nearly always that of the demanding or conniving wife. Material and financial
concerns—the need to furnish a new household, to keep the wife in finery, to finance her
“pilgrimages”—are one testimony to the obvious vein of bourgeois realism in the work.
Although the fifteen vignettes do not constitute a continuous narrative, the first ten
progress chronologically through the expected stages of marital development and
dilemma. The first “joy” shows the newlywed husband straining to keep his young wife
well dressed and to satisfy her every whim. In the second, the husband is already
hoodwinked into providing for the wife’s visits to various “relatives.” By the third “joy,”
the ménage is well established, a child is expected, and the poor husband waits obediently
on his pregnant wife, only to find himself later excluded as the women of the family
cluster around the mother and newborn. Subsequent episodes depict the disarray of the
household after the birth of five or six children, the fatigue and responsibility weighing
on the husband, the agonizingly separate aspirations of husband and wife, and the
predicaments of various mismatched couples. The eleventh through fifteenth “joys” seem
to be case studies of less usual situations, such as the remarriage of a woman who thinks
her husband has died in combat and his ill fortune to discover her remarriage.
All fifteen “joys” bear similar refrains of condemnation and despair, reminiscent of the
Old Woman’s discourse in Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose (11. 13,967ff.): the
husband is the fish caught in the net, doomed to finish his days in pain and anguish,
without hope of escape from his miserable condition. Both prologue and epilogue to the
Quinze joies offer context for the fifteen “joys,” on the one hand justifying an
antimatrimonial stance by a defense of human liberty and of the exercise of common
intelligence, and on the other rationalizing marriage as Christian penance.
The Quinze joies seems to have contributed less to the formal development of
narrative prose genres at the close of the Middle Ages and more to the popularity of
fictional inventories of misfortunes. The work’s anecdotal character and its satirical
stance on domesticity guaranteed its appeal both in England and France. In shortened and
liberally adapted versions, the Quinze joies continued to be popular in printed editions
from the late 15th through the 18th century.
Janice C.Zinser
[See also: ANTIFEMINISM]
Rychner, Jean, ed. Les.XV.joies de mariage. Geneva: Droz, 1967.
Pitts, Brent A., trans. The Fifteen Joys of Marriage. New York: Lang, 1985.
Rizk, Nazli. “Didactisme et contestation dans Les quinze joies de mariage.” Moyen français 1
(1977):33–89.
Söderhjelm, Werner. La nouvelle française au XVe siècle. Paris: Champion, 1910, pp. 29–72.
The Encyclopedia 1461