Gender and Medieval Drama by Katie Normington

Abstract

200 Reviews of theAlfredian frame of The Proverbs ofAlfred and its setting at Seaford, a place with known Alfredian links.The Anglo-Saxon interesthere isclear enough, although largely in the form of commonplace sententiae hardly out of place in anymedieval work. The next three chapters deal with ideas of time,place, identity,and the law in Guy ofWarwick, Beues ofHamtoun, Havelok the Dane, and Horn Childe andMaiden Rimnild. The last, perhaps rather incongruously, traces similar themes in some late medieval and earlymodern descriptions of Winchester. The titleof the book does not prepare the reader for these shiftsof genre. The argument that these romances -specially those of theAuchinleck Manu script: Guy ofWarwick, Beues of Hamtoun, Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild construct for their readers (on the basis of theAnglo-Saxon past) a coherent sense of Englishness which iswhite and Christian, notably by contrast with thepagan and dastardly Saracens ofGuy ofWarwick (Chapter 4), is fineas faras itgoes, but suffers frombeing limited only to these texts. Someone who had also read La3amon's Brut (excluded from this study for no obvious reason), inwhich the Saxons are pagan and the enemy of theChristian Arthur, would surely experience a crisis of identity. And Sir Orfeo, also inAuchinleck, whose story is set inEngland inThrace (which, we are assured, was what Winchester was then called) but in a poem composed 'in Bretayne' for 'Bretouns', cheerfully jumbles identities in a gallimaufry. The striking and long-standing ambivalence among theEnglish about whether we are English or British or both begins in thisperiod and surelymerits attention in any chapter called 'The Romance ofEnglish Identity' (p. 70). Although these romances are set (at least in some part) inEngland and in thepast, it is clear that their authors knew nothing, or almost nothing, about Anglo-Saxon England. They do not use and would probably not have recognized thephrase. They have heard of King Edgar and King zEthelstan;Winchester, so important in the Anglo-Saxon period, retains forsome of them a symbolic significance outweighing its political position in the later Middle Ages; theyhave a sense that all that isgood about English law (some ofwhich happens tobe Anglo-Saxon inorigin)must be ancient; and a greatly romanticized version of thebattle ofBrunanburh complete with obligatory giant crops up inGuy ofWarwick as just one of themany sensational events of thatnarrative. And that is about it. So it is rather surprising that the author insists throughout that this popular myth of old England isproperly to be termed 'Anglo Saxon' and also that the Matter ofEngland romances provide thebest evidence with which to refuteScragg. There is much that isof interest inRouse's exploration here of myth, particularly of place, which would have flourished betterwithout the specious implications ofAnglo-Saxonism. Or, alternatively, if Rouse really did want toengage with Scragg's position, then themany Latin chronicles written in England from the twelfthcentury onwards (byWilliam ofMalmesbury, Geoffrey ofMonmouth, Florence ofWorcester, Henry of Huntingdon, Simeon of Durham, etc.) provide plentiful evidence of scholarly knowledge of thehistory of theAnglo-Saxon period. But one should not perhaps be too critical: this is the book of the thesis. It shares some of the failings of its type,but, at least, itdoes have ideas. NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD MARK GRIFFITH Gender andMedieval Drama. By KATIE NORMINGTON. Cambridge: Brewer. 2004. iX+ I58 pp. ?4o. ISBN 978-I-8438-4027-5. This is an informativemonograph that (partly) fills a serious gap. No other book length study deals with women-the 'gender' of the title and their representation within theentire range of latemedieval English dramatic textsand practices. Building MLR, I02.I, 2007 201 on important gender-based readings byTheresa Coletti, Kathleen Ashley, and others, it argues that 'there are three direct ways inwhich women shaped, or were shaped by, theCorpus Christi cycles: through their discourse [sic] as spectators; by their assistance with the production of the pageants; and last, through visual signals cre ated both by the appearance ofwomen characters on stage and the semiotics of stage production' (p. 3). These are broad and ambitious targets, and it is not surprising that in such a relatively short book Katie Normington isnot able todo justice toall of them. But she does a good job of synthesizing a great deal of...