Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature (review)

'Affections of the mind', in this book's title, comes from St Augustine's discussion of the marriage of Mary and Joseph, while 'sacramental marriage' is used for one particular theory of marriage prevalent during the Middle Ages. The 'late medieval English literature' discussed includes Chaucer's Franklin's Tale, Gower's Traitié pour Essampler les Amantz Marietz, the Mary and Joseph plays in the N-Town Cycle and The Book of Margery Kempe, all of which, Emma Lipton claims, use this sacramental view of marriage to construct a middle-class ideology. She goes on to argue for an intrinsic connection between such literary representations and the construction of a class identity.

Not everyone will be happy with a substructure which distinguishes marriage as a sacrament, based on love, from other views of marriage, such as the 'doctrine' of the marriage debt or the view that the husband should rule over the wife. In the West, marriage was indisputably regarded as a sacrament from at least the thirteenth century, and is regularly included as such in the catechetical material produced in response to the Lateran Council of 1215, but this did not necessarily exclude other 'emphases'. A simple 'love or sex ... partnership or rulership' (p. 3) dichotomy is just too simple, especially when its principal representative turns out to be C. S. Lewis's 75-year-old Allegory of Love! However, if the reader is prepared to suspend belief at this early stage, Lipton offers an interesting theory about the connection of sacramental marriage with the rise of lay values and the self-legitimation of a 'middle strata' of merchants and small landowners just below the level of the gentry.

It is not surprising, then, given the narrator's social status, that the first text presented in this light is The Franklin's Tale, but this is the least rewarding of the four readings. Lipton sees as the key to the tale the Franklin's status as 'civil servant'. But this anachronistic term occludes an important fact: modern civil servants are full-time employees of the state with no other source of income but the Franklin (in his various roles as MP, sheriff and so on) would have been only part-time. And the stress on the Franklin's representing 'a new civic identity and growth of government' (p. 46) completely ignores Chaucer's implied satire of his indolence, self-indulgence and social insecurity. In the event, Lipton's reading is not very different from previous efforts, though with some odd emphases, such as asserting that Arveragus keeps his and his wife's love secret, and stressing 'the violence of his threat to Dorigen' (p. 38). True, he tells her to keep silent on pain of death, but he also says he would rather die than his wife fail to keep her word to Aurelius.

The chapter on Gower's ballad sequence is much more convincing. Lipton argues that Gower transforms the conventional emphasis on sexual rectitude in marriage as a female responsibility. He makes 'marriage a male rather than female concern' and thus promotes 'lay authority'; his stories retell the lives of heroes who become adulterers and come to bad ends (p. 52). It is less clear how Gower 'makes marriage central to masculine identity' (p. 65), specifically of 'men of the upper middle strata ... who are neither aristocratic nor clerical' (p. 82) like himself. But this engaging discussion of a little-known text provokes a desire to know it better.

Lipton then discusses the three Mary plays from the N-Town Cycle: 'Joachim and Anna', 'The Marriage of Mary and Joseph' and 'The Trial of Mary and Joseph'. She acknowledges that the plays have different sources and may be found in the same manuscript only by chance, but she reads all three as presenting a 'reformist' (but not heretical) agenda, linked...