Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West ed. by Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler (review)

182 LETIERS IN CANADA 1996 relatively little analysis of the theoretical or even practical problems of editing. Though these distinguished editors obviouslyknow a lot about the complications of their work, only O'Donnell quotes anything in the theory and shows us a few of the nuts and bolts. Kinney discusses the significance of his text and acknowledges the historical specificity ofmodern editing. At one point Kingdon brieflyaddresses the significance of electronic media for the modern editor. The essays emphasize extra-textual matters: how the editors came to their texts, how the texts form a corpus, why this corpus is significant today, who is (or was) on the team of editors, how they go (or went) about their work, and so on. An important theme emerges, perhaps ofgreater interest to sociologists of acad~rnic life than to editors, though, if we are to follow the well-known path of D.F. McKenzie, perhaps textual scholars are all, deep down, . sociologists. The theme is teamwork. Not one of these scholars works independently, and most write feelingly of their relations, either personal or institutional, with others. Farge speaks at the end of his essay of declining library conditions in Paris, Kingdon names the many teachers and colleagues who helped him learn to read and identify the hands in his ecclesiastical registers, McLelland sees Peter Martyr within the context of a conununity ofmodernscholarship, and McConica gives rich details about the remarkable personal histories of some of the organizers of the two great Erasmus editions: All of the speakers are aware of context for the work, of the importance of community. We get a sense of a twentieth-century humanism at work, one that involves specialized learning and shared obsessionbefore the text and its cultural reproduction. From this perspective, the collection of essays makes for faSCinating reading. (WILLIAM BARKER) Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler, editors. Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West University of Toronto Press. xxviii, 316. $60.00 cloth, $21.95 paper During the past decade the field of premodern studies has experienced a reinvigorating surge in explorations of the multiple ways in which people conceived of the self, the body, and community. Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, a collection of fifteen essays edited by Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler, contributes to this endeavour by focusing on the expression and effects of sex and sexuality in domestic, ecclesiastical, mercantile, literary, and otherintersecting domains. Taken as a whole, these papers (originally delivered at a conference in 1991) gainsay any vestigial assumptions that premodern culture quietly conformed to heteronormative codes of natural identity and behaviour. Desire and Discipline opens with an introduction that accomplishes far more than a precis of the book's articles. Establishing the philosophical and HUMANITIES 183 theoretical frames - Augustine to Foucault, Jerome to queer studies - within which the essayists approach their subjects, Murray identifies one of the volume's most trenchant illuminations: 'the ongoing tension between society 's desire to control sex and sexuality, and people's need to express it.' The essays proper are framed by contributions by Vern Bullough and Nancy Partner which highlight the validity of Murray's observation. Bullough offers an engaging metacritical history - personal and institutional - of changing scholarly attitudes towards the study of sexuality in the Middle Ages. Peppering his comments with glimpses of medieval crossdressing , sex change, and sado-masochism, Bullough calls for a collegial andcollaborativeinquiry into the multidimensionality oferotic experience. Partner's essay, the last in the book, similarly addresses the state of the discipline, arguing that medievalists must resist grim periodization- which she sardonically calls 'the protracted vacancy of Middleness' - and discuss manifestations of sexuality that do not conform to normative stereotypes. As an example of such an undertaking, Partner advances a psychoanalytic account of sexualized pleasure in mystical ravishment. Her argument resonates especially in the context of Dyan Elliott's debunking of the critical assumption that the 'marriage debt' made women and men sexual equals, and her co-ordinate argument thatfemale mysticismwas a site oferoticized resistance to misogynist male hegemony. Elliotes insights dovetail with Barrie Ruth 5traus's account of women's 'voices of renunciation' and their thwarting of 'the heterosexual imperative of...