Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature by Simon Gaunt (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER The appendix connects to the rest of the book through its search for Boccaccio's models and its concern for how Boccaccio produces rhetor­ ically the all-encompassing effect often proclaimed by his readers. Here Forni traces verbal connections between the story of Tancredi and Ghismonda and Ovid's tale of Myrrha in the Metamorphoses, thus offer­ ing strong support to Muscetta, Almansi, and others who have seen in 4.1 hints of incestuous passion. This presence of incest, in turn, albeit implicit rather than explicit, helps to produce the effect of the Decameron's inclusivity of all kinds of love. I have only one small quibble with Forni's many fine insights and ar­ guments. In chapter 1, with regard to the pot ofbasil story, he shifts in the course of a page from "wondering" and "entertaining the possibil­ ity that the declared creative sequence from story to song must be re­ versed in order to understand the story's process of inventio" (p. 22) to the firm declaration that "the sequence must be reversed" (p. 23). Although this is plausible, I would like to see some argument for dis­ believing Boccaccio's claim before conceding that what was entertained as a possibility suddenly "must be" so. Forni's work is otherwise clearly laid out, persuasively presented, and very readable. He draws on the whole history ofDecameron commentary, from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century readers through eighteenth­ century scholars to the most recent writings on Boccaccio. He displays as well a deep familiarity with a very wide range oftexts, classical, me­ dieval, and modern. The questions he raiseshelp to recast fruitfully and to see the connections among traditional discussions of Boccaccio's re­ alism, artful construction, parody, and fascination with language. JANET LEVARIE SMARR University of Illinois SIMON GAUNT. Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature. Cambridge Studies in French, vol. 53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. x, 372. $64.95. Although there is much that is thought-provoking m Dr. Gaunt's study, the reader does come away from it with a slight sense of disap­ pointment that less has been made ofthe material than might have been hoped. It is not just that the title includes the buzz word gender, which 246 REVIEWS still raises some expectations of polemic, but that at the end of the day the genders and the genres that emerge from the book are those that we knew all along. In his introduction, Dr. Gaunt spends considerable time considering the question of genre and its importance to medieval as well as modern studies, and to pointing out that the concept survived the onslaught of the structuralists of the 1960s and 1970s. He is also at pains to indicate that he is concerned with gender as a construct apply­ ing to the masculine as well as to the feminine, and that, unlike bio­ logical sex, gender is a multiplex and polyvalent construct within each "sex." Finally, as his epigraph (three quotations from the Oxford English Dictionary defining "gender," "genre," and "genus") implies, he is aware of the necessary interplay of these terms and their subtending ideolo­ gies in generating each other. Disappointment, therefore, arises from the body of the book, which treats in five successive, and hermetic, chapters five genres (chanson de geste, roman courtois, troubador canso, ha­ giography, fabliaux) drawn from traditional literary history, and deals with gender within them also in a very traditional way: the warrior and his companion; the knight and his lady; the male and female saint; sex, the body, and "obscenity." This aprioristic view that there is an inher­ ent unity between gender and genre is reinforced in the conclusion, in which the major challenges to other (preexisting) gender constructs is seen as coming from other (frequently subsequent) genres. Only mar­ ginally (in the cases of the trobairitz and Clemence of Barking as ha­ giographer) is serious concern shown for the ways in which a genre questions itself in terms of its representation of gender. What seems to be missing, then, is any attempt to redefine the traditional boundaries established for Old French literary genres on the basis of the genders constructed...