Culture and Change: Attending to Early Modern Women by Margaret Mikesell , Adele Seeff (review)

Abstract

MLR, 100.3, 2005 749 Women and Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature. By Lisa Perfetti. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2003. xiv + 286pp. ?36. ISBN 0-472-11321-6. Drawing on a variety oftheoretical approaches, this book examines how female laugh? ter functions when embedded in the male narratorial discourse of medieval texts. These texts are themselves highly varied, being written in English, Italian, Scottish, German, French, and Arabie, and dating from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. Noting in her introduction how woman's laughter is always linked in medieval culture with her troubling sexuality, Lisa Perfetti argues that such laughter can none the less be seen to question the limitations placed on women by the misogynist discourse of the period. Chapter 1 discusses how the Wife of Bath's play fui mimicry of misogynist ideas about women's talkativeness and lasciviousness allows her to challenge the contra? dictions inherent in such notions and to involve both male and female audiences in playing the game of antifeminism. The following chapter examines how, through their choice of tales, the female members ofthe brigata in Boccaccio's Decameron en? gage in good-natured sexual banter with their male counterparts in such a way as to defy the traditional link between women's silence and their presumed sexual modesty. Chapter 3 is devoted to the lesser-known William Dunbar's sixteenth-century Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, in which a male narrator eavesdrops on the bawdy conversation of three women who are discussing their husbands' sexual inadequacies . Although a work of satire, one might almost say of 'anti-conduct' literature, in Perfetti's view the text provides a kind of therapeutic space forwomen to air their frustrations at the woes of marriage. The subject of Chapter 4, Frauendienstby Ulrich von Lichtenstein (c. 1255), makes a fascinating contribution to the lyric tradition of courtly ladies who refuse to listen to their would-be lovers' pleas. As Perfetti argues, the lady's mocking laughter at a man bent on performing the role of feminized male lover, even to the extent of cross-dressing as a woman, subverts the conventions of a genre that normally reduces the female's role to silent acquiescence. In Chapter 5 she discusses the comic battle for dominance between husbands and wives as staged in two late medieval French farces (Le Chaudronnier and Porte Bodes), and shows how the women's verbal dexterity both counters the misogynist view of the idle loquaciousness of the female sex and questions the authority of unruly and drunken husbands. Finally, Chapter 6 looks at how the female narrator, Shahrazad, of the Thousand and One Nights deploys both her sexual allure and her plain-speaking wit in order to challenge her male audience's limited knowledge of women when based on misogynist cliche and to debunk the Islamic lyric tradition of discussing female anatomy only in terms of shameful euphemisms. In her eclectic choice of texts and carefully contextualized readings, which are informed by judicious amounts of modern theory, Perfetti's study makes a powerful case for the important place of women's laughter in dealing with the issues raised by the gender system in medieval culture. University of Leeds Rosalind Brown-Grant Culture and Change: Attending toEarly Modern Women. Ed. by Margaret Mikesell and Adele Seeff. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2003. 400 pp. $48.50. ISBN 0-87413-825-6. This is the fourthvolume in a series based on a series of symposia, beginning in 1990, at the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies at the University of Mary land. The contributions cover a rich variety of place, period, topic, and culture, and bear witness to an outstandingly diverse range of participants, from plenary speakers of 750 Reviews international eminence to graduate students organizing workshops. There was also a more varied audience than is normally enjoyed by academic conferences: Adele Seeff, the Director, notes in her preface that, as well as engaging with 'the university com? munity' and 'cultural institutions' in Maryland, the Center 'has ongoing partnerships with many Maryland school districts and individual schools and offersstatewide and national professional development programs forsecondary school...