The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Literature: Grief, Guilt, and Hypocrisy ed. by Jeff Rider and Jamie Friedman (review)

This interesting volume includes eleven essays that explore in various ways how women characters (both fictitious and historical) in medieval Romance literature engaged with the ‘emotionologies’ (i.e. the society’s attitudes toward appropriate emotional experience and expression) of their particular cultures (4). It should be noted at the outset that the term ‘Romance Literature,’ which appears in the collection’s title, actually refers to a cultural and linguistic category rather than a generic category. At first glance, this could be misleading for readers who are looking for essays examining the genre of medieval romance. However, this volume, which includes chapters on twelfth- through fifteenth-century French, Spanish, Italian, and English (via Chaucer’s translations of Boccaccio) literature, has much to recommend it. Jeff Rider’s introductory chapter offers a detailed discussion of contemporary emotion theory, the ability of narrative to reflect and reproduce emotions, and the suitability of medieval literature as a way of studying past emotionologies. Turning to the question ‘why women?,’ Rider comments on the supposition that women have always been more emotional (whether biologically or culturally dictated) and that negative emotions are of greater interest to scholars of these texts because they are far more prevalent in the inner lives of medieval women than men. ‘Narratives,’ he writes, ‘will always be more about emotional suffering, grief, guilt, shame, and hypocrisy than about happiness and contentment’ (14).

Chapters two through five focus on the literature of Northern France; in chapter two, ‘Order, Anarchy, and Emotion in the Old French Philomena,’ Karen G. Casebier examines the differences between Ovid’s tale of Philomena and Chrétien de Troyes’ twelfth-century courtly adaptation of Ovid’s text, Philomena. Casebier suggests that Chrétien’s primary revision of Ovid is his emphasis on the distinction between civilized and uncivilized societies, between the ‘controlled emotional responses’ of the former and the ‘anarchical impulses’ of the latter (27). Although Chrétien adapts the classical tale to suit the cultural and political interests of a medieval audience, Casebier argues that the poem is still characterized by the seemingly irreconcilable tensions between personal desire as a sign of ‘barbarism’ and civilized collective will (44). In ‘What Was She Thinking? Ysolt on the Edge,’ Brînduşa E. Grigoriu turns to the Prose Romance of Tristan to explore how the philter, or love potion, functions as a means to draw out and, actually, create Ysolt’s emotional responses in the text. While much of the chapter’s important close reading remains relegated to footnotes, Grigoriu comments on the unusual narrative silence surrounding Ysolt’s emotional state in this courtly romance, a silence that is, to an extent, penetrated by an examination of the effects of the philter. In one of the most interesting essays in the collection, Sharon C. Mitchell’s ‘Moral Posturing: Virtue in Christine de Pisan’s Livre de Trois Vertus,’ the author compares Christine de Pisan’s fifteenth-century conduct manual with other popular books of didactic instruction, such as the Ménagier de Paris. Unlike other late medieval conduct literature, Christine’s Livre de Trois Vertus, Mitchell compellingly argues, offers women readers lessons in dissimulation, such as maintaining the appearance of propriety in important social situations, rather than inculcating the need for sincerity in all aspects of their emotional and social lives. In the volume’s final chapter on Northern French literature, ‘Gesture, Emotion, and Humanity: Depictions of Mélusine in the Upton House Bearsted Fragments,’ Tania M. Colwell examines several illuminated fragments of the fifteenth-century Roman de Mélusine which emphasize in their visual interpretation of the story the heroine’s humanity rather than her monstrosity. This important change in Mélusine’s visual depiction in these manuscript fragments, Colwell argues, represents a tendency towards the rationalization of fairies and other supernatural elements in...