The Flower of Friendship: A Renaissance Dialogue Contesting Marriage.

Edmund Tilney. Ed. and intro. Valerie Wayne. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992. xii + 198 pp. $31-50 cloth; $12.95 paper.

Owing largely to the influence of feminist and materialist thought upon students of Renaissance culture, the early modern institution of marriage has in recent years become the focus of much scholarly attention. Marriage was, after all, one of the period's fundamental institutions, and as such it is one of the richest sites available to those who would explore the fascinating workings of ideologies within cultural practices. Valerie Wayne's fine critical edition of Edmund Tilney's 1568 discourse concerning duties in marriage, The Flower of Friendship, is a very welcome contribution to this larger enterprise. The text itself takes the form of a dialogue involving several participants in the contemporary debate over the ends of marriage and the relative duties of husbands and wives. The principal speaker in the first half of the dialogue is the Spaniard Pedro di Luxan, author of the 1550 Coloquios matrimoniales, whose influence upon Tilney is traced by Wayne in her introduction. The fictional Pedro is joined by Vives, Erasmus, Lady Julia (a character based on Eulalia, the model wife of Erasmus' 1523 dialogue, Conjugium), Lady Isabella (Julia's daughter and the principal speaker of the second half of the dialogue), and others. As its title might suggest, the principal aim of Tilney's dialogue is to advocate a notion of companionate marriage derived largely from his humanist precursors.

Contesting with Tilney's dialogue for the reader's attention is Wayne's excellent introduction, which merits the notice of anyone with an interest in Renaissance history and culture, especially those with a particular interest in the question of marriage. She carefully traces the history of ideologies of companionate marriage from the earliest known classical and Christian sources to the writings of the sixteenth-century humanists. She then goes on to demonstrate, through a scrupulous reading of Tilney's dialogue, how this notion of marriage, which had by then become dominant, is both asserted and contested in The Flower of Friendship. The result is that Tilney's text emerges as "a kind of fictional record of the available ideologies of marriage in 1568" (38). Among those available ideologies, residing awkwardly alongside the dominant, humanist one, is an emergent, or perhaps pre-emergent, feminist one.

As Wayne reminds us, the humanist position on marriage claimed to be not only companionate but (more dubiously) egalitarian, emphasizing virtue over rank in the valuation of a marriage partner. However, since a wife's chief virtue was seen to reside in her chastity--that uncertain barricade protecting a husband's lineage and estate--this emphasis upon virtue masked a less noble, if more compelling, desire to control women's sexuality. Wayne argues convincingly that this telling inconsistency at the heart of the humanist notion of marriage creates a space in Tilney's text for the emergent feminist critique put forward by Lady Isabella. Like Queen Elizabeth, the famously unmarried monarch with whom Wayne associates her, Isabella is (at least within the confines of Tilney's fictional discourse) able to address the marriage issue from a position of power, a position that enables her to resist male authority and articulate a notion of marriage more genuinely egalitarian than the prevalent humanist one. As Wayne delineates this emergent feminist subject position, she steers admirably clear of the extremes of "subversion" and "containment" as means of locating it within the broader culture, choosing instead to acknowledge both "the tenuous character of feminism as an ideology during the sixteenth century" (84) and the importance of the subtle contradictions within ideologies that create the spaces in which social change can begin to occur. Both her critical edition of Tilney and her engaging and persuasive introduction profit from Wayne's exceptional scholarship, and the result is a fine and rewarding volume.