Emma Lipton, Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English LiteratureAffections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature. EmmaLipton. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Pp. ix+246.

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewEmma Lipton, Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature. Emma Lipton. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Pp. ix+246.Katharine JagerKatharine JagerUniversity of Houston–Downtown Search for more articles by this author University of Houston–DowntownPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreComprised of merchants, civic officials, royal bureaucrats, and aspiring gentry, the “middle strata” of late medieval England wielded considerable influence in cultural, political, and literary spheres, as scholars have recently shown.1 Emma Lipton contributes to this growing body of scholarship by historicizing companionate sacramental marriage, the social and sexual institution entered into by this group of late medieval society. In a series of finely calibrated close readings of Middle English and Anglo-Norman texts, Lipton finds that late medieval texts used traditional theology in ways that emphasized both the limitations and flexibilities of companionate marriage. Within the late medieval hierarchy of moral value, virginity, celibacy, and finally chaste widowhood were the most three highly prized positions, followed last of all by marriage.2 While perceived to be a lesser state, marriage was nonetheless a lay institution embedded in a matrix of communal and religious ties. It was sacramental and yet, with the exception of baptism in extremis, it was the only sacrament that could be performed without the interceding authority of a priest; as such, it was both a state of being and a powerful speech act performed by ordinary people (6–7). Lipton situates marriage within larger ecclesiastical and literary debates concerning sexuality, companionship, and power and posits that marriage “offered a microcosmic alternative vision for a broader social structure that worked to level the hierarchy of the three estates” (9). Via examinations of marriage in four literary examples—Chaucer's blending of romance and sermon in the “Franklin's Tale,” Gower's lyric ballad sequence Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz, the N-town Marian plays, and the prose Book of Margery Kempe—Lipton argues that these texts depict a burgeoning preoccupation with sacramental marriage driven by “the growth of lay piety, and the increased size and power of the middle sections of society” (2). Of particular interest is Lipton's observation that just as twenty-first-century marriage debates negotiate the social, political, and religious prospects within the institution of marriage, so, too, “a similar politicized negotiation of social and religious authority can be found in late medieval England where an emergent lay middle strata of society used the sacramental model of marriage to exploit contradictions within medieval theology and social hierarchy” (1).Lipton's first two chapters explore the marital ideology in poetry composed by elite male members of the “middle strata.” Positioning her analysis within scholarship on the “marriage group” of the Canterbury Tales,3 Lipton argues in the first chapter, “Married Friendship: An Ideology for the Franklin,” that Chaucer's “Franklin's Tale” is a hybridized genre that mixes both the traditional romance and the vernacular sermon. It is a romance that “critiques and transforms that genre's frequent association of marriage with knightly prowess and public display, replacing them with an emphasis on individual choice and mutual love characteristic of the sacramental marriage model” (22). The “Tale” is narrated by a man whose employment situates him among the rural elite of the “middle strata,” and Lipton persuasively reads the “Tale”'s concern for mutuality and virtue in marriage as representative of the social and political aims of franklins more generally (48). Although a romance in form, the “Tale” is concerned with the nature of marital friendship; its content is thus quite similar to vernacular sermons, and Lipton argues that “the discourse of aristocratic love is appropriated not for royal or court politics but to fashion marriage as a horizontal political model focused on personal merit and participatory governance which would have appealed to members of the middle strata” (23). In her second chapter, “Public Voice, Private Life: Marriage and Masculinity in John Gower's Traitié,” Lipton asserts that marriage serves as a more equitable social and political model and interprets the poem's depiction of masculine marital ideals as indicative of Gower's own social values. While marriage had long been propounded by clerics as an institution for the reform of women, the Traitié proposes the inverse: that men might find in marriage a moral imperative (52). Marriage in Gower's poem is “a means of self-regulation” (75), making it meaningful for “people like himself: men of the upper middle strata in late medieval England who are neither aristocratic nor clerical in their affiliations” (82). Whereas Lipton understands the “Franklin's Tale” as fictional, she reads the Traitié as autobiographical, suggesting that the poem uses an idealized version of marriage “traceable to Gower's own position and social standing” (86). Lipton bases this argument on a moment at the poem's end in which Gower self-deprecatingly identifies himself as a poet and a man. A competing analysis is offered by scholarship on similar gestures toward poetic self-representation in both Old French and Middle English, which reads such moments of apologia not as autobiographical but as self-consciously performative and highly constructed.4Lipton's arguments are especially persuasive in the final two chapters, about the concerns of women in marriage. Her third chapter, “Performing Reform: Marriage, Lay Piety and Sacramental Theater in the N-town Mary Plays,” examines the fifteenth-century N-town manuscript, BL MS Cotton Vespasian D. 8, which contains several miniplays, including The Marriage of Mary and Joseph, Joachim and Anna, and The Trial of Mary and Joseph. Carefully historicized, this chapter looks at the political and religious fabric in which the N-town plays were realized, demonstrating how the plays “perform cultural work by mediating religious political tensions around the relationships between clerical and lay prerogatives in East Anglia” (93). Lipton reads the marriage scene in The Marriage of Mary and Joseph as a kind of advertisement for companionate, lay marriage, pointing out that “watching the wedding take place between two actors as part of a play would have encouraged the play's lay audience to think of weddings themselves as theatrical; just as the congregation within the church would have functioned as witnesses to the weddings performed there, so in the dramatic production, the audience of the play served as witnesses to the wedding” (116). She focuses on the ways by which the plays represent and enact marriage as the highly contested but ultimately cherished cornerstone of civic as well as religious life. The final chapter, “The Marriage of Love and Sex: Margery Kempe and Bourgeois Lay Identity,” asserts that the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe “not only revises existing models to create an idea of marriage more consistent with existing bourgeois values, but it also uses marriage to create a bourgeois ideology” (131). Lipton argues compellingly that Margery's marriage with her husband John, in which he refuses to allow her to remain chaste, situates her within female hagiographic tradition (134–36). She also points out that Margery is the only contemporary female saint who describes having a sexual, marital relationship with Christ even while remaining a bourgeois wife married to a layman (139, 144). Both Margery's chaste sacramental marriage and her spiritual marriage with Christ are companionate in nature, and they allow her considerable autonomy. Yet Lipton recognizes that Margery's marital status is at issue when she is interrogated by the Bishop of York; being married places Margery in “conflict with ecclesiastical norms” just as much as it allows her to travel and to live with some independence (158). This observation—that late medieval sacramental marriage was at once a site of limitation and of possibility—is central to Lipton's excellent book. Notes 1.See, e.g., Glenn Burger, Chaucer's Queer Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford University Press, 1997); Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).2.According to Paul, “it is better to marry than to burn” (1 Cor. 7:9).3.See George Lyman Kittredge, “Chaucer's Discussion of Marriage,” Modern Philology 9 (1912): 435–67, reprinted in Chaucer and His Poetry: Lectures Delivered in 1914 on the Percy Turnbull Memorial Foundation in the Johns Hopkins University (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1915).4.On poetic identity and the performative apologia in Middle English texts, see Lois Ebin, ed., Vernacular Poetics in the Middle Ages (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1984), particularly her essay, “Poetics and Style in Late Medieval Literature,” 263–93; and A. C. Spearing, “A Ricardian ‘I’: The Narrator of Troilus and Criseyde,” in Essays on Ricardian Literature in Honor of J. A. Burrow, ed. A. J. Minnis, Charlotte C. Morse, and Thorac Turville-Petre (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 1–22. For similar analyses of apologia in Old French poetry, see Michel Zink, “Time and Representation of the Self in Thirteenth-Century French Poetry,” trans. Monique Briand-Walker, in “Medieval and Renaissance Representation: New Reflections,” ed. Stephen G. Nichols Jr. and Nancy J. Vickers, special issue, Poetics Today 5 (1984): 611–27; and Kevin Brownlee, Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machaut (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 109, Number 1August 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/660747 Views: 40Total views on this site © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 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