Separation Anxieties in Late Medieval London: Gender in “The Wright’s Chaste Wife”

Abstract

Abstract For centuries, the occupations of soldier, sailor, merchant, architect, and builder have required long periods of separation from wives and families. Those situations have produced a variety of anxieties. Since those occupations were all dangerous, a wife might fear losing both a husband and a means of support. Perhaps even worse was the possibility that a husband would simply be unaccounted for because no one reported the sinking of the ship on which he sailed or because he had been taken prisoner. If her widowhood were in doubt, a wife would not have the legal right to collect the dower from her husband’s estate, and she might have to carry on her husband’s business even if she was ill-equipped to do so. Other times she might be responsible for raising a large ransom to get her husband out of prison or for paying his debts so that he could come home. Husbands worried about the deterioration of their businesses, the training of their apprentices, and the rearing of their children while they were gone. But these financial and practical considerations were not the stuff of medieval stories that dealt with separation anxieties. Rather, both men and women wrote and spoke about the sexual continence of their conjugal partners during absences. While a husband was away, his wife might have lovers or he himself might have a family in another port or city. Perhaps the expressed anxieties over unfaithfulness masked deeper anxieties about the real risks that separation entailed.