TY - BOOK AU - Burger,Glenn D. TI - Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages T2 - The Middle Ages Series SN - 9780812294484 AV - HQ1147.E85 .B874 2018 U1 - 306.87230940902 23 PY - 2017///] CY - Philadelphia : PB - University of Pennsylvania Press, KW - Conduct of life in literature KW - History KW - To 1500 KW - Literature, Medieval KW - History and criticism KW - Marriage in literature KW - Sex role KW - Europe KW - Religious aspects KW - Christianity KW - Virtue in literature KW - Wives in literature KW - Wives KW - Religious life KW - Conduct of life KW - Women KW - Books and reading KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / Medieval KW - bisacsh KW - Cultural Studies KW - Gender Studies KW - Literature KW - Medieval and Renaissance Studies KW - Women's Studies N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Introduction. Loving, Reading, Acting in a Marrying Kind of Way --; Chapter 1. Laboring to Make the Good Wife Good in the Journées Chrétiennes --; Chapter 2. Remaking the Feminine --; Chapter 3. In the Merchant’s Bedchamber: Le Menagier de Paris --; Chapter 4. Affecting Conduct: Feeling Steadfast with Griselda --; Conclusion --; Notes --; Works Cited --; Index --; Index; restricted access N2 - Conduct Becoming examines a new genre of late medieval writing that focuses on a wife's virtuous conduct and ability of such conduct to alter marital and social relations in the world. Considering a range of texts written for women—the journées chrétiennes or daily guides for Christian living, secular counsel from husbands and fathers such as Le Livre du Chevalier de La Tour Landry and Le Menagier de Paris, and literary narratives such as the Griselda story—Glenn D. Burger argues that, over the course of the long fourteenth century, the "invention" of the good wife in discourses of sacramental marriage, private devotion, and personal conduct reconfigured how female embodiment was understood.While the period inherits a strongly antifeminist tradition that views the female body as naturally wayward and sensual, late medieval conduct texts for women outline models of feminine virtue that show the good wife as an identity with positive influence in the world. Because these manuals imagine how to be a good wife as necessarily entangled with how to be a good husband, they also move their readers to consider such gendered and sexed identities in relational terms and to embrace a model of self-restraint significantly different from that of clerical celibacy. Conduct literature addressed to the good wife thus reshapes how late medieval audiences thought about the process of becoming a good person more generally. Burger contends that these texts develop and promulgate a view of sex and gender radically different from previous clerical or aristocratic models—one capable of providing the foundations for the modern forms of heterosexuality that begin to emerge more clearly in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries UR - https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812294484 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780812294484 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/cover/covers/9780812294484.jpg ER -