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  • Women’s Power in Late Medieval Romance by Amy N. Vines
  • Anne Laskaya
Women’s Power in Late Medieval Romance. By Amy N. Vines. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2011. Pp. xi + 169; 3 illustrations. $95.

The tantalizing subject of women’s power in the Middle Ages takes Amy Vines on an exploration of female fictional characters and their actions in medieval romance. Her book does not interrogate notions of “power” swirling in theoretical discussions or extensively investigate the multivalences of this amorphous concept; instead, it quickly focuses on its primary subject: fictional heroines as “models of cultural, intellectual, and social authority” (p. 3). Fundamental to Vines’s argument, then, medieval romance performs a didactic role, teaching women readers strategies of influence that can be deployed in alignment with dominant institutions of medieval power. Women’s historical literary patronage and their opportunities to intervene actively in English culture are understood, then, in relation to the dynamics of influence and intervention evidenced by fictional characters within romance narrative.

The argument commences with a close examination of Chaucer’s Troilus as it is found in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 61. Vines’s initial concern is Cassandra, whose utterances are “effectively silenced because they are ignored” (p. 20). In some ways it is an odd place to begin a discussion about women’s power, with a character whose extensive knowledge and insight are inscrutable to those around her; but Vines is looking for the effect of this dynamic on medieval readers, and she concludes that “Troilus and Criseyde demonstrates the consequences of not following the advice of a female counselor” (p. 20). The titular hero is moved to heroic/chivalric action, first by Cassandra, who provides him emotional support and interpretive political-historical information, and then by Criseyde, who gives him “military and social motivation through love and physical pleasure” (p. 21).

Vines argues that Anne Neville Stafford, prominent member of the aristocratic family that owned the manuscript, “gleaned models of intellectual and emotional influence from Cassandra and Criseyde” (p. 28). Although speculating on what any specific reader or listener might learn is problematic, the assertion, stated as a possibility, merits consideration. Vines pauses, in particular, on the interpolated Latin summary at the top of fol. 144r where no visual sign in the manuscript suggests an interruption of Chaucer’s Middle English. She reads the twelve Latin hexameter lines woven into the Corpus Christi rendition (and several other copies of the Troilus) as evidence that these manuscripts strengthen the representation of Cassandra’s intellectual acumen. Not only does this fictional Cassandra read Troilus’s dream accurately and draw on important textual authorities to assist her interpretation, she can also cite these authorities in Latin. Such a demonstration of intellectual prowess intensifies her valorization for medieval readers and authorizes the dream interpretation she provides her brother. Vines also notes the Corpus Christi manuscript drops some key lines found in other manuscript copies. The erasure constructs a Criseyde softened for lack of the more condemnatory lines found in other manuscript copies of Troilus’s dream where she is foreseen lending affection and support to Diomede and the Greeks. These omissions are not featured in modern editions of the text, but Vines is concerned with the more favorable evaluation of Criseyde within this one manuscript, lauding potential effects it might have had on its local women readers/listeners. She argues that the specific additions and omissions in the Corpus Christi manuscript provide a model for how women “should read, and how a woman should read another woman” (p. 51). However, as high nobility and literary patron, Anne Neville Stafford would likely know of harsher interpretations of Criseyde found in well-known classical [End Page 248] and late medieval texts; the revisions of Criseyde in Chaucer’s text would rest in a sea of other visions and revisions. This doesn’t negate Vines’s argument, but it does suggest potential interpretive complications not explored in the argument.

John Metham’s Amoryus and Cleopes (ca. 1449) serves as the key romance for Vines’s second chapter, where female power rests on Cleopes’s scientific knowledge. The manuscript in which the text resides (Princeton University Library...

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