Lombard remarks that a sacrament is “the visible form of an invisible grace,” yet how can one visualize the invisible grace? The “visible form” of matrimony will be a point of departure. If we look at the iconography of marriage which depicts a wedding ceremony, the act of marrying is consecrated to embody a numerical relationship. Edwin Hall provides a couple of iconographies of marriage in his book.9 Plate 5 entitled “The Sacrament of Marriage”10 depicts a wedding ceremony at which a priest is drawing a husband and a wife together by the joining of their right hands. Behind each of the couple stand his and her kith and kin attending the ceremony. Interestingly, the arrangement of the position of the married couple as well as their kith and kin at church porch reflects the influence of the “Great Theory”:
the guests are segregated by gender, and the visual reference to the proportionate relation between female guests and male guests demonstrates an aesthetics of proportion. In Figure 9 “The Marriage of Moses and Sephora,”11 and Figure 20
“The Marriage of Saint Waudru”12 again, the newlyweds take the central position of the frame, and the guests are segregated by gender, with women accompanying the bride and men the groom. Artists had made the formal joining of a couple be endowed with the beauty of proportion from these iconographies of matrimony. The visual as well as gender balance support an aesthetic interpretation of the matrimonial ceremony. The textual and visual references to a matrimonial joining of right hands
9 The iconographies of marriage reduplicated in Hall’s Arnolfini Betrothal, especially the images following page 26 with plates 1-10, and pages 35-47 with figures 11-22, depict matrimonial ceremonies that clearly reveal an aesthetics of proportion.
10 The Sacrament of Marriage. L’art de bien vivre, Paris, 1492, vellum exemplar. San Marino, California, The Huntington Library (Hall, following page 26).
11 The Marriage of Moses and Sephora, Nave mosaic, 432-40. Rome, Santa Maria Maggiore. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, New York (Hall 21).
12 The Marriage of Saint Waudru. Chroniques de Haniaut, vol. II, Bruges, 1468. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale albert Ier, ms. 9243, following 103r (Hall 43).
and the parallel position of the couple are theologically and aesthetically significant not only because of a one-to-one mathematical correspondence but also because of the
“emblematic depictions of the married state, epitomizing the concordia, or harmony, between the spouses characteristic of an ideal marriage” (Hall 19-20). Thus the relationship between matrimonial ceremony and the aesthetics of proportion can be concretized through the iconography of marriage.
What has been demonstrated about the correspondence between the theory of proportion and marriage as well as the wedding ceremony can equally be applied to the marriages portrayed in Chaucer’s Tales since they all belong to the same religious context. In the Tales, the focus is more on the development of the marriage life rather than on the wedding ceremony itself, yet it shall be beneficial to draw from the symbolic meaning in the iconography of marriage to reflect the religious and aesthetic contexts in the Tales.
III. Proportions of age, estate and religion between the couples in the Tales
When talking about medieval marriage, we tend to think and ask: By what criteria do people judge the quality of marriage? In Chaucer’s Tales, how do his pilgrims decide that a marriage demonstrates a certain unity, order and hence beauty?
In Alan Macfarlane’s words, marriage “was not something automatic and universal … occurring like any natural event. It was something to be chosen, a conscious decision which could be made early or put off, and there were costs and benefits in any solution” (11). Hence the importance of choosing a potential spouse against certain criteria for the part of the male in the Middle Ages. I shall argue that the spouses’ respective age, estate and religion are three major conditions that determine the outward beauty of marriage in the Tales. These three conditions are general measures for a number of husband characters in the Tales to consider before they decide their lifelong partners. When there is a proper and satisfactory proportion for each condition, the marriage denotes a sense of order and harmony, and thus is related to the notion of the beautiful. As a couple lead a happy life, it can be equally called a beautiful life, an adjective which is simultaneously a homology referring to mei-man
in the Chinese tradition.13 In the Western medieval Christian tradition, a happy marriage suggests a perfect state blessed by God. Hence, a happy marriage is conceptually the same as a beautiful marriage. Donnell Van de Voort argues that arranged marriages work out for the best socially: “Riches have always married riches, and power, power; such matches are no doubt calculated to produce the happiest results” (11-12, qtd. in Kelly 32). Such “happiest results” are built on the formal conditions of marriage. The arrangement is obviously based on the theory of proportion: the relation of one spouse’s riches to those of the other demonstrates a one-to-one proportion between a potential couple. In the Tales, we can also observe a similar practicality of the theory of proportion. A good number of pilgrim-tellers have remarked on the criteria of a happy marriage. For instance, Chaucer’s Miller reiterates after the manner of Cato a general principle that “man sholde wedde his simylitude./ Men sholde wedden after hire estaat,/ For youthe and elde is often at debaat” (I 3228-30).14 In his tale, the Miller focuses more on the similitude between a couple’s age, yet the concept of similitude can be understood in a wider sense.
St. Thomas tells us that proportion is a numerical as well as a relational concept,15 indicating both the concrete and abstract features of proportion. The above-mentioned factors, including age, estate and religion, can be likewise quantified and qualified to a certain extent. The quantity in age is self-evident because of its numerical nature. When the ages of a couple are compared at the moment of their marital act, it is characterized by a numerical proportion. As for estate and religion, they serve as the means to evaluate a person’s social value in a rigid hierarchically-defined society such as the Middle Ages. The proportion of the estate and religion between a couple is not so much a numerical as a relational concept.
The relationship between a low-born and an aristocrat spouses does not constitute a
13 Mei is translated as beauty or beautiful in English and man as consummation and perfection. For the Chinese, saying that a marriage is happy is just like saying that it is beautiful and perfect.
14 Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). The subsequent citations of Chaucer’s works in this thesis are from this edition.
15 St. Thomas, ST, Part I, Q. 12, Art. 1 ad 4; please cf. the quote on pages 24-5 of this chapter.
good concordance and thus deviates from the aesthetics of proportion. Similarly, the respective belief of the spouses also brings about the issue of proportion. The relation between a Christian and a heathen or an unbeliever is theologically as well as aesthetically unsatisfactory, while the relation between two Christians fulfills the notion of harmonious proportion. When all these conditions—age, estate and religion—comply with the requirement of proportion, there is an aesthetics of marriage in terms of its form.
The proportion proper to the form of marriage is that a couple have a good arrangement of these three prominent criteria—age, estate and religion of husband and wife. The form of marriage in question is restricted to the moment when a couple swear their oath because a conjugal oath should be expressed in words of the present tense (St. Thomas, ST, Suppl., Q. 46, Art. 1). Furthermore, Scholastics attempt to “establish the correct attitude to beauty, the attitude necessary for the apprehension and evaluation of beauty, or, in modern terms, the specifically aesthetic attitude” (Tatarkiewicz 1970:109). The same can also be said of marriage: the medieval society attempts to impose the correct attitude on the form of marriage, the aesthetically-correct attitude necessary for the union of a couple. Age, estate and religion are acts of existence, while the aesthetically-correct attitude toward the form of marriage designates the law of these acts of existence. When the nuptial tie is based on the concept of proportional age, status a nd religion of the couple, harmony is assumed to be the expected result. In other words, what functions behind these three formal criteria of marriage is the concept of the “Great Theory,” or harmony, order, balance.
On these bases, I shall discuss the factors that make the form of marriage blissful, happy and accordingly beautiful in the selected Tales. In the medieval period, to discourse a matter aesthetically and to discourse it morally would virtually mean the same. When Chaucer’s pilgrims discuss marriage between people of (un)equal age, estate and religion from an aesthetic point of view, they also touch upon these issues from the perspective of goodness. In the Tales, the pilgrim-tellers reveal their sensibility of beauty much the same as they conceptualize the form of marriage in
their narratives. Margaret A. Gist has done a remarkable research on the subject of marriage in romances. She also employs these three marital conditions to discuss the marriage in medieval romances: she has covered marriages between people of age with youth, of unequal estate and of Christians with unbelievers along with the marriage of convenience and other types of marriage relationships. With some modification of Gist’s bases, this chapter analyzes the relationship between marriage and the proportion of age, estate and religion between the couples in “The Clerk’s Tale,” “The Man of Law’s Tale,” “The Second Nun’s Tale,” “The Franklin’s Tale,”
“The Merchant’s Tale,” “The Miller’s Tale,” “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” and her tale.