That women secretly desired dominion over men was a suspicion confirmed by Chaucer's Wife of Bath. In numerous misericords, men are knocked on the head with kitchen pots, clouted with ladles and washing beetles, belabored with distaffs, pulled about by the beard, scolded by untamed shrews. It must be remembered, of course, that the contractors and carvers of the imagery were men. They left fewer examples of men beating women or of mutual violence between the sexes. On a single misericord a man and woman savage each other at the far left while on the right a man birches a woman and a dog bites her leg.
Domestic strife is a mainstay of the human comedy played out among the stalls.
This broad theme ordinarily shares little with education iconography other than the motif of corporal punishment. An exception occurs in one scandalous iconic type wherein an adult female is seated on the back of a man who is on his hands and knees. Sometimes the imagery may refer to the domineering wife, but it usually illustrates an episode in specific medieval narratives allusive to issues in education. Aristotle at Church. The woman who wallops the flanks of a man whom she rides like a horse in many European churches is celebrating a victory over Aristotle, the principal personage of medieval higher education.