Chapter 3: Reforming Propaganda in Answer-Poetry upon Marriage, 1550-1570

In the 1550s and 1560s there appears a small cluster of answer-poems that respond to misogynist contemptus mundi verses upon the subject of marriage by dismissing their disdain for married life. These are lighthearted set pieces simulating the social dialogism of interpersonal verse exchanges in order to fulfil the serious purpose of disseminating the commonplaces of Reformation marriage guidance to their readership through the medium of fictional debates. Frequently, they are derivative of pieces by prominent reformers upon the subject of marriage, including Latin answer-poems by the Protestant theologian and educator, Theodore de Beze and Erasmus’s Latin translations and adaptations of poems from the Planudean Anthology. ²⁷³

These poems, which supplemented a wealth of reforming literature upon the subject of marriage, provided an additional, entertaining medium through which basic marriage guidance could be disseminated, and a ground upon which the literary war between reformers and conservatives or Catholics could be staged. As such, these answers do not necessarily provide an accurate reflection of actual social practices, but they do reflect closely the concerns about the status of marriage that began to be circulated zealously from

²⁷³ Erasmus, of course, was reclaimed as a harbinger of Protestantism whose argument that marriage provided an antidote to fornication, and whose attacks upon clerical abuses, played a significant role in rendering his work acceptable to later generations. He writes in the Encomium Matrimonii,

Let the swarms of monks and nuns […] boast and brag their bellies full of their ceremonies and church service, wherein they chiefly pass all other: yet is wedlock, being well and truly kept, a most holy kind of life. Again, would to God they were gelded in very deed, whatsoever they be, that color their naughty living with such a jolly name of gelding, living in much more filthy lust under the cloak and pretense of chastity.

Quoted from Thomas Wilson’s translation, ‘An Epistle to Persuade a Young Gentleman to Marriage, Devised by Erasmus, in the Behalf of his Friend’, in The Arte of Rhetoric (1560), ed. Peter E. Medine (Pennsylvania State UP, 1994), pp.79-100 (pp.89-90). Subsequent references for this text are given in parentheses following quotations.