Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages ed. by Linda Olson, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (review)

REVIEWS England we see the challenges and problems of theatrical exegesis played out in a theater of remarkable range and urgency. Ruth Nisse ably persuades in this thoughtful, illuminating book that, as her epigraph from Beckett’s Endgame extolls, ‘‘Ah the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them!’’ Gail McMurray Gibson Davidson College Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, eds., Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Pp. xvii, 508. $50.00. This substantial volume of essays is notable for its content, which is consistently valuable and interesting, but still more notable for the form in which that content is presented: essays are presented in pairs, with the second essay being a response to the first—and, in some cases, giving rise to a third piece by one or both of the original writers. The format is useful in so many ways that one hopes it will create a new subgenre in the admittedly crowded category of essay collections. As a whole, the book offers a medievalists’ corrective to Jane Austen’s mocking description of history (or at least historiography): ‘‘the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.’’ The injustice of both parts of this characterization, at least as it relates to women’s access to and participation in intellectual culture in the Middle Ages, is amply demonstrated in pieces that range, chronologically, from the patristic era to the Reformation and, geographically, from Bohemia to France, North Africa to England, although English topics play a larger role than those of any other single area. The authors, too, range from scholars early in their careers to distinguished senior academics, though the eminences of the field are especially well represented. The collection’s examination of hierarchies, debates, and gender politics in medieval culture, and its attention to modern assumptions and blind spots on these topics, inevitably draws our attention to similar questions about modern culture , making it intriguing to consider the gender, status, and style of the authors of these pieces and how they formulate their arguments and responses. The wide-ranging introductory essay by Olson emphasizes PAGE 313 313 ................. 16094$ CH17 11-01-10 14:05:13 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER the usefulness of ‘‘collegiality’’ and collaborative authorship as ways of thinking about not only the volume’s medieval subjects but its modern creators, male and female. This introduction, along with Kerby-Fulton’s lucid account of the issues surrounding female preaching and the contrapuntal discussion of Alcuin Blamires and Barbara Newman on the perception and depiction of women’s relationship to intellectual creativity in (for the most part) secular literature, are the most broadly ‘‘thematic’’ pieces in the book and provide useful points of contact for the essays on more specific topics. Rather than attempting to do justice to each essay’s argument—an attempt that could only do a disservice to a collection this extensive and varied—this review will aim to suggest some of the many resonances that emerge from a reading of the whole book. The thematic coherence of the volume and its consistent emphasis on response and context make it both easier and more compelling for a reader to follow the links that bind these varied essays to one another. The fact that in a number of pairings the valuable close study of the first essay is given a wider background and/or further methodological implications by the second—as, for instance, in the pairings of Catherine Conybeare and Mark Vessey on the letters of Augustine, Alison Beach and John Van Engen on the sermonic compositions of the nuns of Admont, Mary Jane Morrow and David N. Bell on the manuscript context of certain Anselmian prayers, or Katherine Zieman and Margot E. Fassler on Brigittine liturgical practice —promotes a big-picture approach that links all the essays and continually reworks the reader’s sense of what has gone before. The effect is amplified in cases where two pairings are combined to make a quartet. Thus Fiona Somerset’s contextualization of the Lollard Walter Brut’s attitude toward women’s intellectual role, which shows his...