Allegorical Bodies: Power and Gender in Late Medieval France by Daisy Delogu (review)

in this commemorative issue pay fitting tribute to Dow’s inspiring scholarship and do indeed, as the editors hoped,“mark the enduring resonance of her work and life”(vii). University of Kansas John T. Booker Delogu, Daisy. Allegorical Bodies: Power and Gender in Late Medieval France. Toronto: UP of Toronto, 2015. ISBN 978-1-4426-4187-7. Pp. viii + 273. $75. This volume takes as its point of departure a seeming paradox in late medieval French cultural history: the same historical moment that witnessed the formalization of Salic law, which excluded women from royal succession, also favored the emergence of female allegorical figures as personifications of France. Daisy Delogu’s innovative study of late medieval political allegory vividly outlines what was at stake during the troubled reign of Charles VI (1380–1422). As a response to the king’s periodic fits of madness and the problems of succession that continued to destabilize the realm, authors such as Eustache Deschamps, Christine de Pizan, Jean Gerson, and Jean de Montreuil began to imagine the body politic in new ways. Delogu traces the critical move from metaphors of the kingdom as a human body to gendered allegorical representations that depicted France as a courtly object of desire, a damsel in distress, and a beloved mother. Such conceptual frameworks allowed writers to fashion powerful images of national identity in order to influence real political practices. Erudite and elegantly written, the study weaves historical and theoretical considerations with a core of perceptive—often dazzling—close readings of both canonical and lesserknown works. A selection of Deschamps’s ballades illustrates the ways in which this somewhat neglected poet deploys corporeal metaphor and allegories of the kingdom to construct a model of social order and a masculine political subject. Christine de Pizan’s Livre de l’advision Cristine constitutes a powerful political allegory of the body politic as a maternal figure, but goes even further by claiming Christine’s own authority as a“poete theologisan”(80). Jean Gerson’s sermons depict the University of Paris as the “fille du roy,” offering a figural kinship structure as an alternative to the unstable bonds of consanguinity that threatened royal succession and peace. Jean de Montreuil, often credited with “inventing” Salic law, is more properly situated in the context of humanist endeavors: in an effort to defend France against English claims to the throne, Jean marshalled an ancient document into the service of French national identity.Alain Chartier and Jean-Juvénal des Ursins deploy gendered allegorical figures of France to oppose the Treaty of Troyes, which excluded Charles VII from royal succession. In each chapter, Delogu’s inquiry moves beyond the interpretation of individual texts to deepen our knowledge of their authors’place in intellectual history. On a more theoretical level, the study traces similarities between medieval ways of thinking about women and authors’ways of imagining allegory. Both were envisioned 230 FRENCH REVIEW 90.4 Reviews 231 in terms of alienation and mediation; both embodied an underlying risk of interpretive failure or “willful perversion” of meaning (39). This theoretical reflection comes to full fruition in a “coda” on Joan of Arc as a discursive construct. Employed by Christine and Chartier as an efficacious mediating figure, Joan was seen by her detractors as a threat to newly constructed notions of national (masculine) identity. Delogu’s book is essential reading for anyone interested in late medieval allegory, political thought, and questions of gender. University of Georgia Catherine M. Jones Duval, Sophie, et Miren Lacassagne, éd. Proust et les “Moyen Âge”. Paris: Hermann, 2015. ISBN 978-2-7056-9037-3. Pp. 423. 38 a. The twenty-two essays by Proustians and medievalists gathered here revisit a rich field of research, long defined by studies from Richard Bales (Proust and the Middle Ages, 1975; FR 50.2) and Luc Fraisse (L’œuvre cathédrale, 1990). As its inventively formulated title signals, the volume emphasizes both the mediation of Proust’s knowledge about the Middle Ages (largely through the work of art historians, first among them John Ruskin and Émile Mâle), and his creative, polysemic redeployment of the medieval in his works and correspondence. Opening and closing essays by Sophie Duval and...