onds. Love, in their conception, is sensual,
and women are treated by them with great levity. The women, in their
songs, woo the men. In the thirteenth century women are described as
more dignified and self-respecting. Siegfried flogged his wife black and
blue.[1231] Brunhild was also beaten by her husband. The women manifest
great devotion to their husbands, especially in adversity, even fighting
for them like men.[1232] We are constantly shocked at the bad taste of
behavior. At Lubeck, if a young widow was married, the crowd made an
uproar in front of the house and the bridegroom was forced to stand at
show on a certain four-cornered stone in the midst of noisy music "in
order to establish the good name of himself and wife."[1233] The
carnival was an occasion of license for all the grossness and obscenity
in the popular taste.[1234] The woman cult was a cult of free love and
was hostile to honorable marriage. Even in the twelfth century there
were complaints of corruption by bad literature. The nobles and knights
degenerated in the crusades and in the Italian wars of the
Hohenstaufen.[1235] "The doctrine of the church appeared to be a support
of the family, but it was not such. On the contrary, the bonds of the
family were more loosened than strengthened by the ascetic-hierarchical
religiosity of the church."[1236] Dulaure[1237] quotes Gerson and
Nicolas de Clemangis that convents in the fifteenth century were places
of debauch. Geiler, in a sermon in Strasburg Cathedral, gave a shocking
description of convents.[1238] A convent is described as a brothel for
neighboring nobles.[1239] At the end of the fifteenth century the revolt
and change in the mores which produced the Protestant schism caused the
social confusion on which Janssen lays such stress in his seventh and
eighth volumes. It was a case of revolution. The old mores broke down
and new ones were not yet formed. The Protestants of the sixteenth
century derided and denounced the Roman Catholics for the contradictions
and falsehoods of celibacy, and the Catholics used against the
Protestants the looseness as to marriage. Both were right.

+381. The standard of the "good wife." Pair marriage.+ It is safe to
believe that if any woman ever entered into a marriage which was not
repugnant to her she entered it with a determination to be a "good
wife." Her education under the mores of the society around her gave her
the notion and standard of a good wife. The modern se