Power of the Weak: Studies on Medieval Women ed. by Jennifer Carpenter and Sally-Beth Maclean (review)

Abstract

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 statement against precluding the complexity of subjective experience by overtheorizing it, or what is worse, authorizing the theory to speakfor the text itself. Such endeavors to identify the feminine may well, in Mazzoni's words, 'silence the very possibility ofwoman's self representation (258). Instead, the essays in this final section—and indeed, in the book overall—seek to particularize experience and textuality. This volume is a valuable addition to the critical canon, not only for its insights into 'women's writing,' but for its highly capable and insightful readings ofsome too-long neglected texts. LAUREL AMTOWER California State University, San Marcos Jennifer carpenter and sally-Beth Maclean, eds., Power ofthe Weak: Studies on Medieval Women. Champaign: University ofIllinois Press, 1995. isbn: 0-252-065042 . $39-95 (hard), $14.95 (paper). The essays in Powers ofthe Weak: Studies on Medieval Women, edited by Jennifer Carpenter and Sally-Beth MacLean, examine the influence available to medieval women, and the limitations of such influence, through a series of case studies. Although the editors are rightly wary of elaborating any 'overarching theory' or 'artificial unity,' the collection identifies three general avenues of access to power: piety, politics, and, in the somewhat exceptional case ofGracia Mendes, finance. The opening essay, by Jacqueline Murray, is perhaps the weakest. This may be inevitable, since the author attempts to provide an overview both of medieval texts on sexual difference, and of contemporary scholarship on the issue. The result is somewhat too general for specialists, although it may serve as a useful introduction 148arthuriana to non-medievalists or to those unfamiliar with women's history. The last part ofthe essay, on Chobham and Grosseteste, is more valuable, suggesting that writers who had extended contact with women because ofdieir pastoral duties are less likely to endorse the misogynist assumptions ofscholastic writers. Two essays, byJocelyn Wogan-Browne and Jennifer Carpenter, examine a pair of very different holywomen, St. Etheldreda, Anglo-Saxon queen and virgin wife, and Juette of Huy, a twelfth century recluse. Wogan-Browne considers die evolution of Etheldreda's cult through Latin and vernacular vitae, concluding that Etheldreda served different functions for different audiences: in Bede, she is a type ofvirginity; the twelfth century LiberEliensis also represents Etheldreda as an ideal rather than a person, using her to assert a continuing tradition of post-Conquest monasticism. Only the vernacular Vie scinte Audree fully develops her as a female protagonist. Wogan-Browne links this transformation to the probable audience ofthe Vie, AngloNorman noblewomen for whom chastity might be not just an ideal, but a way of controling one's selfand property. ForJuerte, forced to marryand unable to preserve her virginity like Etheldreda, mothering provided a way ofmodeling her life on that of the Virgin, but also tied her firmly and against her will to worldly concerns. Carpenter's essay provides a nuanced discussion ofthe dilemma ofmotherhood for...