A Swift Coming of Age: History of Medieval Women

Abstract

A Swift Coming of Age: History of Medieval Women Dyan Elliott. Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1993. pp. xv + 375. ISBN 0-691-08649-4. Barbara A. Hanawalt. Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1993. pp. xvii + 300. ISBN 0-19-508405-5. John Hine Mundy. Men and Women at Toulouse in the Age of the Cathars. Study and Texts 101. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990. pp. xüi + 235. ISBN 0-88844-101-0. Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff. Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. pp. xii + 235. ISBN 0-19-508454-3. Charity Cannon Willard, ed. The Writings of Christine de Pizan. New York: Persea Books, 1994. pp. xv + 384. ISBN 0-89255-188-7 (pb). Susan Mosher Stuard This selection from the newest scholarship on medieval women and their world illustrates trends in scholarship and publication in the field. Two studies, John Hine Mundy's on medieval Toulouse and Barbara A. Hanawalt's on medieval London, rely primarily on unpubUshed legal records and charters or the "documents of practice" that in the past few decades have yielded so much previously unsuspected information about women, gender, and family. Similarly Dyan Elliott's study of ceübate marriage in the Middle Ages reties on published and unpubUshed theological and church records which, although better known to scholars than the "documents of practice," have been put to new and unanticipated uses by the author. Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff's essays on medieval women and mysticism and Charity Cannon Ward's selection of Christine de Pizan's writing are no less archival and they, too, bring basic new information about women and about the Middle Ages to readers. For this reason the five works under review suggest that scholarship on medieval women is stiU in its initial stages, and that the task of scholars today remains a primary one of gathering and sorting information. Charity Ward admits candidly that the wide selection of Christine's writings which appear in the volume in translation are only a small part of the author's oeuvre, and that they were chosen to help readers discover the wide compass of Christine's Uterary interests (p. xiü). This theme of dis- © 1996 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8 No. 3 (Fall) 1996 Review Essay: Susan Mosher Stuard 229 covery is echoed by Elizabeth Petroff when she notes that not until 1946 was the author of the Mirror of Simple Souls identified as the Margaret Porete who had been burned at the stake in 1310, and only in 1965 was a modern scholarly edition of Margaret's mystical writing made available to scholars (p. 15). Scholarship on medieval women still promises a journey of discovery ; as a field of historical investigation it is only in its infancy. Nevertheless , it also faces demands to behave like any established field where most basic information is available to interpreters. In order to answer complex questions about women, the family, and the the always problematic construction of gender, medievaUsts must be quick off the mark to adopt an interpretively complex and authoritative voice. Thus the authors of these volumes place women in coherent traditions of urban studies, social or reügious history, or medieval and renaissance literary studies. These areas of study respond to their own internal debates, at times interpreting women's history in the context of historical revision or of modern deconstructionist theory. Indeed, three generations of scholarship appear to have been squeezed into a couple of recent decades. An early generation uncovering information, a succeeding generation interpreting that information, and a subsequent generation refining, chaUenging, and deconstructing the interpretation , have been collapsed into a single scholarly effort. Perhaps we should be surprised that it can be done at all, much less that it is done weU. It is done well here; but in this field where no infancy or time to mature has been aUowed we should at least acknowledge that the task of scholars is formidable. Often this telescoping of the investigations of medieval women leads...