Women’s Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church ed. by Virginia Chieffo Raguin, Sarah Stanbury (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ters of this monograph’’ (p. 17). Yet, Christianity is almost always an unexamined category in Queering Medieval Genres (symptomatically, Christ, Christianity, and God are absent from the index), and it is not historically situated in terms of institutional practices. Queering Medieval Genres delivers extensive, innovative readings, and I particularly appreciated the writing. Two examples: Gawain is a ‘‘reluctant masochist’’ (p. 130), tempted by ‘‘pleasures that [he] both enjoys and enjoys denying himself’’ (p. 138); the ending of The Wife of Bath’s Tale spins out of control into a different genre: ‘‘Alison speaks in two voices here, the mellifluous (if not saccharine) tones of romance and the strident tones of fabliau’’ (p. 75). Last but not least, the readings evolve in constant dialogue with other analyses, especially of Chaucer. The abundance and the elegance of that dialogue is just one of the book’s great pleasures. Anna Klosowska Miami University Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury, eds. Women’s Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Pp. x, 261. $85.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. Medievalists reading Foucault’s ‘‘In Other Spaces’’ are likely to find themselves in a familiar place. His first ‘‘other space’’ is medieval, the space of ‘‘emplacement’’—that is, of fixed hierarchies and topographies of power—in contrast to the post-Galilean space of ‘‘extension’’ and the modern orientation of the ‘‘site.’’ But medieval space is of course both produced and contested, not fixed, as different discourses map the world and the communities that inhabit it. Recent work has illuminated such contests, for example, between the way that notaries and artisans defined medieval Marseille and as they register in the substitution of Nuremberg for Jerusalem in a late medieval chronicle (Daniel Smail and Kathleen Biddick, both in Medieval Practices of Space, ed. Hanawalt and Kobialka). Women’s Space, edited by Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury, contributes to the growing body of scholarship on medieval PAGE 322 322 ................. 16094$ CH17 11-01-10 14:05:16 PS REVIEWS space by investigating the place of gender systems and women’s practices in parish churches and monasteries. The editors have long collaborated on the Mapping Margery Kempe Web site (www.holycross.edu/kempe), an important resource and pedagogical tool for thinking about the spaces of The Book of Margery Kempe: the towns of late medieval East Anglia, their parish churches and cathedrals , routes and sites of pilgrimage abroad. This work seems to inspire many of the central concerns of Women’s Space: the gendered spaces of the parish church, the place of lay patronage, the conceptual association between the female body and sacred space, the material, visual, and narrative resources for constructing—and now reconstructing—the space of medieval devotion. It is no coincidence, I think, that this groundbreaking work is prompted by The Book of Margery Kempe, which offers a probing analysis not only of the way space organizes and is organized by social identity but also of the surprising fragility of this organization, readily undone by those who abandon key aspects of that identity—Margery in madness or devotion, or her incontinent husband, who ‘‘spares no place’’ in his dotage. The lead essay by Ruth Evans on the York cycle takes the relationship between the body and space as its central focus. Her provocative analysis begins with the claim that the Fall instantiates spatial, as well as sexual, difference: the undifferentiated world of Paradise gives way to the binary of Eden and exile at the same moment that Adam and Eve become aware, and ashamed, of their sexed bodies. This underwrites Evans’s reading of both the York Plays and the city itself. Gender play or crossing , Evans claims, threatens the social meaning and organizing function of space. The performance of the York Plays encodes this threat, not only thematically but in its very form: the dangerous mobility of exilic sexuality is reproduced by the mobility of a play cycle performed on pageant wagons. If Evans’s bracing argument does not always slow enough to work through its logic and evidence in detail, it offers a new way to think...