Bodytalk: when women speak in Old French literature (review)

Reviews 145 narrative structures to tie a novel together. Instead, he uses rhetorical devices, the most central being the long speech. Most of the work is speeches, either what Fiammetta says, or what she imagines she would like to say. While prolix, the result is enigmatic. W e learn not about her feelings or emotions or motives, but rather about the verbal forms she presents to the outside world. In themes and construction it resembles Decameron, VIII.7, but with much less action. English language readers now have a choice of translations. The Navarre Society edition of 1952 is a modernization of the English translation of 1587. The introduction by Edward Hutton reconstructs the details of Boccaccio's life and relationship with Maria d'Aquino from this and other of his fictional works. The result is speculative, but good narrative. The 1990 University of Chicago Press translation by CausaSteindler and Mauch has a sixteen page introduction and extensive footnotes on thetextand translation. This translation by Payne and Olsen, is dhected at an American undergraduate audience. A brief introduction provides some literary context for the work, which is ruled to be non-feminist. The translators point out that unlike Causa-Steindler and Mauch they have cut up Boccaccio's lengthy sentences and omitted some rhetoricalfigures,seeking to preserve the sense rather than the syntactic patterns. M a x Staples School of Humanities Charles Stint University Burns, E. Jane, Body talk: when women speak in Old French literature, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993; cloth and paper; pp. xvii, 277; R.R.P. US$36.95 (cloth), $14.95 (paper). E. Jane Burns's Bodytalk is the latest and most exciting offering from the field of medieval women's studies philology. French psychoanalytical feminism and some saucy citations from the infinitely entertaining Fabliaux combine to form a sophisticated challenge to the late twentieth-century perception of medieval women as defenceless, silent victims trapped within a sadistic male fantasy-world. B u m s attempts to go beyond the tradition of research exemplified by George Duby and Joan Ferrante that sees female characters in medieval French literature as purely masculine constructs. Openly admitting her frustration at finding so few examples of the female 146 Reviews voice in medieval writing, B u m s determines that if the medieval woman does not exist within the pages of the male-authored texts in question, then it wiU be necessary to invent her. This invention is none other than Mae West. Her main argument is that certain female voices in male-authored medieval Frenchtextsthat discuss gender (for example, the Fabliaux, the Jeu d'Adam, and B6roult's Tristan) operate on two separate levels of commentary. The first level is the most obvious: that discussed by R. Howard Bloch in his Medieval misogyny and the invention of Western romantic love (1991). W o m e n are garrulous but say nothing, and are deceitful, sexually insatiable, and essentially connected to matter as opposed to mind. In a rather pedestrian section B u m s then rehearses what Elaine Pagels, Karen Armstrong, and R. Howard Bloch have already shown; namely, that this ideology was essential to the dominant medieval discourse on gender, had strong patristic sources, and was particularly linked to St Augustine. For the second level of gender-talk, B u m s turns to the feminist psychoanalytical discussion of the position of the female subject in malecentred discourse. At this point she begins to say something rather extraordinary and original. She demonstrates that it is often the women characters themselves in texts such as the Fabliaux who voice the misogynist vision of women as being essentially bodies with nothing to say and no status as subject. Yet by the very act of becoming the speaking subject, by being themselves more than just mindless, chattering bodies, these female characters simultaneously challenge the message that they espouse. This double significance is what Bums refers to as 'bodytalk'. However, in what is perhaps an attempt to make her argument appear more relevant to the prominent and fashionable field of m o d e m cultural studies, B u m s then introduces a quite inappropriate metaphor. She claims that...