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  • Shadows of Mary: Reading the Virgin Mary in Medieval Texts
  • Robyn Cadwallader
Reed, Teresa P. , Shadows of Mary: Reading the Virgin Mary in Medieval Texts ( Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages), Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2003; paperback; pp. xi, 171; RRP US£14.99; ISBN 0708317979.

In her fascinating and wide-ranging study, Teresa Reed takes as her basic premise the shadowy presence of the Virgin Mary in most medieval texts about women – a presence, she argues, that can be discerned even when no specific reference is made to Mary. Her discussion primarily explores female representation in five main texts – Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale and his Wife of Bath's Tale, Seinte Marherete, Þe Meiden ant Martyr, the English Trotula and Pearl – but does so through the lens of medieval representations of Mary.

Reed's main contention is that while Mary was constructed as a model of transcendence and purity for all women, the contradictions inherent in representations of her continually breached the bounds of her figuration. Employing poststructuralists such as Kristeva, Irigary, Derrrida and Butler, the study argues that language itself is material and excessive, and therefore inadequate to express ideas of transcendence and ineffability. Both corporeal and transcendent, virgin and mother, gendered as female and yet beyond its weaknesses, the portrayal of Mary inevitably reveals breaks in the semiotic processes through which she is constructed. Although she overturns Eve's sin in giving birth to Christ, Mary is not simply her opposite, but is understood through relationship with her: she is like Eve and yet unlike Eve. Such disturbances to the semiotic process, by which the church sets up constructions of gender, purity and law as natural and eternal, thread their way throughout the four chapters of the book. After identifying a central issue of each text which is apparently related to a tenet of Mariology, Reed explores texts which will explicate such doctrine while also demonstrating their inability to control and unify their use of language. With such a framework established, she moves on to consider the female in each text.

In Chapter 1, questions of text and body, authority and presence, closure and disturbance, law and story, wind their way through a discussion of Constance's oft-narrated death in The Man of Law's Tale and doctrinal struggles about the Virgin Mary's death. The Virgin's human, fleshly body – and therefore its death – is essential to the doctrine of the incarnation, yet medieval theologians and teachers struggled to reconcile this with Old Testament stories of the bodily assumption of prophets which demanded that Mary also be assumed into heaven. In a similar way, while the death of Chaucer's heroine is related over and over, it never actually occurs, and in narratives of both women the attempt at closure and finality is disturbed by an ongoing female presence. [End Page 270]

In none of the texts studied is the disruption of gendered binaries more evident than in the Wife of Bath's prologue and tale, and Reed's analysis astutely discerns the 'parodic strategy of self-definition' (p. 11) by which Alison questions the contradictions inherent in the culture's expectations of women. While Mary is never mentioned in the tale, Reed contends that her shadows can be discerned as both women disturb the system of authority, language and text which produce the human body as a sign.

St Margaret of Antioch, virgin and patron saint of women in childbirth, has clear affinities with Mary's virgin maternity. Both women are obedient and yet disturbingly liminal. While Margaret's suffering at the hands of pagans expresses her faith in Christ through a defeat of the female body that reaffirms the transcendent logos, the use of Margaret's story and text as an aid in childbirth brings about an intertextuality that recognises the body's existence beyond the realm of discourse and control.

The final chapter explores the self-reflexive narrative form of Pearl, reading its central image not as metaphor, in which the divide between heaven and earth would be reiterated, but as metonymy in which such oppositions become contiguous with one another. Similarly, the Annunciation, Incarnation...

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