Medieval Conduct ed. by Kathleen Ashley, Robert L. A. Clark (review)

REVIEWS 215 Venetian Ships and Boats would have been more suited to the content of the book. In the third and final chapter, Martin attempts to elucidate the various names and types of Venetian watercraft. The images displayed in the catalogue are used as evidence for describing certain attributes of Mediterranean watercraft, including rigging and stern variations, skeletal construction, steering devices and their mounts, and anchor types. The author concludes that the typical Mediterranean ship was lateen rigged (powered by one triangular sail, see figs. 130, 131), and had a skeletal system of construction (see figs. 44, 45, 98, 115). This argument is strengthened by a review of the archaeological remains of eight medieval and Renaissance ships found throughout the Adriatic and Mediterranean Seas. The third chapter concludes with a discussion of textual evidence, taken from primary sources reproduced in Casoni (1847) and Bonino (1978), and representational evidence, taken from the catalogue. After a description of the names of ships that have been found in nautical codices and shipping contracts, Martin sets out to create a functional typology of Venetian ships and boats by forming classes such as “Flat-botomed lagoonal and rive boats” (181), “Warship types: galleys or transports” (183), and so on. The arguments that Martin makes are convincing and are supported by the catalogue of works. At the same time, uncertainties nonetheless arise when one realizes that some of the works cited in Martin’s Venetian typology are in fact non-Venetian. These inconsistencies are partly explained by the author’s concession in the beginning of chapter two, which explains that she will be giving a ship and boat typology for “Venetia” (25). However, she fails to define the geographical and chronological parameters of this term, calling the accuracy of her typologies into question. In the end, the less focused material that falls before and after the main catalogue does not overshadow the contribution this book makes to both disciplines of art history and archaeology. For students of Venetian art, this extensive catalogue of medieval and Renaissance representations of ships and boats is an invaluable resource that makes available a specialized class of images from an extended period of time. For the nautical archaeologist, the catalogue supplements the scant archaeological and textual records with a substantial body of visual evidence that, as Martin has shown, is often detailed enough to decipher specific attributes of Venetian ships and boats. DANIEL SAVOY, Art History, Florida State University Medieval Conduct, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press 2001) xx + 241 pp., ill. Medieval Conduct, a collection of essays edited by Kathleen Ashley and Robert L.A. Clark, grew out of a series of sessions at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University that addressed concerns about the limitations of the genre of medieval conduct literature. The essays seek to open the genre to cultural studies by asking important questions such as: how was conduct literature received, who was its audience, what constitutes REVIEWS 216 the “genre,” and how did it function in its historical context. In exploring these questions, the various authors problematize assumptions that scholars have made about the gender and class of the conduct literature audience; such questions in turn break down the traditional practice/discourse dichotomy commonly associated with conduct literature. Therefore, conduct literature functions not as the clear window onto courtly practice of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that it was once assumed to be, but as a glimpse into the complex culture of the early modern era—a time when power was shifting into the hands of the urban wealthy. In “Eating Lessons,” for instance, Clair Spenser looks at food and its relationship to “the incipient consumer society of the 15th century” (13). She challenges traditional notions that texts like John Lydgate’s Dietary were simply imitated by the emerging bourgeoisie. Instead, using Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, she argues that this new urban elite distanced themselves from both ends of society—the gluttonous consumption of the lower classes and the conspicuous consumption of the upper—by prescribing different ways to eat. For this bourgeois audience, eating was a private act symbolic in its...