Kaplan, S.C.

English

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Volume 57  •  N umber 1  •  Summer 2021Volu e 58  •  u ber 2  •  Winter 2023General and Managing EditorJennifer C. EdwardsHistory, Manhattan CollegeMedieval Feminist ForumA Journal of Gender and SexualityVolume 58  •  Number 2  •  Winter 2023Subsidia Editor Emily Francomano  Spanish and Portuguese,  Georgetown UniversityBook Review Editor Melissa Ridley Elmes  English, Lindenwood UniversityDesign & Typesetting Linda K. Judy  Western Michigan University  Medieval Institute PublicationsSociety for Medieval Feminist Scholarship OfficersPresident: Roberta Magnani (2022–2023) English, Swansea UniversityVice President: Nicole Lopez-Jantzen (2022–2023)History, CUNY—Borough of Manhattan Community CollegeSecretary: Kathryn Maude (2020-2023)Women and Gender Studies, American University of Beirut Treasurer & Membership Coordinator: Amy Vines (2018–2024)English, UNC—GreensboroAdvisory BoardLucy C. Barnhouse (2022–2024), Daisy Black (2022–2024), Suzanne M. Edwards (2023–2025), Kersti Francis (2023–2025), Carissa Harris (2021–2024), Lucy R. Hin-nie (2023–2025), Boyda Johnstone (2021–2024), Laura Kalas (2021–2024), Amy Liv-ingstone (2022–2024), Sara McDougall (2022–2024), Amanda McVitty (2021–2024), Becky Straple-Sovers (2023–2025) Graduate Student Representatives: Thelma Trujillo (2021–2023), Christine James Zepeda (2022–2024), Basil Arnould Price (2023–2025)        Medieval Feminist Forum is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography, pub-lished by the Modern Language Association, 26 Broadway, 3rd floor; New York, NY 10004; http://www.mla.org and Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index, http://www.haver-ford.edu/library/reference/mschaus/mfi/Medieval Feminist Forum, e-issn 2151-6073 https://doi.org/10.32773/ OVDD4032Editorial Board Jessica Barr  Comparative Literature,     University of Massachusetts    Amherst Liz Herbert McAvoy  English, Swansea University E. Ann Matter  Religious Studies,  University of Pennsylvania Lynn Shutters  English, Colorado State UniversityCopyright © 2023 by the Board of Trustees of Western Michigan UniversityMedieval Institute Publications is a program of The Medieval Institute, College of Arts and Sciences• ARTICLES Envisioning a World without Rape inLate Fifteenth-Century Dream Narratives  Boyda Johnstone Selecting Authority: The Compiler and FemaleMystical Sources in Speculum devotorum Caitlin J. Branum Thrash“Oiez mon aventure”: Cuer d’Acier’sNonbinary Gender in Perceforest Brooke Heidenreich FindleyHoly Matter Making Holy Meaning: Fashioning Memory, Community, and Dissimilar Similitude in Middle DutchSister-Books and The Book of Margery Kempe Godelinde Gertrude PerkFemale Reception of Stained Glass Imagesof St. Anne in Late Medieval York: Women,Mothers, and Wives (2021 Gender andMedieval Studies Graduate Student Prize Essay) Susanna Wyse Jackson• BOOK REVIEWSBook of the Body Politic by Christine de Pizan Angus J. Kennedy, ed. and trans.  Reviewed by Renate Blumenfeld-KosinskiChristine de Pizan: Life, Work, Legacy Charlotte Cooper-Davis Reviewed by S.C. Kaplan•CONTENTS74075112150169172Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song Rachel May Golden and Katherine Kong, eds.  Reviewed by Joseph P. DerosierObscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk andSexual Education in Late Medieval Britain Carissa Harris Reviewed by Jenny C. BledsoeStudying Gender in Medieval Europe: Historical Approaches Patricia Skinner Reviewed by Jessica E. Zisa174177179Medieval Feminist Forum172Christine de Pizan: Life, Work, Legacy, by Charlotte Cooper-Davis. London: Reaktion Books, 2022. Pp. 192; 24 color and 3 b/w illustra-tions. ISBN: 9781789144420. Christine de Pizan: Life, Work, Legacy provides an introduction aimed specifically at a general audience to the life and times of the medieval author Christine de Pizan. Organized into four main chapters, the book begins with an overview of Paris during Christine’s lifetime in order to contextualize what follows: a consideration of Christine’s artistic output and vision; her proto-feminist writings; and how her leg-acy has endured across the intervening centuries. The critical apparatus, which consists of a simplified chronology, endnotes, a list of Christine’s principal works, a select bibliography, and index, provide sufficient but not overwhelming information for the non-specialist reader.  The introduction is, essentially, a brief biography of Christine, or-ganized thematically according to the different types of literature that she produced over the course of her writing career. My only quibble with it is that Cooper-Davis presents the biographical information gleaned from Christine’s texts as if it were unvarnished truth, and it is not until the beginning of chapter 3 that she acknowledges that “little can be said about Christine de Pizan’s life with any certainty” (85). However, Cooper-Davis weaves a compelling narrative, peppered with titles and quotations that will spark readers’ interest in learning more about Christine and her works. “A Visit to Christine’s Paris” travels between the past and the pres-ent to offer readers an interdisciplinary understanding of the city at the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth century. Much like Christine does in certain of her works, Cooper-Davis combines documented history and carefully chosen images with lived experience to bring the medieval city space to life. The cityscape is then populated with the most important political figures among Christine’s long list of patrons as Cooper-Davis lays out the basic elements of the Hun-dred Years War and civil strife during this period. This context for Christine’s writings makes clear how involved she was in contempo-rary politics, part of Cooper-Davis’s careful, consistent efforts to push back against prejudices about medieval women without attributing to Christine beliefs that she did not hold. The second chapter, “Christine’s Artistic Vision,” opens with a fun, accessible explanation of how bespoke books on parchment were made. The text segues neatly into an exploration of Christine’s atelier and her involvement in the production of her own works. In Book Reviews 173Cooper-Davis’s presentation of the identification of Hand X as Chris-tine’s own, Cooper-Davis makes clear to readers just how much wom-en were capable of in the Middle Ages, as well as what challenges often stood in their way. Her discussion of the illuminators associated with Christine’s workshop offers a tantalizing glimpse into the complicated world of medieval artists, well calibrated for students who have not yet taken an art history course. Chapter 3, “Christine Stems the Fountain of Misogyny,” tackles the difficult proposition of communicating the essence of the Querelle de la Rose, which also entails sketching out the basics of medieval ideas of authorship, authority, and originality. Cooper-Davis is also careful to point out that Christine’s proto-feminism is still accompanied by a rather essentialist understanding of gender. This chapter is the most traditional in that it primarily consists of literary criticism, as opposed to the more interdisciplinary nature of the other chapters, but the way Cooper-Davis has explicated her citations indicates that she remains very aware of her intended audience. The final chapter, “Christine’s Legacy in Early Modern and Mod-ern Culture,” provides the most potentially new information to scholars who are already versed in Christine’s oeuvre and the related secondary sources. After tracing Christine’s descent into obscurity during the early modern period, Cooper-Davis briefly remarks on her mid-twenti-eth-century revival by Simone de Beauvoir before moving on to a review of the positive and negative ways that Christine has been taken up in modern editions and media, including video games. Most intriguing for this reviewer were the various twentieth- and twenty-first-century art-works discussed, as they simultaneously indicate to the book’s readers the extent of Christine’s international reputation as well as the benefits of looking beyond any single country’s cultural horizon in an explora-tion of an individual’s cultural significance. The images scattered throughout the book are typically well placed and well chosen, drawing readers in regarding the topic that is about to be discussed or offering a reproduction of the miniature or artwork under consideration. However, the minimal information of-fered in the captions about these images’ sources and current locations was frustrating, even in a book aimed at a popular audience. In all, Cooper-Davis has done an admirable job of getting to the heart of matters involving Christine in such a way as to engage a va-riety of newcomers—from people who might not have picked up a book about any medieval historical figure before, let alone one about Medieval Feminist Forum174a female author, to undergraduate students taking their first medieval literature and culture course. S.C. KaplanUniversity of California, Santa BarbaraGender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song, edited by Rachel May Golden and Katherine Kong. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2021. Pp. ix + 310. ISBN: 9780813069036. In this volume editors Rachel May Golden and Katherine Kong place voice at the center of medieval French and Occitan poetry and song, “posit[ing] voice as a multivalent and multimedia phenomenon … that enacts aspects of communication, exposes individual and com-munal emotions and beliefs, negotiates gender and class relationships, and asserts an authorial, social, or rhetorical power” (2–3). The focus on voice allows for an engagement with philosophical and literary tra-ditions, examining the role of gender in medieval social systems, the role of the voice as something that differentiates humans from ani-mals, and the role of the voice as very much an embodied phenomenon but also existing as traces in written forms. The act of “restoring female voice and subjectivity to their rightful place alongside male voices in medieval French literature and lyric” emerges as a primary focus across the volume. Catherine Kong’s “Silence and Speech in Le Chevalier de la Char-rette” opens up the volume with an examination of the gendered roles of literary production in Chrétien de Troyes’s prologues and then more closely in the Charette. This chapter examines the role of the voice and unvoiced promise, silence, and speech acts in the broader economy of gendered relations in the romance. These turns offer nuanced and novel approaches to Chrétien’s work, arguing that the apparent contingency of Lancelot’s masculinity is in fact framed by a security in which even seeming violations of masculine performance reinforce rather than cri-tique it. Tamara Bentley Caudill’s “It Takes Two: Considerations of Voice and Performance of the Male-Female Tenso” follows and focuses on the gendered experience of reading the tenso. Voice emerges as what the medieval listener may have heard, very different from the voice imagined by a modern reader, and framed by the assumed or presumed gender of the writer. She critiques the long-standing tradition that the https://doi.org/10.32773/XXKQ8925 

Christine de Pizan: Life, Work, Legacy

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