Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England by Sarah Salih

Abstract

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER which indeed invite us (most clearly in Chaucer) to read beyond the initial representations, as the scholars here have compellingly done. They have lifted the veil from the poetic illusion. What we do with the often harsh reality beneath will have to be answered in the unfolding future of our criticism and pedagogy. Michael Calabrese California State University, Los Angeles Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001. Pp. ix, 278. $75.00. Versions of Virginity provides a welcome reassessment of established assumptions about the place of virginity in medieval culture. Sarah Salih’s explicit aim is to redefine the way virginity has been interpreted, especially by feminist scholars, and the resulting study amply bears out her Lévi-Straussian claim that ‘‘virgins are good to think with’’ (9–10). She sees chastity as a ‘‘strategy’’—a ‘‘deployment, not a denial, of the body’’ (8). She therefore takes exception to the exclusive model based on work of Caroline Bynum that conceives of female piety only in terms of ‘‘fleshliness and abjection.’’ She also claims that ‘‘there is no single authoritative ‘Church’s view of virginity,’ just as there is no single church, but a ‘site of many competing discourses of piety and politics’’’ (21). After her introductory challenge to current scholarship on medieval women and a fundamental chapter, ‘‘Towards a Theory of Virginity,’’ Salih develops her ideas about virginity as ‘‘multiple and unstable identity ’’ and ‘‘ongoing process/performance’’ in discussions of hagiographic texts of virginity (focusing on the Katherine group), historical practices of virginity in the convent, and the Book of Margery Kempe. Unlike some studies whose theoretical introduction is more or less forgotten once the main texts are engaged, Salih’s exploration of virginity maintains its theoretical vigor and rigor throughout the five chapters of the book. Despite the fact that her book makes for continuously interesting reading , the value of this study is less in new readings of specific texts and practices than in the redefined theory of virginity for which they are test cases. ‘‘Performing Virginity,’’ the wide-ranging third chapter, examines 420 ................. 10286$ CH15 11-01-10 13:55:23 PS REVIEWS the thirteenth-century texts known as the Katherine group—consisting of legends of virgin martyrs Katherine of Alexandria, Margaret of Antioch , and Julian of Niocomedia, with didactic works on virginity and the anchoritic life. Virginity of the martyr type is then compared to that of repentant prostitutes and virgin transvestites in other hagiographic genres. Salih reads saints as cultural constructs that may be variably appropriated rather than proposing one inevitable and ahistorical interpretation of such figures. She asserts that ‘‘Different readings and rewritings of hagiography are likely to occur because saints’ lives tend to point to areas of contested value’’ (44). She builds on the work of Karen Winstead, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, and Sheila Delany to argue against the conventional feminist reading which assumes a universal and unchanging meaning to the violence enacted upon the female body in medieval legend and literature. Judith Butler’s concept of an ‘‘embodied performance’’ of gender identity provides the theoretical basis for moving away from influential theories of spectatorship, especially Laura Mulvey’s, in which the ‘‘active male gaze on the passive, eroticised female spectacle’’ is the ‘‘paradigm for reading the torture scenes’’ in martyr legends (80). For Salih, the virgin martyr is in control of her own performance because ‘‘she understands the politics of spectacle’’ (78). Salih rejects readings of martyrdom as pornographic or as symbolic rape, positing instead that the torture victim may be in a position of power and resistance to social norms, while the spectator may be not just misguided but vulnerable. The martyr legends seek to distinguish voluntary virgins from other women, while legends of transvestite virgins or penitent prostitutes reveal the fluidity of gender negotiations, also destabilizing the gender binary. Chapter 4, ‘‘Containing Virginity,’’ takes up the historical space reserved for virginity, the nunnery. Although nuns did read legends of the virgin martyrs, which often functioned to oppose worldly gender norms, monastic practice envisaged a different configuration of virginity as ‘‘feminized, communal, and recoupable’’ (109). Salih examines various Rules and...