Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300-900.

Kelleher, Marie A.

Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300-900, edited by Leslie Brubaker and Julia M. H. Smith. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004. xi, 333 pp. $29.99 US (paper).

If the paucity of sources has made writing the history of the early Middle Ages a difficult undertaking, then it has made charting the history of gender during that period even more so. In Gender in the Early Medieval World, several established scholars take on this difficult task, and the results, if not always conclusive, are consistently thought-provoking.

The first essays in the volume are grouped chronologically rather than topically, focusing on the world of late Roman antiquity. Walter Pohl examines the use of Amazons as a literary device in late Antique ethnogenesis, and determines that images of powerful, aggressive women played a role in establishing boundaries between Romans and "barbarians," while at the same time policing traditional gender roles for Roman women. Mary Harlow points out that "Barbarian dress" was associated with barbarian characteristics--irrationality and lack of physical and emotional control--and that the replacement by the year 400 of the political toga with the military tunic and chlamys in imperial portraits signals a transformation, not only of Roman masculinity, but of romanitas itself.

The remaining essays are organized more or less geographically, with the first group of these turning to the Byzantine Empire. Shaun Tougher examines the portrayal of court eunuchs, arguing for a multiplicity of gender identities for Byzantine eunuchs. Leslie Brubaker re-interprets the accusations against Theodora in Prokopios's Secret History, and argues that Prokopios uses polemic against the Empress to buttress his negative picture of Justinian: her dominance underlines his lack of essential masculine (and hence imperial) virtues. And Martha Vinson examines the literary trope of the Byzantine "bride show," pointing out that these narratives appeared in the polarized political climate of the iconoclastic controversy, in which the malleability of the bride show topos could be used either to praise or to censure the emperor, whose judgment in choice of a wife stood as a symbol for his ability to make good political decisions.

The next pair of essays moves eastward to look at gender in medieval Islam. Julia Bray analyzes the role of women and slaves in Abbasid narratives, and concludes that female slaves, divorced from any lineage of their own, became key figures in the literary histories of important Abbasid families, who wanted Arabian Islam to be the primary identity of their offspring. Nadia Maria El Cheikh challenges the historiography on the "reign" of Shaghab, mother of the caliph al-Muqtadir, and proposes that we look at powerful women in their own right, rather than merely as symbols of decline and decadence in caliphal regimes.

The final and longest group of essays turns to western Europe. Addressing the daily practice of gender, Bonnie Effros challenges assumptions that women's artifacts are stable markers of culture, and instead proposes that women, like men, could be agents of cultural transmission and change. Janet Nelson and Yitzhak Hen point to important--and public--roles for women in the transmission of culture in the Carolingian and Merovingian worlds, respectively. And Gisela Muschiol and Dawn Hadley take on the issue of the relationship of gender to liturgical practice (Muschiol) and burial practices (Hadley), arguing that gender, while one important "differencing" factor, needs to be read alongside equally important factors like status and age.

Turning from practice to textual constructions of gender, Ian Wood examines the case of the so-called Pippinids, and challenges the tendency of historians, both medieval and modern, to define genealogy by the male line alone, pointing out that much of the landed wealth (and sometimes dynastic legitimacy) was transmitted through the women of that line. Mayke de Jong returns to the "bride show," this time in Carolingian Europe, and argues for an indigenous meaning of these shows in the particular context of the reign of Louis the Pious, based on biblical exegesis rather than on Byzantine models. Finally, Lynda Coon examines the representation of priestly bodies in the biblical exegesis of Hraban Maur, challenging scholarly interpretations of clerical masculinity as either a parody of martial secular masculinity or an asexual "third gender," and arguing instead that Hraban's clerical masculinity was built on sexual models that encompassed both male and female sexual/reproductive roles.

The difficulty with most essay collections is not content, but coherence. In this volume, however, the authors engage with each other's ideas, and several themes emerge throughout. Prominent among these is the relationship between gender and the formation of ethnic or religious identities. Both Pohl and Harlow address the way that representations of gender served either to retrench or to re-imagine the relationship between Roman and "barbarian" cultures during late Antiquity. Bray notes that the nullification of the genealogy of slave and concubine mothers to caliphs came at a time when the Abbasid caliphate was trying to reassert the essential Arabian nature of Islam. And Effros seeks to restore to women an active role in the reshaping of regional and ethnic identities in the early medieval West. Another equally important theme is the caution that gender, while important, does not operate in a vacuum: Vinson, Muschiol, and Hadley each point out that the way a particular individual interacts with his or her culture needs to be read, not just along the axis of gender, but along a grid formed by the intersection of gender and status, as well as other factors. Finally, the contributors to this volume challenge the notion of a public/private dichotomy as it relates to gender: El Cheikh confronts the notion of the harem as a purely private space, pointing out the ostensibly "public" work that was done there, while Nelson and Hen argue that medieval courts offered women as well as men a public cultural space, and that the contributions of women in this arena were important as public performances of authority.

The editors of this volume should also be congratulated for making the effort to balance contributions from scholars of the medieval West with those from scholars of late Antiquity and medieval Byzantium and Islam. Too often these historiographies are treated separately, but this volume makes it clear that we have much to learn from each other. Likewise, the inclusion of essays on masculinity as well as femininity reminds the reader that women are not the only ones affected by gender. The one problematic feature of this collection is that, while it purports to study gender in the early medieval world, some of the essays tend to elide the related, but nevertheless distinct, concepts of gender and biological sex. On the whole, however, the authors and editors have done an admirable job of exploring themes of gender across the borders of time, space, and culture. The questions raised by the essays in this volume should prove a valuable starting-point for scholars interested in any of these fields.

Marie A. Kelleher

California State University, Long Beach