Chaucer and the Cultures of Love and Marriage by Cathy Hume (review)

Cathy Hume’s book is the first study of love and marriage in Chaucer’s works to draw substantially on published letter collections and advice literature. She focuses on the fifteenth-century Paston letters, but also includes material from the Plumpton, Stonor, and Cely letters; and “advice literature for women” (26) from both England and France, such as Le menagier de Paris, Christine de Pizan’s Livre des trois vertus, Philippe de Mézières’s Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, and Caxton’s translation of The Book of the Knight of the Tower. For Hume, advice literature and letters are “a proxy for those ‘horizons of expectations’ that Chaucer’s contemporary readers would have brought to his texts” (208) and can be used to argue for whether we should see individual “characters’ behavior as either shocking or conventional” (208). Throughout the book, Hume carefully analyzes the ways Chaucer revises his sources to correspond more closely to the depictions of love and marriage in letters and advice literature.

After an introduction providing a “brief survey of current historical scholarship on love and marriage in England” (5), Chapter 1 argues that The Franklin’s Tale should be seen as a “story of a loving marriage struggling to survive in a world of changing social relations” (33), and as an exploration of how “an egalitarian marriage ideal would be tested by real-world circumstances” (33). Hume argues that the division of public and private in the Tale is best seen as “part of a complex late medieval social world where personal and business relationships are intertwined and need careful negotiation if both public and private virtue are to be maintained” (35).

Chapter 2 draws on the conventional depiction of wifely obedience in advice literature to argue that The Clerk’s Tale reveals this “ideal” of obedience “with real contemporary currency” is “not only cruel but . . . completely at variance with other conventions in late medieval England” (50). Chapter 3 argues that the comedy of The Shipman’s Tale is “created by the wife’s clever manipulation of roles of hostess, social networker, housekeeper, business assistant, and status symbol. These roles appear to reflect late medieval expectations of wives and wives’ real behavioral practices” (79). In Chapter 4, Hume places January and May’s marriage in The Merchant’s Tale in the “context of contemporary ideals and practices in gentry marriages, showing how few of the conventional wife’s roles January expects May to perform” (90). This chapter includes the brief but fascinating argument that May’s withdrawal to the privy to read her letter conflicted with contemporary norms in which women were more easily granted privacy for letter writing and reading (100). The next chapter argues that Custance’s arranged marriage in The Man of Law’s Tale corresponds to the unhappy experiences of late medieval gentlewomen in letter collections and advice literature. In contrast to much recent criticism, Hume sees The Knight’s Tale as an endorsement rather than critique of arranged marriages, reading Emily’s prayer to Diana as a “conventional stance of willing acquiescence in her relatives’ plans for her marriage” (135).

The last two chapters shift from marriage to “the courtly cultures of love.” Hume situates Troilus and Criseyde in the context of The Book of the Knight and Christine’s Livre des trois vertus, which “describes the risks for women that love entails, and gives practical suggestions for avoiding its pitfalls” (144). The heroines of The Legend of Good Women “fly in the face of contemporary standards of behaviour,” showing “their recklessness, indecorousness and the ease with which they foolishly allow themselves to be manipulated by the tricks the advice literature warns against” (180).

The strength of the book, in my view, lies in the close readings and the careful connections Hume draws between the letters and advice texts she studies and the situations described in Chaucer’s texts. In many cases, Hume...