Women and Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre, and the Limits of Epic Masculinity (review)

This collection brings together a widely disparate set of texts and analyses under the broad rubric of “epic.” Editors Poor and Schulman acknowledge in their introduction that this diverse group of stories immediately “raises the question of how epic should be defined” (1). While traditionally the deeds of heroes or dynasties formed the center of the epic narrative, Poor and Schulman explain that “what unifies all these works, as George Lukács has suggested, is the fundamental place of ‘community,’ whether the works tell the tales of the establishment of particular communities, the foundation from which communities . . . draw cultural meaning, or the end of a foundational community” (2). This generous palette offers space to include the wealth of materials that are the strength of this collection, which draws women back from the margins of the genre.

Christine Chism’s chapter on the characters Candace and Olympias in Middle English romances about Alexander suggests that the two break away from the usual stereotypes about women on the sidelines of epic while the texts also offer them plenty of more traditional, titillatingly monstrous women as well. Susan-Grace Heller’s examination of the Old French Crusade Cycle reveals that depictions of female characters once seen as fabulous were actually corroborated by historians’ chronicles.

The Shahnameh will doubtless be familiar to a much smaller audience than most of the texts included here, but Dick Davis conveys the complexities of this massive epic work (ca. 45,000 lines). The subservient role of women—even rulers—in the latter, more historical part of the epic suggests a deliberate manipulation of women’s perception. While the legendary queen Homay’s rule is elaborately and sympathetically portrayed, the later reign of Puran Dokht is both shortened and disparaged despite outward signs of success. Similarly, Thomas Caldin shows that portrayals of women in medieval Castilian epics highlight the way their actions “generate uncertainty around the transactions on which the patriarchy is based” (107) and in so doing cause the power brokers to question the very formulation of their communities’ base.

Kate Olson writes on the only identifiable female author among the texts, Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, whom she sees as creating new female space within the traditional epic format, writing that “Hrotsvit makes subversive or self-conscious use of her femininity and that of her female characters in order to hijack the classical epic genre and redefine it” (116). Hrotsvit appropriates the epic to relate the history of her monastic community, forging a parallel relationship with the Ottonian rulers, just as the patriarchal power of the divine authorizes the women to pursue the establishment of their own community. As Olson argues, “Much as she did with her plays, [Hrotsvit] molds her epics to fit her own interests by expanding generic boundaries” (130). The elasticity of the genre, which the editors likewise use, Hrotsvit appropriates to turn the traditionally herocentric narrative toward a celebration of female agency and power.

For me, the most interesting section of the book is the final collection of essays on Germanic materials. William Layher scrutinizes the relationship between warrior maidens and their fathers (or father figures) in the fornaldarsögur. Using Saxo Grammaticus’s comment on the ability of Norse women (in the past at least, he implies) to “take off the woman” or cross over from female to male, Layher examines two shield-maidens who take up male roles and even male names to seek their fortunes in the world. Even the narrators accept their switch, using the male pronoun to refer to the characters. When the women face their fathers or other authoritative males, they are refeminized, a process that Layher argues is deliberate and “exploit[s] the transgressivity of the warrior woman in order to bring male anxieties about the (in)stability of masculinity, patriarchy, and male privilege into the spotlight” (185).

Jana K. Schulman’s essay on women...