Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature ed. by Linda Lomperis, Sarah Stanbury (review)

REVIEWS researched, documented, and presented; I would have said that the bibliog­ raphy itself was worth the price if academic books had not become so shockingly expensive. The author, at any rate, has done his part to offer his readership a usable, balanced, and complete reference to his subject. This book complements, rather than duplicates, other studies of medi­ eval dreaming in another important way. With the exception ofNewman's unpublished dissertation cited above, all recent treatments of medieval dreaming have tended to focus on literary texts, relegating philosophical and theological treatises to the status of "background." Kruger's emphasis is the reverse: although he does include some analysis of literary texts, his primary interest is in the dream as a cultural phenomenon, and so he has a tendency to blur generic lines, discussing popular, encyclopedic, theologi­ cal, and literary texts all within the same chapter. In many ways this approach is like the medieval one itself; it seems appropriate that Kruger should close his chapter on "Dreams and Fiction" with a scientific tract that ends with a dream vision. This emphasis is useful for another reason as well, since Kruger supplies the cultural "background" materials that other studies of dream poetry have only danced around. All readers ofthe medi­ eval dream, in whatever context, should be grateful to him for his labors. KATHRYN LYNCH Wellesley College LINDA l..oMPERIS and SARAH STANBURY, eds. Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Pp. 255. $36.95 cloth, $16.95 paper. This collection of ten essays offers a rich exploration of "Feminist Theory and Medieval 'Body Politics,"' to quote the title ofthe introduction. With the exception ofa piece on Petrarch, all the essays focus on Middle English or French literature, including Chaucer's Physician's Tale and Book of the Duchess, the mystery plays, Pearl, the writings of mystics, fabliaux, and romances. The strength of the volume lies in its explicit and sophisticated engage­ ment with a variety offeminist theories as they help us read medieval texts. There is no theoretical "party line," since each essay deploys a different set ofrelevant theoreticians, from Luce Irigaray,Julia Kristeva, and Laura Mul219 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER vey to Adrienne Rich, Mary Douglas, Carolyn Bynum, Teresa de Lauretis, and Judith Butler. Some of the more provocative essays make intensive use of psychoanalytic theory, which they also challenge and sometimes revise on the basis of medieval discourses of the body. The theorizing throughout the whole collection is of uniformly high quality, managing to introduce analytic models of some complexity and then to use them for thorough and searching readings of specific medieval texts. The integration of theory and practice was so admirably achieved that I never felt, as I often do in vol­ umes of this kind, that the effort of introducing theory outweighed its useful application or that the theoretical apparatus was a superficial prelim­ inary to an argument about literature that had already been worked out. Here the balance was perfect, the theory enabling interpretive insights that could have been achieved no other way. The introduction represents the volume as part of a turn toward history within feminist theory. Citing both Teresa de Lauretis and Denise Riley, the editors posit the female subject as "a site of differences" and the task of feminist scholarship to recognize "the historical crystallizations of sexed identities" and not an essentialist "Woman" or "women." All the essays in the collection regard "the body" as a "politically charged discursive con­ struct, a representational space traversed in various ways by socially based power relations." Perhaps their most innovative aim, however, is to "dis­ rupt the boundaries" dividing feminist theorizing from medieval scholar­ ship--to demonstrate that contemporary feminists have much to learn from medieval treatments of body politics. Margaret Brose's essay, "Petrarch's Beloved Body: 'Italia Mia,"' explores the figure of a wounded female body which personifies Italy in Petrarch's canzone 128 of the Rime sparse, seeking to understand "the force of figural language in all aspects of our sociocultural production." She argues that the "villified" and "degraded" female body is metamorphosed into "male power and speech" so that, as...