Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality, Hermeneutics and English Poetry (review)

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302 Short Notices Tinkle, Theresa, Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality, Hermeneutics a English Poetry (Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture), Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1996; cloth; pp. 294; R.R.P. AUS$64.95; ISBN 0804725152. [Distributed in Australia by Cambridge University Press] Medieval Venuses and Cupids are popular figures in medieval poetry. Nevertheless, modern commentators have largely perceived them as binary formulations of 'good' and 'evil' or as a 'courtly couple'. Theresa Tinkle demonstrates that this simple theoretical stance greatly limits any interrogation of the semiotic potential of the mythical deities. Her analysis shows some of the ways that the deities reveal both simple and problematic discourses about medieval sexualities and hermeneutics. For example, mythographic Venus can be a historical w o m a n or a virtue. Cupid can be either male or female, old or young. Tinkle's analysis successfully generates a dialogue between discourses of medieval poetry and mythographic writing in order to ^be alert both to dialectics between texts and traditions, and to dialogues among discourses within a single text' (p. 40). This study underlines the necessity to read the deities within a framework of multiple significations. Subsequently, she draws on a wide-ranging variety of medieval intellectual traditions and conventions on the one hand and modern cultural and feminist analyses on the other. Venerian and Cupidean mythography exposes a variety of competing discourses such as etymology, astrology and physiology. Tinkle's excellent first chapter analyses the prevailing critical readings of mythography and suggests a new interpretive model. The second chapter performs a rigorous analysis of a selection of the most representative and influential mythographic texts from the fifth to the fifteenth century and foreshadows the appeal these texts might have for poets. Selected are Fulgentius, Isidore of Seville, Alberic, John Ridewall, Pierre Bersuire, Boccaccio, Christine de Pizan. Chapters Three and Four explore the relationship between mythography and iconology from classical Latin traditions to the Middle Ages and include analyses of iconographic and poetically-inscribed Venuses, for example, Venus anadyomeme. Chapters Five to Seven are directly concerned with the relations between poetry and mythographic hermeneutics and concentrate on Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate but also discuss the Venerian 303 poetics of Boccaccio, de M e u n and Ovid amongst others. The final chapter examines the development of Venerian patronage in Chaucerian English poetry through Chaucer's Venus w h o represents the 'classicizing dream of vernacular sensuousness and eloquence' (p. 202), whereas Cupidean patronage is associated with French medieval poetry. This book is compulsory reading as m u c h for its outstanding intellectual scope as its careful methodology. Particularly praiseworthy i s Tinkle's fruitful uses of the hermeneutics of medieval mythographic writing and Chaucerian applications of Venus and Cupid to reflect upon current critical and canonical practices in the academy. Helen Hickey Department of English with Cultural Studies University ofMelbourne ...