Marriage Promises in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
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Biheste is dette,” said Chaucer’s Man of Law when it was his turn to tell his Tale. A promise is an obligation, and the Man of Law, like his fellow pilgrims on the way to Canterbury, had agreed to contribute to an effort to help their travel time pass in ways that would provide both moral instruction and pleasant entertainment for everyone in the group. This essay focuses, however, not on what Mary Louise Pratt refers to as the “natural narrative framework” made possible by the twenty-nine pilgrims’ agreement to be guided by the gregarious Host of the Tabard Inn (67), but on another promise, the marriage promise, as it functions within some of their Tales. I will be interested here in the various ways that characters in stories told by the Canterbury pilgrims fulfill, or do not fulfill, their marital obligations, and on the special demands that some characters make of their partners. The basic quid pro quo debtor-creditor relationship of the marriage agreement, as Joseph Allen Hornsby, citing E.M. Makowski’s earlier study of medieval marriage and its canonical sources,[1] spells it out in Chaucer and the Law, will thus provide a useful starting point. Hornsby writes that Like a monetary debt, the marriage debt was something that was owed by one person to another. But, according to canon law, unlike a monetary debt, the marriage debt was a mutual obligation owed by spouses to one another by virtue of the sacrament of marriage and not by virtue of some exchange for value. The marriage debt was the mutual duty shared by husand and wife to perform sexually at each other’s request. It was to be granted freely by one spouse upon the need of the other. This conjugal obligation served to keep the marriage bond solidified through the sexual union of husand and wife. The wife had as equal a right as the husband to exact payment of the debt. Neither spouse had the right to withhold its payment. (101) More : accessmylibrary.com |