Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies: Essays in Honor of E. Jane Burns ed. by Laine E. Doggett, Daniel E. O’Sullivan (review)

At a time when feminism and scholarship need more than ever to be advocated and celebrated, it is heartening to read this volume, which assembles fifteen essays from medievalists in French, English, and German literature and history, to pay tribute to the eminent career of E. Jane Burns. The editors’ Introduction is an effective summary of the wide range and challenging yet collaborative tone of her work, but it is Helen Solterer who most succinctly captures Burns’s ‘signature’ as ‘a critical double-take’ (p. 56), a practice that enables Burns — whether she is writing on female voices, the representation of clothing, or the literary history of silk — to weave between readings, counter-readings, and revelations as ingeniously and elegantly as the interlace of Arthurian romance, the focus of her earliest publications. The volume is organized into four sections, related to areas in which Burns has worked: gender; clothing; margins; and female networks. Particularly impressive are the thought-provoking, analytical essays from Sharon Kinoshita on the importance of silk to accounts of Marco Polo’s travels, Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner on Melusine and the natural, along with Solterer’s fascinating exposé of Honorat Bovet’s depiction of a multilingual Saracen translator, and an original, reflective piece from Ruth Mazo Karras and Tom Linkinen on the embodied and literary possibilities of John/Eleanor Rykener, a transgender prostitute in late medieval London. Madeline H. Caviness’s essay on medieval headwear is juxtaposed productively with Sarah-Grace Heller’s piece on allegories of male clothing. Many of the essays engage with Burns’s scholarship with generosity and care, citing her but also continuing her work of enthusing students: Lisa Perfetti’s contribution, subtitled ‘Why a Feminist Teaches Fabliaux’ is a clear example of this, as well as a reminder that using humour and current affairs is a compelling way to teach medieval literature. The last section is a scintillating quartet of pieces, engaging with manuscript and material sources and focusing on networks of female authority, by Cynthia J. Brown (on representations of Anne de Bretagne and Anne de France), Roberta L. Krueger (on Marguerite de Navarre’s La Coche), Ann Marie Rasmussen (on Christ’s family narratives), and Nancy Freeman Regalado. Regalado’s piece, on the manuscripts of the Epistre Othea overseen by its author, Christine de Pizan, is the last in this section, and is illustrated with numerous images of women reading — a pleasing bookend to the frontispiece of Burns herself, sitting smiling in a book-lined study. In the last piece, Elizabeth Robertson provides a response to the essays and the concerns they raise, with a cogent call for feminist medievalists to engage with new directions in scholarship. Contrasting Solterer’s piece with Bruckner’s, she claims that the political inflection of Bovat’s work ‘takes us far from the fairy-tale world of Melusine’ (p. 243), oddly sidelining the political content and context of the Melusine story. Yet this volume shows that, as with the magical, monstrous, matriarchal Melusine, there is — thanks to E. Jane Burns — more to polymorphous and plural medieval feminisms than meets the eye.