Handbook of Medieval Sexuality ed. by Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER in the late twentieth century for language that undoes itself, that drives a wedge between signifier and signified, is ultimately Pseudo-Dionysian in origin. A claim this audacious would require a detailed examination ofthe historical development ofour aesthetic ideals that may be beyond the scope ofthis investigation, but it strikes me as at least plausible that the repressed that returns in late twentieth-century appreciations of texts like The Canterbury Tales is the religious origin ofour own aesthetic canon. LAURIE FINKE Kenyon College VERN L. BuLLOUGH and JAMES A. BRUNDAGE, eds. Handbook of MedievalSexuality. Garland Reference Library ofthe Humanities, vol. 1696. New York and London: Garland, 1996. Pp. vi, 441. $68.00. This useful ifuneven volume "aims to address the needs ofstudents (and even faculty members) who are interested in the study ofmedieval sex­ uality and who would like a guide to the sources and literature bearing on medieval sex" (p. xv). Handbook ofMedieval Sexuality comprises, in addition to the editors' introductory history of the study (and neglect) of medieval sexuality, eighteen chapters divided into three sections: "Sexual Norms" features chapters on confessionals, canon law, Western medicine and natural philosophy, gendered sexuality, chaste marriage, and male sexuality; "Variance from Norms," on homosexuality, lesbians, cross-dressing, prostitution, contraception and early abortion, and cas­ tration and eunuchism; and "Cultural Issues," on sexuality in religion (Jewish, Muslim, and Eastern Orthodox) and literature (French, Old Norse, and English). This handbook will certainly guide students toward many fruitful areas of research. While the editors disavow any claim to comprehen­ siveness, the amount of information and quality of research made read­ ily available here testify to the vitality of the growing fields that con­ stitute "medieval sexual studies." Jacqueline Murray's chapter on lesbians exemplifies the strengths ofthe interdisciplinary and theoreti­ cal approaches that distinguish many of the chapters: it takes the marginalization of lesbians in both medieval culture and modern 230 REVIEWS scholarship as the catalyst for an invigorating survey of how we can learn about medieval lesbians from canon law, the penitentials, medical writings, court records, poetry and letters, and art and music.Equally ambitious is Laurie Finke's chapter on French literature, which uses the critical debates about "courtly love" and the fabliaux to categorize the major theoretical approaches to literature's status as representation of sexuality: the "reflective," which sees these genres as reflections of a prior reality; the "hermeneutic," practiced by both exegetical and New Critical readers, which seeks a "hidden reality" behind the text's osten­ sible meaning; the "specular," which focuses on the sublimation of sex­ uality into textuality; and the "dialogic" notion that literary texts "re­ flect, but also in turn shape, those social conditions [of their creation} in a process that is, finally, dialogic" (p.353). Not all the entries, however, are as rigorous and sophisticated as these.Chaucerians in particular will be disappointed by David Lampe's chapter "Sex Roles and the Role of Sex in Medieval English Literature," which quotes the Wife of Bath, for example, at length, but gives no no­ tice whatsoever to the crucial recent work on gender and literature by Carolyn Dinshaw and many others.Lampe instead points out that class and age are the determining factors in Chaucer's portrayals of sexual athletes, concluding by affirming "the truism that 'age and youth are often at debate' and also that aristocratic status ...can also be a source of restraint (noblesse oblige) because of the importance of paternal blood­ lines for the inheritance of property and title" (p.413).Of the rest of the Middle English corpus, Lampe surveys obvious passages from The Owl and the Nightingale, the secular lyrics, Dunbar, the romances, the Gawain-poet, Malory, Gower, Langland, and drama-a reasonable se­ lection, to be sure, yet one might question the decision to expend half a page on Harrison Birtwistle's 1991 opera Gawain (p. 416) while ignoring the erotic mystical writings ofJulian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. Finally, this chapter is full of such awkward sentences as "If aristocratic Emilye desires not to marry, ...she is told that because of her social station she cannot maintain that role, but must marry" (p. 413...