Women Where They Ought Not to Be? Revising the View of the Medieval World

Susan B. Edgington and Sarah Lambert, eds. Gendering the Crusades. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. xvi + 215 pp. ISBN 0-231-12598-4 (cl); 0-231-12599-2 (pb).

Sharon Farmer. Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology, and the Daily Lives of the Poor. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002. xvi + 198 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8014-3836-5 (cl).

Judith Herrin. Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. xvi + 304pp.; ill. ISBN 0-691-09500-0 (cl).

Anne L. Klinck and Ann Marie Rasmussen, eds. Medieval Woman's Song: Cross-Cultural Approaches. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. viii + 280 pp. ISBN 0-8122-3624-6 (cl).

The last thirty years have seen a revolution in medieval history: the re-evaluation and re-use of traditional sources—chronicles, legal texts, and so on—to discuss and integrate directly into the historical picture those people whose voices cannot be heard, especially women and the poor. Into this mix has come the recently developed literary analysis, often called "New Historicism," which rejects the "New Criticism" stance that a text can be divorced from its context and still be comprehendible. The result has been an alliance between new social and cultural historians (both those coming out of an Annales tradition and those coming out of Anglo-American theory-based traditions) and New Historicist critics, working together to revise the contemporary intellectual world's views of the past. These associations are not only fruitful—having provided among other things the four books under review in this essay—but they have proven also to be highly effective anodynes against the anachronisms occasionally generated by other theory-based historical perspectives, especially Marxian and Freudian perspectives.

Another benefit of this alliance is the reintroduction of literary texts into the historical canon. It is now possible for historians to incorporate discussions of literature, such as poetry, romance, and lyric, into their mix of sources. Connected to this growing trend is another—the critical analysis of "traditional" sources as narrative and mediated texts. Although it is still possible to encounter medieval historians who continue to use chronicles and legal documents as if they were neutral reporters of "facts," more work than ever before is taking authorship of all forms of discourse into account. And I, for one, think this is a very good thing, indeed.

The four volumes under consideration in this essay offer topics that are more or less completely unconnected: they range from Farmer's superb exposition of the experiences of the poor in thirteenth-century Paris to Herrin's equally superb exposition of three early medieval Byzantine empresses, while wandering through the semi-charted waters of "woman's song" and lyric (the collection Klinck and Rasmussen edited) and the participation of women in the Crusades (the collection edited by Edgington and Lambert). I cannot discuss these texts as they relate to each other in terms of content—they do not. Nevertheless, I can discuss these texts as they relate to each other in terms of theory and methodology. I begin, however, with brief critical analyses of each book before moving on to discussing them as examples of this New History / New Historicist linkage.

It seems best to work in chronological order, so I begin with Herrin's Women in Purple. Although two of the three figures which she discusses, Empresses Irene and Theodora III, figure into more traditional histories of the Byzantine Empire since they both ruled as co-emperors with minor sons and both were instrumental in reincorporating the veneration of icons into Eastern Orthodox worship, her third figure, Euphrosyne, Irene's grand-daughter who forms the bridge between the other two women, is much less well known. Herrin's approach is quite new to most Byzantine political history. She uses the issue of iconoclasm as...