Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages ed. by Jane Chance (review)

Abstract

146ARTHURIANA But not too serious! Let the student, the teacher, and the lover ofmedieval stories treat this volume as an extensive emporium ofscholarly resource; but let them, once loaded and equipped, never confuse being ready with being there—let them haul hastily to the highlands and resume breathing the bracing oxygen ofliterary play. ALAN T. GAYLORD Dartmouth College jane chance, ed., Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages. Gainesville: University Press ofFlorida, 1996. Pp. xv, 342. isbn: 0-8130-1391-7. $59.95. Gender and Text in the Later MiddU Ages, a collection of essays based upon a 1991 symposium at Rice University, is devoted to reconstructing the 'aesthetic' of female writing in the Middle Ages. Invoking sophisticated new approaches to feminine discourse as a 'double-voiced' strategy that reacts to the specific ideological constraints that inscribe both culture and writing, these essays explore the relationship between the role ofgender and the textual traditions ofauthority and discursive representation of subjectivity. As such, the volume seeks to repudiate the common charges that women's writing constitutes some ofthe most 'homogenous' and 'mediocre' texts of the Middle Ages, finding within these texts instead poignant reminders ofthe extent towhichwe have perhaps oversimplified and marginalized some ofthe most interesting examples ofour literary and cultural history. Though Chance's introductory essay is fairly theoretical and wide-ranging, the essays themselves are specific and tightly reasoned, closely analyzing the rhetorical strategies, manipulations, or dissimulations that take place in particular case-studies. Indeed, the articles in this volume are as valuable for their careful readings ofotherwise neglected female writers as they are for their theorizing the issue of 'gender in the Middle Ages.' The individual chapters are careful to present accurate portraits ofthe women they frame. Heloise, Hadewijch, Birgitta of Sweden, Christine de Pizan, Marie de France, Margery Kempe, and Angela of Foligno, among others, speak in these chapters in their own voices. Careful contextualization of these voices within both specific localities and the more encompassing history and tradition of ideas round out the examinations. The volume is divided into three sections addressing voice, subjectivity, and the experience ofthe body in gendered writing. Part I, comprised ofessays by Catherine Brown, Saskia M. Murk-Jansen, Claire Sahlin, and Earl Jeffrey Richards, examines how the various voices of'female expression' employed by women writers reflect not so much the enactment ofgender stereotypes as they do the deliberate manipulation of gendered rhetorical masks that allow the female writer to speak from various authoritative stances. From writers as disparate as Heloise to Birgitta ofSweden, the 'passive' and 'obedient' natures ofthe feminine may be invoked as rhetorical devices to countetmand and aesthetize the strong authoritative demands they make upon an audience of men. This is an observation that has a great deal of relevance for the section on the construction of female subjectivity that follows, where, as Rupert T REVIEWS147 Pickens, Kevin Brownlee, Sarah Beckwith, and Kate Greenspan show, masculine or feminine perspectives can be donned at will to displaydifferentvarieties ofexperience. Christine de Pizan, forexample, rejects outright the notion ofan essentialized feminine nature, deliberately displaying her virtuosity by engaging in an epistolary exchange between male and female writers. Such mystical writers as Margery Kempe,Julian of Norwich and Magdalena of Freiberg, too, exploit preconceived notions of female difference as a way of inscribing their own voices and experiences as authoritative text. Any conclusions we might retain about women's subjectivity in the Middle Ages are largely belied, however, by the very interesting essays ofPart III, which focus on the experience ofthe body andwhat the editor calls 'transhumanization' in subjective experience. These essays use the analyses of individual case studies to challenge dominant trends in psychoanalysis and feminist essentialism, insisting on the unique aspects ofsubjective experience as mediated through both writing and physical body. Highlights include Christina Mazzoni's powerful counter to Lacanian psychoanalysis in her essay on Angela of Foligno; Claire Nouvet's discerning of a new theory of authorship in Christine de Pizan; and Mary Giles' observation that the corporeal nature ofSpanish women's mystical experiences reflects not so much an expression of 'the feminine' as it does an exploitation ofthe affective characteristics of theater. These essays make a powerful...