"So Many Shipwracke for Want of Better Knowledge": The Imaginary Husband in Stuart Marriage Advice

Abstract

A burgeoning popular literature in the early Stuart years addresses the perils and pleasures of marriage, offering advice about married life not only n conduct books and print sermons but also in ballads, controversy books, jokebooks of various stripes, and the catechisms (sometimes pious, sometimes pragmatic) written by parents for their children. One of the consequences of this expansion of courtly and sermonic instruction into a multi-genre literature for a broad audience is that the behavior of men in marriage, especially their bad behavior, becomes a subject of popular culture. An extensive and informative scholarly literature has studied the post-Reformation marriage advice books for their representation of women within patriarchal domestic structures. However, we have yet to explore sufficiently the increasingly complex psychosocial portrait of the English Protestant husband enjoined to rule the Reformed household. Whether or not the early Stuart marriage literature advances a liberalized, Puritan concept of companionate marriage-a claim under debate on several fronts-it does construct a private, interiorized husband-subject defined by negotiation of contradictory imperatives regarding his domestic power. Not necessarily fit to rule a household despite his virtually uncontested authority to do so, the early modern husband has to learn to perform in marriage-a relational

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