Women's Friendship in Medieval Literature ed. by Karma Lochrie and Usha Vishnuvajjala

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women's Friendship in Medieval Literature ed. by Karma Lochrie and Usha Vishnuvajjala Diane Watt Women's Friendship in Medieval Literature. Ed. by Karma Lochrie and Usha Vishnuvajjala. Columbus: Ohio State Press. 2022. viii+299 pp. $99.95. ISBN 978-0–8142–1515–9. The Bechdel Test (or, more correctly, according to Bechdel herself, the Bechdel-Wallace Test) first appeared in 1985 in Alison Bechdel's comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. It describes three criteria by which the level of women's representation in cinema can be judged: a film should have (1) at least two women in it, who (2) talk to each other, about (3) something besides a man. The test has gained widespread currency up to the present day, in and beyond the LGBTQ+ community, as a gauge for progress (or its lack), and has been adapted to apply to a range of under-represented groups in film and other media. In her contribution to Women's Friendship in Medieval Literature, Karma Lochrie riffs off the Bechdel Test to explore the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, teasing out what she calls 'the fleeting and even quirky moments of female friendship [. . .] carved out of the predominantly male fellowship in The Canterbury Tales' (p. 195). In fact, 'fleeting' and 'quirky' are appropriate adjectives to apply to the representation of women's comradeship in medieval literature more generally, as the other essays in this valuable collection illustrate. Starting on the more solid ground of spiritual relationships between women in the essays by Jennifer N. Brown, Stella Wang, Andrea Boffa, and Alexandra Verini, the focus then moves to consider the representation of women's friendship in Middle English romances and in the works of writers such as Chaucer, John Gower, and Thomas Malory in essays by Lydia Yaitsky Kertz, Usha Vishnuvajjala, and Melissa Ridley Elmes. The final section of the volume, which includes contributions by Christine Chism, Laurie A. Finke, and Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, forges innovative approaches in the consideration of virtual friendships and the work of Christine de Pizan, the modern Wicca movement, and contemporary literary reimaginings of relations between early medieval women. Also in the final section, alongside Lochrie's piece, is Carissa M. Harris's study of women's 'cummarship' in medieval alehouse poems, which, like Lochrie's essay, is informed by twentieth-century lesbian culture. Harris finds in the lesbian bar culture which emerged in the United States from the 1930s onwards a queer connection with the representation of women in the alehouse poems, identifying 'the political possibilities of twentieth-century lesbian bar cummarship [that] underscores how it, like premodern cummarship, can foster peer pedagogy that empowers and edifies its participants and provides them valuable knowledge to challenge their marginalized position' (pp. 174–75). In their editorial introduction, Lochrie and Vishnuvajjala suggest that the critical neglect of medieval women's friendship hitherto may have happened because 'the topic was subsumed in the movement of queer studies in the 1990s and early 2000s. [. . .] Queer medieval studies co-opted female friendship studies before [End Page 237] there was such a thing' (p. 7). This seems a rather odd accusation to level at queer studies, and an odder still exoneration of mainstream feminist studies, given that this collection illustrates just how much can be achieved by an intersectional approach. As Audre Lorde said in her 1979 lecture entitled 'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House', 'without community, there is no liberation' (in Lorde, Sister Outsider: Lectures and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2019), pp. 110–14 (p. 110)). Women's Friendship in Medieval Literature offers the reader a range of innovative ways for identifying and analysing textual evidence and representations of comradeship and camaraderie between women in the Middle Ages. These readings often involve being open to finding links between the past and the present and to reading the absences and gaps in the narratives. Diane Watt University of Surrey Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association