Affections of the Mind

The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature

Emma Lipton

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780268085896
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Affections of the Mind argues that a politicized negotiation of issues of authority in the institution of marriage can be found in late medieval England, where an emergent middle class of society used a sacramental model of marriage to exploit contradictions within medieval theology and social hierarchy. Emma Lipton traces the unprecedented popularity of marriage as a literary topic and the tensions between different models of marriage in the literature of the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by analyzing such texts as Chaucer's Franklin's Tale, The Book of Margery Kempe, and the N-Town plays.

Affections of the Mind focuses on marriage as a fluid and contested category rather than one with a fixed meaning, and argues that the late medieval literature of sacramental marriage subverted aristocratic and clerical traditions of love and marriage in order to promote the values of the lay middle strata of society. This book will be of value to a broad range of scholars in medieval studies.

CHAPTER ONE

Married Friendship

An Ideology for the Franklin

As with the other Canterbury Tales, criticism of the Franklin’s Tale has been preoccupied with identifying the ways in which the tale reflects the social status of the teller. Early critics have seen in Chaucer’s Franklin’s hopes for his son and in his opulent hospitality evidence of social climbing.¹ On the other hand, Henrik Specht has argued that the Franklin is not a social climber because he may already be considered gentle, and thus an appropriate voice for gentle values.² More recently, Nigel Saul and Paul Strohm have identified the Franklin as a member of the middle strata, a wealthy freeholding landowner, a category of person who had not yet achieved gentility at the time The Canterbury Tales was written.³ The figure of the Franklin was an effective representative of the new social mobility of late medieval society, because, as several historians have suggested, the forces for economic change at the end of the Middle Ages were to be found not so much in the urban as in the rural populations.⁴ Franklins shared the freeborn status of gentlemen but were not themselves noble; however, as successful small landowners, they sometimes lived in a manner that resembled that of the lower ranks of gentle society. Thus, the Franklin was a crucial example of the members of the middle strata of society who did not fit comfortably into the conventional three estates model. In this tale, the Franklin formulates an ideology for his own emergent class through his portrait of marriage which becomes the basis for an egalitarian political vision at the end of the tale.

To derive a portrait of marriage that expresses the social values of the Franklin, the tale adopts and revises the conventions of romance and fin amor, mainstays of aristocratic literary ideology, by drawing on sacramental marriage. Although the Franklin’s Tale is a romance, the tale critiques and transforms that genre’s frequent association of marriage with knightly prowess and public display, replacing them with an emphasis on individual choice and mutual love characteristic of the sacramental marriage model. The tale not only draws on the broad ideas of sacramental marriage, but it also specifically invokes the classical friendship tradition, often used by medieval theologians and sermon writers to describe the mutuality of conjugal love. This language of marital friendship becomes a means of elaborating an ideal of marriage based in free will, private value, and choice, virtues, as we will see, that are particularly appropriate to the Franklin’s social status in contrast to the aristocratic ideology commonly expressed by romance.

As Kathryn Jacobs has observed, although most of the tale focuses on the domestic relationship between husband and wife, Arveragus and Dorigen, by the end of the tale marriage has become the rubric for expressing a vision of an ideal society.⁵ This is not a universal ideal, however, but one specifically suited to the Franklin’s social politics. The values of mutuality, generosity, and free choice, initially used to depict the marital relationship, are associated at the end of the tale with the homosocial bonds of friendship forged among the three men—the Knight, the Squire, and the Clerk—in their negotiations about the marriage. This friendship, with its bonds of mutuality ranging across the estates, constructs a horizontal political model and a vision of society in which virtue is defined by personal merit rather than social status. Thus, the values of marital friendship, crucial to sacramental marriage, become the basis for an idealized middle strata political vision.

For many readers of the tale, the shift away from the domestic relationship at the end is surprising, and indeed Dorigen’s absence from the end of the tale has been a conundrum for many critics. Her absence can be explained, however, if we see it as an indication that marriage has become a vocabulary for social politics. Although the shift to politics at the end is somewhat abrupt, the tale’s appropriation of the aristocratic discourse of love to create a political model of marriage has a context in contemporary court poetry. As critics such as Lynn Staley, Lee Patterson, and others have demonstrated, love was recognized as a discourse of power by Chaucer and his contemporaries such as John Gower, Thomas Usk, and John Clanvowe.⁶ C. Stephen Jaeger has shown that the social function of love as a political language has its origins in earlier Continental courtly discourse.⁷ In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the courtly discourse of love was used both explicitly and implicitly to comment on court and royal politics, often with references to specific events. Here, however, the discourse of aristocratic love is appropriated not for royal or court politics but to fashion marriage as a horizontal political model focused on personal merit and participatory governance which would have appealed to the members of the middle strata. This horizontal political model was of specific relevance to the Franklin, who is described in the Prologue as a member of Parliament and a sheriff. These offices make the Franklin emblematic of a representative ideal and a symbol of the new civic status accorded to members of the middle strata in the late Middle Ages. It is specifically the Franklin’s role as a civil servant, I will argue, that explains the revision of romance to emphasize the values of free will, choice, and private value.

Rewriting Romance

It is logical for a socially mobile figure such as the Franklin to appropriate the language of love, because love was tied to public status and social standing in aristocratic literary tradition. As C. Stephen Jaeger has demonstrated, earlier Continental models established a courtly discourse in which feelings are seen as the province of nobles and love became a “form of aristocratic self-representation.” Love asserted class privilege, stabilizing hierarchy in favor of an aristocratic elite, and conferred honor on those who practiced it by inspiring virtue, a construction indebted, Jaeger argues, to Ciceronian writings on the elitist honor of friendship.⁸ A broad range of critics has shown that this paradigm of “ennobling love” was a commonplace in late medieval courtly literature.⁹ This idea that love was a source of chivalric virtue was both literary paradigm and aristocratic practice in the late medieval period, as this passage from the biography of Mareschal Bouicicault illustrates:

[O]ne reads of Lancelot, of Tristan, and of many others whom Love made good and famous. Indeed, in our own time living now in France and elsewhere there are many such noble men … [O]ne speaks of Sir Otho de Graunson, of the good constable of Sancerre, and of many others whom it would be too long to name and whom love has made valiant and virtuous. O what a noble thing is love to him who knows how to use it!¹⁰

This association of love with nobility is acknowledged and transformed by the Franklin in his tale. He makes marriage and marital love the central vocabulary for defining virtue in the tale, appropriating some of the paradigms of fin amor and applying them to marriage and revising the portrait of marriage in romance. Virtue is tied not to aristocratic notions of martial prowess inspired by love but to civic values appropriate to the Franklin’s social status and derived from sacramental marriage theology and teachings.

This familiar paradigm in which fin amor inspires a specifically knightly kind of virtue is invoked at the beginning of the Franklin’s Tale:

In Armorik, that called is Britayne,

Ther was a knyght that loved and dide his payne

To serve a lady in his beste wise;

And many a labour, many a greet emprise,

He for his lady wroghte er she were wonne.

(729–33)¹¹

The Franklin calls to mind one familiar type of romance plot that recounts the narrative of an unmarried knight’s famous deeds, the labors and enterprises inspired by the love of his lady, and ends with marriage, which Stephen Knight has referred to as “the knight-alone structure.”¹² This passage alludes to the role marriage often plays in romance: as an apotheosis of battle, an ending that brings meaning to the tale by validating the prowess of a knight, while the meaning of marriage itself is taken to be self-evident. The passive verb form “she were wonne” suggests that the lady is a prize, an award that depends only on the great enterprise of the knight and not on her own volition. Furthermore, the generic quality of this passage and the substitution of “a knyght” and “a lady” for Dorigen and Arveragus’s proper names suggests that Chaucer wanted to invoke this conventional equation of love and prowess.

Granting a woman in marriage to inspire or reward military prowess, as Margaret Adlum Gist has shown, was a familiar trope in medieval romance.¹³ This convention is dramatized in the Knight’s Tale, when Theseus establishes the tournament to determine whether Arcite or Palamon is to marry Emily. Just as the compressed opening lines of the Franklin’s Tale elide any references to the lady’s volition, Theseus claims to speak for Emily in proposing the tournament. Addressing the two rivals, he assures them that “Ech of you bothe is worthy, douteless, / To wedden whan tyme is” (1831–32), asserting, “I speke as for my suster Emelye” (1833). He goes on to say

That wheither of yow bothe that hath might—

This is to seyn, that wheither he or thow

May with his hundred, as I spak of now,

Sleen his contrarie, or out of the lystes dryve,

Thanne sal I yeve Emelya to wyve …

(1856–60)

In this passage Emily’s agency, and her desire, are displaced by Theseus’s in a conversation among the three men focused on resolving the conflict between Arcite and Palamon.¹⁴ Before the marriage we hear only that “Bitwixen hem was maad anon the bond / That highte matrimoigne or mariage, / By al the conseil and the baronage” (3094–96). Her marriage is represented as an explicitly political act requiring the command of the king, the advice of Parliament and the participation of council and baronage. Her marriage is not her own but the embodiment and confirmation of the values of aristocratic society and its public world of honor, a public event as theatrical as the tournament that precedes it.

After its beginning passage, however, the Franklin’s Tale begins to deviate from the conventions of fin amor by granting Dorigen agency and thus rejecting the values of romance in favor of the choice offered by marriage laws and derived from sacramental marriage theology. Unlike Emily, who, like a conventional romance heroine, is given in marriage by Theseus, Dorigen selects her marriage partner:

But atte laste she, for his worthynesse,

And namely for his meke obeysaunce,

Hath swich a pitee caught of his penaunce

That pryvely she fil of his accord

To take hym for hir housbonde and hir lord,

Of swich lordshipe as men han over hir wyves.

(738–43)

Although Dorigen is the subject of the passive verb “was wonne” in the opening lines, shortly thereafter she is given an active verb “she fil.” As David Aers has observed, no mention is made of family, property, or money playing a role in her decision, often described by critics as determining factors in aristocratic marriage.¹⁵ Indeed, the fact that she is said to have “comen of so heigh kynrede” (735) implies that she is of higher status than the knight and must have other reasons for marrying than social advancement. Her “pitee” is, by implication, less the generic expression of aristocratic identity than the motivation for a personal choice. Thus, by thematizing Dorigen’s choice in marriage, the Franklin draws on a value derived from the sacramental marriage model to revise the terms of aristocratic romance.

Although Emily’s marriage is represented as a public event, Dorigen’s betrothal is accomplished not publicly but “pryvely.” Despite the fact that the sacramental paradigm legalized private marriage, this trope of secrecy is characteristic not of betrothal but of the love vow in lais and romances, exemplified by the fairy lady’s first command to her knight in Thomas Chestre’s late fourteenth-century Sir Launfal:

But of o thyng, Syr Knyght, I warne the,

That thou make no bost of me

For no kennes mede!

And yf thou doost, I warny the before,

All my love thou hast forlore!¹⁶

In this passage, the lady’s words suggest that the very existence of her love depends on its secrecy and that it will be lost if forced into the social world. This association of fin amor and secrecy is also played out in other lais, romances, and courtly texts, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, when the lady insists that Gawain keep her love token secret from her husband and the public sphere of her marriage, in the Lai le Freine, in which the private and tortured love of the heroine is transformed by a public and recuperative marriage at the end, and in the blunt assertion of Andreas Capellanus that “when made public love rarely endures.”¹⁷

Although Dorigen’s association of love with secrecy follows the generic expectations of romance, the application of this trope to marriage is unconventional. In response to Dorigen’s agreement, Arveragus also makes a secret vow:

And for to lede the moore in blisse hir lyves,

Of his free wyl he swoor hire as a knyght

That nevere in al his lyf he, day ne nyght,

Ne sholde upon hym take no maistrie

Agayn hir wyl, ne kithe hire jalousie,

But hire obeye, and folwe hir wyl in al,

As any lovere to his lady shal,

Save that the name of soveraynetee,

That wolde he have for shame of his degree.

(744–52)

As with Dorigen’s, Arveragus’s vow does not completely break with the tradition of romance but shifts its terms. Like the good lovers of romance, he vows to obey his lady and to keep their love secret, but his vow applies to love within, not outside, marriage. According to Geoffroi de Charny’s Livre de Chevalerie, secrecy in love is required by knightly honor:

[L]ove a lady truly and honorably, for it is the right position to be in for those who desire to achieve honor. But make sure that the love and the loving are such that just as dearly as each of you should cherish your own honor and good standing, so should you guard the honor of your lady above all else and keep secret the love itself and all the benefit and the honorable rewards you derive from it.¹⁸

In contrast to de Charny’s prescrip...