The Language of Abuse: Marital Violence in Later Medieval England.

Salisbury, Eve

The Language of Abuse: Marital Violence in Later Medieval England, by Sara M. Butler. Leiden, Brill, 2007. xiv, 286 pp. $130.00 US (cloth).

Sara Butler's book contributes significantly to what we know about marital violence in late medieval England. She broadens the scope of the more typical ecclesiastical court assessments to include records of manor and borough courts, the king's court, coroners' rolls, gaol deliveries, confessors' manuals, and select works of literary, visual, and dramatic art. She also narrows her focus to two major regions--Yorkshire and Essex. As the title suggests, Butler provides evidence of how the language of abuse, apparent in various ways in these sources, tells us something about spousal relations and prevailing attitudes toward marital discord. As she makes clear from the beginning "medieval society left it to husbands to negotiate the limits of force," rendering the term "chastisement" subject to interpretation (p. 65). Often, the boundary between correction and abuse was indicated by the use of a weapon and/or a beating sufficiently violent to cause grave injury or death.

Neither the ecclesiastical establishment nor the laity deemed wife beating to be an acceptable practice, however. Rather, the evidence suggests a "widespread repugnance for marital violence and a chivalrous desire to protect women from abuse; the coroners' rolls demonstrate, however, that jurors thought only certain women deserved protection" (p. 225). Women deemed worthy of protection exhibited behaviours consistent with the stereotype of the "good" wife--obedient, silent, uncritically supportive--while women at risk for abuse and treated harshly by the courts were judged to be "shrews" or "scolds." Not surprisingly, the phrase "disobedient wife" is echoed frequently in the testimony of guilty husbands to justify their abuse.

When disparities between an imagined nuptial ideal and the realities of married life are acknowledged to be part of the social fabric, satire and parody can never be very far behind. Depictions of wives beating their husbands such as those carved into the misericords of a number of English churches indicate recognition of the problem and the comic relief often deployed to defuse its disruptive potential. Representations such as these also function, Butler argues, to remind husbands of the possibility of public humiliation: "[b]ecause it is his [the husband's] responsibility to instruct his wife on acceptable and moral conduct, her inability to act accordingly marks his failure" (p. 60). A man who knew when and how much force to apply in the discipline of his wife was expected to be "much happier in his marriage" (ibid.).

The difference between actual life and artistic representation may also be explained by comparing characters such as the Wife of Bath or Uxor Noe with vocally aggressive "real world" women who could find themselves on a cucking stool or fitted with a "scold's bridle, an iron mask intended to still the tongue," for using language in a similar way (p. 231). Such aggressive women, whether imagined or actual, literally embodied the potential for domestic rebellion both within the household and beyond. Butler's contextualization of literary constructions of disobedient wives within a "growing anxiety over social misbehaviours in fourteenth and fifteenth century England, specifically concerning scolding women" extends associations between marriage and the larger community and underscores a perceived need for social control across the board (p. 228).

While representations of mundus inversus and the garrulous female characters mentioned above suggest widespread acknowledgment of a vexing social problem, the "modest number of documented cases of physical abuse" from the two regions under investigation seem to indicate otherwise. Of "233 cases in which a spouse was accused of conjugal homicide 152 (or 65 percent) were alleged uxoricides" carried out exclusively by the husband (p. 90). By way of contrast, the murder of a husband was presumed to require an accomplice because "medieval jurors found it difficult to imagine a wife capable of committing such a monstrous crime without the guidance of others" (ibid.). And while husband-killing could be considered petty treason (a more serious felony), acquittal rates were high: "of the forty-nine cases of husband-killing tried before royal justices in the courts of medieval Yorkshire and Essex, thirty-two women were acquitted, fourteen burned, two hanged, and another convicted (without any indication of the penalty assigned)" (p. 91). Spousal homicide was an extreme response to marital conflict, of course, and intervention from the community (kin, friends, neighbours), according to Butler, did much to thwart the escalation of violence before it reached this degree of intensity. As Butler puts it, "with the abundance of options available to couples and communities for the official and unofficial resolution of violent marriages, couples may have found the causes of marital violence eliminated before they had an opportunity to escalate to the point of homicide" (p. 97).

Difficult as it appears to have been for a wife to defend herself in the medieval courts, there is evidence to suggest that some women were able to manipulate the system. Butler presents six case studies (from the late fourteenth to early sixteenth centuries) that demonstrate how battered wives argued against the grain (marital reconciliation), offering instead "a view to retreating from marriage" (p. 168). Moreover, Butler's observations of a suspicious correlation between the narratives told in court and popular hagiography suggests that "plaintiffs might have embellished their tales of abuse" (p. 177). Cecilia Wyvell, whose husband Henry beat her so severely that he knocked her eye out of its socket, echoes the legend of St. Lucy, who was said to have had her eyes ripped out by her torturers (or plucked them out herself, in another version). Butler sees the blending of testimony with hagiography and other narratives as significant acts of female agency by women willing to "jeopardize their souls through creative fabrication of some details" (p. 183).

There is much to be said to recommend this study. That Butler explores the relation between the language of abuse and its representation in the law and other genres in a carefully documented, analytical way is laudable. That she writes energetically and fluently while providing necessary legal backgrounds and case studies makes reading this informative book a pleasure as well as a valuable enterprise.

Eve Salisbury

Western Michigan University