Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts ed. by Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin, Merrall Llewelyn Price

Abstract

REVIEWS Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn Price, eds. Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Pp. 354. $55.00. Domestic violence in its manifold forms—parricide, infanticide, incest, rape, and assault—has in recent years become the focus of increasing media sensationalism; at the same time, our news daily covers horrific international violence of both unprecedented scale and apparent unpredictability . The relationship between these private and public events has received less attention than it warrants, as has their origins in social structures themselves. By considering the differences and similarities between violence today and violence as we can reconstruct it in the past, Salisbury, Donavin, and Prices’s far-ranging collection of essays offers a variety of pathways into this social thicket. The thirteen new essays are divided into three parts: ‘‘Domestic Violence and the Law’’; ‘‘Fictional Histories’’; and ‘‘Historical Fictions.’’ All the essays bring together a text (whether historical, legal, or literary), a variety of critical theories (historicist, psychoanalytic, anthropological, etc.), and a variety of cultural contexts. The volume as a whole offers a cultural critique of forms of violence that occur within a domestic setting in the Middle Ages. While not all the essays engage directly the political dimensions of domestic violence, they all situate it within a variety of social contexts that provide ample evidence for an exploration of its social and political functions. The editors begin their study by astutely exploring the range of possible meanings of the terms ‘‘domestic’’ and ‘‘violence.’’ Both terms had a rather different meaning than they do today. The boundaries between the public and the private in the Middle Ages are fluid, and the domestic sphere of the household might include a larger range of people than the nuclear family of today, such as household servants, apprentices, and extended family. Furthermore, as a microcosm of the larger social order, paternal authority ruled supreme in the medieval household, and a certain degree of violence was deemed justifiable for the maintenance of paternal authority; violence was considered transgressive only when it was excessive. Our assessment of violence in the Middle Ages must take into consideration the fact that it was an integral part of daily life in medieval Europe, and indeed it was validated as a form of the maintenance of social hierarchies. Endurance of suffering was deeply embedded in Christian ideology as a virtue. To some, violence seems to have been PAGE 421 421 .......................... 10906$ CH11 11-01-10 13:59:51 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER more overtly woven into the ideological fabric of daily life in the Middle Ages than it is today. Although medieval culture was indeed a violent one, the collection of essays suggests that medieval culture was in fact conflicted about the presence of violence in daily life. The collection as a whole is of an unusually uniform high quality. It begins with two thoughtful essays by social historians Philippa Maddern and Emma Hawkes, who examine the often intractable court records of late medieval England concerning domestic violence in relationship to literary and didactic works. Maddern explores the ways in which the silences of the court records of the mid-fifteenth-century East Anglian King’s bench and Gaol Delivery may be said to speak. Her assessment of the records shows that society allowed a ‘‘reasonable’’ degree of violence for the maintenance of ‘‘right’’ governance of the household, and she concludes that the average person did not consider domestic violence an infraction of the law. By focusing on one incident of wife beating that does occur in the records, that of Margaret Neffield (1395–96), in which the battered wife seeking separation was sent back to her husband , Hawkes similarly concludes that the legal concept of reasonable violence supported acts of wife beating. Part II offers analyses of a large variety of literary texts from English romances to the Welsh Mabinogi to the Italian Decameron. By skillfully weaving together literary and legal texts, Eve Salisbury takes one of the most well-known representations of domestic abuse—Chaucer’s representation of the Wife of Bath’s beating by her husband unto deafness— and then studies The Wife of Bath’s Tale...