ABSTRACT
While courtly love sanctified strong emotions to counter heroic love, most people lived by the tenets of companionate love. Marriages were predominantly arranged, and the couple’s main task was to run the farm and keep their children alive. The Unfaithful Wife (c. 1500) offers an exceptional perspective on this pragmatic morality. The school play combines humanistic storytelling with fifteenth-century sexual permissiveness, a convergence that only occurred in Scandinavia. The region’s sole extant Shrovetide farce conveys how marginalized apprentices experienced the era’s mating markets. A defining feature of postkinship-society mating was that most young people had to accumulate resources before they could marry. A shorter reproductive period helped Europeans avoid Malthusian crises but relegated youth to 10+ years of postpuberty celibacy. To the low-status men hoping to participate in the looser sex culture of the post-Plague era, the playwright conveys that courtly love offers poor guidance. It is a myth that a truelove awaits you, as the distribution of mating opportunities is informed by status. The narrative sympathizes with urban incels but encourages them to accept the pragmatism of companionate love. Through connecting short-term mating to witchcraft, The Unfaithful Wife portrays as antisocial those who seek anything but a lifelong pair-bond.
