Women’s Writings in Middle English ed. by Alexandra Barratt (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ALEXANDRA BARRATT, ed. Women'.r Writings in Middle English. London and New York: Longman, 1992. Pp. xv, 328. $45.00 cloth, $22.95 paper. Among the recent classroom anthologies published for use in courses em­ phasizing the role of women in the Middle Ages, two of the most notable are B. Millett and J. Wogan-Browne, eds., Middle English Prosefor Women: The "Katherine Group" and "Ancrene Wisse" (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), and A. Blamires, ed., with K. Pratt and C. W. Marx, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Alexandra Barratt, a scholar of distinction and a vety able editor, has produced a volume of the same high quality, one that comple­ ments their achievements and carves out an important niche of its own. In a sense it takes up, at least chronologically, where Peter Dronke, Women Writers ofthe Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (203) to Marguerite Porete (1310) (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1984) left off, providing coverage of what Englishwomen of the fourteenth to the very early sixteenth century thought, wrote, and read. Because so few works can be assigned with any certainty to women, Barratt has had to cast a wide net: "the aim of this anthology is to illustrate the full range of Middle English writing from the pericxl 1300-1500 in whose production we know, or can reasonably assume, that women were involved in one way or another" (p. 1). Thus the editor includes transla­ tions of works originally written by women in l.atin or a Continental vernacular and translations by Englishwomen of works originally written by male writers. The result is a collection that will be of great value in helping students see how late-medieval Englishwomen understood them­ selves and their relation to men, their families, their God, and one another. A very succinct introduction establishes the rationale for the anthology and explores the intellectual and cultural background for the writings. Accompanying each text are summary accounts of the work and author, a critical comment on the text, information about manuscript(s), and sug­ gestions for further reading. These remarkably terse and thorough intro­ ductory materials are as admirable as the choice of excerpts and the edito­ rial work, including the full sets of glosses accompanying the texts. There are, of course, reasons for small quibbles, quarrels, and disappoint­ ments. The zeal for preserving disputed attributions to female writers leads to resuscitation, in cautiously qualified language, of the 'Juliana Barnes" 152 REVIEWS legend, the supposed prioress of Sopwell and author of The Boke ofHunting. The attribution, invented long ago and sustained by males and recently shown to be without basis by a female scholar, was not a prerequisite for including an excerpt from that part of the text that is a dialogue between a mother and her son. The selections from the letters of Margaret Paston give us a fascinating picture of a mother concerned with the "emotional and financial complications" of her children's marriages. It would have been as interesting to see one of the letters that display the strength and bravery of this complicated, difficult woman in holding offphysical and legal assaults on the family's holdings. While devotion to the Virgin is not unnoticed in the anthology, there is no sample of works that invite the female reader to identify with the Virgin, particularly the planctus Mariae. In fact, the an­ thology tends to emphasize the intellectual qualiry of women's devotional­ ism at the expense of its powerful emotional qualiry. Finally, this reviewer is dismayed to find one of his studies mistitled in Barratt's bibliography. All this notwithstanding, the anthology is a very significant contribu­ tion to medieval studies, as well as to women's studies, not least because it presents interesting excerpts from works by Dame Eleanor Hull and Lady Margaret Beaufort, which are not othetwise readily available. GEORGE R. KEISER Kansas State Universiry FRANCES BEER. Women and Mystical Experience in the Middle Ages. Wood­ bridge: Boydell, 1992. Pp. vi, 174. $59.95. In North...