Medieval Woman's Song: Cross-Cultural Approaches (review)

204 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) of Shakespeare in the contemporary classroom in Australia, with contributions also from New Zealand and India. The volume raises challenging questions about whether we should still be giving so much pedagogical attention to a dead, white, English writer whose significance may be increasingly antiquarian. Fortunately for those who do teach Shakespeare, all the writers answer the question raised in the title with a qualified ‘yes’. The qualification is that he should be taught in ways that place him in contexts that are accessible and relevant to ours students. For example, Paromita Chakravarti and Swati Ganguly suggest that the debate about whether Shakespeare or postcolonial literature should be taught is misguided, and that we should instead be seeking ways of teaching Shakespeare postcolonially. Others argue that the plays can create occasions for risk-taking in the classroom, rather than for reinforcing conservative ideologies. The emphasis in all the essays is on finding ways to make Shakespeare’s texts fresh and meaningful to modern students. They can be used to challenge orthodoxies, rather than reinforce them, so long as there is an emphasis on the provisionality of readings. Derek Peat, for example, suggests teaching King Lear in ways that give students choices, an expansion of possible meanings rather than a foreclosing on ‘the right reading’: the syntax of ‘both / and’ rather than ‘either / or’. This book itself does not aspire to last ‘for all time’, but it conducts a refreshing polemic based on the assumption that Shakespeare can be re-contextualized , and set free to create new significances for each generation of students. R. S. White English, Communication and Cultural Studies The University of Western Australia Klinck, Anne L. and Ann Marie Rasmussen, eds, Medieval Woman’s Song: Cross-Cultural Approaches (The Middle Ages Series), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002; cloth; pp. viii, 280; RRP US$49.95,£35.00; ISBN 0812236246. This collection continues the theme of John Plummer’s Vox Feminae, extending its range, but rarely its depth. It emphasises character and voice, and thus textual femininity rather than authorship, and also treats performance. Klinck’s ‘Introduction’ surveys opinions and arguments, including those based on the poets’ gender, and draws distinctions between ‘popular’ and ‘learned’ or ‘aristocratic’ works. Her essay, ‘Sappho and Her Daughters ...’, Reviews 205 Parergon 20.2 (2003) examines ancient origins of woman’s song, relating medieval works to many of their predecessors, and notes associations of the songs with dancing and eroticism. She illustrates the interlacing and development of the genre in the alba and the motif of looking out of the window. Pat Belanoff’s chapter on ‘The Old English Female Lament’ treats The Wife’s Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer as ‘female-voiced outcries’ (p. 29). She relates them to other OE works, in particular The Wanderer and The Seafarer (with frequent inaccuracies) but establishes no connection with later medieval works, making the essay seem anomalous in this volume. Two contributions offer insights into performance. In ‘Women’s Performance of the Lyric Before 1500’ Susan Boynton considers evidence for women’s performance and composition, and the value of distinctions between public / professional and private/amateur performances. She includes a helpful discography of current performances of the songs and references to forthcoming studies. Judith R. Cohen’s approach, in ‘Ca no soe joglaresa: Women and Music in Medieval Spain’s Three Cultures’, is as an ethnomusicologist and performer. She gives cautious weight to the practice of musical contrafactum, ‘a standard technique at the time’ (p. 79), and the only one available in the absence of musical notation for the medieval women’s songs of the Christian, Jewish and Muslim worlds. She too examines the dichotomy of public/private performance and importance of the performers’ social rank. Esther Corral, in ‘Feminine Voices in the Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amigo’, presents aspects of the feminine characters in male-authored songs of this region. She suggests that the namorada is a generally confident figure, whose relationships involve many emotions, and explores the symbolism of clothing and such actions as washing the girl’s hair. E. Jane Burns, in ‘Sewing like a Girl ...’, explores issues of ‘gender, identity and subjectivity’ (p. 106), and...