New readings on women in Old English literature (review)

196 Reviews by the translator's painstaking expansion of each of Cosijn*s own references and by Bremmer's biographical essay. It was given piquancy by a startling etching of Cosijn at 57, a man of serious but hirsute countenance, with features so strong astobe almost a caricature, of Don Quixote perhaps. Klaeber's obvious high opinion is shown not only by the forty or more references his edition makes to Cosijn (Notes p. xi) but also by the fact that of the 85 textual and interpretative commentators listed on pp. clix-clxv and 449, only Cosijn for his Aanteekeningen (1892) ('Concise, acute, illuminating') and Hoops for his Kommentar (1932), receive unrestricted approval. This dip into the history of Beowulf scholarship was otherwise salutary. One tends to forget that a whole process of gnawing on small bones has gone into shaping the skeletal concision many m o d e m references. Often, of course, the bones to be picked are as much those of, or antipodeanly, with, rival commentators as of the text. Cosijn's robust open jeering ('To insist that O E wist has the sense of "prey" is equivalent to a public confession of utter incompetence', p. 4) is likely nowadays to be replaced by sneering innuendo. Though Cosijn's effect on m o d e m texts may not go much further than a general acceptance of Drihten wedera (2186) or a partial acceptance of, for example, inwitpanculum (749), there are many who would give a dozen potboders to be even more modestly placed on the roU of those who have had a textual emendation recognized in a standard edition of Beowulf. All in all, the reviewing experience confirms the translator's opinion (p. vii) that Cosijn's Notes 'presents an excellent picture of the state of Beowulf scholarship in the second half of the nineteenth century'. Harry Orsman Department of EngUsh Victoria University of Wellington Damico, Helen and Alexandra H. Olsen, eds., New readings on women in Old English literature, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indianapolis University Press, 1990; cloth and paper; pp. xiii, 313; R.R.P. US$39.95 (cloth), $14.95 (paper). This stimulating collection of revisionist essays (some new, some previously pubUshed) is 'part of the recent informal movement by scholars like Chance, Damico, Dietrich, Fell, Olsen and Stafford to restore historical and cultural balance by recovering "women's inheritance" from Anglo-Saxon England.' The nineteen essays 'complement the primary task of the larger feminist critique by conecting "false visions" of women and their status and by articulating reality anew' (p. 15). Its introduction therefore provides brief and cogent reviews of both the larger feminist critique and of Old English literary criticism on women from the nineteenth century to the present. Reviews 197 The essays are divided into four roughly equal sections, representing 'the four main categories of feminist inquiry' (Preface, vii): first the historical record (deating with sources that depict early medieval women's experience); secondly, sexuality and folklore (folklore and myth concerning w o m e n and sexuality); thirdly, language and difference in characterization (the nature and use of language by or about women); and fourthly, the deconstructed stereotype (reinterpretations of women w h o m critics in the past have either neglected or stereotyped). 'Each essay proposes alternative conceptions of women and thus asserts an ideology which challenges that held by many nineteenth-century and contemporary scholars [but] the essays do not attempt to present anything like a manifesto about either women or the representation of women in Anglo-Saxon culture and literature. Rather, they represent a plurality of approaches and positions with a common objective. They seek to reassess women as women actually appear in the laws, in works written by women and in canonical literature' (p. 15). The 'plurality' of the approach is reflected, for example, in the two essays dealing with Wulf and Eadwacer. In one (a newly published piece), Patricia Belanoff, following Kristeva's theories of language, considers this text along with The wife's lament within the genre of frauenlieder; while in the other (previously published) article, Dolores Frese deconstructs the stereotype of the poem as 'the unambiguous lament of a sexually unsatisfied woman' and...