A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [143]
Marriage was the relationship of the sexes that absorbed major interests. More than any other, it is the subject on the minds of the Canterbury pilgrims and its dominant theme is who, as between husband and wife, is boss? In real life too the question of obedience dominates the manual of conduct composed by the Ménagier of Paris for his fifteen-year-old wife. She should obey her husband’s commandments and act according to his pleasure rather than her own, because “his pleasure should come before yours.” She should not be arrogant or answer back or contradict him, especially in public, for “it is the command of God that women should be subject to men … and by good obedience a wise woman gains her husband’s love and at the end hath what she would of him.” She should subtly and cautiously counsel him against his follies, but never nag, “for the heart of a man findeth it hard to be corrected by the domination and lordship of a woman.”
Examples of the terrible fate that meets carping and critical wives are cited by the Ménagier and also by La Tour Landry, who tells how a husband, harshly criticized by his wife in public, “being angry with her governance, smote her with his fist down to the earth,” then kicked her in the face and broke her nose so that she was disfigured ever after and “might not for shame show her visage.” And this was her due “for her evil and great language she was wont to say to her husband.”
So much emphasis is repeatedly placed on compliance and obedience as to suggest that opposite qualities were more common. Anger in the Middle Ages was associated with women, and the sin of Ire often depicted as a woman on a wild boar, although the rest of the seven Vices were generally personified as men.* If the lay view of medieval woman was a scold and a shrew, it may be because scolding was her only recourse against subjection to man, a condition codified, like everything else, by Thomas Aquinas. For the good order of the human family, he argued, some have to be governed by others “wiser than themselves”; therefore, woman, who was more frail as regards “both vigor of soul and strength of body,” was “by nature subject to man, in whom reason predominates.” The father, he ruled, should be more loved than the mother and be owed a greater obligation because his share in conception was “active,” whereas the mother’s was merely “passive and material.” Out of his oracular celibacy St. Thomas conceded that a mother’s care and nourishment were necessary in the upbringing of the child, but much more so the father’s “as guide and guardian under whom the child progresses in goods both internal and external.” That women reacted shrewishly in the age of Aquinas was hardly surprising.
Honoré Bonet posed the question whether a queen might judge a knight when she was governing the kingdom in the king’s absence. No, he answered, because “it is clear that man is much nobler than woman, and of greater virtue,” so that a woman cannot judge a man, the more so since “a subject cannot judge his lord.” How, in these circumstances, the queen governed the kingdom is not explained.
The apotheosis of subjection was patient Griselda, whose tale of endurance under a husband’s cruel tests of her marital submission so appealed to male authors that it was retold four times in the mid-14th century, first by Boccaccio, then in Latin by Petrarch, in English by Chaucer in the Clerk’s Tale, and in French by the Ménagier. Without complaint, Griselda suffers each of her children to be taken away to be killed, as her husband informs her, and then her own repudiation and supposed divorce, before all is revealed as a test, and she willingly reunites herself with the odious author of her trials.
The Ménagier, a kindly man at heart, thought the story “telleth of cruelty too great (to my mind) and above reason” and felt sure “it never befel so.” Nevertheless, he thought his wife should be acquainted with the tale so that she will “know how to talk about all