Minding the Body: Women and Literature in the Middle Ages, 800–1500 by Monica Brzezinski Potkay and Regula Meyer Evitt (review)

REVIEWS MONICA BRZEZINSKI POTKAY and REGULA MEYER EVITT.Minding the Body: Women and Literature in the Middle Ages, 800-1500. New York: Twayne, 1997.Pp.xii, 238.$33.00. This study focuses on textual representations of and literary production by women across a broad range of medieval languages and genres.The book's title articulates its organizing principle: what pulls together analyses of these potentially disparate materials is the idea of "minding the body," a trope that the authors invoke simultaneously to convey and disrupt the familiar medieval identification of women with body and men with mind. The essays in this book track the various ways that the body is "minded" in medieval texts about and by women: as unruly feminine carnality, as generator of life, as suffering and salvific flesh, as constituent of human society itself. The authors target their book pri­ marily for nonspecialists but also express the hope that "something here will interest ...medievalist colleagues" (p.9).Both types of readers are likely to find this book ever intelligent and alternately useful, provoca­ tive, and at times frustrating, because its ambitions for coverage do not consistently complement the sophistication of several of its arguments. Minding the Body concentrates on medieval English literature but also pays significant attention to important texts in Latin, French, and Proven�al.Its introduction and conclusion frame nine chapters, which focus on religious constructions of female authorship, Anglo-Saxon po­ etry, Proven�al love poetry and Marian lyrics, romance, the lais of Marie de France, English biblical drama, dream visions, Chaucer, and mystical texts by women.The book also includes a fourteen-hundred-year chro­ nology of literary events and a bibliography. Potkay and Evitt apply a commensurately broad sense of historical and cultural context to their wide-ranging literary analyses, invoking "literary and artistic conventions; religious and philosophical traditions; psychological needs; economic, ecclesiastic, political, and other social institutions; and cultural practice" to elucidate medieval textual repre­ sentations of women and the feminine.Despite male dominance of the social forces constructing medieval femininity, they generally conclude that "women did not always passively conform to manufactured images but might remodel, resist, or even reject them" (p.10).Individual chap­ ters arrive at this conclusion through engaging arguments that draw upon relevant historical and cultural materials to inform selective read­ ings of literary texts. 377 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Given the scope and complexity of the issues this book seeks to ad­ dress, some of these chapters are admirably lucid models of condensa­ tion. For example, chapter 1, "Body and Soul: Religious Constructions of Female Authorship," examines linkages between classical and Chris­ tian misogyny and antifeminism and the self-conceptions expressed by medieval women authors. Writers such as Hrotsvitha, Heloise, Hilde­ gard of Bingen, and Christine de Pizan are able to challenge the culture's monolithic "disparagement of the feminine" (p. 22) by manipulating metaphoric constructions of textuality (e.g., as body and fabric) and the symbolic potential of dominant culture discourses that gendered ratio and anima as feminine. Chapter 3, "Mirror and Window: The Courtly Lady in Proven�al Love Poetry and English Marian Hymns," provides a useful overview of fin'amor as a social and poetic ideology that under­ writes the fundamental narcissism of troubadour poetry; it then argues that this narcissism is powerfully critiqued in the poems of the trobairitz and implicitly reversed by certain Middle English Marian lyrics, which transform the "visual climax" (p. 61) of troubadour lyric narcissism through a kind of looking, filtered by the Virgin Mary, that is transpar­ ent, communal, and redemptive. Other chapters advance arguments that are more obliquely formu­ lated and hence more difficult to summarize. Chapter 6, "Body Broken, Body Whole: Eucharistic Devotion, Fabliaux, and the Feminine Im­ pulse of the Corpus Christi Drama," establishes the tension between fragmentation and wholeness in medieval ideologies of Corpus Christi as a governing trope for exploring gender relationships and women's roles in English cycle plays. Contending that Corpus Christi drama and the fabliaux "regularly make woman's body or the feminized male bodily sites of inquiry and dramatic fiction making" (p. 112), this chapter ex­ amines the ways in which the drama's feminine...