Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain.
Blamires, Alcuin
ABSTRACT
Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays
for Felicity Riddy. Ed. by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Rosalynn Voaden, Arlyn
Diamond, and others. (Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts, 3) Turnhout:
Brepols. 2000. xv+436 pp. 2017 BEF.
A festschrift on this scale, comprising twenty-three essays by
well-known scholars covering 390 pages, is more than a glowing tribute
to its dedicatee, more even than a multiple contribution to the
interdisciplinary gender-sensitive investigation of the Middle Ages that
Felicity Riddy has penetratingly advanced. It is also an opportunity for
the reader to take the pulse of medieval study and see whether it is
still alive and kicking in the post-millennial educational dispensation.
Deftly appropriating a categorization familiar from romances, the
volume is divided into three 'Matters'. The first,
'Reading Matters', encompasses women as subjects, audience,
and owners of texts. Priscilla Bawcutt gives a lesson in what can and
cannot be deduced from scanty ownership evidence, in 'Women and
their Books in Medieval and Renaissance Scotland'. Closing in on
'The Reading and Circulation of the Middle English Prose Three
Kings of Cologne', Julia Boffey makes an absorbing argument that
female (or sometimes 'mixed household') taste is addressed by
a Magi narrative and by the company it keeps in several
fifteenth-century anthologies. Carol Meale asserts the direct influence
of cycle plays (rather than of meditational sources) in Margery
Kempe's dramatizations of Christian story, but the plays remain a
'hidden' sub-text (p. 64) because their ambience does not
confer the sort of cultural authority that Margery requires.
Meale's '"This is a deed bok, the tother a quick":
Theatre and the Drama of Salvation in the Book of Margery Kempe' is
one likely classic of this volume. Katherine Lewis's
'"Lete me suffer": Reading the Torture of St Margaret of
Antioch in Late Medieval England' is another, urging that the
saint's decisive control over her martyrdom nullifies attempts to
read disempowering 'pornography' in it. While St Margaret is
here recouped for women, in the next essay Helen Phillips, breathing
subtle critical life into aureate and macaronic 'Marian Titles and
Marian Lyrics', concludes that the lyrics' riddling technique
recoups 'potential awe for a female cosmic power' on behalf of
'clerkes' (p. 99). 'Reading Matters' continues with
Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan on Welsh women's incursions into the
'Querelle des femmes' tradition. Memorably, the woman who
features in an early-sixteenth-century instalment of debate had been
sold to the poet by her husband. Formal marital litigation is studied by
Noel Menuge, who meticulously elicits self-constructed
'narratives' from the depositions in a fourteenth-century case
alleging the forced marriage of 'An Orphaned Medieval
Heiress'. The section concludes with Sally Mapstone's
suggestion in 'The Origins of Criseyde' that the construction
of the medieval Criseyde is significantly indebted to versions of
Briseis found in Ovid.
A confirmation of the 'network of possibilities' that the
editors hope to open up between the essays is that Mapstone's
observations on precedents for Criseydan 'fearfulness' (pp.
135, 143) are complemented in the next section, entitled 'Matters
of Conduct', by Alastair Minnis and Eric Johnson in
'Chaucer's Criseyde and Feminine Fear'. They mount an
informed case that Criseyde's fear is certainly morally neutral and
perhaps even an anti-misogynistic virtue, not a 'fatal flaw'
as C. S. Lewis supposed. Carolyn Collette also invites a re-think by
suggesting that Philippe de Mezie'res's treatise on marriage
'helps contextualize' (p. 159) Chaucer's interest in
prudential wives and in St Cecilia. Other matters of conduct are
Nicholas Watson's 'Fashioning the Puritan Gentry-Woman',
studying a little-known 1370s Book to a Mother that eschews conventions
of gender discourse in its strenuous mix of devotion with pre-Lollard
radicalism; and Kim Phillips's analysis of 'The Politics of
Gesture' in romances and instructional books for women. Douglas
Gray's essay on The Epistle of Othea is in effect a splendid
introduction to that inhospitable text. The volume's most striking
detective work comes in 'How Margaret Blackburn Taught her
Daughters', a brilliant exposition by Patricia Cullum and Jeremy
Goldberg of specific and generic mother-and-daughter significance in the
so-called Bolton Hours at York. Another historian, Colin Richmond,
rounds o. the section with a fascinating mini-biography of long-time
widow 'Elizabeth Clere: Friend of the Pastons'.
Elizabeth's will gives a subscriber's view of the
much-satirized phenomenon known as 'the purchase of paradise'.
The final section, entitled 'Household Matters', begins
'In Bed with Joan of Kent' as W. M. Ormrod studies symbolic
meanings latent in chronicle allegations that the rebels invaded
Princess Joan's bedroom in the Tower in 1381. By apt juxtaposition,
the pleas of a desperate duchess are politicized in Arlyn Diamond's
ensuing essay, 'Heroic Subjects: Women and the Alliterative Morte
Arthure'. The household is both materially exemplified and
incipiently theorized in Jane Grenville's archaeological piece on
'Houses and Households in Late Medieval England'. Peter Biller
studies the ill-fated appearance of one of 'The Earliest Heretical Englishwomen' among Cathars in Languedoc. Two essays address verse
romances. In 'Unnatural Mothers and Monstrous Children' (as
much about paternity as maternity) Jane Gilbert illuminates a
'monstrous' conception in The King of Tars with a tour de
force of Lacanian, scientific, and doctrinal analysis. Anne Savage
discusses a recurrent pattern in three narratives which anticipate, then
evasively 'look away from' the 'unmentionable'
problem (p. 349) of the sexual abuse of daughters. Her 'Clothing
Paternal Incest in The Clerk's Tale, E mare, and the Life of St
Dympna' will surprise the Chaucer reader by arguing that Marquis
Walter is represented as actually intent on marrying his daughter until
moved by Griselda to 'change his mind' (p. 351). More
challenging still is the volume's second classic Kempe essay. Sarah
Rees Jones declares Margery Kempe a male fictional creation designed for
the chastisement of sins of the (lesser) clergy and for the enhancement
of episcopal authority.
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne concludes her co-edited collection with a
characteristically nuanced essay, 'Edith of Wilton and the
Representation of Female Community in Fifteenth-Century England'.
The collection is of a uniformly high intellectual calibre. It carefully
continues the painstaking work of retrieving medieval women from
occlusions of all sorts. And, to answer my initial point, it pervasively
demonstrates the vitality of current medieval studies, especially in
investigating social and textual communities and imaginations, and
untangling cultural constructions of gendered selves and societies. Not
only an extremely handsome and well-made book, Medieval Women, 2000, is
a benchmark for the festschrift genre.
ALCUIN BLAMIRES
Goldsmiths University of London
