SOURCE: Kendrick, Laura. “Transgression, Contamination, and Woman in Eustache Deschamps's Miroir de mariage.” Stanford French Review 14, no. 1-2 (spring-fall 1990): 211-30.

In the following essay, Kendrick analyzes the misogynistic elements of Le Miroir de mariage.

Toward the end of the fourteenth century, probably in the 1380s or early 1390s, the most prolific medieval French poet, Eustache Deschamps, a household and judicial officer with a long career in the service of French kings Charles V and Charles VI and of the royal line, composed a didactic treatise over twelve thousand [lines] long, the Miroir de mariage, in which he argued for male chastity as opposed to marriage.¹ Deschamps made this argument against mixing with women through the personified summa of written authorities, Repository of Knowledge, of whom the main character, Free Will, requests counsel on the question of whether or not he should marry, as Desire, Folly, Servitude, and Trickery...