For no effect of tyranny can sit more heavy on the Commonwealth, then this houshold unhappiness on the family. Love in marriage cannot live nor subsist, unless it be mutual; and where love cannot be, there can be left of wedlock nothing, but the empty husk of an outside matrimony; as undelightfull and unpleasing to God, as any other kind of hypocrisie. Milton, Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce , 2nd, Among unequals what society Can sort, what harmony or true delight?
In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer's fascination with the interactions between individual being, predominant social practices and received ideas focussed on those living within the institution of marriage. Here I think we will respond to the poetry more fully if we recall some basic points about marriage in Chaucer's period. Marriage was primarily a transaction organized by males to serve economic and political ends, with the woman treated as a useful, child-bearing appendage to the land or goods being exchanged.
Weddings were often arranged and sometimes solemnized when children were in their cradles. Grown women could also be summarily married off. Conventional male attitudes to this institution, and the place of women in it, are well displayed in two works contemporary with Chaucer, the book translated by Eileen Power under the title The Goodman of Paris , and The Book of the Knight of the Tower.
The former was written by a man of over sixty to his fifteen-year-old wife, and includes a host of exempla to show the woman her duties of unquestioning submission and minute attention to the husband's every need, while insisting she should love him devotedly. The following is a representative illustration: 2. For to show what I have said, that you ought to be very privy and loving with your husband, I set here a rustic ensample.
(mh=eObUC18wbXglnUNl)0.jpg "Sex guide in Troyes")
Of domestic animals you shall see how that a greyhound or mastiff or little dog, whether it be on the road, or at table, or in bed, ever keepeth him close to the person from whom he taketh his food and leaveth all the others and is distant and shy with them; and if the dog is afar off, he always has his heart and his eye upon his master; even if his master whip him and throw stones at him, the dog followeth, wagging his tail and lying down before his master to appease him, and through rivers, through woods, through thieves and through battles followeth him.
