The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation, and Marriage in Premodern Europe (review)

252 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) do enough to make sense of the monstrous, Rosenfield has it overwrite all other concerns. Not all of the essays share these preoccupations with abnormality and otherness. Isabel Davis’s ‘Consuming the Body of the Working Man in the Later Middle Ages’ seeks to redress a scholarly preference for female rather than male bodies. Davis looks closely at the un-monstrous concept of ‘werk’. She addresses the vital link between labouring male bodies and food production, providing an important counter to the view, popularised by Caroline Walker Bynum, that the capacity for breast-feeding makes women responsible for the provision of food more generally in medieval society. Only one essay questions the assumptions upon which the collection is based. Nicholas Watson critiques a painting accompanied by explanatory verses, which hangs in an English public school. It depicts a ‘monstrous’ composite creature, representing an ideal, or ‘trusty’ servant, the destiny to which its audience of schoolboys is supposed to aspire. But as a servile form of masculinity, this creature does not represent a threat to order; rather, it illustrates the complexities of embodying normative standards, where ‘virtue is maintained under the emblem not of innocence but of strain’ (p.18). Whereas most of the contributors to this collection treat the monstrous in opposition to the normative (hence, perhaps, the lack of interest in class, which is a relatively ‘internal’ classification), Watson’s analysis challenges this division. His essay understands normativity itself as a rich and dynamic process, just as worthy of careful consideration as the images of deviancy that define the fringes of conventionality. It is regrettable that such an open approach to the workings of monstrosity is not more widely found in this collection. Melissa Raine Department of English University of Melbourne McClanan, Anne L. and Karen Rosoff Encarnacion, eds, The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation, and Marriage in Premodern Europe, New York, Palgrave, 2002; cloth; pp. xiv, 285; 34 b/w illustrations; RRP US$59.95; ISBN 0312240015. The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation, and Marriage in Premodern Europe is a diverse set of eleven essays examining the material culture of gender in milieux ranging from second-century Rome to early modern Germany. The Reviews 253 Parergon 20.1 (2003) anthology is unified by the focus on the material remains of women’s experiences of sex, marriage, childbirth and childrearing. Such an anthology is certainly overdue, as studies of sexuality have tended to focus on queer experiences. The enormous influence of Michel Foucault and John Boswell in the writing of the history of sexuality has meant that queer – usually homosexual – relationships have been studied while the history of sexuality in marriage has not been so much considered (The History of Sexuality, 1976; Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, 1980). This anthology focuses on women’s experiences of sexuality, particularly experiences of marriage and procreation, areas certainly overdue for scholarly interpretation. Additionally, this anthology provides a welcome contribution to the history of sexuality as it moves away from the usual reliance on textual sources. As McClanan and Encarnacion write in the introduction (p. 2): [T]his anthology began as a project in women’s history intended to use materialcultureasameansofreexaminingthepossibilitiesofgainingaccess tothelivesandexperiencesofmedievalandearlymodernwomen.Whilethe processes and events of sex, procreation, and marriage have been important factors in shaping the possibilities of women’s lives at all levels of society, theirhistoricalanalysishasbeenlargelydeliminatedbythenarrowconditions of textual production and literacy in the premodern period, as well as modes of historical investigation that privilege texts as historical evidence. In focusing on the analysis of material culture, we took as our starting point the belief that as the material grounds of lived experience, objects provide an avenueofhistoricalaccessextendingbeyondthereachesoftextualevidence. As a work examining the material evidence of women’s sexuality, The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation, and Marriage in Premodern Europe is an exciting and interesting addition to the historiography of premodern sexuality. The anthology arose from debates at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women and the International Medieval Congress at Leeds, and was intended as an inter-disciplinary collection. The coverage includes art history, archaeology, literary studies, and medical history. As with all anthologies, the work is somewhat mixed in quality. Some of the...