marriage, Catholic faith, matrimonial authority, Ephesians, epistle, married life, behaviour of wives, contemptus mundi, unhappy marriage, paternalism, Book of Common Prayer

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161

Aunswere’ (no. 256), blames an unhappy marriage upon an overbearing husband’s excessive and intemperate chiding of his wife, while no. 258, ‘An Answere’, insists that since women lack moral agency they are dependant upon husbands’ exercising “force and skyll” in their paternal duty (l.17). Both these verses respond to ones that offer unappealing portraits of married life in which there occurs an abnegation of responsibility for the moral welfare and behaviour of wives. As a group these four poems convey the message that good paternal governance within marriage is a matter of temperance and degree, of finding a mean between the conduct of the overly zealous husband of no. 255 and the husband of no. 257 who has renounced responsibility for women’s moral welfare since both “bad and good/ Wives bring mischief” (ll.11-12). In this way these poems reflect the reformers’ tempering of the paternalism of Peter’s epistle to the Ephesians with the moderation of Paul’s first Epistle in matters of matrimonial authority. ²⁸³ In these verses, and in the others I examine, the wide-ranging Catholic-Protestant controversies become subsumed into the subject of marriage. As a supposedly Catholic ideal, the single life becomes a metonym for the Catholic faith and, as a Protestant ideal, married life becomes a metonym for Protestantism.

The commonplace macrocosmic contemptus mundi debate waged between cynic and

²⁸² Carlson (1994), p.47.

²⁸³ St. Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians enjoins “wives [to] submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord./ For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church” (5:22-3). Peter makes a similar recommendation in his first Epistle (3:1-5). This is tempered, however, by a depiction of marriage in which responsibility for maintaining an equilibrium of tranquility falls upon both parties. He follows his injunction to wives with the following dictum for husbands:

Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honour unto
the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life;
that your prayers be not hindered. (3:7)

The importance accorded to these two scriptural sources is reflected by the marriage service as set out in the Book of Common Prayer in which they are reiterated as injunctions setting out the

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