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Violence against Women in Medieval Texts (review)
- Parergon
- Australian and New Zealand Association of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Inc.)
- Volume 17, Number 2, January 2000
- pp. 262-264
- 10.1353/pgn.2000.0022
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
262 Reviews Roberts, Anna, ed., Violence against Women in Medieval Texts, Gainesvill University Press of Florida, 1998; board; pp. 254; 12 b / w illustrations; R.R.P. US$49.95. Another collection of essays centred on a theme! This one is not for faint-hearted any more than it is suitable for the wily undergraduate flicking through a few books in preparation for a senior essay. You have to work hard on this volume just as Anna Roberts has worked hard on her magnificent Introduction. It is here that the collection takes on a coherent shape. This is not just an exercise in giving a context for the essays (a session on violence against w o m e n at the International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo in 1995), and describing their contents. Roberts has posed some useful questions for the reader wanting to tackle the book as a whole. She also offers some interesting interpretations of the individual essays and suggestions about the interconnections between them. This Introduction is an essential tool for the understanding of the complexities of many of the essays, particularly those of Jody Enders and Jane Chance. While both essays are the work of established scholars, and the research behind them is impeccable, they are, initially, less accessible to the reader than most of the other components of the book. In the case of the Enders essay, the reader is faced with a intricate discussion under whose surface there are issues too large to be covered in a piece of this length. Her consideration of a four-fold topic; violence, silence, memory and witches, is, perhaps, best read from a position of prior acquaintance with her two major works to date, Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (1992) and The Medieval Theatre ofCruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Viole (1999), in which some of the same background material is used. Roberts's Introduction is particularly detailed and helpful in leading the prospective reader gently through Enders's argument. The Enders essay has, clearly, been privileged. The book cover features a nineteenth-century illustration of a scold's bridle that is included in Enders's work, which, as the contributions have been arranged chronologically, is the last in the collection. Yet Enders discusses this instrument of torture only in the final few pages, and, while the book is, virtually, enclosed by this emblematic image, the essays as a whole do not consistently bring out its implications for the violent silencing of w o m e n in the varied medieval texts they discuss. 263 Jane Chance's essay on English translations of Christine de Pizan also benefits from the additional treatment given to it in the Introduction. An initial reading of this essay leaves the impression that it is geared more to a discussion of translation than a study of violence against w o m e n . While the subtext is that Christine was removed (violently) from her texts by the English translators, this issue tends to become submerged in the interesting translation theory into which it is woven. This leaning towards an issue other than the central topic of the present volume m a y be explained by the fact that the argument, in an earlier incarnation, was delivered to an M L A session on translation in 1992. Carolyn Dinshaw's essay on the 'quarrel' between Chaucer and Gower also had a previous l i f e , in a slightly different form, in Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange, (Robert F. Yeager, ed.). As Dinshaw herself comments, there is 'no convenient or smooth transition...between the construction of the Chaucer-Gower quarrel and rape' (p. 141). Rape is, understandably, a c o m m o n theme running through a number of the contributions. The topic is considered in detail from the perspective of several major texts. This provides a straightforward focus for the examination of violence against w o m e n across time and geographical distance, which is made possible by the volume. Other types of violence are possibly even more interesting. Deborah S. Ellis provides an intriguing departure from mainstream violence by considering the way that women's domestic space was violated during the...