MenacingVirgins: Representing Virginity in theMiddleAges and Renaissance.Ed. by KATHLEEN COYNE KELLY and MARINA LESLIE. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press;London:AssociatedUniversityPresses. 1999. 246 pp. ?30. As the editors explain, the title of this volume expresses a purposeful ambiguity. Virgins in the artsin both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are at once passive victims subjected to menaces, and troubling, charged figures seen as sources of menace. All women are virgins for at least part of their lives, and the term virgin embraces many differentfigures:the nubile maiden on the verge of marriage;the unfortunatevictim of seductionorrape;the other-worldlysaintwho defiessexuality; and the fearsome, androgynous virago or Amazon. In turn, virginity and chastity can mean many things, from biological intactness, to spiritualintegrity, to sexual fidelity within marriage. The themes of the essays thus include not only such sexual mattersas seduction, impotence, rape, and cross-dressing,but also the very relationsbetween signsand meanings. The subject,then, is a vast and multi-facetedone, and the contributorsaddressit in relation to a wide range of materials, from thirteenth-centuryIcelandic sagas, throughVives's earlysixteenth-centuryconduct book Instruction ofa Christian Woman, to Margaret Cavendish's idiosyncratic seventeenth-centuryromance Assaulted and PursuedChastity.As a result the volume epitomizes many of the pleasures and frustrationsof the essay collection. On the one hand, it is refreshingto address a subject from a range of angles, extending across nations and disciplines as well as periods: literarycriticism of Chaucer and Milton mingles here with discussionsof paintings on Florentine wedding furniture and of a seventeenth-century Italian cantata. On the other hand, there is a danger that the reader will be left with a feeling that only fragmentaryglimpsesof a theme have been snatched. In theirintroductionthe editorsendeavourto map a difficultcourse,tracingsome connections between different versions of virginity while acknowledging that 'medieval and early modern attitudes toward virginity are not generalizable and evolutionary, but specific, changeable, and often conflicted'. It is not surprisingto find a wide diversityof attitudesto virginityin such diversesources;yet at the same time the multi-contributoressay collection formatsometimes restrictsscope for the drawing of illuminatingcomparisons. One of the best essays,for instance, is Maud Burnett McInerney's on medieval virgin martyrs,in which she accurately records how in numeroussaints'lives the sexualinviolabilityof the heroine endows herwith 'aggressiveeloquence', and tracesthisbackto classicaloccultfiguressuchasMedea. Some reference to this would have been valuable in Lauren Shohet's essay on Comus, in which she finds in the rhetoricallyactive Lady 'the near-oxymoron of a Chastitywho speaks',and in Marina Leslie'sdiscussionof Cavendish'sAssaulted and Pursued Chastity, in which the heroine's very forcefulvanquishing of her attempted seducer with a gun may be seen as an extension of, ratherthan a departurefrom, the alarming vigour of the medieval virgin saint. As another example, William Sayers's essay on 'Skaldic Seduction' in early medieval Iceland asserts that the virginity of a daughter was significant and guarded as an index of her value in marriagenegotiations;comparisonof thiswiththe 'trafficinwomen' in seventeenthcentury England might shed light on the iconographic consequences of patriarchy in both settings. Perhapsthe editors are right to feel that there has been enough discussionof the cult of the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages, and that studies of Elizabeth I have 'created a focus but also a blind spot in the study of the poetics of virginity in the Renaissance'. Even so, the absence of discussion of these figuresin this collection feels like two major gaps. Moreover, while Milton's admiration of Dante and Reviews 266 YES, 32, 2002 YES, 32, 2002 Petrarchas poets of chaste love is brieflymentioned, there is a great deal more to say about their influence and that of neo-Platonism in the iconography of the virginalmistressin both medieval and Renaissance literature. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to observe, as the editors do in their introduction, that 'depictionsof virginityin the Middle Ages and Renaissance aregendered- or coded -as female', and to examine, as does Kathleen Coyne Kelly in her own essay on Malory's MorteDarthur, the very complex and blurred iconographies that come into play when masculine virtue is at issue. Both here and in the collection as a whole thereis much to stimulatefurtherthought. UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON HELEN HACKETT Chaucer andtheEnergy ofCreation. TheDesignandtheOrganization ofthe'Canterbury Tales'. By EDWARDI...