The Representation of Women’s Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Culture ed. by Lisa Perfetti (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER of what can be claimed in the absence of what Constable calls ‘‘positive evidence,’’ as opposed to circumstantial ‘‘argument.’’ Jaeger’s compelling but often aggressively stated argument in favor of the letters’ attribution to Abelard and Heloise lays him open to Constable’s ‘‘gentlemanly skepticism ’’ (as Jaeger puts it in his counter-response), but as Jaeger points out, Constable does not so much refute his argument as suggest that, given the absence of ‘‘positive evidence,’’ it may derive from wishful thinking or emotional involvement. For Watson and Riddy, the interpretive divide is a similarly troubled one, between a reading that requires crediting Margery with deliberate authorship and one that emphasizes the text itself without particular regard to its historical or authorial origins, regarded as essentially irretrievable (in an echo of the JaegerConstable disagreement). Each of these pairs offers a kind of test case of a major debate in the field of medieval studies. The collection’s variety is not without its costs: a reader new to a given topic might become somewhat lost among the names of Augustine ’s female correspondents, for example, or the chaotic chronology of Margery Kempe’s text. But the confusion thus occasioned is outweighed by the value of being introduced to, for example, late-antique epistolary conventions, or the culture of the eleventh- and twelfth-century schools, or the practices of monastic scriptoria. Any useful essay collection can probably be said to be more than the sum of its parts, but the work that the writers and editors have done to enter fully into their dialogues on every level makes this one especially rewarding. One can only hope it will receive the compliments both of attentive reading and then of imitation . Claire M. Waters University of California, Davis Lisa Perfetti, ed. The Representation of Women’s Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. Pp. vii, 222. $65.00. Emotions as they are represented in medieval sources have recently generated a significant amount of critical interest. Jill Mann, in a session of the New Chaucer Society some years ago, was one of the first to raise PAGE 316 316 ................. 16094$ CH17 11-01-10 14:05:14 PS REVIEWS the issue. This year, the International Medieval Congress held at the University of Leeds has set emotions and gesture as the focus of its entire conference, and the New Chaucer Society has organized sessions devoted to emotions for this summer’s meetings. The topic is necessarily interdisciplinary and inspires multiple avenues of research in areas as varied as medical understandings of emotion, legal constructions and curtailments of emotions, emotions as guides to meditations on Christ’s Passion , and the manifestations of emotions as personified abstractions closely linked to the Seven Deadly Sins, all necessary contexts when considering any literary treatment of emotions. Each of these domains has its own specialized contours, terminologies, and archives. And if you explore representations of emotions from the fifth to the seventeenth centuries in countries as different as England, Iceland, France, and Spain, each period and place has its own distinct history and culture. How, then, do you begin to explore such a vast topic? Lisa Perfetti’s timely collection of essays chooses gender as its entry point. More specifically, she focuses on women, a choice that brings to the foreground the medieval medical and theological assumption that women are particularly prone to emotional displays of certain kinds. Perfetti justifies the choice to focus on women because she suggests that enough work has been done on emotions in general to justify a more narrow focus on women and emotions alone. However, very little work has been done on emotions in general. We still do not have a clear understanding of what emotions were understood to be in the Middle Ages, let alone what forms of discourse especially associated women with emotions and why. Before beginning a study of representations of emotions in texts by or about women, it might have been helpful if the medieval association of women with emotion was more clearly established at the outset of the volume rather than in partial accounts scattered throughout the essays. Finally...