Le Ménagier de Paris

Seldom will you see ever so old a man who will not marry a young woman

Beauty and death go ever hand in hand
  —Eileen Power

Le Ménagier de Paris ('The Parisian Household Book'), often abbreviated as Le Ménagier, is a French medieval guidebook from 1393 on a woman's proper behaviour in marriage and running a household. It includes sexual advice, recipes, and gardening tips. Written in the (fictional) voice of an elderly husband addressing his younger wife, the text offers a rare insight into late medieval ideas of gender, household, and marriage. Important for its language and for its combination of prose and poetry, the book's central theme is wifely obedience.

Quotes

Eileen Power, tr., The Goodman of Paris, Broadway Medieval Library (London: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., 1928)

• Seldom will you see ever so old a man who will not marry a young woman.
  • Introduction

• God commands us to go to church and rise early and the glutton saith, “I must sleep. I was drunk yesterday. The church is not a hare, it will very well wait for me”. When she has with some difficulty risen, know you what be her hours? Her matins are: “Ha! what shall we drink? Is there nought left over from last night?” Then says she her lauds, thus: “Ha! we drank good wine yestreen”. Afterwards she says her orisons, thus: “My head aches; I shall not be at ease until I have had a drink”.
  • The Third Article

• Item, one may know whether a coney be fatted, by feeling his sinew or neck betwixt the two shoulders for there you may tell if there be much fat by the big sinew; and you can tell if he be tender by breaking one of his back legs.
  • The Fourth Article

About

• The book well deserves translation into English ... [it] is full of interest of all kinds to the Englishman as well as the Frenchman.
  • F. J. Furnivall, ed., A Book of Precedence (Early English Text Society, 1896), pp. 149–154

• Over all the matter-of-fact counsels there seems to hang something of the mellow sadness of an autumn evening, when beauty and death go ever hand in hand. It was his wife's function to make comfortable his declining years; but it was his to make the task easy for her.
  • Eileen Power, Medieval People (Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1924), p. 97