Excerpts from Two Medieval Texts About Women and Marriage (Context for The Wife of Bath)

[If you lost or missed the handout from Wednesday's class, here it is...might come in handy for a later assignment/exam or just for general knowledge]

TWO MEDIEVAL TEXTS AGAINST WOMEN/MARRIAGE 

* All excerpts from Women Defamed and Women Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts, ed. Alcuin Blamries. Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1992.

Anonymous, Against Marrying (c.1222-50)

A married man’s a slave for sure,

His flesh and spirit pain endure—

Like ox from market homeward led

To work the plough until he’s dead.

Who take a wife accepts a yoke:

Not knowing pain, with pain he’ll choke.

Who takes a wife, himself is caught

And to eternal serfdom bought...

A woman will receive all males:

No prick against her lust prevails.

For who could fill his spouse’s spout?

Alone she wears the district out.

Her lustful loins are never stilled:

By just one man she’s unfulfilled.

She’ll spread her legs to all the men

But, ever hungry, won’t say “When.”

Jehan Le Fèvre, The Lamentations of Mathelous (c. 1371-2)

“Many a war is begun by women and many a murder committed throughout the world; castles are burned and ransacked and the poor made destitute. As every man and woman knows, there isn’t one war in a thousand that isn’t started by a woman and her sowing of discord. She is the mother of all calamities; all evil and all madness stem from her. Her sting is more venomous than a snake’s; there isn’t anyone who has anything to do with her that doesn’t live to regret it...

Now you can see how foolhardy it is to take a wife...What is the point of your studying the matter? Don’t get married, have mistresses. If you are weak by nature, it will be safer for you to have a hundred of them rather than devote yourself to one; treat them as if they were no more important than a straw...Woman is a monstrous hermaphrodite, proving to be a chimera with horns and a tail bigger than a peacock or a pheasant’s. Thus she bears the marks of a monster, as this treatise informs you...their sex in no way prepares them to be virtuous or to do good, indeed they are predisposed to do the very opposite.”