How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter Edited by George Shuffelton

This story talks about how a mother during Middle Age was responsible to teach her daughter about everything she had to know to be a good wife. Married women were required to follow the traditions during medieval times, one of the ways they represented it was following their mother advice of not doing inappropriate things that could affect their reputation and relationship. One example of this tradition is in the poem “How the Goodwife Taught her Daughter” it states “For no covetys no giftys thou take;/ Bot thou wyte why, sone them forsake. / For gode women with gyftys/ Men ther honour fro them lyftys” (goodwife taught her daughter 91-94). This is an advice from the mother to her daughter, it talks about that the woman must not accept gifts from men because they will steal woman’s honor with gift.  This poem also talk about how important was that the women took care of the money, the mothers during Middle Age used to advised their daughters about the importance of saving their husband’s money and working together to increase it. For the goodwife during medieval times was very important that her daughter followed her advises of how to respect her husband and be a good wife. However, not all of the married women during the Middle Age were following the traditions and behaved the same way, because in my previous post “The Shipman’s Tale”, I talked about a wife who was not taking care of her husband money and was having sex with her husband’s best friend to get money. This wife is not a good example of a daughter who was following her mother’s advice. I believe that when the interest of a woman to get what she wants is above her dignity, she will lost something very important the respect for herself.