Glenn Burger's title has two senses: seemly or virtuous behavior and approved behavior in a process of transition. Conduct literature, a flourishing genre in the late medieval and early modern eras, told wives how to achieve virtue in everything from prayer, personal hygiene, and table manners to cooking, hiring servants, and managing a complex household. Manuals of conduct, Burger contends, presupposed a degree of female literacy and interiority cultivated through devotional reading, and helped, in turn, to shape nothing less than “a new model of heterosexuality,” distinct from either the clerical ideology of virginity or the aristocratic discourse of fin'amor (24).
Most studies of conduct books unsurprisingly stress their patriarchalism. The husband acts as guide and governor of his submissive wife, whose obedience is foregrounded in exemplary tales. While acknowledging the value of feminist readings, Burger takes a different approach, inflected by the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu. He emphasizes the innovative character of conduct texts as they strive to reinvent the married household, making it a domain where economically productive labor merges with the “immaterial labor” of devotion, and where wives can indeed become good. Marriage, defined in the twelfth century as sacramental, had begun its gradual shift by the fourteenth toward what we now call companionate marriage, grounded in maritalis affectio enacted through mutual care. While clerics remained suspicious of married sexuality and advised the devout laity to model their spiritual lives as far as possible on monastic routines, a new hybridity was emerging in vernacular conduct books. Advocating a mixed life of contemplation and activity in the world, they allowed wives “a profoundly empowering opportunity” to escape the spiritual marginality hitherto imposed on married couples (39).
Burger's first chapter deals with journées chrétiennes, manuals written to teach affluent laymen and (especially) women how to use their Books of Hours and practice mental prayer throughout the day. Some are impossibly ambitious: John the Carthusian directs women to “wash your hands and face and comb your hair while praying, . . . meditating on the creation of the angels, the fall of the bad and the confirmation of the good angels. Immediately thereafter, turn your attention to the housework . . . while meditating on the celestial hierarchies,” and so forth (64). This unworldly monk expects the young wife to continue his elaborate program of meditation while dressing her children, doing laundry, and tending the chickens. Other texts advise wives to rise at midnight to pray and make love to their spiritual bridegroom as their flesh-and-blood husbands sleep. Despite these unreal expectations, such works cultivated a profound interiority, compelling the user to navigate as best she could between her religious aspirations and the duties of everyday household management.
In chapter 2, Burger examines such French texts as the Miroir des bonnes femmes, which presents biblical exempla of good and bad women. Remarkably, the first “good woman” is Eve. Ruth wins praise for loyalty to her husband (not her beloved Naomi), while Judith's claim to fame is penitential self-discipline rather than the slaying of Holofernes. Another manual, Robert of Blois's Chastoiement des dames, juxtaposes wildly disparate kinds of advice: a chapter on how to behave in church immediately follows one on how to cover paleness and disguise bad breath. Burger reserves his fullest treatment for the Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry (1371), a well-known conduct book composed by a knight to instruct his daughters. The titular chevalier begins by nostalgically recalling his past service to a lady but ends with a staged debate in which he defends courtly love and his wife successfully critiques it. Readers are thus drawn away “from the endless play of fin'amor to the goal-oriented moral relations of sacramental marriage” (102).
Chapter 3 treats a single comprehensive work, Le Ménagier de Paris (The Parisian Household Book, 1393), purportedly written by an aging merchant for his young bride. Burger argues that, when the terrain of the good wife shifts from aristocratic to bourgeois marriage, conduct literature becomes even more experimental. Although this author is often chastised for his patronizing attitude, Burger sees his text as teaching wives “how to work within and through subalternity” to achieve a couple's shared goals (107). If inequality was ubiquitous in medieval social relations, so too was the desire to negotiate a space for personal agency and self-determination. Le Ménagier includes an allegory in which Reason leads a newlywed husband to the Castle of Labor. He is admitted by two married porters, Mindfulness and Attention-to-Duty, and welcomed by the chatelaine Pain and her husband Toil. Once labor has been accepted as a necessary part of marriage, the leisured space of courtly love disappears, but the supportive wife can gain respect as her husband's partner.
Griselda, the most famous abused wife in medieval literature, also appears in Le Ménagier. Burger devotes his final chapter to versions of her tale by Boccaccio, Petrarch, Philippe de Mézières, and Chaucer. Married to a marquis, the peasant Griselda vows absolute obedience, which her husband tests by staging the murders of first their daughter and then their son, divorcing her without a settlement, and finally recalling her to oversee the servants at his second wedding. Hugely popular in the fourteenth century, this tale of superhuman endurance is hard to love. Yet Burger's fine-grained readings show how differently it could be contextualized, whether as a fabliau, a universal humanist exemplar, or an allegory of Christian patience. In Chaucer's telling, the praise of extreme wifely submission coexists with incipient rebellion against it. Setting the roles of wifehood and motherhood starkly at odds, Chaucer's narrator foregrounds the almost unbearable pathos of Griselda's trials. Burger thus interrogates both the social value and the potentially terrible cost of the self-restraint, or “affect management,” promoted by conduct literature.
Despite its difficult style, Conduct Becoming makes a smart, provocative contribution to the history of Christian marriage.
