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Nothing Bad about The Wicked Wife

© Jessica Cresseveur

In December, I had the pleasure of taking Barbara Neubauer's Suite University course entitled The Wicked Wife. As a feminist scholar, I was eager to extend my knowledge of attitudes toward women throughout history. If you have read my bio and my articles, you already know that my area of historical expertise is late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century France. To expand my horizons, I regularly research women artists and women's history from other eras (usually mid-nineteenth century to the present) on my own time. Because the course summary of The Wicked Wife points out that the title of the course is based on a medieval tale, I knew that I would be learning something new that I could very well find useful when writing future articles.

In a nutshell, The Wicked Wife as a whole deals with positive and negative views of women and marriage in what is now Germany during the late Middle Ages and the very early Northern Renaissance. The introduction (Lesson 1) deals with the tale of the "wicked wife," which warned of the domineering woman who would soon turn her husband cuckolded. It was one rendition of a wider fear throughout the patriarchal world that women, if not kept in "their place," would turn the world upside down and rule men.

Lesson 2 is called "The Bad Wife." It deals with advice from writers to single men in choosing a wife (or better yet, the wrong reasons to marry, such as physical attraction), adultery, characteristics of a bad wife, and themes from daily medieval life as pointed out in sermons and other forms of marriage instructions. Neubauer points out in the introduction that the topic of the "bad wife" was a hotter topic during the Middle Ages than that of the "good wife," possibly because the former was deemed more interesting.

Lesson 3 focuses on the often-neglected "Good Wife." Here, Neubauer outlines the characteristics that Judeo-Christian theology attributes to women who make good wives, reasons that both contemporary writers and biblical scriptures offer as to why men should marry, and the thoughts of various theologians as to how wives should behave. These writings served to draw a contrast between the "good wife" and the "bad wife."

Lesson 4, the final lesson of the course, is called "Perspectives of Gender Relations." Generally speaking, this lesson informs the student how medieval German men and women related to each other. Subtopics include the husband's expectations, how women were defined, and gender identity. One interesting point brought up in this lesson is that men should be careful to not "give" women too many children, (1) as this would give her too much power. Barren wives, on the other hand, were believed to be more easily controlled.

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