Wicked Wives and the Insatiable Virgin: Reading the Codicological Unconscious in a Fragment of MS Bodley 851

Abstract:Modern scholars, imagining the reading experience infamously evoked by Jankyn's "book of wicked wives," usually interpret medieval misogamous writing through a patristic and clerkly tradition dominated by Jerome. But surviving compilations rarely display the thematic unity of Jankyn's anthology or neatly reproduce familiar formulations of the Hieronymian tradition. Rather, in their juxtapositions of unlike texts, these manuscripts provide material indications of how medieval misogamy might have been conceived differently by the scribes who prepared such miscellanies and the readers who encountered them. In order to examine the cultural and imaginative assumptions that grounded material and textual compilation in mixed-content manuscripts, this essay attends to the "codicological unconscious" of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 851. Specifically, it examines the obsession with feminine insatiability shared by two wholly unlike poems that survive exclusively and contiguously in a single scribal hand in the earliest material fragment of Bodley 851. Where the Ave virgo mater christi (Hail Virgin Mother of Christ) imagines insatiability as a laudable aspect of the Virgin Mary's pure erotic relationship with God, the De coniuge non ducenda (On the Necessity of Avoiding Marriage) imagines insatiability as a despicable aspect of the wife's proclivity for sexual transgression. Although this topical conjunction does not generate any overarching conceptual synthesis or competing misogamous ideology, it nevertheless illuminates how the experience of reading—recuperated via attention to singular manuscript contexts—can produce harmonies and tensions otherwise obscured.