SOURCE: “Medieval Courtesy Literature and Dramatic Mirrors of Female Conduct,” in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality, edited by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, pp. 25-38. New York: Methuen, 1987.

In the following essay, Ashley explores how social conduct books for non-aristocrats influenced French and English drama in the late Middle Ages.

As many historians have pointed out, the late Middle Ages was an era obsessed with codified and externalized behaviors. For aristocrats, such codes promised to maintain social identities at a time of blurring boundaries between upper and “middle” classes. However, the wealthy bourgeoisie and other upwardly mobile groups subverted the boundaries as they increasingly adopted aristocratic codes to define their new sense of worth and place in medieval society. Although the flourishing of courtesy literature during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was connected to both these impulses, I will be concerned...