The Currency of Eros. Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620 by Ann Rosalind Jones (review)

Book Reviews Ann Rosalind Jones. T h e C u r r e n c y o f E r o s . W o m e n ’s Lo v e L y r ic in E u r o p e , 1540-1620. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990. Pp. xi + 242. Feminist criticism occasionally distinguishes between gynocriticism, the resurrection of obscure or almost forgotten feminine literary figures of the past, and gender studies, the discernment and analysis of male-dominated literary ideologies and techniques according to which women writers, and women in general, are gendered, marginalized and controlled in any given historical period. In this forceful and perceptive study of eight women poets of the European sixteenth century, Ann Rosalind Jones has fused gyno- and gender criticism superbly and produced one of the most important works on the European renaissance lyric in this decade. Using a Marxist-feminist model of negotiation, Professor Jones studies four pairs of women lyric poets and their strategies for maneuvering within social and ideological restric­ tions and turning the contradictions among different discourses to their advantage. The pairing of the women (Isabella Whitney and Catherine des Roches, Pernette du Guillet and Tullia d’Aragona, Gaspara Stampa and Mary W roth, Louise Labe and Veronica Franco) transcends national boundaries, the rationale for the ordering and pairing being neither national nor chronological but following “ a continuum that moves from most adaptive to most oppositional positions, from less to more overtly contestatory responses” (8). The strength of this book does not merely reside in its theoretical positions, which are so elo­ quently argued in the Introduction and in Chapter One. Some of the virtues of the four ensuing chapters reside in the author’s selection of poems to argue her point, the precise English translations that immediately follow each selection, and the close readings and per­ ceptive commentaries Jones brings to bear on each text. One can only admire and defer to Professor Jones’s breadth of knowledge as a com­ parative literature scholar. To read her analysis of the poetry of Isabella Whitney, Tullia d ’Aragona, Gaspara Stampa, Mary W roth, and Veronica Franco was for this reviewer to be reading much of this poetry for the first time. One might arguably speak of a “ renais­ sance” of sixteenth-century scholarship in the past two decades due to feminist critics such as Tilde Sankovitch, Ann Larsen, and Ann Rosalind Jones, not to forget the broadened historical perspectives provided by the research of Natalie Zemon Davis, Barbara Hanawalt and others. One recalls that in his classic study on Rabelais’s religion, Lucien Febvre argued (against Abel Lefranc) that atheism was an ahistorical notion not part of the outillage men­ tal of Rabelais’s time, and that Lefranc was applying it ahistorically and retrospectively to Rabelais. To argue that a notion such as “ sexual power relations” is also an historical con­ cept is to state the obvious, especially if in saying so one fails to distinguish between a con­ cept implicitly and explicitly present. To say that the notion of “ sexual power relations” is not explicitly present in sixteenth-century literature is not to argue that it is not powerfully and implicitly present in the poetry itself. We cannot read the lyric poetry of the sixteenth century with the relative ideological innocence of that century, i.e., as if Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Derrida, or Irigaray had never existed. There is no possible quarreling with Pro­ fessor Jones’s theoretical perspective. Any disagreement with Jones’s readings should be, in this reviewer’s opinion, within the theoretical framework she herself has set. Within this framework, my disagreement with a few of Jones’s readings are a matter of nuance only. In her subtle reading of Pernette du Guillet Jones argues that Pernette used the technique of dialogue with, and imitation of, VOL. XXXI, NO. 2 85 L ’E s pr it C r éa te u r her mentor, Maurice Scève, in order to achieve (implicit) self-celebration. Personally I would see Pernette celebrating the category of the relational in sexual relations rather than superiority of one sex over the other. Posing as the weak, ancillary, or...