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Reviews 219 Parergon 21.1 (2004) Celia Chazelle discusses a miniature Carolingian crucifixion image from the Drogo Sacramentary, c. 850. There is general agreement amongst scholars as to the identity of all the figures, with the exception of the seated man with the white hair and beard. The image is set within an O belonging to a Palm Sunday Prayer, and Chazelle draws attention to the Carolingian liturgy for Good Friday as the culmination of a week of reflection on the crucified Christ, and the use of John as the gospel lection. Chazelle suggests the seated man is Nicodemus who acclaims Jesus as his master at the same time as he waits for the body. In John 3 Nicodemus took Jesus as his teacher, and in John 19 Nicodemus came to help prepare the body for burial after Jesus had died. Augustine’s tractates on John help explain the significance of the serpent at the foot of the image, as well as being the probable source for other features of the image such as the prominence of Mary. The arguments of the contributors are finely drawn and make use of analogous artworks and medieval documents as well as the secondary literature. Students new to the visual art of the Middle Ages will find careful practice and an accretion of detail, rather than general lessons. Max Staples School of Humanities and Social Sciences Charles Sturt University Smith, Julie Ann, Ordering Women’s Lives: Penitentials and Nunnery Rules in the Early Medieval West, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2001; cloth; pp. x, 246; RRP US$74.95; ISBN 1859282385. This book sets out to examine the expectations of women’s behaviour that are expressed in two sets of texts, which it argues are the only sources from the period that can be shown to have impinged directly on women’s lives: the penitential manuals of the sixth to the twelfth century, and the nunnery rules from the fourth to the eleventh. Julie Ann Smith acknowledges the disparities between the two groups of texts. The penitentials were addressed only in part to women specifically, while the nunnery rules were addressed only to a sub-group of women; the nunnery rules were restricted to what went on in the cloister, while the penitentials applied to a much wider spatial context. These disparities are presented as being to a certain extent complementary. The narrower audience of the nunnery rules is 220 Reviews Parergon 21.1 (2004) compensated by the penitentials’ reach into all classes, although note should be taken of the caution sounded by Allen Frantzen that at least in the early period they were probably used by quite restricted groups (The Literature of Penance in Anglo-Saxon England, Rutgers University Press, 1983, pp. 95, 201). More importantly, Smith sees the texts as being related by shared clerical assumptions about women’s nature, and a shared intention to control their behaviour. This intention is not seen simply as a question of patriarchy, but as part of the project of Christianisation of Western Europe. It is their shared participation in this project, their common ‘intention of overlaying existing behavioural patterns and expectations with those of the Christian Church’ (p. 3) (perhaps easier to see in the case of the penitentials than of the nunnery rules), that is advanced as a major reason for bringing these two groups of texts together in a joint study. In spite of the overarching unity of purpose that is argued for the two groups of texts, their differences in audience, function and the contexts in which they were produced impose a separate treatment that results in a two-part structure for the book, that to a certain extent undermines its claims to thematic unity. Each section begins with a chapter that sets out to establish the historical and social contexts of the texts’ production. This is followed in each case by two chapters that divide the analysis of the content thematically; that this thematic division is different for the two groups (into chapters on sexuality and work and magic for the penitentials, and on enclosure and work and abstinence for the rules) tends to underline their disparity. Within these chapters of thematic analysis, which...

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