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in Section One lurks in the background— behind that book’s exploration of what a new married identity politics can mean for the issue of female conduct—now comes to the fore in Section Two. This attention to household knowledges specific to the material needs of this bourgeois household—and the ways that their consumption and production are complexly entangled with each other—thus becomes a central feature of Section Two. As a result, I want to shift critical attention more directly to the question of knowledge in the Menagier and what it can tell us about the
, they are also stories in which desire functions as what Peter Brooks calls the ‘motor force’ of narrative.40 At the start of virtually every romance a desire is present, usually in a state of initial arousal, that is so intense (because thwarted or challenged) that action – some kind of forward narrative movement designed to bring about change – is demanded. Sexual desire (whether wanted, unwanted or feared) is one of the most common initiatory devices, but a desire for offspring, material wealth, a lost identity, political or religious dominion, or simply aventure
1440s: Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon. I argue that Bower’s desire to create a history of Scotland that focused on identity politics meant that Margaret became for him a figure not only of sanctity but also of Scottish culture, and even Scottish identity or patriotism. While texts from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries depict Margaret as a figure of what Karen Winstead calls ‘saintly exemplarity’, the ways in which these texts interpret what it meant to be saintly in a Scottish context differs greatly.1 Margaret as exemplum is understood quite differently in