A History of the Wife (60 page)

TWO

1. For traditional ways of presenting medieval women’s history, see “Introduction” to
   Female Power in the Middle Ages,
   ed. Karen Glente and Lise Winther-Jensen (Copen- hagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1989).
   

2. See Christopher N. L. Brooke,
   The Medieval Idea of Marriage
   (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Alan Macfarlane,
   Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Repro- duction 1300–1840
   (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986); Roderick Phillips,
   Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society
   (Cambridge, New York, New Rochelle, Mel- bourne, Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 26–27; and Frances and Joseph Gies,
   Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages
   (New York: Harper and Row, 1987).
   

3. This is the position of medievalist Jo Ann McNamara, “Victims of Progress,” in
   

   Female Power in the Middle Ages,
   ed. Glente and Winther-Jensen, p. 29.
   

4. This and the following from Shulamith Shahar,
   The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages,
   trans. Chaya Galai (London and New York: Methuen, 1983), pp. 89–90.
   

5. Cited by Barbara A. Hanawalt,
   The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England
   (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 208.
   

6. Olwen Hufton,
   The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe,
   

   vol. 1, 1500–1800 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 70.
   

7. Werner Rösener,
   Peasants in the Middle Ages,
   trans. Alexander Stützer (Cam- bridge, England: Polity Press, 1992), p. 179.
   

8. Martha Saxton, “Foreword,” to Erika Uitz,
   The Legend of Good Women: Medieval Women in Towns and Cities,
   trans. Sheila Marnie (Mount Kisco, New York: 1990), p. 9.
   

9. Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook,
   ed. Emilie Amt (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 140–142.
   

10. Incident recounted by Georges Duby,
    Mâle Moyen Âge: De l’amour et autres essais
    

    (Paris: Flammarion, 1990), pp. 29–30.
    

11. Women’s Lives,
    ed. Amt, p. 66.
    

12. The following citations are from the York manual, found in
    Surtees Society Pub- lications
    63 no. 24, as cited by George Elliott Howard,
    A History of Matrimonial Institu- tions
    (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1904), vol. 1, pp. 304–307.
    

13. Samuel N. Rosenberg, “The Medieval Hebrew-French Wedding Song,”
    Shofar,
    fall 1992, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 26–28. I am grateful to Professor Rosenberg for calling this song to my attention.
    

14. This discussion is indebted to two famous essays by Georges Duby, “Le mariage dans la société du haut Moyen Age” and “L’amour en France au XIIe siècle,” in Duby,
    Mâle Moyen Âge,
    especially pp. 40–42. See also J.-L. Flandrin,
    Un temps pour embrasser. Aux origines de la morale sexualle occidentale
    (VIe–XIe siècle) (Paris: Le Seuil, 1983).
    

15. Women’s Lives,
    ed. Amt, p. 23.
    

16. Reproduced in Shahar,
    The Fourth Estate,
    image 15.
    

17. Brigitte Cazelles, “Saints’ Lives,” in
    A New History of French Literature,
    ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 13–18.
    

18. The latest modern French translator of their letters states, unequivocally, that Héloïse and Abelard did indeed exist and that the basic facts of their lives were “cor- roborated by their contemporaries,” but since the oldest manuscripts date from the mid-thirteenth century—that is, a hundred years after the events—it is impossible to know to what extent the manuscripts that have come down to us correspond to the original documents.
    Héloïse et Abélard, Lettres et vies,
    trans. Yves Ferroul (Paris: GF- Flammarion, 1996), pp. 30–31. My English translations are from this edition.
    

19. Denis de Rougemont,
    Love in the Western World
    (New York: Pantheon, 1956). Originally published as
    L’Amour et l’Occident
    (Paris: Plon, 1946).
    

20. Chrétien de Troyes,
    Lancelot ou le Chevalier de la Charrette,
    ed. Mireille Demaules, trans. Daniel Poirion, (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), pp. 127–128.
    

21. Shahar,
    The Fourth Estate,
    p. 163.
    

22. The Key to Love (La Clef d’Amors)
    , in
    The Comedy of Eros: Medieval French Guides to the Art of Love,
    trans. Norman R. Shapiro (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977), p. 36.
    

23. The Key to Love,
    in
    The Comedy of Eros,
    p. 16.
    

24. Guiart,
    The Art of Love
    (
    L’Art d’Amors
    ), in
    The Comedy of Eros,
    p. 50.
    

25. Richard de Fournival,
    Advice on Love
    (
    Consaus d’Amours
    ), in
    The Comedy of Eros,
    

    p. 104.
    

26. Robert de Fournival,
    Advice on Love,
    in
    The Comedy of Eros,
    p. 116.
    

27. Robert de Blois,
    Advice to Ladies (Le Chastoiement des Dames),
    in
    The Comedy of Eros,
    p. 76.
    

28. Ibid., p. 68.

29. Ria Lemaire, “The Semiotics of Private and Public Matrimonial Systems and their Discourse,” in
Female Power,
ed. Glente and Winther-Jensen, pp. 77–104.

30. Ibid., p. 81.

31. Ibid., p. 86.

1. Chansons des Trouvères,
   ed. Samuel N. Rosenberg and Hans Tischler, with the collaboration of Marie-Geneviève Grossel (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1995), pp. 80–81.
   

2. Shulamith Shahar, “Cultural Attitudes and Strategies of Oppression: Medieval Motherhood,” in
   Female Power,
   ed. Glente and Winther-Jensen, pp. 44–45.
   

3. Merry E. Wiesner,
   Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe
   (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 51–52.
   

4. Women’s Lives,
   ed. Amt, p. 97.
   

5. See Marilyn Yalom,
   A History of the Breast
   (New York: Knopf, 1997), p. 37.
   

6. Women’s Writing in Middle English,
   ed. Alexandra Barratt (London and New York: Longman, 1992), p. 35.
   

7. Erika Uitz,
   The Legend of Good Women
   (Mount Kisco, New York: Moyer Bell Limited, 1990), pp. 71–72.
   

8. Uitz’s book is a mine of information about burgher women’s work on the conti- nent. See also
   Women’s Lives,
   ed. Amt, pp. 194–214.
   

9. Hufton,
   The Prospect,
   p. 64.
   

10. Women’s Lives,
    ed. Amt, p. 208. 42. Ibid., p. 108.
    

1. Pearl Hogrefe,
   Tudor Women: Commoners and Queens
   (Ames: Iowa State Univer- sity Press, 1975), p. xii; and
   Private Life in the Fifteenth Century: Illustrated Letters of the Paston Family,
   ed. Roger Virgoe (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), p. 139.
   

2. Le Mesnagier de Paris
   (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1993), p. 25.
   

3. Chaucer,
   Canterbury Tales,
   ed. A. Kent and Constance Hieatt (New York: Ban- tam Books, 1964), pp. 187, 189, 219.
   

4. The Book of Margery Kempe
   (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1985). This and the following citations from pp. 42–47, 57–58, and 60.
   

5. Their stories are beautifully told by Carol Lee Flinders in
   Enduring Grace: Living Portraits of Seven Women Mystics
   (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993).
   

6. Christine’s Vision,
   part III, as quoted by Andrea Hopkins, in
   Most Wise and Valiant Ladies
   (New York: Welcome Rain, Distributed by Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1997), p. 112.
   

7. Christine de Pisan’s Ballades, Rondeaux, and Virelais,
   ed. Kenneth Varty (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1965), pp. 3 and 5, my translations. See
   The Writings of Christine de Pizan,
   ed. Charity Cannon Willard (New York: Persea Books, 1994), for English translations of Pisan’s poems.
   

8. Boccaccio,
   Decameron,
   VII, 5.
   

9. Beatrice Gottlieb,
   The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age
   (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 76.
   

10. Charles de la Roncière, “Tuscan Notables on the Eve of the Renaissance,” in
    A History of Private Life: Revelations of the Medieval World,
    ed. Georges Duby, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1988), vol. 2, p. 293.
    

11. Gottlieb
    The Family,
    p. 74.
    

12. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “The Griselda Complex” in
    Women, Family, and Rit- ual in Renaissance Italy,
    trans. Lydia Cochrane (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 214; and David Herlihy and Christian Klapisch-Zuber,
    Tuscans and their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427
    (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 223–226.
    

13. Stanley Chajnacki, “The Power of Love: Wives and Husbands in Late Medieval Venice,” in
    Women and Power in the Middle Ages,
    ed. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowalski (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1988), p. 126–148.
    

14. James S. Grubb,
    Provincial Families of the Renaissance: Private and Public Life in the Veneto
    (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 20–21.
    

15. Gene Brucker,
    Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence
    (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). Brucker’s account of the story of Giovanni and Lusanna is of such particular interest, and only available to us in his edition, that I have paraphrased it extensively in the following pages.
    

16. The Jew in the Medieval World: A Sourcebook,
    ed. Jacob R. Marcus (Cincinnati: The Union American Hebrew Congregation, 1938), reprinted in
    Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe,
    ed. Amt, pp. 293–296.
    

17. Gottlieb,
    The Family,
    p. 130. For Italy, see David Herlihy and Christian Klapisch-Zuber,
    Tuscans,
    pp. 83–84.
    

18. Diane G. Scillia, “Israel van Meckenem’s Marriage à la Mode: The Alltagsleben,” in
    New Images of Medieval Women: Essays Toward a Cultural Anthropology,
    ed. Edelgard E. DuBruck (Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), figures 8 and 9.
    

    THREE
    

    1. Martin Luther, “An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility,” in
       Three Treatises
       

       (Philadelphia: The Fortress Press, 1960), pp. 68–69.
       

    2. Martin Luther, “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church,” in
       Three Treatises,
       

       p. 235.
       

    3. Martin Luther,
       Sämmtliche Werke
       (Erlangen and Frankfurt: 1826–57), vol. 20,
       

       p. 84, as cited by Merry E. Wiesner,
       Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe
       (Cam- bridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 9.
       

    4. Dr. Martin Luther’s Small Catechism
       (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1971), pp. 28 and 72.
       

    5. Edith Simon,
       Luther Alive: Martin Luther and the Making of the Reformation
       

       (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1968), p. 327.
       

    6. Roland Bainton,
       Women of the Reformation in Germany and Italy
       (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Augsburg Publishing House, 1971), p. 27.
       

    7. Schachzabelbuch,
       Codex poet., 1467. Würtembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart. Reproduced in Erika Uitz,
       The Legend of Good Women,
       p. 143.
       

    8. Bainton,
       Women,
       p. 36, citing Luther’s
       Tischreden
       .
       

    9. Bainton,
       Women,
       p. 82. 10. Ibid., pp. 87–88.
       

11. Ibid., p. 88.

12. Ibid., p. 91.

1. Eric Jose Carlson,
   Marriage and the English Reformation
   (Oxford, England, and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1994), p. 42.
   

2. Lawrence Stone,
   The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800
   (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977), p. 135.
   

3. Anthony Fletcher, “The Protestant Idea of Marriage in Early Modern England,” in
   Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain
   (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 173.
   

16. Ibid., p. 167.

1. William Gouge,
   Domestical Duties
   (London: 1622), Epistle Dedicatory, as cited by Fletcher, “The Protestant Idea,” p. 168.
   

2. William Gouge,
   Domestical Duties
   , as cited by N. H. Keeble, ed.,
   The Cultural Identity of Seventeenth-Century Woman
   (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 155.
   

3. Michael MacDonald,
   Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seven- teenth-Century England
   (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 100–101.
   

4. William Gouge,
   Domestical Duties,
   as cited by Anthony Fletcher,
   Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800
   (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 113.
   

5. Carlson,
   Marriage,
   p. 114.
   

6. On the late marriage of the English, see Peter Laslett,
   The World We Have Lost
   (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), pp. 84–85, and Richard Smith’s calculations from 1550–1599, as cited by Carlson,
   Marriage,
   p. 106. On the English nonmarried, see Alan Macfarlane,
   Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300–1840
   (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 8 and following.
   

7. Pearl Hogrefe,
   Tudor Women: Commoners and Queens
   (Ames: Iowa State Uni- versity Press, 1975), p. 18.
   

8. John R. Gillis,
   For Better, for Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present
   (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 45–46.
   

9. Merry E. Wiesner,
   Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe
   (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 49.
   

10. Gillis,
    For Better,
    p. 43.
    

11. Ibid., p. 63. See chapter 2 (pp. 55–83) for a mine of information about wed- ding practices.
    

12. Hogrefe,
    Tudor Women,
    p. 20, citing John Stockwood, author of
    A Bartholomew Fairing for Parents
    (1589).
    

13. Thos Becon,
    Workes
    (1560), as cited by Macfarlane,
    Marriage and Love,
    p. 135.
    

14. H. Smith,
    A Preparative to Marriage
    (London: 1591), p. 26, as cited by Fletcher,
    Gender, Sex, and Subordination,
    p. 106.
    

15. Macfarlane,
    Marriage and Love,
    pp. 124–125, citing Montesquieu,
    The Spirit of the Laws
    (1975), vol. 2, p. 6, and Engels,
    Origin of the Family
    (1902), p. 88.
    

16. Fletcher,
    Gender, Sex, and Subordination,
    p. 155.
    

17. See, for example,
    Halfe a dozen good wives: all for a penny
    (London, 1635?) in
    The Roxburgh ballads,
    ed. W. Chappell and J. W. Ebsworth, 9 vols. (London and Hert- ford, 1869–99), vol. 1, p. 451. Reproduced in
    Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England,
    ed. Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (London: UCL Press, 1994), plate 5.
    

18. Martin Ingram, “ ‘Scolding Women Cucked or Washed’: A Crisis in Gender Relations in Early Modern England?”
    Women, Crime, and the Courts,
    ed. Kermode and Walker, pp. 48–80.
    

19. MacDonald,
    Mystical Bedlam,
    p. 98.
    

20. Laura Gowing, “Language, Power and the Law: Women’s Slander Litigation in Early Modern London” in
    Women, Crime and the Courts,
    ed. Kermode and Walker, pp. 29, 34–35.
    

21. Carlson,
    Marriage,
    p. 147.
    

22. William Whateley,
    A Bride Bush
    (1623), as cited in Keeble,
    The Cultural Iden- tity,
    p. 150.
    

23. MacDonald,
    Mystical Bedlam,
    p. 40.
    

24. William Whateley,
    The Bride Bush
    (Amsterdam: Thetrum Orbis Terrarum, 1623; Norwood, New Jersey: W. J. Johnson, 1975), as cited by Fletcher, “The Protestant Idea,” p. 177.
    

25. Gouge,
    Domestical Duties,
    p. 361, as cited by Fletcher,
    Gender, Sex, and Subor- dination,
    p. 114.
    

26. “The Bridegroomes Comming,” in
    The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne
    (New York: Modern Library, 1952), p. 181.
    

27. The information on the Thynne family letters derives from Fletcher,
    Gender, Sex and Subordination,
    pp. 154–157, based on A D. Wall,
    Two Elizabethan Women: Corre- spondence of Joan and Maria Thynne 1575–1611
    (Wiltshire Record Society, vol. 38, 1983).
    

28. Biographical information from
    The Englishwoman’s Diary,
    ed. Harriet Blodgett (London: Fourth Estate, 1992), p. 17. Blodgett reproduces excerpts from the
    Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby,
    ed. Dorothy Meads (London: Routledge and Sons, 1930).
    

29. Rosamond Rosenmeier,
    Anne Bradstreet Revisited
    (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991), p. 16, citing Dod (1612). Rosenmeier provides a perceptive introduction to Bradstreet’s life and work.
    

30. Rosenmeier,
    Anne Bradstreet,
    p. 73.
    

31. The Complete Works of Anne Bradstreet,
    ed. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., and Allan P. Robb (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981), p. 216.
    

32. Ibid
    .
    

33. Ibid.
    

34. Lyle Koehler,
    A Search for Power: The “Weaker Sex” in Seventeenth-Century New England
    (Urbana, Chicago, London: University of Illinois Press, 1980), pp. 56–57.
    

35. Elizabeth Wade White,
    Anne Bradstreet: The Tenth Muse
    (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 4. This is the essential biography of Bradstreet.
    

36. The Complete Works of Anne Bradstreet,
    p. 200.
    

37. Nancy Woloch,
    Women and the American Experience
    (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 23.
    

38. The Complete Works of Anne Bradstreet,
    pp. 179–180. 55. Ibid.
    ,
    p. 180.