Emma Lipton

In contrast to an enduring association of the law with hegemonic power, the Wife of Bath's Tale demonstrates the potential for legal practices to facilitate change, especially through tactical feminist coalition building. The tale does not promote the retributive model of justice associated with King Arthur's court, but embraces a vision of law, associated with the Queen and her female allies, that promotes social change through reeducation. Although elsewhere Chaucerian women are disempowered or objectified by the law, the tale's series of interlocking contracts empowers female agency rather than objectifying women. The shifting voices and audiences at the end present the contract as a tactic, not as a final solution to the precarity of women's safety or marital happiness. The lack of justice at the end of the tale—where a rapist is rewarded with a wife both faithful and fair—is a call to activism, not a vision of equity achieved.

“This dissertation explores the ways in which changing religious, political and social conditions interacted with literary tradition to transform the meaning of marriage in the literature of the later Middle Ages. Since the twelfth century, Latin monastic writings built on the exegetical tradition of the Song of Songs, envisioning mystical marriage to Christ as an allegory for the monastic contemplative life. In many vernacular works of the late Middle Ages, however, spiritual marriage was appropriated in the service of validating earthly marriage, thus blurring the boundaries between celibacy, the distinguishing feature of the clergy, and marriage, the sexual marker of lay status. This validation of marriage practices as spiritual can be linked to the growth of lay piety, which found an extreme expression in the increasingly visible Lollard heretics who made marriage part of their attack on clerical celibacy. As a uniquely lay sacrament which could legally be performed without the participation of the clergy, marriage also played a complex role in contemporary disputes over the sacraments, and the theological history of the development of the sacramental model of marriage provided crucial vocabulary for literature promoting the spirituality of marriage. Late Medieval English literature also appropriated the tradition of fin amors, the literary expression of aristocratic honor and identity, and transformed it into a validation of marriage and a medium for expressing bourgeois ideology. This generic appropriation can be linked to changes in the social structure of late medieval England, when the growth of the middle strata of society made the three estates model, traditionally used as a means of describing medieval society, an increasingly less accurate representation. My readings reveal that marriage was a particular preoccupation in the literature authored by and directed to these middle sections of society who were in search of a social identity and legitimizing ideology because they found in marriage a medium for appropriating clerical and aristocratic cultures and transforming them into a means of constructing bourgeois ideology. Individual chapters feature Chaucer's ‘Franklin's Tale,’ Gower's ‘Traitie Pour Essampler Les Amants Marietz,’ the 'Mary Plays from the N-Town Cycle' and The Book of Margery Kempe.

In John Lydgate’s “Disguising at Hertford,” a group of husbands brings a bill of complaint before the king about the tyranny of their wives.1 Invoking antimatrimonial paradigms, they decry the “bonde of sorowe” that is marriage, claiming that their wives scold, drink, fail to prepare dinner, and beat their husbands with distaffs, fists, and ladles. The husbands request that the king grant them liberty from the bonds of marriage and restore the “nature” and “raysoun” of patriarchal rule. Using a flood of legal terminology, the bill concludes by beseeching the king to use his authority to “graunte hem fraunchyse and also liberte . . . [and] sauf-conduyt to sauf him frome damage . . . Graunt hem also a proteccyoun” (ll. 138–42). For their part the wives defend themselves in equally legalistic jargon, invoking the authority of Chaucer’s Wife of bath who, they say, “cane shewe statutes moo þan six or seven” (l. 169) to prove that law is on their side. They “clayme maystrye for prescripcyoun” (l. 203) and request the king show “his grace” (l. 212) in upholding their domestic sovereignty. Instead of ruling conclusively on the case, the king defers judgment, granting a year-long extension of female rule until the husbands “may fynde some processe oute by lawe” (l. 242) that enables them to “Haue souerayntee on þeyre prudent wyves” (l. 244). Far from offering a defense of female rule, the disguising ends by deeming woman’s sovereignty “a thing vnkouþe” (l. 245) and implying a failure of justice. The “Disguising at Hertford” thus makes the problem of

Although Gower's engagement with sermons and penitentials is well established, this article demonstrates that legal theory was also central to Gower's moral narratives. This reading of Gower's Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz shows the similarities between exemplary narrative and legal logic, and suggests that the formulations of both common and canon law are crucial to Gower's ethics. The Traitié identifies marriage as both an exemplary instance of legal principles and the material instantiation of the principles of law, reflecting the logic of both secular and ecclesiastical medieval legal treatises and indicating that marital and legal theory were mutually constitutive in late medieval culture.

The Wife of Bath’s Prologue provides an introduction to medieval ideas about marriage and love. The Prologue begins like a sermon and then takes on the terms of misogyny and misogamy as the Wife describes her first three marriages, demonstrating her success in manipulating the marriage system to her own advantage as a means to consolidate money and power. When the Wife speaks of her fourth and fifth husbands, however, the Prologue becomes more personal, like a modern autobiography, exploring the role of love in marriage and its relationship to gender hierarchy and domestic violence. In her prologue, Chaucer’s Wife defends marriage against religious teachings that claim that it is inferior to celibacy, maintaining the association of marriage with sex but embracing a more modern perspective that sexual pleasure is a virtue and rejecting the idea that wives should always obey their husbands. The Prologue presents both the challenges to women’s agency posed by medieval marriage and, con...

Although Gower’s engagement with sermons and penitentials is well established, this article demonstrates that legal theory was also central to Gower’s moral narratives. This reading of Gower’s Traitie pour essampler les amantz marietz shows the similarities between exemplary narrative and legal logic, and suggests that the formulations of both common and canon law are crucial to Gower’s ethics. The Traitie identifies marriage as both an exemplary instance of legal principles and the material instantiation of the principles of law, reflecting the logic of both secular and ecclesiastical medieval legal treatises and indicating that marital and legal theory were mutually constitutive in late medieval culture.

Lipton argues that Gower's discussion of marriage in the 'Traitie' is shaped as much by legal doctrine (and his own legal training) as by the sermons and confessional manuals that are more frequently cited and that lie closer to the heart of CA. She notes the prevalence of legal vocabulary in the 'Traitie' and traces the way in which the opening ballades incorporate marriage within an account of the descent of law from divine to natural to positive and from old to new. Both law and marriage, for both Gower and for the writers of the legal treatises that she cites, are regulatory in nature, and they originate in paradise in response to man's fallen condition. The main body of the 'Traitie' is shaped by the "case-based ethical thinking" of Aristotle and Aquinas that was central to medieval legal theory as well, and in contrast to their analogues in CA, the exempla that Gower presents, with their emphasis on punishment, "repeatedly represe...

Lipton argues that Gower's discussion of marriage in the 'Traitie' is shaped as much by legal doctrine (and his own legal training) as by the sermons and confessional manuals that are more frequently cited and that lie closer to the heart of CA. She notes the prevalence of legal vocabulary in the 'Traitie' and traces the way in which the opening ballades incorporate marriage within an account of the descent of law from divine to natural to positive and from old to new. Both law and marriage, for both Gower and for the writers of the legal treatises that she cites, are regulatory in nature, and they originate in paradise in response to man's fallen condition. The main body of the 'Traitie' is shaped by the "case-based ethical thinking" of Aristotle and Aquinas that was central to medieval legal theory as well, and in contrast to their analogues in CA, the exempla that Gower presents, with their emphasis on punishment, "repeatedly represent transgressions of marriage as occasions for exercising justice rather than teaching moral truth" (495). The address of the poem "a tout le monde en general," finally, reflects an evolving view of the social foundations of law. "The poem makes marriage instead of kingship emblematic of legal principles. Rather than presenting law as a divinely given monarchical prerogative, the balades feature principles of common good and contractual integrity, which are essential to the law as a foundation of wide-ranging social order. The poem thus reflects both a contemporary legal view of marital crime as social and the increasingly broad public participation in English criminal justice" (497). [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 33.2.]

author” who “tells entirely different (entirely Jewish) stories about Jewish life and culture” as Krummel puts it (p. 112) but also a cultural interlocutor of multiplex significance whose medieval ascriptions also lead us to the Siege of Jerusalem. Still, Krummel’s attempt to account for a broad range of materials and imaginative approaches is deserving of high praise. Though I can argue that there is a structural fault line or point out individual readings that I think are not sufficiently contextualized, this work nevertheless consistently raises important questions about medieval anti-Semitic discourses and highlights crucial pedagogical and methodological issues. It is well for us, and our students, to remember that postexpulsion England was not entirely without experience of “real” Jews; to consider that both the Biblical Jew (represented by Krummel in illustrations, from Adam to Caiphas) and the Jews imposed upon in documents like the 1275 Statute of the Jewry were likewise “typed” and “figural”; to remember that there are indeed Jewish voices and Jewish writings in and around the expulsion; and to question the boundaries and usefulness of medieval-modern analogies and historicizations— along with our own emotional responses to such. Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England in this way contributes fruitfully to an active scholarly discussion, and it will move the discussion forward. Adrienne Williams Boyarin University of Victoria

Claire Sponsler. The Queen's Dumbshows: John Lydgate and the Making of Early Theater. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. vii + 308 + 7 plates. $65.00. Claire Sponsler's admirable new book is a corrective to the vision of John Lydgate as a writer of court, monastery, and city that puts his dramatic entertainments at the center of inquiry. This focus is an alternative to the centrality of urban religious drama in recent medieval criticism and to the frequent omission of Lydgate from histories of early theatre, but Sponsler also has a more ambitious agenda. "Attending to theater history," she argues, calls for a "rethinking of the development of vernacular literature in England" (4) and acknowledging a "conflict between poetry and performance as forms of cultural prestige in late medieval England" (5). The "London-based, secular, and Chaucer-centered canon," she claims, represents "only a slim segment of the corpus of imaginative writings in Middle English" and does not account for the "many other works that were widely heard and seen--in mimetic performances, viva voce recitations, processional tableaux, wall hangings, or on the page of manuscript books" (4). Through analysis of Lydgate's mixed-media productions, Sponsler puts "theatricality" rather than poetry "at the hub of public culture" (11). The Records of Early English Drama (REED) project has for decades encouraged and facilitated the expansion of archival work on the drama beyond the play texts themselves to consider a range of records documenting performance. Building on the research for her recent TEAMS edition of Lydgate's mummings and entertainments, Sponsler employs a dazzling array of records and also theorizes the ways that "the materiality of both performances and their written residue" (15) shapes drama studies. Ultimately, Sponsler uses the archive to produce not a history of performance but a cultural history of the meanings of performance. As Sponsler notes, Lydgates dramatic works are by a known author and a known compiler, John Shirley, who often added rubrics that spoke to details of performance, audience, and occasion, providing a unique and underutilized resource for studying early English theatre. In her first chapter, Sponsler observes that Shirley did not include markers of performance within the body of the text (such as costumes, gestures, staging), tending to emphasize the "literariness" of Lydgates dramatic works, rather than their theatricality, perhaps converting them into texts for private reading that could have been produced specifically for the Beauchamp household in the 1420s. She notes that the mise-en-page of Lydgate's plays and poems in Shirleys anthology are the same, suggesting the "flexibility of texts in this period" (25) and the fact that "the generic definition of a play was in flux throughout the premodern period" (30). While the book begins by emphasizing the unique archive of Lydgate's performance pieces, the last chapter, "On Drama's Trail," by contrast, addresses the practical difficulties of drama research through a case study of A Mumming of Seven Philosophers, a moralistic poem contained in a miscellany (Cambridge, Trinity College Library MA R.3.19) along with selections from several works known to be by Lydgate. Through a study of scribal hand, language, style, thematic content, and records of court entertainments, Sponsler makes a tentative case for attributing this poem to Lydgate and for locating the performance venue in the court of Henry VI. Her larger purpose is to demonstrate the simultaneously essential and inconclusive nature of documentary research on the drama. The penultimate titular chapter is characteristic of the book's movement among astute detailed readings of Lydgate's texts, contextual documents, and large claims about dramatic history. For example, Sponsler quotes from the Parliamentary statute of 1427-28 stating that anyone marrying the dowager queen Catherine without the king's permission would forfeit his land and possessions during his lifetime. …

instance of it, in the discourse on pity, does not convince. Kendall sees this virtue as a “magnificent” instrument of power—and, citing Andrew Galloway, “as including, indeed mainly being, justice, vengeance, even extreme violence” (p. 256). To get to that point, however, he must collapse Gower’s distinction between pity and justice as discrete “pointz” of Policie and disregard their placement in a framework where each might be seen to temper the other; in this scheme of “pointz,” neither virtue can be totalized. Kendall does better when he draws the argument back to the poet’s idealizations and instantiations of reciprocalism, as here when he shows how, in Gower’s view, inner trouthe and the “counsel of subjects (especially the great)” (p. 249) might constrain a king in the exercise of power. Kendall’s study leaves several large questions unanswered, but it offers fine readings of many tales; effectively creates a new thesaurus of core political concerns in the politics of the great household; and with the focus on instances in the Confessio, usefully enlarges and enriches inquiry into Gower’s political orientation. Kurt Olsson University of Idaho