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Reviewed by:
  • Medieval Women's Writing. Works by and for Women in England, 1100–1500
  • Sheila Delany
Medieval Women's Writing. Works by and for Women in England, 1100–1500. By Diane Watt . Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007. Pp. viii + 208. $69.95.

In order to review Diane Watt's new book, I need to start at the end. This is because the real subject is not medieval women's writing but the process of textual production, and it is only in her "Afterword" that Watt engages the tension between her title and the content of her book. It was with some relief, then, that I came to Watt's observation that her book, like that of Julian of Norwich, is "not yet perfected" (p. 160) because its argument about the collaborative, dialogic nature of textual production produces a view of "women's writing" as "an inherently unstable category" (p. 158). Why keep it, then, and why enshrine it in the title, where it is constantly at odds with the evidence presented? The answer is: as a kind of "affirmative action" tactic (my phrase, not a quotation), necessary as long as pedagogy and literary history continue to suppress the fact of women's agency and to purvey a notion of canonicity that is heavily male-freighted (p. 159).

Individual chapters admirably and lucidly illustrate the collaborative nature of textuality, documenting various permutations along the axis of sex: female author with male secretary, male author with female patrons and female subject-matter, female translator of male-authored text, male author with male patrons and female subject-matter, and mixed audience in all cases. These are situations that tend to muddy the once-clear delineations of gendered authorship, though the extent to which they do so must remain a matter for debate.

Yet simultaneously the chapters seem to resist their own implication because of Watt's continuing emphasis on female voice. For example, in Chapter 1, the author we encounter is an anonymous monk of St. Albans who, commissioned by his French abbot, wrote a Latin life of an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman and prioress, Christina of Markyate (ca. 1096–after 1155), who knew both men, the abbot in the especially intimate relationship of spiritual director. Placed this way, rather than foregrounded as in the chapter title, Christina tends to lose centrality. Key issues discussed here are relations among these three individuals; the role of earlier Anglo-Saxon and Latin hagiographical texts; the importance of another religious [End Page 406] text related to the abbey (the magnificent St. Albans Psalter, probably made for Christina); and the balance of continental and native Anglo-Saxon political and religious traditions. The "Life" is neither by a woman nor specifically for women, and given its heteroglossic background we can scarcely be surprised if "Christina's unmediated voice, if not her story, is all but lost to us" (p. 38). But can we be sure that her story is not lost to us as well, submerged in an ecclesiastical attempt to create a local cult? And if the woman's voice is so weakly heard, why is the chapter given her name as if to imply her agency in producing the text?

With Marie de France (fl. 1180), the focus of Chapter 2, such problems don't arise, for the author names herself; but beyond the bare designation of name and place we don't know who she was socially. There are, to be sure, male patrons for her Fables and her translation of "St. Patrick's Purgatory," a mixed courtly audience, and rivals or detractors whom she deplores but does not identify as male or female. Other problems are also missing, for Marie omits the "specific problems of and prohibitions against women's writing" (p. 44) and refuses to victimize women (p. 61). Watt doesn't engage the possibility that Marie might not have experienced the "difficulties" assumed to exist for this privileged and well-educated woman; and it would be useful had she cited a few instances of the "prohibitions" she refers to. Still, Marie displays "a sophisticated awareness of issues of gender" (p. 62), though it isn't entirely clear how this...

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