Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid by Marilynn Desmond (review)

REVIEWS It may seem odd that an edition of this type is being produced now. Most of the textual evidence is available and so limited that anyone could put it on-line. I assume this is being done, but no one need wait for the largess of a well-heeled consortium. The principal texts can be simply scanned in from the Chaucer Society transcripts and corrected from readily available facsimiles (e.g., of Tanner, Bodley, Fairfax, Pepys, Gg, and Ff). The open edition the editors refer to might be much better represented by an electronic edition ofthis sort, supplemented by photographic facsimiles. The principal value of this edition is as a supplement to the monumental editorial work of Kane. Kane has been instrumental in demystifying the rhetoric of Middle English editors, both of Chaucer and of Langland. This edition provides a potential demystification of his own procedures, and the application of these methods to a text such as LGW may be a case less of breaking a butterfly on a wheel than ofbreaking the wheel on the butterfly. Kane's editorial work, in all its forms, must rank as one ofthe most impor­ tant achievements of late-twentieth-century Middle English scholarship; and if the LGW edition does no more than help clarify those methods and procedures, it will prove well worth the expense. JOSEPH A. DANE University of Southern California MARILYNN DESMOND. Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Pp. xv, 296. $44.95 cloth, $17.95 paper. Reading Dido is, insists its author, "intended to be provisional in every respect," and, of course, such efforts always are provisional whether or not their authors are as self-aware as Desmond. Within that inevitable limita­ tion, however, Reading Dido is a triumph, an extraordinary achievement in (and for) classical philology, medieval studies, comparative literary analysis, women's studies, and reception theory. Informed as well by postcolonial­ ism, cultural studies, and film theory, Reading Dido is a feminist analysis of the historical reception of Dido from Virgil's poetic renegotiation of earlier historical tradition in the Aeneid through Christine de Pizan's Cite des dames. Throughout, the texts and passages discussed are judiciously chosen and scrupulously translated (except for Middle English and Scottish texts, 205 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER which appear only in the original languages). Furthermore, Desmond's awareness of relevant cultural conditions, of reading practices, and of edu­ cational elites informs and contextualizes her analysis of texts. Finally, ap­ propriate visual images from manuscript illuminations and early printed texts are abundantly (and handsomely) reproduced to enrich, to affirm, or to complicate the evidence from written texts. Since this review will attempt to combine description and summary with richly deserved glowing praise, I shall quickly note my few criticisms. First, I hope that the next printing will provide an appendix oftranslations for the Middle English and Scottish materials; the sensible, straightforward translations of the Latin, Italian (although there is a small misunderstand­ ing of the Italian on p. 95), and Old French texts should be matched even in the case of more accessible vernaculars, especially if a book like this is to receive the wide readership it deserves, beyond the realms ofspecialists. (As a comparatist in a classics department, I rarely have occasion to teach Chaucer, but when I last did, to undergraduates at Stanford ten years ago, I found that my breezy confidence that they would have no trouble with Middle English was misplaced.) Second, the section on Chaucer's House of Fame (pp. 128-51) is almost impenetrably encrusted with theoretical con­ siderations, in contrast to the perfect integration oftraditional and theoret­ ical concerns (and of text, context, and theory) throughout the rest of the book. Third, infinitives are split whenever it is possible to split them. Such trivial complaints aside, however, Reading Dido is brilliantly con­ ceived and beautifully executed. Desmond begins with a passage from La Jeune Nee of Helene Cixous, who responds lyrically to Dido's plight with profound sympathy while refusing to share in her victimization. The Cixous passage leads to an introductory discussion of the "Gender and Politics of Reading Virgil," prefaced by quotations...