This is a first-rate essay collection. The topic is both specific enough to gather in and focus the individual contributions--each of them eminently worthwhile in its own right--and broad enough to allow for a variety of subjects and approaches. In the editors' words, the project is "to trace and critique the replication of patriarchy in the quintessentially patriarchal language of medieval high culture. At the same time, [the essays] attend to what is problematic in twelfth-century Latin's self-constitution (and its modern scholarly receptions) as a monologic Tongue of the Fathers". (2-3) Or: "To what extent did the privileged litterati who are the subjects of these essays manage to control the linguistic patterns that enmeshed them?....Did they speak medieval Latin, or did it speak them?" (8) The seven contributions gathered together under these questions, by established as well as younger scholars, range in methodology from traditional philology to very contemporary gender and queer theory. Despite their variety, the contributions come together in genuine conversation on the ways medieval men and women used their 'father tongue', and the ways we can approach these men and women and their language uses today. The editors' success in making these essays speak to each other makes the collection a model of its kind. It is a joy to read, and it will help persuade medieval Latinists that modern theorists have much to offer them--and perhaps even vice versa.
Not surprisingly, Abelard and Heloise figure prominently, being featured in three essays that are nonetheless about as different as they could be. The opening essay by Andrew Taylor, "A Second Ajax: Peter Abelard and the Violence of Dialectic", sets the tone by explicitly linking the cultural performance of medieval Latin to the cultural performance of academic discourse today. The "dialectic" which Abelard embraced and helped define, Taylor argues, is a form of ritualized male aggression, often described in military metaphors. Unlike the careful, meditative reading practices of earlier generations, the dialectic in vogue in early twelfth- century Paris privileged the quick and brilliant (and young) over the thorough, learned, and experienced. The virtues it encouraged--the technical mastery of a relatively limited field, the suppression of subjectivity and connectedness in favor of competition and aggression--are typical elements of male identity formation and male bonding, then as now. Taylor plays his hand very cleverly. The analogy with modern academic debate--'theory' and its critics--is clearly aimed at from the start and carefully prepared, yet is not explicitly brought up until the very end. Like all analogies, it has its limits, of course. One of the weaknesses of the argument is that 'theory' appears as one homogeneous entity, something one can be either for or against--when clearly Taylor's argument works far better for some branches of 'theory' than for others. But, miraculously, his implied argument is not tendentious--neither for 'theory' nor against 'theory'--and it is both clear enough and subtle enough to be quite enlightening on both sides of the equation, medieval and modern. Several of my female undergraduates, who were making their first acquaintance with the genderedness of modern academic discourse in their Introduction to Literary Theory course, found the essay funny, apt, and even liberating.
Marilynn Desmond, in "Dominus/Ancilla: Rhetorical Subjectivity and Sexual Violence in the Letters of Heloise", examines the extraordinary maneuvers required of the rare woman who wanted to gain a foothold in the homosocial academic world described by Taylor; but she also argues that the "sado-masochism" of Abelard's and Heloise's relationship largely replays and reinforces patterns already implied in the pedagogical situation. This situation is (partially) reconfigured after Heloise's pregnancy and Abelard's castration, but also, in the end, reconfirmed: "Heloise, the 'immasculated' woman, and Abelard, the emasculated man" challenge and expose but do not really alter the power relations of "the Latin literary tradition [and its] pedagogic, erotic, and literary discourses". (51)
Rounding out the block of Abelard-and-Heloise essays is Alcuin Blamires' contribution, "Caput a femina, membra a viris: Gender Polemic in Abelard's Letter 'On the Authority and Dignity of the Nun's Profession". In sharp contrast to Desmond's extensive use of Lacanian and recent feminist paradigms, Blamires' methodology is markedly traditional. He aims for a much more literal and sympathetic reading of Abelard's "De auctoritate", defending it against recent feminist deconstructions. This requires some fancy footwork: Blamires has to concede a lot, and eventually walks a very fine line. Yet his argument, to me at least, is convincing, and his reading rings (largely) true; or at least it recovers one fully valid, fully coherent side to Abelard's reasoning, no matter what other, contradictory currents lurk underneath. Blamires argues that Abelard's advocacy of women's auctoritas, even though it does take its departure from the topos of feminine weakness, is nevertheless sincere, respectful, not at all perfunctory, and indeed quite daring. Neither is it, as many readers have felt, a rebuff of Heloise's urgent request for intimate attention, but a fulfillment and sublimation of it. Responding to her on that high professional and spiritual level, Blamires argues, is the ultimate recognition of her personal dignity and the "authority and dignity" of all religious women.
Claire Fanger's "The Formative Feminine and the Immobility of God: Gender and Cosmogony in Bernard Silvestris's Cosmographia" is a brilliant, theoretically informed close reading of Bernard's strange and suggestive philosophical allegory, tracing "Bernard's use of gender as a means of codifying certain properties of the divine". (96) Through very close attention to grammar, nuance, stated and implied imagery, Fanger shows that in Bernard's complex allegorical cosmogony, three female figures (Noys, Nature, and Silva) represent a partial deployment of the Godhead in the world. This deployment makes the divine intelligible, but also paradoxically reverses accepted connotations of 'male' and 'female': "The receptive womb is what acts, while the active penis is immobile." Fanger's analogy between Bernard and Judith Butler may be a bit strained. It may be true that Bernard, like Butler, resists a sharp division between sex (biological, given) and gender (performative, rhetorical, political, "inscribed"); and that Bernard, like Butler, "conceive[s] of gender, even sex itself, not merely as something understood but as something by which we understand". (82) But he does so, as Fanger notes, on very different philosophical grounds. (The lack of distinction between sex and gender may also be rather less surprising in Bernard, since unlike Butler and the rest of us, he has not been taught the difference between the two terms in "Introduction to Gender Studies".) How 'similar' are Bernard and Butler really, even according to Fanger's own analysis? But Fanger's essay is nonetheless a very innovative, stimulating reading of this weirdly 'playful' text; it should be helpful not only to medievalists interested in gender theory but also to gender theorists who are (or ought to be) interested in medieval texts.
Joan Ferrante's informative, thorough study, "Scribe quae vides et audis: Hildegard, Her Language and Her Secretaries" is again much closer to the traditional end of the methodological spectrum of this collection. For Hildegard of Bingen, Ferrante argues, Latin is not so much the language of patriarchy as "the language [she] shares with God". (102) Patiently examining Hildegard's relationship with her various secretaries, one after another, Ferrante shows that Hildegard had a strong sense of her own authorship and maintained a high degree of control over her texts, allowing her male collaborators (except for the last one, Guibert of Gembloux) no more than copy-editing functions. At times one wishes that Ferrante had teased out more completely the gender implications of what she describes: for instance, the very fact that Hildegard had to defend her own Latinity against male ecclesiastical interference, and that she 'yielded' somewhat in the end; the diglossia within Latin-- learned vs. simple--that Hildegard substitutes for the Latin/vernacular diglossia (this is, of course, a topos--but isn't it gendered here?); the exceptionalism that is the core of all the contemporary pro-Hildegard apologias Ferrante cites (if Hildegard is so stunningly extraordinary, what if anything do her position and her achievements mean for ordinary women?); the intricate negotiations of gendered language, partly immasculating on one hand (as in Hildegard's celebrated self- designation, homo, which is in a sense gender-neutral, but is grammatically masculine and entails masculine pronouns), and the emphasis on female functions (motherhood, incarnating the word, etc.) on the other; the fact that the God with whom she "shares Latin" is gendered (predominantly) male. Nonetheless, Ferrante's detective work and sensitive, unobtrusive readings not only provide us with valuable material but also remind us that individual gifted women could and did carve out special relationships with the Church's patriarchy and its patriarchal language--in the words of the introduction, managed to "speak Latin" rather than "be spoken by it".
In "Sex and the Single Amazon in Twelfth-Century Latin Epic", David Townsend offers a queer (and Lacanian) reading of Walter of Chatillon's Alexandreis (of which he has also published a highly readable and highly acclaimed verse translation). Reading very closely, Townsend deconstructs the encounter between Alexander and the Amazon Talestris. His strategy of first citing the entire long passage in translation, and then reprising it piecemeal in the original Latin, is terrific: it allows strong, middling, and weak Latinists, or even those with no Latin to speak of, to have some measure of access to the original text, without sacrificing philological rigor. Townsend methodically follows and deconstructs the passage's play on concealment and lack (what Amazon dress does and does not hide; Talestris's silent wondering where in Alexander's unimpressive physique his virtus may be hidden); and the play on gender difference, which is thrown out of its traditional balances in all sorts of ways by the Amazon's body and the self-sufficient social competence it stands for. Thus, Townsend argues, the passage interrogates Alexander's masculinity and Kaja Silverman's famous "dominant fiction", without necessarily endangering them in any particularly radical way. Townsend does not claim any proto-feminism for his text. It merely problematizes gender relations, in part for defensive and/or humorous reasons: "The indeterminacy of the poem's dialogic relations leaves the reader adrift to order their hierarchy, or not to do so, in the freedom of his or her own reception". (146) In keeping with good Queer Theory practice, Townsend elaborately positions and inscribes himself in the framework of the essay and throughout--a gesture saved from either heavy- handedness or preciousness by the author's customary wit and grace. Reasonable and sympathetic readers can disagree on the appositeness of some of his links to modern culture, for instance in n. 26, where a reference to breast cancer and the politics of mastectomy, triggered by a discussion of Amazon breast amputation, in turn generates a reference to AIDS and its politics. This, even if one fully agrees with Townsend's politics, may strike one as simply too far afield. But, apart from presenting a powerfully smart, thorough close reading, and apart from raising serious questions about gender politics both medieval and modern, Townsend is also clearly enjoying his material, and this reader for one was quite happy to enjoy it along with him.
Bruce Holsinger's "The Color of Salvation: Desire, Death, and the Second Crusade in Bernard of Clairvaux's Sermons on the Song of Songs" is really not so much about gender as about race, othering, colonialism, and the crusades--into which gender is inscribed as one trope among others, certainly an important one but dealt with only briefly in this essay. Holsinger attempts to breach the protective division Bernard scholars have erected between Bernard the crusade preacher and Bernard the affective, contemplative monastic theologian. Holsinger shows that the language and imagery of the Sermones super Cantica Canticorum dovetails neatly with the ideology and rhetoric of the Crusades, his prime exhibit being the treatment of 'blackness' ("nigra sum sed formosa"). In the sermons, however apolitical they may look, "Bernard sought to produce an eroticized longing for conquest, incorporation, and sacrifice at a historical moment in which Latin Christendom, in his eyes, desperately needed to ideologize its everyday practices and rituals toward the reconquest and continued colonialization of the Holy Land". (159) Holsinger is appropriately wary of too facile an identification of modern colonialism and the crusades, let alone an identification of the modern concept of race and Bernard's 'blackness' and 'whiteness'. He stresses that he is not out to prove that the Sermons "were written with Christian conquest as their sole or even primary aim". (159) Nonetheless, as Holsinger himself acknowledges, the precise connection between the sermons and Bernard's crusade propaganda is left somewhat vague ("it would be difficult to assess the precise cultural work the Sermons on the Song of Songs performed in the launching of the second Crusade" [179]). One wishes he had spend a little more time on attempting just such an assessment--though, on the other hand, if there is insufficient evidence to go on, his reticence is commendable. Holsinger's brief "epilogue" tantalizingly introduces us to a set of French translations of the Sermons, ca. 1200, and their possible place in the political rhetoric of the third and fourth crusades.
One characteristic that unites all the essays in this collection is a shared commitment to close reading--perhaps a gift of its Torontonian legacy and the strong tradition of careful philology that comes with it. (Both editors, and at least one of the other contributors, have a Toronto connection.) These close readings can be inflected very differently; they can be cautious and self-effacing, letting the text be, or daring and questioning, putting considerable pressure on the text. In all cases, the readings assembled here are sensitive, nuanced, rigorous, and imaginative; and all the readers are linguistically highly competent. That, and the editors' skill in selecting and moderating the contributions, makes for an excellent conversation among diverse but equal participants. We should have such conversations more often.