Chosen Among Women: Mary and Fatima in Medieval Christianity and Shi’ite Islam by Mary F. Thurlkill (review)

REVIEWS 337 In her next two chapters, however, there is no strain, and Skura presents her brilliant readings. In examining Thomas Whythorne’s collection of connected songs and poems, Skura finds Whythorne’s lifelong urge [necessitated by his career in service] to keep his private life secret. Skura demonstrates that his poems manage to keep secrets even as his prose reveals. She points to Whythorne’s anecdote about the maiden who retires to the basement to chew on a post when she is upset. “Who could guess,” Skura writes, “that for him writing poetry could be ‘much like’ a shrewing maiden chewing on a post?” (124) In Chapter 6 Skura demonstrates that Thomas Tusser’s autobiography is evident in the additions, deletions, and changed emphases between editions of his husbandry manual, A Hundreth Good Points of Husbandry. The first edition recommends hard work, temperance, thrift, obedience, and good cheer; while each subsequent edition offers less hope, promises less, and exhorts more. Skura notes with irony that Tusser continued to revise his manual even after he had given up his unsuccessful life as a gentleman farmer for a life in London. Skura examine how revision can be all-revealing in texts by Isabella Whitney , George Gascoigne, and Robert Greene, respectively, in her seventh, eighth, and ninth chapters. Skura shows how Whitney self-consciously revises Hugh Plat’s Flowres of Philosophie, a collection of epigrams and poems, into her Sweet Nosgay, carefully choosing among Plat’s random assortment of epigrams . Whitney organizes Plat’s epigrams, emphasizing themes of friendship, envy, and disease outbreak. Through Whitney’s frame story, in which she enters Plat’s “garden” and has a dream vision, we can glimpse Whitney’s inwardness . Gascoigne created in 100 Sundrie Flowers a highly revealing and daring collection of poems, only to revise it a few years later in his Posies by removing the risky and potentially-offensive elements; or, as Skura says, the unified “I” and “me” from Gascoigne’s Flowers becomes, in Posies, a “me” without an “I.” In this revision we can understand Gascoigne, endangered in court and searching for new patrons. Skura examines, with somewhat less zeal than in previous chapters, Greene’s fictions to show Greene’s habit of creating debauched characters (similar to himself) who seek, and receive, repentance and literary acquittal. She observes the uncommon specificity with which Greene renders some episodes of his fictional characters’ lives; he was only able to dwell specifically on chronology, Skura claims, when he based his accounts upon actual life events. Skilled as it is, this book left me wanting more. Each chapter necessitated a substantial amount of contextual information, and this has left Skura little space to complete her skillful close readings, forcing her to use a different approach to each author. She has shown us one possible path to each writer’s inner life, but she has not taken us all the way down those paths. She may have been better off focusing on half as many writers and lingering twice as long. I only hope for a follow-up volume in which she fully enacts rather than offers glimpses of her theory of the revelation of inwardness. TOM BOURGUIGNON, Missoula, MT Mary F. Thurlkill, Chosen Among Women: Mary and Fatima in Medieval Christianity and Shi’ite Islam (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2007) 224 pp. REVIEWS 338 In this comparative history, Mary Thurlkill examines the ways images of the Virgin Mary and Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad, were used, respectively, in early Christianity and early Shi’ite Islam. Thurlkill explores how these two female exemplars were exploited to promote orthodoxy and, paradoxically, to provide women with role models that were both powerful and traditional. Thurlkill ’s sources consist mainly of hagiography and collections of Shi’ite hadith, with some material culture thrown in. As Thurlkill herself readily admits, hagiography and hadith are not exactly equivalent sources, which causes some problems when comparing the two women. A more serious issue, though, is that Thurlkill decides to narrow geographically her hagiographical investigation , focusing exclusively on Merovingian Gaul, while retaining the broadest possible geographical range when exploring Fatima. Although scholars have little studied the hadith and gendered...