Between Rites and Rights: Excision in Women's Experiential Texts and Human Contexts by Chantal Zabus (review)

Book Reviews173 Renaissance translations of Ancient writings, medical manuals, and various other works did come to enjoy female readership. The next essay explores how women, who continued to be an important part of the audience of farces, mysteries, and morality plays, became actresses in early Humanist theater, thus exerting a major impact on its development. The third article concentrates on letters by approximately fifteen Catholic and Protestant princesses. Their epistolary activity shows them to have been at the same time ostentatious consumers, avid patronesses ofthe arts, and savvy political propagandists. The second part of Patronnes et mécènes deals with several particularly prominent women—Anne de France, Anne de Bretagne, Marguerite de Navarre, Alienor d'Autriche, Diane de Poitiers, Antoinette de Bourbon, and seven articles devoted to Catherine de Médicis—as well as Anne d'Esté, Catherine-Marie de Lorraine, Louise de Savoie, and the Fontevraud abbesses. There is also an article about the funerary monuments in Nantes and Brou that were commissioned by Anne de Bretagne and Marguerite d'Autriche, respectively. All of these essays bring to light, in one way or another, both the aesthetic and political legacy of women patrons. Topics range from books to architecture, from statuary and portraiture to goldsmithing and enamels, and from gardens to the matrilineal transmission of power and property. Moreover, numerous well-chosen illustrations substantially enhance the reader's understanding and appreciation of each subject. Patronnes et mécènes is a high-quality publication that constitutes worthwhile reading in its entirety, by those who wish to savor the full range of essays, or in part, by those who prefer to concentrate on certain individuals or topics. The only negative observation one might make is that the inclusion of seven articles on Catherine de Médicis, despite her undeniable importance, seems disproportionate. Collectively, the chapters devoted to her exceed in length the whole first part of the book. Nonetheless, this impressive volume definitely achieves and surpasses its stated goal of demonstrating that "l'insertion des femmes dans l'Histoire est bien (trop) souvent l'oeuvre de leurpropre volonté " (42). Beverly J. EvansState University of New York at Geneseo Zabus, Chantai. Between Rites and Rights: Excision in Women's Experiential Texts and Human Contexts. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Pp. 344. ISBN: 978-0-8047-5687-7. $65.00 (Cloth). In her latest work, Chantai Zabus responds to the growing corpus of African women's literary representations of excision. Zabus has indeed produced a compelling and stimulating analysis in a book that is sure to become an important reference on the topic. As stated in the title, Zabus' book seeks to scrutinize women's "liminal position between rites and rights" (3). The goal of this book is to show how discourses around "excision" have evolved from being 174Women in French Studies portrayed as part of elaborate ancestral rites that define a culture to becoming, in the 21st century, a full-blown international human rights issue. Quoting Evelyne Accad, Zabus rightly argues that this shift seeks to transform "woman" into "human." The selected texts include works written in French and English as well as those translated into English from Arabic. Zabus uses historical, religious and anthropological documents to explain these texts, and to map out where and why the various practices ofexcision are prevalent in some parts ofAfrica. The book is divided into three sections. The first part explores earlier anthropological and literary texts on the subject, emphasizing the Kenyan context. Using European and Kenyan documents, the author begins by exploring what she calls the sexual pre-texts in which myths, misconceptions and theories about "what lies between a woman's thighs" (30) were constructed from men's perspectives. Chapters two and three succinctly support Zabus' understanding of the practice of excision as gradually deritualized, from a specific cultural/ancestral rite that was part of initiation of girls into adulthood to a rite that is devoid ofculture and women's rights. Zabus uses early Kenyan women's writings to demonstrate how women's bodies were used in the African men's battle against colonial indoctrination that seeks to abolish, on religious grounds, "crude" Kenyan practices. Hence, in these writings, Kenyan women...