Queering the Middle Ages ed. by Glenn Burger, Steven Kruger (review)

REVIEWS formation is well-organized and thorough. Although I find myself in agreement with much of what Bullón-Fernández suggests, the book can at times be a frustrating read, mostly due to its ambitious scope. BullónFerna ́ndez’s attempts to draw analogies between the familial, political, and authorial spheres can seem at times strained, and it must be said that while the similarities between familial and political authority are highlighted throughout the bulk of the text, her discussion of the author -text relationship appears only late in the book, and is somewhat underdeveloped and unconvincing. Overall, however, Bullón-Fernández has done Gower scholarship a great service in this book, which unflinchingly brings contemporary critical approaches to bear on what has traditionally been a very ticklish subject. Richard W. Fehrenbacher University of Idaho Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger, eds. Queering the Middle Ages. Medieval Cultures 27. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Pp. xxiii, 318. $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper. Queen theory is old enough by now to ask how it might remain queer unto itself. Like resistance theory in composition studies or any marginalized discourse, it runs the danger of finding itself if not at the center at least at the center of the margin. In Queering the Middle Ages, editors Burger and Kruger seek less to uncover a medieval queer here or there than to goose an historical body primly buttoned up in the periods that shape our identities—medieval, renaissance, modern, postmodern. In this they distinguish their work from that of some contemporary queer theorists and some ‘‘gay/lesbian and feminist’’ medievalists for whom this linear temporality remains unproblematic. Once you queer medievalism , ask the editors, what happens to contemporary categories of (post)modernity, which implicitly define themselves as everything the middle ages is not? The historiographical repercussions of posing such a question are explicitly addressed by Kathleen Biddick, who explores the fetishistic logic of periodizing the middle ages as pre-modern, whether decked out as a utopian site of unrepressed pleasures or a dark age of bigotry. 359 ................. 10286$ CH15 11-01-10 13:54:56 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER The volume’s ten essays fall into three sections, each of which concludes with a response by a guest contributor. The rationale behind the tripartite division is not wholly clear, although the final section, where medieval and (post)modern texts rub up suggestively against each other, seems the most coherently connected of the three; certainly Larry Scanlon provides the most substantial and critical of the three responses (by Karmie Lochrie and Francesca Canadé Sautman and himself). Diversity in this collection is all; the book explores an early fourteenth-century marginal of Brunetto Latini in hell; the inquisition proceedings of Arnaud de Verniolle, arrested for heresy and sodomy; Froissart’s account of the face-off between Isabella and Hugh Despenser, boyfriend to her husband Edward II; cigars à la Clinton and Lewinsky; gay porn; HIV/ AIDS; and a sketch of the visit of Oscar Wilde to Harvard in 1882, published in the college rag by a young George Lyman Kittredge, all of which keep the reader engaged throughout. Two essays were particularly entertaining; pleasure after all lies at the heart of getting queer/medieval, and earnest preaching against heteronormativity (of which there are occasional touches) can be a passion killer. Michel Camille looks at the ‘‘first ‘flaming queen’ in medieval art’’ (p. 58), Brunetto Latini, who, in this particular illumination from the Chantilly manuscript, stands with one arm on hip, the other extended in mannered pose. Camille considers the flamboyant ‘‘self-statuary ’’ (p. 70) of the stance, oratorical yet perversely sensuous. The illumination straddles the inner spine of the book, leaving Latini and Dante to face each other across the divide of the page. Camille characteristically foregrounds the corporeality of the reading process, reimagining the inner spine of the book as an ass-crack with teacher and pupil spread out on the nates of the pages, touching only when the book is closed. This is Camille at his most impish, striking his own campy pose within the piece ‘‘as a twenty-first-century sodomite and scholar of the Middle...