Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages (review)

Widows and virgins in medieval western Europe shared the benefits and vulnerabilities of the unmarried state. Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages is a collection of eleven essays that explore these issues as they are revealed in the literature of the period. The book's three sections discuss the connections between widows and virgins, the varieties of virginity, and the constructions of widowhood.

The editors' introduction sets out the paradoxes probed in the subsequent essays. Virgins, often portrayed resisting assaults on their chastity, represent both inviolate purity and enticing temptation; they submit abjectly to God's will yet oppose male control. Chaste widows embody virtue yet co-opt masculine authority. Both kinds of women attain the admiration of society and a measure of autonomy by rejecting their sexuality; in doing so, they become both "arbiters of virtue and potential sites of vice." Their bodies become "contested spaces," places where transgression threatens to occur.

The first section, "Widows and Virgins," opens with Anna Roberts's essay, "Helpful Widows, Virgins in Distress: Women's Friendship in French Romance of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries." Roberts explores romance fiction and Christine de Pizan's ballads, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century philosophical treatises on friendship, and recent historians' work on interactions among networks of women to argue that both widows and virgins—ostensibly vulnerable women lacking necessary male protection and guidance—in fact enjoyed many varieties of emotional and practical support from relations with other women, often other widows or virgins. Roberts maintains that while the romances sometimes portray women's friendships as "willingly and knowingly undermin[ing] men's sovereignty" by allowing widows and virgins to live the autonomous lives that married women could not, overall these works present an overwhelmingly positive view of friendship and solidarity among women. This characterization contradicts that advanced in philosophical treatises, which generally discount the possibility of friendship among women on the grounds that as social subordinates women cannot interact as "disinterested equals," the fundamental criterion for amicitia vera, true friendship. Roberts also demonstrates parallels between the fictional and historical accounts she examines, concluding that the friendships among women depicted in fictional literature mirror those that real women actually experienced.

Continuing the theme that the autonomy possible for widows and virgins allowed women to transcend conventional medieval concepts of inherent female inferiority, Angela Jane Weisl in "The Widow as Virgin: Desexualized Narrative in Christine de Pizan's Livre de la Cité des Dames" asserts that in her retelling of the Life of Saint Christine, Christine de Pizan constructs for herself a distinctively female yet authoritative voice. Arguing against Lynne Huffer's contention that in La Cité des Dames Christine assumes a male voice, Weisl demonstrates that by identifying herself with the virginal Saint Christine and with the Virgin Mary, Christine, a widow, rejects sexuality and "negotiates female authority in a world that takes it away." Weisl sees Christine's use of the vernacular as essentially feminine, a departure from male use of authoritative Latin, while her use of Latinate syntax within the vernacular subtly associates Christine's writings with those of her literary predecessors. This combination results in what Weisl calls desexualized language, which Christine uses to test traditional misogynistic appraisals of women against her own experience of the "character and conduct" of herself and other real women. Thus Christine overthrows masculine authority and speaks her own truth.

Monika Otter's "Closed Doors: An Epithalamium for Queen Edith, Widow and Virgin" probes a different aspect of widow/virgin connections in analyzing the Vita Aedwardi Regis, written just before and after the Norman Conquest in England. The first half of the book, begun in 1065, comprises a panegyric for the father and brothers of Edith, Edward...