We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
The Marriage Debt in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale and The Merchant’s Tale
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2024
I argue in Chapter 3 that the canon law precept of the marriage debt, which was formulated particularly by Augustine, Gratian, and Thomas Aquinas in the course of establishing marriage as a sacrament, indicates a mode by which power is exercised on and through the bodies and the wills of married parties. It is a mode by which individuals are enjoined to a voluntary subservience. The power that the loathly lady figure wields over the penitent knight in The Wife of Bath’s Tale leaves its subject formally free but freely compliant, aiming at the production of internal conditions rather than external constraints. The same dynamic shapes the plots of other medieval texts featuring the marriage debt, from Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale to the tales told on Days 2 and 8 of Boccaccio’s Decameron, all of which I consider as illustrative analogues. These texts identify marriage, and marital sex in particular, as a key site where debt makes subjects, where political power is enacted in and through the free wills of human beings.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
