Medieval Virginities by Anke Bernau , Ruth Evans , Sarah Salih (review)

Abstract

186 Reviews Literary parasites themselves are parasitic, and plagiarism is endemic. Michel Serres's Le Parasite is a constant source of reference. A telling example is the proliferating battening on to Maupassant's mystifyingtale 'Le Horla'. In terms of lan? guage, purists have always fretted over the amount of parasitic words in others' discourses: tautologies, quotations, impurities, borrowings?infections of all kinds, foreign bodies in the text. Indeed, even for the latitudinarian Barthes and William Burrroughs, language itselfis totally riddled with parasitism; Finnegans Wake demon? strates this fact of life ad nauseam. The parasite, a figure,however repellent, of desire, is obviously of fascination not only to creative writers but also to the dernier cri of theorists. But it is not so much undecidable, even when enigmatic, as uncontrollable, interminable, protean. (Intriguingly, there lurks a Mormon parasite in an anonymous French text of 1650.) As Diderot said of Rameau's Nephew: 'Rien ne dissemble plus de lui que lui-meme'. J.Hillis Miller wrote of 'the perpetual reversal of parasite and host'. In French, of course, as in Latin, hote/hospesis bivalent: host/guest. How parasitic is this book, is all literary history and criticism? It is a richly de? tailed, close-teamwork, labour of love (and distaste), thought-inciting on the whole vital question of dialectical dependency. There is, however, much reduplication of material; the book keeps restarting, rather like the film Groundhog Day. Overall, nevertheless, it productively clings on to its subject, like a leech. University of Reading Walter Redfern Medieval Virginities. Ed. by Anke Bernau, Ruth Evans, and Sarah Salih. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 2003. xiv + 296 pp.; 9 plates. ?40 (pbk ?15.99). ISBN 0-7083-1763-4 (pbk 0-7083-1762-6). As Anke Bernau notes, 'Virginity always stands for something other or more than itself?it is a metaphor par excellence' (p. 220). The essays in this volume deploy a variety of approaches to the interpretation of virginity in medieval culture, but all are alert to the complexity of the central concept. The 'Introduction: Virginities and Virginity Studies' (pp. 1-13), by Sarah Salih, Anke Bernau, and Ruth Evans, summarizes scholarly work to date on medieval virginity and tracks the key elements of each of the essays which follow. Salih's 'When is a Bosom Not a Bosom? Problems with "Erotic Mysticism"' (pp. 14-32) is a useful opener. It problematizes scholarly tendencies to see erotic language in religious texts as either entirely metaphorical and theological or entirely sexual, and examines a number of mystical and hagiographic texts to demonstrate more nuanced ways of negotiating these potential meanings. Juliette Dor focuses on an apparently very differentsubject in 'The Sheela-na-Gig: An Incongruous Sign of Sexual Purity?' (pp. 33-55), but also shows how shifting approaches to the interpretation of these sculptures demonstrate 'the impossibility of the representation of either "woman" or "virginity"' (p. 49). Jane Cartwright's 'Virginity and Chastity Tests in Medieval Welsh Prose' (pp. 5679 ) examines a variety of texts which position fertility,pregnancy, and piety as the key characteristics for married women, and which give virginity particular value in the marriage market. The later medieval English legal texts examined by Kim M. Phillips in 'Four Virgins' Tales: Sex and Power in Medieval Law' (pp. 80-101) are also shown to highlight the social value of premarital virginity. John H. Arnold's 'The Labour of Continence: Masculinity and Clerical Virginity' (pp. 102?18) assesses a number of later medieval popular narratives and concludes that 'there is a threat to male virginity, and it lies in the problematic and permeable relationship between "inside" and "outside"' (p. 113). Joanna Huntingdon, in 'Edward the Celibate, Edward the Saint: Virginity in the Construction of Edward MLRy ioo.i, 2005 187 the Confessor' (pp. 119-39), tracks changes in the presentation of Edward's virginity through the eleventh- and twelfth-century Latin vitae of Edward. In Alchemy and the Exploration of Late Medieval Sexuality' (pp. 140-66), Jona? than Hughes stresses the centrality of female sexuality, and the interrelationship of reproductive heterosexuality and virginity, in alchemical medicine, and goes on to propose that the hermaphrodite is 'yet another figure of the virgin' (p. 161). Evans...