A History of the Wife (14 page)

Among her many religious practices, Margery began going on pil- grimages to various English shrines, but she could not leave “without the consent of her husband.” In this respect, she followed traditional law and custom, since a medieval wife needed her husband’s permis- sion to leave the domicile. This her husband freely granted, and some- times he even accompanied her. It was during their pilgrimage to York that another definitive moment occurred. The two of them had refrained from intercourse for a full eight weeks, and when questioned on the subject, her husband responded “that he was made so afraid when he would have touched her, that he dared do no more.” Obvi- ously Margery’s conversations with God and her ongoing desire for chastity were having their effect. It took considerable negotiation between them before both agreed on the following arrangement: “Sir, if

you please, you shall grant me my desire, and you shall have your desire. Grant me that you will not come into my bed, and I grant you that I will pay your debts before I go to Jerusalem.”... Then her hus- band replied to her, “May your body be as freely available to God as it has been to me.”

This momentous event occurred around her fortieth year, and was formalized in a vow of chastity before the bishop of Lincoln. It inaugu- rated a series of pilgrimages that took her as far as the Holy Land, Italy, and Spain. Clearly Margery Kempe had sufficient means to travel, and little worry about her children, some of whom were probably grown up and the others presumably left behind in the care of servants and relatives.

Though Margery Kempe’s story stands out in the annals of medieval wives, it is not unique. Other famous holy women were also married.
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Among the earliest, Mary of Oignies (who died in 1213) was married off at fourteen by her parents in Brabant, but, persuading her husband to live chastely, she convinced him that they should devote themselves

to the care of lepers.

Angelo of Foligno (1249–1309) was a well-to-do wife and mother until the age of forty, whereupon she experienced a conversion and devoted herself to a life of poverty and penance.

Saint Bridget of Sweden (1303–1373) was married at thirteen by her influential parents to a man of comparable station, and they had eight children. Upon her husband’s death in 1344, she retired to a Cistertian monastery, where she dictated her revelations to a prior. She went to Rome in 1350 and remained there, founding a new religious order, the Brigittines, which had wide influence throughout Europe, especially in her native Sweden.

The Prussian visionary Dorothea of Montau (1347–1394) was mar- ried at sixteen and bore nine children, and all but one died young. Unhappily married, she eventually prevailed upon her husband to take a joint vow of chastity with her. In her late years she went on pilgrim- ages to Aachen and Rome, and ended her years as a recluse.

The medieval worldview that prized celibacy above marriage and motherhood allowed these wives to convince their husbands to let them embrace a religious vocation, which included vows of chastity and the abandonment of their children. Margery Kempe scarcely men- tioned her children in her story. She was primarily interested in leaving

behind the record of her spiritual journey. On one of her many pilgrim- ages, she visited the celebrated anchoress Julian of Norwich, the other medieval Englishwoman responsible for a literary milestone. Julian’s
Showings
was the first work written in English by a woman, and
The Book of Margery Kempe
was the first autobiography set down in English by either a man or a woman.

CHRISTINE DE PIZAN

During this same period in France, another “female first” occurred in the case of Christine de Pizan (1363–1429). She was the first woman to earn her living by her pen. A woman of Italian origin, Christine was raised in an atmosphere of cultivated affluence in Paris, where her doc- tor-astrologer father was brought by Charles V. She learned to read and write, but received no formal education. At the age of fifteen she mar- ried a twenty-four-year-old nobleman, Etienne de Castel, a man of scholarly inclinations and great personal charm. As Christine wrote later, “I could not have wished for a better husband.”
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They had three children and lived very happily together for ten years. After his untimely death, she resorted to writing as a means of livelihood to sup- port herself, her children, and her widowed mother. In time she pro- duced some thirty works, the best known of which is her prefeminist utopia,
The City of Women
(
La Cité des Dames
). But as a wife, Christine de Pizan is best remembered for the beautiful lyrics she wrote for the husband she lost too soon. “In Praise of Marriage” is a rare female- authored description of a medieval wife’s happiness in bed . . . with her husband.

A sweet thing is marriage,

I can certainly prove it from my own experience. It’s true for anyone with a good and wise husband Like the husband God helped me find.

. . . .

The first night of our marriage I saw right away

His great worth, for he did nothing To give me offense or pain.

But before it was time to arise

He kissed me a hundred times, I’m sure, Without demanding any base act.

Certainly the dear man loves me well.

. . . .

Prince, he drives me crazy with desire When he tells me he’s entirely mine.

He will make me swoon with sweetness, Certainly the dear man loves me well.
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By contrast, “A Widow’s Grief” expresses the devastation of Chris- tine’s loss.

I am a widow clad in black, alone.

With saddened face and very simply dressed; In great distress and manner most aggrieved I wear the mourning that is killing me.

Whatever the commonplaces of medieval thought—that wives were the bane of men’s lives, that both chastity and widowhood were holier states than marriage—Christine de Pizan was one woman who found great joy in the role of the wife and great sorrow when she had been “promoted” to widowhood.

THE DOWRY, ITALIAN- STYLE

A look at Italy in the late Middle Ages confirms the major marital patterns we have seen so far, but with distinctive features unique to Ital- ian culture. Unlike France and England, which had accepted the church’s jurisdiction of the marriage ceremony by the thirteenth cen- tury, Italy was slow to give up its civil ceremonies in favor of religious ones. Marriage was firmly a family affair, the goal of which was to pro- vide benefits for each of the two families. These could consist of wealth brought in the form of a dowry by the daughter-in-law to her husband, the prestige of association with a noble or powerful name, or simply the network of kin that one could turn to in times of need. Marriage was certainly not something that could be decided by the two young people forced to live together for the rest of their lives.
Quelle idée!

Parents and matchmakers looked for suitable parties from the same

class—nobles with nobles, merchants with merchants, artisans with artisans, peasants with peasants. Sometimes wealthy members of the mercantile class “married up” into the nobility, but marriages that bridged too wide a gap—for example, that of an aristocrat and an artisan—were considered violations of the social code.

As in Roman times, girls from good families had little say in their marriage arrangements, and were carefully protected from chance encounters with potential suitors. The writer Boccaccio (1313–1375) went so far as to say that some girls and even wives could not go to church or weddings, for fear of being approached by inappropriate men, and that in extreme cases, they could not stand next to a window or so much as glance outside.
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The window was, in fact, a likely venue for temptation, for here young women watched the men pass by. In most Italian cities, it was common practice for young men to stroll up and down in front of the windows, trying to catch the eye of the young woman sitting on the other side of the open shutters.

Different regions of Italy had somewhat different customs, but on the whole, marriage usually consisted of three separate events: 1) the betrothal sealed by the prospective groom and the father of the prospec- tive bride; 2) the exchange of consent between the bride and groom, often referred to as the “ring day”; and 3) the move to the husband’s home.

The betrothal was, in its own way, taken as seriously as the marriage vows. To break a betrothal in fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Florence could entail catastrophic consequences—long-term enmity between families and the loss of future marriage possibilities for the defecting party. Both Catholics and Jews were subject to a heavy fine if the betrothal contract was broken.
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In the following journal entry, the Tuscan merchant Gregorio Dati recorded the marital rituals that took place over a period of three months: “On 31 March 1393 I consented and pledged myself under oath to take Isabetta for my wife. On 7 April, Easter Monday, I gave her the ring in the presence of Ser Luca, notary. On 22 June, a Sunday, after nones, she moved into my house, the home of her husband, in the name of God and good fortune.”
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There is no mention of a priest. Mar- riages at the bride’s home or in the notary’s office, without the presence of a priest and without a church ceremony, seem to have been the rule. Like most marriages, this one took place on a Sunday—the day on

which the greatest number of people could witness the spousal proces- sion and escort the bride to the groom’s house.

In Italy, marriage was mandatory for almost everyone, male and female. Unmarried women were either nuns, sent into cloisters at an early age—sometimes as early as seven, though they did not pronounce their vows until twelve or thirteen—or servants trying to amass a suffi- cient sum for a dowry. In the later case, the employer frequently pledged to pay the dowry when the young woman came of age after years of service without remuneration beyond room and board.

Tuscan women usually married at eighteen or younger, while men married at thirty in the city and twenty-six in the country. The large age gap between spouses—eight years on the average, but as much as fif- teen among the rich—encouraged husbands to expect submission from their wives, and for wives to expect protection and tutelage from their husbands. It is hard to know whether our modern ideas of “reciprocity” and “compromise” had much meaning within a family predicated on so great a difference in age and authority.

As in ancient Rome, a wife always married into her husband’s family and moved to his home, thus perpetuating the patrilineal and patrilocal system. A Tuscan home might contain two or even three generations, and various kin related to the husband. An Italian husband never moved into his father-in-law’s home, as occurred sometimes in French families whose sole heir was a daughter. This unusual arrangement was called “son-in-law marriage” (
marriage à gendre
). In Jewish families, it was also common for a well-dowered bride to bring her new husband into her parents’ home, especially when a rich merchant’s daughter had the honor of marrying a poor rabbi’s son. But in Catholic Italy, a wife always lived on foreign territory, so to speak.

The dowry system provided the foundation for marriage at every level of society. In Florence, after 1430, there was even a dowry fund (
Monte delle Doti
) under municipal management: a girl’s father started making deposits when she was a child (not unlike our contemporary college funds) and the accrued sum would be paid to the husband at the time of the wedding.
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Fathers were obliged by law to “dower” their daughter with a share of the family patrimony. This meant that each daughter was given a sum to take with her into the marriage, while sons would inherit the rest of the father’s property. The dowry was more than a sum of money

enabling the couple to start off with some capital: it was the symbol of what the bride, her family, and the new couple were worth. A young woman’s dowry was public knowledge—it was registered with the notary and noised about among the neighbors.
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The dowry, subsequently administered by the husband, was sup- posed to take care of household needs and, if the husband died first, provide for the widow. The general provision throughout Europe was that the widow would receive one-third of the total estate. Ultimately, whatever remained would pass on to the descendants of the union. Determined at the time of the betrothal, the dowry was often paid in installments, each of which was duly notarized. The first payment was usually made before the bride moved into her husband’s house, and the other payments might continue over years. These subsequent install- ments could be the source of conflict in a marriage, if the wife’s family was unable or unwilling to keep up the payments. Another part of the wife’s contribution to the marriage was the trousseau consisting of linens and personal effects.

The husband’s material contributions to the household—in addition to the house itself—came in the form of “gifts.” He usually paid for the clothes worn by the bride on her wedding day, which, among display- conscious Florentines, could add up to a tidy sum. He was also expected to furnish the bridal chamber, a special feature of which were the “wedding chests.” These could be quite elaborate, carved to repre- sent mythological subjects meant to edify the bride and groom, such as conjugal duty, fidelity, and the danger of passions. Often these chests were displayed in the procession to the house of the new couple and then placed at the foot of the marital bed.

While upper-class husbands were prepared to lay out large amounts as a kind of “counterdowry,” even humbler folk were not immune to such practices. The sons of peasants offered gifts in the form of the bride’s clothing, which they sometimes paid for with the first install- ment of the dowry—a practice that became increasingly common at all levels of society during the fifteenth century.

At the highest level, these gifts were subject to a set of byzantine arrangements. A Florentine husband retained legal ownership of the gifts he gave his bride, all of which would revert to him if the marriage were annulled. Often husbands wrote in their wills exactly what the wife was entitled to, were he to die, especially in the event that she