Performing Polity: Women and Agency in the Anglo-French Tradition, 1385-1620 (review)

Performing Polity compares the ideologies of women's roles in the medieval and early modern periods through the interleaving worlds of public and private action. The work follows three main lines of thought, roughly divided into groupings of chapters.

The argument of the book is contextualised within the Anglo-French court and literary culture experienced on both sides of the Channel. Using the ideology of late medieval gender roles as expressed in the Anglo-French texts of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the first line of thought followed throughout the book outlines the important roles for the voices of women and their agency in their support of the larger polity and in the world of the smaller household. Correlating the status of women with the status of individual rights within a society and attending to women's roles through the vehicles represented by women-centred prayer books, courtesy books, sermons, stories, and tracts, the 1385 to 1620 period, the texts signal anxieties about the fundamental alignments of power in society. Encoded within the texts are the attempts to establish and delineate gender roles as well as the reflection of a cultural ideology of a society working harmoniously through corporate units towards a common good.

The first three chapters establish the major themes of the good wife, an Anglo-French tradition encapsulating the role of such a woman in contributing to social stability and social harmony. Women worked with men as effective partners, achieving the common good by taking the initiative in running businesses, households, and estates. The texts of Christine de Pizan, Philippe de Mezieres, and Nicole Oresme are used to underscore the themes, providing the platform from which the discussion moves into the early modern period.

The second line of thought is that the acceptance and value of those roles filled by women diminished as the models of polity in both Church and state in England changed in the early modern period. Advisory texts for women promoted the subjection of women to their husbands and confinement to their domestic space, accompanied by an ignorance of their husband's worldly and business concerns. Initially, the texts appear to constrict women's agency but, in actuality, women's status can be understood as an aspect of a political pattern that prized order and extolled the notion of obedience and subjection over the medieval models of subordinate partnership. The fourth chapter examines the power of the Virgin, the voice and agency attributed to the Virgin in lay spirituality, which empowered and authorised medieval women's agency and voices. The chapter on Anne of Bohemia emphasises the correlation between the mediation and intercessional aspects of the cult of the Virgin and how these were transposed in the court of Richard II. Power was constructed as responsive to intercession and petition as exhibited in the spheres of religious devotion, the expectations of the intercessory role of queens, in Richard's encouragement of the equity court of Chancery, and direct petitions to the Crown.

The last three chapters of the book explore the third line of thought: that to see this change merely in terms of change in expectations of gender roles is to miss the vital link between the status of women and the political construction of individual relationship to authority. The world of mediation and associative polity wherein women achieved agency devolved as religious, political and cultural change reposition expectations of what virtues best supported a just polity. This is explored in chapters concerning Catherine of Aragon and her response to Henry VIII's divorce demands. Catherine is obedient to civic authority but resistant to earthly authority when that authority attempts to usurp the prerogatives of religion. Catholics celebrated Catherine's model response to civic power during a period when Henry VIII and Edward VI moved decisively to structure English polity on both conformity and obedience. The recalled York...