Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589 by Jennifer Summit (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER significant role of rape in the romance—or rather of the ways in which the possibility of rape ‘‘tests’’ chivalric identity—she provides an intriguing reading of the nature of chivalry itself. It would be interesting to look at her perspective on what she calls ‘‘the ambivalence of the social and ethical structures of chivalry’’ (p. 211) in the context of the work of historians of chivalry like Maurice Keen or Richard Kaueper. How would historical texts speak to romance? In her chapter on Malory she seems to begin to answer this question, looking at how rape and abduction become a way of representing knightly lawlessness and violence. With Malory and Chaucer she is dealing with canonical authors, so must spend much more time looking at the work of various other critics. She also must address the disturbing fact that both were accused of rape, although in the end she seems to attempt to explain away the charges, and in this she is not unusual. We prefer not to believe that the writers we love were capable of acts we abhor, and the evasiveness of the records allows us to look away. Contemporary feminist writing about rape forces us to consider the possibility that the charges were justified. Saunders begins the book with an extensive overview of this writing, but she never comes to terms with the issues it raises; this is to my mind the great weakness of her book. The abstract, ungendered neutrality of ‘‘middle ages’’ and ‘‘texts’’ and ‘‘discourses’’ obscures the reality of who wrote and who was written about, especially when women were formally excluded from two of the dominant ideological discourses shaping the debate about rape. What she has given us is valuable, but without an attempt to recover a female perspective, a difficult but not insurmountable task, it is still limited. Arlyn Diamond University of Massachusetts Jennifer Summit. Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Pp. x, 274. $45.00 cloth, $18.00 paper. This book proposes that both women writers and the idea of women writers were important to late medieval and early modern English literature . The claim is paradoxical, the richer for its contradiction between 432 ................. 9680$$ CH16 11-01-10 12:37:32 PS REVIEWS delineating the contributions of women who wrote and tracing their simultaneous exclusion from ideas of authorship and canonicity. This conceptual exclusion, Summit argues, is fundamental to constructing an English national literature, and to establishing a canon of its most respected writers. The ‘‘lost’’ woman writer is the category that permits these more familiar categories to become visible. The ways women are lost as authors are many: they may be self-effacing, or imagined as such; their names may be altered and suppressed as inappropriate to authorship ; they may be gendered vocal or inarticulate in contrast to a clerical tradition of writing; conversely, they may be imagined as the empowering outsiders to the Catholic past for a new Protestant literature. What unites all these configurations of women as ‘‘lost’’ is their ongoing role in defining the edges, the past, or the recuperation of English literature in contrast to its normative center. The first chapter, ‘‘Following Corinne: Chaucer’s Classical Women Writers,’’ connects Chaucer’s representations of women writing to his preoccupations with his own authorship and his place in literary history. Initially, writing women such as Dido, Criseyde, and Anelida define the boundaries of the ‘‘literary’’ by instantiating a range of losses (of languages , texts, and traditions) that ‘‘destabilize the concept of canonical continuity’’ (p. 28). Letters, in their intimate connection to lived moments and their comparatively ephemeral materiality, express a transience gendered feminine in contrast to classical writers cited at the end of Troilus and Criseyde, and even in contrast to the high-literary sort of letter that Troilus produces. But Chaucer does not simply align feminine writing with loss in order to consolidate a claim to canonical stability, for his own work or even for his authorities. Instead, Chaucer’s representations of women writing participate in his larger exploration of ‘‘the failures of auctoritas to provide a...