Bellini and the East ed. by Caroline Campbell, Alan Chong (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 183 the original crimes, were frequently public in nature. The prosecution of female speech may have been pursued as a means of control, as a safe outlet for male anxiety, or as a response to the plague and subsequent rebelliousness. For whatever reasons that the association between illicit speech and women developed, however, the connection between the two has endured. Women are still largely perceived as gossips and nags. The limitations of this book are indeed few, though I suppose they should be recounted nonetheless. I would have liked to see Bardsley give herself more credit for limiting her examination of literary material to Middle English texts alone. She claims to limit the literary material to only those works written in Middle English rather than Latin or Old French because of “an historian’s bias in the use of these texts.” She says that her main purpose in writing this book is to discover “what we can learn about speech, rather than what we can learn about the development of literature” (21). Attributing this exclusion to the bias of her own professional outlook does not, however, make sense. Anyone who reads her book, or even the jacket cover, would not mistake its intent. All projects need some sort of limitation. And her exclusion of Latin and Anglo-Norman literary texts is logical when taking into consideration the population with which this books primarily deals: the peasant and the peasant elite. Latin and Anglo-Norman literature would not be as accessible or as reflective of their perception of language, gender, or class. It would have also been beneficial if Bardsley had spent some more time discussing the nature of her own categorization and translation of law French and Latin to Modern English. While she does raise the point that Latin clerks often translated the term scold in different ways—“garulatrix,” “litigatrix,” “contentrix,” “obiurgatrix,” “rixatrix,” and “scolda”—she does not give the source of the category scold itself (88). That is, she assumes the cohesiveness of scold as legal category without explaining how she is able to do so. As a whole, however, this book was a delight to read. Throughout, Bardsley’s prose was so clear and her ideas so well-developed and controlled that even unfamiliar ideas were perfectly comprehensible. Each chapter built upon the previous one and referenced the same stories in new ways so that vignettes introduced in chapter one felt like familiar tales by the end of chapter six. Bardsley has a unique talent to draw readers in by making use of elements familiar to most medieval scholars—the Wife of Bath, the story of Tutivillus, the Black Death. Regardless of field, she is able to develop these elements of the familiar in such a way that the literary speaks to the historical, the artistic speaks to the literary, and the historical speaks to the artistic. Her command of a broad range of critical literature also makes this book a valuable introduction to the work of other scholars on the history of scolding in Medieval England. I have no doubt that the quality of Bardsley’s work and the skill of its delivery will earn Venomous Tongues a secure place on the shelves of many medieval scholars in many different departments. JENNIFER A. SMITH, English, UCLA Bellini and the East, exhibition catalogue, ed. Caroline Campbell and Alan Chong (London: National Gallery Co.; Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner REVIEWS 184 Museum; New Haven: Yale University Press 2005) 143 pp., 6 b/w + 87 color ill. This book was published to accompany the exhibition Bellini and the East at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (14 December 2005–26 March 2006) and The National Gallery, London (12 April 2006–25 June 2006), and is the result of a fructuous collaboration between the two museums which, for the first time, emphasizes the works made in Constantinople by the renowned fifteenth -century Venetian painter Gentile Bellini. The artist resided in the formerly Byzantine, turned Ottoman capital as an esteemed guest of Mehmed the Conqueror from 1479 to 1481. A nice complement to recent comprehensive studies—such as those by Rosamund Mack, Deborah Howard, and Maria Georgopoulou —dedicated to the interactions between...