Male Authors, Female Readers: Representation and Subjectivity in Middle English Devotional Literature by Anne Clark Bartlett (review)

REVIEWS appealed to them. But apart from the Crawned King the poems also all belong to the years before Oldcastle's 1413 rebellion had made it all too easy for the church to associate Lollardy with civil as well as religious dissent. Had laypersons in the upper echelons of society been able to con­ tinue thinking of Lollardy in terms resembling those deployed in these poems, the English reformation might have belonged to the fifteenth rather than the sixteenth century. Oldcastle helped destroy this possibility. As we learn more about Lollard discourse and the discourses immedi­ ately adjacent to it we will doubtless want to qualify some of Barr's find­ ings. At present, however, her book leaves little room for criticism. It may be worth noting that for this reader at least her section on "Legal Fictions" seemed in places inadequately assimilated to its present context. And rhe­ torically her discussion is sometimes less forceful than it might be: it is too often propelled by the observation that something is "interesting," for example (as in pp. 10, 17, 19, 65, 127, 129, 130, 163). There are some other minor flaws. It is not easy to find one's way around the volume's bibliography of primary sources, which at one point abandons all pretense at alphabetization. It also seems odd in a work so concerned with locating a Piers Plowman tradition to find no reference to the first chapter ofHelen C. White's Social Criticism in Popular Religious Literature of the Sixteenth Cen­ tury (New York: Macmillan Co., 1944). But all such criticisms fade into insignificance beside Barr's discussion as a whole, which obviously grows from wide reading as well as a good deal of hard thinking. We may well wish that the volume were more affordable. But we should be very grateful to Barr for having written it. CHRISTINA VON NOLCKEN University of Chicago ANNE CLARK BARTLETT. Male Authors, Female Readers: Representation and Subjectivity in Middle English Devotional Literature. Ithaca, N.Y, and Lon­ don: Cornell University Press, 1995. Pp. xii, 212. $32.50. Feminist scholars of the past two decades have enriched the discipline by making accessible medieval women's writings as well as engaging the issue offemale representation in canonical texts. A few-such as Elizabeth Rob­ ertson, Bella Millett, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, and now Anne Clark 175 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Bartlett-have ventured into the less glamorous territory of devotional literature; yet this is undoubtedly where the richest vein of information concerning gender and reception is yet to be mined, including material evidence of female textual communities, manuscript transmission, devo­ tional trends, literacy and Latinity, and, as Bartlett argues, "representation and subjectivity." Given the evidence for female ownership of manuscripts including male-authored works like the Speculum devotorum and Contempla­ tions on the Dread and Love ofGod, it is perhaps surprising that no enterpris­ ing scholar has attempted a full-length study to address Bartlett's central concern: "Why were these texts, whose antifeminism ranges from the sub­ tle to the vociferous, so popular among female readers? What did reading these works do to women?" (p. 2). Bartlett's response demonstrates just how fruitful a theoretically informed and interdisciplinary methodology can be. Bartlett's intellectual eclecticism is learned, sensible, and convincing. In negotiating the space between representation and subjectivity, Bartlett constructs authorship and reception in the "complex dynamism" of reading in medieval textual communities, "each with its own cultural authorities, reading strategies, and levels and definitions of competence" (p. 2). Rather than presenting the transmission and reception of devotional literature as an authoritative, hierarchical, or static process, Bartlett deftly explores the tensions, inconsistencies, and polyvalence of devotional works that ap­ peared in codices assimilating a variety of genres (courtly romances, prayers, antifeminist diatribes) and thus discourses of female representa­ tion. Three kinds of "counterdiscourses" in devotional literature challenge misogynist representations of women, each transmitting its own "cluster of social and cultural conventions" from which to "regender" female identity (p. 3). The conventions of courtly romance, monastic epistles of spiritual friendship, and narrative of nuptial and Passion contemplation offered women a variety of roles and rhetorical strategies from which to experience and...