such a move is paralleled in his turn to clerical authorities in order to find the right material for such patriarchal instruction. But by making such instruction his own by adapting it



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to the domestic paternal situation, and by fully engaging with the possibility for the performance of virtue by exploring the full potential of his situation as father and husband, the Chevalier reconfigures an authoritative subject position previously associated with the clerical as the “natural” purview of the responsible, self-­restrained nobleman. It is the Chevalier’s success in securing and representing a stable place for such patriarchal authority, by subsuming the courtly garden within the noble married household as it were, that allows the Livre to risk the kind of dialogic encounter found in the fin’amor debate between the Chevalier and his wife. The wife there can take on the kind of teaching role previously associated with masculinity precisely because she is part of the Chevalier’s body and because her inculcation of moral rectitude so successfully demonstrates the validity of the program of instruction for women that the text has already articulated. No doubt, the success of both strategies works because the Livre’s domestic relations are anchored by the unquestioned noble status of its subjects’ bloodlines. The Menagier, on the other hand, does not take up the universalizing potential of nobility as articulated by the Chevalier and seeks instead to find alternative modes of representation better able to address the intermediate status of its married subjects and the mercantile situation of the household they seek to establish. In Krueger’s reading, the text’s engagement with its social terrain results in “internal contradictions” and a “gap between theory and practice” in the pedagogical relationship between husband and wife and in the impossibility of a successful synthesis emerging from its dialogic narrative structures. But because the Menagier is trying to articulate the complex entanglements of a hybrid space and identity—​­bourgeois, lay, metropolitan, married ­householder—​­which depends upon using the language of others and upon a necessary crossing of known boundaries (masculine and feminine, bodily and spiritual, lay and clerical, active and contemplative, laborer and leisured elite), I argue that in the Menagier it is the dialogic mode itself—​­as much as the behavior of wives—​­that emerges as the real problem that the text seeks to resolve. The Menagier thus experiments in its sexual politics, formal organization, and narrative strategies with what I call an economy of the beside. And I argue that it is precisely those aspects of the Menagier’s hybridity that have often appeared most problematic or have made the text appear incomplete, inept, or muddled that are most innovative and most powerful in terms of opening that discursive space for the reader’s reflection that Krueger noted. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes, “the irreducibly spatial positionality of beside” offers

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some useful resistance to the ease with which beneath and beyond turn from spatial descriptors into implicit narratives of, respectively, origin and telos. Beside is an interesting preposition also because there’s nothing very dualistic about it; a number of elements may lie alongside one another, though not an infinity of them. . . . ​Its interest does not, however, depend on a fantasy of metonymically egalitarian or even pacific relations, as any child knows who’s shared a bed with siblings. Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations.12 By an economy of the beside in the Menagier, then, I mean in the first instance the text’s propensity to bring narratives, gendered and sexualized roles, genres, social groups, epistemological categories alongside each other rather than on top of each other or against each other (as traditional literary and didactic formulations might require). Attending to the spatial positionality of the beside in this text, however, also foregrounds how the Menagier is interested in rearticulating power relations—​­within the married estate and the household, between genders, or among men—​­in more granular, less strictly hierarchized terms, but at the same time, doing so without depending upon a fantasy of metonymically egalitarian or even pacific relations. The extent to which the text’s incorporation of the beside resists the turn to origin and telos that we all too often associate with “the medieval” thus marks it as a form of postmedieval cultural production, that is, one emerging both in sync with and running counter to the logic of “the medieval.”

Border Crossings: The Private Bedchamber in the Later Middle Ages If the structure of the Menagier’s manner of textualization resists dialogic synthesis into one dominant mode of thought, the text’s opening bedchamber conversation dramatizes bourgeois household relations as occurring in their own postmedieval queer time and space. As we have noted, the autobiographical frame of the Livre du chevalier locates its representation of the noble household within the traditional places for noble discourse and action—​­the garden of love and fin’amor debate—​­however much such traditions may be



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adapted to personal ends. The Menagier’s autobiographical prologue, on the other hand, finds the core of domestic relations in the much more ambiguous and fraught space of the married bedchamber. The prologue begins thus: My dear, because you were only fifteen years old the week we were married, you asked that I be indulgent about your youth and inexperience until you had seen and learned more. You expressly promised to listen carefully and to apply yourself wholeheartedly to preserving my contentment and love for you (as you so prudently said following advice from, I do believe, someone more wise than yourself ), beseeching me humbly in our bed, as I recall, that for the love of God I not rebuke you harshly in front of either strangers or our household, but that I admonish you each night, or on a daily basis, in our bedroom, and that I remind you of your errors or foolishness of the day or days past and that I chastise you, if I should want to. You said that you would not fail to improve yourself according to my teaching and correction, and you would do everything in your power to behave according to my wishes. That pleased me so much, and I praised and thanked you for what you said, and I have since remembered it often.13 This vividly rendered account of the text’s origins has suggestive parallels with contemporary attempts to visually represent a proper bourgeois married couple. Jan van Eyck’s 1434 Arnolfini Portrait famously depicts an elaborately dressed bourgeois husband and wife formally posed in their bedchamber. Similarly, an illumination in a fifteenth-­century manuscript of the Menagier, which accompanies the prologue, shows the well-­dressed couple seated in what is likely their solar or upstairs private sitting room (Figure 3).14 But the Menagier’s prologue actually foregrounds a much more intimate and dangerously exposed nighttime bedroom setting for its first presentation of the married couple. In this scenario the couple’s dignity must assert itself over constant threat of erasure from common, stock images of more exposed, everyday bodies of husbands and wives lying in bed together, such as we see in the bedroom frame of Bruyant’s Chemin de povreté et de richesse (which the Menagier’s narrator clearly knew well). In Bruyant’s allegory of virtuous labor, the husband’s vision occurs as a kind of mirror image to the opening of the Menagier. As the new husband/narrator anxiously tosses and turns in bed, worrying about how he will support his new household, his wife sleeps soundly at his side. When

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Want, Penury, Worry, and other threatening allegorical figures appear to him in the bedroom, it is Reason who shows him a way out of his problems, by following the path of Diligence, a journey that eventually takes him to the Castle of Labor and productive engagement with the world. In Bruyant’s poem, the unsettling nature of the married estate within the middling class is figured by the ambiguous intimacies of the exposed bedchamber setting. Given the significance of Bruyant’s text for the author of the Menagier, who, as we have seen, includes the poem in its entirety in a prominent position between books 1 and 2, the decision to begin his text in the same location but to such different ends cannot be coincidence. In order to understand the full signifying power of the frame in both the Menagier and Bruyant’s poem, we need first to consider the representational undecidability of the private bedchamber in this period and why it might offer an at once privileged and anxious location for self-­identification on the part of such middling subjects. The bedchamber occupies a distinctly ambiguous place in the medieval imaginary. Indeed, in many ways it lacks a clear identity even as geometric space. First, the simple presence of a bed in a room does not mean that space is actually used as a bedchamber. For example, the elaborately furnished canopied beds found in public rooms such as the hall or parlor, or by the later Middle Ages, in some elite private reception chambers located on an upper floor, serve more as furniture of estate, marking the social and economic status of its inhabitants, than as places to sleep; their occasional use as an actual bed is reserved for official social occasions such as greeting a new mother following her confinement or paying last respects to the deceased lying in state.15 Second, sleeping space is not limited to one particular room in the house. Beds used for sleeping—​­ranging from simple movable cots to increasingly elaborate “complete” beds with wooden frames, canopies, and curtains—​­are located not only in more private upstairs chambers but also in their annexes (wardrobes and retreats), as well as in certain service rooms and in the stables.16 Sleeping spaces are thus much more fluid and public locations than today. Servants frequently sleep in adjoining rooms or in the same room as their masters, children with their parents, and overnight strangers with their hosts (as we see in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale), with temporary room dividers or curtains around individual beds distinguishing “private” sleeping space. Not surprisingly, then, in the medieval popular imagination the bed and bedchamber constitute prime household locations where unregulated sexual activity and social disorder can easily occur: a space where, in fabliau accounts, wives are ready to cuckold their husbands with clerics, knights, even unknown



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Figure 3. Le Menagier de Paris, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 12477, fol. 1. Small image before the beginning of the text of a man and woman conversing, probably an image of the husband-­narrator and his wife.

guests staying the night; where, from the point of view of the penitentials, wives and husbands are easily seduced into unwarranted sexual acts at the wrong time; or where, in fin’amor literature, the secret love of knight and lady finds temporary satisfaction or the good knight faces temptation.17 My concern with the bedchamber, however, is not simply with its fluid nature as an actual physical location but also with the representational complexity that results from its unique spatialization of the border crossings of late medieval everyday life. These representational issues come into sharper focus when we consider the changing status of the private bedchamber during this period. By the fifteenth century, the private bedchamber had become an increasingly common and elaborated feature of high-­status “middling” households, as this newly emergent social order sought to manifest worth by

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appropriating aristocratic household arrangements. Late medieval houses of the urban patriciate not only incorporated the public and semipublic spaces such as the hall, parlor, and garden that had traditionally identified the noble household, but they also sought to display by means of a separate bedchamber the possession of a quasi-­aristocratic access to personal privacy on the part of their owners.18 The house in the Menagier, for example, would seem to have had three stories—​­a ground floor or a basement, and two floors above that. On the first floor of the house was the main hallway and gathering place, along with the hall. The solar and couple’s bedchamber was located on the upper floor of the house, with the serving women sleeping in a windowless room adjacent to the bedroom. If one measures privacy within late medieval households according to access patterns, as John Schofield and Shannon McSheffrey have argued, that is, according to the number of thresholds that must be crossed to reach a given room, then a separate bedchamber, even more than solar, parlor, or garden, constitutes one of the most clearly private spaces within a bourgeois residence.19 More than these other places in the household, the bedchamber is furthest removed—​­literally and figuratively—​­from household business. It exists, at least officially, to provide the solace of sleep and a place for regulated married sexual activity. Both this explicit preoccupation with the care of the everyday body and this distance from the outside world might encourage a certain association with the feminine. But it would be overly reductive simply to label the Menagier’s bedchamber as private, feminine space in contradistinction to the public, masculine places in the household where the family business is conducted—​­for example, the merchant’s counting house or the artisan’s shop. Public and private in the late medieval context are far less clearly distinguished and ideologically determined than in the early modern period, when they more predictably define distinctions between a feminine domestic sphere and a masculine public domain.20 The late medieval parlor or urban garden, for example, while more private and family-­oriented than a clearly defined public room such as the hall, were nonetheless also designed for the occasional entertainment of guests. And McSheffrey cites examples of the use of both for discussions related to marriage and for the formal witnessed exchange of consent necessary to make a marriage valid—​­clear “public” situations taking place within domestic space.21 The complex and evolving spatialization of the private bedchamber within the household, however, pushes against distinctions of public and private in even more challenging ways. In Bruyant’s Chemin de povreté et de



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richesse, for instance, the husband-­narrator learns at the Castle of Labor not only the value of hard work—​­vividly imaged in terms of late medieval artisanal production—​­but also the worth of sleep as necessary solace to the everyday body of the laboring householder. The bedchamber’s apparent focus on such “private” concerns as sleep is here shown to have clear and consequential relations to the material work of the household in the “public” sphere. So, too, the bedchamber often provides an important location for the kind of immaterial labor increasingly valuable to a middling class that asserted its status through mastering the mixed life of work and contemplation. As we have seen in Chapter 1, for example, in devotional manuals directed at laywomen, the bedchamber is often one of the few “private” spaces at a bourgeois woman’s disposal, although even here often in a provisional way—​­the woman may need to turn her dressing table into a private oratory or engage in her private meditations after midnight when the household and husband are asleep. High-­status husbands, on the other hand, are more likely to have access to privacy in a personal prayer closet, library, or study.22 More generally, the redefinition of marriage as sacrament taking place from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, highlighting both the so-­called marriage debt of mutual sexual satisfaction and the importance of marriage as a place to foster conjugal affection, works to revalue the lay married estate and make it foundational for rethinking social relations more generally. The supposedly “private” and immaterial labor that the bedchamber fosters—​­not just procreation but more importantly the cultivation of proper self-­restrained masculine and feminine roles that together will fulfill the sacramental potential of marital relations—​ ­has clearly “public” consequences for the married household and more.23 The private bedchamber as physical space is also exceptionally mobile in the uses made of it throughout the day and night: alternating as a place to sleep, to dress and undress, to have sex, to pray and meditate, or to welcome intimate guests (whose entry into such a room marks their particular familiarity and social significance to the chamber’s inhabitants). And more than for other, more public rooms in the house, such varied use patterns show how this composite identity of the bedchamber is a product of the varied personal desires of its tenants. The bedchamber thus manifests the “private” interior of its inhabitants in a manner that parallels the more “public” exterior manifestation of identity provided by spaces such as the hall. But the personal nature of that private interiority is forever under threat of erasure by the traditional medieval institutional distrust of the merely personal and the novelty of the more personalized self-­identifications that a space like the private bedchamber

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allows. For example, Philippe Contamine concludes from his survey of late medieval inventories that the bedroom was “where jewelry, silver, and impor­ tant papers (accounts, credits and loans, private letters) were kept in chests, dressers, etc.”24 But when Margaret D. Carroll notes that this is “a point sardonically confirmed by the open chest at the foot of the bed in Bosch’s Death and the Miser,” she highlights how such an emphasis on self-­worth can easily be viewed as simple self-­absorption contrary to the common good.25 It is, then, the bedchamber’s lack of obvious outside regulation as space, as much as its fusion of public and private in novel ways, that makes it a location par excellence for spatializing medieval anxieties about the performativity of the social. The problem posed by the bedchamber, I would suggest, is not simply its supposedly private or domestic status but rather its difficulty in registering as place in de Certeau’s terms, that is, in being recognized as a socially acceptable form of practiced place.26 The hall in a late medieval urban setting can more easily achieve the normalized status of place because, even though located within a private household, it is a place understood to reproduce in reliable ways the configurations of social positioning in the outside world. Nothing is explicitly introduced in the hall that would challenge such instant readability, and all its features present the stable outward face of the family and household it represents. Of course, all sorts of mobile elements can intrude within this managed place—​­assignations, gossip, business transactions—​­that would orient, situate, and temporalize this space as practiced place, but such activity remains under the radar, as it were, in representational terms. Places like the hall exist to affirm, not call into question, the workings of dominant ideologies. In this regard we might also think of the parlor as place precisely to the extent that it exists to allow some of the elements of space as practiced place to emerge in controlled ways, a “private” corollary to the more “public” face of the household provided by the hall. Similarly, the situation of the urban enclosed garden—​­a “private” space in which individuals could escape from the public eye and hence a space inherently dangerous to familial and social ­authority—​­is stabilized by its placement of individual and private actions alongside established and valued manifestations of courtliness and nobility. The bedchamber, however, has little built-­in recognizability as place for all the reasons I have mentioned. Notably, one of the few times that the privacy and domestic intimacy of the bedchamber becomes organized as place occurs in moments such as childbirth or the blessing of the nuptial bed by the priest in the presence of the wedding guests. In both cases space becomes place by its



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ability clearly to bring public and private, individual and community alongside one another in de Certeau’s terms, such that the law of the “proper” rules. The “instantaneous configuration of positions” that occurs in such rituals brings the eternal, sacramental nature of marriage into view in apparently stable ways; we therefore see only the lawful outcomes of marriage, especially procreation and the renewal of the species and the social order, in the place that has been configured out of the married couple’s bedchamber. Sustaining such a view of the bedchamber as place, however, is fraught with difficulty, in light of its disturbing connections to the movements of everyday bodies in the world. Chaucer explores this complication to ironic effect in his account of January’s wedding night in The Merchant’s Tale when, at the very moment that this place of sacramental marriage should be reaching its intended fulfillment, the motion of January’s unbridled sexual desire and May’s forced reception of it transform lawful place into a more conflicted space of complexly individuated sexuality. The bed may have been blessed by the priest, the guest-­witnesses may have withdrawn from the room, the bride may be brought to bed “as stille as stoon,” January may act the part of marital affection for “his fresshe May, his paradys, his make,” but the reader, like May, inhabits her supine position under January, feels the “thikke brustles of his berd unsofte, / Lyk to the skyn of houndfyssh, sharp as brere” as he “rubbeth hire about hir tendre face” and sees his “slake skyn aboute his nekke shaketh” as he penetrates her.27 By foregrounding the actions of the everyday body and personal desire in this way, Chaucer forces us to witness the married bedchamber “as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities,” in short, space as practiced place.28 The bedchamber, as Chaucer presents it here, rather than serving as a stabilizing place that reaffirms a sacramental understanding of what marriage signifies, instead discoheres into a space of contradictory sensory experiences.

Making Space for “Middling” Labor in Le Chemin de povreté et de richesse It is just such a space of contradictory sensory experiences that the bedchamber embodies for the narrator of Le Chemin de povreté et de richesse. Bruyant’s poem not only begins and ends in the newly married couple’s bedchamber but the poem’s depiction of the fractured and embodied nature of married

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relations also highlights the hybridity and unresolved tensions of the bourgeois married estate. The domestic frame for the poem stands in stark contrast to the utopian resolutions offered by its allegorical vision of and spirited advocacy for the efficacy of bourgeois labor. The husband-­narrator’s vision occurs in the midst of marital anxiety one night, nineteen or twenty days after he was married: “The festivities of my wedding and the feasting were past, and it was time for troubles to begin. One evening I was lying in my bed, where I had little enough delight, and my wife was sleeping soundly at my side.”29 At the end of the poem, the husband recounts his vision to his wife thus: You cannot imagine what a difficult night I had while you slept! You did not notice during the night those wicked people hurting me and making such a ruckus—​­Want with Necessity, Penury, likewise Scarcity, the old hag Disquiet and Worry, Distress and Despair! . . . ​ Luckily Reason, the good and wise, gave me directions to protect myself from adversity and live in prosperity. . . . ​Good-­Heart and Good-­Desire and their son Intent-­to-­Do-­Well [have been splendid aids]. . . . ​We traveled to the Castle of Labor, where we found Attention-­to-­Duty and Mindfulness, the gatekeepers of the castle. They received me gladly and led me directly to Pain, the chatelaine of Labor. She too welcomed me forthwith and accompanied me throughout the day. After nightfall, Toil found me, not to dispute with me, but to commend me for fulfilling my tasks and to recommend for me some comfort and sustenance for my body. But Attention-­to-­Duty and Mindfulness, who are against prolonged ease, urged me mightily to arise as early as Matins and buckle down to complete my task quickly. Honestly, that was my vision, and it was not a dream! (207–­8)30 The husband’s vision is notable for its fusion of a theological understanding of Labor and Riches with a more material one. Reason discourses at length about the seven deadly sins and their remedies as a way of countering the despair caused by the appearance of Want, Necessity, Penury, and Scarcity in his bedchamber. But the scene the narrator encounters at the Castle of Labor is that of late medieval urban industry in all its variety: “Attention-­to-­Duty and Mindfulness led me swiftly to the Castle of Labor, where more than a hundred thousand workers toiled throughout the city, each one exerting himself at his designated task. No one was idle. This castle was so noisy with pound-



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ing and hammering that one would be hard pressed to hear God’s thunder” (204).31 No Piers the Plowman, the narrator immediately knows his place in such a setting and quickly settles himself down at a worktable for a full day of artisanal activity. While there is nothing in the poem’s allegory that would contradict a purely theological reading of the husband’s decision to labor in pursuit of riches, nor anything that would undercut traditional authority, either clerical or noble, the manner in which the narrator engages with the pursuit of the good life foregrounds the middling groups of late medieval society and the full sufficiency of the mixed life and its urban, orthodox, and observant layman. The vision’s image of successful labor in pursuit of the good life is also notably uxorious. The allegorical guides that appear to the narrator after Reason are all married couples working together in harmony: Good-­Heart and Good-­Desire lead him down the path of diligence to the Castle of Labor; Attention-­to-­Duty and his wife, Mindfulness, are the porters who admit him to the castle; and most especially, Pain, the chatelaine of the castle, and her husband, Toil, supervise his work in tandem: Pain during the day and Toil in the evening. Pain acts like any good bourgeois or gentry wife in charge of the smooth functioning of the household: “I saw the chatelaine Pain briskly inspecting the multitude of workers. Her skirts were tucked up in her belt, and she went about rapidly, moving with so much industry that one worried that she might sweat blood! She dressed without a surcoat; rather she wore her shabby tunic and sometimes only her shift, when it was freshly washed” (204).32 Cooperating as a husband-­and-­wife team, Pain and Toil together manage a complex artisanal production in ways that would seem to embody bourgeois as much as or more than clerical or noble values, and thus to hold up the value of the late medieval married household as the truly universal model for successful labor in the contemporary world. Under the guise of presenting us with a “traditional” account of theological virtue, the husband’s vision presents the Castle of Labor as a location in which the role of the third estate and the mixed life can be rethought and revalued within the late medieval social imaginary. The immaterial labor of the monastic cell and courtly castle are in certain crucial ways incorporated into and subsumed by the hybrid vision of labor shown in the vision. No simple, patient agricultural worker, Bruyant’s husband here rushes forward into a life of artisanal labor fully sufficient for moral as well as fiscal probity and success. The companionate bonds of the married estate, the obedience of servant to master, the desire for self-­control and industry, all work together to make this

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laborer normative for a new universalizing discourse about right conduct in the world. For this reason, I think, we should be careful not to read too literally the representation of the husband in the poem as a simple artisan. For, like the agricultural worker standing in for all members of the third estate in the traditional three estates model for society, the poem here transforms that earlier model of labor into a new form of universal subject capable of representing the emergent capitalism of the later Middle Ages. In doing so, it works more generally to carve out a potentially hegemonic space for emergent middling groups such as urban professionals, guildsmen, and merchants that are increasingly assuming dominant positions in late medieval society. The poem does not finish with this harmonious vision of life in the Castle of Labor, however. For at the end of a successful workday, Toil sends the narrator to Repose, who, according to Toil, will offer “comfort and the pleasure of drink, food, sleep and rest to those who travail here doggedly.” But Attention-­to-­Duty quickly sounds a more ominous note about Repose: “You will not find anyone more deceitful! Repose has led many people to the hideous road of Sloth that turns its backside toward Riches” (206).33 And this Repose, the narrator tells us, “awaited me at my house” and would appear to be embodied by his wife, whom he finds there “heedless of any disgrace, busily and cheerfully preparing my meal” (207).34 His wife, though, unlike the allegorical helpmeets in the vision, upon hearing his account of what has happened during the night, viciously mocks her husband and his vision: “What are you talking about? Are you out of your mind? You are not making any sense rambling on to me about your night—​­it is a fantasy invented out of some kind of lunacy!” (208).35 The dreamer remains silent in the face of his wife’s verbal assault. As he ruefully acknowledges, there is no use contradicting a woman, whose nature requires that she be praised and have her way. Instead, the husband goes straight to bed, placing his tinderbox beside him under the stool so that he can light his candle in the morning without getting up and thereby get to work more quickly.36 Thus, even as the narrator’s vision asserts the authority and efficacy of its new, universalizing discourse of labor and householder identity, the frame of the poem, embodied in the practiced space of the private bedchamber and lay married relations, expresses possible anxieties about what such a vision can produce in the real world: personal labor and desire may not be sufficient; others may think one overweening; the value of private self-­identifications may prove radically unstable and difficult to assess. The Castle of Labor, it appears, offers an integrating vision of the lay married household as place; the



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husband’s real-­life bedchamber experience, on the other hand, shows all the disturbing disintegrating mobility of household space as practiced place. As much as the vision may assert a new place for the artisanal household economy, ready to be put alongside previous clerical or noble articulations of place, the bedchamber and the feminine remain spaces of dangerous solace, necessary but needing to be contained. Perhaps because of a certain anxiety about the value of “newer” material labor versus that of “older” spiritual and immaterial labor, as well as about the difficulty of incorporating both within the emerging late medieval lay subject, the poem ends by depicting the gulf that still exists between the separated spheres of bedchamber and factory, real-­life and vision, feminine ignorance and masculine learning. And yet our lay husband’s daily practice also brings these two spheres into some measure of temporal and spatial interconnectedness. To that extent, as readers we end in an unsettling bedchamber space that inscribes the disquieting effects of the everyday body, the mixed life, and the hybridity of the lay married estate. In doing so, the Chemin foregrounds the gaps and disjunctures in its audience’s experience of the real in order to propel that audience forward into a middle space, the “tomorrow” of the narrator that includes both the vision of the castle and its practiced space in the married household that he will create.

Rehearsing a Marriage: Between Space and Place in the Menagier’s Bedchamber I have discussed Bruyant’s poem at some length, not just because it engages with issues of married life and bourgeois labor that the Menagier also takes up, but because the poem is given a position of honor and structural significance in the latter text. In the opening chapter to the second section of his book (which immediately follows the transcription of Bruyant’s poem), the narrator of the Menagier notes that he has provided Bruyant’s poem in its entirety because he has no wish to mutilate it or to extract a fragment from it. Because it is all of a piece, “I help myself to the whole to reach the only point that I desire” (183).37 That point, as he says at the end of his transcription of the poem, is to show his young wife, the recipient of the book, what diligence and perseverance are. But the narrator’s comments here belie his tendency throughout the Menagier to bring narratives, gendered and sexualized roles, genres, social groups, and epistemological categories alongside each other in an attempt to provide an encyclopedic guide to every aspect of conduct for the good

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bourgeois wife and the household she manages. In the process, the Menagier at least brings into productive contiguity that which Bruyant’s poem—​­ ­structurally—​­keeps apart. The Menagier widens the scope of Bruyant’s discussion of labor to foreground the value of both material and immaterial labor in achieving a stable and fully functioning household space and identity. More radically, in the Menagier, the lessons on conduct, which in the Chemin were aimed at productive husbands and laymen (and spectacularly not manifested in the nature of real-­life wives), are now directed at the merchant’s young wife. The Menagier inserts Bruyant’s poem at precisely the point in the narrative when the husband is concerned that his young wife’s attention might be flagging. Yet this long poem, an object lesson on diligence and perseverance, begins a second section in the Menagier that, by appearing more protracted and detailed than the first, performatively “proves” the young wife’s inherent desire for much, much more instruction. And a “middling” household that was private divide dangerously bifurcated along gender lines and the public–­ within the frame of Bruyant’s visionary poem, is, in the Menagier, reconstituted as a whole, now capable of embodying the kind of cooperative management that in Bruyant’s poem existed only in the visionary Castle of Labor. Whereas Bruyant’s vision brings the outside into the confined and anxious space of the married bedchamber, the Menagier’s opening tightens our focus so that we remain “inside,” concentrated on the voices of the married couple within the bedchamber. As a result, we do not view the husband and wife from ready-­made social or moral perspectives that would immediately and satisfactorily place them—​­either positively as the sumptuously and properly clothed Arnolfini couple are staged in their bedroom, or negatively, as in the divisive bedroom scenes that begin and end Bruyant’s poem. Curiously, it is only by occluding the bedchamber as any kind of recognized place, and thereby forcing us to attend to the two subjects on their own terms, that the prologue is able to represent the privacy of the bedchamber as the privileged location where this particular husband and wife can, through their own actions, conjure up persuasive images of themselves. The bedchamber is presented here as a threshold or rehearsal space in which the couple can labor to build the productive marriage relationships that will later be taken public and put on display by means of the well-­ordered conduct of the good wife and of the household that she governs under her husband’s authority. Framing the Menagier in terms of a bedchamber conversation between husband and wife thus underscores the unstable ground such a location provides for social relations, even as the work’s textualization of the married estate



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insists upon its significance and inherent sociality. Notably, the prologue foregrounds how a sacramental understanding of marriage structures this couple’s relationship. Both individual consent and ordered interpersonal relations govern this dialogue, and the marriage unit inscribed here obscures otherwise dominant demands of family and class. The sufficiency of the young wife’s higher birth is balanced by her “deficiencies” of youthful inexperience, distance from family, and lack of a living mother or father to claim authority over her. All this, combined with the complete assent implied in her request for advice leads her “naturally” to need husbandly authority and her husband in turn “naturally” to want to provide it. In contrast, we might turn to a story told later in the Menagier (section 1, article 6) in a segment dealing with wifely obedience. There the husband tells his wife about a married couple who quarrel with each other incessantly, each claiming to be wiser, nobler in lineage, and most worthy. Eventually the wife insists on a written contract to govern their marriage: all of her rights are written down, point by point, with all of the obligations she owed to her husband, and on the other hand, her husband’s rights and obligations to her also are also clearly listed. “With that,” the narrator continues, “they should be able to live together in love—​­or if not in love, at least in peace” (119).38 One day, going on pilgrimage, the couple needs to cross over a ditch by means of a narrow plank. The husband, crossing first, sees that his wife is frightened. So he returns, takes her by the hand, and leads her across the plank. As he does so, he falls in the water. Drowning, he asks his wife to use her staff to draw the plank toward the bank to save him. She replies that she must first consult the marriage contract to see if it says she needs to do this. Since the contract does not specifically mention such a situation, she leaves him to drown and goes on her way. Eventually a passing lord rescues the husband. When the lord learns what has happened, he has the wife pursued, seized, and burned. The evident absurdity of the couple’s literalistic contract, the husband’s loss of authority, and the wife’s harsh punishment all underscore the need for the kind of affective contract we witness being agreed to in the Menagier’s prologue, the kind of truly transformative and productive commitment to one another that forms the core of medieval sacramental understandings of marriage. In particular, we see how attending to conduct can work to increase marital affection (affectio maritalis), one of the three “goods” (proles) of sacramental marriage. In this way, the prologue’s bedchamber conversation foregrounds a sexuality that is articulated in terms of desire for self-­denial and service to the common good. Sarah Salih has recently focused on medieval marriage’s

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“capacity to be unpleasurable”: “To make sex less sexy, to make it an obligation rather than an indulgence, is hence a function of marriage.” Exploring “how people—​­most often women—​­understood and lived with the obligation to enact something which they may have experienced as boring, painful, humiliating or disgusting,” Salih notes that “there must surely have been a kind of pleasure in submission, in the awareness of one’s conformity to an experience which was not in itself pleasant. . . . ​The pleasure or unpleasure of sex is not necessarily located in the bodily act at all, but in the narrative framework of what it means.”39 For instance, to return to my earlier example from the Merchant’s Tale, there would certainly be a sanctioned medieval hermeneutic for reading May’s submission to January in the bedchamber “stille as stoon” suffering his bristly beard and surely unpleasant sexual advances in terms of the proper submission of good wife to her husband. But what is so notable about the bedchamber episode that the Menagier begins with is its downplaying of sex or procreation altogether when it discusses the pleasures (and unpleasures) of married relations. Physical consummation might normally mark the culmination of the wedding vows and provide the final act that will render marriage indissoluble. But here the young wife’s request for advice (and the text’s location of that request as a crucial element in the building of a productive marriage relationship) substitutes for sexual consummation. We are asked to imagine the married bedchamber not as the kind of public and institutionalized place represented in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale—​­where the priest blesses the bed and witnesses crowd around anticipating sexual consummation—​­but instead as a personal, provisional space constructed and maintained by the bonds of good conduct and self-­restraint shown by this couple. The Menagier’s prologue thus represents marriage as initiated but not completed by the words of present consent uttered in the actual marriage ceremony—​­“I take you . . . ​as my husband/wife.” And the text foregrounds a more continuous performativity than that found in the single speech act of the actual wedding ceremony, a complex performance of controlled desire whose repetition over time will make possible the kind of transformative stylization of gender that true marital affection might allow for. From the Menagier’s point of view, the most important thing that can be conceived in the bedroom activity of husband and wife, then, is the idea of the good wife and the kind of performative reading and writing practices it incites in and through this book. The prologue presents marital relations, if imagined in terms of such an affective contract, as capable of constructing their own intimate script for husband and



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wife, one that will work to incite the desire for and the production of marital affection. Such marital affection is not the stuff of fin’amor romantic desire, but instead the kind of self-­restrained conduct that will allow for the production of effective and authoritative masculine and feminine self-­identifications in the household and the public sphere. Such an intimate script and the emotives it articulates are thus crucial to the Menagier’s understanding of married relations and household governance. The text is concerned not simply with the exercise of power in marital relations or who is “on top,” however much it may outline an often power-­filled role for the husband. It also foregrounds the value of the affective and companionate relations capable of being generated by marriage, as well as their optimal handling, exchange, and manipulation. The prologue’s opening scene uses the married bedchamber, and the intimate conversation it makes possible, to locate marital relations that can productively remain in between de Certeau’s sense of place—​­where elements are beside one another each in its proper and distinct location—​­and space as a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs. The different and unequal in this bedchamber are brought alongside one another in ways that allow for comparison and sampling without either being completely subsumed by the other. The wife may, for the moment, be placed alongside her husband in ways that encourage her to turn to him as her authoritative resource. But the husband-­ narrator also emphasizes his wife’s ability (and need) to draw on her own and others’ experience: “it is enough for me that you treat me as your good neighbors or relatives, who are of our same rank, treat their husbands. Consult them first about this, then follow their advice, more or less, as you please” (49–­50).40 Later, in the third article of the first section, the husband-­narrator imagines his wife at some point in the future, as a result of what she has learned from him and his book, engaging in textual labor similar to what he has had to do to compile the present book: “And that, my dear, is enough on this subject [i.e., the mass, confession, and the vices and virtues]. For anything more, the natural sense that God has furnished you, your desire to be devout and honorable toward God and the Church, the preachings and sermons given in your parish and elsewhere, the Bible, the Golden Legend, the Apocalypse, the Life of the Fathers, and various other good books in French that I possess, and that you are free to take at your pleasure, will help you and draw you profoundly to what remains, whenever God, who wishes to lead and inspire you to these things, decides” (85).41 In the process, the idea of the good wife allows the bedchamber and feminine nature as practiced place to be

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brought alongside other more public and masculine spaces of the household, as well as of the broader public sphere, in ways that encourage new articulations of the law of the proper and new configurations of space as place. Something similar happens as a result of the emphasis that this dramatic moment focuses on the spatial dimensions of performativity. The immediate location for such performative imaginings is the space of the bedchamber and, equally important, a bedchamber in which the interpersonal relations between husband and wife remake it as their own practiced place. But this space is not a purely private one. As the rest of the book will delineate, the kinds of performative identities constructed by the conjoining of husband and wife, physically, intellectually, emotionally, are inherently public as well, and the text explores how their performative iteration can be extended to household relations (in interactions with servants, children, suppliers) and the relations of the parish and larger community. But it is the kind of self-­identification through another described in the prologue, bringing husband and wife, adviser and advised, alongside each other in intimate and conjoined ways, that allows husband and wife together to manifest the value of the married estate within the confines of the household, and via the household, to the larger world. What the prologue constructs, then, is the marital bedchamber (and by extension, the household that it anchors) as a theater of marriage in which there is endless incitement to talk productively about marital relations as social relations. In this way, the opening of the text imagines the “I take you” initiating the sacrament not as its final iteration but rather as initiating a perfecting “consummation” by attending to the performative nature of the good conduct of wife and husband, one that depends upon a proliferation of what Eve Sedgwick has called “periperformative utterances” that, though not themselves performatives, are about performatives and cluster around performatives.42 The idea of the good wife—​­and the Menagier itself—​­as practiced textual place offers the possibility of creating an imagined community organized not around secure bloodlines and progeny or family name but around the performative, hybrid identities emerging within this theater of married relations. As the husband notes near the end of his prologue, “Although, as I said, it is not appropriate for me to ask much of you for myself, I would nonetheless desire that you have a real understanding of virtue, honor, and duty, not so much for my sake, but so that you can better serve another husband, if you have one after me, or so that you might more ably instruct your daughters, friends, or others, if you wish and if they need it. The more you are



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knowledgeable, the more respect you will receive, and the more your parents, myself, and the others who raised you will be praised” (50).43 Modeling conduct in this way promises an inheritance that can be passed on to future generations and, equally important, that can forge connections across the conflictual programs, contractual proximities, and unequal relations within the local situations described by the Menagier.44 The idea of the good wife thus becomes an organizing logic for identity management across time and space, one that will more fully and productively represent this couple’s hybrid social location as bourgeois, lay, metropolitan, married householders and as a social location that depends upon using the language of others and upon a necessary crossing of known boundaries (masculine and feminine, bodily and spiritual, lay and clerical, active and contemplative, laborer and leisured elite).

An Economy of the Beside in a Postmedieval Time and Place The contradictions and incoherencies that characterize the new space and time of bourgeois conjugal relations emerge in a variety of ways in the Menagier proper. In the remainder of the chapter, I will consider in greater detail three related blocks of text from the first section: articles 1 through 3, which deal with the devotional life of the wife; articles 4 and 5, which deal with wifely chastity and devotion to the husband, and articles 6 through 9, which deal with obedience to the husband, care of the husband’s person, keeping the husband’s secrets, and providing good counsel to the husband. One could easily read the first three devotionally oriented articles of the text as the rote comments of a lay narrator channeling the kind of hegemonic clerical voice directing such guides to wifely conduct as the journées chrétiennes we examined in Chapter 1, a set of texts that try to map a quasi-­monastic order of devotion and prayer onto the time and space of a lay wife’s daily life. The first and second articles of the first section, for example, start with the appropriate prayers to say upon waking, followed by the admonition to attend mass daily and to confess frequently. And the third article (fully a quarter of the first section) provides a lengthy and detailed exposition of the ritual of the mass and of the components of the sacrament of confession, including descriptions of the seven deadly sins and their remedies. Indeed, as Gina Greco and Christine Rose note in their recent edition, the narrator is clearly drawing on a number of recognizable sources for his material here, all widely available to the educated French layman of the period. For example, La

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Somme le Roy (1279) of Friar Laurent d’Orléans, confessor to King Philip III, “the Bold,” of France, provides the basis for the narrator’s discussion of the vices and virtues in the third article, although toward the end, “especially in the paragraphs describing the virtues, the author has garbled and abridged some of Laurent’s work. He telescopes and transposes the discussion, rendering it unrecognizable and fairly confusing unless you have the Somme to hand as a lengthy supplement to the text—​­which, indeed, the young wife may have had.”45 Similarly, Greco and Rose note that the narrator’s “general familiarity with the Bible is obvious, yet his versions of biblical stories are often not traceable to any Bible available at the time, or any collection of Bible stories such as Petrus Comestor’s Historia scholastica and its several French adaptations, called generally Bible historiale.” They speculate that he “may have inserted them from memory.”46 In other words, the narrator’s method here is at once that of the good layman who has assimilated the structures of private devotion and that of a compiler of information intent on framing his material to the particular needs of a specific reader or imagined reading community. Even while attempting to form the good wife’s nature according to clerical adaptations of monastic discipline, the Menagier also works to establish a transformative relationship with clerical hegemony by exploring how our understanding of the natural may be socially and linguistically constructed—​­a contingent effect of institutional control and personal experience rather than something transcendent or absolute. As simple a statement as “the beginning and first article of the first section treats prayer and arising” exposes a potential epistemological fault line for the observant lay subject. For as the narrator goes on to note, “You must arise in the morning—​­and morning means, with regard to the subject we are treating here, Matins.” But “morning” (“matin”) thus signifies differently according to its audience and usage: simple “morning” (“matin”) to laymen and laywomen and the liturgical hour of “matins” (“matines”) to clerics. For while the usage of “we country folk” (“nous gens ruraulx”) calls “day” (“jour”) that which lasts from dawn to night, the usage of clerks, “who are more subtle” (“qui preignent plus soubtilement”) calls the same time period “artificial day” (“le jour artificial”). According to their usage, “the natural day” (“le jour naturel”) is twenty-­four hours long, and begins at midnight and ends at the following midnight. So, the husband-­narrator adds, he has said “that morning refers to Matins” (“que matin est dit de matines”) because the matins bells ring at that hour to wake up the monks to say matins, not because he intends by this that his wife should get up at that time. Instead, the wife should, when she hears the bells for matins, say a prayer before



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going back to sleep again, and he provides prayers appropriate to say either when waking up momentarily at midnight and when arising at dawn.47 Indeed, after providing the prayers in Latin and a French translation, the narrator returns to this issue in an even more latitudinarian manner: “You can say these prayers at Matins [i.e., midnight] or when you awake in the morning, or at both times, or while getting up and dressed, or after dressing—​­all are fine times as long as it is before breaking fast and addressing other business” (57).48 Here again, we see an economy of the beside brought to bear upon those essentializing binaries in the medieval imaginary that would work to hierarchize and organize the social in traditional ways. The narrator expresses temporal and spatial divisions here as malleable and part of a system of exchange, encouraging his wife to emulate in her devotional practice what he as a bourgeois layman must do all the time in his social and business practices. The inward prayer characterizing private devotion here and the concomitant spiritual and cultural capital that accrues from it become movable goods, ones possessed in different ways by different groups of people, with differing valuations depending upon their context and deployment within a complex and variable marketplace. As we saw in Chapter 1, in a more rigorous journée chrétienne such as the Tres devot traittié (MS Arsenal 2176), the clerical guide will frequently advocate midnight as the ideal time for the good woman to wake and pursue her private devotions, for it is a time free from the kinds of household and familial obligations that will begin with dawn and the start of the workday. In contrast, the Menagier sets such epistemological questions directly within conjugal time and space; it raises questions of difference (gender, status, estate) even as it provokes the desire to cross and blur such boundaries. If the journées chrétiennes show us the possibility of constructing agential lay subject positions from within a clerical view of the social, the husband-­ narrator of the Menagier here chooses to stand alongside the monastic and clerical in a mode of embodied cognition that posits a quite different relationship with time and space and with the material demands of bourgeois life. Despite the extended attention to prayer and devotion at the beginning of the Menagier, the text does not focus on the kind of interiorized, private devotional achievement advocated by the journées, although the narrator is clearly aware of the cultural capital available through orthodox modes of piety and controlled displays of affect. Instead, the narrator subsumes devotion to his larger project of foregrounding the relationality of gendered subject positions within the married estate, in contrast to the tendency in the journées to focus on a more interiorized and isolated path to subjectivity.

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Thus the husband-­narrator emphasizes how the married bedroom is not a monastic cell, and the good wife, no nun; instead the text imagines both as sites where very different monastic and mercantile natures can be conjoined in productive ways. In doing so, the text embodies the social effects of a larger late medieval political pragmatism, that is, the absolute pervasiveness of inequality at every level and yet the equally pervasive desire to negotiate personal agency and self-­determination within such unequal spaces. For the husband, there are limits to the incorporation of the sacred into mercantile time and space. One has to balance conflicting agendas and priorities, negotiate a variety of social and linguistic terrains, if one is to determine a set of practices appropriate to this mixed estate. Thus, while the narrative in the opening three articles of the first section reiterates the kind of stylization of the body and truth technology advocated by clerical writers, the husband as narrator does not simply reproduce their ideological intent. Unlike the clerically driven journées chrétiennes, which employ a largely metaphoric mode of substituting Christ as spiritual bridegroom for carnal husband, transforming the bedroom into private oratory, and privileging inner devotion over public duty, the narrator here chooses an additive and mobile mode that prefers multiple roles and voices, some authoritative, some subordinate, none inherent or guaranteed. As much as a clerical voice cannot be ignored, and as much as channeling such a voice may at times work to the advantage of the husband, nonetheless, the husbandly voice emerges as something in excess of the clerical, intent as well on the proper (and materially useful) embourgeoisement of the wife. At the same time as the text is inscribing the unstable entanglements of clerical and bourgeois time and space in ways that secure a certain degree of autonomy and agency for subjects in the mixed life and of “middling” status, it emphasizes an impossibly stable approach to wifely dress and movement within the material world. While the wife may have a certain leeway in when and how to say her prayers, the narrator immediately frames the question of spiritual discipline within the context of a disciplined body. He instructs his wife: “Pay attention to our status and our means” in matters of dress, “attiring yourself with respect to the estate of your family and mine.” She should make sure that she dresses decently without introducing new fashions and without too much or too little ostentation: “Before leaving your chamber or home, be mindful that the collar of your shift, of your camisole, or of your robe or surcoat does not slip out one over the other, as happens with drunken, foolish, or ignorant women who do not care about their own honor or the good repute



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of their estate or of their husband, and go with open eyes, head appallingly lifted like a lion, their hair in disarray, spilling from their coifs, and the collars of their shifts and robes all in a muddle one over the other. They walk in mannish fashion and comport themselves disgracefully in public without shame, quite saucy” (57).49 The distinction the narrator draws between the ordered comportment of the good wife and those with muddled clothing, who walk in a “mannish fashion,” implies an equally clear distinction to be made between masculine and feminine. When traveling to church, indeed whenever outside the household, the wife should always have other gentlewomen accompany her, according to her estate: “When walking in public keep your head upright, eyes downcast and immobile. Gaze four toises [about twenty-­ four feet] straight ahead and toward the ground, without looking or glancing at any man or woman to the right or left, or looking up, or in a fickle way casting your gaze about in sundry directions, nor laugh nor stop to speak to anyone on the street” (59).50 Thus, at the very point where the narrator gives voice to the fungibility and inherent movability of previously separated categories, such as clerical and lay, the text balances such an emphasis on exchange with the fantasy of absolute separation expressed in terms of stabilized gendered roles readily apparent through the disciplined body of the good wife. While the foreground of the narrative in these first five articles inscribes gender inequality as a defining feature of the good wife, the narrative also voices the husband-­narrator’s pragmatic recognition of his own mixed location within a social landscape that naturalizes inequality at every level. As he implies, neither he nor any other respectable layman would ignore the primacy of entrenched clerical wisdom, nor ascribe to bourgeois material wisdom a public persona other than the modesty topos of “us country folk.” At the same time, neither would he expect his wife, herself better born than himself,51 to ignore the kind of attention to the material world and the marketplace of ideas necessary for any merchant household to survive. Nonetheless, the narrator’s engagement with, even embrace of, the necessarily hybrid nature of the good wife’s social location works to imagine as a real possibility a wife whose moral perfectability and improvement have no theoretical limits. Possessing the leisure time made possible by husbandly efforts in the marketplace, the good wife is able to devote herself to the self-­improvement of herself and the household she sustains, as well as bear witness to that achievement in the larger community, thereby suturing together sacred and mercantile time and space. Such a wifely identity can draw on the reserves of cultural capital created by clerical conduct literature in ways equivalent to the literal money,

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goods, and trade motoring the husband’s mercantilist identity. The good wife can thus bring much to the business of the household. And from the very beginning of the narrative the husband-­narrator treats his wife in certain ways as a partner in the family business, a position that is made explicit in the third article of the second section (dealing with household management and recipes), when it asserts that “after your husband, you must be mistress of the house, giver of orders, inspector, ruler, and sovereign administrator over the servants” (217).52 In this way the Menagier finds a way of speaking from the midst of hybridity with a new voice of authority. For it imagines the self-­controlled body of the good wife, desired and nurtured within the scene of marriage articulated in the bedroom and the intimacy of conjugal relations, making manifest that conjugal unit to the larger world by the good wife’s activity in the household and the wider community. In the process the text also imagines and begins to make legible a new way of being in the world, one where compromise and self-­control are the means to productive social agency. In certain crucial and disturbing, but also creative and useful, ways the text explores how changes in marriage symbolism figure the wife as an extension of the husband’s own body. The conjoining of husband and wife as one in the sacrament of marriage became in medieval theology the basis for figuring the hypostatic union of Christ’s human and divine nature for theologians.53 So, too, we see—​­for example, in the language of royal delegation of authority that the Menagier uses when the husband-­narrator charges his wife to be “ruler, and sovereign administrator”—​­that the joining of the unequal is at the heart of much language describing the married couple. The conjoining of male and female, masculine and feminine, in such a union at least to some extent imagines social relations founded on models other than long-­standing homosocial bonds between men and traffic in women. And the gender dynamics of such unions are inherently and provocatively unstable, even as such instability and hybridity offer tangible and valuable bonuses to such marital relations and the household built on them. Undeniably, when the Menagier frames issues such as wifely obedience in sharply hierarchical terms, the text makes important and potentially harmful points that have real effects in the world for women. But at the same time, when the husband-­narrator speaks about his wife, he speaks about a side of his nature as well: as a layman in relation to a traditionally dominant and powerful clergy, as a high-­status “middling” subject in relation to a traditionally dominant and powerful aristocracy, as an emergent identity position occupy-



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ing a hybrid space alongside the good wife (who could always be imagined as potentially on the way to being bad). Thus, any masculine authority imagined is in certain crucial ways constituted by the femininity of the good wife manifested in partnership with the good husband. And the narrator must take a mode of authorizing and revaluing lay bourgeois activity derived from clerically driven agendas for the married estate—​­articulated in genres such as sermon, confessional manual, guides for daily living—​­and bring such discourses alongside the actual labor of the mercantile household in order to make knowable and reproducible a new “middling” ideology founded on the affective contracts of the married household. Viewed from this perspective, anxiety about the potentially destabilizing activity of bad wives would speak strongly to the male householder and reflect how he might easily be read through traditional clerical or aristocratic lenses, just as speaking woman “good” might allow the male householder opportunities to “perform” like a cleric or like an allegorical authority figure. Thus, even as the husband’s attention to his wife’s good conduct works to empower husbands and wives in asymmetrical terms, nonetheless, such labor is possible only within the confines of the affective contract established by a sacramental and companionate understanding of married relations. It is in the sixth article, the most complexly and completely story-­driven of the text’s chapters, and the one dealing with the wife’s being humble and obedient to her husband, where the Menagier becomes most narratively and ethically experimental in terms of the conjoined body produced by the married estate. The Menagier employs an economy of the beside here in order to tease out the contradiction and possibility inherent in the hybridity of the married estate and, with that, to argue the full social and ethical utility of such embodied subject positions as they might be constituted in the world. A simple synopsis of the variety and breadth of narrative material thrown together in this article should make clear the hybrid and “found” nature of this text’s handling of its narrative raw material. The sixth article opens with four directives: (1) the good wife will be obedient to her husband no matter what; (2) the good wife, when conducting business affairs not previously discussed with her husband will seek to carry out what she believes to be her husband’s will not her own; (3) the good wife, when her husband forbids her something, whether in earnest or jest, will absolutely obey his stated wishes; and (4) the good wife will not be arrogant and answer back or contradict her husband. There follows what the narrator calls Petrarch’s story of Griselda (closely following Philippe de Mézières’ French translation), one of the

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period’s archetypal examples of female obedience in the face of almost insupportable testing by an implacable husband. Next comes a story of a wife and husband (discussed earlier in relation to the Menagier’s prologue) who interpret their marriage relations in literally contractual terms, each intent on scoring the advantage. When crossing a river, the wife is saved from falling in by her husband, but when he in turn falls in and is drowning, she refuses, saying it is not in the marriage contract (she is later burned for her crime). Then come brief stories of the Virgin Mary, Eve, and Lucifer, to illustrate obedience and disobedience. Next, as an example of why wives should keep their husbands’ secrets, the narrator tells the story of a certain Robert who owed him two hundred francs. There follows another story from his experience of a woman who committed adultery with her husband’s consent in order to save his life. Then comes a brief encomium on conjugal affection as the heart of marriage. The narrator follows with four stories that in various ways illustrate husbands who ask their wives to obey apparently ridiculous commands. In the first, a story told by the bailiff of Tournai, a group of men bet the price of dinner that their wives will do whatever they say; each is refused by his wife. The narrator berates such wives, citing the examples of Griselda and Lot’s wife, and of young and foolish husbands who will look elsewhere if their will is thwarted. The second story provides a brief comparison of wild beasts (who will follow you if you give them pleasure) and husbands (who will follow wives who think of their husbands’ pleasure). Third comes the story of a bet between three abbots and three husbands. The abbots say that if they put a rod under the pillow of a novice and tell him to leave the door open, he will obey (as each does). The husbands say that their wives will obey their wishes that the wives leave a broom behind the door of the bedroom (they refuse). Finally, the narrator tells two stories of wives he saw with his own eyes obeying their husbands’ requests to jump over a stick. The narrator follows these four stories with the example of his wife’s own cousin who would not follow her husband’s wishes, and the longer account of a disobedient young wife and the punishment she receives from her old husband taken from the Seven Sages of Rome. The sixth article concludes with the example of Adam eating the apple in Paradise, and God’s apparently excessive anger over such a small thing, as a parallel to how the apparently excessive demands of a husband for obedience from his wife might appear ridiculous but manifest a deeper and true justness. While the text gives the Griselda story a strategic position at the opening of the sixth article’s series of tales, that story functions in an almost antiteleo-



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logical fashion in terms of the overall structure of the article, a means of opening up an issue for debate more than for eliciting absolute faith. This emerges first in the narrator’s account of his own conflicted response to the tale and its applicability, and then in the lack of thematic coherence in the stories that follow. The narrator explores the exemplariness of the Griselda story, but as a metaphor of suffering—​­of wives, of Christians, and such—​­with practical examples in the death of friends, the loss of goods, and so on. And he is careful not to make this exemplariness too particular. He points out to his wife that she should not take the story to be directly about his personal relations with her. He is not a tyranical husband, and more important, she is not a shepherdess, being of higher birth than her husband. Moreover, the narrator emphasizes too that he (like Griselda) cannot alter the story; it is Petrarch’s and therefore something worthy in and of itself. The Griselda story thus works to open up the “problem of the husband” that occupies the sixth article as a whole, and with it the question of how to negotiate agency within an unequal but fluid system of social relations. But how the Menagier negotiates resolving that question reflects the heterogeneity of the narrative raw material assembled in this section. The stories not only have a very varied provenance and a wide discursive range, but they frequently contradict each other without the kind of consistent imposition of ideological control we find in a work like the Livre du chevalier (which also incorporates a fairly wide range of story types). Without the sequential organization of a work like the Miroir, or the staged dialogism of the Livre du chevalier, the Menagier’s collection of stories in the sixth article cannot be made to come together as a seamless, logically developed narrative argument. This failure to cohere according to the standards of preexistent medieval clerical or aristocratic culture has often been read as a sign of the Menagier’s lack of narrative control. But we might think about the relationship between the narrator’s choices in the sixth article and the complexities of his social position in more empowering ways. What if we approached the stories assembled here as a collection of found objects brought together through a process of bricolage and montage, where, in Sergei Eisenstein’s words, “each one of these little subsidiary scenes is seen only from one angle, showing only one sharply characteristic feature.”54 The narrative grouping that emerges this way might more productively be appreciated for its ability to think through a set of issues without installing any one ideological goal as supreme. Such a model for a macro-­ montage made up of “little subsidiary scenes” gets us part of the way out from under prevailing medieval models. And we can therefore begin to identify the

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“sharply characteristic feature[s]” that are assembled by the narrator in the sixth article. Such processes of bricolage and montage suggest how this narrator may need to use preexisting signs and fragments of narrative that he himself does not “author” in order to express thoughts in excess of the ideological intentions of the source texts and authors. Eisenstein’s concept of montage, however, presupposes a modern auteur editing the frames in a convincingly controlled fashion. While there is certainly a desire evinced by the husband-­ narrator of the Menagier to come across as such a fully formed “author” capable of providing a “finished” picture of the obedient wife, the narrative structure that is actually put in place in the sixth article seems more complexly heterogeneous, nontotalizing, and postmedieval. First, the narrative raw material oscillates in highly unstable ways in its “foundness.” The Griselda story, for example, is taken up by the narrator and given pride of place because it has a contemporary currency and the imprimatur of high-­status Parisians and members of court. Yet this is also the story that the narrator admits he finds least applicable to his and his wife’s own individual circumstances. And the narrator’s choice of a story that compares husbands to wild beasts seems even more strikingly at odds with his stated ideological goals for the sixth article, which is to argue for a wife’s absolute obedience to her husband. Furthermore, the story told by the bailiff of Tournai—​­about husbands so foolish that they misspend husbandly authority in idle gaming—​­might very well prove the validity of such a comparison of husbands to wild beasts. So, too, the two stories about bets that involve testing a wife with an apparently ridiculous request from her husband would appear to argue different ideological positions. The version told by the bailiff of Tournai holds up the authority of husbands; whereas the version that pits abbots against husbands would seem to hark back to an earlier ideology that gave monastics greater authority than laymen. In the story about the three abbots and three husbands, “older” patriarchal authority (that of clerics) wins out over the “newer” authority of bourgeois husbands, and the folkloric origins of this type of story would suggest that wives might very well be fearful of encouraging obedience to traditional signs of witchcraft. These are hardly the kinds of exempla to secure the authority of the sovereign husband of the household but instead are stories that explore the paradoxes of social structures that “naturally” endow the right to rule to a particular class or gender. The final interpretative narrative that ends the sixth article, the story of Adam eating the apple and the defense of the righteousness of God’s anger, gains whatever authority it has not by invoking a complex allegorical or theological argument but rather by its shrewdly pragmatic—​­and



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self-­serving—​­negotiation of power relations through the kind of enlargement of vision that occurs by bringing together many different subsidiary scenes and looking closely at one angle only. In the end, then, the Menagier demonstrates how stories might have a certain truth function but lack the capacity to represent universals or ideal forms in any straightforward way. The sixth article thus presents us with a collection of heterogeneous components, a collection of stories that break “truth” down into elements that can be dispersed, moved to and fro, reassembled and disassembled as fungible items in a marketplace of ideas.55 In the same way that late medieval proto-­capitalism worked to blur the distinction between movable and fixed goods, treating all things as capable of being exchanged in the marketplace, so too the narrative forms deployed by the Menagier emphasize fungibility rather than a totalizing whole. Markers of traditionally stable identity—​­those of the clerical celibate and dynastic aristocrat, or even, perhaps, “husband” and “wife,” ruler and ruled—​­are here taken apart and reassembled in ways that encourage repetition with difference, territorialization, and reterritorialization. The ninth article, on the subject of “Providing Your Husband with Good Counsel,” ends the first section of the Menagier. The article begins its discussion of how to act wisely when your husband commits folly by providing a translation of the Albertanus of Brescia’s lengthy allegory of Melibee and his wife Prudence. But it ends with a tale the author heard told by his late father, of Jehanne la Quentine, the wife of Thomas Quentin. Thomas took a mistress, a poor wool spinner. When his wife found out, rather than directly confronting him, she approached the mistress at her home. She asked the mistress to be discreet and to help her take care of Thomas in sickness and health. To that end, Jehanne sent a great basin so that his mistress could wash her husband’s feet, wood to warm him, a good bed and bedclothes, and clean hose and shirts. When Thomas next visited his mistress, he saw the new things and asked how she got them. His mistress told him the truth. Shamefaced, Thomas made his mistress a present of these gifts and vowed abstinence from all women except his wife. The narrator concludes: “In this way his wife reclaimed him by subtlety, afterward loving him most humbly and sincerely” (176; “et ainsi le retrahy sa femme par subtilleté, et moult humblement et cordieusement l’ayma depuis,” Les Mesnagier de Paris, 406). The short contemporary example of Jehanne la Quentine and her husband thus effectively replays the structures of the Griselda story in more personally relevant terms. The story of patient Jehanne that ends article 9 and the story of patient

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Griselda that began the sixth article, despite their apparent isolation from each other, temporally, generically, morally, are mutually constitutive of a new kind of hermeneutic and ethical practice. The simultaneous undoing of gender and narrative that marks this interactive process of reading and self-­ authoring, of improvisation within a set of constraints, suggests that the incitement to repetition and remaking engendered by the Menagier might be better understood in terms of what David Greetham has called a “text-­ile,”56 that is, a network of associations, of cultural moments, of competing ideologies, and of variant editorial and critical dispensations that in the case of the Menagier leads to a process of textual enrichment through which the everyday body of the good wife and the desire of her “husbanding” readers (both male and female) can be made fully social.

Chapter 4

Affecting Conduct: Feeling Steadfast with Griselda

From Boccaccio to Petrarch The character Griselda first appears in 1352 in the concluding tale of Boccaccio’s Decameron.1 The story, narrated by the irreverent Dioneo, concerns a self-­indulgent young ruler Gualtieri, who, when urged by his people to marry, bizarrely chooses a young peasant girl as his wife.2 Although Griselda turns out to have all the virtues needed to be the consort of a marquis, Gualtieri still feels bound to test her obedience. He orders, in succession, each of their two children to be removed from their mother and (presumably) killed or left to die, supposedly because his subjects are concerned that his title will fall to the offspring of a peasant. Later, Gualtieri sends Griselda back to her father and pretends to take a young noblewoman as his new bride.3 In his prefatory comments, Dioneo emphasizes the localizing effects of the tale’s domestic focus. He notes that, unlike the doings of kings and sultans that have dominated his stories until now, and in order not to place too great a distance between us, “sweet and gentle ladies” and men of affairs, his last story, while about a marquis, will be essentially the story of a husband and wife, and a bad husband at that. And Dioneo concludes the tale itself with a ribald, fabliau-­like “moral”: “What more needs to be said, except that celestial spirits may sometimes descend even into the houses of the poor, whilst there are those in royal palaces who would be better employed as swineherds than as rulers of men? Who else but Griselda could have endured so cheerfully the cruel and unheard of trials that Gualtieri imposed upon her without shedding a tear? For perhaps it would have served him right if he had chanced upon a wife, who, being driven

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from the house in her shift, had found some other man to shake her skin-­coat for her, earning herself a fine new dress in the process.”4 In 1373, Petrarch decides to translate Boccaccio’s story into Latin as the third of four linked letters to his longtime protégé and friend.5 Addressing his Latin text to a select group of fellow (male) humanist intellectuals rather than to the broader (male and female) Italian audience of the Decameron, and framing it with an account of his own personal enjoyment of the tale, Petrarch adopts a sober high style for this retelling of the story.6 Petrarch’s “re-­dressing” of the Griselda story in this way not only represents Griselda as if she were a contemporary manifestation of a chaste classical matron such as Porcia or Alceste but also explicitly reads Griselda’s trials as an exemplum of the Christian’s steadfast devotion to God, most notably by providing a new, Christianizing moral to end the tale: I thought it fitting to re-­tell this story in a different style, not so much to urge the matrons of our time to imitate the patience of this wife (which seems to me almost unchanging) as to arouse readers to imitate her womanly constancy, so that they might dare to undertake for God what she undertook for her husband. God is the appropriate tester of evils, as the Apostle James said [1:13]; but he tempts no one himself. Nevertheless he tests us. Often he allows us to be belabored with heavy stings, not so that he might know our spirit—​­he knew us before we were created—​­but so that our fragility might be shown to us by clear and familiar signs. I would have rated among the most steadfast of men one of whatever station who endured without complaint and for God what this little country wife endured for her mortal husband.7 Petrarch’s Latin translation soon became the equivalent of a late medieval/ early modern best seller, rapidly eclipsing Boccaccio’s original story.8 The first wave of Petrarchan Griselda fever took hold in Paris in the latter part of the fourteenth century. Two different French translations of Petrarch’s version were produced around the same time in the late 1380s: the anonymous Le Livre Griseldis (the main source for Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale),9 and Philippe de Mézières’s Le Miroir des dames mariées (composed between 1385 and 1389). While Philippe’s translation circulated independently (often in manuals of conduct for good wives),10 he also included the complete story in his extended allegorization of marital conduct, Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage



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(composed by 1389).11 As discussed in the Chapter 3, around 1394 the husband-­ author of the Menagier de Paris included Philippe’s version of the Griselda story in his conduct collection.12 And Philippe’s translation was also the basis for the 1395 play L’Estoire de Griseldis.13 In the 1390s, Chaucer translated the anonymous French Le Livre Griseldis into English as the Clerk’s contribution to the Canterbury Tales. Slightly later, in 1405, a pared-­down translation of Petrarch’s story, focusing largely on Griselda as a strong woman, was included by Christine de Pizan in her collection of exemplary good women, Le Livre de la cité des dames.14 What is it about the Griselda narrative—​­one of the most popular and perplexing of medieval exemplary stories—​­that incited such a desire to read, react, and retell among its early audiences, and that allowed it to travel so readily across different national, linguistic, and social divides? A major reason for the tale’s rapid and singular movement across Europe in the late fourteenth century, I argue, is the timeliness of its focus on marital relations primarily as an affective contract, that is, as a sacramental and companionate relationship in which new forms of agency could be achieved by controlling and intensifying the flows of marital affection that such a union made possible. This chapter considers how the success of the Griselda story, especially after Petrarch’s humanist interventions, depends upon its ability to function (or not) as a kind of lesson in conduct for married men and women. But the chapter also explores what happens when, in contrast to more traditional conduct texts, the authoritative “source” invoked in the Griselda story is narrative invention tout court as opposed to theology (the journées chrétiennes discussed in Chapter 1), scriptural or moral “fact” (the conduct texts from Chapter 2), or some hybrid mix of theology/scripture/moral/family narrative/fiction (the Menagier text discussed in Chapter 3). This chapter also asks what happens when the source of authority is located not in the reliable paterfamilias figures compiling the Livre du chevalier or the Menagier but in an apparently self-­ indulgent, obsessive husband with total control over a powerless wife. Or when—​­as peasant girl and noble ruler are brought together by Walter’s willful actions and Griselda’s utter obedience—​­such a marriage of extremes heightens the hybridity and logic of “the beside” foregrounded by the Menagier’s account of the married estate. At the same time the Griselda story also intensifies the force of the affective contract explored in the Menagier by focusing so relentlessly on the marriage vow’s performative “I take you” as the foundation for its account of married relations. When Walter repeatedly tests Griselda, he investigates more than just the obedience of one woman; he evaluates the

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authenticity of the marriage performative itself and, with that, the capacity of marital relations and the ethical subjects they produce to be adequate models for social relations more generally. In this chapter, I first explore the nature of the affective flows set in motion in Boccaccio’s original version of the tale, and then their transformation by Petrarch into a kind of affective circuit capable of instilling valuable lessons in affect management and personal conduct. Boccaccio’s narrative strategies emphasize the grinding repetition of Griselda’s almost inhuman, mute acceptance of Gualtieri’s tests and pronouncements. Foregrounding social and gender inequality in particularly idiosyncratic and disturbing ways, Boccaccio’s tale displays continuing anxiety about the secure status of the affective contract as the primary good that marriage offers. Petrarch’s active process of translation reframes Boccaccio’s fabliau within the performative reading practices we have seen characterizing conduct literature for women. Because of the lessons in affect management that Petrarch builds into his version of the story, reading Griseldis as archetypal good wife allows Petrarch and his humanist audience to develop a valuable fluency in using a new kind of emotional vocabulary. And reading in such an affective and performative way allows them to construct the kind of ethical subject position that can find new forms of agency within the rapidly changing yet firmly stratified structures of late medieval/early modern society. By emphasizing Griseldis’s exemplary status through such features as a Christianizing moral, Petrarch repositions Boccaccio’s fabliau of a tyrannical husband and inexplicably patient wife as a universalizing guide for personal conduct and by extension argues for the ability of such restrained personal conduct to provide a sure foundation for new modes of social organization.15 In this chapter I then go on to consider the process of revernacularization that Petrarch’s Latin text undergoes as it is translated into French and English in the late fourteenth century. In particular, I trace two complementary and interlinked trajectories to the processes of mouvance and textual variation put in play when Griselda is translated onto new social, linguistic, and political terrains.16 First, and perhaps most widespread, is a tendency to further stabilize and universalize how the story functions as a conduct text, most notable in Philippe de Mezières’s inclusion of the tale as the culminating point of his Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage. There Griselda functions as a female tenth worthy, the end point and culminating example in his universalizing summa of an ethical, reformed Christendom organized around the married household. Second is a tendency to intensify affective responses inside and



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outside the tale in ways that destabilize Petrarch’s affective circuit. As we see in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, such a trajectory works to forestall any real “finishing” of the story as practiced by Petrarch and instead keeps the affective identifications of the story “in between” feeling and socialization. Bocaccio’s Affective Contract

From the beginning, the narrative structure of Boccaccio’s Griselda story keeps readers oscillating uneasily between potential exemplarity and willful idiosyncrasy. Dioneo claims that he will end his allotted time as narrator by shifting attention away from the stories of great men—​­sultans and kings—​ t­ hat have been the subject matter of previous tales in order to focus on a domestic drama closer to the experience of his audience. His tale of Gualtieri and Griselda will be the simple story of a husband and wife, albeit a brutal husband and an unrealistically patient wife. The narrative choices he makes further emphasize personal consent and marital affection as the foundation for whatever authenticity and authority such an idiosyncratic union might have. Despite Gualtieri’s noble rank, and despite the pressure of his people that he wed for dynastic reasons, he insists on choosing his own wife. Furthermore, the woman he chooses perversely turns out to be one of his lowest-­born subjects, someone whose rank and situation could offer few material or social benefits to Gualtieri. What he alone can see is the exceptional purity and self-­ restraint that Griselda possesses in spite of her low birth. Her female virtue, along with her promise of total obedience to Gualtieri as lord and spouse, will provide the necessary proof of Gualtieri’s discernment in noticing Griselda’s worth when no one else could. Boccaccio’s narrative also foregrounds the arbitrary and idiosyncratic nature of the wedding ceremony that Gualtieri organizes, which lacks many of the hallmarks of upper-­class bourgeois and noble marriages in late medieval northern Italy. No priest or notary joins the couple together, as would be customary; instead, Gualtieri and Griselda simply exchange the words of present consent in the presence of lay witnesses. Nor is there any legal contract marking the transfer of lands or goods from one party to another because, of course, Griselda can offer no dowry other than her virginity and her consent to obey Gualtieri in all things. The authority of this wedding, it would seem, rests entirely on the performative force of the “I take you” uttered by Gualtieri and Griselda. Indeed, as if to emphasize literally how only Gualtieri can truly take Griselda’s measure, the marquis has her wedding dress made to his specifications before anyone has seen his future

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bride. Robing his peasant bride with a noble status only he can provide, Gualtieri presents Griselda to his court as now fully transformed by her marriage to him, by his act of will a true marquise despite her humble birth. At the same time, however, Boccaccio’s narrative also foregrounds the threatening hybridity created when two such disparate bodies are brought together as one. We witness, simultaneously, both an ennobling crown placed on the head of the new bride and the peasant girl’s still disheveled hair on which the crown rests. While the domestic and the personal dominate the foreground of the narrative action in this tale, and while this may not be a story of sultans and kings, questions of personal choice here are necessarily (and uneasily) intertwined with Gualtieri’s status as marquis and ruler. Gualtieri may choose his own unique kind of wife, but he also marries because his people and his role as marquis demand that he provide an heir. The story may focus on the domestic drama of this particular husband and wife, but Gualtieri’s dual role as husband and marquis means that any concern about his ability to rule in the domestic sphere cannot but be viewed alongside the larger question of his right to rule in the public sphere. Moreover, the tension between personal choice and public obligation repeated in the action of the tale suggests a further exemplarity for the story in terms of the changing representational force of marriage in the period. Boccaccio’s narrative, in its tight focus on personal choice and the simple efficacy of the words of consent, presents as a fait accompli what was in fact a complex and still unresolved redefinition of medieval marital relations taking place in this period—​­where a previously dominant understanding of marriage as focused on procreation, family will, and the dynastic transfer of property often coexisted uneasily and tensely with an emergent sacramental model focused on individual consent, the grace of indissolubility, and the stimulation of marital affection. As we have discussed in previous chapters, what is signified by marital affection in the context of late medieval marriage is quite different from modern romantic love, described more aptly as those actions and emotions focused on the care of the spouse (often expressed in largely material terms). Furthermore, marital affection frequently manifests itself in different ways according to gender. Husbands in conduct texts are frequently exhorted to demonstrate concern for every aspect of their wives’ behavior, and thus to care about the full extent of their wives’ social welfare (especially if bad behavior threatens to bring a wife, and her husband, into disrepute). Wifely marital affection in conduct texts more often expresses itself as a concern to provide whatever is necessary to maintain her husband’s physical well-­being and social status (whether he is



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behaving well or not).17 Gualtieri’s people may want an heir to maintain the line, Griselda may in the end provide both heirs and fitting aristocratic-­like behavior, but Gualtieri throughout the tale desires much more: total assurance of Griselda’s assent to his marriage offer manifested by repeated signs of absolute obedience to his will. Similarly, the narrative structure is intent on showing Griselda’s marital affection for Gualtieri, taking care of him and his household even when he has—​­on the surface at least—​­put her aside to marry a real noblewoman. Boccaccio’s tale, then, implies that the crucial contract binding Gualtieri and Griselda together is an affective one, that is, the commitment to demonstrate (and intensify) the affection for each other that they agreed to when they became one flesh in marriage. Gualtieri’s tests could thus be read as extreme forms of such husbandly concern, as Griselda herself becomes the crucial sign of the inner truth of marital affection and of the affective contract as truly binding and truly worthwhile. Gualtieri’s need to test Griselda’s loyalty to him focuses our attention as much on the strength and validity of the affective contract as the ultimate good of marriage as on the simple question of Griselda’s obedience. Perhaps this is why Gualtieri feels the need to test Griselda’s commitment not just once, but four times.18 But in doing so, he pushes the question of marital affection’s efficacy in the world to the breaking point. Indeed, what makes his tests seem monstrous is precisely that we cannot absolutely dismiss his behavior as different in kind from the sometimes extreme “concern” that conduct texts advocate as good husbandly behavior.19 Gualtieri’s tests can thus be seen either as an extreme end of a broad spectrum of “proper” husbandly concern or as a botched version of marital affection that gets the boundaries between public and private wrong. Griselda’s outward obedience coupled with her apparent lack of emotion can also be seen either as one extreme on the continuum of wifely self-­restraint and obedience to husband or as a botched attempt at socializing the affective contract. The repetition of the tests produces increasingly extreme and distorted versions of the kind of affective concern for the other that husbands and wives are exhorted to show and which the bonds of marriage are meant to develop. This excessive testing mirrors how Gualtieri is willing to push to the limits his claims for the affective contract as the foundation for his marriage at the expense of traditional dynastic and material factors. Boccaccio’s narrative presents us with such an idiosyncratic account of a “freely” chosen marriage that, from the beginning, rather than simply accepting this union as embodying an essential truth about the sacrament, we are led instead to question its

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naturalness and right to exist. Even when, after the marriage, we see Griselda exhibiting the usual attributes of a truly aristocratic wife—​­she manifests noble behavior, dispenses justice in her husband’s absence, and provides him with the narrative, and Gualtieri, remain both a female and a male heir—​­ unsatisfied. Griselda as wife and marquise clearly produces a performance of noble behavior that seems authentic to Gualtieri’s subjects; indeed Gualtieri’s subjects recognize her nobility even when she is cast aside and dressed again in peasant clothing. And Griselda quickly produces the requisite children and heirs. In short, she does everything necessary to fulfill the traditional goals of a dynastic marriage, despite her unconventional beginnings. But the narrative’s real question—​­articulated so forcefully through Gualtieri’s tests—​­is a much newer, riskier, and less immediately quantifiable one: has Griselda also produced acceptable signs of the affective contract that Gualtieri has insisted on as necessary for his participation in marriage? Indeed, what would such signs look like and how would one interpret them authoritatively? Gualtieri and the reader, it seems, keep searching for signals of authentic emotion from Griselda, manifestations of feeling that would constitute the kind of external, socialized emotional “skin” needed to make visible the truth about her real, inner nature, the one that Gualtieri first saw and desired, then chose to join himself to in his marriage vows.20 If Griselda were to show “natural” emotions such as maternal love in refusing to give up her children, or righteous anger in the face of a husband’s intolerable demands, then such displays would anchor marital relations in ways that we could more easily understand. Instead, Griselda presents an idiosyncratic, unreadable, impassive steadfastness that strikes many readers (and initially Gualtieri) as an unnatural lack of emotion. The end of the tale attempts to resolve this dilemma by suggesting that a more representative “conduct literature” reading has prevailed when Gualtieri chooses once more (and now, apparently, forever) the impassive, endlessly obedient Griselda as his wife and restores her children to her. This Griselda, now explicitly and indissolubly joined together in one flesh with Gualtieri, signals that we should be prepared to read her apparently impassive, absolute obedience as true emotion, a valid “good” of marriage produced out of her experience of the affective contract, and thus a reliable sign that her true nature is that of the good wife. Such emotion born of self-­restraint and submission, paradoxically, is the one thing that Griselda can possess in her own right and that Gualtieri cannot command, but which is nonetheless his by virtue of the affective contract initiated in their marriage vows. If we accept the logic of



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the tale’s tests at face value, such an affective contract massively outweighs whatever material benefit land and property could have brought to Gualtieri through a more traditional dynastic marriage to a noblewoman. Such emotion, as it were, constitutes the ultimate movable good that Griselda as wife could bring to the married estate. If successful as a transaction, such a manifestation of self-­restraint in a recognizable emotional skin could allow the production of “real” emotives that have actual currency in the world. Read through the lens of conduct literature in this way, what Griselda’s “lack” would demonstrate is a new emotion, one embodying the kind of self-­ restraint that sacramental marriage places at the center of marital relations and that forms the basis of its affective contract.21 At the same time, the newness of such emotion means that it is not always recognizable in the world as emotion; such steadfastness on Griselda’s part is all too easily open to being read as false and untrue. Boccaccio’s story thus oscillates between two possible sets of responses. In one, Griselda’s “lack” of emotion elicits a necessary affective response from Gualtieri, one that ultimately shows their affective contract as capable of producing true emotives and the kind of emotional vocabulary that would allow this new set of relationships constructed by sacramental marriage to reach visibility as truly part of the social. But the extremism of Gualtieri’s testing also keeps us anxious as readers: trying to decide whether such a new set of relationships can ever really be natural, or whether there is something truly lacking in the affective contract we see here, one that opens social relations up to domination. By the end of the story, our affective involvement with this married couple leads us away from any simple identification with Griselda’s steadfastness and, with that disidentification, into potential rebellion against Gualtieri. The narrative’s refusal to rest securely in either position means that the “I take you” of this couple remains, in crucial ways, incomplete as a true performative. And the incomplete nature of their marriage continues to reverberate throughout the action of the tale, notably in the continuing anxiety about whether Griselda does, or indeed should, continue to “take” Gualtieri as her husband to “love, cherish, and obey.” This need to keep talking about the marriage performative, staging and restaging its “I take you” as performance, is also taken up in the framing action Dioneo provides as tale-­teller and in the continued interactions of the tale’s fictional audience. Dioneo both declares the story’s closeness to its audience (by choosing to talk about a marquis rather than a king) and at the same time insists upon its lack of exemplarity (because of Gualtieri’s exceptional brutality). Similarly, at the end of his story, Dioneo

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inserts his own distinctly antiauthoritarian and personalized moral: “What more needs to be said, except that celestial spirits sometimes descend even into the houses of the poor, whilst there are those in royal palaces who would be better employed as swineherds than as rulers of men.”22 Afterward, we are told, “the ladies, some taking one side and some another, some finding fault with one of its details and some commending another, had talked about it at length.”23 Boccaccio’s story thus locates the power of the performative unstably in textuality’s persistent need for repetition with difference by framing the marriage performative in a succession of utterances that are about this performative or that cluster around this performative—​­what Eve Sedgwick has called the periperformative—​­without allowing the performative speech act its final, constitutive power.24 Boccaccio’s staging of marriage as performance both parallels and significantly differs from the theater of marriage constructed by conduct texts such as the Menagier or the Knight of La Tour Landry. Like the Menagier, Boccaccio’s Griselda story brings husband and wife, masculine and feminine alongside each other in new ways. And both emphasize how, if the performative “I take you” is to become real, husband and wife must attend to how their conduct can intensify marital affection over time and in a particular social space. But however much the Menagier “opens up” the married estate in order to reconfigure its roles and place in the world, it does so with the very clear ideological goal of stabilizing its version of “becoming married” and of using proper conduct as a way of forming and conforming to new self-­identifications within the realm of the social. As we have seen in Chapter 2, the Livre du chevalier also stages its own dialogic debate between masculine and feminine, which is also, of course, a debate between established modes of noble identity structured around a courtly erotics and newer modes of sacramental married identity structured around marital affection and a quasi-­nuclear married household. In doing so, the text reconfigures and reasserts the normative power of noble identity as a universalizing model for proper conduct in the current moment. In contrast, the theater of marriage created by Boccaccio’s rendition of the Griselda story and its framing within the Decameron rests much more unstably within this late medieval turn to married conduct as a reliable and normativizing mode of self-­identification in the world. Acting as a kind of test case for the power of marital affect and for the kinds of accommodations between a newly defined lay femininity and masculinity, Boccaccio’s story of Gualtieri and Griselda keeps the status of the affective contract very much in play in productive but challenging ways.



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This play emerges most explicitly through the destabilizing effects of the story’s multiple endings. The restoration of Gualtieri and Griselda as husband and wife, and of Griselda as mother, resolves the plot of the story in ways that, superficially at least, appear to validate the project of marital affection in a sacramental and companionate union. The affective flows opened up by a marriage based solely on an affective contract, witnessed in the distortions caused by Gualtieri’s need to test Griselda, appear to be reordered finally by Griselda’s wifely fortitude and self-­control. By the end of the narrative, even Gualtieri, it seems, has been brought back to the path of good self-­governance. In this way the tale forces its readers to explore the possibility of agency through restraint, even submission, but also to understand how the internalization of such a model might provide an important new form of owning an interiorized sense of self. This kind of affect management is maintained through a performative kind of reading in which the exemplary truth of the story is not “out there,” in someone else’s hands, but born of the labor of self-­ production that affect management can bring. As such it would seem to constitute a movement away from the simple experiencing of affect as an ephemeral embodied feeling toward a fixing of affect in more recognizable, socially constructed forms of emotion.25 Read through the ideological lens of conduct literature, as we labor to come to terms with the unbearable and contradictory demands of the story—​­its brutality and its exemplarity, its realism and its structure as a kind of limit case for the affective contract—​­our understanding of Griselda must “end” with our recognizing her steadfastness as a true emotion proper to the good wife. But Boccaccio’s narrative does not remain in such a stable place. The story’s placement within the Decameron reasserts a fictional frame that complicates and destabilizes any such turn to ideological purity, a move very different from the framing devices employed by the Menagier and the Livre du chevalier. At the tale’s conclusion, Dioneo’s fabliau-­style “moral” explicitly contradicts the teleology asserted by the reconciliation of Gualtieri and Griselda as husband and wife, father and mother, invoking in the process what appears to be an older hydraulic model of “natural” emotions as its explanation for what the tale signifies: “For perhaps it would have served him [Gualtieri] right if he had chanced upon a wife, who, being driven from the house in her shift, had found some other man to shake her skin-­coat for her, earning herself a fine new dress in the process” (Decameron, 795). That is, if you bottle one passion up, it will eventually emerge in an excessive, rebellious form. And the continuing discussion among the inscribed audience of ladies about what the tale

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signifies further defers narrative closure. These endings that do not end the tale, and the difficulty represented of constructing a convincing account of the social from the tale’s account of the affective contract and the married estate, all work to keep affect in circulation in ways that do not allow for the complete and convincing transformation of affective flow into the kind of sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of experience that we could recognize as true emotion. The instantiation of the Griselda story within the context of the Decameron thus works not to provide a sense of an innate truth that will out but rather to highlight the unstable flow of feeling and affective remainder (rather than the stability of socialized emotion) that the Griselda story embodies for Boccaccio. He thus sets up the story as a kind of limit case for the role of marital affection in the conduct project and at the same time resists any final resolution of the story’s inconsistencies into the smooth contours of an ideologically convincing conduct text. Boccaccio keeps the affective contract between Gualtieri and Griselda, reader and tale, at the level of an affective flow that connects subjects without fully achieving the social representability of emotion. “Finishing” the story in any satisfying moralizing way is thereby forestalled, and affective identifications within and without the story are instead kept “in between” feeling and socialization. Petrarch and the Affective Circuit

As I have argued, the ending of Boccaccio’s narrative focuses on whether Griselda’s steadfastness has ultimately proved successful. Gualtieri and her children are returned to her, and, it is implied, Griselda’s own steadfast self-­ control in the face of extreme testing has convincingly demonstrated her right to rule alongside Gualtieri as marquise. Even Griselda’s one (and temporary) abandonment of her trademark self-­restraint—​­her joyful weeping when Gualtieri restores her children to her and allows her to express her feelings for them—​­highlights the value of such self-­restraint as the normative marker of noble rule. The success of Griselda’s steadfastness in constituting her exemplary status suggests that what we have experienced through her is a real, socially valid form of emotion, the kind of sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience that is from that point onward defined as personal. At the same time, however, the Decameron’s fictional frame dramatically undercuts such ideological certainty. It challenges us to consider the implications of how much such emotion is socially constructed rather than a force of nature, how much it might depend upon, and be used to further, the workings of ideology



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and entrenched power. Dioneo’s comments underscore the lack of resolution achieved by the narrative as a story dependent upon its reception by its audience. They work to question just how successfully such steadfastness has been fully realized as a new emotion in the world and, with it, the affective contract that it supposedly embodies and represents. Boccaccio’s narrative complexity initiates a series of affective flows that link author, characters, and readers in ways that intensify affect and call out for its proper management, while at the same time ensuring that an ideologically convincing sociolinguistic structure for emotion cannot be achieved. His narrative strategies thus create a level of affective intensity between the text and readers that refuses to “end” or “begin” in some transcendent inner or outer truth but instead keeps us “in-­between,” on the skin as it were, in a way that manifests both our labor at self-­restraint and steadfastness and our proclamation by that labor of a bounded self that is really there. It is Petrarch who makes explicit and authoritative the lessons in affect management that are largely implicit and contested within Boccaccio’s original story and who then finds the narrative means to resolve, in ideologically persuasive ways, the tale’s attempts at affect management. What attracts Petrarch, I think, is the cognitive dissonance produced by this story’s embodiment of marriage as an affective contract played out within a field of inherently unequal power relations and, with that, the capacity of married relations to construct a new kind of ethical subject within the narrative structures of the fabliau and its altogether different understanding of “doing what comes naturally.” In the letter to Boccaccio where Petrarch translates the Griselda story from Italian to Latin, Petrarch describes himself distractedly leafing through the Decameron. Only the final tale, the story of Griselda, far different from many of the preceding ones . . . ​has so pleased me and engrossed me that, among so many cares, it nearly made me forget myself and want to commit it to memory so that I might repeat it to myself not without pleasure whenever I wished, and to retell it, whenever the occasion arose, to my friends, chatting, as we do. I did so a little later; and when I recognized that it was pleasing to the listeners, suddenly, in the midst of talking, I was struck by the idea that maybe such a sweet story would appeal also to those who do not know our language. . . . ​ And so, on a certain day, when my mind was being torn as usual between various thoughts, angry at them and at myself, so to

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speak, I said goodbye to all of them for a time, and, seizing my pen, set out to write that very story of yours, hoping that you would surely be delighted that I would, of my own accord, be a translator of your works, something I would not readily have undertaken for anyone else. I was drawn by love for you and for the story. . . . ​I have told your story in my own words, or rather changing or adding a few words at some points in the narrative. . . . ​Whether I have deformed it or, perhaps, beautified it by changing its garment, you be the judge—​­for it all began there, and it goes back there; it knows the judge, the house, the way—​­so that you and whoever reads this may be clear on one point: that you, not I, must render an account of your works. Whoever asks me whether it is true, that is, whether I have written a history or just a tale, I shall reply with the words of Crispus, “Let the responsibility fall on the author.”26 Several points I have been making come together here: the generic difference Petrarch discerns between the Griselda story and the other fabliau-­like stories that make up the Decameron; the feelings, both ugly and pleasing, that connect Petrarch with Boccaccio, with Petrarch’s wider audience of like-­minded intellectuals for whom these letters are being copied, and with the inscribed (male) “friends” to whom he has told the Griselda story in the past; the emphasis on the virtuous labor that telling and retelling this story can bring about; and the improvements in personal conduct that such an affective engagement with this kind of story will effect.27 Petrarch’s own affective engagement with the tale encourages him to read and reread it, then to tell and retell it to a variety of like-­minded individuals (producing a wide range of affective responses in turn), and finally to translate the text into Latin. But even the “final” version he includes in his letter incites further repetitions of the reading/writing/authoring process. For Petrarch, while inscribing himself as a reader of a text authored by his former protégé Boccaccio, and hence describing himself as now in a subservient position in relation to Boccaccio, also describes his work of translation/reading as rhetorically reclothing the tale in ways that make it really Petrarch’s own text. Thus, for example, rather than simply starting in on the narrative action, Petrarch prefaces Boccaccio’s tale with a rhetorically embellished description of its geographic location. Petrarch moves from the “lofty mountain named Vesulus,” reaching “its peak out of the Apennines and into the rarified air above the clouds,” to consider Vesulus’s additional status as the source of the river Po,



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“king of rivers” in Italy (Historia Griseldis, 110).28 The land of Saluzzo itself “lies among the others at the root of Vesulus, full enough of villages and castles ruled by the will of certain noble marquises. The first and greatest, it is said, was a certain Walterus” (Historia Griseldis, 112).29 Petrarch’s rhetoric not only works to link noble geography and noble ruler, but also to distinguish his elevated translation stylistically and generically from the “low” origins of Boccaccio’s fabliau-­like story. Moreover, by delineating Walterus’s noble antecedents thus, Petrarch’s preface also introduces him more indirectly to readers than Boccaccio does in the original. The Walterus we meet in Petrarch’s text is described as “young and handsome, no less noble in behavior than in blood, he was in short an admirable man in every way, except that, content with his present lot he gave no thought to the future” (Historia Griseldis, 112).30 In contrast, Boccaccio’s initial picture of Gualtieri focuses simply on his self-­ indulgence, “a young man called Gualtieri, who, having neither wife nor children, spent the whole of his time hunting and hawking, and never even thought about marrying or raising a family, which says a great deal for his intelligence” (Decameron, 784).31 Similarly, when Walterus’s subjects come to ask him to marry, Petrarch’s version notes that “these pious prayers moved the heart of the man” (Historia Griseldis, 112).32 Walterus tells them that he submits himself freely to their will, “confident in your prudence and faith” (Historia Griseldis, 112).33 Boccaccio’s Gualtieri, on the other hand, is much more harsh in his dismissal of marriage and only grudgingly agrees to do what his people ask, “since, however, you are determined to bind me in chains of this sort” (Decameron, 784).34 Similarly, Boccaccio’s narrative notes simply that Gualtieri had for some time “been casting an appreciative eye on the manners of a poor girl from a neighbouring village, and thinking her very beautiful, he considered that a life with her would have much to commend it” (Decameron, 785).35 Petrarch, on the other hand, adds details about the poor life she has led, such as how she comforts her father and spins while grazing sheep, and notes that “her body was fair enough, but no one surpassed the beauty of her conduct and spirit, . . . ​a mature, manly spirit lay hidden in her virginal breast” (Historia Griseldis, 114).36 And he further reminds us, through an allusion to the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary that “heavenly grace, which sometimes lights on even the poorest dwellings, had touched his only child, named Griselda” (Historia Griseldis, 114).37 Similarly, Petrarch notes that Walterus, “periodically riding past, fixed his eyes, not youthfully lascivious but maturely considerate, on the virtue of this maid, excellent beyond her age and gender. His keen insight had penetrated the obscurity in which her

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commonness hid her. Thus it happened that, despite his earlier disinclination, he decided simultaneously to marry, and to marry this woman and no other” (Historia Griseldis, 114).38 Furthermore, rather than placing himself in the lesser position of a medieval maker presenting his text to a noble and powerful patron, Petrarch here re-­presents the work in its rhetorically improved form to Boccaccio, his protégé, friend, and fellow humanist. By writing his translation as part of a letter intended to be copied and reproduced for posterity, Petrarch assumes that the translation will work to open up the Griselda story to an audience it would not otherwise have, that is, fellow Latinate and humanist intellectuals. And Petrarch’s emphasis on sending the work back to its authorial father—​­it knows the judge, the house, the way—​­and his rhetorical question—​­whether he has “deformed it, or beautified it by changing its garment”—​­rework the familial relations of the tale’s characters to suggest that Petrarch is a Walterus who gets it right, a man who knows how to “husband” the tale properly by discerning the virtue of the Griselda story, testing it out, and sending it back to its father reclothed and beautified, not shamed and deformed by marriage to a brute. In the first of several telling parallels between Petrarch and Walterus, Petrarch’s description of himself as having to take time away from a busy schedule to read and translate the story also reproduces Walterus being forced to drag himself away from his hunting to take a wife. What Petrarch describes, then, is his own kind of analogous affective contract with Boccaccio, and with the Griselda story itself, in which Petrarch consents to care for the story, and, in turn, the story can then care for him by providing him with the opportunity for profitable intellectual and emotional labor and the comfort and the capacity for improved conduct that comes with that. But this is not simply an account of writing as the exercise of masculinist power that would reproduce the distorted masculinity that Gualtieri too often demonstrates in the tale. For Petrarch in his careful framing of the act of reading and translation also describes a performative reading practice in which he can use affect management to profit from being like Griseldis. It is “on a certain day, when my mind was being torn as usual between various thoughts, angry at them and at myself, so to speak” that he decides to translate the tale. In a letter written after the one in which he translates the Griselda story, but sent simultaneously with it, Petrarch takes Boccaccio to task for urging him to take things easy in old age and for suggesting that in the past Petrarch wasted a good part of his time in the service of princes. Petrarch tells Boccaccio that were he to stop working, “I would perish all the sooner. Continual work and



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concentration are my mind’s food. . . . ​I daily hunt for new labors on the outside.”39 And he insists that in the past, when he served princes, “I was with the princes in name, but in fact the princes were with me.”40 The emotional and intellectual labor of engaging with the Griselda story thus allows Petrarch to construct an intimate script with which he can re-­clothe the ugly feelings that disempowering experiences such as old age or service to tyrannical rulers bring.41 The process of performative reading that Petrarch describes here, and seeks to reproduce and amplify by means of his translation work, thus works to create for Petrarch, as well as Griselda, the skin of a socially recognizable and valuable emotion of steadfastness. As Petrarch describes it, this labor of affect management will create a surplus of emotion that can then be deployed as personal social capital by the reader. Moreover, Petrarch systematizes the flows of affect that Boccaccio drew attention to in the marital relations of Gualtieri and Griselda into a kind of affective circuit (or closed loop) capable of producing a consistent flow of affective energy. For example, Boccaccio describes the interchange between the retainer and Griselda in the first test in ways that intensify the flows of affect between Griselda and her children, and between reader and tortured wife and subject, without providing any means of channeling such excesses of feeling into socially acceptable action. The retainer who comes to take away her first child, while looking “very sorrowful,” simply gives voice to the powerless subject and says to Griselda: “ ‘My lady, if I do not wish to die, I must do as my lord commands me. He has ordered me to take this daughter of yours, and to . . .’ And his voice trailed off into silence.” Griselda simultaneously reads the contradiction between the retainer’s compassionate affect and the implacable political reality of the situation: “On hearing these words and perceiving the man’s expression, Griselda, recalling what she had been told, concluded that he had been instructed to murder her child.” And as readers, our response then mimics Griselda’s as our attention is simultaneously directed to the maternal affect that Griselda feels and her lack of choice as wife and subject of Gualtieri, as she picks up her child and kisses her, gives the child her blessing, and, “albeit she felt that her heart was about to break,” places the child in the arms of the servant “without any trace of emotion” (Decameron, 788).42 Petrarch, on the other hand, emphasizes both the powerfully negative affective flows taking place in this scene and Griseldis’s steadfastness as a subject of Walterus. In turn, the reader is encouraged to engage steadfastly with Griseldis’s plight in a way that does not challenge Walterus’s authority as a ruler. Thus, unlike Boccaccio, Petrarch elaborates the retainer’s response to

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Griseldis in ways that are emotionally and politically complex: “ ‘Forgive me, my lady and do not blame me for what I am forced to do. You know, most wise lady, what it means to be a servant; to someone with your insight, however inexperienced, the hard necessity to obey is not unknown. I am commanded to take this child and—​­.’ He cut his speech short, as if expressing his bloody assignment silently. The man’s reputation was suspect. His expression was suspect. The time was suspect and his demand was suspect, so that she understood clearly that her dear daughter was going to be killed; nevertheless, she neither sighed nor wept. Such behavior would be very stern in a nurse, not to mention a mother” (Historia Griseldis, 118, 120).43 Petrarch thus sets up a mirroring between the sober steadfastness of Griseldis called upon to obey her lord’s unspeakable wishes and caught between duty as wife/subject and mother and that of the reader, who is similarly called upon to empathize with the subject called to obey yet asked to rein in affective responses and demonstrate self-­restraint. If in Boccaccio’s account Griselda is at once a perspicacious and feeling subject brutally forced to submit, in Petrarch’s account Griseldis stages an exercise in how to feel precisely in order also to show how one can properly exercise the thoughtful management of such feeling. Griseldis’s steadfastness in Petrarch’s account comes to figure the return of marital affection flowing without impediment between husband and wife (despite Walterus’s tests). In turn, this loop of marital affection provides a stable basis for figuring other affective circuits structuring social and political, even cosmic, affairs, for example, the binding affection of ruler and subject, or Christian subject and God. Petrarch thus takes us outside Boccaccio’s story in order to construct another affective circuit from the literary interactions of reader with text, and reader/author with other readers/listeners. In both cases what I am calling affect management works to keep either side of the affect exchange in organized relationship with each other such that a functioning circuit can be constructed. What Petrarch describes is simultaneously the necessity to take into oneself the truth value of the story, to make it one’s own, and to recognize that one will only own that interiorized sense of an ethical subject as personal capital to the extent that others can see its value. Emotion, in the sense of socialized forms of affect, individually produced but stilled and shaped by their encounters with others, provides an outer surface, or “skin,” for this effect of deep interiority—​­both by giving an appearance of boundedness for individual perceptions and feelings and by connecting that individual to the social world surrounding him. This paradoxical combination of boundedness and connection occurs when Petrarch’s reclothing of the Griselda story



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makes his Griseldis’s steadfastness recognizable not only as unique to her as an individual actor in the story of her life but also as a universal model for ethical action in the world. The actions of Petrarch and his audience as readers/authors, however, also demonstrate how such steadfastness can become recognizable as an emotion that will lay bare and show the value of the kind of self-­restraint and steadfastness that are the property of those new men of late possessing valuable personal capital and medieval/early modern society—​­ skills but denied the kinds of traditional access to power that aristocratic birth, clerical position, or military force might bring.44 That the production of this kind of individual socialized affect is always necessarily happening in relation to others, and in relation to others more and less powerful than oneself, works to constitute a new kind of emotional community for the period, made up of individualized ethical subjects whose new relationship to power provides the possibility for new understandings of the social—​­first in the married bourgeois household and then in the capacity for that household to figure the modern state.

Revernacularizing Griselda: Philippe de Mézières and Chaucer’s Clerk Petrarch’s framing techniques for Boccaccio’s story do more, then, than simply reconfigure it as a functional exemplary text. They also allow the steadfastness that Petrarch’s Griseldis shows to be more fully socialized as emotion, and thus to signify a humanist set of values that the story’s readers can identify with and share together as part of a new literate, Latinate lay culture. The construction of such an imagined community depends upon masculine readers combining intellectual and affective labor in productive new ways in order to engage properly with the Griselda story. Petrarch’s translation thus undoes how gender operates in Boccaccio’s story in certain crucial ways, in the process recasting what it means to be fully and properly human. As the subject of profound testing by her earthly and heavenly rulers, Petrarch’s Griseldis models a goodness that resonates with both secular and religious exemplars. By recognizing the worthiness of the Griselda story implied by Boccaccio’s placement of it at the collection’s conclusion, and by “rescuing” the story from its debased fabliau setting in the Decameron and reclothing it in Latin high style, Petrarch accords it the status of a contemporary version of a universally true classical story. To this extent, Petrarch’s act of translation works to ensure that

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his Griseldis moves outside the simply fabulous to become truly historical. Furthermore, the actions of the tale’s readers—​­completing the affective labor that the tale’s characters never quite get right, “husbanding” the story in a way that Walterus cannot manage properly with Griseldis, manifesting steadfastness in emotionally readable forms that Griseldis cannot—​­work to further instantiate this process of “becoming historical.” Petrarch’s translation strikes a chord that Boccaccio’s original could not precisely because it brings questions of conduct to the fore such that its readers can answer successfully in ways that resonate as both fully personal and fully social. Petrarch’s version of the story presents right conduct, and the performative, affective reading practices it requires, as a crucial process of remaking the human in order to accommodate and represent the new subject positions emerging in the period. And it recognizes the foundational role that sacramental marriage and the new kinds of household experience, subjectivity, and wisdom it subtends make possible. If Griseldis’s steadfastness is historically real, in the way that Petrarch insists upon, and bears witness to the essential truth of female virtue, then it also assures readers that the actions of exemplary women in the classical past are similarly historical and true to life in the present moment. Petrarch’s emphasis on the historicity and exemplarity of Griseldis’s steadfastness therefore highlights the extent to which humanist values can remake the human more generally. For the new kind of “good woman” imagined by properly reading Griseldis’s exemplary conduct in this way allows in turn the formation of the idea of a new “good man” for Petrarch and his humanist audience. Judith Butler—​­drawing simultaneously on feminist, gender, queer, and transgender theory and practice in ways that speak to what I have been saying about Petrarch and Griselda—​­has written about how undoing gender in the postmodern moment can also initiate a certain remaking of the human: “Sometimes a normative conception of gender can undo one’s personhood, undermining the capacity to persevere in a livable life. Other times, the experience of a normative restriction becoming undone can undo a prior conception of who one is only to inaugurate a relatively newer one that has greater livability as its aim.” This second experience of undoing gender, she notes, provokes questions such as: “If I am a certain gender, will I still be regarded as part of the human? Will the ‘human’ expand to include me in its reach? If I desire in certain ways, will I be able to live? Will there be a place for my life, and will it be recognizable to the others upon whom I depend for social existence?”45 Butler notes:



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If I have any agency, it is opened up by the fact that I am constituted by a social world I never chose. That my agency is riven with paradox does not mean it is impossible. It means only that paradox is the condition of its possibility. As a result, the “I” that I am finds itself at once constituted by norms and dependent on them but also endeavors to live in ways that maintain a critical and transformative relation to them. . . . ​ There is a certain departure from the human that takes place in order to start the process of remaking the human. I may feel that without some recognizability I cannot live. But I may also feel that the terms by which I am recognized make life unlivable.46 “An ‘I’ . . . ​constituted by a social world I never chose” describes Griseldis’s subject position par excellence. And the recurring question of her humanity, of whether she could truly be real or is simply fabulous, foregrounds the dangerous location such an “I” always inhabits. At the same time, Petrarch’s lessons in affect management, his description of a framing process that allows his readers’ subject positions to emerge “riven with paradox” but also capable of maintaining a “critical and transformative relation” to the norms constituting them, show how a “certain departure from the human can take place in order to start the process of remaking the human.” Furthermore, by stressing the possession of emotion as a kind of movable good produced by the actions of the tale’s readers, Petrarch emphasizes how it is the immaterial labor that one performs on the story that gives it its value, rather than the traditional allegorizing notion that a story carries within it an inherent worthy meaning (as a scriptural story would, or as the exemplary stories in conduct literature attempt to do). But if such emotions (and their cultural capital) are movable goods, then they must also, necessarily, be able to be moved around, passed on, broken up. Their “authority,” and their value in making a story such as Griselda’s exemplary, must thus be fungible in a way that is not imagined in traditional uses of scriptural stories or sermon exempla. In the latter case the value in theological and moral terms of such exemplary stories comes from the supposed integrity of their core meaning, which does not change with retelling or translation. But if at their heart, the emotions (and cultural capital) produced by the reading of Petrarch’s Griselda story are fungible in this way, then however much Petrarch’s actions as an author may try to stabilize what the Griselda story signifies as humanist example, his secular, historicist methodology also sets its meaning loose as well.

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In the rest of the chapter I want to explore this fundamental tension in the performative reading practices that Petrarch sets up for the transmission of the Griselda story, especially as it emerges as a space of possibility for experimentation in late fourteenth-­century northern European versions of the tale. For, less than twenty years after Petrarch translates Boccaccio’s Griselda story into Latin, his version is itself revernacularized, moving back out among what he termed “the common herd” and onto the very differently gendered terrain of more companionate models of marriage dominant in Paris and London in the late fourteenth century. As we have seen, this Petrarchan Griselda story is a narrative radically transformed from its original context in the Decameron. Petrarch’s interventions rebrand Boccaccio’s story, converting its unstable, recreational nature as a fabliau-­like story “for the ladies” into one manifesting the universalizing exemplarity of conduct literature. Petrarch’s rebranding thus uses the question of female virtue in the story to transform what it means to be ethical subjects in the world and to provide new modes of agency to the story’s readers. Among the early translators of Petrarch’s Latin text, Philippe de Mézières is perhaps the most intent on taking up the Griselda story’s potential as conduct literature. He not only titles his translation the Miroir des dames mariées but also includes that text in its entirety in his encyclopedic discussion of sacramental married relations and female conduct, Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage. In doing so Philippe intensifies Petrarch’s push to stabilization and universalization and he gives the story pride of place in his book as his culminating example of true wifely virtue. For Philippe, Griselda’s challenging historicity—​­midway between story and history, past and present, classical worthies and Christian saints—​­makes her, next to the Virgin Mary, the ideal example of what female virtue can achieve. Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, on the other hand, continues Petrarch’s engagement with the Griselda story as a type of affective circuit, exploring the possibilities and contradictions inherent in Petrarch’s focus on an affectively understood ethical subject position. But the Clerk’s affective intervention as narrator and his strong identification with Griselda forestall the Petrarchan impulse to “read like a man” as well as any easy move to socialize affect in appropriately authoritative ways. Instead it encourages us to explore the full range of experience and possibility occasioned by “reading like a good wife.”



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Philippe de Mézières’s Conduct Summa: Griselda and Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage

Friend and correspondent of Petrarch, Philippe de Mézières (1327–­1405) was the first to translate his Latinized Griselda back into a vernacular language. Philippe’s French translation, Le Miroir des dames mariées, appears to have circulated widely in Paris among court and city circles at the end of the fourteenth century, and seventeen manuscript copies of the Miroir survive. In addition, the author of the Menagier de Paris includes Philippe’s translation in his compilation, and the play L’Estoire de Griseldis, which appears around the same time as the Menagier, uses the Miroir as its source for the Griselda story. As we noted in the previous chapter, the merchant author of the Menagier acknowledges that even if the story does not apply exactly to their situation, his young wife needs to be aware of it because people that matter are talking about it. No doubt a major reason for such interest in the Griselda story was its supposed exemplarity as a conduct text for women, a currency Philippe’s translation efforts intensified. As we have noted above, nine of the seventeen surviving manuscript copies of the Miroir are teamed with other conduct texts for women, including the Menagier and the Livre du chevalier. Further proof of Philippe’s commitment to Griselda as the universalizing example of contemporary female virtue can be found in his placement of the story in Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, his long and complex exploration of the primacy of Catholic sacramental marriage as a universal model for human behavior.47 The Livre’s advice to married women fuses theological models—​ t­ he care of the soul made possible by the remedies for the seven deadly sins—​ ­ with medical ones—​­ the care of the physical body achieved by careful balancing of the humors—​­in order to provide a complete, real-­life program of ethical conduct for married women. But Philippe’s Livre, I argue, also functions as a kind of summa for female conduct to the extent that it seeks to stabilize, systematize, and universalize female virtue within the sacrament of marriage and the lay married household. In doing so, the Livre explores how such a reformation of female conduct and the married household might provide a sure foundation for a new, united, and ethical Christendom. Philippe structures the Livre in allegorical terms in order to expose how the sacrament of marriage allows the mystical marriage of the pure ruby (Christ) and the pure diamond (the Virgin Mary/the Catholic Church) to interpenetrate the earthly marriages of virtuous husbands and wives. As a result, his book tends not to pay attention to the material details of the married household or rely

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on exemplary stories to make its points in the way that texts such as the Livre du chevalier or the Menagier do. He does, however, turn to narrative at a crucial point at the end of the Livre in order to recount two miracles of female exemplarity: first, the “constancy and loyalty, love and obedience” of the noble marquise of Saluce for her earthly husband, the marquis, and for Jesus Christ, her immortal spouse; and, second, the marvelous appearance of the Virgin every year to a congregation of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Cairo, when she manifests herself as Queen of Heaven, enthroned and surrounded by a host of heavenly saints.48 Clearly for Philippe, Griseldis, by her placement next to the Virgin Mary, provides the crowning example of married female virtue and its potential for action in the world. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Philippe’s contextualizing prologue to the miracle of the noble marquise, far more explicitly and emphatically than Petrarch, also underscores Griseldis’s historicity as well as her exemplarity. Indeed, Philippe singles Griseldis out among contemporary women as a tenth worthy, more praiseworthy than the classical nine female worthies celebrated in secular chronicles, and comparable to female Christian martyrs because of the constancy and obedience she showed in the face of suffering.49 Philippe de Mézières was known in his time across Europe as a Catholic public intellectual, a tireless advocate of European unity and the crusade.50 His interest in the Griselda story and the sacrament of marriage may seem an outlier to the issues that occupy his other works—​­notably Christian unity, the recapture of the Holy Land, and his chivalric Order of the Passion. But I think we can see in his turn to marriage a similar concern with understanding how the ideal becomes part of history; how the personal, social, and cosmic are interconnected; and how the public intellectual furthers ethical action in the world. Philippe’s extensive writing is animated both by an intense devotion to the Virgin Mary and Christ’s Passion and by the pragmatic insights he gained from his long and varied life experience as soldier-­crusader and adviser to kings. While his works are generally polemical interventions into current affairs—​­whether the need for a new crusade, the negative effects on European unity caused by the papal schism and the Hundred Years’ War between France and England, or the value of married love in anchoring social relations—​ ­Philippe’s reason for writing is never simple self-­interest or political advantage. His literary efforts are marked by an intense sacramentalism that views the theological and transcendent as inextricably bound up in the material and quotidian, and vice versa. Catholic doctrine provides Philippe with the kind of large systematic thought needed to frame the real-­life political and social



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concerns he believes need solving. But he approaches such doctrine not from a university-­trained professional scholar’s point of view but instead from the perspective of an engaged layman seeking to advance truth through his handling of worldly affairs. In many of the writings from the last twenty-­five years of his life—​­his most productive literary period, after he retired from day-­to-­ day activity at court to live in the convent of the Celestines in Paris—​­Philippe refers to himself as “le vieil pelerin” (“the old pilgrim”) or “le vieil solitaire” (“the old contemplative”). “Pilgrim” is, of course, an allegorizing self-­definition that can be applied to any engaged Christian while living on earth. But it also very literally applies to Philippe, someone for whom crusading was a lifelong reason for existence as a chivalric warrior. And it brilliantly embodies the unique nature of the authorial presence that Philippe develops so carefully in all his works: a warrior and courtier who never married, a man of affairs and adviser to kings who spent much of his life partially withdrawn from the world of affairs that preoccupied his literary efforts, a thinker who embraced traditional medieval Christian systems of thought but whose learning came as much from his own experience in the world as from clerical learning. Philippe, like a number of the other authors of conduct texts we have considered, grounds the origin of the Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage within an autobiographical frame. In the prologue and in the presentation miniature that occupies the top half of the first folio of the manuscript, Philippe makes clear that he has written the Livre for a particular noble couple, Jehanne de Chastillon and her husband, Pierre de Craon. Pierre was a member of an illustrious family who became chamberlain to Charles VI in 1385, a position he still held in 1389.51 In the miniature filling the top half of folio 1, an untonsured Philippe, dressed as a Celestine, offers a book with his left hand to Pierre and Jehanne, who are kneeling opposite him. A banner above Philippe, and held by Pierre, reads, “Good Jesus, sanctify these two, united together by the sacrament of marriage” (“Bon Jhesu, sainctefie ces deux, conjoins ensamble par sacrement de marriage”). With his right hand Philippe points to a central quatrefoil medallion in which are outlined the letters “YHS” (representing the name of Jesus). Within those Gothic letters is a Crucifixion scene. Moreover, as we have noted, the Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage ends with two “personal” stories drawn from Philippe’s own experience: that of Griseldis, translated from the Latin text of Petrarch, Philippe’s friend, and the story of a Marian miracle that was witnessed in Cairo and recounted to Philippe by another friend, the exiled Leon V, king of Cilician Armenia. Unlike other conduct texts we have examined, however, the

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“autobiographical” frame that Philippe constructs does not inscribe him as the head of a married household writing for his wife or daughters (as was the case in the Livre du chevalier or the Menagier) but instead authorizes him as a devout layman, political courtier, and public intellectual seeking to uncover and highlight in the fullest way possible the sacramental connections possible between a married layperson and God. In his opening prologue to the Livre, as in the larger work, Philippe is much more intent on developing the sacrament’s ability to bring together marital affection and caritas, as well as love of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the church, than on addressing the specific material circumstances of the marriage of Jehanne and Pierre (in contrast to the other conduct texts we examined). Philippe’s discussion of marriage throughout the Livre is structured by the rich and complex articulation of marriage symbolism that developed in western Europe during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.52 In such symbolic readings, the joining of man and woman as one flesh in the sacrament of marriage provides the basis for understanding and figuring God’s marriage to the Christian soul, Christ’s marriage to humanity (through his Incarnation and Crucifixion), and finally Christ’s marriage to the church (figured as the Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven). For Philippe, the spiritual marriage of Christ and the Virgin Mary can thus provide the means to resolve any potential contradictions between earthly and heavenly, medical and theological, clerical and lay, male and female.53 As Philippe explores this mystical marriage further, in order to use it to describe how individual men and women might right any imbalance in their marital relations, he deploys the sacramental nature of marriage as a way of synthesizing all of the moral, theological, medical, and scientific systems of thought at his disposal. The abstruse allegorizing language that Philippe engages in can sometimes make it easy to miss just how much Philippe’s method is intent on practical change in the world. Thus it is worth focusing on a moment in the Livre where he narrativizes this challenge of using allegory as a means of linking the mundane and the cosmic. As I have noted, the ruby and the diamond provide a structuring principle for Philippe’s allegorizing throughout the Livre. In book 3, chapter 24, for example, Philippe adumbrates the ways that husbands and wives should emulate the marriage of the ruby and the diamond. Just as the form of a ruby is round, like that of truth, “with no angles or recesses” (“nul anglet ne repostaille”), so too a husband and his works should be round, “gently and openly communicating and working with his wife” (“et avec s’espouse rondement et plainement converser et besongnier”).54



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And just as the color of the ruby is “crimson and shining” (“vermaulz et resplendissans”), so too married men and all good Christians should be “crimson in their heart through the memory of the Passion and the shedding of the precious blood of Jesus Christ, and also should be shining through good works toward their spouse and close companion.”55 He goes on to outline the four virtues of the ruby in ways that have direct parallels with the behavior of husbands to their wives: first, the ruby comforts the heart and members of its owner; second, the ruby gives lordship and authority to its owner; third, the ruby attracts the love of those who look at it, not out of avarice but for its virtue; and, fourth, the ruby gives light in darkness. Philippe then turns to the diamond, signifying both the Catholic Church, and Mary, Queen of Heaven. In its form the diamond has “four equal sides” (“iiij. faces ingales”)56 in which one can see oneself perfectly through the life of the Virgin Mary. In that mirror the married woman will be able to see through proper contemplation how the four sides of the diamond figure how the good wife (1) knows where she has come from, that is, from vile matter and from the womb of her mother; (2) knows where she is, that is, in a fallen and uncertain world; (3) knows where she is not, to her dismay, that is, in the joy of Paradise; and (4) does not know the hour or manner of her death, or where her soul will be transported. As for the four virtues of the diamond, the first counteracts the effects of venom; the second, the destruction of tempests; the third conserves the love of the one who has given the diamond to its recipient; and the fourth multiplies virtue. This particular discussion of the ruby and diamond, occurring about three-­quarters of the way through the Livre, leads to a dramatized dialogue between “la dame malcontente” and the author. This dissatisfied lady recognizes that the author has undertaken a great labor in comforting women both by the example of Christ’s Passion and by multiple allegories (which to many married women will probably seem obscure): “you have moralized according to your purpose and your will about precious stones, the planets in the heavens, the metals of the earth, the medicines for the body and the soul, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the sacraments of the Church and the works of mercy.”57 But, she maintains, it is too difficult to follow such a strict regimen, since in the present time nature is enfeebled: “And because of my fragility . . . ​ I would prefer a penny that I determine to thirty from your learning.”58 In response, Philippe declares that a married woman such as “la dame malcontente” should focus on her own situation and recognize that she is a pilgrim crossing a great salt sea where the waves are horrible and she does not know if she will escape them. While this is, of course, a common enough Christian

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allegory, it is also one that Philippe himself regularly adopts to denote his character as author and citizen. And perhaps because of that it leads him to use “an unusual allegory” (“une figure estrange”) involving a compass, or “navigator’s box or needle” (“boiste ou aguille de navier”)59—​­drawn from his own experience as someone regularly traveling by ship in the Mediterranean—​­to elucidate how one should navigate such a stormy sea of married life.60 “La dame malcontente,” on the one hand, clearly supports the verities of a traditional clerical hermeneutic, notably the expectation that embodied experience will naturally manifest an obtuse resistance to revealed truth and that femininity will be particularly prone to such ignorant self-­involvement. On the other hand, the lady’s objection that such theological allegory (and its moralizing) does not take into account individual circumstances and too readily simply assumes consent resonates with the concern we have seen in conduct literature for laywomen to attend to individual differences of sex, gender, and class in determining just how different people might do their best to become ethical subjects in the world. The lady’s request does not deter Philippe from continuing with allegory and a resolutely universalizing exemplarity, nor does it encourage him to turn to the kind of exemplary stories that make up so much of the other conduct texts. But Philippe does respond by turning, in his analogy of the compass and the Virgin Mary, to a more narrative form of allegory, one that shows the ameliorative potential in human invention, as a way of countering the lady’s claim that woman’s nature is too enfeebled in the present moment. In contrast to the complexity of Philippe’s preceding allegories of the ruby and diamond, his account of the compass is straightforward and materially exact. Philippe first describes the workings of the kind of magnetic compass in use in Mediterranean shipping by the early fourteenth century. And after outlining just how the compass is constructed and used, Philippe goes on to prove its worth. Such compasses, Philippe says, are used regularly on ships in the Mediterranean but are not found on ships sailing in the North Sea, as he knows from experience. He personally witnessed how in one season off the coast of Prussia around eighty ships perished because they did not have the benefit of compasses to guide them clear of rocks and other perils.61 Only after establishing the real-­world credentials of the compass in this way, does Philippe develop his allegory (summarized here by his modern editor, Joan B. Williamson): The box, Philippe explains, is the human body. The wheel and the four winds are the parts of the body: in an apt parallel with the four



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conditions deriving from the four humors, the East Wind, which is hot and wet, is the head; the West, which is hot and wet, is the legs and feet; the South Wind, which is hot and dry, is the right arm, shoulder, and hand; while the North Wind, which is cold and wet, is the left arm, shoulder, and hand. The other winds are the internal organs: the brain, stomach, liver, and lungs, and the four complexions which go from one to the other. The needle is the heart and the point of metal on which the needle sits is human life, which, Philippe poignantly points out, is only a little point of rotten and failing metal. The lodestone is the Virgin, representing her humanity in this world, while the polar star is the Queen of Heaven.62 Although Philippe’s elaboration is much longer than this summary, it is, in comparison to earlier allegories, relatively clear and direct. And unlike earlier examples, both the literal example (of a magnetic compass guiding sailors) and allegory are developed with material drawn from his own memory and personal experience. New technology, personal experience, material specificity all come together here to rework and to expand radically the force of Saint Bernard’s simple metaphor of the Virgin Mary as the Star of the Sea. If the Virgin Mary, in her earthly form, is the lodestone that rubs the heart of the married woman and makes her point to the polar star, Mary, Queen of Heaven, it is the restoration of proper marital affection in the heart of the wife that will provide the energy necessary to transform the malcontent into accurate guide. It is in this context that we should approach Philippe’s decision to incorporate Petrarch’s Griselda story as one of the culminating “miracles” with which he will end his discussion of the sacrament of marriage and the married household. Philippe’s text as a whole is intent on a reconfiguration of marital affection as a new kind of Christian love, one that eschews the fleshliness and narcissism of eros for a love that is grounded in the gendered, corrected behavior of the married estate, and that, because of the sacramental nature of marriage, can align marital affection with Christian caritas. And as we have seen, his method, while largely an allegorizing one, also recognizes the power of narrative and real-­world example to ground his sacramental vision for subjects in the world. In his own idiosyncratic fashion Philippe takes up and adapts the lessons in “becoming historical” that Petrarch’s Griselda story taught. Thus in the prologue to his translation of the Griselda story, Philippe highlights the Christianizing moral that Petrarch adds to Boccaccio’s story, and at the same

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time makes Petrarch’s moralizing intent more explicit, literal, and historical: “The noble marquise of Saluce provides a solemn and pleasing example to God, not so much as a model for how married ladies should perfectly love their husbands but for how each devout and reasonable soul should entirely love Jesus Christ, her immortal spouse. About this one could say that the constancy and loyalty, love and obedience, of the said marquise through the sacrament of her marriage with the marquis her husband, next to the saints and martyrs and others in the Christian faith, surmounted both her nature and that of all virtuous married women mentioned in old histories and chronicles.”63 Similarly, while Philippe does not take up Petrarch’s lessons in affect management when he turns to the Griselda story, he has, with the encyclopedization of the married estate in Le Livre, done something similar in developing a guide to how to manifest self-­restraint in a fully embodied and socialized way. Clues to how Philippe conceives his role as translator as one of uncovering the real-­life use to be made of the story can also be found in the relationship he articulates with Petrarch in his introduction to the story. There Philippe not only asserts his personal friendship with Petrarch—​­“once his particular friend” (“jadis son especial ami”)—​­but also Petrarch’s singular stature as a “distinguished and solemn scholar-­poet” (“vaillant et solempnel docteur poete”) who was nonetheless also “a devoted and true Catholic” (“tres devot et vray Catholique”).64 In characterizing Petrarch in this way, Philippe charts a very different course from Bernat Metge’s contemporary 1388 Catalan translation. Metge attempts to acknowledge a common humanist scholarly interest with Petrarch by translating the Griselda story into Catalan. For Metge, Petrarch is authoritative simply because he is “poet laureate” (“poeta laureate”).65 And when Metge concludes his translation by reminding his readers that another historical example mentioned by classical authors—​ ­Porcia, daughter of Cato and Hypsicratea—​­showed similar patience, constancy, and conjugal love, both examples are taken from those that Petrarch provides in his last letter to Boccaccio (as a reproof to a contemporary who refused to believe that a real women could ever be like Griselda).66 Like Metge, Philippe also stresses the historicity of Griseldis and her exemplarity, but now in ways that fuse Petrarch’s humanist emphasis on the achievements of a classical past with traditional Catholic teaching, in this case about the benefits of sacramental marriage. We might also see Philippe here constructing Petrarch as a model who reflects the complexity of Philippe’s position—​­a layperson, adviser to princes, scholarly without being a cleric, and orthodox. Because Petrarch was both learned and Catholic, and was considered the greatest poet



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in Christendom during the past hundred years, Philippe “has given more faith to this story so often repeated, written about, and translated by such a devout and Catholic scholar” (“a donné plus grant foy a l’istoire souventefois repetee, escripte et translatee par tel docteur devot et catholique”), a story, moreover, that is “well known and public in Lombardy, and especially in Piedmont and in the county of Saluce, and reputed to be true” (“publique et notoire en Lombardie et par especial en Pieumont et ou marquisie de Saluce et reputee pour vraye”).67 We should thus see Philippe’s Catholic understanding of Griselda’s universality as his own development of the Christianizing moral that Petrarch added to the end of Boccaccio’s story. In his prologue he refers to Griseldis consistently in terms that emphasize the high status she gained through ­marriage—​­as “the noble marquise of Saluce”—​­while at the same time foregrounding the example her singular feminine virtue provides, not just for married women to love their husbands but more generally for all Christian souls to love Jesus Christ, their immortal spouse.68 Whereas Petrarch keeps in play the question of whether his account of Griselda is a made up story or the record of an actual person, Philippe presents his Griseldis as a historical character who provides a kind of midpoint between the average contemporary good wife and the singular, superlative example of the Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven, mystically married to Christ. To that extent, within the Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, Griseldis also provides a clear alternative to “la dame malcontente,” whose voice articulates the limitations posed by a femininity that remains mired in its own physicality. The noble marquise of Saluce, on the other hand, according to Philippe, represents the very best that can be achieved within the secular domestic sphere. Indeed, although Philippe initially gives her a secondary position in relation to Christian saints and martyrs, by the end of his description, her ethical achievement as good wife makes her their equivalent: The constancy and loyalty, love and obedience shown by the said marquise toward the marquis, her husband, within the sacrament of marriage after the saints and martyrs in the Christian faith, surmounts both nature and all virtuous married women of whom old histories and chronicles make mention. And truly if a married woman today suffered as much from her husband and for the love of God, one could say that she was a true martyr. It is not believable that the said marquise, example of constancy and obedience, could

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have suffered what she did at the hands of her husband except by divine arrangement nor without the great and unique favor of Jesus Christ, her immortal spouse.69 Griseldis provides present-­day proof that the kind of fusion of scripture, theology, morality, medicine, and history that Philippe has been attempting in his book project is achievable and can be made part of nature and history. Philippe thus takes up the challenge of Griselda “becoming historical” that we saw Petrarch introducing in his translation of Boccaccio’s fabliau. But rather than the narrower secular canvas of Petrarch’s historicizing of feminine virtue, Philippe seeks a Christian humanism that understands his Griseldis (and the possibility of feminine virtue she represents) as at once historical and synchronous with the transcendent revelations of Christian scripture and theology. Thus he invokes the example of the nine female worthies of ancient and classical history: “Old histories, following the example of the Nine Worthies, also take notice of nine ladies, who by some are called worthy. These ladies, according to these histories, were greatly virtuous and did in the world marvelous things and therefore were considered memorable by the world.”70 In particular, he cites the example of Semiramis, queen of the Assyrians, who after the death of her husband, King Ninus, led her armies in person to conquer all of India and Ethiopia, something her husband had not been able to do. Yet Griseldis, the poor laborer become wife and marquise, surpasses all of these classical queens: “But for whoever would wish to put on the scales and calculate the weight of her valor: there is the great virtue of the invincible heart of the noble marquise of Saluce—​­daughter of a poor laborer—​­in vanquishing and surmounting herself and in strengthening nature, which is a thing of greater merit than to vanquish someone else, as the valiant and honorable Constantine, emperor of Rome, said in this wise statement: ‘For us to vanquish castles and cities in combat shows the physical power of knights, but vanquishing yourself shows the power of true virtue.’”71 The effect is to cast Griseldis as the ideal of what conduct literature is capable of producing; for she does naturally what others must struggle to achieve. Thus, in comparing Griseldis with the nine female worthies, Philippe insists on the far greater worth of Griseldis’s historical example because it shows how a wife’s constancy, loyalty, love, and obedience to her husband and the sacrament of marriage can surmount nature and revalue femininity. If Philippe does not pick up on the affective contract and the possibilities for affect management foregrounded in the Griselda story as told by Petrarch, he does respond to the way that Petrarch’s story represented the possibility for



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feminine virtue to become powerfully historical in contemporary marriage relations.72 In adapting Petrarch’s humanist story to his own vernacularizing agenda, Philippe uses it as the linchpin in his systematization of married lay conduct as the technology for self-­management. In a curious way, he echoes the Livre du chevalier’s movement from the dangerous circularity and ambiguity of fin’amor to the productive teleology effected within the balanced gender system of the married estate. With Philippe this understanding becomes not simply social but cosmological. Philippe imagines the married estate, if properly managed through an attention to right conduct, as capable of bringing into healthy harmony potentially contradictory registers: husbands and wives, the various humors, discourses of medicine and theology, households and nations, and the mundane and the heavenly. His text represents the many possibilities for misdirection and sterile activity that such immense variety and contradiction implies while providing a technology for achieving the kind of balance and integration that can channel that (mis)direction into teleological movement toward completion. “Ful Lyk a Mooder”: Feeling “Sad” and“Steadfast” in the Clerk’s Tale

In contrast to Philippe’s self-­professed constancy to Petrarch’s exemplary moralizing in his translation of the Griselda story, the prologue to the Clerk’s Tale sets up an affective circuit that seems altogether different from, even a parody of, the humanist interchanges carefully cultivated by Petrarch’s epistolary frame. When the Host dismissively hails the Clerk as one who rides “coy and stille as dooth a mayde / Were newe spoused, sittynge at the bord” and urges him to tell a tale that “make us nat to slepe,” it is as if the “common herd”—​ ­which Petrarch freed Boccaccio’s story from by translating it into Latin—​­here reemerges loud, proud, and waving a big stick.73 But the return of Petrarch’s repressed operates in more profoundly destabilizing ways here in the prologue and elsewhere in the tale. The Clerk publicly assents to the Host’s authority, “benignely” (4.21) acknowledging that he and the other pilgrims are under the “yerde” (4.22) of the Host. Yet he chooses a tale that is anything but “myrie” (4.9) in the populist sense the Host has called for, and one, moreover, written by a contemporary celebrity intellectual and poet laureate. More problematically, the Clerk also goes on, in the tale proper, radically to rework the managed identifications with Griseldis and feminine fortitude that Petrarch established with his Latin translation. As we have seen, in his retelling, Petrarch was interested in exploring how feeling like Griseldis could stand in for

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the level of powerlessness that men in his situation might be forced to feel when advising rulers upon whom they are dependent. Properly managing such “feminine” modes of feeling, Petrarch suggests, could stabilize masculine identity in useful ways, since by demonstrating the labor of performative reading—​­of feeling like Griseldis and practicing their own form of ­fortitude—​ ­ etrarch and his (male) readers could also distinguish themselves in crucial P ways from Griseldis and thereby assert forms of humanist masculinity that have reliable agency in the world. The Clerk’s Prologue and Tale challenges the efficacy and reliability of this controlled androgyny put in play by Petrarch’s translation of the Griselda story. Rather than Petrarch’s imagined emotional community of humanist men connected via letters and shared Latin texts, the Host’s comic harassment of the Clerk foregrounds the unpredictable reactions of orality on the part of the nonlearned pilgrims that he inscribes as the Clerk’s Canterbury audience. By interpellating the Clerk in such a dismissive way, the Host short-­circuits any easy performance of Petrarchan masculine feeling and humanist fortitude, instead portraying the Clerk as if he were an inexperienced young woman in need of direction from the real men who rule him. Moreover, when the Clerk publicly assents to the Host’s authority like a schoolboy or wife putting himself under his “yerde,” and only indirectly rebels by choosing a different kind of story than that requested by his immediate audience, the Clerk shows himself unable to achieve easily or authoritatively the kind of author function claimed by Petrarch. Even the Clerk’s invocation of Petrarch’s literary authority in the prologue is complex and contradictory. True, he cites Petrarch as “the lauriat poete” whose “rethorike sweete / Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie” (4.31, 32–­33). But he does so without drawing on Petrarch’s authority as a humanist writer, one whose Latin writing could, like the examples of classical Latin authors, expose universal truths that can transcend time and space. Instead, the Clerk implies a spatial and temporal boundedness for Petrarch’s influence when he says that Petrarch enlightened all of Italy and matter-­of-­factly adds that Petrarch “is now deed and nayled in his cheste” (4.29). The Clerk’s Prologue also foregrounds the limited efficacy of a poetic high style (and with that Petrarch’s humanist project) in the face of a “common herd” that will not listen (and cannot be pushed back into the margins as Petrarch’s epistolary sleight of hand does when he translates Boccaccio’s fabliau into Latin). The Host warns the Clerk not to gild his story with high-­style paraphernalia that common folk will not be interested in. But of course Chaucer does just that by giving the Clerk one of the Canterbury Tales’ few rhyme royal tales.



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Rather than accentuating how he might have achieved an English equivalent to Petrarch’s elevated humanist rhetoric, however, the Clerk foregrounds the narrative energy he expends elaborating how he feels about the events of the story. And as the Clerk becomes more and more involved emotionally with his heroine, and more and more irate with Walter as husband and ruler, he appears to slide into a kind of uncontrolled androgyny that goes far beyond the carefully limited identification with Griselda that Petrarch’s handling of the tale encourages. It is therefore worth attending in some detail to the shifts in tone and affect that the Clerk as narrator makes to the Petrarchan account. The Clerk uses a variety of affective markers to distinguish Griselda from those around her. When Walter first proposes marriage to her, Janicula is so “astonyed” by this “sodeyn cas” that “reed he wax; abayst and al quakynge ” (4.316–­17), a flushing mentioned in both French and English texts. Griselda, on the other hand, while also “astoned” to see such a guest at her father’s house and “quakynge for drede” (4.358) when Walter asks for her complete obedience to his will, is described simply as looking “with ful pale face” (4.340), a feature that occurs only in Chaucer’s version. This contrast between Janicula’s flushed and Griselda’s pale faces might be read as reproducing a certain gendered set of emotional responses. As a father and provider, Janicula might feel shame and flush as a result, or as a man, his greater natural heat (in humoral terms) might encourage an excess of emotion to take such a form. But as is so often the case with Griselda, the Clerk opts for language that at once describes and leaves vague just what is happening at an affective level. Similarly, in the Clerk’s Tale, Griselda’s absolute seriousness is equated with and demonstrated by her controlled language, visage, and general demeanor. The Clerk repeatedly uses the Middle English words “sad” (4.220, 293, 552, 564, 602, 693, 754, 1047, 1100) 74 and “steadfast” (4.564, 699, 1050, 1056, 1094)75 to describe the controlled embodiment she shows in the face of Walter’s repeated tests. “Sad” (meaning both “soberly wise” and “long-­suffering and enduring”) registers the fact of Griselda’s lack, all the things that Walter (or her poor birth) have taken away from her, and at the same time underscores the singularity of the fortitude and seriousness that she manifests. In Griselda’s “sadness” we see simultaneously a promise of emotion (that is, the soberness we suppose must be an expression of Griselda’s inner will) and its lack (the maternal feeling or spousal anger we might expect her to show). As a result, “sad” remains something that we cannot pin down exactly or know definitively, yet whose authenticity and reality we are drawn to test again and again. When Walter comes to Griselda after the birth of their first child—​­a

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daughter—​­to say that she will be taken away (and, it is implied, killed or left to die), Griselda “noght ameved / Neither in word, or chiere, or contenaunce” (4.498–­99). Instead, she simply tells Walter that both she and her child belong to him to do with as he thinks best. But when the fearsome sergeant comes to take her daughter away, Griselda’s general restraint throws into relief the one request she does make—​­that she be allowed to kiss her child goodbye before she dies—​­and thereby accentuates the pathos of the situation:   But atte laste to speken she bigan, And mekely she to the sergeant preyde, So as he was a worthy gentil man, That she moste kisse hire child er that it deyde. And in her barm this litel child she leyde With ful sad face, and gan the child to blisse, And lulled it, and after gan it kisse. (4.547–­53) In contrast, the Livre Griseldis at this point simply declares: “And with a calm face, she took up her child . . .” (152; 153: “Et de plain front prist son enffant . . .”). Moreover, as Walter’s tests repeat themselves in ever more coercive iterations, our interest in the status of Griselda’s restraint increases because the Clerk himself so forcefully, and so often, registers his affective involvement with Griselda’s plight. The French narrator, for example, indicates a certain confusion as to “where the marquis got the strange notion, which some wise men wish to praise, to assay his wife and to test her more than before, whom he had already tried and tested enough, and to tempt her again in diverse ways.”76 Whereas the Clerk intensifies the affective dimension of this confusion by noting how Walter is completely taken over by his desire: he    longeth so To tempte his wyf, . . . ​ That he ne myghte out of his herte throwe This merveillous desir (4.451–­54) Such a desire to test Griselda, the Clerk expostulates, is “Nedeless, God woot” (4.455). Forced by the original Petrarchan story to acknowledge that “som



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men preise it for a subtil wit,” the Clerk quickly adds his own emotional commentary: But as for me, I seye that yvele it sit To assaye a wyf whan that it is no nede, And putten hire in angwyssh and in drede. (4.460–­62) When the Clerk later describes how the sergeant took Griselda’s second child away from her, he frames the event in highly personal and emotional terms. The Livre Griseldis simply comments that “This sergeant was held to be a cruel man, and had an ugly face, and had come at a suspicious hour, and spoke like a man full of ill-­will.”77 The Clerk instead restores the kind of rhetorical embellishment found in Petrarch’s Latin translation and, with it, the kind of properly horrified affect appropriate to the situation: Suspecious was the diffame of this man, Suspect his face, suspect his word also; Suspect the tyme in which he this bigan. Allas!78 (4.540–­43) Similarly, the narrator of the Livre Griseldis notes that after the sergeant takes away her daughter, Griselda “neither shed tears nor sighed—​­who doubts this would be a difficult thing even for a nurse?” 79 The Clerk, however, also feels the need to draw attention to the singular restraint shown by Griselda as a mother: I trowe that to a norice in this cas It had been hard this reuthe for to se; Wel myghte a mooder thane han cryd “allas!” But nathelees so sad stidefast was she That she endured al adversitee (4.561–­65) The Clerk intrudes as empathetic narrator at other key moments in ways that emphasize the unnecessary nature of Walter’s tests and how they expose his lack of restraint as a husband, even as they demonstrate the marvelous quality

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of Griselda’s self-­control as a wife and mother. Moreover, the Clerk does so in a manner that distinguishes him from the kind of masculinity manifested by Walter and that aligns him with the feminine perspective of other wives. When, for example, Walter contemplates a second test after the birth of a son, the narrator apostrophizes: O nedelees was she tempted in assay! But wedded men ne knowe no mesure, Whan that they fynde a pacient creature. (4.621–­23) And after the sergeant has again taken a child away from Griselda, the narrator reaffirms the reality of Griselda’s love for her children by addressing her fellow wives and mothers thus: But now of wommen wolde I axen fayn If thise assayes myghte nat suffise? What koude a sturdy housbonde moore devyse To preeve hir wyfhod and hir stedefastnesse, And he continuynge evere in sturdinesse? (4.696–­700) This kind of androgynous identification on the part of the Clerk reaches a climax when Walter puts Griselda aside as his wife and sends her back to her father’s house clad only in her smock. The Clerk at this point explicitly takes up the comparison that Petrarch provided between Griselda’s and Job’s fortitude in the face of suffering. And the Clerk’s emotional identification with Griselda here expands to include an embrace of women and feminine virtue more generally: Men speke of Job, and moost for his humblesse, As clerkes, whan hem list, konne wel endite, Namely of men, but as in soothfastnesse, Though clerkes preise wommen but a lite, Ther kan no man in humblesse hym acquite As womman kan, ne kan been half so trewe As wommen been, but it be falle of newe. (4.932–­38)



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This is a moment where we see the Clerk stepping outside of the antifeminist hermeneutic tradition he has inherited and rejecting the kind of gendered dialogic that Carolyn Dinshaw has influentially termed “reading like a man/reading like a woman.” Arising out of a clerical exegetical tradition articulated forcefully by Saint Jerome, this hermeneutic binary, Dinshaw argues, essentializes the sex/gender divide. Thus, to read like a man is to adopt “the Hieronymian image of the classical text as alien woman to be passed between men, stripped, and reclothed for the bridal—​­the representation of allegorical reading as a trade, reclothing, marriage, and domestication of a woman.”80 In contrast, in traditional clerical terms, reading “like a woman” would require being focused on the abject bodily residue rightly discarded by a properly masculine spirit. Thus, someone like the Wife of Bath, reading like a woman, “speaks as the literal text, insisting on the positive, significant value of the carnal letter as opposed to the spiritual gloss.”81 In contrast, the Clerk radically reshapes how reading like a woman might signify. His “identification or sympathy with the female—​­one who is fundamentally left out of patriarchal society . . . ​allows ­ erforming—​ him to read with an eye to what is left out of the very reading he is p 82 a­ llows him to read, that is, like a woman.” And the hermeneutical androgyny taken on by the Clerk, Dinshaw notes, stands in sharp contrast to Petrarch’s embrace of translatio’s traditional function as an interlingual process of substitution that excludes by turning away from that which it translates. Thus Petrarch, translating Boccaccio’s vernacular fabliau into humanist exemplum, represents such literary activity as a masculine activity that is performed on a feminine body, effectively excluding women from the audience of the tale and eliminating the particular concerns of women and subsuming them into a larger vision of mankind.83 Dinshaw’s formulation of “reading like a man/reading like a woman” is helpful in understanding the essentializing agenda of a long-­established medieval antifeminist hermeneutic and its ability to marginalize women’s concerns. And I do not disagree that there is much in Petrarch’s framing of the Griselda story as an exercise in translation that works to exclude women and subsume their concerns into a larger vision of mankind. But I think it is also important to take into account just how much Petrarch as translator does not operate as a traditional clerical exegete and just how much his acts of translation frame a humanist version of “reading like a man” in terms of late medieval conduct literature and its emphasis on the positive effects of feminine virtue. By translating Boccaccio’s fabliau as he does, Petrarch makes visible Griselda’s true exemplarity as a good wife, both by casting his relation to the story as a husband

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properly husbanding his wife and by identifying with Griselda’s steadfast loyalty to Walter. The potential contradictions in this act of identification of male humanist with Griselda as good wife, inhabiting that position while at the same time stepping back from it to articulate a secure new form of masculinity, is the complex structure of affect management I have described earlier. What happens, though, when the Clerk foregrounds this process of affect management (and with it the conduct project and its revaluation of reading like a woman as reading like a good wife) in order to expose the workings of its ideologies? We see, I think, a different, more complex exploration of sexual politics, hermeneutic strategies, and the politics of rule than takes place in the older (antifeminist) binary of “reading like a man/reading like a woman.” Reading like a good wife in the context of the conduct literature I have examined in the previous chapters emphasizes the conjoining of male and female bodies in marriage, tries to incite and intensify marital affection, and encourages a controlled androgyny. It thus seeks a different, more complexly gendered understanding of the relationship between reading, conduct, and rule than that found in Dinshaw’s clerical model. If we also think of “clerks” as the vessels of traditional wisdom—​­hence the kind of antifeminist tradition the Wife of Bath must fight against—​­then there is something interesting in terms of temporal (dis)location happening as well. The Clerk would appear to be siding with “the new” as he attempts to inhabit fully what it might mean for Griselda (or the good wife) to be the best embodiment in the present moment of Job’s steadfastness. By embracing the feminine in the way he does in his tale, the Clerk takes up the value of conduct literature as the best way to articulate an ethical subject position in the world. And standing in the place of the good wife here offers the Clerk a way to explore the predicative, innovative potential of “the new.”84 We need, then, to recognize not just that the Clerk steps outside clerical antifeminism to identify with Griselda by reading like a good wife, but also to realize just how much our reading like a good wife (because of the Clerk’s interventions) changes the optics of the story’s sexual politics. If the Clerk, in this moment, sounds a lot like those authors of conduct texts for women who see no limit to the possibilities for goodness manifest in the good wife, it is, I think, because he has recognized the project of female conduct as the interpretative crux in Petrarch’s Griselda story. And we can, I think, read the Clerk’s affective interjections as revealing his own complex reenvisioning of the role of male guide in conduct literature for women. As such, we witness him husbanding Griselda and her text in ways that Walter (and Petrarch) cannot or



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will not. The Clerk’s affective responses push him into more intense, less controlled manifestations of compassion for Griselda that radically transform Petrarch’s affective circuit and provide a more nuanced, politically ambiguous engagement with the project of conduct than that established in Petrarch’s act of translation. I want, therefore, to consider in some detail the final affective narrative interventions that the Clerk makes: first, when the Clerk engages with the differing reactions to Walter’s decision to put Griselda aside and to take a young noblewoman as his new wife; and, second, when the Clerk describes the various responses of Griselda, her children, Walter, and Walter’s court to the news that Griselda will be returned to her children and husband. Addressing how the “stormy peple” are suddenly willing to embrace Griselda’s successor as Walter’s wife because she is “fairer” and “moore tendre of age” (4.988-­89), the narrator provides an unusually political as well as affective critique of their (and Walter’s) judgment: “O stormy peple! Unsad and evere untrewe! Ay undiscreet and chaungynge as a fane! Delitynge evere in rumbul that is newe, For lyk the moone ay wexe ye and wane! Ay ful of clappyng, deere ynogh a jane! Youre doom is fals, youre constance yvele preeveth; A ful greet fool is he that on yow leeveth.” Thus seyden sadde folk in that citee, Whan that the peple gazed up and doun, For they were glad, right for the noveltee, To han a newe lady of hir toun. (4.995–­1005) In light of the narrator’s previous embrace of the new when he praised the Job-­like truth and constancy of women, it is especially interesting how the “stormy peple” here evince the behavior that a clerical antifeminist tradition usually attributes to female embodiment—​­that of waxing and waning like the moon—​­and how they are defined in oppositional terms to Griselda herself, terms that implicitly link Walter’s (bad) rule with their bad judgment. Moreover, critique here emerges not through the direct speech of the narrator but by his quotation of the “sad folk” of the city. They, unlike the “stormy peple,” are able to see the inconstancy of Walter and continue to value the “sad”

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steadfastness of Griselda. In other words, such “sad folk” behave like Griselda and, by thus reading like a good wife, the narrator implies, show them to be the best rulers of themselves and the best fitted to lead the city.85 Their sober steadfastness, in this way, looks and sounds a lot like the self-­restrained, socially astute readers and writers of conduct texts such as the Menagier and the Chevalier. The affective circuit established here between “sad folk” and Griselda, and the Clerk and “sad folk,” is thus not simply or even primarily “man to man,” as it is constructed in Petrarch’s frame for his translation. Instead, the affective circuit that produces “sad folk” arises out of a productive synergy between the sexes and the gendered roles they inhabit within the married estate, and their ability to speak to and influence men like the Clerk, or represent the value of women like Griselda.86 We see in this binary of “stormy peple” and “sad folk” the politics of (self-­)rule that is bound up in reading “like a good wife.” The solidarity of the “sad folk” with Griselda here emphasizes a common sober steadfastness that binds them into a nascent emotional community. They represent the embodiment of the attention to self-­restraint and self-­rule that we have been examining in conduct literature for women, individuals who have achieved a proper balance between compassion and self-­control. What is also interesting here is how conduct reshapes traditional gender politics and how such individual self-­ control helps conserve established power’s right to rule. In other, more traditionally antifeminist clerical writing, the kind of volatile affect that the “stormy peple” show would be associated in essentializing ways with female embodiment and the feminine. Instead the fickleness of the people here encourages us to empathize with a new kind of femininity embodied in Griselda, the good wife, and such compassionate identification with her sober steadfastness becomes a way of defining the ethical superiority of the “sad folk” (and of our new kind of clerical narrator). Moreover, what is more important about the “sad folk,” what makes them “real,” is not their sex but their self-­rule (and with that their suitability to be among those who rule by example in the city). The Clerk’s “sad folk” can thus be imagined as the same mixed group of male and female gentry, nobility, and upper-­level urban “middlings” that form the actual readers of conduct texts (and of the French and English versions of the Griselda story) in this period. We have then a binarization, “stormy peple”/“sad folk,” developed according to a broader, more complex understanding of social station than simple sex or gender or traditional estate could provide, and a sense of station, moreover, that is defined through the emotive “sad” and the attention to personal conduct that it stands in for. But even as



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such a model opens up room to maneuver for a group of “folk” who are defined in individualized modes of self-­rule rather than birth or sex, the instance of their self-­rule that is singled out for approbation (in contrast to the “stormy people”) is their loyalty to Griselda, who in spite of extreme testing by her ruler and husband, chooses obedience at all costs. Paradoxically, then, at the heart of what makes the empathy of the “sad folk” socially recognizable and valued here is its commitment to maintaining the idea (and reality) of a stable social order. The Clerk’s depiction of “stormy peple” and “sad folk” operates as a kind of tableau vivant that we witness from the outside, with any intense flow of affect marginalized in the changeable and unreliable feelings of the “stormy people.” In contrast, the final reconciliation scene between Walter and Griselda, extensively elaborated by the Clerk, presents a more nuanced and presentation of the emotional network depicted with the ambiguous re-­ “stormy peple”/“sad folk” binary, one that allows us to analyze more fully just how affect becomes socialized in a politics of empathy. As we have noted, the Clerk’s affective involvement in his tale is seldom as controlled as those between authors and their exemplary stories in traditional conduct texts. If, in order to make sense of Griselda’s sad steadfastness as an emotive with powerful effects in the world, we are encouraged to read it as the kind of successful performance of restraint that confers nobility of conduct, we are also encouraged to attend near the end of the poem to an important moment of loss of self-­control on Griselda’s part. This is, of course, her double swoon after she learns her children are alive—​­where feeling operates as a more powerful, creative, and disruptive force. In that moment the Clerk allows us to see how Griselda might also embody a pre-­social, pre-­individual affective remainder that has the potential to produce “an upheaval of thought” on the part of the Clerk and his readers (if not Walter and his court). In Petrarch’s version, when Walterus finally takes Griseldis in his arms and reveals the truth about his impending marriage and the return of her two children, he also chides those who might have thought ill of him, noting that he was not “impious” (“impium”) but “painstaking and testing” (“curiosum atque experientem”); “I have proved my wife rather than condemning her” (Historia Griseldis, 128; 129: “probasse coniugem, non dampnasse”). In the Livre Griseldis, Wautier simply notes, “I did what I did only to test and try you” (164; 165: “moy avoir fait ce que j’ay fait pour toy approuver et essaier tant seulement”). Chaucer’s phrasing in the Clerk’s Tale captures more of the sense of Petrarch’s defense of Walter:

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 I have doon this deede For no malice, ne for no crueltee, But for t’assaye in thee thy wommanheede. (4.1073–­75) But rather than simply reproducing Petrarch’s legal language, Chaucer’s “assaye . . . ​thy wommanheede” also adopts the language of the affective contract found in conduct literature, and especially its focus on the cultivation of female virtue.87 While Petrarch notes that Walter’s “words produced almost unbearable joy and frantic devotion” (Historia Griseldis, 128; 129: “Hec illa audiens, pene gaudio exanimis et pietate”), he nonetheless dispatches Griseldis’s joy and devotion in a few lines. She embraces her children, “wearies them with kisses and bedews them with maternal tears” (128; 129: “fatigatque osculis, pioque gemitu madefacit”). Then “quick and doting women” (128; 129: “raptimque matrone alacres”) exchange her old clothes for noble garments suitable to a marquise. The Livre Griseldis focuses a bit more on Griseldis’s emotional state—​­“Upon hearing this news, Griselda was dizzy and about to faint, and just as the marquis took her in his arms, she crumpled” (164; 165: “Et quant Griseldis oÿ ces nouvelles, toute pasmee et avenoiee, ainsi que le marquis l’avoit embrassieé, se laissa cheoir”)—​­but says nothing about her and her children. In the Clerk’s Tale, however, the scene is drawn out for five affecting stanzas. After Griselda first swoons in Walter’s arms “for pitous joye” (4. 1080) at his revelation that her children are alive, she immediately calls both children over to her: And in hire armes, pitously wepynge, Embraceth hem, and tendrely kissynge Ful lyk a mooder, with hire salte teeres She bathed bothe hire visage and hire heeres. (4.1082–­85) Griselda not only breaks down the wall of sad constancy that has until now defined her embodiment, “pitously” weeping “ful lyk a mooder” for the first time, she also breaks out into a rare moment of rhetorical lyricism: O tender, o deere, o yonge children myne! Youre woful mooder wende stedfastly



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That crueel houndes or som foul vermyne Hadde eten yow (4.1093–­96) The Clerk has already used Middle English “steadfast” four times, and “sad” eight times, to described the controlled embodiment Griselda shows in the face of Walter’s repeated tests. The return of “stedfastly” here, in the midst of an unwonted display of feeling, along with its previous fusion with Griselda’s “sadness” and apparent lack of affect, now raises the possibility that Griselda might all along have been feeling such unbearable pain. Moreover, this repetition of “steadfast”—​­and, with it, the sudden apprehension of an unbearable and embodied cognition—​­occurs at the moment of Griselda’s second swoon: And in hire swough so sadly holdeth she Hire children two, whan she gan hem t’embrace, That with greet sleighte and greet difficultee The children from hire arm they gonne arace. (4.1100–­1103; emphasis mine) The final occurrence of “sad” here to describe how Griselda continues to hold her children tight to her even as she falls in a swoon, functions, like the earlier repetition of “steadfast,” as a kind of return of the repressed. Just at the moment when Walter would maintain his lack of cruelty in testing Griselda, and the importance of his kind of testing in “assaying” (with the sense of proving the purity of gold) her feminine virtue, “steadfast” and “sad” return to be read through the blurred vision of Griselda’s “pitously” suffering “lyk a mooder.” And rather than moving us immediately from any potentially disturbing excess of feeling at this reunion of mother and children—​­as Petrarch and the Livre do—​­the Clerk (uniquely) notes the similarly affective response of those around her to Griselda’s pain: O many a teere on many a pitous face Doun ran of hem that stooden hire bisyde; Unnethe abouten hire myghte they abyde.88 (4.1104–­6) Only then, and only after “Walter hire gladeth” and “every wight hire joye and feeste maketh,” does Griselda compose herself and “[catch] agayn hire

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contenaunce” (4.1107, 1109, 1110). Rather than such an extended account of the reassertion of ideological control through emotional self-­control, the French and Latin texts describe the return of joy of the court without the exercise of will foregrounded in Chaucer’s version. Throughout, there is much that is jarring and awkward about this scene. The Clerk not only foregrounds the performance of an emotive, that is, sober steadfastness, and how the exercise of that emotive can unite disparate subjects into a durable emotional community—​­something that is also Petrarch’s focus—​­but he also makes us aware of the variety of peri-­emotives unstably circulating around sober steadfastness. Here, when Griselda tells her children she “wende stedfastly,” what we see her thinking about is the affecting image of her two children eaten by “crueel houndes or som foul vermyne,” not the ideologically satisfying image of the good wife willingly accepting husbandly authority. And this substitution encourages us to question the reality of what we thought sober steadfastness meant earlier as an emotional state to be sought after. For we are brought face-­to-­face with the possibility that such intense pain and maternal love was the real feeling that defined who Griselda truly is and that it was subjugated by the force of an external will at a terrible cost. Thus, when Griselda has finally “caught agayn hire contenaunce,” what we witness seems less an inner gladdening brought about by the concern of others and more her capitulation—​­once again—​­to the inexorable demands of the social for ideological control over its subjects. At the same time, the Clerk also notes the awkwardness of Griselda’s children trying with great adroitness and difficulty to tear themselves away from her steadfast grip as she swoons for a second time. There is, then, something unbearable and unthinkable (in all senses of the word) about the excess of feeling we are mired in in these five stanzas. We feel here the full power of the rhyme royal stanza to slow action and force attention to the rhetorical force and feeling of words and actions. We sense, as well, how such force of feeling is accentuated by a new kind of parallel between Griselda and the Virgin Mary that is established by this tableau of weeping mother and children. Before, when Walter comes to her father’s house to announce his intention to marry Griselda, we are encouraged to remember the young Virgin Mary, another handmaiden meek and mild, joyfully and willingly acceding to the God’s will at the moment of the Annunciation. And when Griselda kisses her children goodbye as they are taken from her, no doubt we remember another mother at the foot of the cross bidding farewell to her child. But on both these occasions, the narrative does not dwell on the



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affective possibilities of this comparison and instead uses it to emphasize the image of the good subject obediently accepting her ruler’s will. Now, however, when Griselda conjures up the cruel hounds and foul vermin she continually imagined eating her children, we engage directly with the kind of intense suffering and lamenting that the Virgin expresses in medieval lyrics, bearing witness at the foot of the cross or holding her dead, crucified son in her arms. But this moment is also awkward in more profound, epistemological ways. Griselda’s disturbing outburst of maternal feeling is bookended by strong displays of marital affection on the part of Walter. Finally, it seems, Walter truly “rewen upon hire wyfly stedfastnesse” (4.1050), maintaining that he tested her not out of “crueltee” (4.1074) but “for t’assaye in thee thy wommanheede” (4.1075). And after her swoon, like the members of his court, he “gladeth” her and “hire sorwe slaketh” (4.1107). This frame could allow us to interpret Griselda’s outburst of feeling as consistent with her previous sober steadfastness to the extent that it is somewhat warranted by husbandly authority through Walter’s own expression of husbandly “concern.” It is useful to think of the kind of emotional balance discussed in the journées chrétiennes in Chapter 1 as a context for this final affective “assaying” of Griselda’s exemplary “wommanheede” (which “womanliness” at this point is hard to read as signifying anything other than female virtue). In Chapter 1, I discussed how a certain level of compassionate empathy along with the expression of a sad steadfastness were mutually constitutive of the kind of emotional range needed by a self-­restrained good wife. Again, to the extent that we are called upon to read this moment “like a good wife,” we are encouraged to stand with Griselda’s feeling long enough to understand the effort needed truly to embrace the full potential of marital affection and remain steadfast. Such a reading would thus be a more fully existential, affective rendition of the movement Petrarch and the Livre Griseldis describe. At the same time, however, the repetition of “crueltee” by Walter and Griselda so close together, but with such different registers of feeling, also encourages a comparison and contrast that makes it hard to resolve the contradictions here simply in terms of marital affection. It threatens, as it were, to overload the affective circuit and disrupt the even flow of affective energy such a circuit needs. In Petrarch and the Livre, the brevity of Griselda’s outburst of feeling, and the immediate return to ideological control brought about by the re-­dressing of Griselda and her return to joy, act as a kind of circuit breaker, as it were, that allows the propriety of Walter and Griselda’s exemplary marital conduct to be maintained. Such a circuit breaker followed by return to a

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“normal” flow of marital affect further encourages a similar management of affect on the part of the discerning reader, who is moved to accept the “higher” authority of Petrarch and his Christian moral. This turn to the proper becomes a much more difficult path to follow in the Clerk’s account, for all the reasons described above. As a result, our desire to linger with Griselda (and the Clerk) in such an excess of feeling has the potential to be what Sarah McNamer, following Martha Nussbaum, has termed an “upheaval of thought.” McNamer is discussing late fourteenth-­century laments of the Virgin, where the formerly restrained and decorous Virgin found in earlier lyrics now begins to rave and protest her son’s death. And she argues that the elements of emotional “excess” in these texts are clues that these texts exceed their ostensible devotional function and have the potential to produce upheavals of thought in the practitioners of such devotion. Such lyrics, and the affective devotion they encourage, thus become the locus for the construction of a dissenting vernacular ethics founded on a new construction of maternal compassion, one that insists that this emotion be the basis not only for sharing the suffering of another but also for seeking to prevent that suffering.89 While the representation of Griselda’s emotional excess in the Clerk’s Tale cannot be said explicitly to produce a dissenting vernacular ethics, nonetheless, the Clerk does force his readers here to attend to the affective flows that precede socialized emotion but that also, perhaps, continue to surround it and whose management remains crucial to emotion’s social force. Griselda’s show of feeling, as well as the empathy readers are called on to feel for her, does not resolve itself into socialized “emotion” in the sense that Petrarch tries to develop sober steadfastness as an emotive for a certain class of masculine subjects; instead, the Clerk and his readers linger in the aftermath of an upheaval of feeling on the part of the good wife that cannot be so readily or acceptably classified. How then are we to interpret the staged reincorporation of Griselda into the court and Walter’s household that takes place after such a complexly embodied understanding of what Griselda’s swoons might signify? We could read Walter’s actions, and those of his court, from the outside, as a kind of emotive tableau vivant. The “pitous face” (4.1104) that the people of Walter’s court show Griselda could then register simply as compassionate expressivity, like that of the “sad folk” who were loyal to her earlier, especially since the courtiers immediately move from pity to a version of sober steadfastness when they move to “gladden” Griselda and bring her back from her swoons. The release of feeling expressed through Griselda’s swoons, followed by the lessons in how to catch your countenance that the courtiers provide, would, in that case,



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operate to produce a preexisting set of socialized emotions rather like the tableaux of intercessory queens and wives kneeling to request mercy from their husband or male ruler—​­for example, Queen Philippa interceding on behalf of the burghers of Calais with her husband, King Edward III. This is the effect created in Petrarch’s original, by its swift and seamless movement from Walter’s news, to Griselda’s “unbearable joy” and “maternal tears,” and then to her successful reintegration as marquise. Here, though, still feeling the reverberations of Griselda’s swoons as the Clerk has embodied them, we appreciate the affective costs involved in constructing such a social expression of emotion as “natural” by Walter and his court. If we engage with Griselda in the moment of her swoon simply in terms of feeling, can we continue to uphold the authority of Walter and what he stands for as husband and ruler? Can we subscribe to the emotional cost of conduct in assaying womanhood in this way? If we answer no, we are led not to socialized feeling and sober steadfastness (as the “sad folk” of the city were earlier) with all of the rewards that its socially stabilizing role can bring but rather into outright revolt. If we answer yes, we can join the “piteous” folk of Walter’s court and focus on the staged program of feeling they act out here, use it as a kind of intimate script to allow us to act the way we know we should act, like Griselda to compose ourselves and catch again our outward appearance of proper conduct. But there is also a third option presented by the Clerk: the moment of affective intensity here could act as a kind of “in-­ between” that allows us, in an excess of feeling felt but then later potentially socially resolved, to appreciate and analyze the existential dilemma of ethical action in an inequitable world.90 If so, we are being asked to distinguish between feeling pity and feeling empathy: that is, between (1) feeling pity in the way that we see the members of the court showing a “pitous face” and moving on, a pity that keeps the person feeling it still separate from the object of pity; and (2) feeling empathy, that is, the kind of compassion where the affective connection obscures, confuses, obliterates the separation from the subject feeling compassion and the subject eliciting that compassion. What cannot happen is the kind of unitary mode of affect management that Petrarch sets up in his reclothing of Boccaccio’s story, one that allows a movement from the individual and the local to the universally true. Instead we have a much more intense and ambiguous engagement with the present, a different kind of “becoming historical” put in play by the Clerk’s affective engagement with the Griselda story. In a moment such as this, it is not enough to state that medieval subjects did not make authenticity the crucial marker of

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success in terms of compassion (or emotional utterances more generally), since the Clerk raises the question of authenticity as something that matters. However, as we see here, to be brought back to oneself is not simply a matter of finding the inner, true self. What we glimpse in this moment is a vivid sense of how late medieval subjects are negotiating the full range of possibility offered by the emotional states of sober steadfastness and marital affection in bringing individual agency, social authority, and emotional expression together in the context of the married household and the state relations it might represent.

Conclusion

Throughout the previous chapters, I have charted how conduct texts for women authorize certain modes of lay behavior as capable of articulating ethical subject positions different from but parallel in authority to those traditionally available to clerics and monastics. They do so from within a sacramental married estate that is characterized as a conjoined body at once masculine and feminine. Often the authority achieved by such texts comes from “translating” monastic modes into lay life, as in the case of the journées chrétiennes; or scriptural models to lay situations, as in the Miroir des bonnes femmes; or secular genres to the ethical concerns of women, such as in the Speculum dominorum or the Chastoiement des dames. In both the Livre du chevalier and the Menagier, for example, we saw their lay authors also privileging personal experience—​­family history, historical examples, fabliau, folktale, proverbs—​­as useful sources of authoritative wisdom with which to develop models of good conduct. And in Chapter 4 we considered how patterns of authoritative ethical conduct could be developed from narrative invention tout court through the models of affect management made possible in the telling and retelling of the Griselda story. In what follows I would like to highlight the implications of this discussion for larger questions in the period: the relationship of conduct to other literary production, to work on medieval affect and the history of emotion, to the history of marriage, and to the history of gender and sexuality more generally. More than conduct literature for men, writings about the good wife challenge the stability of distinctions between “old” and “new,” conservation and innovation, didactic and literary, religious and secular, hegemonic and marginal, empowerment and subordination. Frequently blurring distinctions between religious and secular, and in the process distinguishing lay female conduct from that of women religious, such texts create new synergies between religious and secular practices. If the subjects articulated by such

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conduct texts are “orthodox” in religious terms, it is an orthodoxy defined not so much in terms of theological, or even moral categories, but by the articulation and performance of an emergent discourse of self-­restrained, ethical behavior in the world. This suggests that we should be cautious about constructing too rigid a distinction between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in the period and instead remain sensitive to the influence of “extremism” of whatever sort, as much as doctrinal difference or lay–­clerical divisions, in determining what constitutes dissident or heretical behavior needing to be excised from the body politic. Equally, although the conduct of the good wife necessitates an exploration of the gendered and sexualized material contexts in which such conduct is manifested, these texts also depend upon a productively relational understanding of gender and sexual difference when it comes to the married household. If the ethical system constructed by the controlled interactions of good wife and good husband comes to signify appropriate state relations by the early modern period, it is because texts exploring the proper behavior of the married household have taken on the complex issues raised by thinking about how to cultivate caring, ethical relations within unequal power relations. Following Kathleen Ashley and Robert Clark, I have treated such movements in the conduct of married lay lives as a trans-­European phenomenon. But the significant differences in how the affective circuit operates in Petrarch’s framing of the Griselda story and in the various English and French appropriations of his tale in the 1390s suggest that regional differences in marriage law and custom might alter substantially how such a trans-­European phenomenon is worked out on the ground. Both Petrarch’s and the Menagier’s use of female virtue can be read as operating within a hierarchized sex/gender system that favors the rule of husband over wife, sovereign over subject. Yet the ways that they engage with the inequity of late medieval social structures differ significantly. The Menagier, I have argued, leaves room to maneuver for its bourgeois married couple and experiments in unpredictable ways with narrative and social structures. In contrast, Petrarch’s revision of Boccaccio would seem to initiate the kind of masculinist structuring of the married relations prevalent in early modern, proto-­capitalist northern Italian society, which we associate with the rise of modern patriarchy. So, too, important differences in form and content between a noble-­ authored text such as the Livre du chevalier and a more “bourgeois” text such as the Menagier suggest that economic, estate, and familial influences also impact in significant ways how the “good wife” is imagined. Lynn Staley and



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Carolyn P. Collette have argued for a particular interest in the married household as a model for state relations at the court of Charles V, a reason, perhaps, for the particular interest in the Griselda story among upper-­level members of Parisian society in the 1390s. At the same time, their work and others such as Renate Blumenfeld-­Kosinski and Kiril Petkov’s collection Philippe de Mézières and His Age suggest the need to consider the “traveling” nature of “courtier” culture in this moment, for example, when analyzing and understanding Philippe de Mézières’s influence across English and French court culture in the period. Thus, while Chaucer’s Clerk may foreground Petrarchan authorship of the story in the prologue to his tale, there are probably equally important French influences determining why Chaucer might take up the Griselda story at this moment, ones that have a different social and political emphasis from that of northern Italian culture. And neither influence may match exactly to the unique valences of an “English” attention to marriage and conduct in the period. Paradoxically, then, in considering the trans-­European nature of conduct literature in the period, when it comes to issues of transmission and influence, the local and regional may be crucially important in creating an aura of authenticity when performing the “universality” of conduct. Similarly, the supposed divide between didactic and “literary” is often crossed, blurred, or rearticulated in conduct texts during this period. As I suggest in Chapter 1, apparently “religious” devotional texts such as the journées chrétiennes provide a template within which to frame more wide-­ ranging questions of female conduct, one we can see active in the Menagier’s decision to start its discussion of wifely conduct with a consideration of how to incorporate devotion into the bourgeois wife’s day. The use of narrative by the Menagier and the ways that versions of the Griselda story are employed to provide examples of husbandly and wifely conduct suggest that we might reasonably approach other popular “literary” texts, such as late medieval romances, from the point of view of household conduct. For example, the composition of a manuscript “miscellany” such as Oxford Bodleian Codex Ashmole 61, viewed through the lens of conduct literature, demonstrates a method of selection motivated by the need for all members of a gentry or bourgeois household to have access to the widest variety of guides for conduct. Thus Codex Ashmole 61 places prayers, meditations, and lyrics, saints lives and legends, conduct texts such as “How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter,” exempla and comic tales, and romances such as Sir Cleges or Sir Orfeo alongside each other.1 In ways that parallel the personalized organizational principles of the Menagier, a collection such as Codex Ashmole 61

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might thus reflect the importance of “household knowledges,” as much as external authorities, in providing the local context needed to frame properly the performance of conduct and provide adequate articulations of subjectivity for their late medieval lay readers. We might thus imagine a collection such as Codex Ashmole 61 functioning like the narrative frames of the Menagier or Chevalier, as a way of adapting and localizing the trans-­European systematization of conduct for the various members of a gentry or bourgeois household in a particular temporal or geographical location. Or we might imagine such a collection functioning as a truncated, less privileged (or more portable and accessible) version of the personal library that the husband-­author of the Menagier can offer to his wife. As I have argued in Conduct Becoming, the production of such household knowledge crucially depends upon the proper incitement and management of affective connections between husband and wife and between the members of the household that they establish. When I began this book, I did not expect, in taking up the question of female conduct, to attend to affect and emotion in such a thoroughgoing way. But if embodiment is crucially a potential and traditional impediment for female agency (and for married lay agency more generally), then it is not surprising, perhaps, that a focus on marital affection might provide a crucial mode for dealing with the dilemma of what to do with an identity that too often has been tied to a wayward sexuality. The emotionally performative reading encouraged by the conduct texts I have been examining does not attempt to elicit forms of preexisting passions from within but instead provides a way of developing forms of embodied cognition in its subjects that comes from modulating and managing the interfaces between theatricality and sobriety, masculinity and femininity, inner and outer, personally felt and externally provided. As I will suggest below, this takes the form of a tripartite model of affect, emotion, and habitus that provides a systematic approach to the implementation of marital affection and the development of a coherent and enabling new form of sexuality. Married men and women can thus be imagined as interacting in ways that are fully active in the world but that are not dominated by wayward sexual activity and an abjecting bodiliness. As conduct texts for women demonstrate, the empowered subject positions created by such activity between properly masculine men and feminine women is best achieved through self-­restrained manifestations of marital affection. Both sacramental and companionate models of marriage, developed to facilitate the business of the gentry and bourgeois household, encourage



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the development of marital affection as a major “good.” In such thinking, the performative “I take you,” uttered by husband and wife in the marriage ceremony, which establishes the legal and sacramental essence of the married estate, should also be fulfilled through the repeated emotive performance of “I will care for you” that establishes and develops marital affection. Such an emotive may initially be “felt” in largely physical, gendered terms—​­a husband providing the appropriate clothing and housing for a wife, a wife providing the appropriate level of household maintenance. But as a conduct text such as the Menagier or the Livre du chevalier indicates, “I will care for you” can also shade into “I care about you,” into a kind of affection that looks much more like what the modern term signifies. This emotive, however, in either of its forms, develops because of and in spite of all the complex, inchoate, even contradictory feelings circulating around it. These may be negative: the “unpleasures” of sex—​­if it’s a much older husband and a younger wife—​­or other differences that can develop between two people—​­outright hostility or difficulty of temperament. Or they may be more neutral or positive in relation to marital affection: physical needs shown by a spouse, gratitude, emotional support, and so on. We have discussed similar statements clustering around the marriage performative, following Sedgwick, as periperformatives, working in a conduct text such as the Menagier along with the marriage performative to create a theater of marriage and to enable the performative to have real effects in the world. Here, too, we might see such feelings circulating around the emotional expression of care that makes marital affection manifest with real effects in the world as “peri-­emotives” clustering around the emotive “I care for you.”2 I’m suggesting, then, that we pay more attention in our historicizing of premodern emotion to the role of affect as a kind of peri-­emotive, not something left behind in the process of sociolinguistic fixing whose “end” is the production of a (new) emotion, but rather a crucial part of the ongoing process of emotivity itself. We need, then, to attend to what is going on in the room, as it were, to what is “beside” the emotive, if we are to avoid the reification of a specific “historical” emotion and the ideological structures it becomes part of and helps perpetuate. The complex interaction of peri-­emotive and emotive that is needed to ensure the necessary repetitions across time and space and the diversity of individual embodied manifestations of this emotivity produce a certain level of emotional mouvance that needs to be accounted for in any attempt to historicize medieval embodied cognition. In this context performative reading is emotive reading of a particular

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kind, one where marital affect becomes “sticky” in Sara Ahmed’s terms. As Ahmed notes in her discussion of happiness: “happiness functions as a promise that directs us toward certain objects, which then circulate as social goods. Such objects accumulate positive affective value as they are passed around. . . . ​ Affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects.”3 As the discussion in the book demonstrates, attending to conduct intensifies marital affect in a way that makes it “sticky” in the way Ahmed describes. This might take the material form of a book that actually passes from one hand to another, or orally given and received advice (as imagined by the Menagier), or the debate between wife and husband that the Chevalier describes, or it might materialize in the formation of patterns of behavior that link the domestic and public (as the private devotion of the good wife, or the parental relationships between father/mother and children, or between householder and servants, as described in the Menagier). In all these ways marital affection and the domestic relations it enables create affective connections that bolster and make visible the social, economic, affective affiliations that bind the married household together as a joint enterprise creates an economic, social, and emotional community. Moreover, because the affective bonds of the late medieval married household are inherently hierarchized and inequitable, the stickiness of marital affect becomes a crucial way to negotiate such hierarchized relationships in ways that provide new forms of agency and social representability for emergent groups in late medieval society. This interaction between peri-­emotive and emotive, between affect and emotion, does much to describe the complexity of how the conduct of marital affection is put in play in the world. But there is a final, third dimension to the emotive reading practices developed by the conduct texts considered in this book, what medieval writers might characterize as affectus or habitus. Recently, Holly Crocker has called for an attention to medieval affects as these provide artists and audiences a way of developing what was known in the medieval exegetical tradition as “the moral sense,” or the way one should act in the world. This sense is not simply prescriptive, but allows one to cultivate an ethical orientation that defines or remakes personal identity. It need not have any religious significance whatsoever. . . . ​It is what medieval and modern thinkers similarly refer to as the habitus. . . . ​ To practice an ethical habitus was to cultivate specific affects to



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produce different, frequently new forms of subjectivity. This was not just disciplinary; it was inventive, and sometimes unpredictable.4 The exercise of will involved, especially in moving through “I care for you” to “I care about you,” manifests this kind of higher-­level cultivation of feeling where embodied cognition becomes a kind of ethics. This is what conduct texts such as the Menagier ultimately move us toward, marital affection as a kind of habitus that creates a transformative affective space for the married household. This is the point where marital affection manifests the kind of sober self-­restraint of sad steadfastness (to use Middle English terms), one that is capable of providing a recognizable habitus that can define and promulgate a new “middling” ethics and identity. Without this tripartite modeling of marital affection as sober self-­restraint it is hard to imagine how lay married relations could come to be seen by the end of this period as constituting their own kind of sexuality, the prototype for what will come to be understood as modern heterosexuality, and thus a set of practices that equip the married household to be seen as a fitting model for state relations. As I have argued, the shift of focus in terms of married relations initiated by conduct literature for women—​­away from marriage as dynastic transfer of property, or romantic love as the privileged path to ennobling behavior, or a penitential understanding of married relations simply as potentially wayward sexual relations—​­provides the foundation for a profound re-­ formation of late medieval/early modern sexualities. The discourses of medieval romantic love and the discourses of modern romantic love, themselves operating in very different terms and very different historical terrains, can obscure the innovation in gender and sexuality taking place in the central and later Middle Ages. The conservatism of this new sex/gender system should not blind us to its own internal tensions and contradictions and the experimental force (with an attendant capacity for variation and complexity) that it is capable of generating. Destabilizing what and how the feminine signifies certainly installs new forms of masculinity in ruling positions (husband/ruler of household) but it also empowers the feminine in unexpected ways as wife and governor of the household and gives the married household new representational purchase in terms of how state relations are imagined.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Caesarius, The Dialogue of Miracles, 2:313–­14 (chap. 24, “Of the Purgatory of a Usurer of Liège”). 2. For a modern edition of the Enseignments à sa fille Isabelle, see The Instructions of Saint Louis, ed. O’Connell. 3. For an edition of the Latin text, see “Le Speculum dominarum de Durand de Champagne,” ed. Dubrulle, 2 vols. Mews, “The Speculum dominarum (Miroir des dames),” 22–­23, provides a list of the surviving manuscripts of Le Miroir des dames and discusses the French and Burgundian aristocratic and royal owners of these manuscripts during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. 4. Three copies of the Miroir des bonnes femmes survive: Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS fr. 213, fols. 86–­139; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) MS Arsenal 2159; Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, Rare Books and Manuscript Library Codex 659, fols. 65r–­ 84v [incomplete]. There is no modern edition. 5. However, the two earliest surviving manuscripts of the Menagier, both from the fifteenth century—​­Paris, BnF, MS fr. 12477; and Brussels, Bibliothèque royale, MS 10310-­10311—​­have Burgundian ducal connections. Carroll (Painting and Politics in Northern Europe, 22–­23) notes the strong interest in marriage symbolism at the Burgundian court during this period, especially how marriage provided a new way of understanding the relationship between a ruler and his people. 6. See Codex Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse, ed. George Shuffelton, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008). 7. The German translation of Le Livre du chevalier, Der Ritter vom Turn, was first printed in 1493, with numerous later editions throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The French text was also translated into English twice: first, a manuscript version in the mid-­ fifteenth century, and then a print translation by Caxton in 1484. The frequent linking of a conduct text such as Le Livre du chevalier with devotional material, ethical romances, and literary texts such the Griselda story or the story of Prudence and Melibee is a further indication of how this attempt to represent and prescribe the conduct of the good wife crosses modern generic distinctions between Latin and vernacular, religious and secular, didactic and literary. 8. Since medieval conduct texts for women assume a homology between “woman” and “wife,” I use both terms interchangeably when discussing these texts. Indeed, Middle English makes this homology between woman and wife explicit, since wif signifies both “woman” and

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“wife.” Even if other vernacular languages do not go this far, the homology “woman/wife” permeates medieval thought. 9. Ashley and Clark, Medieval Conduct, x. The proliferation of such books in the later Middle Ages, they note, is a Pan-­European phenomenon that allowed “literate readers to negotiate new sets of social possibilities” as “a combination of sociohistorical forces was changing religious practices, class structures, patterns of consumption, and political identities.” 10. See Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist. 11. See Turner, Chaucerian Conflict; Crocker, Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood; Karras, From Boys to Men; Neal, The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England. Neal argues that the social expectations of laymen and clerics were quite similar, emphasizing a masculine identity that is based on governance of the self, household, and servants and plain dealings with other men. 12. In England this is complicated by the continuing importance of the French of England as a written language of learning and culture. Thus from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries in England, the movement is often from Latin to the French of England, and only then to English, in widening waves of penetration of lay society. 13. Amsler, Affective Literacies; Rice, Lay Piety and Religious Discipline; Bryan, Looking Inward; Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion; Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness. 14. See McNamer, Affective Meditation, 12. 15. “As a substitute for not being able to understand the oral prayers, the practice of private prayer during the Mass, especially at the elevation of the Host, developed. Such prayers were apparently recited softly, from memory, with hands held in the palms-­touching posture. . . . ​The advent of silent reading allowed for a structured and sequential synchronization of the silent prayers or contemplations of the laity with the oral prayers of the celebrants of the Mass” (Saenger, “Books of Hours,” 153); see also Chapter 1. 16. See esp. McNamer, Affective Meditation, 15–­18, 25–­85. 17. Amsler, Affective Literacies, 102–­4. Amsler’s discussion of affective literacy constitutes the book as a kind of happy object in Sara Ahmed’s formulation of the term: “happiness functions as a promise that directs us toward certain objects, which then circulate as social goods. Such objects accumulate positive affective value as they are passed around. My essay will offer an approach to thinking through affect as ‘sticky.’ Affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects” (“Happy Objects,” 29). 18. This is, as Monique Scheer reminds us, a form of embodied cognition deeply embedded in social practices: “Many historians of emotion have looked for ‘emotion talk’ in personal letters, emphasizing the cognitive process of producing emotives. However, writing about feelings, talking about feelings (for example in the context of therapy), or putting a name on our emotions is always bound up in a bodily practice. The specific situation matters: The formulation of thought is different when one is moving a pen across paper or typing on a keyboard as opposed to when one is speaking. Writing for oneself, as in a diary, while sitting alone has interiorizing effects, whereas speaking out loud while in view of a dialogic partner has exteriorizing ones. The social relationship of the two speakers affects the bodily dimension of the emotion in tone of voice, heart rate, and facial expression, which are all guided by the practical sense of the habitus, somewhere between deliberate control and unconscious habit” (“Are Emotions a Kind of Practice,” 212). 19. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS Codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 14v. For a color image and facsimile edition of the manuscript, see The Hours of Mary of Burgundy. 20. For example, the iris in the glass vase is in Latin gladiolus, or “sword-­lily,” a traditional representation of Mary after the Passion because her heart was transfixed by a sword. The glass



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vase could be a symbol of Mary’s virginity, and carnations were symbols of constancy. The rosary, gold chain, and pearls scattered in the foreground are also similarly charged with possible spiritual significance. 21. As is so often the case in this conduct literature, the intensification of affect produced by thinking about the conduct of women in an embodied, experiential way is the intensification of what Sianne Ngai calls “ugly feelings”—​­the “affective gaps and illegibilities, dsyphoric feelings, and other sites of emotional negativity” that result in “ambivalent situations of suspended agency” (Ugly Feelings, 1). 22. Understanding marriage as a sacrament, of course, is not an invention of the Middle Ages; Saint Augustine is the most notable of the early church fathers in outlining its sacramental qualities. What theologians and canon lawyers in the twelfth century begin to do is try to delineate exactly what constitutes its essential elements as sacrament, notably whether consummation or personal consent constitutes the essence of its sacramental nature. For a general history of these developments, see Sheehan, Marriage, Family, and Law; and Schnell, “The Discourse of Marriage in the Middle Ages.” For discussions of marriage in an English context, see Mc­Sheffrey, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture; Hume, Chaucer and the Cultures of Love and Marriage; Lipton, Affections of the Mind; McCarthy, Marriage in Medieval England; Tavormina, Kindly Similitude. For discussions of marriage in medieval sermons and their importance in disseminating knowledge of marriage as a sacrament across Europe and throughout the laity, see d’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons and Medieval Marriage. For accounts of radical alternatives to traditional marriage in the Middle Ages, see Elliott, Spiritual Marriage; and Karras, Unmarriage. 23. For translated selections from medieval penitentials, see Medieval Handbooks of Penance, ed. McNeill and Gamer; see also Meens, Penance in Medieval Europe. 24. Michael Sheehan (Marriage, Family, and Law), Richard Helmholz (Marriage Litigation in Medieval England), and Frederik Pedersen (Marriage Disputes in Medieval England) have written about the role that ecclesiastical courts played in helping knowledge of the sacrament move down through the various levels of society. And such litigation by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries demonstrates that laypeople of a wide variety of classes understood how to make such canon law work to their advantage. 25. On consent, see Donahue, “The Canon Law on the Formation of Marriage”; and Donahue, “The Policy of Alexander the Third’s Consent Theory of Marriage.” 26. On marital affection, see Noonan, “Marital Affection in the Canonists”; Sheehan, “Maritalis Affectio Revisited”; and Pedersen, Marriage Disputes. 27. Pedersen, Marriage Disputes, 156. 28. Noonan, “Marital Affection in the Canonists,” 488. 29. Sheehan, Marriage, Family, and Law, 270, 271. 30. Margery Kempe, for example, takes care of her husband in his old age when he falls sick—​­changing and washing his dirty linens—​­even though they have lived apart for years and she has formally taken on the role of virginal bride of Christ. See book 1, chapter 76 of The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Windeatt, 219–­21. 31. D’Avray, “The Gospel of the Marriage Feast of Cana and Marriage Preaching in France,” 216. 32. “Est etiam dilectio socialis, qua debent se coniuges diligere, quia pares sunt et socii. . . . ​ Unde si vis nubere, nube pari” [BnF lat. 15943, fol. 144va–­144vb]; cited by d’Avray and Tausche, “Marriage Sermons in ad status Collections,” 128–­29. D’Avray and Tausche note that Guibert’s use of the phrase “equal and partners” is remarkable because “pares” is left unqualified. 33. Pedersen, Marriage Disputes, 172.

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34. The Treasure of the City of Ladies, trans. Lawson, 130. Christine goes on in some detail about how a wife should persuade her husband to discuss their finances together, how she should be knowledgeable about the laws relating to rents and taxes, know all about the work on the land of an estate, even to the extent of visiting the fields herself and handling the sale of the harvest. Margaret Paston (1423–­84), a member of the Norfolk gentry family whose extensive correspondence has been preserved as the Paston Letters, is a case in point. Since her husband was frequently in London to defend family interests, it fell to Margaret to manage the day-­to-­day affairs of their properties back home, even at times facing armed opponents seeking to physically eject her from disputed estates. See The Paston Women, ed. Watt. 35. See Sperling and Wray, Across the Religious Divide. 36. Howell, The Marriage Exchange. 37. Howell, “The Properties of Marriage,” 31. 38. See d’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons and Medieval Marriage. 39. See Jordan, “The Household and the State.” 40. Performing Polity, 61. 41. Performing Polity, 60. Nicole Oresme’s translation of Aristotle’s Politiques in 1374, for example, was commissioned by Charles V and remained popular in court circles well into the fifteenth century (based on the existence of a great many manuscripts). One should note as well Christine de Pizan’s political writing, especially Le Livre des faits et bonnes moeurs du roi Charles V le Sage and Le Livre du corps de policie. 42. Carroll, Painting and Politics, 22–­23; Nicholas of Cusa, De concordantia catholica, 2.4.331 (in Opera Omnia, 348). 43. Carroll, Painting and Politics, 23; see also Prevenir and Blockmans, The Burgundian Netherlands, 214ff. For Philip’s installation as Count of Flanders in 1419, see Chastellain, Oeuvres, 1:66–­67. For Philip’s Joyous Entry as Duke of Brabant, see de Dynter, Chronique des ducs de Brabant, 3:500–­502. Carroll notes: “Although the text of Philip’s oath at his Joyous Entry has not, to my knowledge, been published, it was undoubtedly an updated variant of the original blijde inkomst oath of 1356, published in Ria van Bragt, ‘De Blijde Inkomst van der Hertogen van Brabant Johanna en Wenceslas (3 Januari 1356),’ Anciens Pays et Assemblées d’États 13 (1956): 96–­107” (Painting and Politics, 195 n. 145). As we have already noted, two of the three complete surviving manuscripts of the Menagier have a Burgundian provenance from this period. 44. For arguments that premodern sexualities were not heterosexual in the modern sense, see Schultz, Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness; and Lochrie, Heterosyncrasies. 45. Brown-­Grant, French Romance of the Later Middle Ages, 129–­218, argues that a similar shift occurs in late medieval French romance. She notes the relative scarcity of depictions “of extramarital relations between an unmarried male lover and a married lady, this traditional romance model being predicated on the idea of love-­service as ennobling and as an enhancement of military prowess.” Instead, the late medieval romances she examines focus on marriage and family relations and are concerned “with the regulation of sexuality, both male and female, and its containment within the bounds of properly sanctioned marriage” (216). 46. Lochrie, Heterosyncrasies, esp. xi–­xxv. “Heterosyncrasies” is Lochrie’s coinage, “wrought from the ‘hetero’ of heterosexual and ‘syncrasy’ of ‘idiosyncrasy,’ meaning a ‘mixing together.’ The word opposes a unified, monolithic, and presumptive understanding of heterosexuality in favor of a more idiosyncratic, diversified, and even perverse take on heterosexuality” (xix). For an example of a later, “sedimented” and hegemonic form of the medieval couple-­centered, affective contract I am describing in this book, we might turn to Valerie Traub’s description of the development in the early modern period of “domestic heterosexuality,” a “new marital regime in



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which erotic desire became the sine qua non of conjugal life” (The Renaissance of Lesbianism, 268). 47. For a fuller account of such a logic of the preposterous, see Burger and Kruger, Queering the Middle Ages, xii–­xiv: “The logic of the queer also effects a disturbance of temporality that is precisely ‘preposterous.’ ‘The stability or determinacy of linguistic or erotic positioning’ to which Edelman calls attention depends on a certain stabilization of temporal sequence into narratives of causation where sexual norms can be given their necessary and inescapable history. In Western, Judeo-­Christian understandings, ‘proper’ sex takes as its ultimate cause the divine institution of heterosexuality in both the biblical narrative and in the structure of the natural (‘procreative’) world. If queer theory exposes the fictionality of such sexual constructions, it also suggests that the stabilization of a sequential ‘pre’ and ‘post,’ cause and effect, might be thought otherwise. Sexual norms themselves demand not only a reified sexual positionality but also a stabilized temporality. These are condensed both in a myth of origins—​­for the West, the story of Adam and Eve—​­that does not reflect some true origin but is rather the effect of a particular human understanding of ‘proper’ sexuality, and in a myth of nature, considered separate from and prior to the cultural but in fact an effect constructed from within culture to serve particular cultural ends. . . . ​Might we need (preposterously) to rethink what we have come to know as the Middle Ages not as preceding modernity but as the effect of a certain self-­construction of the modern, which gives itself identity by delimiting a ‘before’ that is everything the modern is not? . . . ​ “[Such a rethinking] will, we hope, push simultaneously in two directions. Recognizing the Middle Ages as retrospective construction, how can we—​­queerly, preposterously—​­return, from our current postmodern moment, to deconstruct the medieval as we have come to know it? How can we see anew, restore, that which has been cast aside in order to stabilize a Middle Ages standing counter both to classical antiquity and to a modernity that saw itself (and was seen by nineteenth-­century historicism) as a ‘renaissance’ of the classical? . . . ​ “The work of returning, preposterously, to rethink the Middle Ages from the perspectives of the postmodern and the queer, needs, too, to be brought back to a present that might think itself immune from history. For, indeed, one way the postmodern has often been too easily proposed is as a radical movement beyond a history thought somehow to have come to an end.” 48. Alexandra Wolfe, “What They Were Thinking: A Purity Ball, Oroville, Calif.,” New York Times Magazine, November 13, 2011. 49. Lois Smith Brady, “Vows: Stephen Davis and Jeffrey Busch,” New York Times, December 3, 2009. 50. See, for example, Warner, in The Trouble with Normal, who argues that the movement for gay marriage has embraced an ethic of sexual shame, thereby de-­emphasizing gay sexuality and alternative forms of relationship; and Edelman, in No Future, who poses the queer as the embodiment of a relentlessly narcissistic, antisocial, and future-­negating drive in opposition to a universal politics of “reproductive futurism” focused on “the child.” 51. Brady, “Vows.”

Chapter 1. Laboring to Make the Good Wife Good in the journées chrétiennes 1. Galloway, “Marriage Sermons, Polemical Sermons,” 6–­7. 2. See Walter Hilton’s “Mixed Life,” ed. Ogilvie-­Thomson. Hilton’s text, written for a

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wealthy married man he knew personally, talks about the mixed life as the natural space of the devout noble layman, whereas before the mixed life had been applied to friars or occasionally extended to bishops. See also Bryan, Looking Inward; Rice, Lay Piety and Religious Discipline; Carey, “Devout Literate Laypeople”; and Hoogvliet, “ ‘Car Dieu vault ester serui de touts estaz.’ ” 3. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights, 204. 4. Gillespie, “Vernacular Books of Religion,” 317. 5. Gillespie, “Vernacular Books,” 317. 6. Gillespie, “Lukynge in haly bukes,” 4. 7. Benedicta Ward describes the process of lectio divina thus: “The fragmentation of the concept of prayer inevitable upon its more schematic analysis has made the use of such terms as ‘reading,’ ‘meditation,’ and ‘prayer’ misleading. For Anselm and his predecessors these were different aspects of the same thing, not separate exercises in their own right. Reading was an action of the whole person, by which the meaning of a text was absorbed until it became prayer. It was frequently compared to eating—​­‘taste by reading, chew by understanding, swallow by loving and rejoicing’ [a citation of Anselm’s Meditation on Human Redemption], and the text ‘O taste and see how gracious the Lord is’ was applied more often to the reading of the scriptures than to the Eucharist before the twelfth century” (The Prayers and Meditations of St. Anselm, trans. Ward, 43–­44; cited by Gillespie, “Lukynge in haly bukes,” 5). As Gillespie notes, the monastic view of a ladder of contemplation—​­reading, prayer, and meditation—​­posits an access to the whole of scripture, either in Latin or translation, that the late medieval laity did not possess: “Rolle, in Desyr and Delit, . . . ​recommends that the ‘skyll’ or mind should be ‘ussede in gastely thynges, als in medytacyons, and orysouns and lukynge in haly bukes’ [Rolle, English Writings, ed. Allen, 58]. This process of ‘lukyng’ seems to be a more random and less systematic exercise than lectio divina, and may perhaps be likened to the freer kinds of spiritual reading recommended by patristic authors. . . . ​Reading is recommended as a variant activity to be employed when prayer and meditation appear fruitless and unsatisfying. Reading is far from the essential first step envisaged by Guigo and others, and has become a means to eschew idleness” (“Lukynge in haly bukes,” 5). 8. As Gillespie points out, “Rolle’s own ecstatic chapel experience proceeds from the discipline of the Psalms and it is significant that he makes no attempt in his vernacular instructions and meditations to evolve or recommend a philosophy of reading as a basis for meditation. Rather he emphasizes the value of reflection on particular actions and images from Scriptural narratives (especially the Passion of Christ as elaborated by tradition and from the liturgy), focusing on the affective potential of such activities for kindling devotion. Although Rolle recognizes that ‘other mens’ words can be of some use in the very early stages of affective reformation and spiritual development, for him ‘lukynge in haly bukes’ comes a poor third to prayer and meditation. . . . ​In this branch of the discipline of meditation, Christ’s body becomes the book: ‘Study then, O man, to know Christ. . . . ​His body, hanging on the cross, is a book open for your perusal.’ [The Monk of Farne, ed. Farmer, 76]. In this ‘reading’ process, the five chief wounds are the vowels and the other wounds form the consonants” (“Lukynge in haly bukes,” 9–­10). 9. Duffy, Marking the Hours, 5–­6. 10. As Kathryn A. Smith notes: “One of the foremost appeals of the book of hours for its owners was its flexibility of content. Apart from the Calendar, the Hours of the Virgin itself, the Penitential Psalms (Psalms 6, 31, 37, 50, 101, 129, and 142, the theme of which is repentance of sin), Litanies, suffrages or memoriae (short prayers to saints, usually found in the Hour of Lauds), and the Office of the Dead, considered the ‘essential’ elements of Continental books of



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hours, a typical example of the genre could include a selection of other popular or more unusual offices, prayers and texts. More idiosyncratic in their contents than their Continental counterparts, the only constant or essential element in thirteenth-­and early fourteenth-­century insular books of hours is the Hours of the Virgin itself. Many of the added prayers, poems and other devotions that enrich surviving examples were written in vernacular languages, an expressive mode that permitted the laity potentially greater access to forms of religious experience that had previously been the preserve of the clergy” (Art, Identity and Devotion, 3). 11. Hasenohr, “La Vie quotidienne de la femme vue par l’Église,” 19–­101; for a richly suggestive discussion of the journées chrétiennes, see Clark, “Constructing the Female Subject in Late Medieval Devotion.” Hasenohr’s critical treatment of these texts implicitly characterizes them as a distinct genre—​­alongside sermons, Books of Hours, and penitential manuals—​­in the repertoire of religious instruction aimed at the laity. But it might be more useful to view the texts more loosely as part of a continuum made up both of devotional treatises addressing the proper conduct of the mixed life (for both laymen and laywomen) and of more secular ethical works (such as Le Menagier de Paris or Le Livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry) addressed specifically to actual or would-­be wives. Some of these journées chrétiennes are explicitly organized in terms of the liturgical hours, providing appropriate prayers and devotions to be said at each point of the day. Others limit such private devotion to the times of the day most suited to a married woman’s crowded timetable, notably the hours of waking and sleeping, the leisure time after dinner, and the time for reflection within morning mass. In their most extreme form, these guides advocate, as Clark puts it, “a constant mental effort to override nondevotional activites by projecting spiritual significance onto them in a systematic way” (“Constructing the Female Subject,” 170). 12. McNamer, Affective Meditation, 12; quoting Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 104–­5. 13. McNamer, Affective Meditation, 13. 14. They thus outline a somewhat different kind of intimate script and production of emotion than the texts examined by McNamer. In her first chapter (“Compassion and the Making of a True Sponsa Christi”), for example, she discusses monastic women’s deployment of an institutionally sanctioned desire to marry Christ in order to construct agency for themselves: “if the standard rituals were enacted, chastity observed, and, crucially, the fitting feelings repeatedly performed, female religious could become literally, by which I mean legally, married to Christ—​ ­not only in this life but for all eternity” (Affective Meditation, 28). As we will see, this provides a powerful model for clerics writing journées for lay married women, but such texts directed at secular women have to engage with the contradictions and complexities of married women’s material contexts as wife, mother, and manager of the day-­to-­day activities of the household. 15. Medieval Conduct, x. 16. See d’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons, esp. 1–­30. 17. Medieval English Prose for Women, ed. Millett and Wogan-­Browne, 21. See also De Gendt, L’Art d’éduquer les nobles damoiselles, 156–­57, for a discussion of Saint Jerome’s writing on this subject. 18. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century, 256; quoted in Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion, 2. The English translation is by Pantin; he provides the original Latin (from Oxford, New College MS 92) in The English Church, 276. 19. Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion, 2. 20. As Carey points out: “Deanesly noted that the most popular devotional works bequeathed in the fourteenth and fifteenth century were, in this order: the works of Rolle and Walter Hilton, Nicholas Love’s translation, the Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Crist, the Prick of Conscience (ascribed to Rolle after 1400), the Pore Caitiff, Grace Dieu and, in no particular order,

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the Life of St. Catherine of Siena, the Revelations of St. Brigit of Sweden, Speculum Christiani, Suso’s Orologium Sapientiae and the Chastising of God’s Children. English legends of the saints were also popular. This is quite remarkable, for if we were to judge by the number of surviving manuscripts, texts such as Mirk’s Liber festialis, Grosseteste’s Chateau d’Amour, the Manuel des Péchés, and the Somme le Roi, or their English translations, should feature at least if not more prominently than such comparatively rare texts as the Grace Dieu, Suso’s Orologium or the lives of Catherine and Brigit. Yet the Manuel des Péchés is mentioned in only one will noted by Deanesly, and that by a clergyman, and the others not at all. Even the seeming exception of the Speculum Christiani, a text based heavily on the seven-­point programme for the edification of the laity devised in 1281 by John Pecham, Archbishop of Canterbury, is mitigated by its use of Richard Rolle” (“Devout Literate Laypeople,” 370; citing Deanesly, “Vernacular Books”). 21. Andrew Taylor, “Into His Secret Chamber,” 47; Taylor is quoting from The English Works of John Fisher, ed. Mayor, 1:294–­95. Taylor also notes: “Cicely, duchess of York and mother of Edward IV and Richard III, rose at seven each morning, and with one of her chaplains recited the matins of the day followed by the matins from the Little Office of Our Lady. She then heard a low mass in her chamber, and after that she breakfasted. When breakfast was finished she entered the chapel, where part of her household would be assembled, and here she assisted at the Office of the day and two low masses. Leaving her chapel, she passed straightaway to dinner. The meal was accompanied by the reading aloud of some pious work, such as Hilton’s Contemplative and Active Life, pseudo-­Bonaventure’s Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ, the apocryphal Infancy of the Saviour, or the Golden Legend. After dinner she would give audience, rest for a quarter of an hour and then turn to her private devotions. At supper she repeated to those around her what she had heard at dinner” (46–­47, citing “Orders and Rules of the House of the Princess Cecill,” 37). Taylor adds: “For these women, daily life had taken on both the discipline and the ritual dignity of the liturgy; it had been apportioned, with due hours for business and for honest recreation, its divisions marked off by a regular sequence of prayers, followed with only minor variations from day to day. Reading played a vital role in these devotions. Elegant private Books of Hours allowed the Duchess of York and Margaret Beaufort to participate in the lengthy daily liturgy, almost as if they were in orders. Nor, when Margaret Beaufort turned to private meditation, did she do so unaided; she took up a book. For such pious laywomen, devotional reading was a source of personal solace and relaxation, as well as an edifying accompaniment to dinner. Even when private prayer or meditation did not directly take place as a form of reading, it remained part of a cultural practice in which bookishness, privacy and piety were intimately connected” (47–­48). 22. See, for example, Rebecca Krug’s “Margaret Beaufort’s Literate Practice: Service and Self-­Inscription,” in her Reading Families, 65–­113. Krug notes, for example, that Caxton’s preface to his translation of the French romance Blanchardyn and Eglantine “announces Margaret’s concern with the education of England’s people. Like the good mother of conduct literature, Margaret, the king’s mother, is shown to care for readers by providing them with morally uplifting and socially useful books. In this way, Margaret, like her mother-­in-­law, provides literary ‘nourishment’ as a form of community service” (83). Krug argues that Margaret learned this from the model provided by her mother-­in-­law, Anne Stafford, whose involvement with books was communal, and her promotion of morally significant writing counted among her household duties. 23. Barratt, “Dame Eleanor Hull,” 293. 24. According to Eamon Duffy, “many of the Books of Hours which date from thirteenth century England can be associated with women, and no fewer than six of those made before 1300 contain what appear to be portraits of their female owners” (Marking the Hours, 11). See



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also Donovan, The De Brailes Hours, 183–­200; Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion. Duffy goes on to note that “this association with women would be a constant in the history of the Book of Hours, and would survive even the advent of print. Something like a quarter of the surviving Books of Hours printed for England before 1500 have been written in by women” (Marking the Hours, 180 n. 20). See also Erler, Women Reading, 116–­33, for a discussion of the physical evidence for women owners of religious incunabula in England. 25. See esp. Hasenohr, “La Vie quotidienne,” 20–­40. 26. Saenger, “Books of Hours,” 142; see also, Saenger, Space Between Words. 27. Saenger, “Books of Hours,” 142. 28. Saenger, “Books of Hours,” 142; Saenger goes on to say: “Fifteenth-­century devotional literature offers many clues as to which portions of the texts contained in books of hours were thought more apt to be read aloud or silently [these were the psalms, litany, offices of the hours]. . . . ​ “The rubrics of the canonical office of the Virgin and other prayers for oral recitation in many French, English, and Spanish books of hours confirm this hypothesis in that they were often partially in the vernacular so as to be fully comprehended by the person praying, while the texts themselves, which obtained force through pronunciation, remained in Latin. Moreover, other evidence associated with vernacular prayers for the hours which were not translations of the canonical offices indicate that the former may have been subsumed under the practice of private silent reading” (147–­48). 29. Saenger notes that “in the fifteenth century, the private reading of prayers and other devout texts during the Mass became a source of concern at least among some scholastics who were, of course, literate in Latin and able to understand the Mass as it was pronounced. Wessel Gansfort, to an audience literate in Latin, specifically forbade the practice of reading or praying during the Mass because it violated communal participation in its meaning, an ideal still held to be valid by modern Catholic liturgical reformers” (“Books of Hours,” 155). 30. See Riddy, “Fathers and Daughters in Holbein’s Sketch.” 31. Saenger, “Books of Hours,” 150. 32. See Rebecca Krug’s introduction, “From Law to Practice: Women, Resistance, and Writing” (Reading Families, 1–­17), where she discusses the advantages of considering medieval women’s participation in literate culture in terms of “literate practice” rather than legal models of literacy: “Practice theory in this way produces a less romantic version of women’s literate engagement than does the model of rebellion associated with figures such as the fictional Wife of Bath, but it allows for a more complicated presentation of individual action than has otherwise been available: it insists on the presence of social structure, individual players, and unequal power and resources in discussions of text-­based activity. “Further, ‘literate practice’ avoids the sense of stasis associated with ‘literacy,’ that is, the term allows me to resist the notion that the individual either is or is not literate, and to avoid a related idea that individuals’ literate investments never change. . . . ​Sharply divorced from the normative connotations of literacy, the term ‘literate practice’ describes the range of activities engaged in by individuals at varying times as well as the diversity of social meanings of those activities as associated with and reshaped by literate agents” (7). 33. Saenger, “Books of Hours,” 153. See also Andrew Taylor, “Into His Secret Chamber,” 41–­61. 34. English translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 35. “Selonc son estat et sa condition en tele maniere que tout che que l’en dist ou fait—​­soit en conseil ou en jugement ou en justice ou en grasce ou en quelconques autres coses—​­soit fait

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selonc Dieu et selonc son plaisir et sa volente, quar la volente de Dieu si est nostre rieule” (fol. 41r). 36. Here we see the importance of mental prayer as a creator of a kind of virtual private space and time, a privacy reinforced by but not dependent on having an actual private space. Paris, BnF, MS fr. 15212 contains: fol. 1, Chronique universelle (condensed); fol. 16, Miserere and Caritas; fol. 126v, Priere a la Vierge (in verse); fol. 132, Comment on se doit maintenir selonc les heures; fol. 156, Le Quinse signe que avenront devan le jugement; fol. 161v, La Vie . . . ​le Magdaleine; fol. 169v, Li Sermons de la douce vierge Marie by Guillaume d’Auvergne; fol. 181, Miracles de Notre Dame (in verse). Note also that in London, MS BL, Royal 16.E.XII, the brief introductory directives about the religious life are, according to Hasenohr, “filled out a bit more in MS Royal 16.E.XII than in MS fr. 15212” (“La Vie quotidienne,” 80; “un peu plus étoffées dans le ms Royal 16.E.XII que dans le ms fr. 15212”). The Royal manuscript prescribes two examinations of conscience each day—​­in the evening before going to sleep and in the morning upon waking. After confessing in the evening, ask God’s pardon, pray to him and to the angels that they will protect you at night, sprinkle holy water on the bed, make the sign of the cross, and once in bed keep yourself from thinking about unprofitable things. Follow much the same procedure in the morning. Before getting dressed make the sign of the cross, raise your eyes on high and with hands crossed say a prayer. Once arisen and dressed, sprinkle yourself with holy water, kneel down, and record what you did the day before, ask pardon for your sins, and when you can go to confession to confess them. Make good resolutions for the day. 37. “Apres que vous seres retourne de leglise en vostre maison entendes a vostre mesnage iusques au disner” [a.iii.]. 38. French: “Apres que serez retourne de leglise entendez en toute bonne paix a vostre affaires en instruysant en ce que vous pourrez en toutes bonnes meurs voz enfans et toute vostre famille en leur apprenant les commendemens de dieu. Les articles de la foy et toute leur creance et les enseignez a humblement e deuotement et davantaige de raison ne les tenez point oyseux ne vacabous. Mais faictes leur aprendre science [7v] ou excercisse honneste selon lestat que vouldrez quilz prennent. Ne souffrez en votre maison gens de mauuaise vie comme blasphemateurs et iureurs du nom de dieu ne de ses saincts. Menteurs larrons yurongnes ne paillars en quelque sorte que ce soit. Et se ne pouyez vous en deffaire ainsi comme vous pourrez remonstrez leur doulcement leur maauuaise vie affin quilz puissant ester enluminez et congnoistre la voye de penitence et de salut. Car si vous nen faisiez votre deuoir vous seriez cause et consentent [8r] de leur mal et en danger daller auecques eulx a perdicion.” 39. This could be the treatise “Some devout meditations upon which a person ought to meditate during the Holy Mass” (Paris, BnF, MS fr. 24439, fols. 38–­41v), discussed by Saenger (“Books of Hours,” 154, 172 nn. 108, 109), which declares “that the person who heard the Mass profitably was not the individual who listened to the words, but rather the one who remembered with his or her memory and heart the passion of our Lord” (154). The text notes: “the more devoutly and fervently one says these things in one’s heart, the more one can please God. And it could at times be done so devoutly that the person listening to the Mass would profit more than he who says it” (fol. 41; “tout plus devotement et en plus grant ferveur l’on dit ces choses ycy en son cueur que l’en peult plaire a Dieu. Et se pourroiet faire alcuneffoiz si devotement que celuy qui escoute la messe profiteroit plus que celuy qui la dit”); quoted by Saenger, “Books of Hours,” 172 n. 109). We might see something like this being put into practice in Petite instruction et maniere de vivre pour une femme seculiere when it describes (during the section on devotions during the mass) a the complex intertwining of literal action (elevation of the host) and inward



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commemoration, coupled with uttered prayers, “so that I may be crucified on the cross of penitence and mortification of my vices” (see note 39 below). 40. Petite instruction et maniere de vivre pour une femme seculiere (Troyes: Jean le Coq, [ca. 1554–­74]; first printed by Jean Jehannot, 1512–­17), [22]: “Et toutes les fois que vous voyez leuer nostre Seigneur Jesuchrist a la Messe pensez que vous le voyez esleuer en la croix: car sen est la representation. Et adoncques ladorez deuotement / et dictes. Aue sal[u]us mundi ou autre chose / et puis dictes. O Dieu le pere Eternel ie vous presente le sainct sacrifice que vostre beneist cher enfant vous a faict en larbre de la croix represente en ceste saincte Messe. Et vous requiers mon Dieu quen la vertu diceluy beneist et sainct sacrifice il vous plaise de me pardonner tous mes pechez et me donner la grace de faire vostre saincte volonte en toutes choses. Mon Dieu plaise vous me donner ceste grace que ie me puisse crucifier en la croix de penitence et de mortification de mes vices et mauuaises inclinations pour lamour de vous. Et quand on dira les Agnus dei qui tollis. Dictes deuotement. Mon Dieu ie desire vous receuoir en mon ame spirituellement par grace: en laquelle ie vous prie quil vous plaise habiter eternellement et iamais ne vous en separer. Et après au demourant de la Messe pensez a vostre point de la passion de nostre Sauueur Jesus / pour ce iour.” 41. “Instructions for a Devout and Literate Layman,” ed. Pantin, in Alexander and Gibson, Medieval Learning and Literature, Engl. trans. 398–­400, Latin 420–­22 (repr. as “A Spiritual Regimen for a Fifteenth-­Century Gentleman,” in Shinners, Medieval Popular Religion, 332–­34). One can imagine the devotee addressed in this text having already received (whether orally from the cleric writing this text or a confessor, or by owning a journée text like the Petite instruction et maniere de vivre) more detailed guidance about incorporating devotion into his daily life. The single-­page summary Pantin has published would then be just that, a summary reminder that the devotee could carry around with him at all times. 42. Perhaps because of this, the kind of texts it mentions for consultation during the mass have a distinctly clerical tinge to them, and the male devotee’s manner of engagement with them comes closer to a clerical lectio divina than is usual in other journées (whether intended for a male or female audience). On the other hand, the male devotee is also at times directed to oral prayer centered on the Virgin and the rosary, which seems more in keeping with an older mode of reading and meditation rather than the silent reading and affective piety that the journées emphasize with their meditations on the Passion and the Eucharist. This bifurcation may simply reflect a somewhat conservative approach to meditation on the part of the clerical author or it may be this cleric’s ambivalent response to the hybridity of the mixed life itself. If the latter, the more rote form of devotion may be a subtle way that the clerical author chooses to at once cultivate and cater to an educated and extremely devout lay urban professional or country gentry while at the same time containing the scope of such devotion and quasi-­clericalism by emphasizing certain traditionally orthodox modes of communal lay piety. 43. Indeed, one might argue that Pantin’s text manifests a “feminizing” extreme version of a devotional life that is able to dominate this man’s day much more than the more public role imagined for male devotees or noblewomen devotees in some of the more generic journées. Or perhaps Pantin’s text is able to imagine more fully than others the possibilities inherent in the paternal, head of household role and the devotional life—​­something we see taken up in King Louis IX’s conduct book for his daughter, discussed in Chapter 2. Similarly, we might see the important role the wife assumes in constructing an exemplary private religious practice as a kind of late medieval expansion of noblewomen’s patronage as devotion (in their earlier important role commissioning Books of Hours and devotional art). See Gee, Women, Art and Patronage. As

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Kathryn Smith notes (citing Gee’s work): “the religious and artistic patronage of laywomen and their involvement with art in all media was not exceptional: rather, it was a normative aspect of culture and religious experience in late medieval England. As patrons and recipients of illustrated religious manuscripts and in their roles as guardians of their families’ spiritual welfare, women like Lady Cobham, Margaret de Beauchamp, Hawisia de Bois and Isabel de Byron were, as Susan Groag Bell put it, ‘arbiters of lay piety’ within society as a whole” (Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion, 5); see also Bell, “Medieval Women Book Owners.” 44. Pantin’s instructions for a devout layman are unusual in being written in Latin. This might be seen as a gendered marker of the particularly devout nature of this devotee’s devotional life, an exceptional status that for a woman might be marked by more time spent on internal devotion, especially at night. 45. Hasenohr, “La Vie quotidienne,” 56. 46. Clark, “Constructing the Female Subject,” 170–­71, translating Hasenohr’s French version (“La Vie quotidienne,” 96) of the original Italian text. Although the addressees here are technically not yet married, their social situation and John’s treatment of them cast them as proto-­wives. 47. MS Arsenal 2176, fol. 109v–­110. English translation, Clark, “Constructing the Female Subject,” 175–­76; French: “Je croy, ma tres chere fille, que l’eure la plus prouffitable a vous et a nous [pour s’adonner à la contemplation] seroit de mynuyt apres dormir, apres la digestion de la viande, quant les labours du monde sont separez et delaissez, et quant aussi les voisins ne nous verront point et que nulz ne nous regardera fors Dieu et qu’i[l] n’y aura personne qui puisse veoir noz gemissemens ne les lermes et souspirs venans du perfond du cuer, ne aussi les ameres clameurs, plainctes et complainctes entrerompuez par fors souspirs, les prostracions et agenoillemens d’umilité, les yeux moulliez, la face muante ou suante, maintenant rouge, maintenant pale, quant on ne voit aussi batre la coulpe souvant et par grant contricion, baisier la terre par grant et humble devocion, lever les yeulx au ciel et les mains par grant desir, souvent plaier et entrelasser les bras comme se l’en acoloit son amy par grant amour, estandre le corps sur terre ou tout sur piez comme en une croix par grant compassion: telle chose est bonne a faire ou temps et en lieu que nul fors Dieu ne voie ces choses et autres semblablez signes de doulce devocion, lesquelles choses sont moult requises a ceste gracieuse oroison et euvre. Non obstant que en toute heure et en tout temps on doit, comme dit est devant, estre prest et diligent de drecier tousjours et lever continuellement sa pensee a Dieu, toutesvoies l’especiale heure si est l’eure de mynuyt.” (Hasenohr, “La Vie quotidienne,” 44–­45). 48. Although the Petite instruction et maniere de vivre advises the wife to be careful to keep good peace always between herself and her husband and to help to save each other, in many of the women’s journées, the wife’s real-­life husband is figured more as a problem to be surmounted. On the one hand, the clerical authors of the journées pragmatically acknowledge the necessity for the total submission on the part of a wife to her husband, and hence the husband’s (not cleric’s) total control over his wife’s spiritual as well as physical life. On the other hand, to the extent that such writers outline an intense devotional life for their lay female readers as ideal, they also tend to marginalize the husband in order to substitute themselves and Christ as the higher, spiritual masters of the female body. Thus, the husband is a largely absent figure in these texts, even in the bedchamber, where a perfect privacy is often imagined for the wife so that she can encounter her spiritual bridegroom, Christ. If the husband is acknowledged, it is as a menacing figure keeping the wife from achieving her goal of perfection. As Hasenohr wryly notes, in these texts “we are indeed a long way away from the doctrine of the mutual sanctification of spouses” (“La Vie quotidienne,” 49; “On est vraiment loin de la doctrine de la sanctification mutuelle des epoux”).



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49. Sharon Farmer cites Thomas of Chobham’s Manual for Confessors (ca. 1215), which argues that wives (even in the bedroom) “should employ persuasion, feminine enticements, and even deceit in their attempts to influence and correct the moral and economic behavior of their husbands” (Farmer, “Persuasive Voices,” 517). And Carolyn P. Collette notes: “The cult of St. Cecilia current in Italian and French intellectual circles from the thirteenth century through the Renaissance was not merely an example of a glorious martyrdom, it was a pattern of idealized wifely behavior. Sherry Reames’s article ‘Mouvance and Interpretation in Late-­Medieval Latin: The Legend of St Cecilia in British Breviaries’ calls attention to this shift of focus as it notes a tendency to ‘domesticate’ Cecilia’s legend in the late Middle Ages: ‘Indeed, one would hesitate to call her a hero at all on the basis of many of these breviaries, since they do not allow her to do anything except convert her own husband in the privacy of their bedroom, eventually refuse the persecutor’s order to sacrifice, and somehow acquire a group of female followers whom she commits to the Pope when she dies [Reames, 188].’ Reames notes that in the later Middle Ages saints’ lives in general were ‘apparently being revised and updated—​­brought into closer line, that is, with the values and expectations of the revisers’ own culture [Reames, 189]’ ” (Collette, Performing Polity, 50). 50. Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century, 80. 51. See Chapter 3 for a fuller discussion of the fraught representational status of the married bedchamber. 52. “Emotive” is a term formed by analogy to the role of “performative” in speech act theory, and coined by Reddy in The Navigation of Feeling. The term has proved generative for medievalist historians of emotion, notably Barbara Rosenwein (Emotional Communities, 18–­22) and Sarah McNamer (Affective Meditation, 12–­13). Emotives, as Reddy defines them, are “first-­ person, present tense emotion claims” that constitute “a form of speech act that is neither descriptive nor performative. . . . ​An emotive utterance, unlike a performative, is not self-­referential. When someone says, ‘I am angry,’ the word angry is not the anger, not in the way that, in ‘I accept,’ accept is the acceptance. As a result, an emotive is not a distinct type of speech act in the original sense of the term, because the original theoretical domain of speech act theory was restricted to utterances, without reference to how they came to be formulated. . . . ​Emotives are translations into words about, into ‘descriptions’ of, the ongoing translation tasks that currently occupy attention as well as of the other such tasks that remain in the queue, overflowing its current capacities. Emotives are influenced directly by, and alter, what they ‘refer’ to. Thus, emotives are similar to performatives (and differ from constatives) in that emotives do things in the world. Emotives are themselves instruments for directly changing, building, hiding, intensifying emotions, instruments that may be more or less successful” (Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 104–­5). 53. For a modern critical edition of the Middle English life of Elizabeth of Spalbeek by Philip of Clairvaux and a discussion of Elizabeth’s performatio Christi, see Brown, Three Women of Liège, 27–­50, 191–­217. 54. It should be clear that the terms I am using to describe this emotion counterbalancing the devotee’s compassion are exactly those Chaucer uses to describe Griselda in the Clerk’s Tale. See Chapter 4 for a discussion of the Griselda story as conduct text, one that explores the social consequences of such “sad steadfastness” for emergent, high-­status subjects in the later Middle Ages. 55. See Barbara H. Rosenwein’s recent discussion of “theatricality” and “sobriety” in terms of Margery Kempe and the Pastons respectively, in Generations of Feeling, 193–­224. She notes that the Pastons used as many emotion words as Kempe, but theirs “tended to emphasize quiet

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and equilibrium” (220). If they expressed feelings in such attenuated ways, Rosenwein argues, it was because such emotions best suited achieving the goals of practical and productive members of the gentry, that is, “labor, diligence, earning a living” (224). 56. In Holy Feast and Holy Fast, Bynum refutes “the standard interpretation of asceticism as world-­rejection or as practical dualism and of the standard picture of medieval women as constrained on every side by a misogyny they internalized as self-­hatred or masochism. Rather,” she explains, “I argue that medieval efforts to discipline and manipulate the body should be interpreted more as elaborate changes rung upon the possibilities provided by fleshliness than as flights from physicality. I also demonstrate the extent to which religious women derived their basic symbols from such ordinary biological and social experiences as giving birth, lactating, suffering, and preparing and distributing food. The identification of this characteristic of women’s symbols—​­which contrasts sharply with the enthusiasm contemporary males felt for symbols of reversal (especially the renunciation of wealth and power)—​­enables me to raise fundamental questions about differences in male and female religiosity” (6).

Chapter 2. Remaking the Feminine 1. English translations of St. Louis’s text are my own. “Souvent confesser et eslisiés tous jours confessours qui soient de sainte vie et de souffissant lettreüre par qui vous soiiés ensignie des coses que vous devés eschiever et des coses ke vous devés faire. Et soiiés de tel maniere par quoi vostre confessours et vostre autre ami vous osent hardiement ensignier et reprendre” (Instructions of Saint Louis, 79). 2. “Et quant vous serés u moustier, gardés vous de muser et de dire vaines paroles. Vos orisons dites en pais ou par bouche ou par pensee, et especiaument entrués con li cors Nostre Signour Jhesu Crist sera presens a la messe, soiiés plus en pais et plus ententieve a orison, et un pieche devant” (Instructions of Saint Louis, 79). 3. “Chiere fille, pour che que je quit ke vous retenrés plus volentiers de moi pour l’amour que vous avés a moi, que vous ne feriés de pluisours autres, j’ai pensé ke je vous fache aucuns enseignemens escris de ma main” (Instructions of Saint Louis, 78). O’Connell notes that, along with Jehan-­Tristan, Isabelle was Louis’s favorite child. Notably, the only other conduct text Louis writes is for his eldest son, Philippe, the future king of France. That text, more widely known because Joinville included it in his life of Saint Louis, reproduces much of the material found in the Instructions, along with extra advice relevant to the good rule of the kingdom that Philippe will inherit. The advice to Philippe opens with a similar salutation to a well-­loved child, but without the same appeal to affect present in the opening of the Instructions: “Dear son, because I desire with all my heart that you should be well taught in all things, I think that I will provide you with some instruction by means of this writing; for I would have you hear said certain things so that you would be admonished more by me than by others” (The Teachings of Saint Louis, ed. O’Connell, 55; “Chiers filz, pour ce que je desirre de tout mon cuer que tu soies bien enseignié en toutes choses, je pense que je te face aucun ensaignement par cest escript; car je t’oÿ dire aucunes foiz que tu retendroies plus de moy que d’autrui”). 4. Instructions of Saint Louis, 62; O’Connell goes on to say: “This document therefore represents a literary act on the part of Saint Louis in that, although it is addressed personally to Isabelle, Louis must have known full well that it would eventually reach a much wider audience. Isabelle is the recipient of the Instructions because of the attachment her father had for her, but by virtue of the fact that Louis took the time to write down and to structure his thoughts, he was



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quite possibly writing with this potentially larger audience in mind. Indeed, is it not logically consistent that a king so conscious of the value of didactic writing, and so dedicated to the copying and collecting of books, try his own hand at writing?” (62–­63). 5. See Matthews, Writing to the King. 6. Huot, “The Writer’s Mirror,” 29, 32. 7. Huot, “The Writer’s Mirror,” 35. In addition, as Susan Groag Bell notes, mirrors were an important feature of the late medieval scholar’s study: “One of the most interesting items to be seen in the illustrations of Christine in her study is the mirror on her desk in manuscript Ms. Fr. 603 of the Mutacion de Fortune now in the Bibliothèque nationale. Mirrors for scholars at this time had several uses. First, their refreshing qualities of reflection protected against eye-­strain. The reflections they produced lit up dark chambers; they also made small rooms appear larger. Most important and useful for scholars was the fact that they enlarged small, and even faded scripts that a reader like Christine was often forced to decipher. Even though the mirror would reverse the script the enlargement would assist the reader. The mirror would probably have been made of polished steel, a practice known since classical antiquity. Glass mirrors were invented in the fourteenth century in Germany and were difficult and very expensive to acquire elsewhere. The mirror shown in the Duke’s Ms. Fr. 603 in the Bibliothèque nationale was set in a wooden surround and stands about a foot tall. Petrarch had a mirror exactly like Christine’s in this illustration on his desk in a drawing from ca. 1400 supposedly showing him in his ‘studio.’ Jean de Meun discusses the usefulness of mirrors, especially their capacity to enlarge and clarify objects in the Roman de la Rose. ‘Nature’ explains the mirror’s powers: ‘A glass can make the smallest things—​­grains of powdered sand or letters small seem great and to the observer bring them close . . . or to read the smallest script’ ” (“Christine de Pizan in Her Study”). 8. The Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode, anon. trans., ed. Henry, EETS OS 288, 88–­89. In Guillaume de Lorris’s secular love poem, the Roman de la rose, Idleness, gatekeeper to the Garden of Mirth, is depicted more ambiguously as a fashionably dressed lady holding a mirror in her hand: “Her hand a mirror bore. / . . . ​/ It seemed from her attire / That she was little used to business. / When she was combed, adorned, and well arrayed, / Her daily task was done. A joyful time—​­/ A year-­long, carefree month of May—​­was hers, / Untroubled but by thoughts of fitting dress. (Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Robbins, 3.26, 30–­35. “En sa main tint un miroër, / . . . ​/ Il paroit bien a son ator / qu’ele estoit poi embesoignie. / Quant ele s’estoit bien pignie / et bien paree et atornee, / ele avoit feste sa jornee. / Mout avoit bon tens et bon mai, / qu’el n’avoit sousi ne esmai / de nule rien fors solement / se soi atorner noblemen” (Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Roman de la rose, ed. Lecoy, vol. 1, lines 555, 564–­72). Gregory M. Sadlek, in Idleness Working, argues that, in addition to an understanding of love as passion, there developed through the Middle Ages a positive value for the immaterial labor that fin’amor occasioned: “Although love’s labor may not always be joyous, it is always active rather than passive. Far from being a malady the lover suffers, love’s labor demands exertion of the faculties of the mind and body to gain some goal” (10). 9. For an edition of the Latin text, see Dubrulle, “Le Speculum Dominarum de Durand de Champagne.” Dubrulle notes that a large part of the Speculum dominarum is drawn from the Speculum morale (which circulated as part of the Speculum maius of Vincent of Beauvais, but in fact was not written until the late thirteenth century). 10. Mews, “The Speculum dominarum,” 14. 11. Lahav, “A Mirror of Queenship,” 34. 12. Mews, “The Speculum dominarum,” 22–­23, lists the surviving manuscripts of Le Miroir des dames and discusses the French and Burgundian aristocratic and royal owners of these

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manuscripts during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Copies of the Miroir des dames were in the libraries of at least four of Christine de Pizan’s female contemporaries mentioned in her City of Ladies. For a discussion of these women and their libraries, see Karen Green, “What Were the Ladies in the City of Ladies Reading?” See also Pinder, “A Lady’s Guide to Salvation,” 45–­53, for a discussion of three manuscripts that preserve a collection of texts that were probably made for a lady of noble birth around the turn of the fifteenth century and organized around the Miroir des dames. The texts included with the Miroir des dames are all religious (with some specifically intended for women living in the world). Two of the manuscripts are illuminated and belonged to Jean, Duke of Berry (1340–­1416). 13. Ysambert de Saint-­Léger, Le Miroir des dames, ed. Marazza. 14. Three copies of the Miroir des bonnes femmes survive: (1) Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS fr. 213, fols. 86–­139; (2) Paris, BnF, MS Arsenal 2159; (3) Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, Rare Books and Manuscript Library Codex 659, fols. 65r–­84v [incomplete]. There is no modern edition. However, John L. Grigsby provides a detailed description of the text’s contents in two articles, the first (“Miroir des bonnes femmes—​­a New Fragment” [1961) dealing with the examples of bad women from the Bible, the second (“Miroir des bonnes femmes [1962]), with examples of good women. 15. Blamires, The Case for Women in Medieval Culture, 30. 16. Rachel (pleasing her husband), Ruth (loving who your husband loves), Abigail (protecting your husband even when he is wrong), Abisag (caring for your husband’s physical well-­ being), the woman from Thecua (interceding with your husband to prevent discord), the unbelieving women who ministered to Jesus (doing good works even if your husband is evil). Judith would also fall into this category by virtue of the chaste widowhood she maintains. 17. Pharaoh’s daughter (showing mercy, especially to orphans), Samson’s mother (fasting and abstinence in allowing her to bear a child), the Queen of Sheba (seeking wisdom from a trusted teacher), Tobias’s wife (restraining anger), Esther (the concern for reputation that love for husband brings, love for one’s subjects, and not caring about elegant clothing), Susanna (preserving one’s chastity from assault), mothers in Maccabees (love of children), Leah (bearing children because humble) and Rebecca (valuing the son who loved God the most and ensuring he was married into a home where God’s law was observed), and Martha (being hospitable to the poor). 18. Huot, “The Writer’s Mirror,” 32. 19. The Chastoiement survives in five manuscript copies: Paris, BnF, MS Arsenal 5201; Paris, BnF, MS Arsenal 3516; Paris, BnF, MS fonds fr 2236; Paris, BnF, MS fonds fr 24301; Paris, BnF, MS fonds fr 837. For a modern edition, see Robert de Blois, son œuvre didactique, ed. Fox. 20. Udry, “Robert de Blois and Geoffroy de la Tour Landry on Feminine Beauty,” 92. 21. English translation by Udry, “Robert de Blois,” 93; French: “Cil l’i puet matre sanz forfait / Qui dou surplus son plaisir fait; / Quant qu’il voudra bien le sosfrez, / Qu’obedience li davez / Con li moinnes fait a l’abé / Por ce furent li sain fermé, / Que nus autres n’i doit main matre.” (Robert de Blois, ed. Fox, Chastoiement, lines 105–­11). 22. Udry, “Robert de Blois,” 95. 23. “Un beaul commun ensoignemant / Orrez” (Robert de Blois, ed. Fox, Chastoiement, lines 4–­5). 24. He was involved in a legal dispute in 1402 and his son Charles is referred to as chevalier of La Tour and of Bourmont in 1406. My discussion of the life of Geoffroy IV de la Tour Landry draws on the biographical information included by M. Y. Offord in his edition of Caxton’s translation: Caxton, The Book of the Knight of the Tower, xxxiv–­xxxviii.



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25. The Chevalier mentions several times in the Livre du chevalier that he also composed a conduct book for his sons, although no record of this text survives. Gaston Paris attributed a second work, the romance of Ponthus et Sidoine, to Geoffroy. See Caxton, Book of the Knight of the Tower, xxxvi–­xxxvii, for Offord’s discussion of this work and its connection with the Tour Landry family. 26. Gilles was the son of Geoffroy’s second wife, Marguerite des Roches, and her first husband, Jean Clérembault. Geoffroy’s eldest son, Charles, had married their daughter Jeanne Clérembault in 1390; so the two families were closely intertwined. 27. See Caxton, Book of the Knight of the Tower, xix–­xxii, for a list of the manuscript copies and a discussion of the printed editions. Offord also notes that in miniatures in these manuscripts the knight is usually portrayed in a garden or an orchard, with three daughters beside him; one manuscript shows him alone, one with two daughters (xxiv n. 3). In contrast, the manuscript that is closest to Caxton’s translation (although not the exact copy he used) has a miniature that “shows the Knight seated in a room apparently addressing an assembly of young men and women, the men grouped on one side of him and the women, to whom his head is turned, on the other” (xxiv). 28. Le Livre du chevalier de La Tour Landry, pour l’enseignement de ses filles, ed. Montaiglon. Montaiglon’s edition was out of print until Nabu Press issued a reproduction in 2010. A more recent modern edition exists in the dissertation of Sister Helen M. Eckrich: “An Edition of Le Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry pour l’enseignement de ses filles.” 29. The Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry, Compiled for the Instruction of His Daughters, ed. Wright; Caxton, Book of the Knight of the Tower, ed. Offord. Modern English translations of parts of the French original are included in Rebecca Barnhouse, The Book of the Knight of the Tower, but the book does not constitute a complete English translation or modern edition of the work. 30. The French text is divided into 128 chapters instead of Caxton’s 144. 31. Grigsby, “A New Source of the Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry,” 198. For an earlier, more extensive comparison of the sources and analogues for the Livre du chevalier, see Stolingwa, “Zum Livre du Chevalier de La Tour Landry,” 87–­149. 32. The first use of fin’amor is in the Nun of Barking Abbey’s Life of St. Edward (1181), and it is in a religious setting. See MacBain, “Some Religious and Secular Uses of the Vocabulary of Fin’Amor.” 33. Emma Lipton notes: “This idea that love was a source of chivalric virtue was both literary paradigm and aristocratic practice in the late medieval period, as this passage from the biography of Mareschal Boucicault illustrates: ‘[O]ne reads of Lancelot, of Tristan, and of many others whom Love made good and famous. Indeed, in our own time living now in France and elsewhere there are many such noble men. . . . ​[O]ne speaks of Sir Otho de Graunson, of the good constable of Sancerre, and of many others whom it would be too long to name and whom love has made valiant and virtuous. O what a noble thing is love to him who knows how to use it!’ ” Lipton, Affections of the Mind, 24, quoting Boucicault as translated in Benson, “Courtly Love and Chivalry,” 241; for the French, see Boucicault, Livre des faits, 6:393. 34. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 117. 35. See De Gendt, L’Art d’éduquer, 27–­35, for a discussion of the changing world of the French nobility in this period as a result of the Hundred Years’ War and demographic and social changes. 36. English translation my own; French, from Le Livre du chevalier, ed. Montaiglon, 1. 37. English, from Caxton, Book of the Knight of the Tower, 11; French: “Qui de honneur et

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de tout bien sçavoit et de bel maintien et de bonnes moeurs, et des bonnes estoit la meillour, se me sembloit, et la fleur” (Le Livre du chevalier, ed. Montaiglon, 2). Subsequent quotation will be from these editions with page numbers given in parentheses. 38. “En elle tout me delitoye; car en cellui temps je faisoye chançons, laiz et rondeaux, balades et virelayz, et chans nouveaux, le mieulx que je savoye” (Montaiglon, 2). 39. This would appear to be another case of the Chevalier invoking a “real” source that turns out to be fictional. While Saint Louis’s Enseignements à sa fille Isabelle provides a real-­life equivalent of a royal parent writing a conduct text for his child, no such book is known to have been written by a queen of Hungary. 40. “Car tel vous rit et vous fait bel devant qui par derrière s’en va bourdant. Pour ce forte chose est à congnoistre le monde qui à present est” (Montaiglon, 4). 41. Montaiglon (xxviii–­xxxii) argues that the prologue was originally written in rhyming verse and later transformed into prose, a further manifestation of the Chevalier’s initially lyric mode for his self-­representation in the garden. 42. So successful is the Chevalier in this reorientation that the earliest English translation mistranslates the prologue and implies that the dead lady he initially mourns in the garden was actually his wife and the mother of his three daughters, a mistake perpetuated by some contemporary critics using this translation. The French simply says of the lady he loved in his youth: “Mès tous mes maulx me guerredonna pour ce que belle et bonne me donna . . . ​En elle tout me delitoye. . . . ​Mais la mort qui tous guerroye, la prist, dont mainte douleur en ay recue et mainte tristour. Si a plus de xx ans que j’en ay esté triste et doulent” (Montaiglon, 2). Caxton translates the original French closely as: “But alle myn euylles haue rewarded me. Sythe that the fayre and good hath gyuen to me. . . . ​In whome I so moche me delyted. . . . ​But the deth. whiche spareth none hath taken her / For whome I haue receyued many sorowes and heuynesses In suche wyse that I haue passed my lyf more than twenty yere heuy and sorowfull” (Caxton, 11). The English translation of MS Harley 1764 is generally freer. It is especially confusing at this point because part of the first column of the manuscript copy is difficult to read. Thomas Wright, the manuscript’s modern editor, inserts a few words from Caxton’s translation to clarify the sense: “But my sorw was heled, and my seruice wel ysett and quitte, for he gaue [me a fayr] wyff, and . . . ​that was bothe faire and good . . . ​and y delited me so moche in her. . . . ​But deth, that on all makithe werre, toke her from me, the which hathe made me haue mani a sorufull thought and gret heuinesse. And so it is more than .xx. yeere that I haue ben for her ful of gret sorugh” (Book of the Knight of La Tour-­Landry, ed. Wright, 1–­2). The words in square brackets and the first ellipsis are Wright’s; the other two ellipses are mine. Even with the imperfect manuscript copy, it is clear that the Harley manuscript’s translation sees this woman as a wife of the Chevalier’s, dead for twenty years at the time of writing of the book. Since the Chevalier’s daughters appear right after this reference to the dead wife, it is easy to assume (although not absolutely necessary) that they are the daughters of this dead wife. Presumably that would make the wife who debates the Chevalier later in the book a second wife. She, however, calls the daughters her daughters. The Harley translator also says that three daughters appear in the garden, when the French and Caxton simply say “daughters.” 43. “Du vergier je m’en alay et trouvay enmy ma voye deux prestres et deux clers que je avoye, et leur diz que je vouloye faire un livre et un exemplaire pour mes filles aprandre à roumancier et entendre comment ells se doyvent gouverner et le bien du mal dessevrer. Si leur fiz mettre avant et traire des livres que je avoye, comme la Bible, Gestes des Roys et croniques de France, et de Grèce, et d’Angleterre, et de maintes autres estranges terres; et chascun livre je fis



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lire, et là où je trouvay bon exemple pour extraire, je le fis prendre pour faire ce livre . . .” (Montaiglon, 4). 44. Lynn Staley, in her recent discussion of the Livre, reads this scene as part of the Chevalier’s construction of himself as a “benign monarch,” a correlation between head of household and sovereign that obtained during the reign of Charles V: “[The Knight] thus presents his own household as a pastoral, ordered space. Its good father has seen fit to include in it such figures of education and piety as priests and clerks who can, at his direction, help put together a book for the instruction of its daughters. . . . ​The Knight presents himself as a sovereign who employs a select group of scholars to translate and supply instructive texts for his approval. The Knight’s control of his household is as lovingly patriarchal as that of the king, whose care for his children extended to care for their education and whose care for his court very much included care for the great library he assembled as the repository for the cultural program that stamped his reign. . . . ​[The Knight’s] rhetorical position can be used as a way of thinking about a type of household book as a text with an ambiguously defined cultural or political application. In fact, the very popularity of the Livre du Chevalier in both England and France raises questions about readership that are ultimately relevant to perceptions of power and the relationship between civil and familial figurations of authority” (Languages of Power, 270–­71). 45. The sections borrowed largely from the Miroir are Caxton, chaps. 37–­110 (Montaiglon, chaps. 37–­112). De Gendt (L’Art d’éduquer, 96–­97) argues that the Chevalier came upon the Miroir after he had started writing, accounting for its late incorporation into the Livre. More particularly, Le Livre du chevalier would appear to have used the Arsenal manuscript of the Miroir (or a manuscript like it), whose layout and illuminated miniature, according to Grigsby (“A New Source,” 174 n. 5), suggest an intended audience that is made up of noblewomen reading its stories as conduct literature intended for them. If the Chevalier is turning to the authoritative voice of clerical culture and scripture, then, it is in the already mediated form of a conduct collection assembled for noble laywomen. 46. See Grigsby, “A New Source,” 200. 47. Caxton, chap. 136; Montaiglon, chap. 127. See De Gendt, L’Art d’éduquer, 38, 116–­25. 48. “Toutes les femmes qui respectent les exigences de leur condition semblent avoir les mêmes chances d’accéder au salut éternel. . . . ​La chasteté devient donc une vertu non seulement morale, mais aussi sociale” (De Gendt, L’Art d’éduquer, 158). 49. Caxton, chap. 114: “As the good knyght whiche tendeth to come to worship & flee vylonye payneth hym self and suffreth many grete trauaylles as cold hete and hongre / and putteth his body in to grete Ieopardy and aduuenture to deye or lyue for to gete worship and good Renommee . . . ​Lyke wyse it is of the good lady and good woman / whiche in euery place is renommed in honoure and worship / This is the good woman that payneth her selfe to kepe her body clene and her worship also” (Caxton, 151); Montaiglon, chap. 116: “comme fait le bon chevalier d’onneur qui tire à venir à vaillance, qui tant en trait de paine et de grans chaux et de frois, et met son corps en tant aventure de mourir ou de vivre pour avoir honneur et bonne renommée . . . ​Et tout aussi est-­il de la bonne femme et de la bonne dame qui en tous lieuz est renommée en honneur et en bien, c’est la preude femme qui met paine et travail à tenir nettement son corps et son honneur” (Montaiglon, 225). 50. Caxton, chap. 118: “For as sayth the holy scrypture nothynge is so agreable to god and to his Angels as a good woman / and in a parte god preyseth more her than the man / And by reason she ought to haue more meryte / by cause she is of lyghter courage than the man is / that is to saye that the woman was fourmed and made out of the mans body / And in so moche that

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she is more feble than the man is / And yf she resisteth ageynste the temptacions of the deuylle / of the world / and of the flesshe / the more she is worthy to haue gretter meryte than the man” (Caxton, 157); Montaiglon, chap. 119: “Car, si comme dit la sainte escripture: Nulle chose n’est si noble que de bonne femme, et playst à Dieu et aux angels en partie plus que l’omme, et doit avoir plus de merite, selon rayson, pour ce que elles sont de plus foible et legier couraige que n’est l’homme, c’est-­à-­dire que la femme feust traitte de l’omme, et, de tant comme elle feust plus foible et elle puet bien resister aux tamptacions de l’ennemy et de la chair, et, en l’aventure, de tant doit-­elle avoir plus grant merite que l’omme” (Montaiglon, 234). 51. Caxton, chap. 24; Montaiglon, chap. 25. De Gendt notes that the sin of sloth, along with avarice, are the only ones not treated in the material the Chevalier borrows from the Miroir. But when the Chevalier does deal with sloth (Caxton, chaps. 26–­29; Montaiglon, chaps. 27–­30), in contrast to the Miroir’s clerical author, he focuses more on sloth’s secular rather than theological manifestations. While the Chevalier mentions two traditionally theological instances of sloth—​­foolish gossip during divine office (Caxton, chaps. 27 and 28; Montaiglon, chaps. 28 and 29) and a lack of diligence in hearing mass (Caxton, chap. 29; Montaiglon, chap. 30), he focuses much more on idleness. This is a state of being, the Chevalier maintains, that poses special dangers for women because it promotes the kinds of shameful thoughts and dangerous desires that threaten chastity. In remediating idleness, however, the Chevalier largely eschews any kind of contemporary economic understanding of countering idleness. In contrast to Christine de Pizan, who in the Livre des trois vertus outlines in great detail the daily duties that should keep aristocratic women busy, the Chevalier advocates traditional feminine occupations such as sewing, spinning, embroidery, weaving, or charitable works and devotional activities. Only rarely does he comment on economic labor (such as governing a land in the case of widowhood) (Caxton, chap. 111; Montaiglon, chap. 113) or managing the affairs of the household (Caxton, chap. 136; Montaiglon, chap. 127). De Gendt concludes: “If, from the perspective of our author, the economic capability of women is indeed real [in the sense of contributing to the prosperity of the household], it will not be exerted by the means of expression of some ordinary profitable activity, but by the exemplary accomplishment of her religious, moral, and conjugal duties” (L’Art d’éduquer, 170; “si, dans l’optique de notre auteur, le pouvoir économique de la femme est bien réel, il ne s’exercera pas par le truchement d’une quelconque activité rentable, mais par l’accomplissement exemplaire de ses devoirs religieux, moraux et conjugaux”). 52. The Chevalier himself enacts this kind of movement in the prologue by presenting his choice to write in the less courtly medium of prose in familial and affective terms, and thus the valuation of performative private reading practices over simple rote social utterance: “whiche I wold not set in ryme / but al along in prose for to abredge / and also for the better to be vnderstonden And also for the grete loue that I haue to my doughters / whom I loue / as a fader ought to loue them / And thenne myn herte shal haue parfyte ioye. yf they torne to good and to honoure / That is to serue and loue god / and to haue the loue and the grace of their neyghbours / and of the world” (Caxton, 13; Montaiglon, 4: “je ne veulx point mettre en rime, ainçoys le veulz mettre en prose, pour l’abrégier et mieulx entendre, et aussi pour la grant amour que je ay à mes enfans, lesquelz je ayme comme père les doit aimer, et dont mon cuer auroit si parfaite joye se ils tournoyent à bien et à honnour en Dieu servir et amer, et avoir l’amour et la grace de leurs voysins et du monde”). 53. “Elle fust chambre et temple de Dieu où furent faictes les espousailles de la deité et de l’umanité . . . ​Dieux voulst que elle espousast le saint homme Joseph, qui estoit vieulx et preudomme; car Dieu voulst naistre soubz umbre de marriage pour obeir à la loy qui lors couroit, pour



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eschever les paroles du monde, et pour luy bailler compaignie à la gouverner, et pour la mener en Egypte” (Montaiglon, 212). 54. “And thus ought euery good woman to be in deuocion and in the seruyse of god” (Caxton, 144; Montaiglon, 213: “et ainsi doit ester toute bonne dame en devocion et ou service de Dieu”). 55. “Car elle voulst premierement sçavoir comment ce seroit. Mais ainsi ne fist mie Eve, car elle estoit de trop legier couraige, comme font aujourdui maintes simples femmes qui croyent de legier les folz, dont depuis ells viennent à la folie. Elles ne enquièrent mie ne ne regardent a la fin où ells en vendront, comme fist la glorieuse vierge Marie, qui enquist à l’ange la fin du fait que il luy anonçoit, et en fust paoureuse, et ainsi doivent faire les bonnes femmes et les bonnes dames, quant l’en leur parle de jeunnesse ou de chose qui puisse venir au deshonneur de elles” (Montaiglon, 213–­14). 56. The Chevalier follows this set of specific, named historical examples of good women in the next chapter (Caxton, chap. 112; Montaiglon, chap. 114) with more generally historically true “facts”: a young and fair wife (widowed by the time of the battle of Crecy, twenty-­six years ago) married to an ungracious, one-­eyed, crookbacked husband, who nonetheless loved and respected him while he was alive and after his death refused to remarry in honor of his memory; or a fair woman of good birth married to an old man whose sickness and incontinence did not deter her from serving him with joy and pleasure during his life, and remaining a widow after his death. 57. Thus the last three chapters dealing with the Virgin Mary delineate how women should follow her example in being “meke and humble” (Caxton, chap. 108; Montaiglon, chap. 110), “pyteous,” (Caxton, chap. 109; Montaiglon, chap. 111), and “charytable” (Caxton, chap. 110; Montaiglon, chap. 112). The Chevalier emphasizes the social ties that affective relations modeled on the Virgin can produce. Humbling oneself as Mary did will help avoid the kind of socially disruptive pride shown by the angels who fell from heaven. The pity Mary showed in her concern for the lack of wine at the wedding at Cana is a good example of how every good woman ought to have pity for her parents and poor neighbors, helping them as she may, according to nature. And the visitation of Mary to Elizabeth, according to the Chevalier, provides a good example of how parents and friends ought to visit each other when giving birth or at times of sickness. 58. Caxton, chaps. 114–­17; Montaiglon, chaps. 116–­17. 59. “Si vous di, mes chières filles, que vous ne croiez pas vostre père en ce cas” (Montaiglon, 248). 60. “Car pour certain, pour soy tenir simplement et meurement et non faire guères plus grant semblant ès uns mieulx que aux autres, elles en sont mieulx prisées et sont celles qui plus tost sont mariées” (Montaiglon, 253). 61. The woman he courted “wyst and knewe well how it was spoken of yow & her for her maryage / maade to yow as grete chere / as she hadde loued and knowen your personne all the dayes of her lyf / ye prayd her of loue / but by cause that she whiche was not wyse ynough to ansuere yow curtoysly and wel / ye demaunded her not / And yf she had hold her self more secrete and couered / and more symply / ye had take her to your wyf ” (Caxton, 168; Montaiglon, 253–­54: “Si la voulsistes veoir, et si savoit bien que l’en parloit d’elle et de vous. Et lors elle vous fist si grant chière comme se elle vouz eust veu tous les jours de sa vie, et tant que vous la touchastes sur le fait d’amourettes, et que elle ne fist mie trop le sauvaige de bien vous escouter. Et les responses ne furent par trop sauvaiges, mais assez courtoises et bien legierettes, et, pour le grant

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semblant qu’elle vous fist, vous vous retraystes de la demander, et se elle se fust tenue un peu plus couverte et plus simplement vous l’eussiés prise”). 62. “Que elles facent bonnes chières et liées à toutes manières de gens d’onneur, et plus aux uns que aux autres, c’est assavoir comme ils seront plus grans et plus gentilz et meilleurs de leurs personnes et, selon ce qu’ilz seront, qu’elles leur portent honneur et courtoisie et chière liée devant tous, et que elles chantent et danssent, et se esbattent honnourablement” (Montaiglon, 256). 63. In this way, the wife here balances the previous chapters’ attention to how fin’amor might disturb the securing of an appropriate marriage, understood in more dynastic and worldly terms, with the higher demands of the affective contract undergirding the married estate when it is understood as a sacrament. Thus, if a woman does not maintain the appearance as well as the essence of purity in marriage, gossips will spread false rumors and in this way “a good & trewe woman [might be] blamed and dishonoured / And yf hit befalle that by somme aduenture her lord haue ony knowlechynge of hit. he shalle take her in hate / and of hertely loue he shalle neuer loue her / And euer he shalle saye euylle of her / And thus is the trewe loue of maryage lost and go fro them / and neuer parfyght Ioye ne loue shalle they haue to gyder” (Caxton, 172; Montaiglon, 259: “Et ainsi sera une bonne damme ou demoiselle, ou autre femme, diffamée et deshonnourée. Et se il advient par aucune adventure que son seigneur en oye aucune parole, lors il la prendra en hayne, ne jamais de bon cuer ne l’aymera, et la rudayera et laidangera et lui sera plus rude, et elle lui. Et ainsi veez l’amour de leur marriage perdue, ne jamais parfaitte amour ne bien ne joye n’auront ensemble”). The Chevalier’s wife then describes how she herself dealt with men who were about to propose love to her. She has many times perceived how some men were about to speak to her about love, but she called someone over and thus preempted such a conversation. One time when playing with a group of knights and ladies, one knight said to her that he loved her more than all the ladies in the world. She then asked him if he had been sick a long time, and he answered that he had been sick with love for over two years and could never tell her of it. She then replied that it could not be such a space of time; he should go to church and pray, and his temptation would soon pass because this was a new love. When he asked why, she replied that a lover ought not tell his lady that he loved her until seven and a half years had passed.

Chapter 3. In the Merchant’s Bedchamber 1. There are four extant manuscripts of Le Menagier de Paris: (1) Paris, BnF, MS fr. 12477 (173 folios; fifteenth century, with Burgundian ducal connections); (2) Brussels, Bibliothèque royale, MS 10310–­10311 (193 folios; fifteenth century, with Burgundian ducal connections); (3) Paris, BnF, MS nouv. acq. fr. 6739 (282 folios; late fifteenth century; appears to be a copy of BnF, MS fr. 12477); (4) Luxembourg, Bibliothèque nationale de Luxembourg MS I:95 (ancien numéro 19) (360 folios; early sixteenth century). The narrator’s original plan for the Menagier—​ ­as outlined in the opening table of contents—​­promises three distinctions (or sections), but in these four manuscripts only the first two distinctions are included. In the original plan the third distinction would contain three articles treating games and amusements that would help the wife socialize—​­the first and third articles to deal with parlor games (such as chess and dice), and riddles and arithmetic games, respectively. Surviving manuscripts of the Menagier, however, insert the second of the three articles planned for the missing third distinction—​­a chapter on hawking—​­in the second distinction between its third and fourth articles.



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2. Jérôme Pichon produced the first modern edition of the French text, Le Ménagier de Paris, in 1846. The standard scholarly edition (published in 1981 but now out of print) is Le Menagier de Paris, ed. Brereton and Ferrier. Their edition of the French text was republished in 1994 in the Lettres Gothiques series with a facing-­page modern French translation: Le Mesnagier de Paris, ed. Brereton and Ferrier, trans. and notes Ueltschi. The Brereton-­Ferrier edition omits the tale of Griselda, the tale of Prudence and Melibee, and the Bruyant poem. Ueltschi includes the first two in her modern French translation and reproduces the Pichon edition of the Bruyant poem in an appendix without translating it. Eileen Power translated much of Pichon’s 1846 edition of Le Menagier into English in 1928 (repr. 2006) as The Goodman of Paris; see pp. xiii–­xiv for a list of the many condensations and omissions Power made to the text. A full English version of Le Menagier de Paris has recently appeared in a vibrant new translation by Gina L. Greco and Christine M. Rose: The Good Wife’s Guide (Le Ménagier de Paris): A Medieval Household Book. 3. The book’s title is often understood as referring to the narrator husband himself, partly as a result of Power’s translation. But Brereton and Ferrier, in their introduction, note that the way the work is referred to in the surviving manuscripts and in library inventories of the period would suggest that the title refers to the work itself (as in The Book of Housekeeping) and not the author as householder (Le Menagier, xxi), a reading taken up by Greco and Rose in their recent translation. 4. Dinshaw et al., “Theorizing Queer Temporalities,” 187. 5. My formation of the term “postmedieval” here parallels Judith Halberstam’s rearticulation of postmodernism for her project of queer temporality and postmodern geographies in In a Queer Time and Place: “ ‘Postmodernism’ in this project takes on meaning in relation to new forms of cultural production that emerge both in sync with and running counter to what [Fredric] Jameson has called the ‘logic’ of late capitalism in his book Postmodernism (1997). I see postmodernism as simultaneously a crisis and an opportunity—​­a crisis in the stability of form and meaning, and an opportunity to rethink the practice of cultural production, its hierarchies and power dynamics, its tendency to resist or capitulate. In his work on postmodern geography, [Steve] Pile also locates postmodernism in terms of the changing relationship between opposition and authority; he reminds us, crucially, that the “map of resistance is not simply the underside of the map of domination’ ” (6). 6. See, for example, Le Menagier de Paris, ed. Brereton and Ferrier, xxi–­xxx; Ferrier, “ ‘Seulement pour vous endoctriner’ ”; Ferrier, “A Husband’s Asides”; Brereton, “Deux sources du Ménagier de Paris.” 7. Le Mesnagier de Paris, ed. Brereton, Ferrier, and Ueltschi, 7–­16; Vincent-­Cassy, “Quand les femmes deviennent paresseuses”; Christine M. Rose, “What Every Goodwoman Wants.” 8. Rose, “What Every Goodwoman Wants,” 408. More recently in the introduction to their edition of the Menagier, Rose and Greco, while continuing to develop this view that the text is all about “the management of a wife’s body and soul and her duties toward her husband” (Good Wife’s Guide, 11), also acknowledge the wife’s ability to read and write and the variety of ways that the narrator mitigates his at times harsh admonishments to perfect behavior (11–­14): “Notwithstanding the stern restrictions on female behavior, Le Ménagier de Paris depicts a family and a household where the home is a moral refuge from the outside world” (15). 9. Krueger, “Identity Begins at Home.” Ionut Epurescu-­Pascovici, “From Moral Agent to Actant,” has used actor-­network theory “to contrast the husband as a moral agent with the wife imagined as executing his instructions mechanically” as an “actant,” that is, as “a figuration of action more than an assignation of initiative or strategizing” (227). Epurescu-­Pascovici also reassesses the text’s relation to the social imaginary of the later Middle Ages through a comparison

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of the Menagier with the libri rationis or livres de raison, compilations of sale deeds and charters, notes on family events, and sometimes the personal reflections of the paterfamilias. 10. Krueger, “Identity Begins at Home,” 25, 26. 11. Krueger, “Identity Begins at Home,” 35. 12. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 8. 13. The Good Wife’s Guide, ed. Greco and Rose, 49; Le Mesnagier de Paris, ed. Brereton, Ferrier, and Ueltschi, 22: “Chiere seur, pour ce que vous estans en l’eage de quinze ans et la sepmaine que vous et moy feusmes espousez, me priastes que je espargnasse a vostre jeunesse et a vostre petit et ygnorant service jusques a ce que vous eussiez plus veu et apris; a laquelle appreseure vous me promectiez d’entendre songneusement et mettre toute vostre cure et diligence pour ma paix et amour garder (si comme vous disiez bien saigement par plus sage conseil, ce croy je bien, que le vostre) en moy priant humblement en nostre lit, comme en suis recors, que pour l’amour de Dieu je ne vous voulsisse mie laidement corrigier devant la gent estrange ne devant nostre gent aussi, mais vous corrigasse chascune nuit, ou de jour en jour, en nostre chambre et vous ramenteusses les descontenances ou simplesses de la journée ou journees passees et vous chastiasse s’il me plaisoit; et lors vous ne fauldriez point a vous amender selon ma doctrine et correption et feriez tout vostre pouoir selon ma voulenté, si comme vous disiez. Si ay tenu a grant bien et vous loe et scay bon gré de ce que vous m’en avez dit, et m’en est depuis souventesfoiz souvenu.” Subsequent quotation from the French original and the English translations will be from these editions; page numbers will be inserted parenthetically after each quotation. 14. For an image of the Arnolfini Portrait, see http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/ jan-­van-­eyck-­the-­arnolfini-­portrait. The color miniature of the Menagier couple is found in Paris, BnF, MS fr. 12477, fol. 1r, reproduced in black and white here (see Figure 3). 15. For representations of this kind of “official” bed in the visual arts, see Hall, The Arnolfini Betrothal, 83–­88. Hall points out that this is the type of bed “described by Aliénor de Poitiers in her account of Burgundian court ceremonies at the time of the birth of Margaret of Austria’s mother in 1456 as ‘a bed where no one sleeps’ (‘un lict où nully ne couche’)” (84). Hall further argues that the room depicted in the Arnolfini Portrait is thus a reception hall rather than a bedchamber. Recently, Wolfthal, In and Out of the Marital Bed, has argued otherwise: “Hall’s thesis that the Arnolfinis’ bed is ceremonial is unconvincing because such beds were exceedingly rare in the fifteenth century and reserved for monarchs and noblemen.” She provides extensive evidence from the visual arts in the period that reveal a distinction between the two kinds of rooms, arguing that the Arnolfini Portrait portrays a “small, private bedchamber, not a large, public reception hall” (37) and that “the Arnolfinis’ marital bed” does indeed refer to conjugal sex and procreation: it “is a public affirmation of the ‘chaste’ sexuality that was an integral part of the contemporary conceptualization of the holy sacrament of matrimony” (41). 16. See Contamine, “Peasant Hearth to Papal Palace,” esp. 489–­502 (“The Bed” and “Ostentation and Privacy”). The Menagier de Paris itself provides a wealth of detail about the living conditions of its Parisian merchant husband and his wife; for a reconstruction of such a house based on information from the text, see Luckhardt, “Le Menagier de Paris: A Parisian Bourgoisie Household in 1400,” http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/history/undergrad/pat/journal2002/luckhardt .pdf. For discussions of room configurations in urban housing in England, see Schofield, Medieval London Houses; Schofield, “Urban Housing in England, 1400–­1600”; Schofield, “Social Perceptions of Space in Medieval and Tudor London Houses”; Grenville, Medieval Housing, 157–­93. 17. McSheffrey notes in Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture that when marriages took place in private homes in late medieval London, as they frequently did, the bedchamber was seldom the



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preferred site for the exchange of licit vows. On the few occasions when this did happen, it would appear that marriages had to be conducted in a bedchamber because of the sickness or pregnancy of one of the participants (126). The authority of the bedchamber as personal space can move in the other direction, too. When Honoré Bouvet appears to Christine de Pizan in bed, as Bell notes, Christine’s bed is in her study: “Thus, we know first the most famous dream vision of Le Chemin de Long Estude with the Sibyl appearing at the sleeping Christine’s bedside. Then, we know the goddess of war ‘Minerva’ to whom Christine appealed for help when she decided to write a book on warfare for the dauphin, the duke of Guyenne. However Minerva was not as useful to her as Honoré Bouvet, the author of L’Arbre des batailles (The Tree of Battles), which he had composed between the years 1386–­1389. He appeared at her bedside as she lay asleep surrounded by books. She wrote, and I quote from the significant first English translation by William Caxton of 1488: ‘as surprysed with slepe lyenge upon my bed’ [Bell’s emphasis] this stately and wise man praised Christine’s great and unceasing love of literary studies, and had therefore ‘now come for to be as to thy helpe in the perfourmynge of this present boke . . .’ This illustration brings me to an important point I want to make about Christine’s physical study. Not only was it lit by windows and had a door for complete privacy. The study also contained her bed. We know from various sources that people’s sleeping arrangements were cramped and that peasants usually shared their sleeping quarters with their animals. It was also common for royalty to receive people in rooms containing their beds. We only have to remember the famous illustration of Queen Isabeau with her ladies in waiting as Christine presents her manuscript. As late as the 17th century Abraham Bosse depicted a ladies’ dinner party with the bed a prominent feature of the same room. More importantly for my purposes here: is the author Jean Mielot in his study, copying a manuscript for his patron Philip the Good of Burgundy (ca. 1450) with a bed in an alcove snugly behind his desk. And finally in this manuscript of the Livre de fais d’armes, now in Brussels, Christine’s study also showing her bed in the alcove behind her. Not surprisingly reading in her study or cell had become a comfortable habit” (“Christine de Pizan in Her Study”). We should also note that studies were also often situated in a smaller room off a private bedchamber. 18. Luckhardt, in “Le Menagier de Paris: A Parisian Bourgeoisie Household in 1400,” writes: “The upper floor of the house contained the bedrooms and main living quarters for the author and his wife. On this third floor lay the master bedroom, which is described in some detail, including some furniture, as compared to the rest of the house. The master chamber contains a bed with bedding; white sheets most likely made of linen, fur covers, and coverlets. The bed also had “tassels” on it, perhaps to draw the canopy closings around the bed. . . . ​There was also an armoire for the master’s and mistress’s clothing. . . . ​Next to the master bedroom is a small room for the serving girls to sleep in so the mistress of the house might keep a close eye on them. The room was to have no windows so that the girls could not get into trouble with the young men outside. . . . ​Also on this top floor was a solar. This room was a sun parlor made to catch whatever sun there was as a pleasant room for female pursuits and socialization.” 19. See McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture, 120–­34; and Schofield, “Social Perceptions of Space.” Of course, according to such a theory of thresholds, even more than the private bedchamber, the privy chamber (with commode) “was the utmost private space, the place where one went to relax and perhaps to play ‘chamber games,’ to take care of body and soul, and to write” (Contamine, “Peasant Hearth to Papal Palace,” 502). 20. See Spain, Gendered Spaces; Camille, “Signs of the City”; Rees Jones, “Women’s Influence on the Design of Urban Homes”; Riddy, “Looking Closely”; Gowing, “ ‘The Freedom of the Streets.’ ”

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21. Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture, 122–­26 22. See the discussion of Pantin’s “Instructions for a Devout and Literate Layman” in Chapter 1. 23. See Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation, 37–­77; Lipton, Affections of the Mind, 1–­20. 24. “Peasant Hearth to Papal Palace,” 502. 25. Painting and Politics, 13. For an image of Hieronymus Bosch, Death and the Miser, ca. 1485/1490, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Samuel H. Kress Collection, see the National Gallery’s website, http://www.nga.gov. 26. See de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 117; and Chapter 2 in this volume. 27. Chaucer, “The Merchant’s Tale,” Canterbury Tales, fragment 4, lines 1822, 1824–25, 1849 (The Riverside Chaucer, p. 161). All subsequent references to the Canterbury Tales will be to the Riverside edition. 28. De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 117. 29. The Good Wife’s Guide, ed. Greco and Rose, 183; Bruyant, Le Chemin de povreté et de richesse, in Le Mesnagier de Paris, ed. Brereton, Ferrier, and Ueltschi, 813: “Que passés furent les foiriez / De mes nopces et de ma feste, / Et qu’il fut temps d’avoir moleste, / Un soir me couchay en mon lit / Où je eus moult peu de délit, / Et ma femme dormoit lez moy / Qui n’estoit pas en grant esmoy.” Subsequent references to Bruyant’s poem will be to the French edition by Ueltschi in Le Mesnagier and to the English translation by Greco and Rose in The Good Wife’s Guide. An adapted and abridged version of the poem, Pierre Gringore’s Chasteau de labour, was printed in France in 1499, and shortly after that Alexander Barclay translated this version into English; Wynkyn de Worde printed his poem in England in 1506 as The Castell of Labour (see the Roxburghe Club’s 1905 facsimile, introd. A. W. Pollard). There are fifteen manuscripts of the poem, two of which are extensively illustrated with painted miniatures: Philadelphia, Free Library of Philadelphia, MS Widener I; and New York, Morgan Library, MS M.0396. Little is known of the author, other than his name: see Langfors, “Jacques Bryant et son poème”; and Badel, Le Roman de la Rose au XIV e siècle. Although the Menagier tells us that Bruyant was formerly royal notary at the Châtelet, Ionut Epurescu-­Pascovici notes: “During Bruyant’s time this was a minor office, and it is unclear whether he even held it; the documentary record does not support the Ménagier’s assertion. The Chemin, however, is permeated by legal culture, and it may be that Bruyant served at the Châtelet temporarily or in a related capacity. He might have received some university training, but it is unlikely that he graduated. The poem’s autobiographical references suggest that Bruyant lived a difficult life of work and modest achievement. . . . ​The comparison with the Ménagier reveals the limits of Bruyant’s learning: the latter’s author, an educated bourgeois but hardly an intellectual, cites a plethora of literary works and makes our legal professional appear, by comparison, quite unsophisticated” (“Le Chemin de Povreté et de Richesse and the Late Medieval Social Imaginary,” 21). 30. “Dame, dis-­je, ne savez mie / Comme j’ay eu forte nuitie / Quant vous de lez moy dormiez / Et vostre repos preniez. / Vous n’avez pas véu à-­nuit / La male gent qui tant m’a nuit / Et fait si grant adversité: / Besoing avec Nécessité / Souffreté, Disette autressy, / Pensée la vieille et Soussy, / Desconfort et Désespérance. . . . ​/ Mais Raison la bonne et la sage / M’a apris la voie et l’usage / D’eschever toute adversité / Et de vivre en prospérité. . . . ​/ Si m’y ont moult bien aïdé / Bon-­cuer et Bonne-­voulenté / Talent-­de-­bien-­faire leur fils. . . . ​/ Au chastel de Labour alasmes, / Où nous Soing et Cure trouvasmes / Qui sont de ce chastel portiers: / Ceulx me reçurent moult volentiers / Et me menèrent droit à Peine / Qui de Labour est chastellaine / Peine me reçut sans séjour: / O moy a esté toute jour; / Travail ores, puis l’annuitier, / Vint à moy non pas pour luitier, / Mais pour dire et ramentevoir / Qu’avoie bien fait mon devoir / Et que temps



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estoit de venir / Mon corps aisier et soustenir. / Mais trop m’ont hasté Soing et Cure / Qui de long aisement n’ont cure, / De moy, dès matines, lever / Pour tost ma besoigne achever. / Or vous ay compté sans mençonge / Ma vision qui n’est pas songe” (836–­37). 31. “Lors me menèrent Soing et Cure / Ens ou chastel grant aléure. / Là avoit bien plus de cent mille / Ouvriers ouvrans par la ville, / Dont chascun faisoit son mestier / Si comme il lui estoit mestier; / Là n’ot homme ne femme oiseux. / Tant estoit ce chastel noiseux / De férir et de marteller / Qu’on n’y oïst pas Dieu tonner” (833). 32. “Peine qui aloit visitant / Tous les ouvriers dont je vy tant. / Les pans avoit à sa ceinture / Et moult aloit brant aléure; / De telle ardeur se remuoit / Qu’a pou que le sang ne suoit; / Nulle fois surcot ne vestoit, / Mais en sa povre cote estoit / Et aucune fois en chemise, / Quant elle l’avoit blanche mise” (834). 33. “Plus décevable ne trouvas / Puis que tu fus de mère nés; / Repos a maintes gens menés / Ou hideux chemin de Paresse / Qui tourne le cul à Richesse” (835). 34. “Qui ne pensoit à nul diffame, / Mais m’appareilloit à mengier / A lie chière et sans dangier” (836). 35. “Qu’est-­ce que vous me dictes cy? / Vous estes, je croy, hors du sens, / Car ne me congnois en nul sens / En ce que vous m’alez disant / Et toute nuit cy devisant, / Car ce n’est tout que fantasie / Que vous dictes par frenaisie” (837). 36. Reflecting on the counsel to avoid laziness that the narrator has received in his vision, he notes: “And God, by his grace, sets me aright to live so well in Diligence and Perseverance, to the satisfaction of Toil and Pain, that I can envision myself in the demesne of the grand lady Riches, to the salvation of my body and soul” (208). “Et Dieu, par sa grace, m’amand / De si bien vivre en Diligence / Et en bonne Persévérance, / Au gré de Travail et de Peine, / Que véoir me puisse ou demaine / De Richesse la haute Dame, / Au sauvement de corps e d’âme” (837). 37. “Je me aide de tout pour obtenir au point ou article que seulement je desire” (412). 38. “Et atant devoient demourer ensemble en amour, se non en amour au moins en paix” (234). 39. Sarah Salih, “Unpleasures of the Flesh,” 131–­32. 40. “Il me souffist bien que vous me faictes autel service comme vos bonnes voisines font a leurs mariz qui sont pareilz a nous et de nostre estat et comme vos parentes font a leurs mariz de pareil estat que nous sommes. Si vous en conseillez presentement a elles, et aprez leur conseil si en faictes ou plus ou moins selon vostre vouloir” (24). 41. “Et atant, chiere suer, vous souffise de ceste matiere. Car le sens naturel que Dieu vous a donné, la voulenté que vous avez d’estre devote et bonne vers Dieu et l’Eglise, les predicacions et sermons que vous orrez en vostre perroisse et ailleurs, la Bible, la Legende Doree, l’Apocalice, la Vie des Peres et autres pluseurs bons livres en françois que j’ay, dont vous estes maistresse pour en prendre a vostre plaisir, vous donra et atraira parfondement le remenant, au bon plaisir de Dieu qui a ce vous vueille conduire et entalenter” (128). 42. As Sedgwick notes, “there may be value in simply reintroducing the spatiality of concepts that are customarily thought of in temporal terms. Jacques Derrida’s and Judith Butler’s important discussions of performativity, for example, tend to proceed through analyses of its temporal complexity: iteration, citationality, the ‘always already,’ that whole valuable repertoire of conceptual shuttle movements that endlessly weave between the future and the past. By contrast, the localness of the periperformative is lodged in a metaphorics of space. Periperformative utterances aren’t just about performative utterances in a referential sense: they cluster around them, they are near them or next to them or crowding against them; they are in the neighborhood of the performative. Like the neighborhoods in real estate ads, periperformative

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neighborhoods have prestigious centers (the explicit performative utterance) but no very fixed circumferences; yet the prestige of the center extends unevenly, even unpredictably through the rest of the neighborhood” (Touching Feeling, 68). 43. “Et toutesvoies, jasoit ce, comme j’ay dit, que a moy ne appartiengne fors que ung petit de service, si vouldroie je bien que vous sceussiez du bien et de l’onneur et de service a grant planté et foison et plus que a moy n’appartient, ou pour servir autre mary se vous l’avez aprez moy, ou pour donner plus grant doctrine a voz filles, amies ou autres, se il vous plaist et besoing en ont. Et tant plus savrez, tant plus d’onneur y avrez, et plus louez en seront voz parens, et moy aussi et autres entour qui vous avrez esté norrie” (24–­26). 44. At the beginning of the fourth article of the first section, the husband more pointedly imagines this textual/performative attention to personal conduct—​­on the part of himself, his wife, and his book—​­as establishing an ever-­expanding textual community. This fourth article addresses the wife’s continence and chastity, not because the husband doubts her possession of such virtue: “but because I appreciate that after you and me this book will fall into the hands of our children or our friends, I choose to include all kinds of things that I know. Indeed you must instruct your friends, and especially your daughters” (86; “pour ce que je scay que aprez vous et moy ce livre cherra es mains de noz enfans ou autres nos amis, je y mectz voulentiers tout ce que je scay, et dy que aussi devez vous endoctriner voz amies, et par especial voz filles” [130]). 45. The Good Wife’s Guide, 53–­54. 46. The Good Wife’s Guide, 53. 47. The full passage from the beginning of the first article of the first section reads as follows: “The beginning and first article of the first section treats prayer and arising. You must arise in the morning—​­and morning means, with regard to the subject we are treating here, Matins. For just as we country folk describe the day as from dawn to night, or from sunrise to sunset, clerks who are more subtle say that is the artificial day, and that the natural day is 24 hours long, and begins at midnight and ends at the following midnight. So that is why I explained that morning refers to Matins. I mention it because the Matins bell rings then to wake up the monks to say the Matins and praise God, and not at all because I wish to imply that you, dear one, or any married women, must get up at that hour. But I do want to have pointed it out, so that at the hour that you hear the Matins ringing, you praise and hail Our Lord with some greeting or prayer before you fall back to sleep. To this purpose, proper orisons or prayers are included below. For either the hour of Matins or at daybreak, I have written down two prayers for you to address to Our Lord, and two others for Our Lady, appropriate to say when waking up or arising from bed” (55). “Le commancement et premier article de la premiere distinction parle de adourer et du lever. Lequel vostre lever doit estre entendu matin, et matin en l’entendement que l’en peut prendre selon la matiere dont nous avons a traictier est dit de matines. Car ainsi comme entre nous gens ruraulx disons le jour depuis l’aube du jour jusques a la nuit, ou du soleil levant jusques a soleil couchant, les clercz qui preignent plus soubtilement dient que c’est le jour artificiel; mais le jour naturel qui tousjours a .xxiiii. heures se commence a la mynuit et fenist a la mynuit ensuivant. Et pour ce j’ay dit que matin est dit de matines. Je l’entendz avoir dit pour ce que adont sonnent les matines pour faire relever les religieux pour dire matines et louenge a Dieu, et non mie pour ce qe je vueille dire que vous, belle seur, ne les femmes qui sont mariees, vous doiez lever a celle heure. Mais je le vueil bien avoir dit pour ce que a icelle heure vous oyez sonner matines vous louez adoncq et saluez Nostre Seigneur d’aucun salut ou oroison avant ce que vous vous rendormez; car a ce propos sont cy aprez propres oroisons ou prieres. Car, soit a celle heure de matin ou au matin ju jour, j’ay cy escript deux oroisons pour vous a dire a Nostre Seigneur, et deux autres a Nostre Dame, propres a esveillier ou lever” (34–­36).



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48. “Ces oroisons pouez vous dire a matines ou a vostre esveilier du matin, ou a l’un et a l’autre, ou en vous levant et vestant, et aprez vostre vestir, tout est bien, et que ce soit a jeun et avant toute autre besoingne” (40–­42). 49. “Et avant que vous partiez de vostre chambre ou hostel, ayez par avant avisé que le colet de vostre chemise, de vostre blanchet, ou de vostre coste ou seurcot ne saillent l’un sur l’autre; comme il est d’aucunes yvrongnes, foles, ou non sachans qui ne tiennent compte de leur honneur ne de l’onnesteté de leur estat ne de leurs maris, et vont les yeulx ouvers, la teste espoventablement levee comme un lion, leurs cheveux saillans hors de leurs coiffes, et les coletz de leurs chemises et coctes l’un sur l’autre; et marchent hommassement et se maintiennent laidement devant la gent sans en avoir honte” (42). 50. “E en alant ayant la teste droite, les paupieres droites basses et arrestees, et la veue droit devant vous quatre toises et bas a terre, sans regarder ou espandre vostre regard a homme ou femme qui soit a destre ou a senestre, ne regarder hault, ne vostre regard changier en divers lieux muablement, ne rire ne arrester a parler a aucun sur les rues” (45). 51. The husband alludes to this point twice—​­in the prologue when he notes that she is of nobler lineage, and in his response to the Griselda story when he comments that he is no Walter nor is she a shepherdess (The Good Wife’s Guide, 50, 118–­19; Le Mesnagier de Paris, 24, 232). 52. “Apres vostre mary, vous devez estre maistresse de l’ostel, commandeur, visiteur, et gouverneur et souverain administreur” (440). 53. See d’Avray, Medieval Marriage. 54. Eisenstein, Selected Works, 2:144. I am indebted to Pamela Sheingorn’s use of montage and bricolage to discuss how Aelred of Rievaulx juxtaposes fragments of Joseph’s life in De Jesu puero duodenni: “Drawing an analogy to the process of creating a film, I understand each of the narratives of the twelve-­year-­old Jesus in the Temple as a macro-­montage, ‘a compositional combining of separate scenes, of whole parts of a complete work’ [Eisenstein, Works, 2:109], and I investigate the construction of Joseph in the separate scenes. In Eisenstein’s words, ‘Each one of these little subsidiary scenes is seen only from one angle, showing only one sharply characteristic feature’ (Works, 2:144)” (Sheingorn, “Constructing the Patriarchal Parent,” 163). Claire Sponsler, “In Transit: Theorizing Cultural Appropriation in Medieval Europe,” has similarly discussed bricolage as a cultural process of appropriation. As she notes: Lévi-­Strauss says, for the bricoleur, “the rules of the game are always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand,’ that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions.” Sponsler adds: “Bricolage thus can open up the world, especially the world of objects, to new and oppositional readings” (“In Transit,” 23). 55. In the end, then, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s machinic assemblage, more than montage, might capture the kind of nontotalizing, mobile technology of truth production being mobilized here: “In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. . . . ​ All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an assemblage. One side of a machinic assemblage faces the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism, or signifying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it also has a side facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulate, and attributing to itself subjects that it leaves with nothing more than a name as the trace of an intensity” (A Thousand Plateaus, 3–­4). Cf. Manuel DeLanda’s attempt in A New Philosophy of Society to develop a coherent social theory out of Deleuzoguattarian assemblage.

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56. Greetham describes his work as editor thus: “Instead of a singular, unitary text I have borrowed Jeauneau’s concept of ‘matière en fusion,’ weaving Eriugena and Jeauneau’s presentation of Periphyseon into a textile (which is, after all, the root meaning of text), a network of associations, of cultural moments, of competing ideologies, and of variant editorial and critical dispensations” (“Édouard Jeauneau’s Edition of the Periphyseon,” 548).

Chapter 4. Affecting Conduct 1. Critics have often argued for a folktale origin for the story. William Edwin Bettridge and Francis Lee Utley (“New Light on the Origin of the Griselda Story”) have identified a folk tradition they call “The Patience of a Princess,” which they note occurred in the Mediterranean and is more likely than previous candidates to have influenced Boccaccio. More recently, Richard Firth Green has argued that we should imagine “a forerunner of Boccaccio’s story being told in a fourteenth-­century equivalent of the Tuscan veglia, or evening gathering around the family hearth, so vividly evoked for us by the Sienese scholar Alessandro Falassi. . . . ​The veglie attended by Falassi in the countryside around Siena in the 1970s proceeded in three stages, each concentrated on a different age group (first children, then those of marriageable age, and finally the elders). Here is his description of the final stage: ‘When at the end of the veglia the elders took the floor again, the tone and topic changed; the emphasis shifted to maintaining the family units, rather than the formation of couples. . . . ​In general, the elders liked and were interested in the “stories of married people,” in which the protagonists confronted situations with which the narrators or listeners who were “old” (that is, “adult” with positive connotation, deriving from age and experience) had to deal regularly at that stage of their life. Consequently, toward the end of the veglia, the narrators recounted pitiful cases, the events and vicissitudes of marriage” (Green, “Griselda in Siena,” 4; quoting Falassi, Folklore by the Fireside, 148). 2. When talking about the story more generally I will use the English “Walter” and “Griselda.” But when speaking about individual versions of the story I shall adopt the different spellings each author uses in order to distinguish the various versions as much as possible: thus “Gualtieri” and “Griselda” for Boccaccio’s Italian version; “Walterus” and “Griseldis” for Petrarch’s Latin translation; “Wautier” and “Griseldis” for the anonymous French Livre Griseldis; “Gautier” and “Griseldis” for Philippe’s French translation; and “Walter” and “Griselda” for Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale. 3. Green points out that Walter actually submits Griselda to four tests: “(1) He has their infant daughter taken away, leaving Griselda with the impression that she is to be killed; (2) He has their infant son taken away under similar circumstances; (3) He produces a forged divorce document and sends Griselda home to her father; and (4) He brings Griselda back to the house to prepare it for the arrival of his new bride. Interestingly there is a tendency among readers to reduce these four to three, either by amalgamating the first two (thus the first test becomes ‘the removal of the children’), or, more commonly, the last two (so that the third test becomes ‘the divorce and second marriage’)” (“Griselda in Siena,” 7). 4. Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. McWilliam, 794–­95; Italian: “Che si potrà dir qui? Se non che anche nelle povere case piovono dal cielo de’ divini spiriti, come nelle reali di quegli che sarien piú degni di guardar porci che d’avere sopra uomini signoria. Chi avrebbe, altri che Griselda, potuto col viso non solamente asciutto ma lieto sofferir le rigide e mai piú non udite pruove da Gualtier fatte? Al quale non sarebbe forse stato male investito d’essersi abbattuto a una che quando, fuor di casa, l’avesse fuori in camiscia cacciata, s’avesse sí a un altro fatto scuotere il



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pilliccione che riuscito ne fosse una bella roba” (Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Branca, 1248). Future reference to Boccaccio’s story will be to these two editions and inserted parenthetically. 5. See Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, trans. Bernardo, Levin, and Bernardo, 2:643–­71: The four letters to Boccaccio in Epistolae seniles, book 17, are: a letter describing the transmission of the letters (17.1), Petrarch’s negative response to Boccaccio’s suggestion that he reduce his literary labor because of his old age (17.2), the Griselda tale with introductory comments and concluding moralization (17.3), and Petrarch’s report on the tale’s reception by two readers (17.4). See Severs, The Literary Relationships of Chaucer’s “Clerkes Tale,” 7–­ 11, for details of their composition. 6. David Wallace has posited the existence of what he calls the “Petrarchan Academy”: “a small, consciously exclusive, masculine group of initiates dedicated to the pursuit of Latin culture: just such a group, in fact, as Petrarch describes in framing his Griselda story . . . ​ I employ the term ‘Petrarchan Academy,’ then, to denote a complex cultural phenomenon that was in part historical (Petrarch’s admirers held meetings) and in part imaginary, expressive of a desire to escape history entirely. . . . ​The most important of these peripheral Petrarchan groups were located at Florence and Naples” (Chaucerian Polity, 264–­65). But of course such an academy is but the epicenter of larger imagined communities—​­Petrarch’s extensive network of correspondents (which included people such as Philippe de Mézières), admirers of Petrarch as humanist, those who respected him as learned “doctor” and poet laureate, and so on. 7. Petrarch, Historia Griseldis, ed. Farrell, 128; Latin, 129:“Hanc historiam stilo nunc alio retexere visum fuit, non tam ideo, ut matronas nostri temporis ad imitandam huius uxoris pacienciam, que michi vix mutabilis videtur, quam ut legentes ad imitandam saltem femine constanciam excitarem, ut quod hec viro suo prestitit, hoc prestare deo nostro audeant, qui licet ut Iacobus ait Apostolus intemptator malorum sit, et ipse neminem temptet: probat tamen. Et sepe nos multis ac gravibus flagellis exerceri sinit, non ut animum nostrum sciat, quem scivit ante quam crearemur. Sed ut nobis nostra fragilitas notis ac domesticis indiciis innotescat. Habunde ego constantibus viris asscripserim, quisquis is fuerit, qui pro deo suo sine murmure paciatur quod pro suo mortali coniuge rusticana hec muliercula passa est.” Future reference to Historia Griseldis will be to this edition’s facing-­page English translation and Latin text and inserted parenthetically in the text. 8. See Golenistcheff-­Koutouzoff, L’Histoire de Griseldis en France; and more recently, Morabito, “La diffusione della storia di Griselda.” Petrarch’s text was also translated into Catalan in 1388 by the humanist writer Bernat Metge, as Valter e Griselda; see Obra completa de Bernat Metge, ed. Badia and Lamuela, 125–­43. By the sixteenth century Petrarch’s story had been translated into virtually every major European language. See Bronfman, Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale; and Bliss, “The Renaissance Griselda.” 9. For a modern edition of Le Livre Griseldis with facing-­page translation (based on Paris, BnF, MS fr. 12459), see Le Livre Griseldis, ed. Goodwin. Future reference will be to Goodwin’s edition and inserted parenthetically in my text. 10. Nine of seventeen manuscripts containing the Miroir des dames mariées also contain conduct texts for women; see Golenistcheff-­Koutouzoff, L’Histoire de Griseldis en France, 34–­42. In one copy of the Livre Griseldis (included in Paris, BnF, MS fr. 11505), the scribe also explicitly addresses his text to married women and those about to marry. 11. Philippe de Mézières, Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, ed. Williamson. This text survives in a unique manuscript copy: Paris, BnF, MS fr. 1175 (which Williamson argues was written by Philippe himself ). See Williamson’s edition of Le Livre, 1–­24, for a description of the manuscript and its history. While Williamson concluded that the Livre was written sometime

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between 1385 and 1389, more recently Keith Val Sinclair has proposed that it was more likely produced between 1386 and 1388 (“Un élément datable de la piété du Livre de la vertu du sacrement,” 166). 12. See Good Wife’s Guide, ed. Greco and Rose, 105–­22. 13. L’Estoire de Griseldis, ed. Craig. Craig (following Frank, “The Authorship of Le Mystère de Griseldis”) attributes authorship of the play to Philippe (4–­6). 14. The Griselda story occurs in 2.50.1 of Le Livre de la cité des dames. See Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, ed. Richards, 170–­76. 15. In his fourth letter to Boccaccio, Petrarch recounts how different readers had very different affective responses to the story. A Paduan friend, “a man of the highest intellect and broad knowledge,” was overcome by weeping “scarcely past the middle of the letter” and could not continue. Another friend, from Verona, having heard what happened wanted to read the tale. He read it all without stopping and without showing any emotion. In the end, he said, “I too would have wept, for the touching subject and the words fit for the subject prompted weeping, nor am I hard-­hearted; but I believed, and still do, that the whole thing was made up. For if it were true, what woman anywhere, whether Roman or of any nation whatever will match this Griselda?” Petrarch then notes: “the answer was simple: that there are some who consider whatever is difficult for them, impossible for everyone . . . ​whereas there have been many, and perhaps still are, for whom things that seem impossible to the multitude are simple. For who is there, for example, who would not think the tales of Curius and Mucius are fictitious . . . ​or, since we are speaking of women, Porcia, Hypsicratea, or Alcestis and others like them? And yet the stories are true” (Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, 2:669–­70). It is precisely this tension between the intention to uncover an effective universal meaning in Griselda’s example and the realization that doing so involves wrestling in individual, even somatic, terms with the conflicting responses elicited by the tale, that constitutes the kind of performative reading practice and affect management that will demonstrate a truly ethical subject in the world. This will necessarily take different forms; so it is the process itself, rather than the supposed inherent Christian moral, that is made historical and real through such reading and telling of the Griselda story. Such affective reading practices, Petrarch insists, allow their practitioners real purchase in the world; for they have the capacity to reshape and reform not just an individual subject’s power relations with the social but the social itself. 16. The revernacularization of the Griselda story that ensues as Petrarch’s text is translated again and again throughout the fourteenth century does not, strictly speaking, constitute mouvance in Paul Zumthor’s terms since Zumthor deals primarily with the tranformations inherent in the transmission of oral poetry rather than a written text such as the Griselda story. But the concept does help describe how the affective work of performative reading that Petrarch initiates reintroduces the local into the universalizing trajectory of the tale and, with that, a hermeneutical situation focused on a state of perpetual becoming. Zumthor’s concept of mouvance provocatively draws attention to the value of the copy rather than the original in describing the embodied, preindustrial textual practices of the Middle Ages. And it argues for repetition with difference as the defining characteristic of a medieval work’s transmission through oral and written culture. Thus, Zumthor notes, “the [medieval] work is fundamentally unstable. Properly speaking it has no end; it merely accepts to come to an end, at a given point, for whatever reasons. The work exists outside and hierarchically above its textual manifestations” (Toward a Medieval Poetics, 47–­48). Postmodern textual critics have gone even further in delineating the material and performative dimensions of medieval textual instability. Tim Machan, for example, has argued that the objective of a modern edition “predicated on the historical determi-



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nants of the discourse of late Middle English manuscripts” would not be to recover “an authorized text behind a number of documentary ones—​­as is the case in traditional textual criticism—​­but the work behind a document. The character of this work would depend on the physical and textual evidence of the manuscript, on the literary and cultural traditions that frame it and on which it draws, and on its relationship to other manuscripts of what might be considered, within these contexts, the same work” (Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts, 184). As I argue in this chapter, the affective labor of individual readers, as much as the interventions of individual scribes or authors, accounts for the inherent instability and variation within the transmission of a medieval “text” such as the Griselda story across different cultural locations and over time. 17. See Introduction above. 18. Green notes that “the laws of folktale mean that the crucial test, the one upon which Griselda’s fate ultimately hangs, must be the last—​­her return to the house to prepare it for her replacement” (“Griselda in Siena,” 7). Her final test, then, is of her wifeliness, and notably Griselda behaves as if she has already so completely incorporated the lessons of conduct literature for women that she does naturally what they recommend as the ideal actions of the good wife, something the noble visitors arriving with Walter’s new young bride notice. While modern readers often focus on Griselda as a mother enduring the terrible pain of losing her two children in the first two tests, Green reminds us of the commonness of a mother’s absence from her children in medieval upper-­class households. He argues that even if we do not agree with Philippe Ariès’s contention (Centuries of Childhood) that childhood was not seen as a separate stage of life until the early modern period, Griselda’s position as wife in the story is more significant than her status as mother (“Griselda in Siena,” 11). 19. In article 6 in the first distinction of the Menagier, dealing with wifely obedience, in addition to the Griselda story that begins the article, the text recounts stories of a wife who insisted on a list of contractual obligations owed by husband and wife to each other. When her husband fell in a river while trying to cross it, his wife refused to help him, saying it was not in the contract. A lord later rescues the husband, finds out what has happened, and has the wife pursued, seized, and burned. And the narrator of the Menagier tells, with approbation, several stories of wives who, without any complaint, obey apparently arbitrary requests by their husbands, such as jumping over a stick on command (Good Wife’s Guide, ed. Greco and Rose, 119–­ 20, 125, 127–­30). 20. See Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 54: “Phenomenology hence shows us how objects and others have already left their impressions on the skin surface. The tactile object is what is near me, or what is within my reach. In being touched, the object does not ‘stand apart’; it is felt ‘by’ the skin and even ‘on the skin.’ In other words, we perceive the object as an object, as something that ‘has’ integrity, and is ‘in’ space, only by haunting that very space; that is, by co-­ inhabiting space such that the boundary between the co-­inhabitants of space does not hold. The skin connects as well as contains.” 21. See Chapter 1, for a discussion of steadfastness as a new, companion counteremotion to compassion in the affective devotional practices of the journées chrétiennes. 22. Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. McWilliam, 794–­95; Italian: “Che si potrà dir qui? se non che anche nelle povere case piovono dal cielo de’ divini spiriti, come nelle reali di quegli che sarien più degni di guarder porci che d’avere sopra uomini signoria” (Branca,1248). 23. Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. McWilliam, 795: Italian: “le donne, chi d’una parte e chi d’altra tirando, chi biasimando una cosa, un’altra intorno a essa lodandone, n’avevan favellato” (Branca, 1249).

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24. See Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 68. See also my discussion in Chapter 3 of how the Menagier manages such periperformatives. 25. Such a movement thus fantasizes the kind of socialized fixing of affect that Brian Massumi has defined as emotion: “An emotion [in contrast to affect] is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity. . . . ​It is intensity owned and recognized” (Parables for the Virtual, 28). 26. Petrarch, Sen. 17.3, in Letters of Old Age, 2:655–­56. 27. See Sidhu, “Weeping for the Virtuous Wife,” for a discussion of the tale’s appeal to masculinity, piety, and emotion and its relations to the increasing importance of a man’s supervision of the married household in late medieval society. 28. “Est ad Ytalie latus occiduum Vesulus ex Appennini iugis mons unus altissimus, qui, vertice nubile superans, [liquido sese] ingerit etheri, mons suapte nobilis natura, Padi ortu nobilissimus . . . ​sed fluviorum a Virgilio rex dictus . . .” (Historia Griseldis, 111). 29. “Inter cetera, ad radicem Vesuli, terra Saluciarum vicis et castellis satis frequens, marchionum arbitrio nobilium quorundam regitur virorum, quorum unus primusque omnium et maximus fuisse traditur Walterus quidam . . .” (Historia Griseldis, 112–­13). 30. “Et hic quidem forma virens atque etate, nec minus moribus quam sanguine nobilis, et ad summam omni ex parte vir insignis, nisi quod presenti sua sorte contentus, incuriosissimus [futurorum erat]” (Historia Griseldis, 113). 31. “Un giovane chiamato Gualtieri, il quale, essendo senza moglie e senza figliuoli, in niuna altra cosa il suo tempo spendeva che in uccellare e in cacciare, né di prender moglie né d’aver figliuoli alcun pensiero avea; di che egli era da reputar molto savio” (Decameron, ed. Branca, 1234). 32. “Moverunt pie preces animum viri” (Historia Griseldis, 113). 33. “E prudencie vestre fisus et fidei” (Historia Griseldis, 113). 34. “Ma poi che pure in queste catene vi piace d’annodarmi” (Decameron, ed. Branca, 1234). 35. “Erano a Gualtieri buona pezza piaciuti i costumi d’una povera giovinetta che d’una villa vicina a casa sua era, e parendogli bella assai estimò che con costei dovesse potere aver vita assai consolata” (Decameron, ed. Branca, 1235). 36. “Forma corporis satis egregia, sed pulcritudine morum atque animi adeo speciosa ut nichil supra. . . . ​sed virilis senilisque animus virgineo latebat in pectore” (Historia Griseldis, 115). 37. “Ut pauperum quoque tugurria non numquam gratia celestis invisit, unica illi nata contigerat Griseldis nomine” (Historia Griseldis, 115). 38. “Sepe illuc transiens, quandoque oculos non iuvenili lascivia sed senili gravitate defixerat, et virtutem eximiam supra sexum supraque etatem, quam vulgi oculis condicionis obscuritas [abscondebat], acri penetrarat intuitu. Unde effectum vel uxorem habere, quam nunquam ante voluerat, et simul hanc nullamque aliam habere disponeret” (Historia Griseldis, 115). 39. Petrarch, Sen. 17.2, in Letters of Old Age, 2:653–­54. 40. Petrarch, Sen. 17.2, in Letters of Old Age, 2:650. 41. In describing as “ugly feelings” the kinds of disempowering emotions that humanists such as Petrarch might feel as part of their unequal power relations vis-­à-­vis the rulers they served, I draw on Sianne Ngai’s provocative positing of a set of negative, often unrecognized and unnamed emotions prevalent in modern literature—​­envy, anxiety, paranoia, irritation, a racialized affect she calls “animatedness,” and a “strange amalgamation of shock and boredom” she



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calls “stuplimity”—​­that she sees functioning similarly “as mediations between the aesthetic and the political.” (Ugly Feelings, 2–­3). 42. “Il quale con assai dolente viso le disse: ‘Madonna, se io non voglio morire, a me convien far quello che il mio signor mi comanda. Egli m’ha comandato che io prenda questa vostra figliuola e ch’io . . .’ e non disse piú. La donna, udendo le parole e vedendo il viso del familgiare e delle parole dette ricordandosi, comprese che a costui fosse imposto che egli l’uccidesse: per che prestamente presala della culla e basciatala e benedetola, come che gran noia nel cuor sentisse, senza mutar viso in braccio la pose al famigliare” (Decameron, ed. Branca, 1239–­40) 43. “Parce, inquit, o domina, neque michi imputes quod coactus facio. Scis, sapientissima, quid est esse sub dominis, neque tali ingenio predite quamvis [inexperte] dura parendi necessitas est ignota. Iussus sum hanc infantulam accipere, atque eam—​­. Hic sermone arrupto, quasi crudele ministerium silencio exprimens, subticuit. Suspecta viri fama, suspecta facies, Suspecta hora, suspecta erat oracio, quibus etsi clare occisum iri dulcem filiam intelligeret, nec lacrimulam tamen ullam nec suspirium dedit. In nutrice quidem, ne dum in matre, durissimum” (Historia Griseldis, 119, 121). 44. See Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 267–­77, for a discussion of Petrarch’s service to and patronage by Italian despots, especially the Visconti family. 45. Butler, Undoing Gender, 1, 2–­3. 46. Butler, Undoing Gender, 3–­4. 47. For a somewhat different account of Griselda’s importance in Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, see Collette, Performing Polity, 41–­58. Collette argues that Philippe’s work epitomizes a larger ideology of women as participants in shaping polity, one influential on both sides of the Channel. Philippe’s stories of married women, she notes, center on the connections to be made among virtue, marriage, and the public good. Thus Philippe emphasizes the role of “Prudence as an important female virtue . . . ​in the private life of the individual woman rather than as part of the strategies that enable her public life” (42), or the Saint Cecilia story as an exemplum of marriage as much as of martyrdom. And his narrative end point, the story of Griselda, casts her as the most exalted exemplar of female virtue—​­greater even than any of the nine ancient worthy women—​­because she conquers herself and manifests an unwavering self-­control. 48. For the Griselda story, see Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, ed. Williamson, 356–­77; for the miracle of the Virgin, 384–­92. Two prayers to the Virgin and the Sacrament of the Altar follow and close the book. Philippe notes in his prologue to the miracle that he heard about it from the king of Cilician Armenia, Leon V, during his exile in Paris. Philippe underscores how the destruction of the Christian kingdom of Cilician Armenia (last of the Christian kingdoms of mainland Outremer) and the capture and extended imprisonment of the king and his family in Egypt by the Mamluk sultan provide a crucial backdrop to his account of the miracle. Thus, even as we call to mind that disappointment for Christianity, we are also encouraged to focus on this miracle that occurs each year in a Jacobite church on the island of Rosetta, where the Virgin Mary appears enthroned to the congregation surrounded by a host of heavenly saints. People in the congregation can witness not only the Virgin but close relatives who have died but who are now safely under the Virgin’s protection in heaven. Furthermore, not just Christians, but also Jews and Saracens come to witness this event. While the king was not allowed by the sultan to attend, the members of his family, including his wife, have witnessed the miracle and can vouch for its authenticity.

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49. In his prologue to the Livre, Philippe provides a longer version of the book’s title that also foregrounds the importance of Griselda to his project: “Et est intitulé cestui livre De la Vertu du sacrement de mariage espirituel et reconfort des dames mariees et de tout bon Crestien par un devot example de la Passion de Jesu Crist et du miroir des dames mariees, la noble marquise de Saluce” (Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, ed. Williamson, 47). 50. The only biography of Philippe is Jorga, Philippe de Mézières, 1327–­1405. There has been renewed interest recently in Philippe’s crusade activism, his role as a conduit connecting East and West, and his connections with the court culture of many of the most important European courts. See especially discussions by Blumenfeld-­Kosinski, Poets, Saints, and Visionaries; Staley, Languages of Power; and the essays included in Philippe de Mézières and His Age, ed. Blumenfeld-­ Kosinski and Petkov. For a discussion of the development of the role of the public intellectual in the fourteenth century, see Hobbins, Authorship and Publicity Before Print. 51. See Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, 6, 9–­11, for a discussion of this miniature. As Williamson notes, there is no clear evidence for why Philippe presented this autograph manuscript to the couple. They were already long married; so it was not a wedding present. Philippe says that Jehanne virtuously kept her marriage vows (Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, ed. Williamson, 44–­45), that she is honored for this observance (49), and that she is reputed to be content with her marriage (217). And Philippe also notes that “the same noble baron [Pierre de Craon], as a result of his great courtesy, included the said contemplative [Philippe] in his close and private friendship, and he showed to him [Philippe] great affection (because of his reverence of God) and gave to him many goods and honors” (“Lequel noble baron par sa grant courtoisie receut le dit solitaire en son grant et privee amisté, et li monstra tant d’amour pour la reverence de Dieu, et li fist tant de biens et d’onnours”) (Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, ed. Williamson, 44). We do know that Pierre had promised a rent of two hundred pounds to Philippe’s military Order of the Passion (Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, ed. Williamson, 10–­11). There is, however, strong evidence that Pierre was not quite the “noble baron” that Philippe makes him out to be. There were earlier accusations that Pierre had misappropriated funds to finance the expedition (1383–­84) by Louis I, Duke of Anjou, to seize the kingdom of Naples, spending the money instead on riotous living. And later, in 1392, Pierre fled Paris and the royal court after he tried to assassinate Olivier de Clisson, the king’s constable (s.v. “Pierre de Craon le Grand,” in Michaud, Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne; see also, Jones, Ducal Brittany, 1364–­1399, 106, 123–­24, 128, 130, 200). 52. See d’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons and Medieval Marriage. 53. Philippe’s emphasis on the marriage of Mary and Joseph as the perfect embodiment of a truly sacramental marriage—​­despite their both remaining chaste (vierge)—​­has led Anna Loba (Le Réconfort des dames mariées, 144–­60) to argue that Philippe in the Livre is proposing that his readers adopt the kind of nonsexual “spiritual marriage” practiced by particularly devout laypeople. As proof she cites the examples of such spiritual marriage provided in the Livre: the Provençal nobles Elzear of Sabran and his wife, Delphine (Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, ed. Williamson, 223–­24); Saint Cecilia and her husband, Valerian (274); as well as the example of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, who embraced a life of chastity after the early death of her husband (335). See also Loba, “Contempler le miroir de la passion.” While Philippe is clearly devoted to the example of the Virgin’s marriage, in both its spiritual form with Joseph and its mystical with Christ, I would argue that his approach ultimately remains sacramental rather than mystical and that his description of spiritual marriage as an ideal should be seen within his encyclopedic aim for the Livre, one that presents sacramental marriage as a continuum ranging from those most troubled and needing rebalancing, such as “la dame malcontente,” to those



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most capable of embodying caritas in its purest form, such as Delphine, Griselda, or the Virgin Mary. It is hard to imagine that even someone as resolutely optimistic and idealistic as Philippe would imagine that he could persuade Pierre de Craon to enter into spiritual marriage. Moreover, as the discussion of conduct literature in the previous chapters makes clear, a crucial part of such an attention to conduct was the redescription of married gender relations in light of an attention to chaste married relations, that is, a sexuality organized around self-­restraint. It seems particularly important, in this regard, to note that it is Griselda who is the culminating example of ideal female virtue, herself a wife who does not attempt a spiritual marriage with her husband but who nonetheless can achieve an unparalleled exemplarity because of her obedience to earthly and spiritual spouse. 54. Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, 309. 55. “Vermaulz en son cuer par la memoire de la Passion et effusion du precieux sang de Jesu Crist et si doit ester resplendissans par bonnes euvres envers s’espouse et a son proisme” (Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, 309). 56. Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, 311. 57. “Tu as moralisié a ton propos et a ta volenté des pierres precieuses, des planetes du ciel, des metaulx de la terre, des medecines du corps et de l’ame, des dons du Saint Esperit, des sacremens de l’Esglise et des euvres de misericorde” (Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, 314). 58. “Et pour conclusion de ma fragilité . . . ​j’aime mieulx une denree de ma volenté que de ta doctrine trente” (Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, 314). 59. Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, 314, 316. 60. The simple magnetic compass as we know it was not completely in place in European navigation until the beginning of the fourteenth century. See Singer, Price, and Taylor, “Cartography, Survey, and Navigation to 1400,” 523–­24. Williamson comments that “Philippe’s depiction of the differences in sailing techniques on different seas is accurate, for Singer notes that seamen of western and northwestern Europe had no charts like those used by the Mediterranean pilots” (Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, 317 n. 210, citing Singer et al., History of Technology, 3:526). 61. This navigator’s box has “a point of metal in the middle on which is seated a flat, round card, able to turn like a wheel, although independently of the box. Lines painted on the card represent the winds, the four main ones being the East, West, North and South winds. Attached to the card is an iron needle with the point fixed on the line representing the North Wind. To use this box one rubs the point of the needle with the lodestone and the needle points to the polar star by which sailors chart their path.” Summary by Williamson, “Allegory Then and Now,” 78. The full French passage reads thus: “dedans laquele boiste ou millieu sur une petite pointe de metail a une petite tablete, plate et ronde, en maniere de roe tournant, assise sus la dicte pointe; et samble qu’elle le tiegne en l’air dedens la boiste; et toujours se remeut et tourne sus la dicte pointe quant la boiste aucunement se remue. Sur la dicte tablete et roe sont paintes et figurees certaines lignes, segnefiees et attribuees a .iiij. vens principaulx de la mer, c’est assavoir au vent d’Orient et d’Occident, de Midi et de Septentrion et aussy a autres .iiij. vens consequens; entre les dessusdis sont autres iiij. lignes figurees. Encores plus sus la dicte tablete ronde et tournant est attachie et fermee de plat une aguille de fer, dont la pointe de l’aguillon est fermee a la ligne qui represente le vent de Septentrion ou Aquillon. Or est ainsi que qui bien veult user de l’office de ceste aguille de fer il fault que la pointe de la dicte aguille soit souvent et tres bien frotee et touchie a la pierre d’aymant qui attrait le fer a lui; et tantost qu’elle est touchie, comme dit est, la dicte roe a toute s’aguille tournant et retournant, finablement la pointe de la dicte aguille, ainsi touchie, comme dit est, a son droit regart a l’estoille fixe et non erratique qui

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est appellee l’estoille tremontane, par laquelle estoille tous les maronniers cognoissent leur chemin. “Et est ceste aguille de telle condition, par la vertu de la pierre d’aymant a laquelle elle a esté touchie, qu’il ne fera ja si grant fortune [en mer] ne si grant orage, ne tenebres a minuit, ne ja ne se remuera tant la boiste, que la dicte aguille n’ait toujours son regart a l’estoille tremontane.” (Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, ed. Williamson, 316). 62. Williamson, “Allegory Then and Now,” 78. For the original French text, see Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, ed. Williamson, 317–­20. 63. “La noble marquise de Saluce . . . ​donne un example solempnel et plaisant a Dieu, non tant seulement aus dames mariees d’amer parfaictement leurs maris, mais a toute ame raisonnable [et] devote d’amer entierement Jhesu Crist son Espous immortel. Dont il se puet dire que la constance et loyaulté, amour et obedience de la dicte marquise ou sacrement de son mariage envers le marquis son mari, aprés les sains ([et]) martirs et autres en la foy crestienne, surmonte et nature et toute femme mariee vertueuse dont les histoires anciennes et croniques faissent aucune mencion” (Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, ed. Williamson, 356). 64. Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, 358. Philippe likely met Petrarch in the early 1360s while accompanying Peter I of Cyprus on one of his European diplomatic missions. He and Petrarch seem to have shared a common interest in the crusade and disgust at the excesses of European knights during the capture of Alexandria in 1365. In November 1369, Petrarch replies to a letter from Philippe telling Petrarch of the death of a common friend, Giacamo dei Rossi, an Italian soldier who campaigned with Philippe during the Crusade of Alexandria. Petrarch commends Philippe: “Before I stop, there is one thing to be touched upon, to give testimony of your incomparable loyalty. You indeed, noble sir, honor with touching kindness a friend who has been taken from our midst; not only do your speech and pen testify to the affection of your spirit, but you also embrace with constant love his surviving children.” In the letter Petrarch laments the weaknesses of the European crusaders that led them to abandon the city and end the crusade: “Greedy barbarity won out, and the despicable love of plunder. . . . ​And so, laden with booty, which is the only thing they had come for under the pretense of religion, but weighed down and overwhelmed with disgrace, they departed, dropping and ignoring their crusades—​­I doubt whether anything more glorious has been contemplated within our grandfather’s memory. But enough of this” (Petrarch, Sen. 13.2, in Letters of Old Age, 2:481–­82). Evelien Chayes (“Trois lettres pour la postérité”) analyzes the concern for peace and the northern Italian familial and political relationships linking these three correspondents who wrote about the loss of Giacamo dei Rossi. 65. Metge, Valter e Griselda, 125. 66. Metge, Valter e Griselda, 142; Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, 2:670 67. Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, 358. 68. As Collette notes: “Philippe devotes a comparatively extensive section of his story to describing her success as a marquise. . . . ​Her virtue is a public virtue, for when Walter is absent she manages affairs of state as well as she manages her household; conforming to the ideal of a noble woman exercising power, she is what Christine calls a moyeneresse, she mediates ­disputes. . . . ​Given this emphasis on her role as public mediatrix, it is not surprising that Walter’s tests present her choice as one between her own will, located in her love for her children, and the common good. . . . ​When she is asked to surrender her children she chooses between her will and the public good. “Born to poverty, Griselda, it seems, has schooled herself to subordinate her will; she is



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thus a perfect wife and a perfect political subject, always modelling loyalty to her lord through ready cooperation in supporting his goals” (Performing Polity, 54–­55). 69. “La constance et loyaulté, amour et obedience de la dicte marquise ou sacrament de son marriage envers le marquis son mari, aprés les sains ([et]) martirs et autres en la foy crestienne, surmonte et nature et toute femme mariee vertueuse don’t les histoires anciennes et croniques faissent aucune mencion. Et vrayement si une dame mariee au jourd’ui souffroit autant de son mari et pour l’amour de Dieu, il se porroit dire qu’elle seroit vraye martire, ne il n’est pas a croire que la dicte marquise par la divine disposition, example de constance et d’obedience peust avoir souffert de son mari ce qu’elle souffri sans grant grace et singulere de Jesu Crist son Espous immortel” (Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, 356). 70. “Les anciennes histoires, a l’example des .ix. preux, font grant mencion des .ix. dames qui par aucuns sont appellees preux, lesquelles dames, selonc les histoires, furent de grant vertu et firent en ce monde choses merveilleuses et quant au monde dignes de memoire” (Le Livre de la Vertu du sacrement de mariage, 356). The Nine Worthies were three good pagans, Hector, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar; three good Jews, Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabeus; and three good Christians, King Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon. Frequently, a contemporary nobleman or prince was added as a tenth worthy in the later Middle Ages and early modern period as a form of flattery. As Julia Boffey notes: “The desirability of some parallel grouping of worthy women to set alongside the nine worthy men was no doubt keenly felt: and an evenly matched group of Nine Female Worthies, the so-­called ‘Neuf Preuse,’ was formalized, its earliest documentation customarily located in some of the ballades of Deschamps, and in some lines in Jehan le Fevre’s late fourteenth-­century Livre de Leesce. The composition of this group does not always mimic the three Jews / three pagans / three Christians pattern of the male Worthies. . . . ​More often the nine were famous warrior queens: Sinope, Hippolyta, Melanippe, Lampedo, Penthilesea, Tomyris, Teuta, Semiramis and Deipyle” (“ ‘Twenty Thousand More’ ”). See Deschamps, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Queux de Saint-­Hilaire and Raynaud, 11:226–­27; Le Fèvre, Les Lamentations de Matheolus et le Livre de Leesce, ed. Van Hamel, 2:91 (lines 2889–­2907); Macmillan, “Men’s Weapons, Women’s War.” 71. “Mais qui vaudra bien peser a la balance, qui rent a chascun le pois de sa valour, la grant vertu du corage invincible de la noble marquise de Saluce, fille d’un povre laboureur, en vaincant et surmontant soy meisme et en efforsant nature, qui est une chose de plus grant merite que n’est de vaincre autrui, si comme le vaillant et preudomme empereur de Romme, Constantin, par sentence disoit, ‘Vaincre,’ dit il, ‘par nous les chastiaus et cités en combatant c’est la force des chevaliers, mais vaincre soy meisme c’est la force de proper vertu’ ” (Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, 357). 72. Collette has noted the significance of an important addition Philippe makes to Petrarch’s original, when he stresses how Griselda herself joins in the sweeping and preparing of the domestic space of Walter’s household as the guests arrive for the wedding of him and his new bride: “As the narrative approaches its conclusion, Griselda’s virtues of good works, self-­control, and humility are augmented by a new focus on how she manifests the virtue of Prudence in returning to prepare the palace for Walter’s new bride. . . . ​for in sweeping and preparing the domestic space of Walter’s household, Griselda is also preparing a public space that will witness a new marriage, a new dynamic in the polity of Walter’s domain. Philippe stresses the public nature of her action in emphasizing the public response to it. Sweeping and cleaning dressed as a maid, Griselda is on display; she seemed to all who beheld her ‘une femme de grant honnour et de merveilleuse prudence’ (Mariage, p. 374); the guests who arrive with the wedding party make

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the same connection among ‘une majesté d’onnour, de bonnes meurs et de prudence [. . .] soubz un si povre habit’ (Mariage, p. 375). At the very conclusion of the story Griselda in her triumph is said to seem more the daughter of an emperor ‘ou de Salmon par prudence que fille du povre Janicola’ (Mariage, p. 377). Even the humblest of domestic actions, if well performed, send public messages” (Performing Polity, 55). 73. Chaucer, “Clerk’s Prologue,” Canterbury Tales, fragment 4, lines 2–­3, 14. 74. Petrarch emphasizes how, with Griselda, “a mature, manly spirit lay hidden in her virginal breast” (Historia Griseldis, 114; 115: “virilis senilisque animus virgineo latebat in pectore”). The French translates the phrase as “a mature and ancient courage was hidden and enclosed in her virginity” (Livre Griseldis, 144; 145: “courage meur et ancien estoit muciez et enclose en sa virginité”). Chaucer says: “in the breste of hire virginitee / Ther was enclosed rype and sad corage” (Canterbury Tales, 4.219–­20). Thus neither the Livre Griseldis nor the Clerk’s Tale genders the universality and maturity of individual spirit as “manly” in the way that Petrarch’s Latin does. Chaucer also does not specify Griselda’s unique spirit as “ancient,” as the French does, opting instead for the less humanist “sad.” Similarly Chaucer’s later description of Griselda’s “sad contenance” (4.293) again focuses on her emotional state more than the French and Latin, which have respectively “humblement et en tres grant reverence” (Livre, 144, 145; “humbly and with great reverence”) and “reverenter atque humiliter” (Historia, 114, 115; “reverently and humbly”). Later, Chaucer’s “With ful sad face” (4.552) translates “de plain front” (Livre, 152, 153; “with a calm face”) and “tranquila fronte” (Historia, 120, 121; “tranquil countenance”). “So sad stidefast was she” (4.564), “suffered this with sad visage” (4.693), and “so sadly holdeth she / Hire children two” (4.1100–­1101) have no counterparts in the French and Latin texts. Walter’s description of Griselda’s “cheere” as “sad and kynde” (4.602) replaces the French “en quelconque maniere ne la vit ou apperçut change ou muee” (Livre, 152, 153; “did not see or perceive her to be changed in any manner whatsoever”) and Latin “nullum unquam mutati animi perpendit indicium” (Historia, 120, 121; “never found any indication of a changed spirit”). “Ylike sad forevermo” (4.754) corresponds to the less embodied “Sed ut que [semel] de se suisque de sortibus statuisset, inconcussa constitit” (Historia, 122, 123; “But always firm about herself and her lot, she remained unaffected”) and “elle ne s’en esbaÿst ne mua en aucune maniere ne ne changa soy” (Livre, 156, 157; “she was not afflicted by it or altered in any manner or changed”). “And she ay sad and constant as a wal” (4.1047) also elaborates in more embodied terms, the French la constance (“constancy”) (Livre, 164, 165) and Latin constanciam (“constancy”) (Historia, 126, 127). 75. Chaucer’s use of “stedfast/stedfastnesse” does not have counterparts in the French and Latin, except possibly at 4.1056, where “stedfastnesse” might stand in for the French “vraie amour et obeïssance de mariage” (Livre Griseldis, 164, 165; “true love and obedience of marriage”). 76. “Quelle ymaginacion merveilleuse print ledit marquis, laquelle aucuns saiges veulent louer, c’est assavoir de experimenter et essaier sa femme plus avant, laquelle il avoit desja assez essayee et approuvee, et de la tenter encores par diverses manieres” (Livre Griseldis, 148–­51). 77. “Ce sergent estoit tenuz pour crueux homme, et estoit de laide figure, et a heure souspessonneuse estoit venuz, et parloit comme homme plain de mauvaise voulenté” (Livre Griseldis, 150, 151). 78. Petrarch’s Latin reads: “The man’s reputation was suspect. His expression was suspect. The time was suspect and his demand was suspect” (Historia Griseldis, 120; 121: “Suspecta viri fama, suspecta facies, Suspecta hora, suspecta erat oracio”). 79. “Ne plours ne sospirs ne fist, qui dobt estre tenue a tres dure chose en une nourrice.” (Livre Griseldis, 150–­53). 80. Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 133.



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81. Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 120. 82. Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 154. 83. Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 150. 84. See Ingham, The Medieval New, for a discussion of how “the medieval ‘new’ served as a means to adjudicate the ethics of invention and eventful change, leveraging thorny problems of fate, creativity and desire” (4). 85. There is a way in which this scene replays and complicates the opening scene of the tale, subtly but consequentially changing its terms of reference. Initially, it is Walter’s “peple,” “flokmeele on a day,” who approach him to urge him to marry, with “oon of hem, that wisest was of loore / Or elles that the lord best wolde assente” acting as spokesperson (4.85–­88). The later opposition of “stormy peple” and “sad folk” exposes the more complex and fluid class politics involved in the negotiation of such political action. 86. This is articulated more explicitly in a contemporary dramatic rendition of the Griselda story associated with Philippe de Mézières and the court of Charles V, L’Estoire de Griseldis. Recent work on the play by Collette explores the ramifications of Griselda’s social status in order to reformulate a French class system in which everyone can know his or her place and which can function in more stable ways. In her chapter titled “Political Griselda: L’Estoire de Griseldis and Nicole Oresme’s Translation of Aristotle’s Politics” (Performing Polity, 59–­78), Collette notes that the play, “in its emphasis on dialogue and the scenes it selects” for inclusion “re-­presents the story of Gautier and Griselda within a wider social context than the terms of an individual, if exemplary, marriage found in most prose versions” (62)—​­through extended scenes of action and conversation between Gautier, his huntsmen, and courtiers; through conversations between Griselda and a nurse that establish a context of nurture and maternal solicitude for Griselda’s virtue; through portrayals of the court as a chorus for an elite class with a particular interest in advancing the common good; and, most important, through a pastoral motif established in the exchanges between two shepherds who abandon dreams of escaping their class like Griselda to choose duty and the care of sheep as their highest calling. Throughout, Collette traces the close correspondences between these features of the play and elements of Oresme’s political theory in order to demonstrate how, “rather than being ends in themselves, the virtues Griselda manifests serve a greater purpose, the establishment of social harmony in a hierarchical yet integrated society” (78). 87. The first examples that the Middle English Dictionary gives for the use of “womanhood” in the sense of “the qualities belonging to or characteristic of a woman, womanliness, femininity,” occur in Chaucer, notably here in the Clerk’s Tale, and in the Knight’s Tale (1.1748), Man of Law’s Tale (2.851), the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale (8.1346), Anelida and Arcite (299), Troilus and Criseyde (1.283), F Prologue to the Legend of Good Women (297), “Complaynt d’Amour” (39, 65), and “Womanly Noblesse” (28). See Tara Williams, “ ‘T’assaye in thee thy wommanheede’ ”; and, more recently, Williams, Inventing Womanhood, 11–­50. 88. The Latin version reads: “Happy applause and auspicious words from all surround them. That day was renowned for its great joy and tears even more than the day of marriage was” (Historia Griseldis, 128; 129: “Plausus letissimus et fausta omnium verba circumsonant, multoque cum gaudio et fletu ille dies celeberimus fuit, celebrior quoque quam dies fuit nupciarum”). The French: “and then all began to cheer up and be joyful, for the lord wished it and entreated all to do so. There was a greater celebration than there had been at the first wedding” (Livre Griseldis, 164; 165, 167: “Et adoncques chascun commença a faire bonne chiere et joyeuse, car le seigneur le vouloit et en prioit chascun. Et fist on plus grant solennité que on n’avoit fait aux nopces premieres”).

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89. McNamer, Affective Meditation, 150–­73; and Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 1. 90. The affective “in-­between” I am describing as ending the Clerk’s version of the Griselda story has clear parallels with, and differences from, the emotional outburst, or “Envoy,” that follows the actual tale. The affective in-­between that I have been describing encourages analysis but without threatening to break the movement to social stability established by Petrarch’s “original,” much in the way Griselda’s swoon interrupts but does not stop the action of the reconciliation scene. The emotive outburst of the Clerk’s Envoy, on the other hand, with its mixing of genres and denial of Griselda’s historicity, takes us “beyond” the tale in a way that harks back to the Decameron’s finale, a move that perhaps pushes us toward the kind of “upheaval of thought” and dissenting vernacular ethics that McNamer ascribes to the laments of Virgin that she examines.

Conclusion 1. See Codex Ashmole 61, ed. George Shuffelton. 2. See Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 68 (quoted in Chapter 3 n 42 above). 3. “Happy Objects,” 29. 4. Holly Crocker, “Medieval Affects Now,” 12–­13. See also Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice.”

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Index

actor-­network theory, 221n9 ad status sermons, 39, 42 adultery, 90, 136 Aelred of Rievaulx, 62, 227n54 affective contract, 15, 16, 26, 144; agency and, 32; in Boccaccio’s Griselda story, 145–­52; at core of sacramental marriage, 20, 23, 100, 125; gay marriage and, 26, 29; journées chrétiennes and, 38; medieval sexual regimes contrasted with, 25; in Menagier, 125, 126, 143; “middling” ideology and, 135; in Petrach’s Griselda story, 153 Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (McNamer), 37–­38, 63, 205n14 affect management, 144, 151, 153, 158, 161; performative reading practices and, 156; surplus emotion as social capital, 157 agency, 13, 42, 48, 55, 102, 143, 190; communal, 67; embodiment as impediment to, 194; individual identity and, 54; interdependent, 35; legal, 21; negotiation of, 137; paradox and, 161; through restraint, 151 Ahmed, Sara, 196, 200n17 Albertanus of Brescia, 139 Alexander III, Pope, 18 allegory, 110, 113, 121, 163, 167–­68, 179 Amsler, Mark, 8, 10, 200n17 anchoresses, 3, 36, 39 Ancrene Wisse, 36 androgyny, 48–­56, 61, 180; controlled, 174, 180; hermeneutical, 179; uncontrolled, 175 antifeminist tradition, medieval, 2, 4, 96, 179; citation in conduct literature, 4–­5, 78; representation of female embodiment and, 79, 181 aristocracy, 29, 134; dynastic marriage, 17; fin’amor and, 25; nobility and, 4, 5 Aristotle, 202n41, 239n86

Arnolfini Portrait (Van Eyck, 1434), 32, 113, 222n15 Arsenal 2058 manuscript, 50 Ashley, Kathleen, 4, 38, 192 Augustine, Saint, 201n22 Barclay, Alexander, 224n29 Barratt, Alexandra, 42 Beauchamp, Margaret de, 40, 210n43 Beaufort, Margaret, 41, 206nn21–­22 bedchamber, 31, 45, 65, 71, 119; at core of household productivity, 68; in later Middle Ages, 112–­19; as rehearsal space, 32; between space and place, 123–­29; wife’s encounter with Christ in, 65, 67 Beghards, 50 beguines, 3, 56, 69 Bell, Susan Groag, 210n43, 213n7 Bernard, Saint, 53 Blamire, Alcuin, 84 Blumenfeld-­Kosinski, Renate, 193 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 32, 141–­42, 153, 156–­57, 229n5, 230n15 Bois, Hawisia de, 40, 210n43 Bonaventura, 34 Bonnet, William, 59 Books of Hours, 8, 14, 35, 205n11; flexible content of, 204–­205n10; journées chrétiennes contrasted with, 48, 49; of Mary of Burgundy, 10, 11, 12–­14, 70; in partial vernacular, 207n28; printed by F. Regnault for the English market, 52; saints depicted in, 74; women associated with, 49, 206–­207n24 Bosch, Hieronymous, 118 Bosse, Abraham, 223n17 Bourdieu, Pierre, 109 Brantley, Jessica, 8

254 In d e x Brereton, Georgine E., 108, 221n3 bricolage, 137–­38, 227n54 Bruyant, Jacques, 106, 113–­14, 116, 123 Bryan, Jennifer, 8 burgess law, 6 Burgundian court, 23, 199n5 Busch, Jeffrey, 28–­29, 30 Butler, Judtih, 160–­61, 225n42 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 70, 212n56 Byron, Isabel de, 40, 210n43 Caesarius of Heisterbach, 1–­2, 3, 7, 20, 29 Caillaut, Antoine, 51 canon law, 17, 18, 19, 201n24 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 2, 143, 174 capitalism, 66, 122 Carey, Hilary M., 40, 205n20 Carroll, Margaret D., 23, 118 Carthusian order, 8 Castle of Labor, 114, 117, 120–­22, 124 Catholic Church, 17, 26, 163, 167 Caxton, William, 89, 90, 100, 199n7, 206n22, 214n24, 223n17 celibacy, clerical, 4, 7, 24, 107; dominant medieval sex/gender system and, 17; status of marriage and, 21 Certayne Questions: What Is Synne with the Ordre of Confession, 53 Certeau, Michel de, 90–­91, 96, 104, 106, 118–­19, 127 Charles V, 22, 193, 202n41, 217n44, 239n86 Chasteau de labour (Gringore), 224n29 chastity, 16, 31, 39, 96, 129, 226n44; idleness as threat to, 218n51; as moral and social virtue, 95 Chastoiement des dames, Le [The Ladies’ Instruction] (Robert of Blois), 76, 85–­87, 96, 97, 191, 214n19 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 32, 114, 119, 143, 211n54 Chemin de Long Estude, Le (Christine de Pizan), 223n17 Chemin de povreté et de richesse, Le [The Way and Direction of Poverty and Riches] (Bruyant), 106, 113–­14, 116–­17, 119–­23, 124, 224n29 children, 30, 61, 128, 203n50 chivalry, 5, 91, 100, 215n33 Christian subject, 1, 5, 14, 23; agency as, 54, 55; monastic subject and, 66; public nature of devotional literature and, 8; sacramental marriage and, 22; virginity ideal and, 24 Christine de Pizan, 21, 202n34, 202n41,

214n12, 218n51; dream vision at bedside, 223n17; Griselda story and, 143 church fathers, 201n22 Cicely, Duchess of York, 41, 206n21 Clark, Robert, 4, 38, 192, 205n11 class distinctions, 6, 48, 125 Clerk’s Tale (Chaucer), 32, 142, 145, 162, 173–­ 90, 211n54, 238n74, 240n90 Collette, Carolyn P., 22–­23, 193, 211n49, 236n68, 239n86 Comestor, Petrus, 130 Comment la personne se doit ordener ( journée text), 49, 51, 56 Comment on se doit maintenir selonc les heures du jour (journée text), 50, 56 communal model, in marital property law, 21 compassion, 38, 68, 70 conduct literature for women, 2, 5–­6, 19, 180; antifeminist tradition and, 4–­5; bodily self-­restraint as ideal, 9; bourgeois audience for, 2; devotional reading and, 14; femininity reconfigured by, 25; fin’amor poetry contrasted with, 3–­4; Griselda story and, 231n18; narrative experimentation in, 78; Pan-­European proliferation of, 200n9; performative reading practices and, 7–­8, 13; relational modes of subjectification in, 15; self-­restraint ideal and, 182 confessional manual, 110 conscience, book of the, 78–­79 Contamine, Philippe, 118 Copland, Robert, 52, 53 courts, ecclesiastical, 18, 201n24 Crocker, Holly, 196–­97 Crusade of Alexandria, 236n64 cultural capital, 7, 37, 47, 62, 161 Daras, Symon, 54 Davis, Stephen, 28–­30 d’Avray, David, 19, 22, 23, 39, 201n32 Dayes of the week moralysed, The, 53 Deanesly, Margaret, 40, 205n20 Death and the Miser (Bosch), 118 Decameron (Boccaccio), 2, 32, 141–­42, 162, 228nn1–­3, 240n90; affective contract in, 145–­ 52; Petrarch’s Griselda based on, 142, 153–­55 Decor puellarum (John the Carthusian), 63–­ 64, 68 De Gendt, Anne Marie, 95, 218n51 De Jesu puero duodenni (Aelred of Rievaulx), 227n54



In d e x

Deleuze, Gilles, 227n55 Derrida, Jacques, 225n42 devotion, private, 8, 13, 48, 56, 196; “invention” of the good wife and, 6; literate practices and, 7; meditational programs and, 36; performative reading practices and, 13, 30; role of gender and class, 42; secret and inward, 64; within married estate, 33 Dialogue of Miracles (Caesarius of Heisterbach), 1 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 179, 180 dotal model, in marital property law, 21 Duffy, Eamon, 36, 206–­207n24 Durand de Champagne, 2, 3, 31, 78 Ecclesia, 12 economy of the beside, 111–­12, 129–­40 Edward III, King, 189 Eisenstein, Sergei, 137, 227n54 Elizabeth, Saint, 82, 84 Elizabeth of Spalbeek, 69 embodiment, female, 2, 5, 6, 25, 28, 68, 85; antifeminist modes of representing, 79, 181; revisioning of, 26 emotions, 38, 151, 174, 232n25; cultural capital of, 161; disempowering “ugly feelings,” 157, 232n41; emotional community, 15, 70, 159, 174, 182, 186, 196; happiness, 196; history of, 191; “peri-­emotives,” 186, 195; promise and lack of, 175; socialized, 152, 188, 190; steadfastness, 159. See also affect management Enseignements de Saint Louis à sa fille Isabelle, Les (Louis IX, ca. 1267), 2, 31, 76–­77, 81, 212nn3–­4, 216n39 Epurescu-­Pascovici, Ionut, 221n9, 224n29 estates, 6, 22, 122 Estoire de Griseldis, L’ (attrib. Philippe de Mézières, 1395), 22, 143, 163, 230n13, 239n86 Eucharist, 36, 58, 204n7, 209n41 Evangelical Christianity, 26 exemplary stories, 1, 76, 81, 102, 137 Eyck, Jan van, 32, 113 fabliau stories: Boccaccio’s Decameron and, 32, 144, 154, 159, 172, 179; Le livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry and, 89, 94, 191 Falassi, Alessandro, 228n1 female body, 2, 7, 65, 86, 210n48 female nature, 5, 77, 127

255

femininity, 5, 15, 135, 150, 182, 194; embodied experience and, 168; physicality of, 171; revaluation of, 172; self-­restraint ideal and, 31 feminism, 109, 160 femme couverte, 21 Ferrer, Saint Vincent, 53 Ferrier, Janet M., 108, 221n3 feudal law, 6, 21 fin’amor poetry/literature, 3, 25, 76, 87, 215n32, 220n63; debate on value and danger of, 90, 100–­102, 111, 112; immaterial labor and, 213n8; Le livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry and, 90–­93, 95–­96, 98, 100–­ 102, 104, 106, 111; male objectification of women and, 16; marital affection and, 19, 127; marriage viewed in, 24; noble conduct and, 31; proto-­heterosexuality and, 107; romance erotics in, 4; secret love of knight and lady, 115 Fisher, Bishop John, 41 folktales, 191, 228n1, 231n18 Franciscan order, 2 François I, 80 French language, 77 “From Moral Agent to Actant” (Epurescu-­ Pascovici), 221n9 Galloway, Andrew, 33 Gansfort, Wessel, 207n29 garden of love, courtly, 16, 91, 93, 96, 104, 112 gay marriage, 28–­29, 203n50 gender, 48, 159, 191; late medieval innovation in, 197; personhood and, 160; power relations and, 112; privacy/free time and, 61; relational understanding of, 192 Gillespie, Vincent, 34, 204nn7–­8 Golden Legend, 127 good husband, 4, 15, 60, 61, 135, 147, 192 good wife, 15, 20, 25, 38, 102, 192; Christ as spiritual spouse of, 65–­66; domestic economy of household and, 42; emotion and, 151; everyday body of, 140; exemplary virtuous conduct of, 1–­2; identity management and, 129; immaterial labor of, 106; male guardians and, 6; modes of embodiment of, 68; private devotion of, 196; rehabilitation of, 43; social relations and, 4; spiritual labor and, 62, 63; submission to husband/male authority, 5, 126, 135; supervision of household by, 61, 134; surveillance and control of, 108

256 In d e x gossip, 49, 61, 118, 220n63 Gratian, 18 Greco, Gina, 129, 130 Green, Richard Firth, 228n1 Greetham, David, 140 Grigsby, J. L., 89, 94, 95 Gringore, Pierre, 224n29 Griselda story, 2, 22, 199n7 Griselda story, of Boccaccio, 141–­42, 145–­52, 159, 162, 169, 228nn1–­3, 231n18 Griselda story, of Petrarch, 135–­37, 142–­45, 169–­70, 179, 229n6, 230nn15–­16; affective circuit and, 152–­59; Chaucer and, 162, 173–­90, 193, 211n54; female conduct as interpretive crux in, 180; French translations, 142–­43; Menagier and, 135, 139, 143; Philippe de Mézières and, 162, 163–­73, 233n47, 239n86; revernacularization of, 32, 159–­62 Guattari, Félix, 227n55 Guibert de Tournai, 19, 201n32 Guillaume de Deguileville, 79 Guillaume de Lorris, 87, 213n8 habitus, 109, 194, 196–­97 Hali Meidhed, 39, 42, 61 Hasenohr, Geneviève, 30, 37, 50, 205n11, 210n48; on ad status sermons, 42; on journées chrétiennes, 42–­43, 49; on secular and religious time, 63 Helmholz, Richard, 201n24 heteronormativity, 29 heterosexuality, 4, 24, 26, 197; as divine institution, 203n47; “heterosyncrasy,” 25; invention of, 17; lay married estate/household and, 5; proto-­heterosexuality, 107 Hilton, Walter, 8, 36, 41, 206n21 Historia Griseldis (Petrarch), 152–­59 Historia scholastica (Comestor), 130 Holy Feast and Holy Fast (Bynum), 70, 212n56 Holy Land, recapture of, 164 Hours of the Conception of the Virgin, 53 Howell, Martha, 21 Hull, Dame Eleanor, 42 Hundred Years’ War, 88, 91, 104, 164 Huntington, Agnes, 20 Huot, Sylvia, 78–­79, 85 hybridity, 6, 28, 62–­63, 66, 74, 107, 134; Boccaccio’s Griselda story and, 146; of bourgeois married estate, 120, 123, 135; as desired goal, 67; of domestic relations in married estate, 106; economy of the beside

and, 143; of good wife’s social location, 133; mixing of public and private, 45; performative identity and, 39 identities, 15, 128, 134–­35 Idleness Working (Sadlek), 213n8 imagined community, 46, 60, 128, 130, 159 “Instructions for a Devout and Literate Layman” (Pantin), 61–­62, 77 Jameson, Fredric, 221n5 Jean de Meun, 213n7 Jeanne de Navarre, Queen, 2, 3, 79, 80 Jeanne de Rougé, 88 Jeanne of France, 99 Jehanne de Chastillon, 165, 166, 234n51 Jehannot, Jean, 209n40 Jerome, Saint, 179 Joan, Lady Cobham, 40, 41, 210n43 John the Carthusian, 63–­64 journées chrétiennes, 2, 38, 74, 88, 187, 191, 193; androgyny in, 48–­55; audience for, 49–­52, 209n41; clerical voice channeled in, 129, 131, 132; devotions paired with canonical hours, 37; female audience for, 42–­43, 49, 64–­65; mental prayer and literate practice in, 43–­48; molding of female nature, 77; new public sphere and, 55–­62; organization of, 205n11; performative identity encouraged by, 39; performative reading practices and, 9, 75; spiritual discipline and, 30, 39; wife’s place in household and, 62, 63 Kempe, Margery, 70, 201n30, 211n55 Krueger, Roberta, 109–­11 labor, immaterial, 13, 47, 48, 62, 64, 121; androgyny of journées chrétiennes and, 54–­ 55; fin’amor and, 213n8; household space/ identity and, 124; of lay private devotion, 37; of monastic spirituality, 63; performed by reader on story, 161 labor, material, 30, 47, 48, 64; hierarchized, 55; household space/identity and, 124 Lahav, Rina, 80 laity, 6, 8, 33; book of the conscience and, 79; Books of Hours and, 13; clerical communication with, 39; private devotion and, 34; self-­restraint ideal and, 16; spiritual advancement techniques assimilated by, 34; vernacular literacy and, 9



In d e x

Latin language, 3, 36, 53, 77; clerical literacy in, 41; devotional manuals in, 34; humanist, 32; interweaved with vernacular, 68; prayers in, 9, 35, 43, 55, 98, 131 lectio divina (“divine reading”), 35, 204n7, 209n41 Leon V, king of Cilician Armenia, 165, 233n48 Lévi-­Strauss, Claude, 227n54 Life of St. Edward (Nun of Barking Abbey, 1181), 215n32 Life of the Fathers, 127 Lipton, Emma, 215n33 literacy, 6, 35; affective, 7, 10, 15; comprehension, 10; in Latin, 43, 207n29; legal models of, 207n32; “phonetic,” 44, 48; vernacular, 7, 60, 200n12 literate practices, 46, 47, 75, 207n32 Livre de la cité des dames, Le (Christine de Pizan), 143 Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, Le (Philippe de Mézières, by 1389), 32, 142–­44, 229–­30n11, 233n47; Griselda story in, 162–­73; “navigator’s box” (compass) allegory, 168–­69, 235n60; sacramental marriage symbolism in, 166–­67, 234n53; Virgin Mary in, 163–­64, 233n48 Livre des trois vertus (Christine de Pizan), 218n51 Livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry, Le (1371–­ 72), 3, 14, 88, 105, 110, 163, 215n25; aristocratic household as model, 31; Boccaccio’s Griselda story and, 150, 151; Caxton’s English translation, 89, 90, 215n27, 216n42, 217nn49–­50; competing versions of “the noble” in, 27; dialogism of, 137; fin’amor and, 90–­93, 95–­96, 98, 100–­101, 104, 106, 173; German translation (Der Ritter vom Turn), 89, 199n7; noble desire reoriented in, 88–­104; personal experience as source of wisdom, 191; Philippe de Mézières and, 166; publishing history of, 89, 215nn27–­28; readership and authority in, 94, 217n44; sacramental marriage in, 16; space/place distinction in, 90–­91, 93–­94, 106; on the Virgin Mary, 98–­100, 219n57 Livre Griseldis, Le (anonymous), 142, 143, 176, 177, 183–­87, 238n74 Lochrie, Karma, 25 Louis IX (Saint Louis), 2, 31, 76–­78, 79–­80, 209n43, 212n3 Love, Nicholas, 8, 34, 41 Low Countries, 21

257

Machan, Tim, 230n16 Maillard, Brother Olivier, 56 Maner to lyue wel deuoutly and reuerantly, The (journée text), 52 Maniere de bien vivre, La (Quentin, 1491), 51–­52, 53, 55, 61, 71, 72–­73 Manual of Confessors (Thomas of Chobham, ca. 1215), 211n49 Manuel de Péchés, 41, 206n20 Marguerite de France, 80 Marguerite des Roches, 88, 215n26 marriage, sacramental, 2, 6, 15, 16–­19, 194–­95, 201n22; as affective contract, 15, 20, 26, 125, 144; Burgundian court and symbolism of, 199n5; Christian caritas and, 169; Christ’s human and divine nature in relation to, 134; companionate marriage and, 16, 194–­95; connection with Virgin Mary, 98–­99; consent and marital affection, 17–­ 19, 21; female chastity and, 100; femininity revalued by, 172; fin’amor contrasted with, 102; homologies with mystical marriage, 22; indissolubility of, 17, 19–­20, 22; inheritance patterns and, 21; Mary and Joseph as perfect embodiment of, 234n53; Petrarch’s Griselda story and, 160; regulation of, 17; self-­restraint ideal and, 25; sexual activity in, 6, 17, 62, 87, 117; as vehicle for property transfer, 25 Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture (McSheffrey), 222–­23n17 married estate, 5, 22, 33, 39, 124; affective contract and, 15; clerically driven agendas for, 135; conjoined body of, 25, 26, 191; discourse of sacramental marriage and, 30; as divinely instituted order, 56; everyday experience of, 21; gendered and sexualized relations within, 16; Griselda story and, 152; hybridity of, 62, 106, 120; power relations in, 112; secular manifestations of, 28; translation process of conduct texts and, 13 married household, 3, 7, 104, 169; affective literacy and, 15; affective reading practices and, 16; hierarchized affective bonds of, 196; hybrid spaces of, 14; patriarchal social imaginary and, 91; performative reading practices and, 8; relational understanding of sex/gender and, 192; wife as manager of domestic sphere, 13 martyrs, 5 Mary Magdalene, 58, 81

258 In d e x Mary of Burgundy, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 70 masculinity, 5, 15, 87, 150, 194, 200n11; in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, 178; in Griselda story, 156; in ruling positions, 197; voice of masculine authority, 103 Massumi, Brian, 232n25 McFarlane, K. B., 34 McNamer, Sarah, 9, 14, 37–­38, 63, 68, 188, 240n90 McSheffrey, Shannon, 116, 222n17 meditation, 35, 38, 42, 51, 204n7; reading/ writing/editing and, 85; as virtual private space, 208n36 Meditationes Vitae Christi (Bonaventura), 34 Menagier de Paris, Le [The Parisian Household Book] (ca. 1394), 2, 3, 14, 106–­8, 115, 163, 192; autobiographical prologue, 31–­32; bedchamber in, 112–­19, 123–­29; Burgundian court and, 199n5, 202n43; economy of the beside in, 129–­40; Griselda story in, 32, 106, 135, 136–­39, 143, 150, 151; hybridity and the dialogic in, 108–­12; link between domestic and public, 196; marital affection as habitus, 197; modern editions, 106, 221n2; narrative in, 193, 194; performativity in, 128–­29, 226n44; personal experience as source of wisdom, 191; sacramental marriage in, 16; surviving manuscripts, 220n1 Merchant’s Tale, The (Chaucer), 119, 126 Metge, Bernat, 170 Mézières, Philippe de, 32, 135, 142, 144, 162; influence on English and French court culture, 193; Petrarch and, 236n64 Middle Ages, 6, 17, 44, 62, 107, 197; emergent capitalism in, 122; queer disturbance of temporality and, 203n47; representational politics in, 110; sexuality in, 24; universal codes of behavior in, 4 Mielot, Jean, 223n17 Mireoir as dames (Watriquet de Couvin), 78 Miroir aux dames, 78 Miroir des bonnes femmes (anonymous, ca. 1280–­90), 78, 137, 199n4; biblical women in, 2, 81–­85, 214n14; Le livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry and, 89, 94–­98, 217n45, 218n51 Miroir des dames, Le (Durand de Champagne, ca. 1300), 3, 31, 78, 199n3; importance to French and Burgundian courts, 80, 213–­ 14n12. See also Speculum dominarum

Miroir des dames mariées, Le (Philippe de Mézières, 1385–­89), 142, 162, 163, 229n10 Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (Love), 8, 34 Mixed Life (Hilton), 8, 36, 206n21 monastic community, 47, 60 monks, 2, 30, 34, 36 montage, 137–­38, 227n54 Montaiglon, Anatole de, 89, 215n28, 216n41 More, Thomas, 45 mouvance, 144, 195, 230n16 “Mouvance and Interpretation in Late-­ Medieval Latin” (Reames), 211n49 Munkton, Emma, 20 Munkton, Simon, 20 Mutacion de Fortune, 213n7 Navigation of Feeling, The (Reddy), 211n52 Neal, Derek G., 200n11 Ngai, Sianne, 201n21, 232n41 Nicholas of Cusa, 23 Nine Worthies, 172, 237n70 nobility, 5, 100, 104, 182 Noonan, John T., Jr., 18 Nun of Barking Abbey, 215n32 nuns, 3, 5, 36; chaste status of, 21; contemplative lives of, 34; devotional discipline of, 2, 30 Nussbaum, Martha, 188 O’Connell, David, 77, 212nn3–­4 Offices of the Virgin and the Dead, 43 Olive de Belleville, 95 Oresme, Nicole, 202n41 Orléans, Friar Laurent d,’ 130 Oxford Bodleian Codex Ashmole 61, 193–­94 Pantin, W. A., 58–­61, 64, 77, 209n41, 209n43, 210n44 Passion of Christ, 36, 52, 56, 57, 209n41; acting out of, 69; Hours of the Virgin coupled with, 50, 51; secret place to meditate on, 69–­70 Paston, Margaret, 202n34 Pedersen, Frederik, 18, 201n24 Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, Le (Guillaume de Deguileville), 79 Peregrinus of Oppeln, 33, 56 perfection, spiritual, 66, 210n48 periperformative utterances, 128, 225n42 Petite instruction et maniere de vivre pour une



In d e x

femme seculiere (journée text), 56–­57, 59, 60, 208n39, 209n41; agency of lay practitioners and, 68–­69; emergent social groups and, 61–­62; on husband as problem, 210n48; on secrecy of private devotion, 64, 69 Petites Heures du duc de Berry, Les, 49 Petkov, Kiril, 193 Petrarch, 32, 135, 164, 213n7; Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale and, 173–­74; on labor of affect management, 157–­58, 232n41; letters to Boccaccio, 156–­57, 229n5, 230n15; Philippe de Mézières and, 236n64. See also Griselda story, of Petrarch Philippa, Queen, 189 Philippe de Mézières and His Age (Blumenfeld-­Kosinski and Petkov, eds.), 193 Pichon, Jérôme, 221n2 Pierre de Craon, 165, 166, 234n51, 235n53 Politiques (Aristotle), 202n41 postmedieval, as term, 107–­8, 112, 221n5 postmodernism, 221n5 prayers, 17, 42, 200n15; Latin, 9, 43, 55, 131; matins, 130–­31, 226n47; public/private balance and, 61; vernacular, 45, 47, 207n28 privacy, 14, 54, 61 privy chamber, 223n19 Prudence and Melibee, story of, 2, 139, 199n7 Prymer of Salysbury Use, 52, 53, 55 psalms, 36, 43 public/private binary, 43, 45, 71, 90 public sphere, 61, 63, 70, 117, 127, 128, 146 purgatory, 1 queer theory, 26, 160, 203n47 Quentin, Jean, 51, 53, 55, 71 Quentin, Thomas, 139 Quentine, Jehanne la, 139 reading practices, performative, 8, 9, 10, 35, 74, 105; affective contract and, 126; authentic (whole) self and, 97–­98; invention of heterosexuality and, 16–­17; monastic community and, 60; private devotion and, 13, 30; reshaping of the social and, 230n15 Reames, Sherry, 211n49 Reddy, William, 38, 211n52 Reeve’s Tale (Chaucer), 114 Regnault, F., 52, 55 Rice, Nicole, 8

259

Riule de no vie, Li (early French journée), 50, 51, 56 Robert of Blois, 76, 85, 96, 98 Rohan, Anne de, 53–­55, 61; at devotions in bedchamber, 71, 72–­73; as member of high nobility, 74 Rohan, Françoise de, 54, 74 Rohan, Pierre de, 54, 71 Rolle, Richard, 35, 41, 204n7 romance poetry/literature, 3, 202n45 Roman de la Rose (Guillaume de Lorris), 87, 213nn7–­8 Roman law, 18, 21 romantic love, 19, 24 Rose, Christine, 108, 129, 130 Sadlek, Gregory M., 213n8 Saenger, Paul, 44–­46, 207nn28–­29 saints, 74, 162; cult of Saint Cecilia, 211n49; legends of, 206n20; prayers to, 52, 204n10; Virgin Mary and, 164 Salih, Sarah, 125–­26 Scheer, Monique, 200n18 Schofield, John, 116 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 111–­12, 128, 150, 195, 225n42 sermons, 76, 94 sex/gender system, 5, 15, 17, 25, 179, 197 sexuality/sexual relations, 119, 126, 194, 195; controlled in marriage, 21; in fabliau accounts, 114–­15; late medieval innovation in, 197; regulation of, 202n45; self-­denial and, 32 Sheehan, Michael, 18, 201n24 Sheppey, Bishop John, 40 sins, seven deadly, 81, 96, 120, 129, 163 Smith, Kathryn A., 8, 40, 204n10, 210n43 Somme le Roy, La (d’Orléans, 1279), 129–­30 space/place distinction, 90–­91, 93–­94, 104, 118–­19 Speculum dominarum (Durand de Champagne, ca. 1300), 2, 31, 78, 79, 191; sources of, 80, 213n9; universalizing moral and religious ideal in, 81. See also Miroir des dames, Le Speculum maius (Vincent of Beauvais), 213n9 Speculum morale, 213n9 speculum principis, 76, 78–­80 Spiritual Friendship (Aelred of Rievaulx), 62 Sponsler, Claire, 227n54 Stafford, Anne, 206n22

260 In d e x Staley, Lynn, 192–­93, 217n44 Stein, Marquart vom, 89 subalternity, 107 Taylor, Andrew, 206n21 textual culture, 35, 43, 44, 46, 48, 94 textualization, 10 theology/theologians, 17, 27, 163 Thibaut V, 77 Thomas Aquinas, 19 Thomas of Chobham, 211n49 Timenel, Sir William, 59 Tour Landry, Geoffroy IV de la, 88, 214n24, 215nn25–­26 Traub, Valerie, 202n46 Tres devot traittié (anonymous), 65, 66, 68, 69, 71, 131 Udry, Susan, 86–­87 Ueltschi, Karin, 108, 224n29 Vigils of the Dead, 52 Vincent-­Cassy, Mireille, 108 Vincent of Beauvais, 213n9 virago, 5 virginity, 5, 7, 25, 26, 39, 62; in Griselda story, 145; virgin martyrs, 95 Virgin Mary, 52, 84, 95, 100, 136; Catholic Church figured as, 166, 167; as greatest example of good woman, 81; Griselda story and, 155, 164, 186, 233n48; Hours of the Virgin, 36, 37, 50, 51, 54; as ideal

example of female virtue, 162; laments of, 188, 240n90; in Mary of Burgundy’s Book of Hours, 10, 11, 12, 14; mystical marriage with Christ, 22; oral prayer and, 209n42; as Queen of Heaven, 13, 84, 166, 167, 169, 171; sacramental marriage and, 98–­99; as Star of the Sea, 169; virginity symbolism and, 200–­201n20 Wallace, David, 229n6 Ward, Benedicta, 204n7 Watriquet de Couvin, 78 “What the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter” (popular English poem), 3 widows, 3, 7, 56, 74, 99 Williamson, Joan B., 168 Wixom, Brenden, 26–­27 Wixom, Tara, 26–­28 women: biblical, 2, 15, 81–­85, 89, 96, 214nn16–­17; capability of self-­ improvement, 4, 31; devotional programs sought by, 40; exemplary women of classical past, 160; married women in relation to virginity, 7; “private” spaces and, 117; resistance to male authority, 109; vernacular literacy and, 7; woman/wife homology, 199–­200n8 Worde, Wynkyn de, 224n29 Ysambert de Saint-­Léger, 80 Zumthor, Paul, 230n16

Acknowledgments

This book has been a long time in the making, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge here the abundant support I have received in producing the book. PSC-­ CUNY grants enabled visits to the British Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale, and I am grateful to the staff at these libraries for their assistance. Sabbaticals provided by Queens College provided me with crucial periods of time to conceptualize and finish writing this book. Parts of Chapters 2 and 3 appeared in Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debates and Thresholds of Medieval Visual Culture: Liminal Spaces respectively and I am grateful to Routledge and Boydell and Brewer Presses for permission to reprint them here. I am grateful to my colleagues in the Queens College English Department and the Graduate Center Doctoral Program in English for providing a supportive and enriching intellectual environment in which to work on this project. I’d like especially to thank the members of the faculty seminar at Queens, the medieval and early modern students at the Graduate Center, and my research assistants, Abby Ballou and Soojung Choe. From start to finish, it has been a pleasure to work with Penn Press. I thank Jerry Singerman for his genial support, efficiency, and good judgment; and Hannah Blake, Noreen O’Connor-­Abel, and Jennifer Shenk for shepherding the manuscript along with grace; and Alexander Trotter for his support with the index. Much gratitude also goes to Kathleen Ashley and the other, anonymous, reader for the Press, whose thoughtful and perceptive reports provided very helpful guidance with final revisions. This book has benefited greatly from further advice and feedback from a variety of sources. Members of my writing group—​­Valerie Allen, Jennifer Brown, Matthew Goldie, Steven Kruger, Michael Sargent, and Sylvia ­Tomasch—​­have read sections of the book at various stages of development, and it is much the better for their careful analysis and astute observations. Ideas for the book have also been tested out at various conferences—​ ­Kalamazoo, MLA, and New Chaucer Society—​­as well as oral presentations at

262 Ac k n ow le d gm e n t s

the University of Alberta, Binghamton University, the Medieval Club of New York, NYU, the University of Michigan, the University of Oregon, Princeton University, Rutgers University, UCLA, and the University of Toronto. The audiences in these locales have provided invaluable feedback and encouragement, in particular, Anthony Bale, Judith Baskin, Renate Blumenfeld-­ Kosinski, Jessica Brantley, Lisa Cooper, Susan Crane, Patricia DeMarco, Marilynn Desmond, Susanna Fein, Andrew Galloway, Warren Ginsberg, Sarah Kay, Ethan Knapp, Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, Shannon McSheffrey, Jacqueline Murray, Christine Neufeld, Tison Pugh, Julee Raiskin, David Raybin, Nicole Rice, Will Rogers, Catherine Sanok, Martin Schichtman, James Schultz, Myra Seaman, Lynn Shutters, Vance Smith, Jutta Sperling, Zrinka Stahnljak, Valerie Traub, Stephanie Trigg, David Wallace, Jocelyn Wogan-­Browne. I have benefited greatly from the support and interest in this project shown by various friends and colleagues over the years: Anke Bernau, Isabel Davis, Ruth Evans, Elina Gertsman, Noah Guynn, Sue Hamilton, Wan-­ Chuan Kao, Katharine Jager, Emma Lipton, David Matthews, Larry Scanlon, Talia Schaffer, Jill Stevenson, Marion Turner, Amy Tucker, Teresa Zackodnik. I have also learned so much from collaboration and friendship with Holly Crocker, as together we pursued twin interests in feminine virtue and the role of affect and emotion in the Middle Ages. My thanks, too, to Alyson Cole, dear friend, who has heard more than she ever thought possible about medieval marriage and female conduct. Finally, Steven Kruger—​­lover, collaborator, sounding board, friend, husband—​­has been with this project every step of the way and shown me again and again the inestimable value of loving in a marrying kind of way. This book is dedicated to Pamela Sheingorn, who has been a shining example to me of everything a scholar should be, and whose interest in this project provided invaluable encouragement and support.