The Iconography of ‘Husband-beating’ on Late-Medieval English Misericords

The Iconography of ‘Husband-beating’ on Late-Medieval English Misericords

By Betsy Chunko-Dominguez

The Mediaeval Journal, Vol.3:2 (2013)

Abstract: Scenes carved on late medieval liturgical furniture, known as misericords, have been described as surprisingly secular, considering their limited audience of male clerics. is article argues that surviving examples depicting laywomen beating submissive husbands reflect specific aspects of English culture within a framework of sexual politics. Ultimately, these images served to remind the male clerical viewer of his professional responsibility to educate the masses according to the literature of his own profession, at times utilizing popular vernacular sources as well.

Introduction: At Tewkesbury Abbey a carving on a mid-fourteenth century ‘misericord’ — a type of liturgical chair designed to support monks, canons, and collegiate priests during the Divine Office of the liturgy — shows a woman vigorously beating her prostrate husband. She holds him by the hair as he flails helplessly about on his back, his mouth a grimace of pain and frustration. Un-moved, she hovers above him, threatening with her long, sturdy-looking washing paddle. In this treatment of domestic violence, the woman is, even if just for this moment, ‘on top’. The man is not just subordinated; he is reduced to the same status as a pile of soiled laundry. This image and others like it, including the somewhat later copy at nearby Fairford’s Church of St Mary, were intended for clerical eyes only, positioned, as they were, in the restricted liturgical space of the choir.

Yet the obscurity of their meaning and the strangeness of their violent and apparently secular iconography are not well understood. Elizabeth Moore saw them as a ‘visual jest’, revealing a common sense of humour between clergy and their lay parishioners. Christa Grössinger stressed the relationship between such imagery and the vitriolic legacy of Eve, the ‘bad woman’ par excellence in medieval misogynist traditions.

Most recently, Paul Hardwick placed them within a broader trajectory of Northern European iconography treating the female body, reading in them moralizations on the subject of lust. While these treatments have helped to place the phenomenon of such husband-beating imagery within a wider medieval socio-cultural context, key aspects of their original literary and iconographic status in England remain to be illuminated. Indeed, more misericords depicting husband-beating survive in England than in other European countries, and their artistic profusion is mirrored in the rich vernacular tradition for which violent wives proved a favoured subject.

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