Autour des quenouilles: la parole des femmes (1450–1600) (review)

In the late fifteenth century, there appeared a number of texts that tell of women meeting to engage in a common women’s occupation, usually spinning. As they gather around their distaffs they converse about subjects of interest to women: la parole des femmes autour des quenouilles. Even in the earliest of these texts the distaff was a central symbol of women’s occupation. The most important text, and the one central to in this book, is the Evangiles des quenouilles, which recounts a series of six meetings, from Monday through Saturday, in which six elderly women (hence potentially women of accumulated wisdom) in turn bring up a subject of discussion as they work. Their subjects cover a range of women’s beliefs, superstitions, taboos, popular sayings and proverbs, ruses, remedies against the hazards of life, and ways of getting something desired. Although it is implied that these items of faith and trust are invested with the authority of the Gospels to the women, the attitude towards women in this and other texts is derisive.

The purpose of this book is to draw attention to a tradition hardly recognized or explored in histories of literature. As the editors point out in their Introduction, there is nearly always a male in the texts who is editing the women’s conversations, so that there are always questions of perspective: Who is speaking? And what is the nature of the public to which the conversations are directed? Although these questions are raised in the Introduction, they are never discussed; the book stays on the periphery of its subject and does not explore it. It claims to bring together a number of versions of meetings of women in different languages of Western Europe, but in fact the range and number is limited to a few Romance languages – French, Spanish, and Occitan. No German or Scandinavian text is mentioned.

The account (in the Introduction) of the genesis of the book helps to explain its fundamental weaknesses. The articles derive from an international colloquium in Toulouse that adopted a format rare in France or, indeed, anywhere else: ‘au lieu de demander aux participants de venir lire un article quasiment fini, tous ont été priés de présenter un projet d’article, qui a été envoyé à tous les participants … pour que l’on puisse faire ensuite, ensemble, non pas un volume d’actes, mais un livre d’une conception équilibréé’ (p. 4). But what is a ‘conception équilibréé’? Is it one in which there is little divergence of interpretation? A reading of the contents does not suggest that the contributors have been guided by a balanced overall concept. On the contrary, this unusual approach turned out to be unfortunate for this project, since all the contributors, having much the same familiarity with their core material, write essentially to one another rather than to a wider academic public. They assume an audience as familiar with their texts as they are and do not make an effort to instruct it about the content and tenor of the texts they deal with. The only essay that gives some account of the contents of the Evangiles des quenouilles, Madeleine Jeay’s, is relegated to the final position in the book. It should surely have been the first.

Of the ten articles in the book, seven are in French, three in English. One of those in English deals with an English translation of the Evangiles that was printed by Caxton. More interesting and informative about Caxton’s methods and history of publication than about the translation itself, it reinforces one’s impression of the skirting of central issues associated with the texts of women’s discourses. Another of the articles – a piece on the Spanish Corbacho, written in English by a Spanish speaker – contains numerous awkward expressions and errors that checking by a native speaker would...