Le Dit de Menage: A Fourteenth-Century Set of Anti-Matrimonial, Anti-Clerical, Anti-English Dialogues

Journal article

Le dit de Menage is a short dialogic poem in Middle French which only survives in a single manuscript, namely Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français, 24432. It remains underexamined by scholarship on account of the lack of any satisfactory scholarly edition. This edition fills this lacuna, presenting the first full edition of the text since the nineteenth century, and the first to present the text as it is likely to have been performed: split into a series of dialogues between three characters. We examine the manuscript context of the poem, as well as its content, form, and themes, before presenting the full edition with accompanying glossary.

Authors: Dows-Miller, S

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Journal: Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie
• Volume: 141
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 350-373
• Publication date: 2025-06-11
• DOI: 10.1515/zrp-2025-0015
• EISSN: 1865-9063
• ISSN: 0049-8661
• Language: English
• Keywords: medieval misogyny; marriage; edition; Middle French; anti-clerical; Hundred Years War