SOURCE: Kendrick, Laura. “Transgression, Contamination, and Woman in Eustache Deschamps's Miroir de mariage.” Stanford French Review 14, no. 1-2 (spring-fall 1990): 211-30.

[In the following essay, Kendrick analyzes the misogynistic elements of Le Miroir de mariage.]

Toward the end of the fourteenth century, probably in the 1380s or early 1390s, the most prolific medieval French poet, Eustache Deschamps, a household and judicial officer with a long career in the service of French kings Charles V and Charles VI and of the royal line, composed a didactic treatise over twelve thousand [lines] long, the Miroir de mariage, in which he argued for male chastity as opposed to marriage.¹ Deschamps made this argument against mixing with women through the personified summa of written authorities, Repository of Knowledge, of whom the main character, Free Will, requests counsel on the question of whether or not he should marry, as Desire, Folly, Servitude, and Trickery have encouraged him to do. After reading the more than seven thousand verses of Repository of Knowledge's warning letter and listening to over two thousand lines of rebuttal from Folly and company, Free Will makes the right decision by announcing that he will remain chaste, and then he turns to castigate Folly for her part in human history from the Fall to the Battle of Poitiers (where the French king was captured by the English) and the Treaty of Brétigny (1360). At this point, the poem breaks off.

Scholars have paid little close attention to the Miroir, except to edit it and to posit parts of it as a source for Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Indeed, Deschamps's poem is a compilation of the misogynist lore of the times, chiefly drawn from religious sources stretching back to the early Christian fathers. Male medievalists may have passed lightly over this work partly out of fear that they might be considered misogynists themselves if they showed much interest in it. The relatively static nature of the Miroir, a personified interior debate involving a series of long monologues and virtually no physical action, also does little to stimulate critical interest. Repository of Knowledge and Free Will communicate through an exchange of letters, as if Free Will were studying the authorities, while Desire, Folly, Servitude, and Trickery visit Free Will to speak their arguments. Folly's worldly advice, although persuasive because familiar to us, is clearly wrong given the way Deschamps has labelled its speaker. Modern readers have little patience for such cut-and-dried didacticism.

We much prefer to romanticize and carnivalize the Middle Ages as a kind of happy infancy of Western man, a period when people were less constrained in the expression of their emotions, when constraint came from the outside, not from the inside. That we are indeed more self-controlled and “repressed” than the average medieval person is perhaps one of the reasons why we do not see anything extraordinary in the didactic, “regulatory” poetry of the Middle Ages. We are less interested in how we were civilized, a painful process we would rather forget, than in how we were before we were civilized. When Eustache Deschamps, one of whose official positions was maître d'hôtel, harps on the virtues of sleeping alone (having a bed to oneself rather than sharing with strangers or even with one's wife [5: 300-01; 7: 235-36; 8: 172-73]) or satirizes courtiers for their bestial manners of chewing their food (5: 15-16) or writes a mock charter outlining the rules of conduct for overnight guests in his house (no noise, no graffiti on the walls, no shitting in the house, no picking of the plants in the garden on the way to the outhouse … [7: 343-47]), we are less interested in Deschamps's regulatory intentions (for we have long been trained to contain ourselves in these ways) than in the images of transgression his prohibitions suggest.

Instead of burdening us, the great length of Deschamps's Miroir de mariage should stimulate wonder at what could have provoked Deschamps, a widowed layman who seems never to have remarried after his wife died giving birth to their third child in 1376, only three years after they were married (11: 17-18), to spend so much time and parchment compiling misogynist lore? Could three years of marriage have been so hellish? Evidently not, if we take as sincere one of Deschamps's earlier ballads advising his daughter, upon her marriage in 1393, to resemble her late mother in her actions, to be “humble, courtoise et debonnaire” (6: 82-84). Collected in the huge, sole manuscript of Deschamps's works (Paris, B. N. ms. fr. 840) is one Simon Ployart's mocking ballad, which begins with the salutation, “He! Eustace, dire pues desormés / ‘Adieu bon temps!’ car tu l'as tout perdu” [Ha-ha, Eustache, from now on you can say, / ‘Goodbye, good times,’ because you have lost everything] and ends with the refrain, “Chetifs, dolens, es tu bien mariez?” (4: 351) [You pitiful wretch, are you really married?]. Deschamps's response to this ribbing, which may well be his own invention, is to suggest a written debate between Ployart and himself in which Deschamps will defend his marriage in prose (4: 352). No such work has come down to us; instead, we have inherited the lengthy dissuasion against marriage of Deschamps's Miroir, the bulk of which he had probably already finished when he wrote the ballad advising his daughter, upon her marriage, to imitate her dead mother's virtuous behavior. If Deschamps looked back on his marriage and his wife's conduct as ideal, why did he denigrate wives and marriage so zealously in his Miroir?

Just as paradoxically, how could Deschamps, who participated upon several occasions in marriage negotiations for the French royal family (11: 39, 44-45, 80), and whose practical and literary efforts were devoted to consolidating and improving his own and the king's worldly status, possibly have intended to persuade the noble and bourgeois laymen who made up his audience not to marry, but to enter religious orders and remain chaste, as the young man of his Miroir eventually decides to do? Surely this is not the sort of advice that Philippe de Mézières, tutor of the young Charles VI and his brother Louis, would have wanted the princes to take to heart and act out literally, even though Philippe, in his Songe du vieil pelerin, recommended that they read or listen to the “dictez vertueulx de ton serviteur et officier Eustache Morel” [the virtuous poems of your servant and officer Eustache Morel].² Younger sons of the nobility and bourgeoisie might choose the church as an avenue for their ambitions, but able elder sons, and all males in the royal family, were expected to marry and produce heirs as rapidly as possible. If it was not Deschamps's intention to persuade men not to marry, and if he was not writing out of unhappy experience of the miseries of married life, why did he write the Miroir? Ought we to take the Miroir's repudiation of marriage and wives literally, or does this rejection figure a rejection of another kind?

To be sure, Deschamps was following the literary tradition of a patriarchal society. St. Paul, such fathers of the church as Tertullian and Jerome, not to speak of collections of the lives and sayings of the desert fathers, provided authoritative Christian arguments against mixing with women. With the revival and French translation of Aristotle and other classical authors, “scientific” arguments concerning woman's inferiority also began to circulate more widely. Indeed, in the fourteenth century there was a vogue for French vernacular compilations (translations, paraphrases, versions) of earlier religious and secular misogynist lore; the trend began with Jean de Meun's enormously successful Roman de la rose and was amplified by Jean Le Fevre's translation of the lengthy Lamentations of Matheolus and several other lightly fictionalized or allegorized compendia including Deschamps's Miroir de mariage.³ If Deschamps's reason for writing the Miroir was mainly a desire to be fashionable, need he have gone to such superlative lengths? To attribute the motivation for Deschamps's Miroir, and that of other late-medieval vernacular misogynist works, to literary tradition has been a way of begging the question of intention by smoothing over differences and trying to push the “original” act of engendering such texts back to time immemorial. We can interrogate literary traditions and individuals who follow, modify, and further them. What is the same and what is different about Deschamps's complaint against wives in the Miroir de mariage as compared to earlier misogynist texts, and does this tell us anything about Deschamps or his society?

About seven thousand lines into the Miroir, Deschamps cites a biblical passage in which Moses commands a husband who has repudiated his wife for her shameful behavior not to accept her return to his house under any circumstances after she has become the wife of another man, even if that man should die or repudiate her (Deuteronomy 24: 4). Claiming to follow St. Gregory, Deschamps then proceeds to allegorize these actions in such a way as to emphasize the necessity for expulsion; the wife, as Deschamps explains, represents the worldly concerns that pollute the man's soul. Expanding on this transfer, and playing on the similar sounds of the words for “outside” (“pueur,” more usually spelled puer) and “stench” or “putrefaction” (“pueur,” emended by Raynaud from the manuscript reading of “peur”), Deschamps urges man to eliminate worldly concerns by expelling the wife from his house and refusing her return, thereby protecting the purity of his soul:

Oste celle femme et met pueur,
Et tu osteras la pueur
De ta maison, c'est la pensée
De chose terrienne amée
Et la cure solicitaire
Qui fait celle pueur attraire.

(9: 233)

[Remove this woman and put her out / and you will remove the putrefaction / from your house, that is, the thought / of an earthly thing loved / and the anxious concern / that attracts this stench.]

To interpret personification allegory (such as Deschamps's Miroir, with its debate among characters representing different parts of one psyche), we must connect the exterior world of visible things with the invisible interior world of emotion and thought. Our interpretation interiorizes action and is, in this respect, the opposite of “projection,” whereby we exteriorize inner conflict by linking it to the visible world, as in the invention of personification allegories (or of virtually any fictions). In the context of an argument for chastity over marriage, Deschamps's interiorizing interpretation of Moses's command to repudiate a sinful wife clearly does not erase the action it interprets, but rather suggests that the way men may purge themselves of worldly concerns, of sin, is to expel women from their homes, to refuse marriage. Woman is a figure for man's sin, which he may purge himself of by separating himself from and repeatedly rejecting the woman upon whom he has projected—who symbolizes for him—that sin. By controlling woman, man controls himself.

The multitude of late-medieval vernacular personification allegories witnesses to the great effort being made at this time to link the inside to the outside, to find a way to regulate interior conflicts by representing and resolving them in visible material (“mirroring”) forms. Perhaps today we have developed sufficiently strong inner controls to be able to dispense with a certain number of visible gestures of control. For example, our inner contrition or determination to behave better is not necessarily dependent upon our making any external signs of rejecting the Other of our former behavior. In effect, we have interiorized gestures of expulsion or repression. We have, in many situations, succeeded in erasing the visible text, or what we might call the literal—Otherwise—level of the allegory. Modern man can purify himself without actually making the gesture of repudiating and refusing to take back his wife—as so many of the desert fathers actually did.

The notion of transgression, like personification allegory, orders experience by materializing it in space, giving it a topography, thereby making a certain understanding, measurement, and control of behavior possible. Transgression is, literally, a stepping across limits, an infringing of boundaries; it involves bodies touching other bodies (or the property of other bodies). Prior to any act of transgression, though, must be an act of expulsion and delimitation, a setting up of boundaries such as we saw in Deschamps's interpretation of Moses's command: the husband should expel his wife from his house and prevent her return: he should expel the putrid matter of worldly concerns from his soul, keep the impurity (“pueur”) on the outside (“puer”). What has been expelled is bad, impure, dangerous.⁴ The good inside must not mix with the bad outside. Boundaries must be respected, transgression avoided: “Good fences make good neighbors.” Why? Because man is by nature not only competitive and aggressive, but predatory and destructive. Civilization has consequently been a process of splitting and separation, of building fences to be gradually interiorized. Man has expelled the “bad” in himself (or in the social body) in order to make himself “good”; he has set up limits to hinder destructive impulses from contaminating the center, to keep them marginal.

An emblem of this civilizing process familiar to all medievalists is the garden of love of Guillaume de Lorris's Roman de la rose, an idealized center that walls out the vices inimical to love figured on its exterior surface (vv. 129-468): Hatred, Cruelty, Spite, Covetousness, Avarice, Envy, Depression, Old Age, Hypocrisy, Poverty. An equally powerful representation of the civilizing process—an expulsion of “bad behavior” from the center—is the pictorial representation in the margins of the late medieval manuscript page of perverse, foolish, aggressive, bestial behavior, spatially hedged out from the regularized, idealized corpus of the written text.⁵ The civilizing process is also dramatized in the relationship between the medieval king and his “personal” fool, a sort of monstrous double who might be dressed exactly like the king, but over whose irrational, uncourteous, and in every way “uncontrolled” behavior the king had unquestionable control.⁶ In chastizing the fool's behavior, expelling him from the center, the medieval king controlled, figuratively, his own folly and that of the society he represented.

Man does not naturally aspire to be good or to control his destructive impulses. He does so only under the threat, from a more powerful, “parental” source (… legal, royal, Divine) of physical punishment or loss of status should he continue his disorderly behavior. The way to avoid the threat of punishment is to learn to control one's own misbehavior. Every child discovers this, and one of the major ways he learns to control himself is to project his objectionable behavior, to play it out on Others in fiction. Even when the entire social body is “punished” or threatened with punishment, as in the case of natural disasters or plagues, one way to regain seeming control of the situation is for the society to punish itself in a self-preservative way. This punishment or repression of bad conduct often takes the form of scapegoating, of a projection of the objectionable behavior on individuals or groups within the society, a collective Other, who can then be expelled, marginalized, or penalized in some way for the “common good.”

The expulsion of woman from man and the exclusion of woman from the masculine social body have served the same purpose as many other splittings, separations, and expulsions throughout history: man's aim in representing woman as bad is to try to make man good. The lack of self-restraint imputed to woman reflects men's efforts to control themselves, which they do by regulating their relationship with the women upon whom they have projected—expelled—their own disorderly tendencies. Furthermore, as is perhaps most evident in the more impassioned sorts of verbal invective against women, the energy men expend in expelling or enforcing the exclusion of woman probably gives a pleasurable release as it turns the force of violence to “good” in punishing “feminine evil.”

In La peur en Occident, Jean Delumeau has pointed out that the chorus of voices culpabilizing woman grows stronger and more secular among Western intellectual elites from the middle of the fourteenth century on; indeed, early humanists were among the loudest voices in the misogynist choir. He concludes that the pressures of war, schism, plagues, and the fear of the world's end with that of the century created an obsessional mentality among late-fourteenth-century men, and that they found an outlet for their frustrations in the degradation of women: “In these conditions … libido, bridled more than ever in them, changed into aggression. Sexually frustrated beings who could not help but experience temptations projected on others what they did not want to identify in themselves. They set up scapegoats that they could despise and accuse in their place.”⁷ Delumeau is right to connect the “pressures of the times” with the increase in invective against woman written by secular men, such as Eustache Deschamps, in the late fourteenth century; however, the purposes this misogynist literature served are more complex than mere défoulement.

Verbal (or physical) repression of (or aggression against) woman may be a pleasurable release, but it is seldom recognized as such by the oppressors, who see themselves instead as virtuous protectors of an endangered masculine society and of its and their own inner purity. The discharge of aggressive impulses is thus masked as the enforcement of order, as a quelling, not a release, of dangerous excesses, which are located, not in the self or the society, but in woman as Other (represented also in the Middle Ages by the pagan, the foreigner, the Jew, the fool, the humanoid beast). Aggressive expulsion of the disorderly Other is potentially dangerous energy turned to good, sublimated, regulated by serving the explicit purpose of regulation, pointed away from the center, away from male peers.

Invective, satire, criticism, and complaint against woman have been fundamental to the civilizing—constraining—process in patriarchal Western societies. When man has made what we consider to be progress in controlling and civilizing himself, during ascetic religious revivals or periods of intellectual “renaissance,” we often find, upon closer inspection of the premises, that he has made himself better by making woman worse, that he has accomplished a symbolic defecation of woman. Thus did Odo, tenth-century abbot of Cluny: “If men could see what is under the skin, the sight of woman would nauseate them. When we cannot touch with the tip of one finger a piece of spittle or a turd, how can we desire to embrace this sack of shit?”⁸ In his De contemptu mundi, the mid-twelfth-century Cluniac monk, Bernard of Morval (or Morlas), compiles a long verse catalog of feminine vices wherein he accuses woman, using various invective epithets, of being a dangerous opening and stigmatizes her as unclean:

Sordid woman, perfidious woman, broken woman,
contaminates what is pure, ruminates impious things, spoils actions.
Woman is a thing accused, a thing maliciously carnal, entirely flesh,
eager to ruin, born to deceive, expert in deception,
freshest pit, worst viper, beautiful putrefaction, slippery path …
conscious of no good, everchanging, impious, pot full of infection,
pit of lechery, instrument of the whirlpool, mouth of vices.
… She is the supreme folly, the intimate enemy, the intimate pestilence.
… Perfidious woman, fetid woman, stinking woman
is the throne of Satan; modesty, a burden to her. Flee her, reader!(9)

As the aggressive energy of this invective expulsion (or exorcism) of woman demonstrates, obtaining and maintaining perfect closure and stability of the masculine body—individual and social—was no easy matter. Such invective is the verbal equivalent of the building of walls to protect the inside from the dangerous outside, to protect the chaste monks in their cloister from contamination, in the tradition of the desert fathers. These early Christian men attempted to gain total self-control and self-sufficiency by enclosing themselves in small, tomb-like cells, restricting everything that entered or touched their bodies, and expelling dangerous desires in the form of hallucinations, most commonly of seductive females, to be constantly fought off.¹⁰

We like to think of the early humanists as standing on the shoulders of “giants” (great classical authors) in order to improve their vision, yet they also elevated themselves by standing on the backs of “monstrous” women. Even the civility of the ancients to whom the humanists looked for authority depended on their ability to control woman, the Other upon whom they had projected many of their own dangerous impulses. Thus, Plato considered woman's uterus to be a wild beast roaming about in her abdomen, while later physicians tried to coax or repel the beastly organ into its proper position by pleasant-smelling or disgusting vaginal fumigations. So dangerous were women and women's bodies that Romans of good family married prepubescent girls and “regulated” their unruly bodies by making them pregnant. Roman authors such as Pliny promoted the age-old taboo against contact with menstrual blood, which men considered to be so poisonous as to kill every living thing it touched, even grass.¹¹

This particular projection of interior viciousness upon woman was still current in the Middle Ages, authorized most forcefully by Pope Innocent III in his De contemptu mundi, which was copied, translated, and paraphrased ad nauseam by medieval writers, including Geoffrey Chaucer, whose English version has been lost, and Eustache Deschamps, in his Lay de la fragilité humaine:

Mais de quoy est li conceus
Ou ventre nourris et pus?
C'est d'orribleté amere,
De sang qui est corrumpus;
Menstre est appellé et flus
Qui cesse lors a la mere;
L'erbe en muert, c'est chose clere,
Les arbres en sont confus,
Les chiens enrragent tout sus
D'atouchier telle matere.

(2: 256-57)

[But of what is he conceived, / fed and filled in the womb? / It is the bitter horror / of putrefied blood. / It is called menstrual blood and flux, / which ceases then in the mother. / Grass is killed by it, this is clear; / trees are destroyed by it; / dogs go completely mad / from touching this matter.]

Elsewhere, in ballads on the miseries of the human condition (2: 121; 6: 12), Deschamps repeats this charge of feminine impurity:

Tresmalheureus, orgueilleus, povres corps,
Qui est conceus en puour de luxure,
Nourris dedenz, quan qu'il soit du dehors,
De sang manstru, treshorrible pasture,
Chiens en muerent, terre en pert sa verdure.

(2: 121)

[Miserable, proud, impoverished body, / which is conceived in the putrefaction of lust, / fed inside, until it be outside, / on menstrual blood—most awful fodder! / Dogs die of it; the earth loses its greenness because of it.]

The human foetus's prolonged contact with—indeed, forced feeding on and composition from—putrid, poisonous, menstrual blood is the very means by which original sin is conveyed and the soul of the infant corrupted, according to this line of Christian reasoning. The child is conceived in the “puour de luxure,” that is, in the sex act and in the womb, in a putrefaction that corrupts the infant soul just as a “bucket of filth attracts infections” (Lay 2: 251). [Ainsi que vaisseauls d'ordure / Attrait les infections]. Because of his physical conception in this manner and his expulsion at birth covered with a “shamefully bloody, filthy skin” (Lay 2: 261) [“une orde pel diffamée / De sang”], man is fundamentally impure, likened to excrement. Whereas other living things provide useful products, man produces only filth; his very nature is excremental: “tu es chargée / De fiens, pyssat, cracherre; / Bonne odeur seult on requerre / Es arbres: en toy, fumée” (Lay 2: 262) [… you are full / of shit, piss, spittle. / Pleasant odors one may seek in trees; in you, fumes].

If what is bad in man can be attributed to his stay inside the female body, then the way to purify himself of the contamination of his physical origin (and to take control of himself) is to perform an act of symbolic defecation. The logic of transgression, of impurity and danger, is a logic of the body, which should not take within its boundaries anything that it has previously expelled. Transgression is a reunion of what has been separated and deliberately kept apart, a mixing of the sullied outside with the pure inside. The only way for man to redeem himself from the degradation of being something expelled from the female body at birth is to expel the female from his own body, and the only way he can do this is symbolically, as through verbal invective against or degradation of woman, or through laws preventing women from participating in the masculine social body. As a symbolic act of defecation, misogynist literature or invective against women (conveyed by words “expelled” from men's mouths) is the equivalent of legal measures excluding women, such as the fourteenth-century decision that the French crown could be handed down only through the male line, only from father to son.¹² Even though social repression may have more harmful effects than mere nasty words on actual women or any Others, as symbolic action there is no difference between “literature” and “life”; both are texts requiring interpretation.

In arguing that the basic purposes of misogynist literature as symbolic action have remained the same from time immemorial, I do not mean to apologize for patriarchy or to suggest that all misogynist literature is alike in every respect. The particular vices woman is laden with depend on the kinds of behavior man wants to purge himself of, which may differ with the time, place, and author. The wars, plagues, schism, and other hardships of the late fourteenth century, perceived as divine “punishments” for misbehavior, may have, as Delumeau argues, encouraged even secular men at this time to project and expel their own “punishable” behavior on women, whom men must not then mingle with for fear of contamination. With his Miroir de mariage, Deschamps erects male chastity as the best protection against contracting, being polluted with, the “female” vices of compulsive competition, violence, predation, and unrestricted, insatiable appetite.

Woman in the Miroir is an inveterate predator, always on the prowl for victims:

Tousjours aguette comme uns leux
Par mi les champs, par my la voye
A ce qu'elle puist prandre proye,
Comme larron, et s'elle voit
Ung non causte, elle le deçoit
Et le tue par son resgart.

(9: 199)

[She is always prowling like a wolf / in the fields, on the road, so that she can take her prey, / robber-like, and if she sees / one who is uncautious, she deceives / and kills him with her look.]

The projection of masculine violence upon woman is particularly striking in Deschamps's interpretation of the biblical story of Susanna and the elders who accuse her of adultery for refusing their sexual demands. Initially Deschamps uses this exemplum to prove that truth will out (when a baby speaks out the elders' falsehood); later he recycles the story in order to blame the old men's crime on the violence of a predatory female beauty who seizes them and disrupts reason:

La forme et beauté de Suzanne,
Qui fut fille du viel Helcanne,
Print et deceut les deux vieillars.
Je treuve aussi entre les ars
De Seneque avec d'Aristote,
… Que beauté de femme est de rage
Le principe et commencement,
Et desvoie l'entendement
Des saiges et le conseil fraint:
… Les roys, les princes, les barons,
Les grans, les petis, les felons,
Clers, nobles, bourgois, chevaliers
Et personnes de touz mestiers
Sont tuit fraint par beauté de femme,
Et maint en ont esté infame,
Mutilés, mors et affolez,
Detranchiez, batuz, decolez
Et mis en mains aultres perilz,
Perdu corps, dampnez esperiz
Abregié le cours de leur vie.

(9: 174-75)

[The shape and beauty of Suzanne, / who was the daughter of the elderly Helcanne, / took and deceived the two old men. / I find also, in the arts of Seneca along with Aristotle, / … that the beauty of woman / is the origin and beginning of violence / and derails the understanding / of wise men and breaks up consultation. / … Kings, princes, barons, / the great, the small, the lawless, / clerics, nobles, bourgeois, knights, / and people of all occupations, / are all broken by the beauty of woman, / and many have been shamed by it, / mutilated, killed, and frenzied, / cut to pieces, beaten, beheaded, / and thrown into many other perils, / their bodies lost, their souls damned, / the courses of their lives cut short.]

The elders, like men of all estates, are transformed by this interpretation (supported by references to classical authorities) into victims of a female violence intent upon “fracturing” men, destroying their “wholeness” and their lives. As Repertory of Knowledge counsels, the way to escape such a frightening threat to masculine integrity is to avoid the sight of woman, to wall man in (and woman out).

Deschamps's lengthy catalogs demonstrating the boundlessness of feminine appetite—for sex, fancy dress, household equipment, and food (the latter especially during pregnancy)—also suggest, by their very excessiveness, that here lies another effort at making man better by making woman worse. Husbands, according to Deschamps, are the victims of a feminine sexual desire that never lets up. When women are pregnant their desire for the male is even greater:

Plus sont grosses, et plus desirent
Les hommes qui enfans leur firent;
Plus veulent ce chetif mestier
Et la compaignie traictier
De leur mari ou leur amant.

(9: 177-78)

[The further along they are in pregnancy, the more they desire the man who made their child, the more they want this base service and solicit the company of their husband or their lover.]

Deschamps continually smears the sex act with filth, conflating “ardour” with “ordure.” He accuses wives of being unable to resist any man who flatters them:

Et quant femme oit sa beauté dire,
Lors rogist, lors taint, lors fremie,
Et fait le tour de l'escremie,
Et se consent comme une beste
A l'ort pechié, vil, deshonneste,
Et se melle comme uns pourceaux
Avec cellui, avecques ceaux
Qui l'empruntent a son mari …

(9: 57)

[And when a woman hears her beauty praised, / then she blushes, then she pales, then she trembles / and accepts a round of “combat” / and consents like a beast / to the filthy sin, base, dishonorable, / and mixes like a pig / with the man, with those men, / who borrow her from her husband.]

Characteristically, it is wives (not flattering males with adulterous intentions) who are compared to pigs, insatiable, sloppy, indiscriminate feeders that constantly transgressed property limits and whose diet included waste, even excrement.¹³

Deschamps amplifies to outrageous lengths in a randomly listing style all the material things wives must have, from articles of personal dress (9: 43-46, 48-50), to articles of household equipment and food supplies (9: 46-48), to prepared foods and drinks demanded during frequent pregnancies (9: 125-27). With such lists, Deschamps castigates the boundlessness and the fluctuations of feminine appetite:

Une fois veult piez de mouton;
Or veult manger cendre ou charbon;
Or veult frommaige, or veult letue;
Or veult que son mari li tue
Un pourcel, pour manger la rate;
Or veult de l'oison une pate;
Or veult vinaigre, or veult du lait:
Or couvient autre fois qu'elle ait
De la porée de chardons …

(9: 125-26)

[One time she wants sheep's foot; / now she wants to eat ashes or charcoal; / now she wants cheese; now she wants lettuce; / now she wants her husband to kill / a young pig so that she can eat the spleen; / now she wants a gosling pie; / now she wants vinegar; now she wants milk; / yet another time she must have / thistle purée …]

On the other hand, the masculine ideal Deschamps praises in numerous ballads is an ascetic one of the closed, solitary, self-sufficient body, of the “simple country life” characterized by very strictly controlled consumption, a lifestyle that supplies only the basic physical needs.¹⁴ The ideal of near-perfect masculine stability that Deschamps represents in the brief, closed form of his ballads contrasts with the lengthy, open-ended nightmare of feminine flux represented in his Miroir de mariage, which expels and attempts to exorcise all that Deschamps fears is deserving of punishment in his own and his society's behavior by projecting this “regressive” behavior on wives.

Also revelatory of Deschamps's fears is his criticism of wives for their unrelenting, aggressive competition for social status and for goods in the marketplace. This criticism is voiced as praise (in Repertory of Knowledge's letter) through the glaringly unreliable persona of the mother-in-law, who argues that wives must be free to go where they please in order to learn courtesy and marketing. Her description of courteous behavior at church is one of the more amusing parts of the Miroir (which Deschamps recycles in ballad form [8: 156-57]). Every woman tries to outdo the others in acts of deference, with the result that courtesy becomes, not a way of restraining aggressive behavior, but a weapon women use to compete viciously for status. Each time that someone must go first—to make an offering, to kiss the pax, to go out the door of the church—the battle of deference begins again and is only temporarily resolved when the most honorable lady finally leads the pack. To behave discourteously by going first without making elaborate signs of deference is to expose oneself to the cutting, demeaning tongues of the other women, as the mother-in-law explains in describing how a wife ought to behave when offered the pax (a handled tablet, often featuring an image of the Crucifixion, kissed first by the priest celebrating the mass, then by other officiating clergy, then by the congregation):

Respondre doit la juene fame:
“Prenez, je ne prandray pas, dame.
—Si ferez, prenez, douce amie.
—Certes, je ne le prandray mie;
L'en me tendroit pour une sote.
—Baillez, damoiselle Marote.
—Non feray, Jhesucrist m'en gart!
Portez a ma dame Ermagart.
—Dame, prenez, saincte Marie,
Portez la paix a la baillie.
—Non, mais a la gouverneresse.”
Lors prant et despiece la presse,
Et les autres prannent après.
La fait on grans poses et très,
Et certes honnie seroit
Celle qui celle paix prandroit
Au premier coup sanz refuser,
Et en verriez femme ruser,
Et l'estrangler trestoute vive:
“Resgardez la meschant chetive,
Qui n'a pas vaillant une drame,
Et a prins devant celle dame
La paix et celle damoiselle:
Il n'appartenoit point a elle.
Il pert bien ou elle a esté:
Elle a encore po cousté
Pour sçavoir honeur, bien le monstre.”

(9: 110-11)

[The young wife ought to answer, / “Take it, I will not, lady.” / “Yes you will; take it, sweet friend.” / “I certainly will not; / I would be taken for a fool.” / “Accept it, damsel Marote.” / “I will not, Jesus Christ prevent me from it!” / “Pass it to milady Ermagart.” / “Lady, take it, by Saint Mary; / pass the pax to the bailiff's wife.” / “No, instead to the magistrate's wife.” / Then she takes it and breaks up the congestion, / and the others take it afterwards. / There one makes long pauses and stops; / and she would certainly be shamed / if she took the pax / on the first round without refusing, / and you would see a woman push her back / and strangle her alive: / “Look at the malicious wretch / who is not worth a penny / and takes the pax in front of this lady / and this damsel. / It was not her turn. / It's clear where she has been. / It didn't cost much / to teach her good manners, as she demonstrates so well.”]

Here we have a nightmarish version of courtesy-as-aggression that Deschamps exorcises by projecting it on women, thus purifying the center (himself as well as court society) and protecting an ideal of courtesy-as-self-control.

In another argument for the wife's liberty of movement, the mother-in-law persona praises the wife's regular inspection of the market in order to make sure that her servants are not overcharging her (9: 114-15). Repertory of Knowledge's following commentary reverses this praise, turning the wife's “marketing skills” into another sign of uncontrolled appetite and predatory instinct:

Elle marchande, elle a sa part
De tout ce qu'om vent et achate;
Elle est plus glote que la chate,
Qui boute par tout son musel.
Il n'y a bossu ne mesel,
Se barguignoit sa marchandise,
Qui n'en eust quelque friandise:
Elle trace comme uns lymiers;
Plus grant marchié a ly premiers
Et cilz qui legierement offre,
Que cilz qui tient fermé son cofre.

(9: 119)

[She bargains; she has her part / of all that man sells and buys. / She is more gluttonous than the cat / that shoves its muzzle into everything. / There isn't a hunchback or a leper, / if he haggled over the price of the sale, / who would not have a little tidbit. / She trails like a bloodhound. / The first man gets a better bargain, / and the man who offers readily, / than the one who keeps his coffer shut.]

The wife's commerce, as we gradually discover, is sexual; she bargains with her body, markets herself in return for material goods:

Du marchié fait la bourse ouvrir
Et les denrées descouvrir:
Il fault tressoirs et annelès;
Il fault frontiaulx et jouelès;
Il fault rubis, saphirs, jaconces,
Et tu aras douces responces,
Esmeraudes, perles, topaces;
Et si fault que tu lui enlaces
Ton nom et le sien bien brodé
En un chapelet bien ouvré,
Si que nul ne s'en apperçoive.
Il fault que son mari deçoive
Au revenir, qui longuement
L'a attendue …

(9: 119-20)

[She opens the purse of the marketplace / and uncovers the merchandise. / There must be hair ornaments and rings; / there must be forehead bands and precious things; / there must be rubies, sapphires, hyacinths, / and you will get sweet answers, / emeralds, pearls, topazes, / and also you must intertwine for her / your name and her own, beautifully embroidered / in a carefully worked chaplet, / in such a way that no one perceives it. / Upon returning, she must deceive / her husband, who has been waiting / a long time …]

Such competitive exchange of bodies and goods is frightening to Deschamps, who stigmatizes commerce (whether sexual or mercantile) as contaminating.

By contrast, in numerous ballads and even in brief sections of the Miroir, Deschamps idealizes a completely stable, closed society in which each person remains fixed in his estate (imagined as a sealed compartment) and uses his rents or his own labor to live “cleanly” both in spirit (by containing any act of violence, committing no sin) and in body (by covering himself with tidy, spotless clothes):

Soit riche, moien, povre ou nu,
Est de droit et raison tenu
A vivre selon ces deux poins
Nettement, que hors près ne loings
Ne face a nulle creature
Dommaige, deshonneur, injure
… Et soy par sa rente chevir
Ou son labour, et qu'il labeure.
L'autre point, qu'honnestement cuevre
Son corps, ses jambes et ses piez,
Et se ses habis estoit viez,
Qu'il ne soit ors ne descousus,
Taichiez, soilliez ne desrompus.

(9: 138)

[Whether he be rich, moderately wealthy, poor, or destitute, / he is by right and reason bound / to live cleanly according to these two points: / that, out of doors, nearby or afar, / he do no harm, dishonor, or injury / to any human being, / … and support himself on his rents / or his labor, and that he work; / the other point, that he honorably cover / his body, his legs and his feet, / and even if his clothing is old, / that it not be dirty or coming unsewn, / spotted, soiled, or torn.]

Deschamps's lengthy argument for chastity as opposed to marriage in the Miroir is a purgative; it is an obsessive effort to expel impurity—figured as wives—and thereby to attain a condition of spotless integrity protected from future contamination by enclosure, by the fixing of limits not to be transgressed. It seems very likely that Deschamps's social position in the middle (petite noblesse de robe and educated legal professional), threatened from above by the nobility and from below by merchant classes (aggressive “courtesy” and aggressive commerce), may have contributed, along with the intermittent wars, plagues, and other life-threatening events of the late fourteenth century, to Deschamps's need for protective enclosures such as his ideals of the sealed estate or of male chastity.

Deschamps shared his regulatory obsession with other poets and intellectuals of his time, even though it was still more fashionable in the late fourteenth century to express this, not through invective against wives, but through the poetry of “courtly love” addressed to ladies who were definitely not in circulation, but walled around with powerful interdictions (indeed, certain of Deschamps's ladies, as well as Machaut's, were nuns [11: 85]). In the common effort to visualize, measure, and control emotion, Froissart, in his Horloge amoureux, outdoes nearly everyone else by allegorizing his love for a lady as clockwork in a detailed comparison of his own “inner workings” to those of a mechanical clock (such as the one in the Palais Royal, which set the standard of the king's time for all of Paris beginning in 1370).¹⁵ In contrast with Froissart's more tightly controlled allegory of self-control, Deschamps may seem to have lost control of his endless Miroir de mariage. The very strength of his need for control and closure, which manifests itself in so many ways in his poetry, keeps Deschamps writing. Instead of classifying the Miroir de mariage as an unfinished work, we might more accurately consider it to be a finished work that does not end. Deschamps could have concluded his text in a formally satisfying way by simply ceasing to write after Free Will announces his decision not to marry, but Deschamps needed, through the purgative projection of his fiction, to go on “righting” what was wrong with himself and his society.

Notes

1. The Miroir de mariage fills volume nine in the Oeuvres complètes d'Eustache Deschamps, ed. Le Marquis de Queux de Saint-Hilaire and Gaston Raynaud, 11 vols. (Paris, 1878-1903). Volume eleven contains both Raynaud's biography of Deschamps and a study of the literary sources of the Miroir. Abbreviated references to this edition in the text refer to volume numbers followed by page numbers. Translations are my own.

2. Philippe de Mézières, Le songe du vieil pelerin, ed. G. W. Coopland, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969) 2: 223.

3. In addition to Raynaud's study of the Miroir's sources (11: 164-96), see, for example, R. Howard Bloch, “Medieval Misogyny,” Representations 20 (1987) 1-24.

4. The analysis that follows owes much to the following works: Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966); René Girard, La violence et le sacré (Livre de Poche, 1980); Norbert Elias, La civilisation des moeurs (Livre de Poche, 1977), La dynamique de l'Occident (Calmann-Lévy, 1976), and La société de cour (Calmann-Lévy, 1974).

5. This subject will be treated in more detail in a book I am working on, Animating the Letter: Writing and Illumination in the Middle Ages; the best reproductions of such “marginalized” behavior may be found in Lilian M. Randall, Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).

6. On the similar dress of ruler and fool and on the fools of French kings in the late fourteenth century, see Le sceptre et la marotte (Fayard, 1983) 63-65, 159-69.

7. Jean Delumeau, La peur en Occident (Fayard, 1978) 411; translation is mine.

8. Cited by Delumeau 409.

9. H. C. Hoskier, ‘De contemptu mundi’: A Bitter Satirical Poem of 3000 Lines upon the Morals of the XIIth Century by Bernard of Morval, Monk of Cluny (London: B. Quaritch, 1929) 52-55, vv. 445-518. My translation makes no attempt to do justice to Bernard's elaborate Latin word play.

10. Aline Rousselle, Porneia: De la maîtrise du corps à la privation sensorielle, IIe-IVe siècles de l'ère chrétienne (PUF, 1983) 183-226.

11. Rousselle, on classical gynaecology (37-63, 85-102).

12. Delumeau 331.

13. On the transgressions of the domestic pig, see Deschamps's ballad on pigs (6: 241-43) and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).

14. Deschamps's ideal of the self-sufficient body is treated briefly in my essay, “La poésie pastorale de Eustache Deschamps: Miroir de mentalité à la fin du 14e siècle,” Romanistische Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte 7 (1983) 31-33, 36-38, 43; it will receive more attention in my book on Deschamps and the late fourteenth century, The Corpus Enclosed.

15. On the mechanical clock as an instrument of government, see Jacques Le Goff, Pour un autre moyen âge (Gallimard, 1977) 76.