Wr itten for a series that aims to be "accessible to the non-specialist reader" (p. ii), this introduction to women in late medieval and Renaissance art is worth a discussion. It offers rich material and a good balance between painting and minor forms of art such as engraving and manuscript illumination. Despite its title, it focuses on Northern art, c. 1400 to c. 1540 (Germany, the Low Countries, England, France). You'll find nothing Mediterranean in it, neither Lorenzetti nor Titian. Sculpture is also excluded for unclear motives, excepted for a few carvings and misericords. On the other hand, the gap between middle ages and early modern period is filled. Let us first present the argument, and then discuss its validity. The author, a lecturer at the University of Manchester's Department of Art History and Archaeology, has chosen a very simple scheme to expose her views. The first chapter ("The history of misogyny") only briefly evokes its title and posits the opposition between the temptress and the good woman, using pictures of St Anthony's temptation, the opposite figures of Eve and Mary, and parallels with the Synagogue and the Church, the Foolish and the Wise Virgins (including the hortus conclusus and other allegories of virginity), before going on to medieval and Renaissance nudity and the classical or biblical figures of Lucretia, Suzanna, the daughters of Lot, and the Three Graces. The material discussed in this chapter could as well have been divided between the two next chapters, which truly form the core of the book, "the Good Woman" (Chapter 2) and "the Evil Woman" (Chapter 3). Among the good, the author begins with an iconographical introduction to female saints and to the Virgin Mary, including her daily life, going on to depictions of nuns and mystics (pp. 20-43), before shifting to the daily life of ordinary women. The good housewife is mainly seen as a type (pp. 43-50), whereas the place of female portraits and pictures of working women in this chapter is questionable: are they not more "neutral" than "positive" depictions? The wild women, seen as passive and representing fertility, appear in representations of harmonious wild family life. All in all, even the good women depicted in this chapter were on the edge of evil (e.g. the good housewife being rather the exception than the norm in the comic and moralistic traditions). The next chapter analyses various figures of the evil woman: Eve and the Foolish Virgins, the seductress and the prostitute, but also figures of the bad housewife: the brutal virago who dominates her man in a topsy-turvy way (themes of Phyllis riding Aristotle, the battle for the breeches, etc.), as well as the adulterous woman; and finally witches. A last and very short chapter 4 is devoted to the ages of woman. The book has an index and an annotated bibliography (more analytical than critical), mainly in English, but including titles in Dutch. This may seem very classical. Once more, the world of pictorial representation (and of mentalities as a whole?) looks divided between the good women and the evil women, with no place for intermediate or neutral depictions; the right place for women being the private space and society being founded on misogyny, as may be deduced from most of the analyses. This typology and its assumptions deserved more examination. What differences of perception occurred between clerics and lay people in matters such as contemptus mundi, sexuality, body, beauty, and so on? How far does lay culture resist ecclesiastical ideology? Can we really describe the lay culture as misogynistic as a whole? How did humanism influence artists (as a strong and renewed version of the late medieval lay culture, or as a learned and authoritative renewal of the scholastic misogyny?)? Is humanism to be seen as heir to a bodily and sexually oriented medieval culture, or to the ecclesiastical and moralistic dismissal of women and the human body? In exploring late medieval and Renaissance images it is necessary at times to look from outside the learned discourse of that time. The artist's own readings, the patron and the councilor, especially if clerical, surely have their part in the process of producing images, especially allegories or biblical scenes. But it is important to remember that artists also lived outside the realm of clerical ideology. The real world of studio, corporation, household, parish, and street, has its own culture, which should not be underlooked. So, the author does, for instance, too easily identifies medieval nudity with "obsessive fear," shamefulness, and sin (p. 12), without any reference to positive medieval views of nudity, as for instance the good nudity of Adam and Eve before the Fall, or the nude characters in representations of the Last Judgement (the Elected being as naked as the Damned in Van der Weyden's version for instance), and without even mentioning the two famous lost pictures of naked women by Jan Van Eyck. Further, to say on p. 15 that "even with the Renaissance in full swing, there is a great timidity in the North about treating themes of love and passion, for the medieval concern with morals remains" may be partially true, but is far too direct and will astonish any reader of Chaucer and other medieval courtly texts, as well as any admirer of courtly ivories. A question is not fully addressed in the discussion of numerous satirical engravings (except briefly on pp. 127 and 147): where is the boundary between pure laughter or comedy, even if bawdy, and the moralistic purpose? In a few cases only, the author establishes the connexion (e.g. the writer H. Sachs and the engraver E. Schoen in 16th c. post-Reformation Nuremberg clearly had moral concerns: pp. 108-109, 122-123, 151). Regarding the opposition of private vs. public spaces, the somewhat structuralist reading of Van Eyck's "Arnolfini Double Portrait" (is it a marriage?), stating a contrast man/window/outside world vs. woman/bed/private space is hazardous, even if seductive (it has been proposed independently and in a wider context by J. Paviot, "Le double portrait Arnolfini de Jan van Eyck", Revue belge d'arche'ologie et d'histoire de l'art, vol. 66, 1997, here p. 26). I feel the most uncomfortable with this kind of a priori analysis: we all know that images are polysemous, but here the interpretation is too frequently one-sided. Depictions of strong or victorious women, for instance, are thought to have been conceived and perceived as a warning against the dangers of the female gender. A few errors or misreadings occurred as well. Plate 21 is clearly misread, judging from the comment on p. 51: the women are not kneeling before their teacher, as stated. The two of them are clearly sitting as may be deduced from the folds of their dresses. Only the woman whose hand is going to be beaten kneels before the teacher. Kneeling is thus not the usual attitude of learning, as stated by Groessinger, but only that of the bad pupil receiving her punishment. Concerning plate 39 ("A game of chess in a Garden of Love", 15th c. engraving by the Master E. S.): is the tonsure the "symbol of a fool" (p. 104, but on which grounds?) or more likely that of a cleric (in this case, an unchaste one)? Although written in French for a duchess of Burgundy by her chaplain, the codex Bruxellensis 9296 cannot be said to be a French manuscript (p. 70-71, pl. 29), as it was made in Brussels for the said Burgundian duchess living in the Low Countries (see Margaret of York, Simon Marmion and the Visions of Tondal, ed. Th. Kren, Malibu: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1992, p. 49). By the way, the marriage of the duchess took place in 1468, not 1469 (see p. 69, probably a misprint). The first illustrated tract on witches in not the one by Ulrich Molitor (1484-1494), as written on p. 132, for illuminated manuscripts on witches already appear in the Low Countries two decades earlier (Brussels, Royal Library, ms. 11209, fol. 3, dated ca. 1467, and Paris, BNF, ms. fr. 961, fol. 1, dated ca. 1470, both copies of Tinctoris' treaty on the witch-hunt in Arras). One last detail: to say that St. Augustine "had a common-law wife for many years" (p. 4) is an unhappy anachronism (just say "concubine"). As for the plates taken from manuscripts and early prints, the precise folio number is not always given, which is often irritating in an art history book. The book works on the level of examples and illustrative cases, but does not explicitly refer to systematic research on the theme. A discussion of Sarah F. Matthews Grieco's extensive study based on 6000 engravings (Ange ou diablesse: la repre'sentation de la femme au XVIe sie`cle, Paris, 1991), however not mentioned in Dr. Groessinger's bibliography, would thus have been welcome. The works of the historians An Delva (Vrouwengeneeskunde in Vlaanderen tijdens de late middeleeuwen, met uitgave van het Brugse Liber Trotula, Bruges, 1983) and Myriam Greilsammer (L'envers du tableau. Mariage et maternite' en Flandre me'die'vale, foreword by J. Le Goff, Paris, 1990, that I reviewed for the Revue d'Histoire eccle'siastique, vol. 88, 1993, pp. 805-815) offer valuable feminist analyses of Southern Netherlandish iconography (especially birth and marriage), and should have been mentioned here.
Despite these observations, the book also has fine qualities. First of all, a wide range of material, already mentioned, that raises questions about typology, interpretation and exploitation. The discussion of female portraits is welcome (pp. 55-66). Some lesser-known pictures are presented, such as the ice-skating Lidwina of Schiedam, a Dutch holy maiden, in a woodcut of 1498 illustrating her Vita (fig. 15). The replacement of the dove by a flying Christ Child in some Annunciation scenes is rightly pointed out (p. 24). Nevertheless, as far as the general frame and the iconographic typology is concerned, this book looks, I am afraid, like a summing up of well-established feminist scholarly cliche's from the seventies, stating a binary opposition bad women vs. good instead of looking for the connexion between art and social life. A synthesis could have questioned too easy assumptions, even if authoritative. The general conclusion is more nuanced than the body of the text (pp. 147-153), treating much of the material discussed before (the so-called marginal arts) as propaganda directed at "popular culture" (and becoming "more hard-hitting" with the advent of print and the introduction of the Reformation). The effectiveness of this propaganda in increasing misogyny and female subjugation in the long term (p. 150) is plausible but still a matter that deserves further research.