Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages (review)

Consideration of gender and difference in medieval literature is a fast developing and fruitful field of study. Sharon Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack have obviously considered carefully some of the ways in which such scholarship can most effectively advance. They are clear about the purposes of this collection of essays: to move beyond a study of binary gender difference to examine the further complexities that arise from the encounter with social status, religion and sexuality.

One of the most striking features of the eleven essays in this book is the range of subject matter and breadth of scholarship covered within this theme. The colour and variety of the medieval world are strongly evident through detailed scholarship and argument, and the reader sees familiar patterns shot through with difference and complexity. This is particularly evident in Part One, 'Differing Cultures, Differing Possibilities', which explores the ways in which gender paradigms were subverted or expanded in the first millennium through a variety of cultures.

Daniel Boyarin's excellent essay provides an appropriate opening to the collection through his study of the encounter of early western Christian and rabbinic Jewish interpretations of Genesis 1 and 2 with Lacan's psychoanalytic theory of the Phallus, thereby alerting the reader both to some of the earliest sources of medieval gender systems and to the contingent nature of contemporary theory. Everett K. Rowson's 'Gender Irregularity as Entertainment' takes us to Baghdad to explore the ways in which the rigid gender structures of the Abbasid court were subverted by both male and female cross-dressers, creating a complexity in which gender intersected with behaviour, role and social status.

In 'Reconfiguring the Prophet Daniel', Kathryn M. Ringrose considers the tensions between binary and multiple constructs of gender evident in the study of the eunuch as a possible third gender in Christian Byzantium. Using interpretations of Daniel from the fourth and tenth centuries, Ringrose demonstrates the ways in which this Old Testament figure could be understood as both holy man and court eunuch, and the complexity of gender categories which changed across time where several cultural traditions intersected. A somewhat similar dynamic of tension and change is explored in Pasternack's precisely argued essay 'Negotiating Gender in Anglo-Saxon England' which examines the influences on gender subjectivity of the introduction of Christian dogma to the elite pagan culture of Anglo-Saxon England.

Succinctly enunciating the theme of Part Two, 'Discourses of Domination', Mathew S. Kuefler's 'Male Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy in Twelfth Century France' explores the ways in which the devaluing of sodomy as effeminate and perverse was used as a means of social and political control. A similar means of domination is considered in "Because the Other Is a Poor Woman She Shall Be Called His Wench": Gender, Sexuality, and Social Status in Late Medieval England' by Ruth Mazo Karras, who looks at the intersection of gender and social status in the light of a discourse which enforces control by branding any sexually deviant woman a whore. In her study of a smaller community – that of the Cistercian order – Martha G. Newman extends the boundaries of existing scholarship by examining the influence of social and literary status, rather than gender, on spiritual expression. A fascinating finale to this section – and a timely theoretical proposition for both east and west – is Michael Uebel's 'Re-Orienting Desire: Writing on Gender Trouble in Fourteenth-Century Egypt'. Uebel looks at the ways in which the Christian West differentiated itself from the Muslim Orient by demonizing Saracen gender and sexuality.

Part Three, 'Individual Choices, Strategies of Resistance', considers the ways in which the individual can resist domination. Farmer's 'Manual Labor, Begging, and Conflicting Gender Expectations in Thirteenth-Century Paris' returns us to a rereading of the Genesis creation stories and to the story of Jehanne of Serris to argue that gender binaries were complicated through intersections with...