The Case for Women in Medieval Culture by Alcuin Blamires (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER the lament "might have functioned as a potent antidote to male appre­ hensions that were likely to have been raised by the literature of women's visionary experience" (p.1 3 6). The final chapter analyzes the devotional tradition's growing empha­ sis on Jesus' physical suffering.Bestul reads these details historically (as evidence of the authors' knowledge of judicial torture) and not stylis­ tically (the increasing formal realism of medieval texts). Drawing on Elaine Scarry's study The Body in Pain, he argues that the authors of these narratives were troubled by the inexpressibility of pain.In order to cre­ ate a language for Christ's pain, the authors turned to the language of judicial torture: "...the detailed punishments of Christ well illustrate the workings out of a fully developed state mechanism for the prosecu­ tion of an undesirable and dangerous outcast" (p. 157).Here Bestul is more interested in depictions of physical torment as manifestations of "extreme materialization" (p.163) in the later Middle Ages than in the close textual analysis he has offered in the previous chapters.For Bestul the consequences of this "extreme materialization" are dire: depictions of torture desensitize readers and, like movies in our own culture, por­ tray violence as an acceptable part of human experience. Bestul's focus on the marginal actors, the Jews and the women, works against the texts' own focus on "the overwhelmingly detailed accounts of the suffering of Christ" and the effect of this focus-"isolating the body of Christ for clinical attention, separating it in these narratives from a social context of which it had traditionally always been a part" (p. 163). Moreover, in placing these texts in dialogue with contemporary theory, he works against another form of isolation-the marginalization of Latin texts in the study of medieval literature. KATHERINE LITTLE Vassar College ALCUIN BLAMIRES. The Case for Women in Medieval Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 19 97.Pp.viii, 27 9.$24.9 5. If a reader finishes The Case for Women In Medieval Culture bemused by the medieval fascination with woman-as-subject and fascinated by the 320 REVIEWS complicated relationship between rhetoric, gender, and social reality, that is not the fault of this intelligent and interesting book. Having provided a useful collection of documents in his earlier anthology, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended, Alcuin Blamires here turns to a generic and thematic analysis of a relatively neglected corpus of texts that constitute what he defines as "the case for women." Apparently gen­ erated by the more familiar "case against women," the defense is, ac­ cording to Blamires, a quasi-judicial argument designed to present the feminine gender as socially valuable and morally virtuous. Although ob­ viously many different kinds of works incorporate positive representa­ tions of women, his book concentrates on what he calls the "formal" case, characterized by certain topoi which he discusses in detail in five of his eight chapters. Typically, a defense as he defines it will interrogate the psychology and character of those who slander women; call into question the validity of slanderous generalization as an intellectual tool; remind readers of the crucial role of women as mothers and domestic partners; refer back to women's notable roles in secular and religious history, with, of course, particular reference to the Virgin; and compare (unfavorably) male and female morality. The scope of the study is deliberately restricted, not treating ancillary texts such as catalogues and encomia, avoiding courtly matter, and giv­ ing very little historical or cultural context for individual texts and au­ thors. It begins with Marbod of Rennes, the earliest example Blamires could find, and ends for practical reasons with Christine de Pisan, clearly not the last to write in this tradition. (Virginia Woolf's A Room OfOne's Own, with its viciously witty portraits of misogynist dons and resur­ rected history of Shakespeare's sister, fits his model rather neatly.) Even with these limitations, the book surveys a sufficiently wide range of ma­ terial to suggest its value for those studying medieval and early modern culture, and I am probably not the only one to start thinking about pos­ sible ramifications as I...