Choosing Not to Marry Women and Autonomy in the Katherine Group

9780415937849

0415937841

This study concerns the earliest English literature encouraging women not to marry, the Katherine Group. It is a set of five early thirteenth-century devotional texts, a sermon calledHali Meidhad("Holy Virginity"), the lives of three early Christian virgin martyrs, Katherine, Margaret, and Juliana, and an allegorySawles Warde("Care of the Soul"). All of the texts celebrate virginity, but they do so in a novel way. Unlike other virginity literature, which focuses on the sacred benefits that come to women who do not marry, these texts argue that marriage harms women, and they focus on the material advantages of not marrying. They are profoundly non-mystical, articulating the values of self-sufficiency and self determination. Placing the Katherine Group within the male clerical tradition of Jerome and Peter Abelard, a tradition whose concerns about marriage and domesticity have not been much appreciated before, the author shows how the texts of the Katherine Group operate not as part of afemale mystical tradition, but within the male clerical tradition of anti-matrimonial literature.