Medieval Conduct

2001

Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark, editors

What do books on how to behave tell us about society during the Middle Ages?

Focusing on a broad range of texts from England, France, Germany, and Italy—conduct and courtesy books, advise poems, devotional literature, trial records—the contributors to Medieval Conduct draw attention to the diverse ways in which readers of this literature could interpret such behavioral guides, appropriating them to their own ends.

Contributors: Mark Addison Amos, Anna Dronzek, Roberta L. Krueger, Ruth Nissé, Ann Marie Rasmussen, Jennifer Fisk Rondeau, Claire Sponsler.

This collection is engaging, exciting, and well researched. The authors write with theoretical sophistication while taking a novel approach to the study of conduct literature.

Laurie A. Finke, author of Women’s Writing in English: Medieval England.

Focusing on a broad range of texts from England, France, Germany, and Italy—conduct and courtesy books, advice poems, devotional literature, trial records—the contributors to Medieval Conduct draw attention to the diverse ways in which readers of this literature could interpret such behavioral guides, appropriating them to their own ends.

Medieval Conduct expands the concept of conduct to include historicized practices, and theorizes the connection between texts and their concrete social uses; what emerges is a nuanced interpretation of the role of gender and class inscribed in such texts. By bringing to light these subtleties and complexities, the authors also reveal the ways in which the assumptions of literary history have shaped our reception of such texts in the past two centuries.

Contributors: Mark Addison Amos, Southern Illinois U; Anna Dronzek, U of Minnesota, Morris; Roberta L. Krueger, Hamilton College; Ruth Nissé, U of Nebraska-Lincoln; Ann Marie Rasmussen, Duke U; Jennifer Fisk Rondeau, U of Oregon; and Claire Sponsler, U of Iowa.

Kathleen Ashley is professor of English at the University of Southern Maine. Robert L. A. Clark is associate professor of French at Kansas State University.

This collection is engaging, exciting, and well researched. The authors write with theoretical sophistication while taking a novel approach to the study of conduct literature.

Laurie A. Finke, author of Women’s Writing in English: Medieval England.

Scholars of medieval literature will undoubtedly find this collection thought-provoking.

History: Reviews of New Books

This excellent collection of essays provides a much-needed assessment of the status of conduct literature in current medieval studies.

Arthuriana

Ashley and Clark’s collection of imaginative, engaging, and theoretically informed essays presents a new vision of conduct literature. Filled with insights.

Speculum

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Medieval Conduct: Texts, Theories, Practices Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark

1. Eating Lessons: Lydgate’s “Dietary” and Consumer Conduct Claire Sponsler
2. “For Manners Make Man”: Bourdieu, de Certeau, and the Common Appropriation of Noble Manners in the Book of Courtesy Mark Addison Amos
3. “Nouvelles choses”: Social Instability and the Problem of Fashion in the Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry, the Ménagier du Paris, and Christine de Pizan’s Livre des Trois Vertus Roberta L. Krueger
4. The Miroir des bonnes femmes: Not for Women Only? Kathleen Ashley
5. Fathers to Think Back Through: The Middle High German Mother-Daughter and Father-Son Advice Poems Known as Die Winsbeckinand Der Winsbecke Ann Marie Rasmussen
6. Gendered Theories of Education in Fifteenth-Century Conduct Books Anna Dronzek
7. Constructing the Female Subject in Late Medieval Devotion Robert L. A. Clark
8. Conducting Gender: Theories and Practices in Italian Confraternity Literature Jennifer Fisk Rondeau
9. Grace under Pressure: Conduct and Representation in the Norwich Heresy Trials Ruth Nissé

Contributors

Index