Virtue and Venom: Catalogs of Women from Antiquity to the Renaissance by Glenda McLeod

Abstract

REVIEWS GLENDA McLEOD. Virtue and ri>nom: Catalogs a/Womenfrom Antiquity to theRenaissance. Women and Culture Series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. Pp. vii, 168. $24.95. Glenda McLeod's Virtue and ri>nom: Catalogs ofWomenfromAntiquity to the Renaissance, part of the University of Michigan Press's Women and Culture Series, is an informative, interesting, and highly readable book. McLeod examines a literary genre important for the study of the nature of women, real and fictional, and thus she contributes to our understanding of the classical and medieval misogynist traditions. A study of the social and historical contexts of this genre, this book also discusses issues of poetics, such as the role of the narrators as compilers and readers of literary authority. Chapter 1, "A Fickle Thing Is Woman," traces the development of the catalog (found in many different genres) and its gradual association with the florilegium genre during the classical period. While Virgil, Plutarch, Juvenal, and Ovid's Herozdes are her main focus in this chapter, McLeod also discusses briefly Hesiod, Homer, and Semonides, giving us a much fuller picture of the classical traditions used by later authors. In these catalogs women are isolated from their social and historical contexts, creating a definition of "femineity" that centers on women's sexuality-a definition that becomes authoritative. Chapter2, "Woman's Peculiar Virtue," focuses on the early Christian and medieval authors and works: Jerome, Walter Map, sermon literature, and Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose. Jerome's Adversus ]ovinianum "com­ pletes the evolution [of the catalog] toward the florilegium" as well as illustrating "how a compiler can manipulate his sources without that manipulation being apparent to general readers" (p. 35). His concern for chastity as the indicator of feminine conductleadsJerome to continue the catalog's interest in female sexuality, and within a Christian context "women's virtuedependson thesuccessfulrestraintof their nature" (p. 39). Chapter 3, "TheMulier Clara," discussesBoccaccio's De clans mulierzhus and De casibus virorum zilustrz·um as popular and important sources for later authors. These florilegia show the compiler calling attention to his sources at the same time he works within a scholarly, humanist tradition: "Boccaccio's role as writer often involves an ongoing revelation of his role as reader" (p. 79). Unlike his predecessors, Boccaccio often focuses on the women's "deeds rather than their nature" (p. 68), and he praises women artists and writers. On the whole, however, he continues the earlier misogy­ nistic patterns. 175 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Chaucer's Legend of Good Women is the focus of chapter 4, "'Al of Another Tonne' " - a work that highlights the role of the compiler as both reader and writer. McLeod discusses both the F and the G prologues because both resemble the forms of prologues to academic works that state the author's subject, method, intent, and utility. She argues against the critical notion that Chaucer abandoned this project because he was bored; instead, she argues that the abandonment is part of the narrator's fiction, that "we have the final legend of the series even if we do not have a complete ensemble" (p. 105). Chaucer's poem, like Ovid's Heroides, shows the compiler commenting on literary authority. The final chapter, "The Defense of Gender, the Citadel of Self," is an analysis of Christine de Pizan's Cite des dames as a revisionist catalog, not merely a translation of:Soccaccio'sDe clans mulien'bus (a common criticism of Christine's work). Unlike her male predecessors, Christine "doesn't transmit tradition but investigates and redefines it" (p. 114); her defense of womenbecomes a process of self-definition- by placing women back into social and historical contexts, Christine comes to an understanding of her own identity. This work also looks forward to the Renaissance querelle des femmes, a subject that McLeod discusses briefly in her conclusion. McLeod's attention to the development of the catalog genre is most profitable in the last two chapters; herargumentsabout both Chaucer's and Christine's works are original and most compelling. In earlier chapters she perhaps relies too heavily on material from a single critic (such as Anderson onJuvenal or Mazzotta on Boccaccio), but this...