Equally in God’s Image: Women in the Middle Ages ed. by Julia Bolton Holloway, Constance S. Wright, Joan Bechtold (review)

REVIEWS both seeing the relationship between things and understanding the rela­ tionship between ideas- perspective in a figurative sense. These are very different things, and the second, understanding, need not depend on the first, seeing,thoughideascan be "drawn," usingperspectiveor not using it. Indeed, it is just the literalness with which Holley takes the idea of perspective that is the most careless aspect of her work. She insistently makes the phrase "point of view" visual. In the Introduction to her book, Holley cites Morton Bloomfield on Chaucer's perspectivism perhaps as a way to ground her argument that Chaucer,as a poet ofperspective (in a sense all Chaucerians have used since Dryden), is also a visualist-geometrician. But Bloomfield does not use perspective in a visual sense at all: "What Ruiz, Boccaccio, and Chaucer did for the old framed tales," according to Bloomfield, was to use "dialogue, debate, and circumstantial realism to make a complex perspectivism and a rich ironical self-aware sense oflife" (p. 1). Perspectivism for Bloomfield is not about seeing scenes in Chaucer and still less about imaging the abstract geometric shape of his narratives, triangular or diamondlike. Indeed, one can call Chaucer a poet ofperspective without ever invoking the idea ofthe visual or the geometric. Framing gives a kind of perspective-it separates the observed from theobserver, or observers (framing can be layered)-but what is framed in Chaucer is not necessarily a "picture" of anything. "Reading pictures" and "picturing works" are different. Indeed, with respect to the idea offraming, Holley does not even begin to describe what we might see, for example, when we actually hear com­ mentary in Chaucer's work, commentary usually ascribed to a narrator, sometimes Chaucer himself, sometimes simply a voice not identified as a character in the narrative. In these instances, framing of any sort breaks down, and we can see Chaucer's narrative as pictorial only ifwe imagine the entire performance of a Chaucerian piece as a picture of the event of reading. LEONARD MICHAEL KOFF University of California, Los Angeles JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY, CONSTANCE S. WRIGHT, andJOAN BECHTOLD, eds. Equally in God's Image: Women in the Middle Ages. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. Pp. xiii, 336. $54.95. This book is a collection of essays and notes, new and not so new, on the estate ofwomen in the Middle Ages and somewhat later. The contents are 161 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER arranged to fit a schema of three sections: "The Distaff and the Pen," "Sexuality and Textuality," and "On Pilgrimage and in the Cloister." The essays are signed; the Introduction and links, designed to unify the book into chapters, are not signed. The author of the Introduction says of the book, " ... it will argue that for women to attain equality it has been necessary historically to resist hierarchy, to quest liminality, to exercise holy disobedience" (p. 1). Since she writes from a feminist point of view, she can hardly mean that the equality sought was ever reached. One can learn a great deal from these collected materials. It is unlikely that most readers already know that medieval women engaged in warrior activities before Joan of Arc did so (Eleanor of Aquitaine may be the exception) and that female pilgrims went to the Holy Land in greater numbers than might be deduced from Chaucer's portrait of the Wife of Bath and with worse experiences than those described in Margery Kempe's autobiography: witnessthe case oflsoldaParewastell (1365),who wastaken prisoner, tortured, and left for dead, as described in Anthony Luttrell's essay (pp. 184-97). More important than these extraordinary activities is the daily life of women in the ubiquitous domestic textile industry, symbolized by the distaffand the thread (analogous with life itself) produced therewith. Not only could the distaff provide necessities of life in the home, it could earn money, hence representing female power more practical than the obviously phallic connotations of its shape. At the same time, it kept women locked into a domestic role for which the skills of literacy were not only unneces­ sary but, after the rise of the universities, forbidden, a situation tragically illustrated by the plight of Heloise (Introduction, p...