Art and Context in Late Medieval English Narrative ed. by Robert R. Edwards (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS113 The major theoretical problem with Burns' very clever argument is its assumption that fictive discourse by male authors allows for the construction of a female subjectivity—that male writers can write as women, and not just like women. By mostly ignoring orbarely acknowledging contemporarydebates (by Kamuf, Modleski, Culler, Scholes, Fuss, and others) on gender and reader-response theory that examine this vexed question, Burns introduces a troubling essentialism: women, and women medievalists, are neither like Old French heroines constructed by male authors, nor are they Old French heroines. How it is possible for female body parts or characters to speak dialogically in monologically-constructed texts? Equally appropriate might have been an examination of the double-voiced tensón among the lyrics of the Trobairitz, in which a Troubadour responds to a female voice. In her zeal to rationalize a focus on male-authored texts, Burns also ignores those texts written by French medieval women, most especially the Trobairitz, Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, Marguerite d'Oingt, and Marguerite Porete, and thereby endorses the idea that even female subjectivity—gender identity—must itself be authorized by men—that only their fictionalization of a female discourse validates the construction of the female. Burns explains that after all 'Marie de France' exists in only one manuscript—that there may not even have been a historical Marie—and also that when historical authors like Christine wrote, they often «inscribed the misogyny ofthe cultural, social, and literal practices oftheir day. The reader ofher book may well heed her warning to feminists who read literary texts that 'focus on the metaphorization of women, readings that take no account of the existence of historical women in the Middle Ages, readings that distance the object ofstudy— women— from the female observer/listener': as with her own book, 'all tend to meet resistence...in the body of the woman critic' (pp.248-9). Thus she repeats the very phallocentric taxonomy that she wishes to disengage. What in fact Burns has proven is that antifeminist writers who problematize the female body reinscribe the misogyny oftheAcademy, in its attempt to silence and decapitate the speakingwoman, in their projection oimaU subjectivity onto female characters and their body-parts. JANE CHANCE Rice University Robert R. Edwards, ed. Art and Context in Late MedievalEnglish Narrative. Essays in Honor ofRobert Worth Frank, Jr. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994. xiv, 205. isbn: 0-85991-4070. $63. One of the reasons publishers don't like Festschriften, no matter how distinguished the person to be honored, is that they are difficult to sell. Even the most academic booksellers have no shelf-space between English 101 and Geology for Festschriften. Moreover, they are, for the most part, not books but collections of disparate essays thrust violently together in the hope that theywill somehow coalesce into a marketable entity. The problem is complicated when the designated honorée is a medievalist because medievalists—like the Middle Ages themselves—tend to be so catholic in terms ofgenre, so diverse in terms ofculture and nationality, so various in language, and so undisciplined in terms of discipline (they are often composed of unequal 114ARTHURIANA parts ofphilologist, linguist, historicist, folklorist, theorist, ironist, humorist, editor, paleographer, bibliographer) that all attempts to reflect the interests ofthe honorée and at the same time to impose coherence upon the book end in sputter. (The next paragraph should begin: 'But that is not the case with this book.') But that is not the case with this book. To be sure, since Robert W. Frank, Jr.'s catholicityofinteresr and richnessoflearning (the Festschrift includes his bibliography) are supassed only by his generosity to students and colleagues, we can expect the Art' ofthe title to include poetic, narrative, visual, and architectural art; the 'Context' to be social, linguistic, political as well as literary; 'Late Medieval' to run from the 12th to the 17th century; and 'English' to involve French and Latin, too. But readers should not let that deter them. This book is about Langland and Chaucer. In a marvellously descriptive introductory essay, the editor, Robert R. Edwards, accurately sets forth the twelve important essays that comprise this volume; in the paragraphs which follow I haveas freelyquoted from his...