Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies: Essays in Honor of E. Jane Burns ed. by Laine E. Doggett and Daniel E. O’Sullivan

Abstract

LAINE E. DOGGETT and daniel E. o'suLLiVAN, eds., Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies: Essays in Honor ofE. Jane Burns. Gallica 39. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2016. Pp. 280. ISBN: 978-1-843-84427-3. $99.Where has feminism gone? This question is relevant both within and beyond the academy, and the answer in one arena invariably impinges upon the other. Ideally, academic and mainstream feminism are mutually reinforcing: second-wave political movements gave rise to women's studies programs, even as women's studies courses introduce many students to feminist viewpoints that guide their perspectives beyond their undergraduate careers. Conversely, in our current 'postfeminist' era, feminism is frequently construed as a past political movement that has fully achieved its goals. Within academia, feminist studies can be similarly dismissed as a throwback to a previous, superseded era of scholarship. It is no surprise, then, that medievalist feminist scholars find themselves at a point of reassessment: what have we accomplished, and where can we go from here?The contributors to this edited volume face these questions head on, as they honor E. Jane Burns and her imaginatively versatile scholarship in and beyond medieval French literature. The volume consists of fourteen essays written predominantly by scholars of medieval French but also those hailing from history, art history, and German literature, with an afterword by a Middle English specialist. Appropriately, the volume's essays are organized into four parts, each taking up a key strand of Burns' scholarship. These strands include her claim that ostensibly misogynistic texts can nonetheless give voice to female perspectives (Part 1: 'Debating Gender'); her claim that clothes comprise complex symbolic systems in medieval literature and culture (Part 2: 'Sartorial Bodies'); her examination of silk, as both material object and literary topos, to tease out Western/non-Western cultural dynamics (Part 3: 'Mapping Margins'), and her attention to material culture and the lives of actual medieval women (Part 4: 'Female Authority: Networks and Influence'). The essays are astute in their readings of Burns' scholarship and innovative in their application to new texts, objects, and contexts. While full consideration of these incredibly rich, diverse essays is beyond the scope of this review, I describe two as examples of the volume's consistently high quality.In their essay 'John/Eleanor Rykener Revisted' in Part 2 of the collection, Ruth Mazo Karras and Tom Linkinen reconsider the case of Rykener, a fourteenth-century cross-dressing prostitute. In her earlier scholarship, Karras described Rykener as 'transvestite.' In this essay, the authors follow Burns to claim that because clothing is constitutive of medieval gender systems, 'transgender' is a better term for Rykener. Karras and Linkinen are keenly aware both that transgender is a modern term not recognized in the Middle Ages and that so little is known about the historical Rykener that reconstructing her gender is an act of speculation. They therefore argue that two twenty-first-century creative reimaginations of Rykener, the play John/Eleanor by Linkinin and Timo Vantsi and the novel A Burnable Book by Bruce Holsinger, usefully open up perspectives on Rykener that traditional scholarship might foreclose. …