Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index


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1. Record Number: 6925
Author(s): Ashley, Kathleen.
Contributor(s):
Title : The "Miroir des bonnes Femmes": Not for Women Only? ["To read the 'Miroir des bonnes femmes' as relating only to women, therefore, would be to misunderstand its role in the formation of new ideologies during the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. The conjunction of female-based rhetoric, familial identities, and the promise of social advancement through proper conduct marks the first stage of a distinctive bourgeois ideology that will be fully articulated and culturally dominant by the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Despite the assumption, perhaps, on the part of conduct book owners that they are justifying a claim to 'noble' rank, it is in bourgeois culture that female honor is made the symbolic basis of a family's social reputation. As they cultivated that reputation and fostered a process of social advancement, fathers as well as their daughters therefore had a vital interest in owning conduct texts addressed to women." p. 102].
Source: Medieval Conduct.   Edited by Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark .   Medieval Cultures, Volume 29. University of Minnesota Press, 2001.  Pages 86 - 105.
Year of Publication: 2001.