Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages

by Glenn D. Burger

Overview

Conduct Becoming examines a new genre of late medieval writing that focuses on a wife's virtuous conduct and ability of such conduct to alter marital and social relations in the world. Considering a range of texts written for women—the journées chrétiennes or daily guides for Christian living, secular counsel from husbands and fathers such as Le Livre du Chevalier de La Tour Landry and Le Menagier de Paris, and literary narratives such as the Griselda story—Glenn D. Burger argues that, over the course of the long fourteenth century, the "invention" of the good wife in discourses of sacramental marriage, private devotion, and personal conduct reconfigured how female embodiment was understood.

While the period inherits a strongly antifeminist tradition that views the female body as naturally wayward and sensual, late medieval conduct texts for women outline models of feminine virtue that show the good wife as an identity with positive influence in the world. Because these manuals imagine how to be a good wife as necessarily entangled with how to be a good husband, they also move their readers to consider such gendered and sexed identities in relational terms and to embrace a model of self-restraint significantly different from that of clerical celibacy. Conduct literature addressed to the good wife thus reshapes how late medieval audiences thought about the process of becoming a good person more generally. Burger contends that these texts develop and promulgate a view of sex and gender radically different from previous clerical or aristocratic models—one capable of providing the foundations for the modern forms of heterosexuality that begin to emerge more clearly in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812249606
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	10/27/2017
Series:	The Middle Ages Series
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Glenn D. Burger is Professor of English and Medieval Studies, Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Table of Contents

Introduction. Loving, Reading, Acting in a Marrying Kind of Way 1

Chapter 1 Laboring to Make the Good Wife Good in the Journées Chrétiennes 33

Chapter 2 Remaking the Feminine 75

Chapter 3 In the Merchant's Bedchamber: Le Menagier de Paris 105

Chapter 4 Affecting Conduct: Feeling Steadfast with Griselda 141

Conclusion 191

Notes 199

Works Cited 241

Index 253

Acknowledgments 261

Editorial Reviews

"Feminist scholars have long used conduct books to illustrate the brutally patriarchal nature of medieval marriage. Glenn Burger's Conduct Becoming strikes a new, counterintuitive note."

London Review of Books

"Attending to a diverse range of texts broadly characterized as conduct literature Glenn D. Burger constructs a layered and nuanced argument for the emergence of a new medieval subject, 'the good wife,' along with new models for married relations in the later Middle Ages . . . The full weight of Burger's argument unfolds gradually across the chapters, but it rewards its readers with its attentiveness to the many potential ways in which narratives interact with their readers, another dialogic relationship that calls for a dynamic, negotiated, and relational understanding. Burger offers such an understanding here."

The Journal of Religion

"Much has been published about conduct literature in the past twenty years, but I don't know of a book that covers a similar range of texts and makes such a large intellectual argument. This new model of the good wife focuses primarily on the married lay woman whose attitudes and activities as a member of a marriage and a household have significant roles to play in the wider society."

University of Southern Maine Kathleen Ashley

"Much has been published about conduct literature in the past twenty years, but I don't know of a book that covers a similar range of texts and makes such a large intellectual argument. This new model of the good wife focuses primarily on the married lay woman whose attitudes and activities as a member of a marriage and a household have significant roles to play in the wider society."

Universityof Southern Maine Kathleen Ashley

"Feminist scholars have long used conduct books to illustrate the brutally patriarchal nature of medieval marriage. Glenn Burger's Conduct Becoming strikes a new, counterintuitive note."—London Review of Books

"Attending to a diverse range of texts broadly characterized as conduct literature Glenn D. Burger constructs a layered and nuanced argument for the emergence of a new medieval subject, 'the good wife,' along with new models for married relations in the later Middle Ages . . . The full weight of Burger's argument unfolds gradually across the chapters, but it rewards its readers with its attentiveness to the many potential ways in which narratives interact with their readers, another dialogic relationship that calls for a dynamic, negotiated, and relational understanding. Burger offers such an understanding here."—The Journal of Religion

"This book is a challenging and important contribution to the understanding of ''thinking' in the later Middle Ages..[A] scholarly work rich in ideas and insight that offers new ways of engaging with late-medieval thinking and feeling."—Parergon

"Much has been published about conduct literature in the past twenty years, but I don't know of a book that covers a similar range of texts and makes such a large intellectual argument. This new model of the good wife focuses primarily on the married lay woman whose attitudes and activities as a member of a marriage and a household have significant roles to play in the wider society."—Kathleen Ashley, University of Southern Maine

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