Abstract
As we saw in chapter 1, medieval thinkers recognized a range of unequal relationships, such as lord and servant, abbot and monk, and husband and wife.1 In each of these cases, a person made a decision to enter a relationship and legally relinquished his or her autonomy to another to greater or lesser degrees. Indeed, the use of these analogies in law and literature ought not surprise us, as Lynn Staley and other critics have noted that medieval authors, especially Chaucer, argue politically sensitive points by analogy.2 In this chapter, we will concentrate on the relationship between wife and husband as an analogy for that between lord and retainer. Exploring the power dynamics between a lord and his retainer would have been potentially fraught for a medieval author, in part because the authors were usually of lesser status than the lords they described and critiqued. The analogous relationship between husbands and wives was ubiquitous, however, and utterly safe to criticize, as the authors benefited from their privileged position as men. These are all reasons that the married couple as a notion was “good to think with” for medieval English people.3
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For a pointed example, see Susan Crane’s reading of the Franklin’s Tale that identifies Dorigen’s struggles with the class struggles of franklins: “The Franklin as Dorigen,” Chaucer Review 24 (1990): 236–52. In general, see David Aers and Lynn Staley, Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press, 1996).
This phrase is used by Glenn Burger in Chaucer’s Queer Nation (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 44
Matthew Giancarlo, Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 138.
All Chaucer citations will be to the Riverside edition, using Benson’s abbreviations for work title and line number. Larry Benson, ed. The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
Christine Rose voices an all-too common approach to the problem when she wants to recover the body of the raped woman in Chaucer’s texts; “Chaucer’s audience discovers indeed that the rapes in his narratives are tropes for decidedly alternative purposes than highlighting violence to women,” and later “women... must read to recover the literal sense of the trope,” p. 22. As a feminist, I applaud Rose’s and similar critics’ awareness of how our own female bodies color our readings of Chaucer’s texts. However, I seek in this chapter a more culturally embedded way to read medieval narratives of rape. Christine Rose, “Reading Chaucer Reading Rape,” in Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine Rose (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 21–60.
Even more fascinating, this statute did not end appeals in practice. Christopher Cannon illustrates instances of appeal of what we would today consider rape dating to after the statute; “Raptus in the Chaumpaigne Release and a Newly Discovered Document Concerning the Life of Geoffrey Chaucer,” Speculum 68 (1993): 74–94. In a very positive interpretation of the slippery nature of the law of rape, Sue Sheridan Walker suggests that “the common law concerning domestic relations permitted the self-will of an unhappily married woman in leaving her husband to be played out in the guise of an abduction.... The husbands of ‘abducted’ wives could secure only damages usually equivalent to the value of chattels ‘taken’ with his wife but never recover her person,” in “The Feudal Family and the Common Law Courts: The Pleas Protecting Rights of Wardship and Marriage, c. 1225–1375,” Journal of Medieval History 14 (1988): 13–31, esp. 24. For contemporary debate, see Samuel Thorne, ed. Yearbooks of Richard II. 6 Richard II 1382–1383 (London: Ames Foundation, 1996), 6
Elizabeth Robertson notes that study of medieval marriage and rape “[has] implications for our understanding of medieval sub-jectivity and agency.” My own examination of this pairing travels a different path than Robertson’s; however, her recognition of the usefulness of such study argues that we might all pay greater attention to these topics. Elizabeth Robertson, “‘Raptus’ and the Poetics of Married Love in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale and James I’s Kingis Quair,” in Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning, ed. Robert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), pp. 302–23
H. Marshall Leicester, “‘My Bed Was Ful of Verray Blood’: Subject, Dream, and Rape in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” in Geoffrey Chaucer: The Wife of Bath, ed. Peter Beidler (Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 235–54.
Cannon, Raptus: 80–81, for example. For an entire monograph devoted to the topic of the culture of common law and how it related to the statutary law, see J.W. Tubbs, The Common Law Mind: Medieval and Early Modern Conceptions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
A number of critics will be discussed below, but see the following for a sampling of recent contributions in this area: Burger, Queer Nation, pp. 113–18 (examines the false autonomy Dorigen is supposed to enjoy); David Raybin, “‘Wommen, of Kynde, Desiren Libertee’: Rereading Dorigen, Rereading Marriage,” Chaucer Review 27 (1992): 65–86
Elizabeth Robertson, “Marriage, Mutual Consent, and the Affirmation of the Female Subject in the Knight’s Tale, the Wife of Bath’s Tale, and the Franklin’s Tale” in Drama, Narrative, and Poetry in the Canterbury Tales, ed. Wendy Harding (Toulouse, France: Publications Universitaire de Mirail, 2003), pp. 175–93
Mark N. Taylor, “Servant and Lord/ Lady and Wife: The Franklin’s Tale and Traditions of Courtly and Conjugal Love,” Chaucer Review 32 (1997): 64–81
Andrea Rossi-Reder, “Male Movement and Female Fixity in the Franklin’s Tale and Il Filocolo,” in Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Peter Beidler (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 105–16
Carolynn Van Dyke, “The Clerk’s and the Franklin’s Subjected Subjects,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 17 (1995): 45–68.
Richard Firth Green, “Chaucer’s Victimized Women,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 10 (1988): 3–21.
Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).
Francine McGregor, “What of Dorigen? Agency and Ambivalence in the Franklin’s Tale” Chaucer Review 31 (1997): 365–78.
Rowena Archer, “‘How Ladies... Who Live on Their Manors ought to Manage Their Households and Estates’ Women as Landholders and Administrators in the Later Middle Ages,” in Women in English Society c. 1200–1500, ed. P.J.P. Goldberg (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton, 1992), pp. 149–81.
John M. Fyler includes a very nice breakdown and discussion of the lament in “Love and Degree in the Franklin’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 21 (1987): 321–37.
Craig Bertholet, “From Revenge to Reform: The Changing Face of ‘Lucrece’ and Its Meaning in Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Philological Quarterly 70 (1991): 403–21.
A good example is Louise Sylvester, who limits her article to the Lucretia stories appearing “in three medieval story-collections: Chaucer’s poem The Legend of Good Women, Gower’s Confessio Amantis and Christine de Pizan’s story collection Le Livre de la Cité des Dames” (p. 115), omitting Lydgate entirely from consideration. Louise Sylvester, “Reading Narratives of Rape: The Story of Lucretia in Chaucer, Gower, and Christine de Pizan,” Leeds Studies in English 31 (2000): 115–44.
Nigel Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes Narrative Tragedy in its Literary and Political Contexts (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005)
I will use Macaulay’s edition of Confessio Amantis, and cite book and line number. G.C. Macaulay, ed. The Complete Works of John Gower, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902)
Textual citations for Fall of Princes are from Henry Bergen’s edition and cite short title, book, and line numbers. Henry Bergen, ed. Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).
Richard Ireland, “Lucrece, Philomela (and Cecily): Chaucer and the Law of Rape,” in Crime and Punishment in the Middle Ages, ed. Timothy Haskett (Victoria: University of Victoria, 1998), pp. 37–61.
Elizabeth Robertson, “Public Bodies and Psychic Domains: Rape, Consent, and Female Subjectivity in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” in Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine Rose (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 282–310
For information on Chancery, see Margaret Avery, “The History of the Equitable Jurisdiction of Chancery before 1460,” Bulletin of the Institute for Historical Research 42 (1969): 129–44
William Baildon, Select Cases in Chancery A.D.1364–1471, Seldon Society 10 (London: Seldon Society, 1896)
Mark Beilby, “The Profits of Expertise: The Rise of the Civil Lawyers and Chancery Equity,” in Profit, Piety, and the Professions in Later Medieval England, ed. Michael Hicks (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1990), pp. 72–90
Timothy S. Haskett, “Conscience, Justice, and Authority in the Late-Medieval English Court of Chancery,” in Expectations of the Law in the Middle Ages, ed. Anthony Musson (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2001), pp. 151–63
P. Tucker, “The Early History of the Court of Chancery: A Comparative Study,” English Historical Review 115 (2000): 791–811.
Colin Fewer, “John Lydgate’s Troy Book and the Ideology of Prudence,” Chaucer Review 38 (2004): 229–45
C. David Benson, The History of Troy in Middle English Literature (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 1980)
All citations to the Troy Book will include book and line numbers. Henry Bergen, ed. Lydgate’s Troy Book, A. D. 1412–20 (London: Early English Texts Society, 1906–1935).
All citations to the Laud Troy Book will be to J. Ernst Wulfing, ed. The Laud Troy Book (Millwood, NY: Early English Text Society, Kraus Reprint, 1988)
Chaucer makes little mention of Helen in the other major Middle English Troy-text, Troilus and Criseyde. For a perspective arguing that Helen’s presence nevertheless shapes that text, see Christopher Baswell and Paul Beekman Taylor, “TheFaire Queene Eleyne in Chaucer’s Troilus,” Speculum 63 (1988): 293–311.
Gerald Richman, “Rape and Desire in The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” Studia Neophilologica 61 (1989): 161–65.
Robert J. Blanch, “‘Al Was this Land Fulfild of Fayereye’: The Thematic Employment of Force, Willfulness, and Legal Conventions in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale,” Studia Neophilologica 57 (1985): 41–51
For example, see T.L. Burton’s statement: “the single couplet devoted to the rape itself (887-88) is a masterpiece of compressed dramatic characterization,” in “The Wife of Bath’s Fourth and Fifth Husbands and Her Ideal Sixth: The Growth of a Marital Philosophy,” Chaucer Review 13 (1979): 34–50
Elaine Tuttle Hansen, “‘Of His Love Daungerous to Me’: Liberation, Subversion, and Domestic Violence in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” in Geoffrey Chaucer: The Wife of Bath, ed. Peter Beidler (Boston: Bedford, 1996), pp. 273–89
See the selected examples in the following: Blanch touches on it from the angle of contract law (p. 46); Richman (p. 161), also Biebel (p. 74), in Elizabeth Biebel, “A Wife, a Batterer, and a Rapist: Representations of ‘Masculinity’ in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” in Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Peter Beidler (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 63–75
Citations will be to the following edition: Thomas Hahn, ed. Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995).
For a consideration of Arthur’s humility here, see Robert Shenk, “The Liberation of the ‘Loathly Lady’ of Medieval Romance,” Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 2 (1981): 69–77.
Copyright information
© 2009 Kathleen E. Kennedy
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kennedy, K.E. (2009). Attaining Women. In: Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval English Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230621626_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230621626_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-37401-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-62162-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)