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Reviewed by:
  • Reconsidering Gender, Time and Memory in Medieval Culture eds. by Elizabeth Cox, Liz Herbert McAvoy, and Roberta Magnani
  • Zita Eva Rohr
Cox, Elizabeth, Liz Herbert McAvoy, and Roberta Magnani, eds, Reconsidering Gender, Time and Memory in Medieval Culture (Gender in the Middle Ages), Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2015; hardback; pp. 203; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781843844037.

According to editors, Elizabeth Cox, Liz Herbert McAvoy, and Roberta Magnani, our traditional way of understanding the historical past is sexed and gendered. The dominant conception of time, they suggest, is male; overwhelmingly linear in contrast to ‘female’ time that is influenced by lifecycles and daily rhythms that have ‘traditionally differed from those of men’. Consequently, women can have ‘no place in the notion of the universal’ [End Page 204] (p. 3). Nevertheless, as Carolyn Dinshaw has argued, the Middle Ages was a time of ‘the multiple and the queer’, which unsettled ‘temporal and spatial stereotypes’ and revealed the ‘disruptive presence of “a more heterogeneous” now that knows no temporal boundaries’ (p. 4). Medieval time was organised into ‘heterochronics’ of multiple temporal rhythms and experiences, with contemporary sources frequently revealing a preoccupation with the unusual, the miraculous, and the dysfunctional, as well as ‘the slippage between the expected and the unexpected’ (p. 9). The essays in this collection ‘remember’ medieval time, configuring it as ‘a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein’ rather than a linear process ‘that generates an “ever-accumulating” past’ (p. 4).

Patricia Skinner’s essay is among the collection’s strongest. For women, Skinner argues, the expectation of a smooth progression from one life stage to another was disrupted by life events and by ritual obligations and vigils. She does not insist that medieval men all lived uncomplicated, linear existences – her gendered approach is ‘sensitive to all forms of social oppression and exclusion’ (p. 20) – only that women faced considerable repetition of life stages.

Victoria Turner’s compelling contribution engages with the Old French chantefable, Aucassin et Nicolette, a tale of young, cross-cultural love, in which ‘linear time is suspended’ and the youthful protagonists ‘live for the moment’ (pp. 29–30), while also concerning themselves with the possibilities for their future. Aucassin and Nicolette experience a moment in queer time; driven as they are by the pleasure of the moment, their progress towards adulthood is arrested. Aucassin, in particular, ‘fails to launch’, and his parents object to his desire to marry his Saracen princess, Nicolette. The lovers embark upon a journey that enables them to live multiple experiences of time and, while they do not suddenly become adults by the end of the tale, they have reconciled pleasure and instant gratification with longevity, creating their own time and a potentially fulfilling and happy future for themselves in marriage.

Liz Herbert McAvoy’s essay is highly theoretical and demanding, but nevertheless, compelling and ultimately very rewarding. She begins with an allusion to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which describes inexorable decay, the nature of the passing of time in an abandoned domestic space, and the way in which ‘“now” incorporates a lost past, a meaningless present and a hopeless future’ (p. 96). From here, McAvoy moves to her essay’s literary focal point, the anchoritic writings of Julian of Norwich and the Recluse of Winchester, to discuss the experiences of enclosed women. She engages with Luce Irigaray’s work, exploring what happens when women push back against the role imposed upon them to support male conceptions of dominance in linear time and space. However, McAvoy’s theoretical applications might have been stretched a little too far; it seemed, to this reviewer at least, that [End Page 205] some of the situations she analyses might be equally relevant to both males and females.

The other essays in the collection are sound contributions, with some stronger than others, and one or two that could perhaps have been developed further. Overall, this is a valuable, carefully curated, and thought-provoking volume, that reconsiders gender, time, and memory in medieval culture in innovative ways.

Zita Eva Rohr
The University of Sydney
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