Esope au feminin: Marie de France et la politique de l'interculturalite (review)

Amer, Sahar. Esope au féminin: Marie de France et la politique de l'interculturalité. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999. Pp. 243.

Sahar Amer's book on the cross-cultural dimensions of Marie de France's Fables aims to revitalize our perception of a work that enjoyed widespread popularity in the Middle Ages, although it has remained largely undiscovered by contemporary readers outside the small field of medieval French and Anglo-Norman scholars. The originality and significance of Esope au féminin depend in large measure on the unusual gifts that Amer brings to her work. She exhibits not only the creativity and intelligence we expect in scholars trained by the best institutions in her field; her background, the unique range of cultural and linguistic tools at her disposal, in conjunction with her command of a variety of critical approaches, place her at the cutting edge of a number of intersecting fields and give her access to areas of knowledge, concepts and experience, where few scholars can follow. As the subtitle of her study indicates, this Esope enters into the multicultural dialogue that has grown strong in American communities both within and outside the academy, with all the polemical stresses any effort to open ears to the sound of new and different voices entails. Her choice to write in French represents a desire to extend that multicultural dialogue into the Francophone world, itself caught up in the exuberance and the tensions of intercultural exchange, with their inevitable political implications. In the wake of September 11 and in current debates on the "clash of civilizations," the importance of exploring the history, and the present state of East-West confrontations, exchanges, and interdependence, has been underscored in the most urgent fashion.

Amer's study of the way Marie de France's twelfth-century fable collection demonstrates her creative engagement not only with the Latin, but also the Eastern Aesopic tradition transmitted through Arabic sources, takes as her point of departure the Eurocentrism of traditional scholarly debate—a certain resistance to acknowledging the role of Arabic culture in the formation of what we take to constitute the basic characteristics of medieval Europe. In this respect she finds models in Maria Rosa Menocal's works (The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History [Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Press, 1987], or more recently Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of Lyric [Durham: Duke UP, 1994]), as well as in Alain de Libera's Penser au moyen âge (Paris: Seuil, 1991), which situates the question of medieval philosophy's debt to the Arabic transmission and elaboration of Aristotle within the context of political and cultural tensions that characterize France's current engagement with a growing North African presence in its midst. My first reaction to Amer's charges of critical Eurocentrism was to consider them somewhat exaggerated in the contemporary context, when the majority of academic and public intellectuals seem to have accepted the need for integrating multicultural dialogue (however fierce the debate remains on how best to do so). What she depicted as the neglect or even the suppression of "other," non-Western voices, I considered largely the result of academic ignorance, a general lack of linguistic and cultural competencies—the same kind of complaint one hears among medievalists lamenting the separation of Latin and vernacular cultures into separate departments and specialties in today's institutions. But if September 11 has taught us anything, it has shown that we can ill afford ignorance—willful or not—in our understanding of either the past or the present. And so I listen with new ears to Amer's conclusion calling for a better comprehension of medieval culture where the "boundaries" between East and West have been arbitrarily reconstructed by later history. Such lines of division must be crossed and reconceptualized by today's students and scholars.

In her analysis of the Fables, Sahar Amer has given us a most...