Recent scholarship such as Yossef Rapoport's Marriage, Money and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society (2005), Maya Shatzmiller's Her Day in Court (2007), and the edited volume The Islamic Marriage Contract (2008) have made enormous contributions to our understanding of the pre-modern Islamic law of marriage and divorce and the ways in which it was applied and manipulated by qadis, notaries, and ordinary individuals. Among other things, these studies have revealed the enormous variability and negotiability of the rules by which marriages were contracted and dissolved. They have also suggested the ways in which different interpretations of the rules affected the bargaining positions and comparative power of men and women negotiating their roles within the marital relationship. Meanwhile, Kecia Ali's Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam (2010) has provided a trenchant analysis of the historical background and ideological assumptions of the early Islamic law of marriage and divorce, emphasizing the gendered and asymmetrical nature of marital rights and duties and the centrality of the concept of male dominion. While indispensible to all future scholarship, Ali's work does not extend beyond the early period and thus does not cover many developments in classical and post-classical law. This paper examines how later Islamic jurists, primarily of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries C.E., overtly theorized about the underlying logic and gendered implications of the marital relationship, showing that they engaged in significant – and widely divergent – reflections on the roles of husbands and wives. To what degree were roles within marriage subject to change based on the social context or status of the husband and wife? To what degree did the rights and duties of husbands and wife reflect timeless and non-negotiable gender roles? Did the gendered entitlements and obligations of husbands and wives primarily reflect balance and reciprocity, or hierarchy and domination? Focusing primarily on the issues of domestic labor and of marital sex, the paper shows that fundamental aspects of the marital relationship were subject to serious debate in this period, a conversation pursued particularly vigorously (but not exclusively) by Ibn Taymiyya and his school. Using both legal texts and biographical dictionaries, this paper suggests not only that views of the normative roles of wives changed during this period, but that a corresponding shift is reflected in the depiction of individual women as "good wives."