French Romance of the Later Middle Ages: Gender, Morality, and Desire (review)

In response to recent criticisms that have sought to challenge the image of late medieval literature as coming from 'a period of ineluctable decline' (p. 1), Brown-Grant's study of morality and gender in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century romance provides a sensitive and wide-ranging analysis that is of considerable scholarly merit. Approaching a comprehensive corpus of later medieval romances (which includes both mises en prose and remaniements of earlier texts, in addition to original late medieval narratives), the author explores a number of aspects relating to the literary construction of male—female relationships within the ideological context of their day: the respective roles of men and women both within marriage and in pre-marital relationships, the interplay between love and chivalric duties, and transgressive forms of sexuality such as adultery and incest. The book is divided into four subgenres, each of which investigates a different representation of gender relations. In terms of methodology, Brown-Grant effects a diachronic contextualization relating the narratives both to their earlier medieval counterparts, and to moral and political discourses of the later Middle Ages. This close historicization reveals not only ideological developments in relation to the corpus's literary predecessors, but also a close connection between romance and contemporary didactic moral attitudes. In this way the portrayal of gender interaction is seen to provide both positive and negative examples of relationships with the opposite sex, transforming the individualistic passions of earlier romance narratives into models of conduct that promote harmony between personal affiliations and social duties. Chapter 1 demonstrates an ideological continuity between later medieval chivalric romances and contemporaneous non-fictional chivalric treatises, both of which reject earlier forms of love service as a spur to achievement, in favour of adventures that educate the knight for his future social responsibilities. Chapter 2 resituates the rebellious lovers of late medieval idyllic romance within moralizing discourses on adolescent behaviour, revealing a critical perspective towards the lovers' disobedience. This is seen to be in conflict with earlier medieval portrayals, which sympathetically adhere to the 'cult of youth'. Gender attitudes within marriage are discussed in Chapter 3, in which the later medieval authors are shown to adopt clerical models of marriage; priority is given to the role of the spouse over an aristocratic concern with procreation, and the wife is exemplified as a moral role model for her husband. The destructive potential of misdirected male sexuality, whether in adulterous, bigamous, or incestuous relationships (as explored in Chapter 4), is closely connected with transgression on a wider social scale: rulers who fail to conform to the moral example of their spouses are portrayed as tyrannical and irresponsible, the family being conceptualized as a microcosm of the wider body politic. This book's close engagement with romance, gender, and broader social discourses should make it a valuable contribution to both medieval gender studies and current research into the culture of the later Middle Ages.