Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy (review)

178 Reviews of women's moral and spiritual equality with men. This overview will provide an excellent introduction to Christine's defence ofw o m e n for students in women's studies and history in general, but is likely to befrustratingfor some because, while Brown-Grant translates the passages of Latin that she quotes, she fails to translate quotations in French. This seems to m e to have been an editorial mistake, for rather than pushing Christine scholarship into new regions, Brown-Grant provides a thorough survey of existing scholarship that is likely to be ofas much use to those outside French studies as to those working within it. Karen Green School of Philosophy and Bioethics Monash University Caviness, Madeline H., Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy (The Middle Ages Series), Philadelphia, University of Philadelphia Press, 2001; cloth; pp. ix, 231; 80 b/w illustrations; RRP US$55.00; ISBN 0812235991. While post-structuralist theory has found a place in the study of medieval li it has not featured to any real extent in the study of art. There have been a few interesting and important explorations, such as the work of Michael Camille or Suzanne Lewis, but these examples are rare. Madeline Caviness, a well-respected scholar noted for her work on stained-glass, has in this book set out to apply contemporary theories of the gaze, based on Laura Mulvey's important essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (1975), to medieval art. Mulvey's essay opened up a new avenue ofcritique for feminist, queer and post-colonial scholars, as well as artists, in art theory and practice. Although challenged and modified, Mulvey's analysis ofclassicfilm noir cinema highlighted the implicit gendering ofcoded looking acted out in this genre which presumed an active male gaze and a passive female object of that gaze. Caviness argues that this idea of the 'male gaze' is useful for deconstructing the patriarchal cultural codings of the high Middle Ages. Like most critics who have used Mulvey's theory, she does so only with significant caveats, reminding us that an awareness of historical context (like identity politics) impacts on contemporary theories, thus changing them. Reflecting her interest in thinking around the issues raised by both the application of modern feminist theory and the challenges found in that imposition on the exposition of medieval art, Caviness has organized her book Reviews 179 in an unconventional manner. In her note to the reader she suggests that the work need not be read sequentially, and that the introduction might be more usefully read last by some readers. Opening with a prelude discussing the problem of Mary, Caviness then goes on to discuss the theoretical framing of the work in her introduction 'The "Male Gaze" and Scopic Economies', which is followed by three case studies: Lot's Wife and Daughters; 'Sado-Erotic Spectacles, Breast Envy, and the Bodies ofMartyrs'; and Relics and Body-parts. Accompanying each section is a breathtakingly extensive bibliography broken down into subsections generally dealing separately with relevant contemporary theory and pre-modem scholarship. Each chapter is also densely documented with ongoing and important discussions continuing into the notes. Occasionally clarification for the commentary in the main text, where the language is sometimes unnecessarily obfuscatory, is found in the footnotes. In her chapter on representations of female martyrs, for example, is found the following sentence: 'Mutilated w o m e n did not take charge of their o w n bodies (St Peter healed Agatha), and only one became cephalophore; most submitted to the phallus' (p. 90). It is only in the notes that w e find mention of St Valeria represented holding her decapitated head on a series of late twelfth-century reliquaries, thus explaining the 'cephalophore' reference. I can't help thinking that this type of information might be incorporated back into the main text without danger of losing the theoretical thread; indeed it may act to make more coherent the thought behind the statement. Caviness's text isrichin references to a range ofcritics such as Kristeva, Bataille and Lacan, and she has also drawn on more subtle readings of Freud, qualifying some criticisms by feminist theorists...