Abstract
Money is the great signifier of exchange. In the narratives, “The Franklin’s Tale,” “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” and The Book of Margery Kempe, money is exchangeable with permissible rape, with the right to recalculate the marriage debt, with the right to qualify the terms of soveraynetee, the right to redemption of status; it is exchangeable with moral superiority, with despair, with enjoyable sex, with circulation of the self, and in “Franklin’s Tale,” it is literally exchangeable with franchise1 and with trouthe. Even for a man—in this case the chicken-hearted knight in the “Wife of Bath’s Tale” who pleads with the loathly hag, “Taak al my good [wealth] and lat my body go”—money is viewed by him as interchangeable with his (aristocratically privileged) sexuality.2
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Notes
Franchise (fraunchise) refers to the social status of a free person, but in this tale, more specifically to “nobility of character, generosity of spirit.” The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, third edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), glossary. All references to “The Franklin’s Tale” and “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” are from this edition.
Symbolic capital refers to any ability or asset considered as being valuable by a given group of people. The primary forms of symbolic capital are labor and landed property, which may be converted “to gain advantages in the form of additional wealth, power, allies and marriage partners.” Rebecca Bliege Bird and Eric Alden Smith, “Signaling Theory, Strategic Interaction, and Symbolic Capital,” Current Anthropology 46:2 (April 2005): 221–48, quote on p. 223. Because symbolic capital implies differences between status and identities, its value lies in the cost of the investment in terms of time, energy, or wealth.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1990), pp. 112–13.
The Riverside Chaucer, p. 900, notes that although “Chaucer follows Jerome closely, he places his examples in a different order.” The same endnote adds that Donald C. Baker, “A Crux in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale: Dorigen’s Complaint,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 60 (1960): 56–64, “argues that the exempla are organized into women who commit suicide to avoid rape (1367–1404), women who commit suicide after being raped (1405–38), and notably faithful wives (1439–56).”
Jane Tibbetts Schulenberg is instructive on this issue in her “The Heroics of Virginity: Brides of Christ and Sacrificial Mutilation,” in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), pp. 29–72.
A list of scholars’ charges against Dorigen’s speech is found in James Sledd, “Dorigen’s Complaint,” Modern Philology 45:1 (1947): 36–45, esp. pp. 36–40. Sledd’s argument is itself forward looking, with a postmodern touch to it: he sees a certain performing self-consciousness in Dorigen’s complaint, calling it “a deliberate bit of rhetorical extravagance, intended actually as an assurance that all shall yet go well” (p. 42). On the other hand, he disallows an intelligent seriousness to Dorigen’s meditation, remarking that “when Dorigen indulges in her exempla, no audience can take them altogether earnestly” (p. 45).
Jochen Hörisch, Heads or Tails: The Poetics of Money, trans. Amy Horning Marschall (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), p. 15.
Joel T. Rosenthal, “Fifteenth-Century Widows and Widowhood,” in Wife and Widow in Medieval England, ed. Sue Sheridan Walker (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 33–58, esp. p. 34.
Tim Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 22.
James Brundage, “The Merry Widow’s Serious Sister: Remarriage in Classical Canon Law,” Matrons and Marginal Women in Medieval Society, ed. Robert R. Edwards and Vickie Ziegler (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1995), pp. 33–48, esp. p. 34.
Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual, ed. and trans. Charles Fantazzi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), Book Three: Chapter Seven, p. 323.
James Brundage comments on the moral and social dilemmas widows faced: they could remarry but canon law disallowed priests to bless their marriage. Widows of modest means were “advised not only to remarry but also to do so speedily. But at the same time, civil authorities threatened to punish them if they did so within a year, while Church officials promised to nullify the civil penalties.” “Widows and Remarriage: Moral Conflicts and Their Resolution in Classical Canon Law,” in Walker, Wife and Widow in Medieval England, pp.17–31. See also Barbara J. Todd, “The Remarrying Widow: A Stereotype Reconsidered,” in Women in English Society 1500–1800, ed. Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 54–92, esp. p. 54.
Mary Carruthers, “The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions,” Proceedings of the Modem Language Association 94:2 (1979): 209–22, esp. p. 213.
Mark Amsler, “The Wife of Bath and Women’s Power,” Assays 4 (1987): 67–83, esp. p. 69. Amsler cites Theodor Adorno’s and Michael Riffaterre’s work on the textual function of the cliché—namely, its resistance to being intended as entirely (in this case) negative (note 6).
Brian Castle, “Chaucer’s ‘Shaply’ Guildsmen and Mercantile Pretensions,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 99:2 (1998): 211–16. All citations are from paws.wcu.edu/bgastle/SHAPLY.HTML. Castle writes, “Wealth, social status, and membership in a reputable guild was a pre-requisite for holding a position of power such as alderman. Thrupp notes that, of over 260 London aldermen elected in the fourteenth century, ‘only 9 were citizens of lesser companies,’ and those nine had clear merchant ties and were likely moving into merchant activities of the greater guilds themselves. In the following century, not one sheriff or alderman was elected in London who was not one of the greater merchant guilds.”
David Hinton, “‘Closing’ and the Later Middle Ages,” Medieval Archaeology 43 (1999): 172–82, esp. p. 176.
Sylvia I. Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London 1300–1500 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989),
cited in Brian Castle, “Breaking the Stained Glass Ceiling: Mercantile Authority, Margaret Paston, and Margery Kempe,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 36:1 (Spring 2003): 123–47, esp. p. 128–29.
Joel Fredell, “Margery Kempe: Spectacle and Spiritual Governance,” Philological Quarterly 75:2 (Spring 1996): 137–66, quote on p. 140.
All but one of the essays in their volume address early modern England. Michael J. Braddick and John Walter, Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 1–2.
Sheila Delany, “Sexual Economics, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and The Book of Margery Kempe” in Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect, ed. Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 71–87, quote on p. 76.
The Book of Margery Kempe, trans. B. A. Windeatt (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1994), p. 43. All references will be from Windeatt’s edition.
Corinthians 7:3–5 cited in Lillian Bisson, Chaucer and the Late Medieval World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), p. 224.
Terence N. Bowers, “Margery Kempe as Traveler,” Studies in Philology 97:1 (2000): 1–28, quote on p. 15.
Judith Adler, “Travel as Performed Art,” American Journal of Sociology 94:6 (1989): 1366–91. Adler adds, “Performed as an art, [and Kempe’s pilgrimage was both self-conscious imitation and liturgically driven] travel becomes one means of ‘worldmaking’ (Goodman 1978) and of self-fashioning,” p. 1368.
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© 2010 Theresa Earenfight
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Bodden, M.C. (2010). Take All My Wealth and Let My Body Go. In: Earenfight, T. (eds) Women and Wealth in Late Medieval Europe. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106017_3
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