Translating Desire in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (review)

This collection explores acts of "translation" in a series of medieval texts ranging from the Middle English Pearl to the works of Brunetto Latini, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare; in the editors' words, the essays move "across the borders of nation, language, genre and gender, . . . explor[ing] how medieval and early modern authors convert discourses of desire the conventions of which are primarily male, literary, and erotic into terms that serve the mixed social, religious, political, and literary aspirations of both male and female voices" (vii). Their goal is "rendering medieval and early modern literature accessible and exciting" and "transforming remote texts into fresh, inviting literary engagements" (xv). They seek to remedy this remoteness by revealing that the medieval and Renaissance authors were doing subversive things that will appeal to a modern academic, feminist and politically activist audience, i.e., exposing the evils of patriarchy and laboring for the subjectivity of woman and other social outsiders. For example, in the first essay, while Daniel Kline offers some illuminating information about the birth and death of medieval English children, he frequently lapses into cultural studies jargon, telling us that the fourteenth-century girl child "occupies the most highly marginalized position in her culture" (21) and that the poem Pearl itself, in giving her authority, "is critical of the social and discursive structures of dependence and powerlessness that render children, particularly young girls, as passive objects of parental and cultural desire" (29). Kline, sounding indebted to self-esteem craze of the 1990s, concludes that "Pearl creates the possibility for a fully fledged subjectivity of childhood by creating a valued and honored subject position for the Pearl-child outside the traditional roles usually occupied by children, whether in late medieval culture or in contemporary literary criticism" (29). But overt and reductive cultural politics do not inform all that follows, and the great strength of the better essays is that they relate literature to public life because the authors and poets themselves did. That is, instead of practicing presentism, the essays at their best show how composing literature, often involving some form of adaptation of other texts and corpora, could be a public, politically engaged act.

The next essay, Vivian Long's "Victim of Love: The Poetics and Politics of Violence," examines the Petrarchism of the sixteenth-century French poet Theodore Agrippa D'Aubigné, in whose verse, as Long puts it, "the fire of love becomes the fire of Protestant martyrdom," when the Petrarchan themes of love suffering "have been translated into the context of the Wars of Religion in France" (36–7). However, Albert Russell Ascoli's long, detailed "Body Politic in Ariosto's Orlando furioso" starts with a series of pre-determined assumptions about gender relations (such as the "systemic repression and exclusion of women"; see page 52), and later aligns the Italian text with these worn slogans. Analysis becomes in this essay simply a way of indicting a male author who gives expression to "insidiously misogynist desires." One's suspicion that the clock has been turned back to the 1980s is confirmed in a footnote dating a draft of this essay to 1985.

Suzanne Wayne's "Desire in Language and Form: Heloise's Challenge to Abelard," studies how Heloise "presents a self-image of a hypocritical and guilty woman needing to be disciplined" and that "[t]his subordinate self-image is self-perpetuating and dependent upon her desire for Abelard" (91). This results in "perhaps only minor success" rhetorically for Heloise who, in receiving the "rule" for her convent, does succeed "in some small way in forcing Abelard back into her life as an authority and teacher," a conclusion that should have taken into account essays by Linda Georgiana and others on Heloise's voice (107). It is not clear that this proposed argument does much more than describe, in emphatic plot summary, the couple's sometimes formulaic, sometimes dynamically confrontational dialogue. V...