Bitel, Lisa M.

Medieval Feminist Newsletter

English

ScholarWorks at WMU

women were victims or agents,suffering victimization or enjoyinga golden age at any given histori-cal moment, we need to probe themultiple narratives of gender thatcoexisted and overlapped withinthetexts and other evidence left to us.Mcl-lamara's essaydirectlyengages her earlier piece, writtenwith Suzanne Wemple, in the 1988volume. She applies fifteen years'worth of collective wisdom to theirprevious hypothesis that womenderived power from their roleswithin early medieval kin-groups.She and Wemple had guessed whatlater work by David Herlihy, GayleRubin, Diane Owen Hughes, andGeorges Duby actually helped toprove. Her instincts were right,according to McNamara, but heremphases and chronology werewrong: rather than haplessly tum-bling into positions of authorityduring times of political disorder,women actively sought political andeconomic power via the partnershipof marriage. Women suffered noabrupt gains or declines at the tran-sition to the later Middle Ages, butworked creatively with men over amillennium and more to createwhatwe now call European civilization.Dyan Elliott and JocelynWogan-Browne offer their usualfirst-rate work on literate religiouswomen. Elliott describes howMARY C. ERLER AND MARYANNE KOWALESKI, EDS. GENDERINGTHE'MASTER NARRATIVE: WOMEN AND POWER IN THE MIDDLE AGES. CORNELLUNIVERSITY PRESS, 2003. PP. VIII, 269.If you teach medievalEuropean history, women's history,or gender history, buy this book.Makeyourgraduatestudents buy itand read all of it and assign essaysfrom it to your undergraduates. Ifyou're teaching historiography, as-sign this book in conjunction withsome of the other feminist historio-graphical classics, especially the1988 volume, Women and Powerin the Middle Ages, edited by thesamescholars and born of the sameconference as this one. This newcollection of short, fine articles of-fers a methodological sampler, acollective discussion ofrecent issuesin women's history, and a chancefor some of our best medieval-ists to revisit the Frauenfrage(n)that have plagued us for so manyyears and too many printed pages.A concise introduction byErler and Kowaleski. along withJo Ann Mcblamara's remarkableessay, remind readers of how muchwe've discovered since 1989. Wehave learned how to use social sci-ence to study power, agency, family,and patriarchy. We have taken thelinguistic turn and finally figuredout Foucault and Butler. We real-ize, now, that we have been puz-zling over the wrong questionsand expecting the wrong sorts ofanswers; instead of asking whether51women ofthe thirteenth century, es-pecially beguines, reinvented them-selves as professional penitents inan intimate relationship with theirconfessors. They took the blame forsin but theyalso made men listentotheir religious revelations in a mu-tually binding system that at onceempowered women yet limited theirliturgical influence. Wogan-Browneoffers a series of quietly brilliantdiscoveries aboutreligious women'sagendas andhowwomen networkedto achieve them. Here, she studiesthe women of French-speaking An-glo-Norman convents who commis-sioned of female-authored lives ofindigenous saints. The nuns select-edtheirhagiography tosuit theirpo-litical identities and liturgical tastes.Otheressays in the volumetake up the sametheme of reassess-ing historical categories, defini-tions, and timelines. Wendy Larsonsuggests the simple tactic of read-ing the material remains of popularcult practice on the same concep-tual pages as written hagiographictexts, so that neither assumes thehistoriographical role of dominantdiscourse for any particular cult.She shows us exactly how to dothis with her explication of dragonimagery in the cult of St. Margaret.Pamela Sheingorn also refocusesthe lens of art history on the imageof St. Anne teaching the BlessedVirgin to read. Instead of assumingthat Anne, Mary, andJesussymbol-ized the Incarnation, what aboutinvestigating the books that Anne52and Mary are always holding andreading while they ignore the baby?Another significant themelinking the essays of this volumeis what the editors call the push-and-pull of women's power andstatus in theMiddle Ages. Foreverystatement of women's authority ordisenfranchisement, the contribu-tors offer complexities and quali-fications. Nicholas Watson tries toexplain the surprising popularityof the seemingly misogynist partsof Ancrene Wisse, the thirteenth-century guide for anchoresses. Thetext's tough love for female hermitschastised them as weak womenbut directly addressed them as he-roes who bravely maintained theChristian desert within their ownhearts. Barbara Newman analyzesthe figure of Dame Nature in me-dieval French literature. complicat-ing the tension of feminine Natureand masculine Culture by reveal-ing the many Natures of medievalthought. Katherine French showshow involvement in parish func-tions helped Englishwomen achievesocial visibility, but also reinforcedtraditional gender roles. Three ar-ticles on women's uses of space byHolly Hurlbut. Sarah Rees Jones.and Felicity Riddy help to gray theblack-and-white of private femininespace and public. politicized, mas-culine space assumed by most so-cial scientists. How gendered wereworkspaces in late medieval urbancenters? How did other conditionsof habitus inflect gendered spaces?The only problem withthis book lies in its very collectiv-ity. Except for the introductory es-say, which is fairly narrowly aimedat summarizing the articles, andMcblamara's essay, the volumeconsists of case studies. The es-says complicate synthetic historiesthat track highly visible women,or that reduce women to victims ofhistory and historiography, but thebook offers no sustained, coherent,critical voice. There is no radical orinnovative feminist solution to theQuestion of Women here. Instead,the essays read like the vigorous,empowering chatter of a conscious-ness-raising session. Together, theysuggest that we trust no singledefinition, periodizing scheme, ormethod to find feminist answers tohistory. Our main hope of coher-ence is the gnomic wisdom offeredby Jocelyn Wogan-Browne: whenyou peek past the master narra-tives of history, literature, andart, "women are always there."LISA M. BITELUNIVERSITY OFSOUTHERN CALIFORNIA53

Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, eds., Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages. Cornell University Press, 2003

Lisa M. Bitel

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Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, eds., Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages. Cornell University Press, 2003

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