Nicole Oresme, Le livre de Yconomique d‘Aristote.

Menut, Albert Douglas. Maistre Nicole Oresme: Le livre de Yconomique d‘Aristote. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1957. Print.

Based on the title of the text, the above image may seem out of place. But having read the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics, or at least the English translation of Oresme's French translation of the Latin and Greek sources, marriage is really what this book is about. A relatively short text, the Economics was assumed by medieval audiences to have been written by Aristotle. The text itself does not immediately belie such a consideration, being structured something like the Nichomachean Ethics, and it sets itself up as a followup to matters left unsaid in the Politics. Specifically, this text opens by discussing how the management of a state and the management of household differ, and that more thorough discussion of a household is required. The very term economics literally refers to just this, coming from the Greek "oikos," or house. Thus once again, economics as a term has a rather different connotation for this text than in its modern context. Interestingly, the lion's share of the text deals with the specifics and necessities of marriage, considering why such unions are virtuous and beneficial, how they benefit the household specifically, and how the manager of the household (i.e. the husband) is best to manage his wife. 

Much of this follows somewhat standard misogynistic rhetoric, but what interests me is the ties to economics (in the modern context). In the first part, the text discusses the role of children in marriage, suggesting that they are an investment towards the future who can care for the household and their parents later in life. Secondly, the text describes the necessity for the husband to carefully choose, nurture, and shape his wife, as she is considered to have been bought at great cost and is directly compared to the arable land for his seed and is thus a natural resource that needs to be properly cultivated. In both of these examples, the specific language used (at least in Oresme's French) utilizes heavy economic metaphor, emphasizing the connection to economic matters. On top of all of this, Oresme himself is of interest for my economic reading, as he wrote De Moneta, a text largely concerned with the economics and currency of late medieval Europe. It is, therefore, of specific relevance to me that Oresme himself provided a translation of the Economics, something that perhaps ties to the larger medieval representation of marriage in economic metaphor which I have been seeing in various instances of Middle English Literature.