Venus and Mars: Engendering Love and War in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (review)

Abstract

Reviews 209 'Mercy, moderation and charity', says the author of the sources, 'do not meet the historian at every turn' (p. 154). Logan himself has incorporated these missing virtues into this most compelling book. Megan Cassidy Department of History University of Melbourne Lynch, Andrew and Philippa Maddern, eds., Venus and Mars: Engendering Love and War in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Nedlands, University of Western Australia Press, 1995; paper; pp. viii, 214; 24 plates; R.R.P. AUS$24.95. The ten essays assembled in this volume derive from the second annual conference of the Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group, held in M a y 1993. Individually, the papers cover a wide range of periods and issues; collectively, they leave the reader with a powerful sense of men's long struggle to distance and control the feminine both within and outside themselves. And it is much more 'the feminine' at issue here than actual females. Only Patricia Crawford's 'Friendship and Love between W o m e n in Early M o d e m England' focuses on 'real' women. The friendships that Crawford's painstaking research has uncovered have a pleasant ordinariness; even the exchanges that invoke the language and perhaps even the activity of physical love between w o m e n carry a tone of playfulness and affection alien to the overheated male imaginings surveyed in most of the other papers. This book made m e realise, in a way I had never confronted before, how much Venus as well as Mars is a personification of male fantasies and dilemmas, and how intimately they are related. These essays show how, in using force to establish precise cultural boundaries of maleness and femaleness, men rendered themselves perpetually vulnerable to their own fantasies of female transgression. Perhaps it is some primal guilt for usurping the mother (what could be called an Orestes complex?) that creates the anxiety out of which these fantasies emerge. Any perceived challenge to male power becomes sexualised; any sexual initiative becomes a challenge to male power. The contrast between the woman's perception of her own wholeness and 210 Reviews the male urge to dichotomise and demonise femaleness comes out most starkly in Stephanie Tarbin's '"Pucelle de Dieu" or "Wicche of Fraunce": Fifteenth-Century Perceptions of Joan of Arc' Joan's enemies easily dismissed her as witch and whore, but even her supporters were stymied by her combination of humility, virginity, claims to divine authority, and assumption of male clothes and roles. It would be almost humorous, if it were not also so sad, to hear comrades such as the Duke d'Alencon earnestly testifying that Joan must have been a virgin because the sight of her beauty did not sexually arouse him (p. 135). Paradox, not to mention absurdity, seems endemic to male pronouncements involving gender. Jennifer Smith shows how the medieval homilist John Mirk, in equating spiritual purgation to shaving or circumcision, poses a problem for the female worshippers he is ostensibly eager to save. Sixteenth-century woodcuts, as Charles Zika ably demonstrates, tended to equate witches' desire for power with an unbridled and un-male-oriented sexuality that then naturally, somehow, involved the urge to castrate men or otherwise render them impotent. Zika shows how these gloatingly detailed scenes walk the queasy boundary between nightmare and pornography. Clare Everett closes the volume with a sampling of male denunciations of female transvestism, which disagree freely in their premises but unite in assuming that women dress as men in order to 'point out to the whole world the venerous inclination of their corrupt conversation' (Phillip Stubbes, quoted on p. 194). T w o other excellent articles slip on either side of the Venus-Mars conjunction. Pina Ford's '"A fre liberal wille": Charity in Piers Plowman' masterfully traces Will's search for the meaning of love, in its high, nonVenereal sense of charity. Ordinarily I resist attempts to find philosophical coherence in Langland's vertiginously disjunctive text(s), but Ford eases meaning out of the chaos in a way I found reassuringly convincing (or has it just been too long since I reread Piers?). Andrew Lynch's essay on blood in Malory emphasises...