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REVIEWS sumptions of modern historiography. Jane Tibbetts Schulenberg offers a series of hagiographic anecdotes about the miraculous exclusion of women from male monastic churches. They predictably represent women as temptresses and threats to sanctified space, but the argument that they therefore served to warn women from violating sacred space is unconvincing without a discussion of the likely audiences of the Latin vitae, which must often have been the monks themselves, not women. Similarly, the reading of these accounts as evidence that women resisted such restrictions grants them the status of transparent fact without investigating the contexts of their production and circulation—that is, the conditions that might help us understand the local purpose they served. The final essay provides perhaps the clearest evidence of how complicated medieval space could be. Corine Schleif investigates the gendered logic and practice of distinguishing between left and right, directions determined in religious iconography not by the viewer but by the image. The essay works toward a fascinating exploration of the difference between this embodied, positional sense of moral significance (in which the right was privileged over the left) and an abstract geographic one (in which south was privileged over north), both used to map male priority . While the first structured the relations in devotional art, the second determined the position of congregation and some of the gendered decoration (images of saints) in the nave of the church. The two ways of reckoning space could thus sometimes complement, sometimes complicate , each other. Schlief’s nuanced exploration of different, often overlapping , systems of gendered space is a strong conclusion to this thought-provoking volume. Catherine Sanok University of Michigan Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel, eds., The Middle Ages at Work: Practicing Labor in Late Medieval England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pp. vi, 267. $65.00. The title doesn’t work. These essays do not in fact give an account of medieval people at work or, as the editors prefer to euphemize it, practicing labor. When they approach work, the essays are about its intellecPAGE 325 325 ................. 16094$ CH17 11-01-10 14:05:18 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER tual margins—how legislators tried to control workers, how preachers thought about work, how intellectuals themselves might have worked, what happened to the concept of labor. What the collection does not discuss is the actual presence of labor in the medieval period or the medieval consciousness. One brief passage (pp. 146–47) deals with manuscript illuminations, but only to note that peasants are depicted as wearing clothes inappropriate to their status. It does not wonder why this is—aesthetics or politics, or both?—or consider the common visual bestialization of labor, turning peasants into grotesques and part-animals. Similarly, the recurrent partial presence of labor in literature is not discussed seriously: Langland’s prologue, with its density of work detail, is treated as a generic exercise by Andrew Cole in an essay proclaiming its flight from labor reality in the title ‘‘Scribal Hermeneutics.’’ The collection offers no discussion of Chaucerian labor, from the occupants of the House of Rumour and the low-class birds to the old women and dazed peasants who form a substratum of the Canterbury Tales. The York essay collection, The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England, which emphasizes the actual activities and representations of medieval labor, though mentioned in a few footnotes, has not been used as a source, nor has the rich empirical detail of Christopher Dyer’s research engaged the authors’ attention. Not all of this collection is without value. Those who eschew the curiously assertive semi-theory approach that seems to infect modern academe (with the required brief reference to Foucault, Butler, or Žižek) and just get on with some descriptive work do provide useful material. Brian W. Gastle’s account of the varying uses of the category of ‘‘femme sole’’ shows that this legal role was not only, and perhaps not much, for brave proto-feminists, but that the rich used it to dodge the embarrassments of wealth. Kate Crassons’s study of a major sermon by the Wycliffite, and martyr, William Taylor outlines both his Lollard sympathy for the poor and his...

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