Conjugal Rights in Flux in Medieval Poetry Page: 2
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women and their actions as subjects exercising newfound rights.2 By not only exploring the
impact medieval law had on literature but also by concentrating on how these laws affected the
representation of female literary characters from the Anglo-Saxons to Chaucer, I build on
Steiner's and Barrington's scholarship and gesture towards that of Richard Firth Green, who
argues that the literature and the law are parallel discourses.3 While Steiner, Barrington, and
Green have thought about the similar production of literature and law, there is still a dearth of
scholarship that considers the evolving legal system in relation to the perception of female
autonomy in the Middle Ages. This thesis attempts to fill this gap. To do so, I focus on important
differences between canon and common law that invite early and late medieval authors to
mobilize women in their works as opponents to unappealing legislation. These agentive female
protagonists ultimately promote legislation that reinforces gender egalitarianism in marriage.
Canon law in Anglo-Saxon and fourteenth-century England supported a certain degree of
female agency in marriage. Under Anglo-Saxon law, wives received more inheritance rights than
they did in the fourteenth century. As seen in the law codes of Wulfstan and in V IEthelraed and
VI IEthelraed, wives, with or without their husband's discretion, had the authority to retain
property after their husbands died.4 According to canon law a century later, the importance of the
dual consent between a man and women entering a marriage began to be emphasized, even
though widows' property rights became less stable due to its transition into the common law's
2 Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington, The Letter of the Law (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2001), 2.
3 Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), xvi.
4 For more on Wulfstan's interest in widow's rights, see Stephanie Hollis, "'The Protection of God and
the King': Wulfstan's Legislation on Widows," Wulfstan, Archbishop of York: the Proceedings of the
Second Alcuin Conference, ed. Matthew Townend, Studies in the Early Middle Ages 10 (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2004), 443-60.2
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Ward, Jessica D. Conjugal Rights in Flux in Medieval Poetry, thesis, May 2014; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500176/m1/7/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .