Reformation, marriage, propaganda, procreation, blessing, Greek Anthology, Planudes, Roman, funerary inscriptions, Greek, Turbervile

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matrimony borne out of a combination of mutual affection and pragmatic consideration here. The advocating of mercenary marriage in these lines departs from the spirit of Reformation marriage propaganda, while their mutual acceptance that procreation is a blessing remains in keeping with the Protestant message. The answer continues to commodify women in the lines, “For sure though some be shrewes as some there be,/ (As of the sheepe are some that beare no wull)” (ll.29-30). This echoes such a commodifying attitude as that which condoned the rare practice of wife selling whereby an unwanted spouse could be presented “in the public market-place in the guise of a beast for sale”. ³⁰³ While this commodification of women reflects actual social attitudes, ³⁰⁴ it also weaves in a classical marriage motif. His metaphor of woman as sheep is not found in any other reworkings of the Greek Anthology poems. Possibly it reflects his awareness of qualities admired in women in the classical world that would have been familiar to him from other verses collected by Planudes. ³⁰⁵ The production of wool was a much praised activity of wives in the classical world, and is often mentioned in Greek and Roman funerary inscriptions; something that I discuss in more detail below. Turbervile’s metaphor merely

³⁰³ Mendelson and Crawford (1998), p.141. See also Carlson (1994), p.131 and Laurence

(1994), p.54.
³⁰⁴ In his De Institutione Feminae Christianae, for instance, Juan Luis Vives reminds wives that their bodies are the property of their husbands and that to commit adultery is “to gyve away that thynge, whiche is an other bodies, without the ownners licence”, The Instruction of a Christen Woman, trans. Richard Hyrde (printed by Thomas Berthelet, ca. 1529), ed. Virginia Walcott Beauchamp, Elizabeth H. Hageman, and Margaret Mikesell et al (Chicago: Illinois UP, 2001), Bk. 2, III. xci. An electronic edition is available at: http://www.press.uillinois.edu/epub/books/vives/toc.html. Subsequent references for this text are given in parentheses following quotations.

³⁰⁵ See, for instance, The Greek Anthology, ed. W. R. Paton, 5 vols (Heinemann; NY: Putnam, 1916), I. no. 247, no. 250, nos 283-4 and nos 288-9. As John Erskine Hankins observes, many of Turbervile’s epigrams are translated from the Greek Anthology, ‘The Life and Works of George Turbervile’, HSt, 25 (1940), p.74. Turbervile was a prolific writer of epitaphs and, even if he did not know of the motif through the Greek Anthology, his miscellany indicates that he was sufficiently familiar with classical poetry to have encountered it elsewhere (see Erskine Hankins, p.76).

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