Customer Reviews

The Good Wife's Guide: A Medieval Household Book

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The Good Wife's Guide is a marvelous glance into a late 14th century household guide book. The work was written by a Parisian man for his very young bride. It contains suggestions for running the household, morality, selecting servants, guidance of purchasing and caring for horses, and a treatise on hawking.

This work is the first complete English translation. The authors are professors of English and French whose skills really complement each other in bringing this work to light.

The 'Ménagier de Paris' has been edited and translated several times in the past. But for those that don't read French, there was just one translation, by Eileen Power (1928, reprinted in 2006), in archaic English and incomplete (of 380 recipes, only 153 are in that book). This is the first complete translation in English. In the introduction the editors concentrate on the whole book, not just the culinary recipes. This is refreshing, because the 'Ménagier' is more than just a cookbook, it is a complete guide to the behaviour and duties of the married woman from wealthy bourgeois circles in Paris around 1400. This focus is also apparent in the title, 'The Good WIFE's Guide'. However, if you DO want to cook the recipes you are practically on your own here. The ideal combination for that is this edition with Nicole Crossley-Holland's 'Living and Dining in Medieval Paris' (almost out of print, Amazon.co.uk still has it).

The first complete English translation of the Menagier de Paris (Power's 1928 version was substantially cut down). However, the authors are not cooks. They translated it for a feminist studies class and they have an Agenda with a capital "A". This means that the emphasis is not on the recipes, but on its "gravity as an agenda of female oppression." Also, the authors posit that the author was not a real older man instructing his young bride, but merely a narrative device. I don't see why the text would then name specific people such as Master Jehan... but whatever.

Finally, the authors have made some egregious non-cook errors such as (sigh) calling grains of paradise cardamom. This was an error originally made by Constance Hieatt in "Pleyn Delit" and she's since fixed it, but the mistake continues to propagate through other people's lazy scholarship.

Despite these flaws, it's worth getting simply because it *is* a complete, well-done translation. But read with care.