Published in 1985
The Goodman of Paris
Excerpt from The Goodman of Paris Published in 1928
In the 1300s and 1400s, as Europe passed from the Middle Ages into the beginnings of the Renaissance (RIN-uh-sah-nts), trade was increasing, cities were growing, and a new middle and working class appeared. Both groups, an essential part of a growing economy, fell between the rich and the poor: the middle class were typically owners of small businesses, and the working class were less educated (and usually less wealthy) people who worked with their hands.
As contact between various classes increased, so did awareness of social rank and the need for rules governing such contact. This was particularly important with regard to relationships between men and women. Here class barriers were not so important as were traditional male and female roles, though it appears that the author of The Goodman of Paris had married a woman of a higher class. This, along with the fact that she was a teenager and he was clearly a man much older, indicates that he may have felt a need to keep her under control, as the excerpt from his instructions to her suggests. (The term "goodman" was a medieval word meaning "master of the house"; as for the author of The
"And besides encouraging the others, the wife herself should be involved in the work to the extent that she knows all about it, so that she may know how to oversee his workers if her husband is absent, and to reprove them if they do not do well."
From The Treasure of the City of Ladies
"I have often wondered how I might find a simple general introduction to teach you.... [M]e-seems that... it can be accomplished in this way, namely in a general instruction that I will write for you."
From The Goodman of Paris 81
Christine de Pisan (kneeling) offers a manuscript to Isabel of Bavaria, Queen of France.
Reproduced by permission of the Corbis Corporation.
Goodman of Paris, he was an anonymous Paris merchant of the 1390s.)
Christine de Pisan (pee-ZAHN; sometimes spelled Pizan; 1364-c. 1430), perhaps the most well known female author of medieval times, offered a different view of marital relations in a passage called "Of the Wives of Artisans and How They Ought to Conduct Themselves," from The Treasure of the City of Ladies.
Christine de Pisan
The trials of single motherhood, making a living in a male-dominated world, trying to raise a family on the income of a working mom—these all sound like problems specific to many modern women, but in fact they characterized the career of Christine de Pisan.
Born in the Italian city of Venice, Christine was raised in the court of France's King Charles V (ruled 1364-80), for whom her father worked as court astrologer. When she was fifteen, she married the king's secretary, Etienne du Castel (ay-tee-AN). By the time Christine was twenty-five years old, however, she had lost not only her husband, but her father and her king.
Not only that, but she had three children to raise.
Christine continued to serve in the French court, which was her "day job," but she also began to write poems and other works for patrons, or wealthy supporters. She went on to become perhaps the best-known female writer of the Middle Ages, and in her work she defended the status of women against many outspoken male critics. Among her notable writings were The Book of the Three Virtues, also known as The Treasure of the City of Ladies; an autobiography called The Vision of Christine; and a poem celebrating another notable woman of fifteenth-century France, Joan of Arc.
She depicted a situation in which neither age nor class separated a husband and wife, and she took for granted the fact that the power in the home resided in the hands of the woman. Perhaps this was the secret view of the Goodman, which would further explain his need to control his young wife.
World History
