Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages

By Glenn D. Burger

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Sep 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9780812294484

Book preview

Conduct Becoming

THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES

Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor

Edward Peters, Founding Editor

A complete list of books in the series

is available from the publisher.

Conduct Becoming

Good Wives and Husbands in the

Later Middle Ages

Glenn D. Burger

Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Burger, Glenn, author.

Title: Conduct becoming : good wives and husbands in the later Middle Ages / Glenn D. Burger.

Other titles: Middle Ages series.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018] | Series: The Middle Ages series

Identifiers: LCCN 2017010471 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4960-6 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Wives—Europe—Conduct of life—History—To 1500. | Wives—Religious life—Europe—History—To 1500. | Sex role—Europe—Religious aspects—Christianity—History—To 1500. | Women—Books and reading—Europe—History—To 1500. | Wives in literature—Europe—History—To 1500. | Conduct of life in literature—History—To 1500. | Marriage in literature—History—To 1500. | Virtue in literature—History—To 1500. | Literature, Medieval—History and criticism.

Classification: LCC HQ1147.E85 B87 2018 | DDC 306.872/30940902—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017010471

For Pamela Sheingorn

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

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Loving, Reading, Acting in a Marrying Kind of Way

Systematizing Conduct for Women in the World

Caesarius of Heisterbach recounts the following in The Dialogue of Miracles, his early thirteenth-century collection of exemplary stories. A certain moneylender in Liège dies and his local bishop denies him burial in consecrated ground because of his sinful practice of usury. The man’s wife appeals the decision directly to the pope; for she has heard that man and wife are one, and the apostle Paul said that a believing wife can save an unbeliever. Therefore she happily promises to make up for whatever shortcomings there may have been in her husband and give satisfaction herself to God for his sins. The pope grants her request and the wife shuts herself up in a dwelling she has built beside her husband’s grave. There she devotes herself to alms, prayers, and fasting on her husband’s behalf. Finally, after fourteen years of diligent activity, the wife has a vision of her husband dressed in white. With a joyful face he tells her: Thanks to God and thee that to-day I am delivered.¹ Caesarius includes the story in a section devoted to the punishment and glory of the dead, and it is clear that he intends it to teach the value of intercessory prayer in the theology of purgatory emerging in the period. His universalizing moral thus asks an inscribed clerical audience to recognize just how much this good wife stands out as a miraculous exception to normal female inconstancy and sensuality and at the same time to move past the accident of gender in order to focus on her exemplary status as a Christian subject.

In the century and a half after Caesarius’s Dialogue of Miracles, however, a series of texts emerge that encourage a radically different model for interpreting what the good wife represents. These works make their primary focus a miracle left unacknowledged by Caesarius, that is, the exemplary nature of the wife’s virtuous conduct and its ability to alter marital and social relations in the world. Caesarius’s good wife of Liège, after all, is able to deploy her own brand of practical theology and persuade the pope to bury her husband in sacred soil because she can exploit the new emphasis on marriage as sacrament formulated by theologians and canon lawyers in this period. Even more amazing, she so perfectly embraces her wifely role within the sacrament that for fourteen years after his death she continues to devote herself to her husband’s well-being above all else. In Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages, I examine this new genre of writing in order to consider what happens when the good wife moves front and center as an exemplary figure in her own right and becomes the model for what every woman should strive to be. I argue that these new conduct texts for women reconfigure how female embodiment is understood in the period. For while a pervasive medieval antifeminist tradition views the female body as naturally wayward and sensual, signifying an abject identity inimical to masculine reason and self-control, late medieval conduct texts for women outline models of feminine virtue that show the good wife as an identity with positive effects in the world.

As a genre, late medieval conduct literature for women encompasses a wide variety of narrative forms and extends across a variety of social terrains. The ability of such texts to reach both established aristocratic audiences as well as newly emergent gentry and upper-level bourgeois groups ensures that the issue of lay female conduct becomes a widespread, Pan-European phenomenon by the end of the Middle Ages. Whether a royal father’s advice to his daughter, as in Louis IX’s Les Enseignements de Saint Louis à sa fille Isabelle (ca. 1267),² a Franciscan friar’s exhortation to a queen, as in Durand de Champagne’s Speculum dominarum (ca. 1300) for Jeanne de Navarre,³ or the list of good and bad biblical women in the anonymous Miroir des bonnes femmes (ca. 1280–90),⁴ such texts focus on the value of attending to a specifically female conduct across a spectrum of theological, moral, and secular concerns. In Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages, however, I also argue that this discussion of female conduct extends further to include literary texts such as Prudence and Melibee or the Griselda story, as well as explicitly devotional texts such as the journées chrétiennes. The latter incorporate a strongly ethical component into discussions of female conduct by providing a rule for the mixed life that allowed laywomen to emulate the devotional discipline of a monk or nun. The former, while sometimes included in conduct texts proper (as in the case of Le Menagier de Paris) or in other literary texts such as the Canterbury Tales or the Decameron also circulate on their own or are incorporated in diverse household manuscript miscellanies.

Despite the royal and aristocratic origins of some of the earlier examples of the genre, later conduct texts for women are notable for the variety of class, estate, national, and generic boundaries that they cross. Durand dedicates his original Latin text of the Speculum dominarum to his royal patron, Jeanne de Navarre. But the work is soon translated into French as Le Miroir des dames in order to reach a wider audience, and the French text survives in multiple manuscript copies. Subsequent conduct literature inscribes an even broader, nonnoble audience and includes an increasingly wide range of material to address the different needs of its more diverse audience. In Le Menagier de Paris, for example, a wealthy late fourteenth-century merchant incorporates recipes and advice about gardening and managing servants along with the more typical devotional and ethical advice in order to educate his young bride and equip her to manage every aspect of her life and that of the upper-level bourgeois household she controls.⁵ The popular English poem What the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter also assumes a bourgeois context for its lessons in female conduct, and the poem was anthologized in at least one manuscript collection associated with an urban bourgeois or gentry household.⁶ Another late fourteenth-century text written by a noble father for his daughters, Le Livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry, despite—or perhaps because of—its aristocratic provenance, certainly reached beyond its inscribed elite audience since twenty-one manuscript copies survive, as well as English and German translations and a 1514 printed edition of the French original.⁷

Unlike earlier romance and fin’amor poetry, or guides such as the Ancrene Wisse that are addressed explicitly to religious women living apart from the world, these new texts imagine female conduct primarily within the context of the married household and the social relations it makes possible. And they imagine their audience explicitly as daughters who will marry, women already married, or widows who once were wives. Thus it is first and foremost the range of interests and activities available to the good woman as wife that holds their interest and not the conduct of courtly lovers or of religious women living as celibate nuns, anchoresses, or beguines.⁸ These texts move the discussion of the good woman from a strictly theological and clerical terrain, such as we saw foregrounded in Caesarius’s moralizing of his story, onto a lay terrain that thinks through such issues in the context of the fusion of active and contemplative experiences that make up the mixed life of concerned lay subjects in this period. At the same time, medieval conduct texts for women avoid the kind of romance erotics that fin’amor uses to conflate aristocratic identity with the universal category of nobility. As these conduct texts explore new possibilities for the kinds of personal and social relations that the good wife might sustain, they put the category of woman under intense scrutiny and offer new possibilities for reconceptualizing what it might signify. Because such texts 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 dynamic relational terms, together producing a chastened version of male—female relations that embraces a certain degree of ascesis without having to adopt the model of clerical celibacy. Conduct literature addressed to the good wife thus reshapes how late medieval audiences think about the process of becoming a good person more generally. In doing so, it works to develop and promulgate a sex/gender system radically different from previous clerical or aristocratic models, one capable of providing the foundations for the modern forms of heterosexuality that begin to emerge in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

These conduct texts for women are clearly trying to be more than simple courtesy books describing the proper manners, dress, and language necessary for a courtly lady. They do, of course, address such matters, although frequently adapting the question of courtly manners to a wider range of social groupings. But they also regularly take on larger issues of conduct, such as the devotional practice, liturgical observance, and scriptural learning appropriate to a woman, or the correct, ethical way to treat her peers and servants. Systematizing conduct for women in the world, then, paradoxically demands both the perpetuation of codes of behavior that traditionally define the universal for the Middle Ages—that is, the celibacy and devotional labor of monastic men and women, or the politesse of noble men, or the refined beauty (both exterior and interior) of the courtly heroine—and the translation of such codes onto new social and textual terrains. Addressing female conduct in the broadest way possible, this genre aims—as Kathleen Ashley and Robert Clark have argued for medieval conduct literature more generally—to produce written texts that systematize a society’s codes of behavior and allow their literate readers to negotiate new sets of social possibilities.⁹ The logic of conduct literature for women is therefore often divided and self-contradictory. Such texts can never stand completely outside long-standing and powerful antifeminist modes of thought prevalent in medieval clerical and lay culture. At the same time, however, they argue that a woman’s nature is inherently capable of self-improvement. To reconcile this paradox, conduct literature for laywomen must continue to practice a certain degree of stabilizing citation from a long-standing and dominant antifeminist tradition even as such citation occurs in radically different contexts that represent woman’s nature as open to significant self-improvement. Not surprisingly, perhaps, conduct literature addressed to good wives often brings a stultifyingly repetitive and conservative content that attempts to contain female behavior in oppressive, even violent ways, alongside experiments in narrative form that pragmatically seek to fuse old and new ideologies in innovative ways.

Because such texts approach a woman’s nature as something capable of developing and improving in ways comparable to that of a man’s, the good wife is no longer an anomalous eccentric in the sex/gender system—as the masculinized saintly virago had been earlier.¹⁰ Instead, these texts are instrumental in helping to reshape the status quo of the late medieval sex/gender system. In constructing such a positive representation of woman’s nature and femininity, they provide the good wife with a crucial role in an emerging late medieval/early modern heterosexuality whose foundation lies in the lay married estate and the household it establishes. These texts’ revaluation of female conduct, not surprisingly, consistently defines itself in relation to the authority of the father and husband that God has put in positions of authority in order to guide the good woman. The more the good wife seeks to fulfill her nature as woman, the more she will embrace the self-restraint that is its defining feature. This model of the good woman willingly submitting to authority reshapes femininity into something to be valued and emulated as a model for right action in the world alongside new forms of masculinity, in stark contrast to how an antifeminist tradition imagined female nature as an inherently abject and wayward form of embodiment to be avoided whenever possible by right-acting Christian subjects. There are parallels here between such a transformation of female nature and the transformation of the concept of nobility in the period. No longer defined solely in terms of noble blood and inheritance, nobility becomes a character trait that one can learn by carefully emulating one’s betters. And the more its essential nature becomes reconfigured in terms of ethical conduct, the more nobility becomes available as a model to a much wider group of men and women than an aristocracy defined by bloodline or a chivalric identity defined by martial prowess. In this book, I will argue that conduct literature for women provides a similar redefinition of woman and the feminine such that the benefits of chastity can be made available to a much wider group of women than virgins, martyrs, or nuns.

Performing the role of good wife according to the textual practices encouraged by conduct literature is clearly not a revolutionary practice, but it is powerfully engaged with the changing relationships between the individual and the social in the later Middle Ages. At a time when higher status gentry and bourgeois subjects are increasingly literate readers engaging with a wide variety of vernacular texts, when an increasingly monetized economy is blurring the traditional estate and class distinctions, when urban men and women are often negotiating conflicting demands of feudal and burgess law and custom, conduct literature addressed to the good wife provides a means for its lay readers to negotiate many of these profound changes taking place in their lives by representing the new realities of lay households and their changing relationship with state and ecclesiastical institutions. As I have said, the nature of such a good wife is necessarily articulated in relation to and through the intervention of male guardians—clerical advisers, fathers, and husbands—who will properly husband her true nature. And conduct literature directed at woman as wife brings devotion to God alongside devotion to husband and father in new and unpredictable ways. The invention of the good wife in discourses of sacramental marriage, private devotion, and personal conduct during the long fourteenth century also works to highlight the changes that a more ameliorist account of the laity’s nature more generally might bring about in relations between clerics and laypeople, or between traditionally lower social groups and their betters such as the aristocracy.¹¹ As the figure charged with the management of the everyday bodies lodged in the lay household, the bourgeois or gentry good wife is a lynchpin in the domestic economy of the household and foundational for its modes of embodiment. Changing the nature of the good wife thus offers a profound opportunity to change the cultural position of the lay household and the lay estate more generally. At the same time, marriage (and the sexual activity it presumes) remains the most obvious mark of the laity’s troubling difference from the enclosed, celibate nature of the original monastic audiences for the forms of spirituality being translated in the later Middle Ages. We might therefore think of the idea of the good wife as a kind of limit case for the efficacy of such a negotiation of lay conduct through a chaste self-discipline, both highlighting such hybridity and providing a conceptual mechanism capable of managing it.

Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages, while attentive to how the real-life situation of married women is in tension with the representation of a woman’s experience in such texts, is also concerned with what such texts have to say about the fundamental nature of the good wife, its potential for improvement, and its changing status in relation to virginity in the social imaginary. For these texts have much to tell us about important changes taking place in the representational politics surrounding the female body in this period. Woman may on the surface remain a stable category, one still situated uneasily on the margins of the social, but within that category, the traditionally unequal relationship of married woman and virginity is changing as rapidly and as fundamentally as that of married layman and celibate cleric. Higher-status women in particular benefit from the general increase in vernacular literacy that takes place throughout the later medieval period and the dramatic increase in the translation of learned culture into vernacular forms.¹² It is especially in the literate practices surrounding private devotion that the laywoman, living not in a nunnery or anchorage or beguinage but fully in the world of the married household, can find a space and time where her conduct can most effectively show the full potential of her nature, where the good wife can equal, or even excel, the virgin nun in her excellence as a fully formed ethical subject. Such texts and the practices that they engender open up a space and time for her labor in ways that rework the formerly hierarchized relation of virgin, widow, wife and reconceptualize the good wife’s place in that symbolic imaginary.

Reading Women, the Affective Contract

Caesarius situates his good wife of Liège in a social and textual environment quite different from that represented in the conduct texts examined in this book. However much Caesarius’s good wife may draw on the oral resources available to her in order to empower herself as a female and lay subject, the narrative structures Caesarius employs—notably a moral that emphasizes the story’s use as sermon exemplum and a narrative frame that represents the collection as an instructive dialogue between a monk and novice—underscore just how much real cultural capital rests securely in the hands of a celibate clergy. The conduct texts examined in this book, however, presume both a high level of vernacular literacy on the part of their female readers and an empowering degree of access to certain kinds of Latinate culture. Frequently they are authored by laymen and sometimes are framed as dialogues between husband and wife or father and daughter. These texts also foreground a set of performative reading practices and a kind of affective literacy that provides a way of institutionalizing and universalizing what is individual and exceptional in Caesarius’s exemplum. To do so, conduct literature for women explicitly translates the performative reading practices encouraged by late medieval private devotion among the laity to the terrain of secular life and the married household. In the process they enable the transformation of an existing moralized, theological subject formed through the sacrament of confession and private devotion into a new ethically conceived secular subject.

Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the innovative role played by the reading practices of lay practitioners in the development of private devotion and affective piety. Mark Amsler, for example, has examined how socially situated literacies create subjects and agents in late medieval multilingual manuscript cultures. And the work of Nicole Rice—analyzing how Middle English prose guides were developed to adapt professional religious rules and routines for lay readers—and Jennifer Bryan—considering how the growth of devotional reading created a crucial arena for the making of literate subjectivities—has explored how the line between religious and lay, author and reader/practitioner blurs during this period. Nor should the public nature of devotional literature—the fact that it is produced as institutional knowledge and consumed by individuals manifesting their participation in a group identity as orthodox Christian subjects—deny a lively individual, embodied reading experience. Kathryn Smith, for example, has examined how three Books of Hours mediated the devotional experience of their female owners and constructed and confirmed their sense of personal, familial, local, and social identity. And Jessica Brantley has explored how the format of a late medieval Carthusian miscellany reveals connections between the private reading of a meditative lyric and the public performance of civic drama.¹³ The performative reading practices initiated by late medieval private devotion give the lie to any preconceptions modern readers might have that such didactic literature is inherently a by-rote, top-down transmission of dominant ideologies to subaltern subjects. By the end of the thirteenth century, the growing use of newer forms of private, affective devotion first by noble and then by wider groups of gentry and bourgeois laymen and laywomen suggests that such privileged members of the laity have become much more than mere consumers of orthodox ideologies controlled by the clergy. Instead they might better be understood as active agents working in conjunction with clerical forces in the production of orthodox authority and securing their own individual self-identification through this process.

Reading popular devotional texts as diverse as Books of Hours, Walter Hilton’s Mixed Life, or Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ can thus become empowering performative activities for their literate high-status readers, both men and women. As I discuss more fully in Chapter 1, not only are these laymen and laywomen being encouraged to read vernacular texts with comprehension and silently in their heart, rather than simply mouthing Latin prayers aloud and by rote, they are also encouraged to manifest that inner experience outwardly to the world through individually developed modes of personal conduct and self-identification. In other words, the act of reading—itself a complex combination of physical text, relationship to space, sense of larger audience not necessarily present—is imagined as a kind of performative where the activity of embodied reading itself helps bring about the sought-for goal. The reader does not need to begin in a state of devotion; performative reading practices themselves allow the material text to function as a kind of intimate script that can provide the framework—over time and with repeated practice—for making a personally felt experience of devotion possible.¹⁴ Reading in this way imagines devotion as a performance repeated across time and space; indeed, as the journées chrétiennes discussed in Chapter 1 make clear, such devotional reading often takes place according to set programs that assign devotion to specific times of the day and to certain household and public spaces. This repetition works to instill and ensure the kind of stylization of the body and new relationships with familiar spaces needed to articulate a proper moral and theological subject position for the reader. As material examples of these performative reading practices, we might think here of the new embodiment of prayer in the form of kneeling devotees’ hands folded together in front of them, such as we see in donor portraits in late medieval paintings,¹⁵ or of the new fashion of private prayer in side chapels of parish churches or in private oratories throughout the week rather than in the public context of the parish Sunday mass. Or we might turn to the affective practices leading to the invention of compassion in late medieval devotion that Sarah McNamer has discussed, practices she associates in particular with women and feminine experience.¹⁶ Or as we will discuss in Chapter 1, a certain display of lack of affect could signify the kind of emotional boundedness needed to register the bodily self-restraint that conduct texts for women in particular aim to foster in order to remake the feminine.

This variable scene of reading, then, cannot be confined solely to the literal words on the page or to the orthodox ideologies ostensibly authoring such didactic literature. In order to be fully realized, such a reader-centered devotional text requires the performative consent of its reader, a consent manifested initially as the text is absorbed by this protracted reading process into the interiority of the individual reader, and then as that devotional subject in process is similarly read by others within her larger social milieu. These new practices of performative reading manifest what Mark Amsler has called affective literacy, a term he uses to describe how we develop physical, somatic, and/or activity-based relationships with texts as part of our reading experiences. Performative reading of this kind occurs at the boundaries between inner and outer, the personal and the public, and—given the didactic content of such texts—the differential power relations of masculine and feminine and clerical and lay: In this respect, affective literacy, like marginalia and glossing, sites reading as a hinge rather than a conduit. The hinge of reading opens and closes the gap between reader and text, between the skin of the page and the reading body.¹⁷ Rather than simply providing a conduit for dominant ideology to flow from top to bottom, subjecting the powerless, consuming reader to the strictures of a clerically controlled knowledge, affective literacy positions the lay reader as at once consumer and author. The reader is both subjected by the powerful ideologies disseminated through such a process of textualization and at the same time the individualized agent required by those very modes of textualized dissemination.¹⁸

An illumination from a deluxe Book of Hours produced for Mary of Burgundy in Flanders in the 1470s vividly and complexly represents the hinge of reading generated by this new mode of reader-centered comprehension literacy (Figure 1).¹⁹ Mary figures twice in the illumination. First we see her in the foreground sitting in a private oratory reading from a Book of Hours that she holds in her lap. Presumably this represents the same Book of Hours that the illumination itself is part of. Then, in the background, framed by a window opening from the oratory into the choir of a majestic Gothic church, we see brought to life the inner devotion that such reading with the heart makes possible. On the left, Mary of Burgundy and her ladies kneel before a seated Virgin Mary, center, who holds the Christ Child in her lap. The high altar and its reredos act as a kind of halo for the Virgin, while on the right a priest kneels in adoration. The oratory window as framing device not only brings the two spaces of the painting alongside each other but also works to represent how devotional reading with the heart can itself hinge the bodily and the spiritual together in meaningful contiguity.

Certainly, one orthodox mode of interpretation would view Mary’s material act of reading in her oratory as simply a conduit to the inner spiritual space represented in the church interior. Such a movement encourages us to accept the space of lay devotional reading as inherently governed by institutional and ideological forces outside the individual’s control, forces that will necessarily move the individual reader to transcend the particularities of her personal moment of reading. Thus, a series of visual repetitions made possible by the various framing devices set up by the structure of the illumination lead us deeper into the space of the painting in ways that prompt ever more precise moments of similitude. The seated bodily Mary of Burgundy in the frame leads the viewer’s eye to the smaller spiritual version of her shown kneeling in the left of the inset church space. This identification of an inner and outer Mary in turn encourages us to move from the margins of the inset to finish focused on that other Mary, the Virgin holding the Christ Child, who seems thus naturally and properly to occupy the center of the painting. In doing so, we also end up—within the confines of a material church sanctuary—centered on its transcendent spiritual form as Ecclesia, that earthly disseminator of divine grace with which the Virgin is so intimately identified. In this way, bringing the bodily Mary of Burgundy alongside her imagined devotional self and her spiritual counterpart, the Virgin Mary, moves us beyond things as they are into a teleological mode of reading that stabilizes temporal and spatial relations in ideologically satisfying ways.

Figure 1. Mary of Burgundy at her devotions; inset, Mary kneeling in front of the Virgin. Book of Hours of Mary of Burgundy, Flanders, ca. 1475. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS Codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 14v.

But such an orthodox, clerical mode of reading is just one possible way of working through the elements of the illumination. Frequently in contemporary paintings when a donor and saint are represented, the saint is depicted as materially much larger and visually more important than the kneeling patrons; indeed the latter human agents are sometimes literally consigned to the margins of the manuscript. Here, however, the representation of Mary of Burgundy’s performative reading practices reverses such clearly hierarchized spatial relations. Even though the Virgin Mary occupies the physical center—and as I have been arguing, an orthodox hermeneutic center as well—nonetheless the reading Mary of Burgundy in the foreground physically dwarfs the Virgin Mary. Moreover, despite the apparent stasis of Mary of Burgundy’s seated position in the foreground or as diminished marginal figure within the framed vignette, as viewers we return repeatedly to her seated figure, decoding the signs of her presence strewn throughout the foreground frame that occupies the bottom third of the painting.²⁰ So, too, while the objects in the frame simultaneously identify the Virgin Mary and Mary of Burgundy’s chaste piety, their inherent richness in material terms also works to signal Mary of Burgundy’s elevated social position—as does the fantasy setting that imagines Mary reading in a private oratory in the heart of a church. These signs of aristocratic leisure and ease keep our interest focused on the material Mary of Burgundy even as we follow a prescribed hermeneutic path that leads us to the physically smaller but spiritually more significant Mary of Burgundy portrayed with the Virgin Mary in the church sanctuary. So, too, the ability of the apparently calm foreground to keep our senses and emotions occupied encourages us to reflect on how Mary of Burgundy’s symbolic value in the illumination depends upon the continued labor of her (and our) private devotion. The ambivalences built into the framing devices of the illumination complicate the hinge of reading being represented here and actively work to defer any act of reading as conduit that would simply reinscribe one ideological, orthodox way of experiencing and interpreting this experience. The open window—as a frame or hinge representing how and what Mary of Burgundy’s performative reading practices signify—figures here the ability of private devotion to open up new modes of agency for lay subjects and points to a fantasy of exceptional access to the core of ecclesiastical culture (represented by the location in the church and the location of Mary of Burgundy alongside the Virgin and Christ Child). At the same time the frame of private devotion puts beside such a model of human exceptionalism the possibility that the means of such immaterial labor are available to a much wider group of devotional subjects than a Mary of Burgundy or Mary, Queen of Heaven, herself. This illumination fantasizes Mary’s private oratory as its own lay version of the traditional monastic cell, just as the laity’s daily reading of Books of Hours fantasizes lay devotion as equivalent to monastic practice.

The performative reading practices and affective literacy learned through this new kind of devotional literacy thus provide the secular readers of conduct literature with a powerful model for the new genre. Reading about conduct, like reading devotional texts, can continue and complete a translation process that proceeds from monastic to private lay devotion to the secular and married estate. Just as Books of Hours bring monastic culture into the layperson’s individual experience, so too a conduct text teaching a young wife to realize as fully as possible her role as wife and mother and manager of the domestic sphere of the married household infuses even the most secular aspects of lay life and female identity with the added value of devotion. If lay private devotion brings some of the forms and status of monastic life and identity into the world, this kind of conduct literature and its performative reading practices promise to translate the moral and theological status of lay devotion to secular conduct, converting what might in the past have been imagined simply as attention to matters of courtesy or external manners into a set of practices that can now outline how to develop fully ethical identities for lay subjects active in the world. Similarly, such conduct texts, while often beginning as specially commissioned texts for specific noble or royal patrons, are later passed on to other family members or more widely to other social groups, in ways that parallel the widening circles of consumption of individual Books of Hours—often produced for a specific patron, but then passed on to close relatives and friends, and in later generations to individuals in social groups far beyond the ambit of the original manuscript.

There are, however, important and crucial differences between the performative models developed for devotional reading and those for the reading of conduct texts. The scene of reading for the Book of Hours owned by Mary of Burgundy is imagined ideally as a space that seamlessly hinges the private and public into perfect alignment. Mary’s private oratory opens onto the sanctuary of the church with the Virgin at its center. Private merges with public (the devotional Mary of Burgundy depicted here and the imagined viewer of the illumination who knows her public persona), then with the ecclesiastical (Mary of Burgundy and the priest in the sanctuary), and finally with the celestial (Mary of Burgundy and the Virgin Mary). Other modes of affective piety—for example, the kind meant to intensify a compassionate identification with Christ recently discussed by Sarah McNamer—bring the devotee’s inner embrace of Christ even more directly and emotionally in explicit contact with the transcendent, heavenly encounter of human and divine recorded in scripture and promised to the Christian subject after her death. Conduct texts for women, however, situate themselves within the hybrid spaces of the late medieval married household. The narrative frames of the Livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry and the Menagier de Paris—discussed in Chapters 2 and 3—make this explicit: the Livre du chevalier originates in the privacy of the aristocratic enclosed garden and ends with a debate between husband and wife in front of their daughters; the Menagier begins literally in the bourgeois marriage bed itself and ends immersed in the day-to-day material needs of that household. Both these texts also emphasize how their production arises out of and depends upon the sophisticated resources of the noble and bourgeois household. The aristocratic author of the Livre du chevalier calls on his personal staff of clerics; the Menagier’s merchant depends upon his own library and its wide range of texts translated into French. The two authors also draw on personal experience