The currency of Eros: women's love lyric in Europe, 1540-1620 (review)

214 Reviews headings seem designed to pander to the common taste. The illustrations are in the same vein, consisting of really awful drawings by the author, apparently carried out with a blunt instrument on blotting paper, or of soft-core romantic recreations of the pagan past in which no participant ever suffers from the poUo, arthritis or tooth abcesses described on p. 17. There is an ambiguity here which may deter the serious scholar from using this book. That would be a pity because it is in fact a valuable exposition both of the past and of its contemporary interpretations. Aedeen Cremin Centre for Celtic Studies University of Sydney Jones, Ann R., The currency of Eros: women's love lyric in Europe, 15401620 , Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1990; cloth; pp. xii, 242; R.R.P. US$29.95. In the last decade, as feminist theory and criticism have found a place in the academy, the revisionary history of early women writers has gained momentum. This renewed interest has produced a growing body of critical texts which address themselves to the writings of Renaissance women. Ann Rosalind Jones makes a substantial contribution to that project with The currency ofEros. Jones approaches women's love lyric in the Renaissance by looking at eight women poets from Italy, France and England. She writes as a cultural materialist, utilising the concept of negotiation to focus not on women's victimization but on contestation and compromise at work in the writing of the eight poets she considers. On the premise that 'reigning discourses are neither seamless wholes nor swallowed whole' (p. 2), she looks at the variety of ways in which women writers were abletonegotiate not only the gender ideologies of their time and place but also the gendered discourses of love lyric that were available to them. W o m e n poets, she argues, 'made themselves heard through the gridwork of gender rules and lyric tradition' (p. 2). To illustrate her thesis, Jones structures her book around four pairs of women writers, organized by the various forms of negotiation that Jones identifies in their work. Each pair occupies a different position on a scale of responses which ranges from compromise to overt contestation. Isabella Whitney and Catherine des Roches take up the most adaptive position on this scale. Their poetry is read as a 'hybrid' of dominant discourses, a hybrid which invoked accepted forms of women's work to construct acceptable personae for the two authors. Next on the scale come Pernette du GuiUet and TuUia d'Aragona, who drew on the reputations of famous men in their literary circles, through mutual exchanges of praise, to construct a public reputation for themselves. More oppositional poets follow: the pastoral poetry of Mary Wroth and Gaspara Reviews 215 Stampa is read as a surreptitious 'vehicle for protest' which criticized the elite circles from which the women were excluded. Andfinally,in open contestation, Louise Labe and Veronica Franco appropriated masculine discourses in the outspoken eroticism of their work. The eight poets discussed in The currency ofEros came from diverse cultural and class backgrounds. While recognising that all women writers in the period were faced by cultural restrictions and prohibitions on their reading and writing, Jones is careful to distinguish differences between women, be they from city or court, emergent bourgeoisie or nobility, Florence, Lyon or London. The position of a Venetian courtesan such as Veronica Franco presents the writer with a different set of cultural restrictions and prohibitions to those of a wellbom but unemployed lady's maid in London: the position of Isabella Whitney. Jones contextualizes the forms of negotiation that each poet adopts, paying attention to the specificity of cultural and historical location. The pairings she makes, however, extend across national and class boundaries, and this produces some provocative comparisons andrichpossibilities for intertextual analysis. The attempt in The currency of Eros to discuss women's love lyrics across national and linguistic boundaries in Europe is one of the most useful features of the book, allowing for a stimulating analysis of the textual strategies of a highly diverse group of poets. Somewhat paradoxically, however, it contributes to the major limitation of the book...