Damned Wives, Wicked Wives: Marital Conflicts in Medieval English Drama
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.48162/rev.35.007Keywords:
Middle Ages, medieval drama, mystery plays, parody, marriage, women, domestic violence, sexismAbstract
Medieval English drama, in the form of Mystery Cycles, is often a source of information about the idiosyncratic social, political or even religious conflicts of the medieval contemporary society. Most of the times, these conflicts are portrayed with clear comic overtones. Among the most popular ones in these plays, the marital conflicts serve to portray an unambiguous sexist view of the wife as the source of all the suffering of the husband, in particular, and of the medieval society in general. Notwithstanding the religious context and the theological interpretation of these conflicts, they address current social issues such as domestic violence, the criminalization of women and the sexist vision of an institution, marriage, created to be used as a social and even political control tool.
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