Medieval Women and Their Objects ed. by Jenny Adams, Nancy Mason Bradbury (review)

Material Women and Their Objects, edited by Jenny Adams and Nancy Mason Bradbury, is a rich volume of essays dedicated to Carolyn P. Collette, who has contributed enormously to medieval literary scholarship. The essays in this collection investigate the complicated relationships between gender and materiality in the culture of later medieval England and France. The contributions are varied and multifaceted, using the tools of literary, historical, art-historical, and legal scholarship. While some of the authors reexamine the objectification of historical or fictional women, others consider how medieval women used objects to negotiate or even to subvert gender roles. Still others view the idea of the "object" more loosely, focusing on intangibles such as words or songs, or on women's objects of desire.

The collection is divided into three equally compelling sections. Part 1, entitled "Objects and Gender in a Material World," focuses on fictional women who use material objects to challenge gender roles and the structure of patriarchal power. The essays in Part 2, "Buildings, Books, and Women's (Self-) Fashioning," examine objects possessed by historical figures, using them as sources for insight into the women who owned them. Part 3, "Bodies, Objects, and Objects in the Shape of Bodies," inquires into complicated relationships between women's bodies and material objects, in which the border between the categories of agent and object often overlap or blur.

Part 1: "Objects and Gender in a Material World"

Each of the three essays in Part 1 focuses on one of the Canterbury Tales, providing fresh perspectives into these well-read texts. In "The 'Thyng Wommen Loven Moost': The Wife of Bath's Fabliau Answer," Susanna Fein rereads Alisoun's Arthurian romance as a fabliau. Using two lesser-known French tales as models of romance–fabliau hybrids, Fein cogently argues that the Wife uses fabliau elements to subvert the message of her tale; the real object of desire, the "thing wommen loven moost," is, in fact, not sovereignty but the male phallus.

Nancy Mason Bradbury's essay, "Zenobia's Objects," argues that in The Monk's Tale, the conquered queen's exchange of objects—her warrior's helmet for vitremyte—represents more than a misogynistic punishment for female transgression. Although scholars have traditionally viewed Cenobia's new headgear as humiliating, Bradbury instead sees this new object more neutrally as a "soft, feminine headdress." She argues that while Cenobia has indeed fallen victim to Fortune, the occupation with which she lives out her days demonstrates not her abject humiliation but rather her engagement in the laudable industry of a virtuous woman.

In "The Object of Miraculous Song in 'The Prioress's Tale,'" Howell Chickering analyzes the narrative's three central objects: the corpse of the "litel clergeon"; his song, the "Alma redemptoris mater"; and the grain the Virgin places under the boy's tongue. In doing so, he reexamines the tale's traditional dual critical status as both a satire on the character of the Prioress's worldliness and an expression of her devotion to the Virgin, and offers a new reading of the "greyn" as analogous to Chaucer's use of the Prioress as agent of the tale.

Part 2: "Buildings, Books, and Women's (Self-) Fashioning"

In contrast to the first section, Part 2 focuses on historical women and investigates the relationship between these women's identities and objects they possessed or created. Michael T. Davis, in "A Gift from the Queen: The Architecture of the Collège de Navarre in Paris," looks into Jeanne de Navarre's influence in establishing the first academic campus in Europe, the "Maison des Escholiers," in which she sought to combine moral and scholastic instruction. Through an examination of contemporary writings and later, nineteenth-century plans for reconstruction, Davis attempts to piece together the original architectural plan for the school. He concludes that in conceiving of this architectural "object," the French queen outlined a deliberate geometrical scheme...