Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Medieval Europe (review)

Reviews 171 The short glossary, like the section on Theory and Practice, seems to have been compiled without any direct reference to the preceding text, and some inclusions and omissions are odd. W e are able to learn what circumvallation was, but not contravallation, and many of the entries have no specific military significance—why define 'Hussites' but not 'Saxons' or 'Swabians'? I would also take issue with the definition of 'gallo glach' (gallowglass) as 'heavilyarmored Irish footsoldiers'; as Cyril Falls notes in Elizabeth's Irish Wars, they were actually Scottish in origin, and were for a long time considered to be foreign troops by the Irish, the literal definition being gall (foreign) uglach (young fighting man). The reading list is very useful, including works published up to 1994, and the chronology chart will be of help to many readers. Charles Edelman Department of Language and Literature Edith Cowan University Hotchkiss, Valerie, R., Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Med Europe (The N e w Middle Ages 1), N e w York and London, Garland, 1997; board; pp. 201; R.R.P. US$30.00. This book provides a lively discussion of those strange creatures, women w manly spirits and the clothes to match, w h o drifted through the imaginations of medieval writers. As Hotchkiss points out in her introduction, disguised women aspired to and often achieved the male virtues of daring and strength while of necessity suppressing their female qualities. It is of course essential for the success of these narratives that the disguise be recognised, and although the male characteristics of the w o m e n m a y have usually w o n approval from their narrators, some aspect of essential femininity is at last revealed and the essential weakness of w o m e n is demonstrated. This broad outline of the function of the tales of female cross dressing is convincingly applied by Hotchkiss to an impressively wide variety of sources. After a brief contextual introduction, there are seven chapters each concentrating on one set of sources. Chapter T w o is a broad discussion of cross-dressing within hagiography. The main sources are the hagiographical texts of the early and predominantly eastern saints, w h o used male dress for a variety of purposes but were all discovered in the end. The conclusion drawn by Hotchkiss is that male disguise was usually viewed as sign of special sanctity, a view which served to underline the male dominance of all aspects of the medieval church. Chapter Three is an in-depth study of one historical woman, Hildegund von Schonau, w h o entered a monastery as the monk Joseph in 1187 and died a year later, after which her disguise was discovered. The texts analysed by Hotchkiss include the vitae written within a few years 172 Reviews of Hildegund's death, and portray profound ambivalence between admiration of the strength of Hildegund in her ability to maintain her disguise and anxiety about her femininity, particulalry her bodily functions. Chapters Four and Five continue the in-depth studies, with analyses of Joan of Arc and the legendary Pope Joan respectively. Hotchkiss concentrates on the place that cross dressing played in the rise and downfall of these two women. She is particularly interesting in discussing the ways that later medieval and early Renaissance writers used these two legends for their o w n political and religious purposes. Chapters Six and Seven return to discussions of a broad range of materials— the disguised wife in vernacular literature and a more general discussion of literary figures and cross dressing. These chapters emphasise the breadth of Hotchkiss' research and emphasise her conclusions that the male authors of tales of cross dressing display profound ambiguity about the virtues of masculinity and femininity. Generally, the chapters contain enough background information for the diverse source material to be understood by the non-specialist, though this is perhaps a little tedious to those readers w h o are very familiar with the material. One feature of this book is the inclusion of an appendix of the hagiographic sources which have been used. This is useful in offering the references to...