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REVIEWS Gail Ashton. The Generation of Identity in Late Medieval Hagiography: Speaking the Saint. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Pp. viii, 176. $85.00 This book uses French feminist theory, primarily the work of Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, as a lens through which to study late medieval hagiography—or, more precisely, Middle English lives of women saints written by men. The author argues that hagiographers’ attempts to confine their subjects’ identities to conventional categories of femininity and holiness reflect an ongoing project of silencing female voices in medieval Christian culture. Such attempts are, however, repeatedly undermined by the ‘‘fissures’’ in the texts themselves, where ‘‘a feminine voice reveals itself differently’’ from the ‘‘masculine generic one’’ (p. 4), offering a feminine multiplicity that challenges masculine univocality. The book is useful as the first attempt I am aware of to offer a full-length Cixousian/ Irigarayan reading of medieval hagiography of women, and one that alerts us to internal pressures on hagiographic horizons of expectation. Its mode of argument and use of sources, however, show the potential limitations of such a reading, and leave many of the questions it raises unanswered. The book is divided into two sections. Part 1 consists of a single long chapter, ‘‘Narration and Narratorial Control.’’ Here Ashton begins by discussing the generic codes of hagiography, emphasizing its communitybuilding and normalizing aspects, and then provides a brief discussion of each of her sources: Mirk’s Festial, Capgrave’s Life of St. Katherine of Alexandria, the Early South English Legendary, Bokenham’s Legendys of Hooly Wummen, Caxton’s translation of The Golden Legend, and Chaucer’s Man of Law’s, Second Nun’s, and Clerk’s Tales. She sees most of these texts as stifling the voices and occluding the bodies of their female subjects through their imposition of an idealized female saintliness, with the male hagiographers acting in a kind of de facto collusion with the pagan tormenters of virgin-martyr legends. A problem here and throughout the book is a lack of historical specificity : Ashton gives very brief historical contexts for the vitae she studies , and while she acknowledges in the conclusion that ‘‘individual 521 ................. 8972$$ CH21 11-01-10 12:23:01 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER characteristics and different audiences partially detract from [the] univocality ’’ of the ‘‘predominant discourse’’ of the hagiographers (p. 158), this concession is only rarely touched on in the preceding text, which often offers examples from disparate texts in a group, without attending to their individuality. The result is that the univocality and oppressive disregard of the feminine that she sees in masculine narrators and characters alike often seem to be more the product of her own critical focus than of the texts themselves. Her claim, for example, that Bokenham’s Cecilia ‘‘breaks the confines of [his] textual structures, and asserts an identity gravely at odds with the passive ideal he wished to represent’’ (p. 60), gives the author little credit for his account of numerous outspoken female saints. Another difficulty is the assumption that hagiography ’s confines are exclusively a problem for women; while surely there are gendered aspects, these could have been more precisely delineated by occasional comparison with the lives of male saints, since many of the normalizing features that Ashton notes—such as the insistence on God as the source of speech and power—are also, if not equally, characteristic of male saints’ vitae. In the three chapters of part 2, Ashton turns to the ways in which hagiographic texts can work against the constraints of generic expectations . In ‘‘A Concept of Space and a Notion of Identity,’’ she suggests that the confining of the saint, both by the demand for physical integrity and, often, by imprisonment or enclosure, works to reinforce social stereotypes of femininity and holiness, but also provides a kind of secret locus of power and ‘‘unknowability’’ from which the saint can challenge those who would put her in her place. Ashton’s depiction of enclosure— as, for example, in the case of anchoresses—as an ambiguous and potentially powerful way for women to interact with the world by apparently withdrawing from it is a suggestive one, and...

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