“Bendig tu…qui fis me fenna”: donne, libri e letteratura nel Medioevo giudeo-provenzale

Foreword Raymond P. Scheindlin Most of this issue of Prooftexts is devoted to a single Hebrew poem, a work that is probably the most ambitious literary endeavor undertaken by a Hebrew poet in the Middle Ages, Miqdash meʿat by Moses da Rieti (1388-c. 1460). Begun in 1416 and stretching over more than 130 pages in the only printed edition (edited by Jacob Goldenthal, Vienna, 1851), the work is loosely modeled on Dante's Divine Comedy, being written in terza rima, divided into three parts made up of cantos (the third part is missing and may never have been composed), and including glimpses of unseen worlds as well as digests of philosophical, scientific, and religious lore. It may be described as an attempt to provide a broad view of the nature of the Jewish religion in a philosophical and kabbalistic vein, through visions, prayers, surveys of Jewish literary history, and epitomes of philosophical systems. Although it is often referred to in scholarly writing on medieval Hebrew literature, intellectual history, and philosophy, Miqdash meʿat is virtually unknown and practically inaccessible. Yet its importance and literary quality have been recognized in the past, as is attested by the numerous manuscripts in which it has been transmitted and by the fact that one of its cantos was used as a prayer in Italian synagogues and was early translated into Italian. Its importance has occasionally been recognized by moderns as well: two selections were included in T. Carmi's Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, and Dan Pagis, in private conversation, is said to have called Rieti a "poetic genius." Yet until the appearance of the article "Mosheh de Rieti (xive-xve siècle): Philosophe, scientifique et poète," by Alessandro Guetta in the Revue des études juives 158 (1999), not a single study had been devoted to it since the nineteenth century. This neglect may be due to the somewhat forbidding character of the work, arising from: the unfamiliarity of Rieti's Hebrew idiom (a combination of Tibbonide Hebrew and Italian-Hebrew diction); his innovative use of a difficult rhyme scheme that was completely new in Hebrew and that necessitated a certain amount of syntactic distortion; the complicated subject [End Page 1] matter; and the fact that the text published in the nineteenth century is unvocalized and provides no commentary to guide the reader. During the past several years, Alessandro Guetta (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales), Devora Bregman (Ben-Gurion University), and the undersigned, despite living and working on three different continents, have been finding opportunities to study Miqdash meʿat together. Professor Bregman is a specialist in medieval Hebrew literature, especially of Italy; Professor Guetta is a specialist in Jewish intellectual history in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, with a particular interest in Rieti and with a specialist's familiarity with Rieti's Italian writings; and the undersigned is a specialist in Hebrew literature of the Judeo-Arabic world with a strong interest in literary translation. Our collaboration began at the Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania, where the three of us participated in a yearlong seminar (1998-99) devoted to medieval Hebrew poetry. During the summer of 2000, we put in a month of intensive work on the project together in Jerusalem. Since then, we have worked by correspondence, both electronic and conventional. Our hope was to produce an edition that would include a new and fully vocalized Hebrew text based on a complete survey of the many manuscripts, together with a commentary and a translation into English. In this issue of Prooftexts, we are presenting the first two cantos of Miqdash meʿat as a sample of our work. The division of labor was as follows: Professor Bregman took responsibility for the Hebrew text. I took notes during our deliberations in Philadelphia and Jerusalem and drafted a commentary in Hebrew, based on our discussions. This draft, as critiqued and revised by my colleagues, became the basis of the English commentary presented here. As part of the work on the commentary, I also prepared a line-by-line prose translation, which I later converted into the metrical, unrhymed translation published here...

This article aims at a critical examination of modern research on medieval Hebrew literature. Here, the definition of ‘medieval Hebrew literature’ excludes writing in Jewish languages other than Hebrew, and singles out literature from other types of non-literary Hebrew writing. The variety of literary types included in this survey ranges from liturgical and secular poetry to artistic storytelling and folk literature. Both early liturgical poetry (piyyut) and the medieval Hebrew story are rooted in the soil of the Talmudic period. The beginnings of medieval Hebrew storytelling were even more deeply connected to the narrative traditions of the Talmud. However, the constitutive moment of the birth of piyyut and narrative as distinct medieval genres had to do with their separation from the encyclopedic, all-embracing nature of the Talmud.

Gender Studies and Medieval Hebrew Poetry Matti Huss Tova Rosen . Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, xvi + 264 pp. 1 Tova Rosen's Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature is a significant contribution to the field and one that has far-reaching implications for the way we read both the secular and liturgical works of the Hebrew Middle Ages. It is also the first work of its kind: an extensive study of medieval Hebrew literature done from the perspective of gender studies. Rosen's detailed readings take us from the secular and liturgical poetry of the Andalusian period (Muslim Spain, 950-1150) through the rhymed narratives and the secular poetry of various literary schools of the Christian-Spanish era (c. 1200-1497). To this rich mix, Rosen adds an important element from the Hebrew-Italian school of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries: the Mahbarot (rhymed narratives) of Immanuel of Rome. In her first chapter, "No-Woman's-Land: Medieval Hebrew Literature and Feminist Criticism," Rosen presents the historical and literary background of the period as well as the theoretical and methodological assumptions on which she bases her readings. She follows these with a gender-oriented outline that enables the reader to comprehend the principal contours of the diverse body of texts that she investigates. In the seven subsequent chapters, she offers close readings that focus on different aspects of this outline. Some chapters deal with a single work (chapter 5), and others investigate a group of texts (chapters 3, 6, 7, and 8) or analyze the features of an entire genre from a feminist perspective (chapters 2 and 4). In the course of her detailed discussion of these aspects, Rosen meticulously unearths the [End Page 369] complicated textual network that surrounds them. She directs our attention to correlate texts and echoes of texts from Hebrew, Arabic, and European contemporary literary systems. 2 The main criterion guiding Rosen in the process of constructing the outline with which she opens her book is a detailed analysis of the ways in which the binary opposition between women's speech and women's silence is molded in poems and rhymed narratives of various genres. Rosen's decision to focus on this specific opposition is, of course, not accidental. The contrary values given to feminine speech and silence occupy a central position in patriarchal thought throughout the ages. The projection of this contrast on secular and liturgical Andalusian poetry—and on the rhymed narratives written mainly in Christian Spain—proves efficacious and reveals major generic features that traditional genre analysis overlooked entirely or whose significance it failed to appreciate. For example, Rosen shows how three out of four of the central features of the beloved in the Andalusian love lyric—her beauty, her cruelty, the existential threat to which she exposes her lovers, and her powerful silence—are transformed radically in the erotic epithalamia by poets of the period. The silence of the beautiful beloved, which is the ultimate metonymy of her continuous rejection of the lovers' advances, is in these epithalamia replaced by the erotic speech of the bride directed to the bridegroom—a speech act that signals the commencement of their sexual relations. Correspondingly, misogynic elements typical of the silent beloved in love lyrics are deprived in the wedding poems of their devastating demonic power. But this happens only after they are explicitly displayed in the text. For example, the bride in Judah Halevi's "Halo ala" tries to calm the frightened bridegroom. She informs him that he should not be afraid of the metaphoric snakes curling in her hair because they are not meant to harm but only to arouse him: "And if you see my snake in the garden bed of my cheeks / approach, do not be frightened, I have placed him there to entice you."1 These same metaphoric snakes appear in the conventional love lyric as guardians whose function is to deter the lover from even daring to [End Page 370] approach the beloved. One should, of course, suspect the integrity of these disavowals in the erotic epithalamia even if they are spoken by the bride and...

Medieval and Trans Ways of Being

The study of settlement patterns of the rural world of the Middle Ages is motivated by the strong impact that this issue has on the history of the Middle Ages and It is further justified by the complexity of its implications in terms of the structuring of landscapes and socio - economic and political cases. The scientific research, historical and archeological, is now in possession of a significant amount of data even for X - XV centuries, sources who sometimes speak different languages , but that they can help to discuss the different themes of the debate medieval historiography. The planning of this work is to offer a new reflection on the setting and the organization of rural areas of a particular geopolitical district of Tuscany, without any claim to completeness. The hope is to make available a valid element of comparison, a new contribution to the archaeological debate.

Reviewed by: A Matter of Geography: A New Perspective on Medieval Hebrew Poetry by Uriah Kfir Jonathan Decter Uriah Kfir. A Matter of Geography: A New Perspective on Medieval Hebrew Poetry. Leiden: Brill, 2018. 164 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000187 "The Hidden Praises of Time Have I Seen" is a panegyric by a poet named Pinḥas, a rival of the more famous Todros Halevi Abulafia (1247–d. after 1298), in honor of Don Çag Yiẓḥak ben Ẓadok, a courtier in the service of Alfonso X of Castile. The poem opens with a fictional poetic speaker recounting a "prophetic" vision, a gathering in which poets come from all directions to boast over their specific locales. After the representatives of the East, North, and South speak, they call for the prince of the West, but no one answers until Pinḥas himself steps forth and boasts of its qualities. The participants "whisper to one another about [End Page 214] the one for whom kingship is fitting" until Time (i.e., Fate) interjects, "What have I to do with North, East, and South? The West have I acquired! / Behold, my seal and its cord [Genesis 38:18] are yours; the mark of dominion have I set upon your beloved's forehead." The "beloved," of course, refers to the addressee of the poem, Don Çag Yiẓḥak ben Ẓadok. Pinḥas's masterful poem participates in a discourse of post-Andalusian Hebrew poetry that centered on geography, a subject of cultural import after the period of the great Hebrew poets of al-Andalus (Samuel ha-Nagid, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Judah Halevi, etc.) had come to a close. Clearly for Pinḥas, the West (which meant Spain from a Mediterranean perspective) could claim superiority over other regions, and here the claims of poetic accomplishment and political legitimacy dovetail poignantly. The recent book by Uriah Kfir, based on a Hebrew doctoral dissertation (Tel Aviv University), provides an in-depth view of the fascinating dynamics of geographic debate in Andalusian and post-Andalusian Hebrew literature. (The dissertation also offers critical editions of many of the texts discussed.) The approach departs from existing scholarship in that previous scholars (with a few exceptions) have thought more in terms of literary development across geography rather than the way in which geography itself functions as a topic within medieval Hebrew literature. Rather than focusing on the degree to which post-Andalusian poets depended on, selectively absorbed, or departed from Andalusian literary conventions, Kfir investigates the cultural tensions of place, wherein al-Andalus and later Christian Iberia functioned as a "center" with a venerated literary tradition, while other locales—including Italy, Provence, Egypt, and Iraq—functioned as its "periphery." In approaching the corpus in this way, Kfir reads through prisms that have been employed fruitfully in postcolonial theory in Europe and the United States, including within the field of modern Hebrew literature. The book is divided into two main sections, the first of which deals with the Iberian "center" from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries. Here Kfir discerns a four-part process ("distinction, amplification, promotion, and preservation") by which the hegemonic claims of the earliest generations of Andalusian poets are reproduced by authors of Christian Iberia for the retention of hegemony in the face of rising Hebrew centers in Provence and the Islamic East. Kfir first shows how the great poets of what has been termed the Golden Age of Hebrew poetry in al-Andalus promoted the primacy of the Jewish culture of the Islamic West. Thus Samuel ha-Nagid asserted not only his literary prowess but also his independence from Hai Gaon of Baghdad in legal matters. Andalusian Jews represented themselves as the descendants of Jerusalem exiles, hence claimants of pure Hebrew speech, and also as the inheritors of Eastern geonic authority. Hebrew authors of Christian Iberia, though they departed from their predecessors in significant ways, could make the case for continuing the Andalusian tradition most easily and represent their superiority not as a matter of mere emulation but rather as one of innate ability. The second part of the book presents a series of case studies of authors from Iraq, Egypt, Italy, and Provence during the thirteenth...

Reviewed by: A Matter of Geography: A New Perspective on Medieval Hebrew Poetry by Uriah Kfir Jonathan Decter Uriah Kfir. A Matter of Geography: A New Perspective on Medieval Hebrew Poetry. Leiden: Brill, 2018. 164 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000187 "The Hidden Praises of Time Have I Seen" is a panegyric by a poet named Pinḥas, a rival of the more famous Todros Halevi Abulafia (1247–d. after 1298), in honor of Don Çag Yiẓḥak ben Ẓadok, a courtier in the service of Alfonso X of Castile. The poem opens with a fictional poetic speaker recounting a "prophetic" vision, a gathering in which poets come from all directions to boast over their specific locales. After the representatives of the East, North, and South speak, they call for the prince of the West, but no one answers until Pinḥas himself steps forth and boasts of its qualities. The participants "whisper to one another about [End Page 214] the one for whom kingship is fitting" until Time (i.e., Fate) interjects, "What have I to do with North, East, and South? The West have I acquired! / Behold, my seal and its cord [Genesis 38:18] are yours; the mark of dominion have I set upon your beloved's forehead." The "beloved," of course, refers to the addressee of the poem, Don Çag Yiẓḥak ben Ẓadok. Pinḥas's masterful poem participates in a discourse of post-Andalusian Hebrew poetry that centered on geography, a subject of cultural import after the period of the great Hebrew poets of al-Andalus (Samuel ha-Nagid, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Judah Halevi, etc.) had come to a close. Clearly for Pinḥas, the West (which meant Spain from a Mediterranean perspective) could claim superiority over other regions, and here the claims of poetic accomplishment and political legitimacy dovetail poignantly. The recent book by Uriah Kfir, based on a Hebrew doctoral dissertation (Tel Aviv University), provides an in-depth view of the fascinating dynamics of geographic debate in Andalusian and post-Andalusian Hebrew literature. (The dissertation also offers critical editions of many of the texts discussed.) The approach departs from existing scholarship in that previous scholars (with a few exceptions) have thought more in terms of literary development across geography rather than the way in which geography itself functions as a topic within medieval Hebrew literature. Rather than focusing on the degree to which post-Andalusian poets depended on, selectively absorbed, or departed from Andalusian literary conventions, Kfir investigates the cultural tensions of place, wherein al-Andalus and later Christian Iberia functioned as a "center" with a venerated literary tradition, while other locales—including Italy, Provence, Egypt, and Iraq—functioned as its "periphery." In approaching the corpus in this way, Kfir reads through prisms that have been employed fruitfully in postcolonial theory in Europe and the United States, including within the field of modern Hebrew literature. The book is divided into two main sections, the first of which deals with the Iberian "center" from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries. Here Kfir discerns a four-part process ("distinction, amplification, promotion, and preservation") by which the hegemonic claims of the earliest generations of Andalusian poets are reproduced by authors of Christian Iberia for the retention of hegemony in the face of rising Hebrew centers in Provence and the Islamic East. Kfir first shows how the great poets of what has been termed the Golden Age of Hebrew poetry in al-Andalus promoted the primacy of the Jewish culture of the Islamic West. Thus Samuel ha-Nagid asserted not only his literary prowess but also his independence from Hai Gaon of Baghdad in legal matters. Andalusian Jews represented themselves as the descendants of Jerusalem exiles, hence claimants of pure Hebrew speech, and also as the inheritors of Eastern geonic authority. Hebrew authors of Christian Iberia, though they departed from their predecessors in significant ways, could make the case for continuing the Andalusian tradition most easily and represent their superiority not as a matter of mere emulation but rather as one of innate ability. The second part of the book presents a series of case studies of authors from Iraq, Egypt, Italy, and Provence during the thirteenth...

The article considers the problem of the development of shields, the main element of medieval protective equipment, and an important military and heraldic symbol in Ukrainian medieval state of Rus’ and in Europe in general. The state of the research and the source base are outlined. The main trends in the development of the design and symbolic significance of shields in Europe during the Middle Ages are outlined. At the same time, emphasis was placed on sources concerning Rus’ lands and adjacent territories. The author draws attention to the need to compare archaeological, written and iconographic sources in one study. The study focuses on the most representative sources, especially those that can be to apply on material from the Rus’ lands. It is emphasized that the shield as a basic element of protective equipment during the Middle Ages, іn Rus’ lands largely developed in line with European trends. Which in turn makes it impossible to isolate local features about to beginning of the ХІІІ century. At the turn of the XII–XIII centuries in some regions of Eastern Europe, namely the Rus’-Baltic-Polish border, a relatively new type of shield is being formed, the so-called “protopaveza”. This in turn had a direct impact on the armaments of Rus’ and the Teutonic Order in the ХІІІ–ХІV centuries. The author analyzes the main interactions and borrowings of types of shields between different regions of Eastern Europe during the Middle Ages. It is noted that in the Ukrainian medieval state of Rus’, which was at the intersection of Eastern and Western military traditions, shields of both European types and the eastern “kalkan” could be used. However, given the available sources, it is safe to say that the European trend of development of this protective equipment had an advantage. The author came to the conclusion that the shields used in Rus’ and Europe in the X–XII centuries generally belonged to the same types. In particular, it is round, almond-shaped and triangular shields. The issue of shields of the XIII–XV centuries remains more complicated. During this period can be observed as the influence of Western Europe on Rus’, for example, the spread of the knight's “tarch”. And trends that began in Eastern Europe, namely the spread of pavises in the XIV–XV centuries.

This essay examines the non-linear development of the topos of the dissembling poet in medieval Hebrew literature, from Andalusian Spain down to Renaissance Italy. Drawing on classical and Arabic poetics, medieval Jewish philosophers and religious thinkers established two different theoretical models separating poetry from truth. In response, poets unabashedly devoted themselves to exploring literary variations on a theme rife with ironic possibilities: they employed their artistic medium to question the value of the medium itself. In its literary incarnation, suspicion about the lack of truth in verse amounted mostly to tricks of style and defensive manuevers, so the literary history of this topos underscores the confidence and selfconsciousness of poets well aware of their notoriety.

The purpose of this article is to provide a close reading of a thirteenth-century Hebrew narrative by Jacob Ben El‘azar of Toledo that recounts the tale of a “sodomite” who meets a violent end. The story focuses on the amorous affair of Sapir, an adult male, his beloved Shapir, a male youth around the age of puberty, and Birsha, a nefarious old man who lures Shapir away from Sapir, though Sapir ultimately seeks out Shapir and is reunited with him. Sapir and Birsha dispute over the boy and ultimately submit their case before a judge. The judge declares that Birsha deserves the death penalty, though he is spared this sentence and ordered only to forfeit the boy. Nevertheless, Sapir and Shapir take the law into their own hands and brutally murder Birsha. At the heart of the narrative is the tension between two models of eroticism between males, epitomized by the relationships of Sapir–Shapir and Birsha–Shapir, one sanctioned and the other condemned. The question that will be dealt with here is to determine what exactly distinguished the two relationships. Was Birsha considered a “sodomite” as opposed to Sapir, despite the fact that they both loved the male youth Shapir? Were they distinguished by their age, the nature of their desire, their sexual “identities,” their sexual acts, or other behaviors? (Foucault, The History of Sexuality, argued that the notion of sexual “identity” did not emerge until the modern era and that pre-modern societies thought only in terms of sexual acts. I largely agree with this evaluation though I will maintain that the categorization in the narrative under discussion distinguished between individuals who desired males and females versus those who desired males only.) In order to unravel this complicated narrative, we must delve deeply into the construction of sexuality within medieval Hebrew literature and more broadly within medieval Jewish culture—so enmeshed within its Islamic and Christian environments. I will argue that the identification of Birsha as a “sodomite” resided in his obsessive, mendacious, and violent qualities and not in his choice of love object, much less his sexual “identity.” Before presenting the narrative and my reading, I review some of the history of scholarship on homoeroticism in medieval Hebrew literature in order to provide a counterpoint to the methodological underpinnings of the present study. Throughout the study, I engage a variety of source types—Arabic homoerotic poems and narratives, Andalusi Hebrew poems, Christian reports of Muslim sexuality, exegetic and legal sources—in order to convey the highly specific and culturally circumscribed forms of homoeroticism assumed in Ben El‘azar's story.

In the present article the author indicates the need to review the denomination of the historical periods according to the uses of every age. Thus, it defends the change of the empty term Age for Christianitas. In such sense, it exhaustively tracks the use of this denomination in an amount of old sources and exposes - and bases - his opinion on the distortion of the term in Modernity. For the author, an historical time must reflect the reality and cosmo vision on those who lived in it leaving no doubts that nobody - between the V and XV centuries - thought remotely that they lived in a Middle Age.

Chronicles were a popular genre of urban literature of the late Middle Ages in the German-speaking area. Being a syncretic genre, they combined the canons of chancellery writing and stylistic patterns of traditional «world» chronicles and influenced the language of not only historiographical, but also a vast layer of informative texts. Some of the (urban) chronicles represent significant linguistic and historical-cultural monuments of the respective period. Such are, in particular, the Bernese Chronicle by D. Schilling (XV century) and the work of the same name by V. Anshelm (XVI century), dedicated to the Burgundian Wars (1474–1477). We consider Schilling’s chronicle to be a representative of a mainly militaristic type of discourse, Anshelm’s chronicle to be a polydiscursive type combining informational, political and, to a lesser extent, militaristic discourses. The purpose of the article is to analyze in comparison the military vocabulary used as the most important marker of military discourse, as well as the linguistic representation and interpretation of the war protagonists in both chronicles. In the article, methods of descriptive, contextual, and cognitive-semantic analysis are used for this purpose. This study is relevant both for historical genre studies and for clarifying the parameters of military discourse in diachrony. Although military vocabulary plays a significant role in Schilling’s chronicle due to the plentitude of battle scenes, however, it has not any evaluative character, but objective in nature and is not associated with any side of the conflict. Charles the Bold is portrayed by chroniclers as an arrogant and tyrannical ruler, but Schilling describes him in darker tones than Anshelm. Anshelm’s main puppeteer is Louis XI, who skillfully manipulated the Swiss. Both chroniclers gloss over Bern’s expansionist aspirations. The difference in the interpretation of events and their participants is due to both the biography of the authors and their individual intention – legitimization by Schilling and information by Anshelm

Reviewed by: Women's Friendship in Medieval Literature ed. by Karma Lochrie and Usha Vishnuvajjala Diane Watt Women's Friendship in Medieval Literature. Ed. by Karma Lochrie and Usha Vishnuvajjala. Columbus: Ohio State Press. 2022. viii+299 pp. $99.95. ISBN 978-0–8142–1515–9. The Bechdel Test (or, more correctly, according to Bechdel herself, the Bechdel-Wallace Test) first appeared in 1985 in Alison Bechdel's comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. It describes three criteria by which the level of women's representation in cinema can be judged: a film should have (1) at least two women in it, who (2) talk to each other, about (3) something besides a man. The test has gained widespread currency up to the present day, in and beyond the LGBTQ+ community, as a gauge for progress (or its lack), and has been adapted to apply to a range of under-represented groups in film and other media. In her contribution to Women's Friendship in Medieval Literature, Karma Lochrie riffs off the Bechdel Test to explore the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, teasing out what she calls 'the fleeting and even quirky moments of female friendship [. . .] carved out of the predominantly male fellowship in The Canterbury Tales' (p. 195). In fact, 'fleeting' and 'quirky' are appropriate adjectives to apply to the representation of women's comradeship in medieval literature more generally, as the other essays in this valuable collection illustrate. Starting on the more solid ground of spiritual relationships between women in the essays by Jennifer N. Brown, Stella Wang, Andrea Boffa, and Alexandra Verini, the focus then moves to consider the representation of women's friendship in Middle English romances and in the works of writers such as Chaucer, John Gower, and Thomas Malory in essays by Lydia Yaitsky Kertz, Usha Vishnuvajjala, and Melissa Ridley Elmes. The final section of the volume, which includes contributions by Christine Chism, Laurie A. Finke, and Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, forges innovative approaches in the consideration of virtual friendships and the work of Christine de Pizan, the modern Wicca movement, and contemporary literary reimaginings of relations between early medieval women. Also in the final section, alongside Lochrie's piece, is Carissa M. Harris's study of women's 'cummarship' in medieval alehouse poems, which, like Lochrie's essay, is informed by twentieth-century lesbian culture. Harris finds in the lesbian bar culture which emerged in the United States from the 1930s onwards a queer connection with the representation of women in the alehouse poems, identifying 'the political possibilities of twentieth-century lesbian bar cummarship [that] underscores how it, like premodern cummarship, can foster peer pedagogy that empowers and edifies its participants and provides them valuable knowledge to challenge their marginalized position' (pp. 174–75). In their editorial introduction, Lochrie and Vishnuvajjala suggest that the critical neglect of medieval women's friendship hitherto may have happened because 'the topic was subsumed in the movement of queer studies in the 1990s and early 2000s. [. . .] Queer medieval studies co-opted female friendship studies before [End Page 237] there was such a thing' (p. 7). This seems a rather odd accusation to level at queer studies, and an odder still exoneration of mainstream feminist studies, given that this collection illustrates just how much can be achieved by an intersectional approach. As Audre Lorde said in her 1979 lecture entitled 'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House', 'without community, there is no liberation' (in Lorde, Sister Outsider: Lectures and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2019), pp. 110–14 (p. 110)). Women's Friendship in Medieval Literature offers the reader a range of innovative ways for identifying and analysing textual evidence and representations of comradeship and camaraderie between women in the Middle Ages. These readings often involve being open to finding links between the past and the present and to reading the absences and gaps in the narratives. Diane Watt University of Surrey Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

This is a volume of six papers from a conference held at the University of York in March, 1996, with a solicited contribution by Rob Meens; extracts from a fourteenth-century treatise on penance edited and translated by Michael Haren; and John Baldwin's Annual Quodlibet Lecture of June, 1996. Readers already familiar with the scholarship on confession in medieval thought and life will find these essays substantial and illuminating. The unfamiliar will benefit even more because the contributors generally clarify the scholarly contexts in which their research should be placed so that the reader can easily be brought up to speed and readied to enjoy these explorations of the medieval institution, its theory, and its diverse practitioners. The focus extends from the early Middle Ages to the fourteenth century, but it should arouse the interest of historians who work in later periods as well.

Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew LiteratureRosenTova <i>Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature</i> University of Pennsylvania PressPhiladelhia, 2003, xvi, 264, £31.500-8122-3710-2