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Chapter 8 - Gender and Class in the Circulation of Conduct Books

from III - Health, Conduct, and Knowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2023

By
Kathleen Ashley
Edited by
Corinne Saunders  and
Diane Watt
Corinne Saunders
Affiliation:
Durham University
Diane Watt
Affiliation:
University of Surrey
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Summary

This essay focuses on what may seem an ideologically narrow genre: the conduct book, offering a broad and complex interpretation of the texts and their place in medieval culture. Ashley ranges across European examples, especially French works that were later translated into English, beginning with the celebrated early example of the book written by Dhuoda, a Carolingian noblewoman for her son. Louis IXߣs Enseignemenz (Teachings), by contrast, provided advice for both his son and daughter. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the readership of conduct books expanded to include the middle classes. The conduct works of Christine de Pizan illustrate the growing popularity of the genre, reflecting an assumption that the lower classes will learn from the examples set by aristocratic women. Ashley demonstrates the appeal to a wider readership of the late-fourteenth-century book of Geoffrey de la Tour Landry, written for his three daughters and focused on marriage rather than life at court, while, in the same period, Le Menagier de Paris provides an example of a work addressed to a bourgeois audience that anticipates the development of ߢhousehold anthologiesߣ.

Keywords

conduct literatureDhuodaLouise IXAnne of FranceChristine de PizanGeoffrey de la Tour LaundryLe Menagier de Parisclassgender
Type
Chapter
Information
Women and Medieval Literary Culture
From the Early Middle Ages to the Fifteenth Century
 , pp. 160 - 178
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

Further Reading

Amsler, Mark (2012). Affective Literacies: Writing and Multilingualism in the Later Middle Ages, Turnhout: Brepols.Google Scholar
Armstrong, Nancy, and Tennenhouse, Leonard, eds. (1987). The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality, New York: Methuen.Google Scholar
Ashley, Kathleen, and Clark, Robert L. A., eds. (2001). Medieval Conduct, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Burger, Glenn D. (2018). Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Ferster, Judith (1996). Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, Karen, and Mews, Constant J., eds. (2011). Virtue Ethics for Medieval Women, 1250–1500, Heidelberg: Springer.Google Scholar
Hentsch, Alice (1975). De la littérature didactique s’adressant spécialement aux femmes, Cahors, 1903; repr. Geneva: Slatkine.Google Scholar
Johnston, Mark D., ed. (2009). Medieval Conduct Literature: An Anthology of Vernacular Guides to Behaviour for Youths, with English Translations, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Lipton, Emma (2007). Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.Google Scholar
Sponsler, Claire (1997). Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar

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