Fowler's article provides and interesting reading of the Vision of Piers Plowman specifically considering how the idea of contract, economic thought, and "coverture" operate within the Lady Mede portions of the text. While Fowler's reading raises interesting points about how Langland may be using marriage as a larger metaphor of political contract, I find her section on civil death and marriage the most engaging and widely applicable.
Fowler's first and largest section digs in to the issues of agency and marriage, considering both the intentional and functional levels of agency women were able to maintain before and after marriage, taking into consideration the various factors that could alter that agency throughout the process. Citing medieval church doctrine on marriage, Fowler considers how women maintained the agency of choice to enter marriage, but that upon doing so their agency, or Will, was subsumed by their husband's will. (Fowler teases out the complex state of married agency in much greater detail, also bringing in discussions of marital debt and common law property to provide a clearer picture on the matter). The greatest potential for agency, then, lay with a woman's choice to enter marriage; Fowler argues that this is the source of Conscience's issue with Lady Mede, that she represents the pure potential of agency without the moral guidance to instill the proper final choices. Fowler ties this perspective to the economic angle of Lady Mede, suggesting that money also possesses no moral will of its own and can be equally used good or ill gains. This seems to tie to Diane Cady's point in "The Gender of Money," that women, like money, are likely to circulate outside of societal/patriarchal control if they are not properly regulated.
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