Women and Race in Early Modern Texts by Joyce Green MacDonald (review)

REVIEWS 254 “Lancastrian” style of writing by looking at the works of Gower, Chaucer, and Langland among others. Richard Firth Green, as always, researches yet another fascinating topic; this time he looks at the juridical nature of a quarrel in Chaucer ’s Knight’s Tale. In particular, Green examines the “trial by battle” and the related concepts of treason, vindication and arbitrary justice. Maura Nolan also looks at Chaucer, in particular (and appropriately for this volume) the introduction to his tale of the “Man of Law” and how Chaucer “recognized the tension between the concrete and the abstract in legal discourse.” Emily Steiner in “Inventing Legality: Documentary Culture and Lollard Preaching” makes two important points for the study of law in general. First, people began to desire law and documentary evidence in order to give beliefs, perhaps even life, structure, “from which even an anti-establishment agenda may proceed.” Second, although groups like the Lollards distrusted the law in general, they needed it for legitimacy, even if the legitimizing document had come from within their own organization. Emma Lipton in “Language on Trial” asserts that “critical assessment of language was crucial to medieval legal procedure” and that plays recounted this importance for, if not taught the use of legal language to, the audience. Her work focuses on the East Anglian N-Town play, The Trial of Mary and Joseph, in which the “holy couple” are tried for adultery. Bruce Holsinger argues convincingly that the concepts of jurisdiction as found in the vernacular provide a separate but valid legal knowledge base within local culture in his article, “Vernacular Legality: The English Jurisdictions of The Owl and the Nightingale.” This is a worthwhile collection of papers that will be useful to literary scholars , historians, and those interested in the history of law. A few of the articles contain the original language, whether Latin or Middle English, but all of them are written in such a fashion that an advanced undergraduate will find them accessible. Scholars will not be left wanting: footnotes are thorough throughout, and there is an interesting document, “History or Narration Concerning the Manner and Form of the Miraculous Parliament at Westminster in the Year 1386, in the Tenth Year of the Reign of King Richard the Second after the Conquest, Declared by Thomas Favent, Clerk,” translated as an appendix. Tying the articles together is a nice introduction, and the volume includes a good index as well. The editors have performed an excellent job of allowing each author their own voice, while finding consistency in the language and temperament of the works, so that the book can be read as a whole. WENDY J. TURNER, History, Augusta State University, GA Joyce Green MacDonald, Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press 2002) xi + 188 pp. The scope of Joyce Green MacDonald’s provocative study of Women and Race in Early Modern Texts seems vast in comparison to the brevity of the printed volume. The deliberate generalizing of its title, however, betrays the explicit efforts of the study to release important concepts from increasingly circumscribed or confused theoretical models and disciplines, established and emerging . MacDonald critiques the theoretical privileges assumed generally by postcolonialism and feminism, arguing that the two are conjoined in early modern racial knowledge. REVIEWS 255 MacDonald writes “against what sometimes seems to me the increasing absorption of the specificity of race into other kinds of postmodern critical discourse , and an increasing denial of its very existence” (20). Race appears and disappears in postcolonial and feminist criticism much as the black female figure in early modern performances emerges as a central figure and then vanishes . The black lady, featured in the mounted tournaments of the wild knight before King James IV of Scotland in 1507 and 1508, is “offered and withdrawn ” (3), and the figure of Imoinda in Aphra Behn’s novella Oroonoko (1688) changes significantly in Thomas Southerne’s dramatic adaptation (1695) and John Hawkesworth’s refashioning (1759). Imoinda’s skin color changes while her racial identity remains the same, facilitating the inscription of specific gender roles. MacDonald examines carefully the “removal of dark-skinned women from representation, and the submersion of Englishwomen’s racial...