Queering Medieval Genres by Tison Pugh

Abstract

REVIEWS marriage), but it is laden with unsupported claims and is undercontextualized to the point that it reads as notes rather than an argument. Kristi Gourlay’s essay, ‘‘A Pugnacious Pagan Princess,’’ is the first of the essays to consider race and ethnicity; it rather too broadly surveys attitudes toward male and female anger in a variety of sources, from court records to literary texts, then turns to an interesting study of the Saracen romance heroine Floripas, showing how exceptional are her displays of emotion. Sarah Westphal’s theoretically sophisticated and exceptionally well-argued analysis looks at the intersection of law and gender in Middle High German texts. It carefully delineates forms of anger (for example , the socially approved heroic form of anger), then turns to a consideration of female anger in the Sachsenspiegel, showing how representations of Calefurnia’s excessive bodily rage in the courtroom contributed to the historical diminishment of female legal agency and ultimately to female silencing. Westphal furthermore demonstrates how ethical negativity is ascribed to the dark skin of other female characters when their anger is not contained. Valerie Allen’s intelligent essay concerning the Ancrene Wisse and Chaucer within a well-focused context of works by Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas shifts attention to an entirely different area of discourse, shame and sexuality, and demonstrates how shame that arises from bodily experience is specifically feminized in medieval texts. The collection rather abruptly ends here and could have been improved with a bibliography. A collection that initiates discussion of a large but badly neglected topic will inevitably cohere with difficulty. It is bold of Perfetti to begin a crucially important investigation into a pervasive cultural trope. As society continues to associate women with excessive displays of emotion and casts such displays in a negative light, it is all the more crucial that we investigate the origins of these views. This collection of essays provides ample avenues for further discussion. Elizabeth Robertson University of Colorado at Boulder Tison Pugh. Queering Medieval Genres. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pp. x, 226. $65.00. Tison Pugh’s Queering Medieval Genres is a rich and careful book: rich in the breadth of engagement with queer studies from classical to postPAGE 319 319 ................. 16094$ CH17 11-01-10 14:05:15 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER modern, with literary criticism from Bakhtin to Derrida, and with medieval texts and scholarship, English and Franco-Latin; and careful in framing the investigated texts as ‘‘resistance’’ and ‘‘subversion,’’ and not as rejection or short-circuit of sexual and gender hegemony. The dominant ideological edifice within which these texts practice their subverting bricolage remains intact. Pugh states: ‘‘On the whole, I see little evidence to indicate their interest in subverting Christianity. . . . Rather, through their queering authorial play, they resist, expand, and subvert Christian constructions of queerness while affirming a commitment to salvation and to Christ’’ (p. 15). By contrast, some queer theorists would perceive conflict and opposition where Pugh sees resistance and subversion . The concentration of power in the institutions of which the authors were dependent members, and in relation to which, as Pugh shows, they acted as acculturated contributors, amplifies any trace of insubordination , however feeble. (By the way, thanks to Pugh’s insightful readings, the traces appear far from feeble.) In a queer theoretical framework different from Pugh’s, the opposition voiced by these texts would be seen as witnesses of an irreconcilably different consciousness. In that different framework, the texts would mark the onetime presence and subsequent maintenance and/or clever clandestine subsistence of a parallel culture. The texts’ ‘‘little . . . interest in subverting Christianity’’ (p. 15) would be seen either as a survival strategy or as the trace of a mute (and thus the more disturbing) breakdown testifying to the violence exerted by the dominant culture. By focusing on genre as the means of analyzing queerness, Pugh’s investigation is, much of the time, equally interested in same-sex desire as in subversions or differences of many kinds; for example, the play between the anticipated genre projected by the narrative frame versus the genre of the imbedded narratives in Canterbury Tales, in his incisive discussion of ‘‘Alison of Bath, the fabliau...