Women and literature in Britain 1150-1500 (review)

Abstract

276 Reviews are again misunderstandings. For example, 'In the century before the discovery of the Cape route, Portuguese shipbuilders had adapted the refined maritime technology of Mediterranean Muslims to their own ships in the Adantic, . . . ' (p. 159). In fact the caravel was developed in the fifteenth century by the Portuguese from their own medieval sea-goingfishingboats and the carrack, which succeeded it on the routes to die Indian Ocean, was developed by the Italians from an amalgamation of the North-European cog with elements of their own medieval sailing 'round ships'. Muslim maritime technology contributed nothing to eidier die caravel or the carrack. When he draws attention to the limitations of the Portuguese impact on the indigenous states and peoples of die Indian Ocean, McPherson really needed to relate die discussion to the limitations of sixteenth-century shipping and artillery. He is aware that ' . . . Portuguese ambitions in the Indian Ocean were also curbed by shortages of manpower, shipping and capital.' (p. 165). However, it was not only small numbers of men and ships but the fact that, pace Carlo Cipolla, sixteenth-century artillery was simply too ineffective to eliminate competition that was instrumental. A discussion of the technology of maritime warfare is sorely missed in a book which is essentially focussed on die historical clashes of civilizations across the sea. Although the themes of this book are interesting, its limitations of research and structure are so severetiiatit is unlikely to 'live' for long. John H. Pryor Department of History University of Sydney Meale, Carol M. ed., Women and literature in Britain 1150-1500 (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 17) Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993; cloth; pp. 223; R.R.P. $99.00. Carol Meale explains in her introduction that the issue central to the essays in this collection is: ' . . . women's access to a written culture, and their ability, or lack of it, to use that culture for their own ends, independent of the male authority by which it was sanctioned' (p. 1). The authors address the nature of literacy and literature in their subjects' milieux and the roles women played in a range of literary genres, including romance, hagiography, and devotional works, as well as in the authoring, commissioning, and dissemination of texts. These are large and important questions that the Reviews 277 authors respond to with imagination and scholarship,resultingin a valuable collection of studies, fascinating in their insight and learned in their detail. The collection begins with three essays on the roles of women in romance: 'The power and weakness of women in Anglo-Norman romance' by Judith Weiss, 'Women as lovers in early English romance' by Flora Alexander, and 'Mothers in Middle English romance' by Jennifer Fellows. The following three focus on women as writers and readers of vernacular religious works: ' "Clerc u lai, muine u dame": women and Anglo-Norman hagiography in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries' by Jocelyn WoganBrowne , 'Women in no man's land: English recluses and the development of vernacular literature in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries' by Bella Millett, and ' "Women talking about the things of God": a late medieval subculture ' by Felicity Riddy. T w o essays which examine book ownership and literacy follow: ' "... alle the bokes that I haue of latyn, englisch, and frensch": laywomen and their books in late medieval England' by Meale, and 'Women authors and women's literacy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England' by Julia Boffey. An essay by Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, 'Women and their poetry in medieval Wales', concludes die collection. The volume includes indices of manuscripts and of names and titles. Bibliographic details are found in each essay's end-notes, which in several cases contain a wealth oforiginal research. Many perceptive conclusions are drawn from the dual focus on women and literature. Just a few are Felicity Riddy's suggestion that it is the female protectors and disciples of Richard Rolle 'who in a sense socialise Rolle into writing his vernacular epistles' (p. 107), Bella Millett's observation that some texts imply 'a hierarchy of literacy, ranging from the clerici assumed by some of the untranslated Latin to the illiterate women who will need to have the book read to them, whether...