A History of the Wife (13 page)

How did the city girls spend their days, once they were married? The German medievalist Erika Uitz has shown that many burgher wives worked outside as well as inside the home.
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They not only acted as deputies for their husbands when the men were ill or away, but many formed partnerships with their husbands in such enterprises as trading, finance, the textile industry, inn and tavern keeping, bakeries, brew- eries, bathhouses, and various crafts.

In many German towns and cities, one of the requirements for full mastership in a guild was to have a wife, under the assumption that a workshop could not be properly run without her presence.
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In some cities, women themselves were admitted to guilds as their husbands’ partners. Thus the city of Basel in Switzerland in 1271 allowed women to join the guild for builders provided that their husbands were alive. In London, women with small businesses could also be guild members, and a few Parisian craft guilds allowed for “mistresses” as well as “mas- ters.” Generally speaking, widows were allowed to continue their hus- bands’ crafts, but if they remarried a man who was not a member of the same guild, they had to abandon the craft.

Some women worked independently of their husbands, most notably in textile work and beer production. We know from a German business document dating from 1420 that one female brewer con- tracted to teach two men her skill. The enlightening document reads:

I, the aforementioned Fygin with the knowledge, approval and per-

mission of my aforementioned husband have agreed with the hon- ourable wise gentlemen mayors and town council of Cologne . . . that I shall loyally and industriously and to the best of my ability teach two men to make good
grut
. . . . With this document I have obliged and committed myself to do this for the aforementioned gentlemen and the town of Cologne for eight consecutive years, beginning with the date of this document. And whenever they let me know that they need me for their
grut
making I shall, unless I am ill, come to their town of Cologne to instruct and teach . . . for this reason they shall give me one mark of the Cologne currency to cover my labour and my upkeep.
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Apparently the husband in question felt this was a welcome addition to the family income, even if it entailed his wife’s overnight absence for a number of days.

Many married women were midwives, and a few practiced as doc- tors—that is, until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the fac- ulty of such prestigious centers as the University of Paris disallowed the term “physician” for any but university graduates (all men) and enforced the expulsion of women from the medical profession. The case of the lady Jacoba Felicie, preserved in the records of the Univer- sity of Paris, demonstrates how one woman practicing as a doctor in Paris and its suburbs, was forced to desist from offering her services.
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One way of getting around such interdiction was for a doctor and a midwife to be married, a situation that was common in certain Flemish cities.

Outside the cities, peasant wives spent their days preparing meals, cleaning house (a fairly rudimentary occupation, since the houses were small and there was little furniture), milking the cows, feeding the poultry and the swine, tending the vegetable garden, fetching water from the well or stream (if she did not have children to perform that time-consuming task), doing the laundry at the nearest pond or stream, spinning, and sewing. In addition, they nursed and swaddled their babies, supervised children, and cared for the sick and the elderly. They also helped in the fields, hoeing, weeding, harvesting, and gleaning when the harvest was over. And in all of these occupations, peasant wives rarely had any help other than their children.

“Help” was a distinguishing characteristic of households above the level of most peasants and the urban poor. The wives of men in trade

and the professions usually had at least one servant, and great house- holds employed many more. The letters of the Paston family in fif- teenth-century England suggest some twelve to fifteen servants in an affluent household, under the general supervision of the wife.
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Keep- ing an eye on the servants, including provisions for their food and clothing, added heavily to the managerial duties of the Paston wives and their likes. All wives, whatever their station, were deemed respon- sible for household management, given a gender division of labor that has been with us since time immemorial.

GRISELDA AND THE WIFE OF BATH

Le Mesnagier de Paris
and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath in
The Canterbury Tales,
both written around 1400, offer two radically different pictures of wifehood. The Parisian author, a man probably old enough to be the grandfather of his fifteen-year-old spouse, proposed a model of wifely submission based on traditional religious instruction and the figure of Griselda widely known from popular fable. Griselda is the obedient wife par excellence. Taken from a humble family by a powerful noble- man, she promises him, as her sole dowry, that she will obey him in all things. Little does she know that this will entail enduring episodes of extreme cruelty and humiliation. But at each ordeal—giving up her children to presumed execution, returning to her father’s home bare- footed when her husband announces he is taking a second wife—she obeys him without the slightest reproach. Of course, the story ulti- mately ends happily, like the story of Job, for Griselda passes all the tests of unconditional obedience with flying colors. However unreal Griselda may seem to us today, the Parisian husband assumed his wife would take her model seriously.

While half of
Le Mesnagier de Paris
addressed the religious and moral duties of a wife, especially to her husband, the other half concerned more practical domestic matters: the care of the garden, the supervi- sion of servants, and, in detailed recipes, the preparation of food. The latter was probably the main reason this work has survived for so many centuries.

We know absolutely nothing about the fate of the young wife for whom this book was written—whether she ultimately became a good cook and housekeeper, whether she remained chaste and obedient,

whether she shared with her husband the affection he obviously had for her. In all probability, she outlived him and married again, as her hus- band had anticipated in the Prologue to his book, when he opined that her acquisition of “virtue, honor, and duty” would serve not only him, but “if the case arises, another husband” in the future.
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For an antithetical portrait of a wife where the “case” did arise and who married no less than five times, let us look at Chaucer’s Wife of Bath—Griselda’s opposite in every way. Though the Wife of Bath con- firms every stereotypical flaw men have attributed to women since antiquity, she stands convincingly for an archetypal powerful woman who must have existed in the Middle Ages and who exists in every age. She is bossy and manipulative, gossipy and argumentative, loving and lusty. In defiance of the prevalent ascetic ideal, she makes a case for sexual enjoyment. She asks “To what end/ were reproductive organs made?” And she replies: “for necessary business and for pleasure.” For her part, she will use her “flower... in the acts and fruits of mar-

riage.”
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As a paragon of female lust and dominance, the Wife of Bath con- fronts the Griselda myth head-on. She fights with her husbands, lies and remonstrates, suffers blows and returns them in kind, and is not satisfied until her last husband—the one she loves best—cedes control and declares, “My own true wife, do as you wish the rest of your life.” This, she says, put an end to argument and brought perfect harmony into their home.

Griselda and the Wife of Bath exemplify the two extreme poles of a debate about married women that went on throughout the Middle Ages. Men idealized the selfless devotion represented by Griselda. Women belied that ideal, leaving men disappointed and resentful. Frenchmen who wrote books such as
The Book of the Knight of La Tour- Landry
and the
Fifteen Joys of Marriage,
and the English authors of
Why Not to Take a Wife
and
The Purgatory of Married Men
dragged misogynist resentment across the centuries, seeking to prove that the only good wife is one who is beaten regularly and kept underfoot.

THE STORY OF MARGERY KEMPE

The unique autobiographical text known as
The Book of Margery Kempe
provides a very different picture of the late-medieval wife. Her

experience as a quirky mystic contradicts the fictive female prototypes of that period. Margery Kempe was born in 1373 into a well-to-do middle-class family from King’s Lynn, Norfolk. At the age of twenty, she married John Kempe, a man of lesser social status. After the birth of her first child (the first of fourteen), she suffered some form of postpartum psychosis, from which she was rescued eight months later through a vision of Christ. Henceforth, her life would follow a turbulent path marked by frequent sobbing and mystical conversations with the Lord. It is this religious trajectory that she, an illiterate woman, decided to set down through dictation when she was about sixty. Despite the interme- diary of a scribe and Margery’s third-person style, her own voice comes through vividly. Here is how she speaks of herself during the period that followed her breakdown and redemptive vision.

And presently the creature grew as calm in her wits and her reason as she ever was before, and asked her husband, as soon as he came to her, if she could have the keys of the buttery to get her food and drink as she had done before. Her maids and her keepers advised him that he should not deliver up any keys to her. . . . Nevertheless, her husband, who always had tenderness and compassion for her, ordered that they should give her the keys. And she took food and drink as her bodily strength would allow her, and she once again recognized her friends and her household, and everybody else who came to her in order to see how our Lord Jesus Christ had worked his grace in her.
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It is this mixture of the domestic and the divine that distinguishes Margery Kempe’s autobiography from the other spiritual writings of her era, and provides unique insights into marriage from the perspective of a wife. Margery describes her husband as tender and compassionate, will- ing to trust her with the keys to the larder she had possessed before her illness, and hopeful only of her recovery. Perhaps he was somewhat awed by his wife, especially since she came from a more distinguished family than his own, as she sometimes reminded him. But if Margery was occa- sionally hard on her husband, she was usually harder on herself. She pre- sented herself as proud and envious, headstrong and snappish, unable to learn from past experience. In the early years of her marriage she took pride in “her showy manner of dressing” and “was enormously envious of her neighbours if they were dressed as well as she was.” And then, as she

put it, “out of pure covetousness, and in order to maintain her pride, she took up brewing, and was one of the greatest brewers in the town of N. for three or four years until she lost a great deal of money.”

After brewing, she took up corn-grinding—another unsuccessful venture. These reversals of fortune were interpreted as “scourges of our Lord that would chastise her for... her pride.” Her religious bent began to manifest itself in all aspects of her life, and came to a head in the incident recounted as follows.

One night, as this creature lay in bed with her husband, she heard a melodious sound so sweet and delectable that she thought she had been in paradise. And immediately she jumped out of bed and said, “Alas that ever I sinned!” Afterwards, whenever she heard this same melody, she shed very plentiful and abundant tears of high devotion, with great sobbings and sighings for the bliss of heaven. . . .

However bizarre her weeping and sighing appeared to her neigh- bors, Margery was convinced that she was in communication with a higher order of reality, known only to mystics like herself. The night she heard the music of paradise was a turning point in her relationship to her husband. She writes:

And after this time she never had any desire to have sexual inter- course with her husband, for paying the debt of matrimony was so abominable to her that she would rather, she thought, have eaten and drunk the ooze and muck in the gutter than consent to intercourse, except out of obedience.

And so she said to her husband, “I may not deny you my body, but all the love and affection of my heart is withdrawn from all earthly creatures and set on God alone.” But he would have his will with her, and she obeyed with much weeping and sorrowing. . . . And often this creature advised her husband to live chaste and said that they had often (she well knew) displeased God by their inordinate love, and the great delight each of them had in using the other’s body, and now it would be a good thing if by mutual consent they punished and chastised them- selves by abstaining from the lust of their bodies.

Admittedly, Margery Kempe was not a “representative” woman. Yet

her strange personality does not diminish the value of the record she left behind: it shows how Christian theology expounded from the pul- pit worked its way into the marital bed. The medieval emphasis on chastity, with its repugnance for sexuality, ran counter to her husband’s personal inclinations, and even her own previous behavior. Now that she had been enlightened by a mystical experience, she began to recon- sider the pleasure they both took in sex. In keeping with Christian doc- trine, “inordinate lovemaking” was seen as displeasing to God. Intercourse was acceptable only as a procreative function, and Margery, who had already had more children than the norm, was determined to give it up.

Her husband, however, was not yet ready to take the vows of chastity she so ardently desired. In a state of perpetual disquiet, Margery increased her devotions: she attended church two or three times a day, prayed all afternoon, fasted, and wore a hair shirt. If we now tend to think of this garment as a perverse fantasy, we have only to read her account to be convinced of its reality: “She got herself a hair- cloth from a kiln—the sort that malt is dried on—and put it inside her gown as discreetly and secretly as she could, so that her husband should not notice it. And nor did he, although she lay beside him every night in bed and wore the hair-shirt every day, and bore him children during that time.” We may well wonder about a husband who does not notice his wife’s hair shirt, even as they continue to have intercourse. But we also have to wonder about the accuracy of an account written by a woman who was, by the standards of any age, wildly eccentric.