Women and Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre, and the Limits of Epic Masculinity by Sara S. Poor, Jana K. Schulman

Abstract

REVIEWS Women andMedieval Epic: Gender, Genre, and theLimits ofEpic Masculinity. Ed. by SARA S. POOR and JANA K. SCHULMAN. (The New Middle Ages) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2007. Xii+299pp. ?45. ISBN 978-I-4039-6602-5. 'Epic' isdefined ratherbroadly in thisnew collection of essays, which ranges in scope frommedieval Persia to Iceland, unsettling expectations about the roleswomen ha bitually play in epic. The women who are the focus of these studies certainly can be construed as victims or as prizes forheroic achievement, sidelined by the aggres sively honour-oriented practices of epic masculinity, but the rereadings are highly productive. The textsunder consideration are largely vernacular, thoughHrotsvit's treatments ofOtto I and the foundation of her own monastery ofGandersheim were composed inLatin. Kate Olson makes a convincing case thatHrotsvit regarded her twoworks as epic; they engage with foundation stories, and celebrate the immediate national past. Hrotsvit notes that it isnot theplace of a frail woman (fragilismulieris) tonarrate stories ofwar: thus she redefines thegenre forher own purposes. Hrotsvit is the only female author under consideration; the other essays examine women as characters. Some of themost interesting essays are, perhaps unexpectedly, on little-known texts.This raises the problem of how much plot paraphrase is required for the ana lysis tomake sense; differentauthors solve the problem indifferentways. Confining plot summaries to footnotes is rather unsuccessful; Thomas Caldin's discussion of Poema deMio Cid and Mocedades de Rodrigo becomes confusing for the non-expert reader.Dick Davis's account ofwomen in thePersian Shahnameh integratesplot sum mary and discussion much more clearly and holds the reader's interest.One or two essays are heavily inflected by theoretical approaches: William Burgwinkle offers an engrossing account of Berthe inGirart de Roussillon, despite substantial summaries of Lacan, as interpreted by Zizek, and finally it is the brief deployment of Judith Butler which persuades. Lisabeth Bucholt makes use ofMary Carruthers's work on memory to structure her discussion ofEve inJunius II; her livelyargument gestures towards a longer piece which would set out the case for regarding themanuscript as a single four-chapter narrative more clearly. The contributors aremostly assiduous ingiving theoriginal textaswell as transla tion; the exception, oddly, is an essay by one of the editors. Jana Schulman cites only translations of the sagas of Icelanders and of thePoetic Edda, making no reference at all to the Icelandic text, though the Icelandic laws appear inunnormalized citation. Schulman's article ispart of a group of essays at the end of the volume dealing with Germanic material. The case for regarding the sagas, whether fornaldarsogur (sagas of ancient times) or Islendingsogur (sagas of Icelanders), as epic, since they are prose works, only loosely dealing with the subjects typical of classical epic, remains to be made. However, this flexibilityof definition permits a thoughtful close reading of two rarelydiscussed sagas in William Layher's essay, a rather too introductory but never theless useful account of feasts in the sagas of Icelanders, a structuralist comparison of Brynhildr and Kriemhilt across theMiddle High German and Norse traditions, and an intriguing account of the significance of the ruler's smile in theNibelungenlied inwhich the combination of close reading and awareness of recentwork in the psy chology of emotion pays dividends forKathryn Starkey. Christine Chism compares the depiction of Olympias, Alexander's mother, and the formidable queen Candace across the Middle English Alexander romances, while Sarah-Grace Heller argues that the romances of theOld French Crusade Cycle evi dence the actual historical experience of the thousands ofwomen who journeyed with theCrusaders to theHoly Land. MLR, I03.2, 2oo8 49 I The introduction by Poor and Schulman largely signals the essays to follow, rather than offering a theoretical overview, but given the book's ambition and scope, it is clear that, whatever models ofvernacular epicmight have been elaborated, they would swiftlybe dismantled by the individual contributions. The variety of literatures, texts, and approaches which this collection embraces certainly puts paid to unconsidered generalizations about women in epic. It is awelcome and imaginative treatment of a too-little investigated topic. ST JOHN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD CAROLYNE LARRINGTON Lancelot: Der mittelhochdeutscheRoman imeuropdischenKontext. Ed. by KLAUS RID DER and CHRISTOPH HUBER. Tiibingen: Niemeyer. 2007. vi + 3I7 pp. ?86. ISBN 978-3...