Women’s Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church ed. by Virginia Chieffo Raguin, Sarah Stanbury (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 308 position combined with their considerable financial independence allowed them to be powerful shoppers in their own right. Overall, Shopping in the Renaissance succeeds in exposing the social, political , and moral attitudes that problematized and defined the notions of commodification and consumerism in early Modern Italy. Welch effectively combines documentary evidence with insightful analysis to present a rich canvas of everyday life in the Italian marketplace, while her concise and clear language and the book’s wealth of illustrations make this work suitable both for academic and less specialized audiences. RITA EMMANOUILIDOU, Comparative Literature, UCLA Women’s Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church, ed. Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury (Albany: State University of New York Press 2005) x + 261 pp. Women’s Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church is a collection of essays that address the location of women and their bequests within the church. Drawing on the postmodern understanding of the spaces we inhabit as representing and enacting the laws of community organization, the authors explore aspects of the most significant medieval communal space in an attempt to render visible structures of power that are often taken for granted or considered universal. The eight essays in this collection make use of a variety of disciplines to contribute to our understanding of gendered space within parish churches and monasteries. Attentive to the political and ideological agendas behind holy edifications and their decoration, Women’s Space focuses on specific churches and women evidencing ways that control of space limited women’s visibility in public and strategies women employed to exercise influence despite patriarchal restrictions. The first three essays examine medieval texts as archives of material culture, sites for the play of identity and the performance of gender. Ruth Evans’s study of the York Cycle is the only essay to consider urban spaces outside the church, although the plays contain religious material. Her main argument is that the spatializations offered by the mobility of the York Play question the categories of sex, gender, and the body by exposing the divisions between private and public spaces and different social ranks. The most interesting point she makes concerns medieval transvestite theater, however. Although it has long been regarded as unproblematic, Evans argues that the York plays call attention to the artifice of a transvestite theater and to the artifice of gender itself by rendering the categories of masculine and feminine unstable. Virginia Blanton’s chapter illustrates how the compilers of the vita of St. Aethelthryth, the founding patron of the monastery at Ely, in the Liber Eliensis, used the imagery of rape and identification with an enclosed shrine of a female body to represent the inviolability and autonomy of the monastic community. The strength of this chapter is in its demonstration of the manipulation of historical accounts for ideological purposes. Blanton’s analysis of Ely’s resistance to the Norman conquest as documented in the Liber Eliensis leaves no doubt that hagiographical accounts and the gendering of spaces they represent are more than mere symbolism and have the authority to influence economy, politics and history. REVIEWS 309 The following chapter by Sarah Stanbury is another exhibit of the construction of power through representation. In her textual study of The Book of Margery Kempe she argues that Kempe models her interaction with Christ on contemporary donor images, creating a public self defined by strategic spatial placement. Focusing more on architecture and material culture, Virginia Chieffo Raguin’s complementary study of the same work probes the ways that Kempe uses her body to compete vocally with clerical sound and to compete posturally with local patrons. Although she is denied the ability to depict herself as a donor she finds ways to embody the self in the same places. Both chapters indicate that awareness of location, visibility and access to ritual masculine space allowed Margery Kempe to create an empowering textual reality and public persona. They also highlight the self-consciousness of medieval women and the limitations that poverty placed on visible status within the medieval church. Katherine L. French subsequently examines pews and church arrangement in two fifteenth-century English churches in the most interesting chapter in...