The bachelor's banquet (review)

142 Reviews Gildenhuys, Faith, ed., The bachelor's banquet (Publications of the Barnabe Riche Society, Vol. 2/Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, Vol. 109), Ottawa/Binghamton, Dovehouse/Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1993; cloth & paper; pp. 153; R.R.P. CAN$22.00 (cloth), $9.00 (paper). The purpose of the Barnabe Riche Society is to provide scholarly editions of early m o d e m Englishtextswith m o d e m spelling. The bachelor's banquet is an Elizabethan adaptation of an earlyfifteenth-centuryFrench work: Les quinzejoies de manage. Wynkyn de Wordefirstprinted a version in 1507 and there were many subsequent English editions. Structured around fifteen scenes of married life, the work is a classic misogynist text. Wives are lustful, greedy, and deceitful. Aided by then female neighbours and/or their mothers, they deceive then loving, kind, and trusting husbands. The policy of modernized spelling and punctuation is not altogether successful. Certainly, it makes the text easy to read, and the editor has provided glosses to archaic words. But the work reads uneasily as a translation of a translation. Unlike the English Experience series, for example, which provides the early m o d e m text in facsimile, the Barnabe Riche Society policy destroys the sense of the work as an early modem text. The provision of an introduction does make the work more accessible. In it Gildenhuys explains the history of thetext,discusses the question of the identity of the translator, and assesses the translator's own contribution to the work. But unfortunately, her account of the historical context is its least satisfactory aspect. She has little notion of social distinctions, consistently describing the characters as 'middle-class' and referring to the wife's gossips as 'ladies'. While it was customary for a woman in child-bed to invite some women of higher social class, the majority in these scenes appear to be women of middling urban status. However, the social context of the scenes is vague. Traces of Catholicism remind the reader of the earlier context, rather than of Elizabethan London. GUdenhuys relies heavily on secondary sources for historical background. To explain that 'while articulated traditions worked against women's equality, practical experiences were creating greater personal freedom for women and wives' seems too simple. Certainly the experience of service distanced young women from 'the direct influence of the father', but it did not free them from patriarchy since it placed them in a vulnerable position in the patriarchal household of a master. To refer to the Reviews 143 satiric and negative comments on w o m e n in Jacobean texts as 'perhaps reflecting King James's dislike of women' is again to simplify to a personal bias the massive misogyny of a wide range of popular literature. While the appearance of new early m o d e m texts avaUable forteachingis always to be welcomed, this edition wiU need to be used with caution. Patricia Crawford Department of History University of Western Australia Goldberg, P. J. P., ed., Woman is a worthy wight: women in English society c. 1200-1500, Stroud and Wolfeboro Falls, Alan Sutton, 1992; cloth; pp. xvii, 229; 22 tables, 3figures;R.R.P. £28.00, US$62.00. This collection of essays, which grew out of a conference at Clare College, Cambridge, in 1988, is a fine example of recent work by demographic historians on later medieval England. By investigating extant historical records the contributors to this volume aim not only to shed light on the social circumstances of English women in the late Middle Ages but also to illuminate the structure of the family and households, age at marriage, and patterns of migration. The records drawn on are varied, and of considerable interest. They include pastoral manuals, letters, deposition records, wills, didactictexts,court rolls, cloister archaeology, and nunnery seals. The sequence of essays is nicely arranged. Thefirstfour are concerned with the implications of marriage for medieval English women's economic and social situation: 'Marriage, migration, and servanthood: the York cause paper evidence' by P. J. P. Goldberg, 'Geographical diversity in the resort to marriage in late medieval Europe: work, reputation, and unmarried females in the household formation systems of northern and southern England...