Medieval Woman’s Song: Cross-Cultural Approaches ed. by Anne L. Klinck, Ann Marie Rasmussen (review)

REVIEWS 243 Jonathan Hughes offers a fascinating history of alchemy as it bears most readily on gender, sexuality, and the political in “Alchemy and the Exploration of Late Medieval Sexuality.” Arguing that the medieval male alchemist strove to appropriate the generative feminine, Hughes ranges from citing Galen to considering the effects of effeminizing the body politic with female monarchs. Likewise, his observations range widely—perhaps in some cases wildly. He claims, for example, that alchemy “was in some senses a masculine masturbatory fantasy” (161). Further, he leaves us with the assertion that “the end-product of the process of perfection through alchemical masculinization is the hermaphrodite , a monster complete in itself and so removed from the heterosexual economy; that is, yet another figure of the virgin” (161). While these perspectives certainly illustrate the categorical resistance of the concept of virginity, should we not consider the mark they leave? Virgin martyrs form the subject of Ruth Evans’ “The Jew, the Host, and the Virgin Martyr: Fantasies of the Sentient Body” and Robert Mills’ “Can the Virgin Martyr Speak?” Evans provides a fascinating juxtaposition and analysis of aspects of Judaism and Christianity, persuasively arguing that the narrative in which Jews torture the host is analogous to the narrative in which pagans torture Christian virgins. Taking a contrasting approach, Mills places his virgin martyr analysis within the postcolonial writings of Gayatri Spivak. Following Spivak’s famous query regarding the subaltern’s ability to speak, Mills poses the question of whether death “makes martyrs, like satis, emblematically silenced subjects” (188). Highlighting the power of speech to disrupt systems of power and rape “scripts,” Mills claims that the female virgin retains her good name by arguing, cursing, and talking back. However, addressing the broader discursive arena that is in fact the book Medieval Virginities itself, he also warns that the “I” spoken by the virgin martyr is “a nexus of multiplicity, a site of heteroglossia in which a body of contradictory researches are historically situated” (207). In “’Saint, Witch, Man, Maid or Whore?’: Joan of Arc and Writing History” Anke Bernau analyzes the political, social, and cultural significance of Joan of Arc’s virginal status. She reads contestations of Joan of Arc’s virginity as part of England’s need to shift away from Catholicism toward Protestantism. Consequently , virginity’s role in constructing national and religious identity is revealed : “virginity is always political” (215). Finally, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, in “Virginity Now and Then: A Response to Medieval Virginities” moves beyond a strictly medieval context to consider ramifications of virginity for our contemporary world. Investigating the hymen and twentieth-century medicine, Wogan-Browne shows the enduring and vitally practical importance of inquiring into the concept of virginity. Certainly, this collection has contributed significantly to such inquiry. TANYA LENZ, English, University of Washington Medieval Woman’s Song: Cross-Cultural Approaches, ed. Anne L. Klinck and Ann Marie Rasmussen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2002) viii + 280 pp. When Vox Feminae: Studies in Medieval Woman’s Songs appeared twenty years ago, its eclectic collection of essays by a wide range of scholars brought REVIEWS 244 to the attention of English language scholarship a literary category which had for a long time been the preserve of students of Continental literatures. Given the fact that figures such as Goethe, Alfred Jeanroy, and Gaston Paris had each believed that in medieval and contemporary “woman’s song” (chanson de femme, Frauenlied) one could discern traces of Europe’s earliest artistic expression (3), the novelty of the subject to Anglo-American scholars is all the more remarkable. The volume currently under consideration, well edited by Anne L. Klinck and Ann Marie Rasmussen for the Middle Ages Series of the University of Pennsylvania Press, takes as one of its goals an assessment of the ideas that have come into circulation since Vox Feminae made its debut. And certainly scholarship has measured some distance since then. In particular , Medieval Woman’s Song tries to move the definition of “woman’s song” away from the notion of female authorship towards a more inclusive and representative consideration of songs that assume a recognizable female voice or attitude. As Klinck writes in her introduction, this tack “allows us...