G lenn D. B urger . Conduct Becoming

Investigating French fourteenth- and fifteenth-century conduct literature, and to a lesser extent its English translations, Glenn D. Burger’s book Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages presents fresh ways to think about such medieval instruction. His claims for this genre are large: that focus on the figure of the good wife made possible the development of a spirituality neither clerical nor particularly aristocratic, but performed by laity in the world, especially by women. In fact, literate practices (Burger uses Rebecca Krug’s term) enabled the good wife to equal or excel the virgin nun in her moral development. The seat of this cultural change was the household—more specifically the marriage bed, where the notion of affection developed toward its modern emotional version. Particularly intriguing is the book’s first chapter, which deals with the movement of monastic reading into lay hands. This process has been acknowledged as centrally important, but the myriad specific ways in which it happened have not been sufficiently described. Following Geneviève Hasenohr, Burger examines further what she calls journées chrétiennes, or daily schedules of lay activity, widely thought to derive from monastic models of the patterned day. Hasenohr categorizes these schedules as a genre, like books of hours, but one able to move more widely across gender and class lines (57). They constituted a continuum from devotional treatises to ethical ones, and she claims that it is in these books that we see clerics “grappling most explicitly with the changing social reality of ‘middle-’ and upper-class women” (42). Such guides to the Christian day seem to have been primarily a French fashion, though Robert Copland’s translation of a French text is briefly treated (The maner to lyue wel; see 52–53). Recognition of this genre’s English importance, however, would have to acknowledge this text’s appearance in thirty-six primer editions between 1527 and 1556 and its central role in the vernacularization of the primer in England.

Affection · Ancient history · Art · Fifteenth · Literature · Middle Ages · Middle class · Middle English · Political science · Reading (process) · Sociology · Spirituality · Wife · Classics · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Medieval and Early Modern Justice · Psychology · Social Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies