Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages by Glenn D. Burger

Abstract

Reviewed by: Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages by Glenn D. Burger Mary-Rose McLaren Burger, Glenn D., Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages (Middle Ages Series), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017; hardback; pp. 272; 4 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$65.00, £54.00; ISBN 9780812249606. This book is a challenging and important contribution to the understanding of ‘thinking’ in the later Middle Ages. Analysing the purpose of texts that focus on the behaviour of women and men is fraught with difficulty in the context of twenty-first-century feminism. Frequently, I found myself rising to challenge Glenn D. Burger’s paradigms, only to have him add another, richer layer of interpretation. The book is logically constructed. Burger lays the foundations of the study by identifying the significance of texts that move the ‘good wife front and center’ (p. 2) to become a model; the negotiation of new social responsibilities that this opens up; and the fusion of new and old ideologies that can be observed in the texts. One implication of such texts is the transformation of morality to ethics. Burger sets the scene for the analysis and examination of specific texts with a discussion of embodied reading, where the action of reading itself helps to bring about the sought-after behaviour. He argues several ideas that build on each other: that an affective contract lies at the core of medieval developments in thinking about marriage as a sacrament; that conduct literature for women ‘mainstreamed’ thinking about married relations and households and transmitted this across Europe and across social classes during the fourteenth century; that literature aimed at the good wife provides the context for ‘a new model of heterosexuality’ (p. 24); that love of the marrying kind constituted an affective, rather than an erotic or feudal, contract, and that this kind of love ‘empowered new forms of social activity’ (p. 24). Burger further argues that conduct texts had the capacity to reconfigure female identity, which, in turn, created a space for a new authority for men as husbands and fathers, creating new patterns of social recognition and engagement. Consequently, this literature provides ‘a powerful medium for such a rethinking of gender and sexual relations’ (p. 25). He presents this conduct literature as a hinge, or turning point, between marriage as it had been known and developed during the medieval period, and the beginning of a new understanding of heterosexuality that can be seen emerging during the early modern period. Central to this notion is the transformative power of the ‘revisioning of female embodiment’ (p. 26) and the tension which this generates within the social context. Burger then analyses specific texts, each of which adds a further layer to his interpretation of the role of conduct literature as determining functions and [End Page 184] behaviours within both the family and wider society. Such texts as the Journées chrétiennes provide a recognized role for women beyond that of an enclosed religious life (Chapter 1). Les Enseignements de Saint Louis à sa fille Isabelle, the Speculum dominarum, and Le Miroir des bonne femmes present a new belief in the capacity of women’s nature for improvement, just as men are capable of improvement. They reflect changing marital relations and authorize the aristocratic household as ‘a new model for the social’ (p. 31; Chapter 2). Burger then uses Le Menagier de Paris, a household book, to examine what happens when the newly understood social function of marriage, as constructed via conduct literature, is played out in an urban merchant’s household. The bedchamber becomes the rehearsal space for the more public playing out of the couple’s marriage, which centres on the good conduct of the wife under the authority of her husband (Chapter 3). The final layer added by Burger is a discussion of the earliest iterations of the Griselda story. Boccaccio and Petrarch’s versions are examined, as well as Philippe de Mézière’s French translation, and the inclusion of this into Le Livre de la vertu du sacrament de mariage and Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale. In these texts, shaping narratives of...