Stephanie Trigg. “How to Live.”

Trigg, Stephanie. “How to Live.” Ed. Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English. Edited by Paul Strohm. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.

Trigg's essay works more to consider how to approach readings of medieval conduct literature rather to push a single reading of her own. Considering both texts that are expressly in the genre of conduct literature, such as John Russell's Boke of Nurture and Ailred of Rievaulx's De institutione inclusarum in addition to other texts that Trigg reads as conduct literature, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. While not pushing a single reading, Trigg's essay is largely interested in how conduct literature constructs privileged social identity, both in positive and negative examples, and what these constructions may say about concerns or realities of everyday medieval life.

In her "Three illustrative topics" section, Trigg focuses on how Carving, the Mouth, and Touch operate in conduct literature. Carving, as Trigg demonstrates, involved a social performance that was tied into the service to a household, the progression to knighthood, and loyalty to one's lord. Issues surrounding the mouth are doubly problematic as the mouth contains the potential to overindulge in food or to eat improperly as well as the capacity to perform poorly in public speaking. While the section on touch is the shortest, Trigg provides a brief glimpse into how touch seems to provide an intimate and social function, one that is suggested as both pleasant and risky to propriety. In sum, Trigg's article is perhaps most useful in its suggestion of how it is possible to read these texts rather than the readings themselves. Trigg draws in sociohistorical context to draw connections between conduct and other late medieval literature, demonstrating how a critic may tie threads between these texts and gain a better understanding of the issues that lie between them.