State of Matrimony, Erasmus, Conjugium, Socrates, marriage, Xanthippe, drunkenness, philosopher, tyranny
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178
State of Matrimony’, the husband can nurture concord with his wife if he “will use measurableness and not tyranny, and if he yield some things to the woman”. Thus, he “ought to wink at some things and must gently expound all things and [should] forbear” (p.16). This advice is informed by a belief in the turbulence of married life if husbands fail to adopt such behaviour: “How few matrimonies there be without chidings, brawlings, tauntings, repentings, bitter cursings, and fightings” (p.15). Erasmus’s ‘Conjugium’ also works upon the assumption that couples have a tendency to commit acts of violence upon one another, and the dialogue offers banal guidance for avoiding such disputes. Eulalia counsels her friend Xanthippe, the spouse of Socrates, upon how to defuse the spirited brawls in which she and her husband engage, and thereby to bring their relationship towards understanding and accord. One strategy she advises, for instance, is for wives to indiscriminately show “submissiveness and courtesy” to their husbands.
313
Socrates’s marriage to Xanthippe provided reformers with a model for persevering with discordant marriages at a time when divorce was only granted in exceptional cases, and when annulment or separation of bed and board were often difficult to secure or impractical.
314 ‘An Homily of the State of Matrimony’, for instance, describes how the philosopher turned his wife’s raillery and drunkenness to his advantage by treating her behaviour as a means to put his tolerance to the test (pp.23-4).
315
When presenting himself in a similarly unhappy marriage, William Gray, the adversary of Thomas Smyth encountered in Chapter Two, extracts no such compensation for suffering under his wife’s tyranny. His ‘An Epitaphe Written by W. G. to be Set vpon his Owne Graue’ (Tottel, no. 255) describes how his irascible wife drove him to an untimely end.
313 Thompson trans. (1997), XXXIX. pp.306-27 (p.312).
314 Houlbrooke (1984), pp.114-16.
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