Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages (review)

270 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) problematics of masculine heroism are scrutinised and criticised at least as early as the Aeneid, and arguably as early as the Odyssey. If Milton begins Samson Agonistes after defeat, the same is true of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound and Sophocles’Oedipus at Colonus. What movesAntigone if not a feminine heroism? To frame the discussion largely within the seventeenth century therefore seems a little arbitrary for the history of heroism generally, though Rose makes a powerful case that this century distinctively enabled the writing of female heroism. Anthony Miller Department of English University of Sydney Sautman, Francesca Canadé and Pamela Sheingorn, eds, Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages, New York, Palgrave, 2001; cloth; pp. vi, 312; 2 b/w illustrations; US$35.00; ISBN 0333915399. The introductory essay to Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages outlines the objectives of the book as reading the apparent silences which surround the existence of female same-sex affectivity and interrogating the clear voices of a ‘deceitful normativity’ which sought to impose social, legal, doctrinal and political limits on women’s sexual expression. Each of the essays focuses on a single case study wherein the historical actuality of same-sex desire among women is claimed to be both real and recoverable. The limitations which have until recently inhibited the study of same-sex relations between women in the pre-modern past, that is concerns over anachronism (naming that which had no name) and invisibility (denial of sexual agency and hence of lesbian capability), have been broken down. Female homoerotic and affective relationships can now be examined in their own terms, that is, as operating in the face of patriarchal power and the prescriptive norms of the clergy. Many of the sources which can provide insights into affective and erotic relationships between medieval women are the same texts which inscribe licit and indeed exemplary female behaviour. Susan Schibanoff’s essay, ‘Hildegard of Bingen and Richardis von Stade: the Discourse of Desire’, analyses Hildegard’s angry and anguished response to Richardis’s appointment to the abbacy of Bassum. Schibanoff examines a selection of Hildegard’s letters, writings and music, and a letter from Pope Eugenius III, for the insights they provide into the ‘loving friendship’ between the two women. Lisa Weston focuses on Baudonivia’s vita of Radegund in ‘Elegiac Desire and Reviews 271 Parergon 20.1 (2003) Female Community’. Weston interprets an incident in which Radegund rejects the attentions of a beautiful young man (Christ) as underlining ‘a discourse of unconsummated elegiac desire’ invested in the saint by the sisters of Holy Cross. The legal ramifications of lesbian behaviour in medieval Europe were embedded in concerns that women engaging in homoerotic relations were appropriating male sexual roles. In ‘The Erased Lesbian: Sodomy and the Legal Tradition in Medieval Europe’, Edith Benkov traces the struggle of both civil and ecclesiastical authorities to legislate against female same-sex behaviour.Aphallocentric perception of female sexuality along with difficulties of defining and articulating same sex activities among women contributed to an apparent refusal to legislate against lesbianism. In ‘Tribadism/Lesbianism and the Sexualized Body in Medieval Arabo-Islamic Narratives’ Fedwa Malti-Douglas shows that the apparent approval of female homoerotic practices by the medieval jurist Al-Tîfâshî in his erotic work Nuzhat al-Albâb is actually characteristic of the generic adab literary form. The adab is a sophisticated literary form in which entertaining anecdotes and learned lore are intermingled with poetry and Qur’ânic verse, and the subject matter is both praised and denounced. In the ‘ludic atmosphere’ of this literary form female homoerotic practices are free from traditional male condemnation. Etienne de Fougère’s representation of female homoerotic practices in his Livre des Manières is the subject of two essays, Sahar Amer’s ‘Lesbian Sex and the Military: from the MedievalArabic Tradition to French Literature’and Robert L.A. Clark’s ‘Jousting without a Lance: the Condemnation of Female Homoeroticism in the Livre des Manières’. Amer underlines the parallels between the literary devices in Etienne’s seven-stanza description of lesbian sexual practices and those found in Arabic...