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Matrons and Marginal Women in Medieval Society (review)
- Parergon
- Australian and New Zealand Association of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Inc.)
- Volume 14, Number 2, January 1997
- pp. 165-167
- 10.1353/pgn.1997.0115
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Reviews 165 of realising the text in performance, and also that some solutions are better than others. Rosalind King School of English and Drama Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London Edwards, Robert R. and Vickie Ziegler, eds., Matrons and Marginal Women in Medieval Society, Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 1995; cloth; pp. xi, 127; 4figures,1 plate; R.R.P. US$53.00. This collection of seven essays originated with a conference on matrons and medieval women held at The Pennsylvania State University on April 5-7, 1991. Some of the contributions included in this volume were specially commissioned for it; others are revised versions of papers given at the conference. There are no notes on contributors, no index, nor any bibliography, and it is impossible to know which of these was a conference paper and which was not. The book is extremely short and could, in m y view, have profitably included at least four more essays. The contributors are all well-known scholars in theirfields.The essays in the collection work well together and address a variety of issues relating to marginal women. The Introduction makes clear the fact that this work will deal both with matrons who were obviously accepted, regular members of medieval society, and with women living outside the accepted sphere, such as the lay religious, artists, and prostitutes. The collection actually goes much farther than that, to discuss such figures as female warriors and young women berating their parents for not allowing them to participate in erotic experience. This is an inter-disciplinary collection crossing the boundaries of History, Literature, Art History, Gender Studies and Medicine. Barbara Hanawalt's essay A t the Margin of Women's Space in Medieval Europe' contributes to the discourse on marginal people by defining the category as one which does not differ in the discussion of women or men. She argues on p. 3 that 'for medieval women the boundaries marked the physical space women could occupy'. Those who existed beyond the boundaries were deemed to be marginal. She explains with great clarity and precision the ways in which space defined women's roles and activities. Ann J. Kettle, 'Ruined Maids: Prostitutes and Servant Girls in Later Medieval England', looks at the sexual behaviour of two very different sorts 166 Reviews of women—servants and prostitutes—in Litchfield in the fifteenth century. Most of her material comes from court records. Her conclusion states that the barriers between respectable and fallen women, including servants whose sexual conduct was outside marriage, and prostitutes, were higher than they had been earlier. James A. Brundage's contribution 'The Merry Widow's Serious Sister: Remarriage in Classical Canon Law', offers a brilliantly focused and documented look at the church's position on remarriage. He addresses in particular the anomalies which existed in the theological consideration of whether or not widows should remarry. In his view (p. 46), 'Canon law concerning the remarriage of widows was . . . neither intellectually coherent nor practically effective.' Laurinda Dixon's essay: "The Curse of Chastity: The Marginalisation of W o m e n in Medieval Art and Medicine' moves into a new realm of study. She shows how a thirteenth-century manuscript is the source of seventeenthcentury Dutch artists' preoccupation with the portrayal of ailing females. She discusses the concept of women whose health suffers from an excess or absence of love, and how such conditions were perceived to affect the female body. Her discussion of ancient and medieval gynaecological theory is excellent. Carol Clover writes about militant women in 'Maiden Warriors and Other Sons', discussing the importance of the imagined heroic women of Old Norse literature. Most of these women are portrayed as transvestites, donning male attire in order to fight. Her discussion relates thefictionaltales of women acting out their lives as men to actual women who, because they had no male relatives, likely adopted male roles. Christopher Kleinhenz' 'Pulzelle e Maritate: Coming of Age, Rites of Passage, and the Question of Marriage in Some Early Italian Poems' looks at instances in thirteenth-century poetry in which young w o m e n lament their father's or mother's activities in finding, or not finding them...