Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval English Literature.
- Author/Editor
- Kennedy, Kathleen Erin
- Title
- Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval English Literature.
- Published
- Kennedy, Kathleen Erin. "Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval English Literature." New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 ISBN 9780230606661
- Review
- Borrowing a trope from Barbara Hannawalt, Kennedy presents maintenance--the "lord-retainer relationship”--in the eyes of most late medieval English folk as akin to how the “Mob” would have seemed to residents of 1920s Chicago: “From your perspective, the Mob does bad things: it kills people, and it corrupts government and law. But at the same time you recognize that the Mob does good things as well: it can make obtaining goods and social services easier and less expensive, and may curtail some kinds of crime” (1). Marriage comes into it because, Kennedy argues, Middle English writers used the husband-wife model, and that of master-servant, as safer stand-ins for the lord-retainer relationship, ever a target, albeit just beneath the surface: “because of the status of the lords involved…criticism of this dynamic could be dangerously political” (6). Kennedy draws on the letter collections of the Stonors, Pastons and Plumptons to illustrate “different sorts of service relationships,” and to provide an introduction to fifteenth-century litigation, by way of grounding her more literary material. Similarly--again as a grounding model--she examines legal discourse and precedent in rape cases, because “rape forced medieval legal officials and writers to consider the degree to which autonomy was compromised as the responsibilities of service clashed with the sense of autonomy modern readers associate with ‘free will,’ particularly in the social, legal, and religious institution of marriage” (12). In her fourth chapter she takes up contemporary works addressing the maintenance directly: Chaucer’s Melibee, Langland’s Lady Meed, the “Arthuriad” section of Lydgate’s "Fall of Princes." Her final chapter considers “the relationships between masters and a particular category of servants: lawyers” (13). Here Kennedy finds the "Mirour de l’Omme" and "Vox Clamantis" especially valuable, and devotes the bulk of her chapter to showing that “legal professionals and the equity of the law suffered when service was involved. The question began to become whether a lawyer’s lord was a man or the law itself. Which institutions or individuals had the right to constrain a lawyer’s autonomy?...Gower seeks to map out the problem in detail . . .” (13). She finds Gower’s witness valuable not only for its detail, but also because she takes it for granted that Gower “was probably a lawyer or other legal official” (89, 149, n.1). Kennedy’s is the closest reader to take so seriously those sections of the MO and VC dealing with her subject. Placed in the broader context she establishes (Chapter 5 also includes Hoccleve’s "Regement of Princes"), her insights are especially thought-provoking. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2.]
- Date
- 2009
- Gower Subjects
- Vox Clamantis
- Biography of Gower
- Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis)