Bonoure and Buxum: A Study of Wives in Late Medieval English Literature

Description: Niebrzydowski documents "significant attention," positive and negative, paid to wives and wifehood in the literature and architecture of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. The volume is structured to "follow the life cycle of a wife," from the canon law of eligibility to topics such as marital contracts, sex education, childbirth and motherhood, and depictions of life with a husband--drawing on art, literature, and history for examples of the freedoms and constraints of female marital life. The wide variety of texts (conduct literature, homilies, historical records, cycle plays, the Book of Margery Kempe, and more) indicates how wifehood was "constructed by patriarchal textual discourses." Includes sustained discussions of ClT, MerT, MLT, and especially WBPT.

Chaucer Subjects: Wife of Bath and Her Tale; Clerk and His Tale; Merchant and His Tale; Man of Law and His Tale