Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380-1530 (review)

reviews 155 primatology to its current state as a robust sub-speciality within reproductive endocrinology, Haraway's narrative admits of a different, more disturbing, concluding trajectory. There is a contradiction in Haraway's valorization of a postmodern fragmentation, de- and recontextualization of the human body. While the inter-species reproduction and cyborgization celebrated by Butler, and other contemporary feminist science fiction writers, may metaphorically embody the emancipatory possibility of escaping the unitary, gendered and bounded construction of the human subject, on the level of scientific and medical practice such concepts continue the narrative of scientific sadism and masculine usurpation of female procreative power that Haraway has previously documented in such ideologically distinct sites as the Harlow monkey experiments, the "apes in space" program, and the liberal feminist primatology of Sara Blaffer Hardy (233-235; 138-9; 366-367). Now it is not primates, but women who have become the "natural/technical objects of knowledge," and women's reproductive capacities are being fre]constructed to produce male power. Haraway's argumentative impasse results from, and embodies, the ambiguity at the heart of cultural postmodernism. While philosophical postmodernism promises an escape from oppressively unitary meta-narratives—allowing "difference without opposition"—as it functions in contemporary scientific and medical technology (in the de- and re-contextualization of reproductive technology and genetic engineering) postmodernism produces greater, rather than less, control; oppression rather than emancipation (Owens, 1983, 62; Hayles, 1990, 282-293). While fundamentally flawed in its concluding third section by this inherent ambiguity within postmodernism, Primate Visions is a crucial text for contemporary feminist study. In dramatizing the increasing gap between postmodernism and praxis, it sets the theoretical and practical agenda for feminist theorists as we approach the millenium. WORKS CITED Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Jacobus, Mary, Evelyn Fox Keller and Sally Shuttleworth, eds. Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses ofScience. London: Routledge,l990. Jordanova, Ludmilla. Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989. Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. SUSAN SQUIER Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain. 1380-1530. Edited by Lee Patterson. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990. 345 pp. $38.00 cloth. For nearly a decade, English literary studies have seen a particularly focused application of New Historicist strategy to Renaissance texts. Groundbreaking studies by critics like Clifford Geertz and Stephen Greenblatt have shown the essentiality of historical writings, municipal records, legal documents and hearing transcripts, commercial invoices, and private letters to a richer and sharper understanding of Renaissance plays, novellas, romances, and lyrics. The new volume of essays titled Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380-1530 pushes back, with conviction, the horizon of New Historical approaches into the literary domain of the Middle English period. 156 the minnesota review In his concise Introduction to the collection, "Critical Historicism and Medieval Studies," Lee Patterson describes the political and social status quo of twentieth-century medieval studies in the American academy. After a brief survey of the roots of the "New Historicism" (a term which Patterson, following Howard Horwitz, eschews in favor of "Critical Historicism"), Patterson depicts the contemporary academy of medieval scholars as self-isolating. Of all the "period" disciplines in the humanities, medieval studies is seen even by its practitioners as arcane, elect, and "other." Strangely out of line with current institutional tendencies in the academy, medieval studies are above all a "hierarchy" and a "clerisy"; they are still steeped in "positivist" method and sensibility (3). Anchoring his critique of the field on the macrometaphor of "negotiation," Patterson proposes that the healthy future of medieval literary studies lies in stronger inter-disciplinary work—particularly in terms of the inclusion of historical and quotidian, personal texts as pan of our critical apparatus. His program is ultimately political, particularly when his introductory argument points against the reactionism of thinkers like Alan Bloom and federal administrators like Lynne Cheney and William Bennett. Patterson prudently concludes, "The question is not whether we are going to engage in a politically charged activity...