No sooner than one husband’s dead and gone
Some other Christian man shall take me on.
—The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, translated by Neville Coghill
* * *
The man is not under the lordship of the woman, but the woman is under the lordship of the man.
[Another writer has added in the margins: “Not always.”]
—From the thirteenth-century regulations of the poulterers of Paris, edited by GB Depping, Réglemens sur les arts et métiers de Paris rédigés au 13e siécle et connus sous le nom du Livre des métiers d’Étienne Boileau, 1837