Inventing Womanhood: Gender and Language in Later Middle English Writing (review)

Inventing Womanhood: Gender and Language in Later Middle English Writing is a welcome addition to the literature of medieval gender studies. A thorough exploration of Middle English writers’ experimentation with new ways of defining women’s lives and experiences, coining of new gendered terms such as womanhood and femininity, and reformulating terms already in use such as motherhood, Inventing Womanhood delves into the complexities of the ways that fourteenth- and fifteenth-century writers defined the larger idea of womanhood underlying identities such as wife or mother. Adding further depth to the richness of this complex work, Williams situates herself amid the most recent studies of medieval gender treatment in literary texts such as the scholarship of Mary Erler, Rebecca Krug, Catherine Sanok, Nancy Bradley Warren, Claire Waters, Carolyn Dinshaw, and others. Williams traces the first appearances of the word womanhood through careful textual analysis of passages from the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower associated with characters such as Criseyde, Griselda, Hippolyta, and Amans’s lady. The book also examines John Lydgate’s Temple of Glas, Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid, Julian of Norwich’s The Shewings of Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe’s The Book of Margery Kempe. The result is thought-provoking scholarship in which Williams reveals that the invention of the term has undergone a long diachronic process with various usages and influences. The organization of the material, including an introduction, four chapters, and a concluding chapter, not only highlights the development of the term womanhood in the works of each writer separately, but also, by referring to the commonalities and overlapping aspects, allows the reader to envision the multifaceted impact of each writer’s work on their contemporaries or successors.

In chapter 1, “Amazons and Saints: Chaucer’s Tales of Womanhood,” Williams explores Chaucer’s interest in representing women not only through well-known figures such as the Wife of Bath and Griselda but also at the level of language itself (11). She studies the female characters in the Knight’s Tale and the Clerk’s Tale in order to “uncover problematic relationships [of these women] to power” during their transformations from submissive figures to authoritative ones through intercession (12). Williams argues that Chaucer’s use of gendered language allows for new ways of imagining womanhood—ways that reconcile “womanly virtue with feminine power” (50). By manipulating extant ideas of womanhood such as those found in hagiography, romance, etc., Chaucer’s works leave space for experimentation with new vocabulary and new concepts—an experimentation with social and literary ramifications.

Chapter 2, “Beastly Women and Womanly Men: Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” focuses on John Gower’s text Confession Amantis and development of womanhood in relation to gender and morality. Williams contends that Gower’s construction of the term womanhood is analogous to both manhood and beastliness. Gower’s understanding of gender is performative; that is, any identity is subject to change and can be learned or feigned. Although Gower’s use of womanhood in Confessio is associated with virtuosity, maidenhead, and chastity, it is used as a register of the morality of others, particularly men. Williams studies Gower’s “beastly women” and “womanly men” in the Confessio and “connects Gower’s concept of womanhood in the tales with the figure of Amans’s lady in the frame of narrative” (53). In this way, Williams elucidates Gower’s emphasis on the ambiguity and multiplicity of language and terms such as womanhood.

In the following chapter, Williams argues that compared to Chaucer and Gower, Lydgate in his Temple of Glas illuminates the shortcomings of social models of gender while Henryson in Testament of Cresseid moves beyond those models entirely and approaches the modern conception of womanhood. Williams shows how womanhood develops into a broader gendered category, where its connection to morality is loosened, in these fifteenth-century texts. In Temple of Glas, Williams examines feminine “characteristics and behaviors determined by literary and social precedent rather...