Women in Old Norse Society (review)

196 Reviews more than a new tendency, no doubt highly original but not the best. If w e assess the artistic output of the period by the single, fundamental criterion of 'quality', then Mannerism emerges as nothing more than a subsidiary phenomenon—vague, with all the artifice and occasional aberration that the word implies. Ingenuity cannot be compared to genius. The challenges and distortions to which classicism was subjected did cause considerable commotion and crowded out a great deal of the art production, but in the end it carried less weight than its natural, rightful offshoots, (p. 112) The tradition of the High Renaissance thus survives the Mannerist debauch, and it is appropriate that Jestaz' third period ends, not with late Mannerism, but with Annibale Carracci. (Carracci's most Poussinesque painting, the 'Domine quo Vadis?' the only work in the National Gallery in London to rate a colour plate.) Reassured that the values of the Grand Siecle prevail, we may close the book and allow ourselves to sink with comforting complacency into the arms of Raphael's 'Madonna of the Meadow' on the cover, the embodiment of everything the Renaissance stood for. David R. Marshall Department of Fine Arts (Art History and Cinema Studies) University of Melbourne Jochens, Jenny, Women in Old Norse Society, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1995; cloth; pp. xiii, 266; R.R.P. $US45.95. As has been already said, and fairly, of this timely volume, it is both well documented and well presented, with its dual purpose of focussing on the role and social experience of certain medieval women and, in the process, clarifying a considerable amount of neglected cultural history. The writer, by her own account and various relevant earlier publications, has for some twenty years, been exploring various aspects of women's history in the sagas, movingfirstto 'women worthies', and then to the slow unravelling of the various famed images of women from the pagan age in which they had been situated, or from the Christian age of the saga writers themselves. As had been expected or suspected, there were found to have been shaped very largely by images formed in the imaginations of men. Notable fresh perceptions here were her 1987 study of "The Female Inciter in the Kings' Reviews 197 Sagas', or her 1993 essay, 'Gender and Drinking in the World of the Icelandic Sagas'. Her early work had been accompanied by the ever more sophisticated use of the evolving techniques of gender analysis, a methodology now applied to the various genres of the Norse literary corpus. The present study is the first of these twin preparations for her present definition of the larger themes of female existence in the Germanic north. As might have been expected, the uneven but surprisingly rich Norse material yielded a variety of subtle portraits, rather than the male-perpetuated stereotype of a proud pagan w o m a n so often in the assertive goddess mould. The writer's method also produced so many details which enabled texts, classical and less familiar, to be read very closely in the light of historical and legal investigation of women's day-to-day life in marriage and of the patterns of work both in Northern Europe and in Iceland. The related time continuum necessary covered both pagan and Christian settings, and changing attitudes, in the move from verse to prose and in the late and more shrewd responses to contemporary society. (The divine, mythic and heroic women—initially depicted by Latin writers—as found in oral lays and now only preserved in the Elder Edda, are treated in her separate and imminent volume, Old Norse Images of Women.) The present study is, thus, free of the mythic, to be squarely focussed on social issues such as: the transformation of marriage under church influence, and the significance of women's work in a pastoral economy, as making a vital contribution to the underpinning of that social order. As the writer claims very fairly (p. xi), she is attempting to do for Germanic Norse women what the Dane, Vilhelm Gr0nbech, did early this century in his four volumes of Vor Folkeatt i Oldtiden (1909-12). Appropriately, the pivot...