Patrick Geary is the distinguished author of a number of books on the relationship of Western myth and history ranging from ancient studies to the Middle Ages. Four polished essays, distillations of extensive research, offer exemplars drawn from Biblical, classical, and Western European records followed by an Epilogue, Notes, Suggestions for Further Reading, and Index. The stated purpose is not a comprehensive account, but a concise demonstration of “tensions between ideological programs and lived experience" (5) playing out in the writings of the male authors with a span of a thousand years and crossing Western cultures. The purpose is, rather, to revise assumptions inferable from recent research, such as by Georges Duby, about the rise of primogeniture in European aristocracy and the transformation of kinship structures from bilateral shifting to strict vertical lineages. The tightly crafted approach has the advantage of clarity and conciseness, but there is the danger of overextending the evidence, simplifying local nuances outside a total context, and prioritizing origin myths within the mental landscape.
Tales of the origins of medieval peoples are often those of royal families, and frequently borrow from classical sources (20), but the pattern is similar in the ambiguous role of women in the origin of religions. The independence of Eve and Pandora are the cause of human misery, while the literary texts try to eliminate or circumscribe distinguished women of tradition or historical record as foundational. Rather than mining records and myths for straightforward information about the range of roles and status of women in historical Western European societies, Geary traces the evolution of Western male authors’ wrestling with gender and power concepts. After “writing women out” as demonstrated in Chapter Two on Amazons and barbarians, they are “written in” through sacred genealogy and gender in Chapter Four.
Thus the Amazon Libuše of Czech tradition was co-opted and shaped by Cosmos while considering Mathilda, a contemporary, highly regarded female ruler of the time. Cosmos’s version commented “upon the relationship between ruler and people" (37) in such a way as to resolve troubling ambiguities for male authorship. Female rule was circumscribed as a temporary solution for failure in male power. For Cosmos, Libuše’s being a wise and just leader is less troublesome, since this can be framed as holding power. The problem is with Libuše’s being a seer. Geary sees women in origin accounts to be “firmly in the control of masculine ideological agendas" (4), and if present at the beginning, then not so at the end. The male authors controlled the texts and felt a need to reconstitute a proper order with the male in control by defeating any warrior women and effacing any powerful historical women, such as the two ninth-century Judiths, limiting them to auxiliary and proper women’s roles.
For Geary, the troubling exception is the role of Mary in the Christian world “because of the complexities of reproducing and transmitting power and authority in medieval society" (4). She appears at the end as she appeared at the beginning in male discourse, an irresolvable ambiguity as means to male transmission along the Davidic line, emasculating Joseph but introducing conceptually the possibility of independent women.
I suggest Geary’s position would be dramatized and enriched by comparing the literary sources he considers to oral traditions of peoples that became feudalized comparatively late, such as in the Finnic and Baltic areas, where the mythical songs and folklore were recreated and performed by women and where bilateral kinship was not lost. Significant variations among different “barbarian” peoples as to gender ideology are not focused upon, but can be inferred with resulting regional differences in how Geary’s thesis is played out in stronger and weaker versions. The importance of female seers can be explored in northern Eurasian traditions, such as the northeast oral Asian tale of the Nišan Shamaness recorded in Manchu written tradition.
The homunculus theory, which recognizes only the father as the source of life, is recorded as far back as the high culture of patriarchal Greeks, notably in Aeschylus’s “The Eumenides.” Nevertheless, conceptual alternatives, such as parthenogenesis, the Spartoi springing from sown dragon teeth, or virgin birth persisted in oral and written tradition even down to not-so-long-ago cabbage-patch folklore. In the Epilogue, Geary speaks of the concept of Mary opening up mental landscapes for future possibilities for women. The same paragraph has the statement, “it would be centuries before families and kingdoms could be headed by women, who, neither widows nor guardian mothers, ruled as well as reigned" (78). This may be so, but Geary does not substantiate a link between the concept of Mary and female rulership as antecedent of concrete examples, for instance, Elizabeth I of England or Catherine the Great of Russia. It is possible to argue by analogy that if the Virgin Mother was “at the beginning,” persisting “to the end,” the Amazons, or rather equivalent warrior women, persisted as possibility in archetypal mental landscape or oral tradition at the edge of a number of cultures more or less independent of a clean monolithic hegemonic male literary evolutionary narrative, perhaps arising as with Jeanne d’Arc from half-forgotten tradition when needed.
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[Review length: 853 words • Review posted on May 3, 2007]