Clean Maids, True Wives, Steadfast Widows: Chaucer’s Women and Medieval Codes of Conduct by Margaret Hallissy (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER MARGARET HALLISSY. Clean Maids, True Wives, Steadfast Widows: Chaucer's Women and Medieval Codes of Conduct. Contributions in Women's Studies, vol. 130. Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, 1993. Pp. xvii, 224. $47.95. As suggested by her title and outlined in her preface, Margaret Hallissy's goal is to delineate the climate of opinion about women in fourteenth­ century England, the network of expectations and common assumptions held by Chaucer's contemporaries, in order to examine whether and when Chaucer is conventional or innovative in his representations ofwomen. The traditional division of women's lives into the three stages, or "estates," of virginity, wifehood, and widowhood is utilized both as a structural princi­ ple for the work and as an indication of medieval thought: Hallissy wishes to "recreate the resonances for [Chaucer's} original audience of this power­ ful received idea" (p. xv). Hallissy's strategy is to lay her groundwork in the first two chapters by historical-cultural study, looking at the economic status of women, canon and civil law, but mostly at the attitudes and precepts ofdidactic literature about women. She focuses particularly on conduct or courtesy literature, the precepts ofwhich, she claims, are widespread and continually repeated (this part ofthe study is heavily indebted to Diane Bornstein's work in The Lady in the Tower: Medieval Courtesy Literature for Women (1983} and her long entry on "Courtesy Books" in the Dictionary ofthe Middle Ages). Hav­ ing laid her groundwork, Hallissy then tests her findings against certain of Chaucer's works, following the tripartite scheme set up in her title. Unfortunately, the methodology of the first two chapters, which is also carried through into later ones, is so flawed that it undermines the reliabil­ ity of the rest of the work. Hallissy is prone to sweeping generalizations, beginning with her assertion that "a single climate of opinion on the sub­ ject of women's behavior existed all through the medieval period, within which medieval writers great and small created their women characters" (p. 5). Her claims about what "medievals" thought are frequently con­ trasted to what "moderns" think, as though her audience were an under­ graduate women's studies class; for example, "Authority over is a concept repugnant to many moderns, but a universal principle of order to the medievals" (p. 44); "The interrelationship between common character flaws and sexual profligacy appears precarious to moderns, but was quite clear to the medievals" (p. 58). Broad generalizations are built on singular exam­ ples or extrapolated from references to particular texts; for example, she 210 REVIEWS supports her categorical claim that a medieval woman takes the rank of her husband after marriage by a quotation that the endnote reveals is taken from a study of noblewomen in the Pays de Coutumes, 1100--1300 (p. 6, cf. n. 19); Georges Duby's observation that "only males count" in the biographical poem William Marshall is taken as a statement about "medi­ eval historical records" in general (p. 61, cf. n. 8); a quotation from one treatise is presented as a general precept of the behavior manuals (p. 165, c£ n. 7) (Hallissy has an irritating habit of peppering her text with unat­ tributed quotations, forcing the reader to check the endnotes constantly). Medieval culture is clearly for Hallissy vast and monolithic, encompass­ ing the whole of western Europe and stretching from late antiquity to the seventeenth century: chapters typically begin with discussions of attitudes in the Old and New Testaments and patristic literature before turning to medieval writings; citations of conduct literature range from the twelfth century (p. 63) to the seventeenth century (p. 58 or p. 134), and are drawn from many languages-Middle English, Old French, Provenral, medieval Italian-without differentiation, since they are always quoted in transla­ tion and usually from secondary sources. There is no acknowledgment of the linguistic situation in fourteenth-century England; indeed, it is possi­ ble to read Hallissy's book without being aware that Chaucer could have chosen a language other than English as his literary medium. To indicate the dangers of this approach, I turn to Hallissy's discussion of three "representative examples of conduct...