Filios, Denise

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that competition and contention among bishops and counts, for example,created spaces in which heresy might flourish. Similarly, Cheyette'sexposition of the historiography of feudalism that negates the existence ofauthentic female lords allows us to understand better the role of women likeErmengard in a feudal "system."Cheyette's luxurious prose is dense and demanding, but also exciting andentertaining. His confidence as a scholar and experience as a teacher areapparent in his readiness to explore how modern sensibilities (and thushistoriography) have difficulties making sense of the medieval world. Hedraws contemporary examples to help bridge the gap referring, for example, toIrving Berlin and Cole Porter (8) or Ritalin and Prozac (202). Some readersmay find this jarring, and this tendency may become problematic for thoseunfamiliar with contemporary American culture, and it will place specialdemands on translators.The book has a number of illustrations, the most poignant being Cheyette'sphotograph of the ruins of the Knights Templar house of Mas-Deu, inRoussillon, where Ermengard spent her last days in exile and asked to beburied. Cheyette writes, "As a final, ironic postmortem humiliation, the richcartulary of Mas-Deu, which includes a list of important persons buried in itscemetary, contains not the slightest mention of Ermengard.... Abandoned inthe grinding world of dynastic politics by those who should have loved her(most significantly her heir, the Castilian nobleman Pedro de Lara), she istransformed in death into the lady of the courts of love" (342). Well known inher own time, Ermengard of Narbonne has been a mystery in the modernworld, known mainly through oblique references in the troubadours' ofteninaccessible love songs. Cheyette's work has restored her to the historicalmap, to the "grinding political world" of twelfth-century Occitania-a worldof love and betrayal.-Miriam Sliadis, Athens, OhioCultural Contexts/Female Voices, ed. Louise M. Haywood. Papers of theMedieval Hispanic Research Seminar, 27. London: Dept. of Hispanic Studies,Queen Mary and Westfield College, 2000. 78p.The title of this volume suggests that the contents should be of vital interest tomedieval feminists, exploring hot topics with the latest critical and theoreticaltools. Unfortunately the collection fails to fulfill these expectations. Althoughthe modest contributions it makes to the field are certainly valuable, thearticles are uneven, ranging from too-preliminary studies to well-researchedand persuasively argued essays. These five studies by Spanish, British, andAmerican hispanists focus on female voices in late medieval and earlymodern male-authored texts. They were originally presented at conferencesand still bear marks of oral delivery. I wish that the contributors had revisedtheir essays in light of the other articles in this collection. While Haywoodordered the essays according to thematic and methodological similarities,they do not speak to each other, except indirectly. Nonetheless, I found thelast three essays very worthwhile and enjoyable to read. The first two weresomewhat frustrating due to the breadth of their topics and the brevity of theirtreatments.The first two essays both seek to identify a corpus or sub-genre based ontextual femininity. Vicenta Blay Manzanera in "El varon que finge voz demujer en las composiciones de cancionero" surveys three caticioneros, firstbriefly discussing each text in which a non-allegorical female characterspeaks, then commenting on the patterns she observes in these texts. Sincethis is a very partial study of the cancionero corpus, she refrains from offeringconclusions, but does comment on the relatively small number ofcompositions in this category and on their conventionality. Louise M.Haywood in "'Sola yo, la mal fadada': Secular Castilian Female-VoiceLaments for the Dead" uses a motif analysis to argue that these lamentssignificantly differ from male-voiced laments and suggests that thesedifferences can lead us to a lost oral tradition of female lament similar to thatcurrently found in Greece. Her discussion of how the laments reflect adistinctively feminine discourse of mourning is strong, especially as to theimportance of a personal relationship between the deceased and the mournerand the conjunction of motifs that reflect the modern clinical model of grief.However, I find her suggestion that "medieval literary laments may mediateactual responses to mourning" (35) highly problematic. Her discussion of themodern grieving process acknowledges some problems with applying thismodel to medieval literary texts, yet Haywood construes it as supporting herattempt to recover a lost historic tradition of women's lament.The third essay in this collection, "The Cancionero de Valencia, Question deAmor, and the Last Medieval Courts of Love" by Nancy F. Marino, offers aninteresting discussion of the conjunction between literature and socialpractices in Valencia, 1526-36. Marino focuses on Germaine de Foix'spolitical and social power as well as her taste for luxury and leisure to arguethat she and her third husband conscientiously recreated female-dominatedcourts of love, based upon their literary depictions in chivalric novels anddebate poems. Marino's carefully contextualized -discussion makes for a muchmore persuasive argument than the two previous essays, although hercontribution does not strictly reflect the collection's focus on textualfemininity.The final two essays both focus on questions of audience interpretation andfemale voices in two late fifteenth-century narratives that circulated in twoforms, a shorter, more didactic version, and a longer variant that allowedmore subversive interpretations. In "Antes y despues: la voz de Melibea en latransicion de la Comedia a la Tragicomedia," Eloisa Palafox shows that theincreased number of speeches in which Melibea expresses pleasure in hererotic relationship with Calista undercuts the moralistic reading that Rojas (orrather, the "author") proposes in the introductory letter that accompanied theedition of the shorter Comedic. Palafox explores how Rojas' repetition ofmetaphors of pleasure and his depiction of Elicia and Areiisa's envy ofMelibea's pleasure affect the dominant reading of the Tttigicomedio, enablingreaders to focus more on the attractions of romantic love and less on themechanics of punishment for transgressions. Dorothy S. Severin in her"Audience and Interpretation: Gradisa the Cruel and Fiometa the Rejected inJuan de Flores's ptosimettum, Grimalte y Gradisa" focuses on how Alonso deCordoba's poetry, added to the prose text of Flores's Giimalte y Gradisa andvoiced by the female characters Gradisa and Fiometa, constitutes a revisionfor a wider audience, Arguing that Flores originally wrote for an all-maleacademic audience and thus focused on the anti-social effects of romanticlove, Severin proposes that the expanded version not only is appropriate forpublic reading and musical accompaniment but also would please a courtlyaudience with its play on conventions and the tragic ending, She comparesthis process of adaptation to that of the Celestina, arguing that both revisionswould be read quite differently by a female audience. Not only are these twoessays the best of the collection, the overlap in their topics and argumentsmake for a strong conclusion to a mixed volume.-Denise Filios, University of IowaHicks, Eric. ed. with Diego Gonzalez and Philippe Simon. Au champ desescriptures, IIIe Colloque international sur Christine de Pizano Lausanne,18-22 juillet 1998. Etudes Christiniennes, 6. Paris: Honore Champion, 2000.Pp. x, 851.The fifty articles from the third international Christine de Pizan Congresscollected in this volume make a hefty contribution to the thriving publishingindustry devoted to Christine de Pizan, The editors wisely have divided thepapers under ten headings: I. Autoportraits (7 articles); II. Intertextualitesanciennes (5); III, Mouvances contemporaines (6); IV. "Policie" ( 4); V,"Politiquement vivre." L'Ethique (5); VI. L'Universite des femmes (6); VII.Figures et rhetorique (7); VIII. Texte et image (4); IX, Manuscrits, Bibliornetrie,Ecdotique (4); X, Langue et style (2), Many articles deal with one particularwork of Christine de Pizan (thereafter CdP), and this reviewer found it veryrewarding to read together articles dealing with Le Livre de 10cite des dames(Lori Walters, Margarete Zimmermann, Monique Niederoest, RomanReisinger, Earl Jeffrey Richards), Le Livre des trois veiius (Christine McWebb,Meg Lota Brown, Julia M, Walker), and Le Livre du chemin de long estude(Julia Simms Holderness, Didier Lechat, Christian Heck).There are interesting and original articles on CdP's life such as NikolaiWandruszka's. He attempts a thorough examination of CdP's Italian familyand makes the surprising statement that she may have used her maiden namewhen she decided to write because she was a widow. This hypothesis wouldbe more convincing if he had provided other examples from the late MiddleAges of wives who adopted their husband's name and then resumed usingtheir maiden name after they were widowed. Jennifer Monahan shows howextensively CdP drew on Valerius Maximus. Didier Lechat believes that CdP

Louise M. Haywood, ed., Cultural Contexts/Female Voices. Papers of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar, 27. Department of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, 2000

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Louise M. Haywood, ed., Cultural Contexts/Female Voices. Papers of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar, 27. Department of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, 2000

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