The Education of the Maiden and the Formation of the Boy: How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter and How the Wise Man Taught His Son

Abstract

This article examines the Middle English poems How the Wise Man Taught His Son and How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter, with particular attention to the version in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole 61. The analysis underscores how these two texts, traditionally classified in the scholarly tradition as conduct literature, were reworked by the scribe Rate within a coherent project that articulated direct instruction to the younger generation, thereby constructing complementary educational roles for son and daughter within the framework of the traditional family. While the teachings addressed to the young man are articulated through exhortative directives accompanied by discursive justifications – thus reinforcing male authority and the ideal of household governance – those directed to the daughter take on a proscriptive character, designed to internalize modesty and self-control as both bodily and social habitus, with constant emphasis on economic management and bourgeois respectability. In comparison with the other texts in the manuscript’s first booklet – Sir Isumbras, Saint Eustace, and Right as a Ram’s Horn – it becomes clear that Rate pursued a process of redactional and ideological balancing that presents the nuclear family as the paradigm of late-medieval Christian and urban society.