The nine essays of this collection, which resulted from a panel at the Kentucky Foreign Languages Conference in April 1997, are linked by the common threads that each explores female characters in medieval French literature and that each is "informed by questions of discourse about and by these figures". (3) In the introduction Kathy Krause notes that the essays have been arranged to facilitate the drawing of connections among the works, first, "roughly by genre", and, second, by "key pairs of essays" that cross generic boundaries (3). Furthermore, the connections to be drawn by the reader are not only those among the medieval works discussed in the essays, but those among the critical approaches of the essays. Ideally any collection manifests a reason for its existence as a collection. Still, readers in practice tend to mine collections for individual essays, and therefore in keeping with the spirit of the introduction, which explicitly asks the reader to activate links, Diderot-like, this review will follow links as it describes the individual essays.
The introduction concisely describes recent feminist criticism about heroines in medieval French literature, discerning two major approaches. Reading the heroine as a creation of patriarchal discourse, one approach deplores her status as mere symbol for more "serious" masculine concerns. This type of criticism results in the "erasure of woman from the text". (5) The other critical approach, upon which the essays in this collection are based, takes into account the competing discourses out of which the heroine is created, and even though it recognizes that those discourses are largely male, devises ways for the reader to amplify the feminine voices buried within. Each essay in this collection, which is composed of three groups of three essays each (Saintly Women, Amorous Women, and Dissenting Women), proposes a means of access to those voices.
In the first essay, "'Cume lur cumpaine et lur veisine': Women's Roles in Anglo-Norman Hagiography", Duncan Robertson notes that saintly women are a "varied lot", challenging a common critical position that female holiness amounts to the defense of virginity. His own focus is Clemence of Barking, composer of a vernacular life of St. Catherine and probable composer of one of St. Edward, who through her poetry creates an intimate union among her own companions, the nuns of Barking, the characters within her narratives, and the inhabitants of heaven. Moreover, Robertson disputes the notion that male-authored saints' lives preclude intimate union because they alienate women with their profoundly negative view of the female body. Rather, writing has the power to create a sense of immediacy, to break down barriers between this world and the divine, and within this context twelfth-century lives of women saints affirm the confidence of their writers, male or female, in this power.
Robertson's ideas on religious language speak to those of David J. Wrisley, whose "Women's Voices Raised in Prayer: On the 'Epic Credo' in Adenet le Roi's Berte as grans pies," is third essay in the collection. Wrisley discusses the prayers attributed in this text to Berte and her mother, Blanchefleur, in terms of performance. First, the prayers are examples of performative acts: reciting them causes something to happen. Second, as performances they are infinitely repeatable, therefore universal. Once again, a universalising language, this time prayer, collapses the limits between past and present, between this world and the divine. Through prayer, the female characters provide the link between the family of Charlemagne and the French nation, and between this story and the world beyond.
Although any number of links to other essays in the collections could be activated, I found that the final essay with its analysis of women's language in the farce suggested an interesting comparison. In "Woman's Cry: Broken Language, Marital Disputes, and the Poetics of Medieval Farce" Christopher Lucken first considers the notion of women's speech as noise within Patristic discourse, before turning to its role in the farce. In absolute contrast with the universal speech of religion embodied in the discourse of saints' lives and in prayer, speech that does not discriminate for gender, Patristic discourse creates female speakers who are incapable of comprehending the meaning of language and who are therefore forever incapable of real communication with their male counterparts. Interested only in the word, the covering, the noise, women represent language set adrift from truth. The dichotomy between noisy women and rational men structures the farce, but in their quarrels, the language of both degenerates into a meaningless racket, which in turn challenges the very laws upon which male authority is based. Lucken notes that this language "drowns out not only reason but also the ideal, silent beauty of the courtly dame". (173) Furthermore, linking this essay to the first section of essays raises the question of the relationship between the language of the farce and the language of religion with its confident connection to the divine.
The other two essays of the third section, Nadine Bordessoule's "'Fine Words on Closed Ears': Impertinent Women, Discordant Voices, Discourteous Words" and Sally Carden's "Poetic Justice: The Revenge of La Guignarde in the Livre des Cent Ballades" continue the interrogation of male speech by female speech, exposing the deceitfulness of a male discourse predicated upon sincerity. Each examines a "discourteous" feminine figure, a figure typically read by modern critics as a straw man created by the flagrantly male discourse of "courtly" love to validate itself. However, both essays show how this figure actually reveals that discourse to be mere noise. Bordessoule reads Jean de Meun's La Vieille as eschewing the passive role offered by "courtly" love discourse for an active one. The lady of Jehan de Saintre also rejects this discourse, asking the young knight who knows only that "one song" to sing another. Carden looks at another figure often considered to derive from La Vieille, La Guignarde of the Livre des Cent Ballades. Carden claims that this figure actually threatens to explode the system of "courtly" love by revealing its inconsistencies. Despite the fact that in the text she does not "win" the debate against the proponents of "courtly" love, she successfully reveals that the language of that discourse often conceals unpleasant truths.
The notion of being trapped within an internally inconsistent discourse leads back to Kathy Krause's essay, second in the first series, "Virgin, Saint, and Sinners: Women in Gautier de Coinci's Miracles de Nostre Dame". In this examination of the Gautier's Virgin, the Empress of Rome, and female sinners, Krause teases out the ambiguities in his presentations. His portrayals of the Virgin, lovely but beyond sexual attractiveness, and the Empress of Rome, who loses her physical beauty as she achieves holiness, are not particularly problematic figures. Indeed, by positioning them against the female sinners Gautier would seem to be mirroring the ancient dichotomy between Mary and Eve. Concerning the female sinners, however, Gautier's categories seem unable to maintain the rigid dichotomy between good, sexless women and evil, sexual women. In the Miracles, Gautier admits that the world is quicker to condemn women than men. Furthermore, he evinces sympathy for the female sinners. And yet, they are guilty. The final ambiguity is that despite the world's perception of woman as sinful, they are far fewer in number than male sinners. Gautier's women, Krause concludes, do "not receive equal treatment in this world--nor in Gautier's text". (47) Trapped within the clerical discourse of female sinfulness, Gautier experiences reservations, but cannot clearly articulate them.
The second section of essays considers "amorous women" in romance and lyric. The first of this group, Ana Pairet's "Melusine's Double Binds: Foundation, Transgression, and the Genealogical Romance" lays bare the restrictiveness of certain masculine discourses, those of history and romance, and shows how they are transgressed by a literally unstable female heroine, whose very indeterminacy paradoxically serves to justify the sovereignty of the historical figure Jean de Berry. The stability of masculine identity in this story is contrasted with feminine instability, but the former is also shown to arise from the latter. Furthermore, masculine identity in this story is shown to assert itself through military prowess rather than birth. Thus Jean de Berry's control of the Lusignan domain is legitimated: "military virtue wins over heredity" (84), and the familiar masculine discourse of genealogical romance is opened up to reveal a feminine presence no one had suspected.
The final two essays of this section, William Paden's "The Lyric Lady in Narrative" and Joan Tasker Grimbert's "On Fenice's Vain Attempts to Revise a Romantic Archetype and Chretien's Fabled Hostility to the Tristan Legend" re-examine critical discourse on the romance, showing how restrictive this, too, has been. Grimbert disputes the canonical view forwarded originally by Frappier of Fenice as a heroine who freely makes her own decisions in love. In fact, Grimbert argues, the conception of love as overwhelming force, present both in the episodes concerning Fenice and Cliges and Soredamors and Alixandre, militates against the notion that Fenice exercises her free will in love. Paden strengthens the case against a position he has long disputed, that the lyric lady is necessarily married. Despite the widespread assumption that fin'amors implies an adulterous relationship, the texts do not support this view, Paden and others have argued in previous essays. In this essay Paden tests his theory by considering the applications of lyric insertions in Jean Renart's Roman de la Rose, and Gerbert de Montreuil's Roman de la Violette, hypothesizing that because the singers of the lyrics in the texts are not expressing adulterous desire, the lyrics they sing were not necessarily associated by their publics with adulterous love affairs. Rather, the singers express "the desire of a young man for a young woman, desire that in these cases leads to marriage". (109)
Reassessing the Heroine in Medieval French Literature offers a good representation of recent criticism that seeks to uncover feminine voices in masculine discourse. The goal of the collection is to illustrate the variety of insights to which this approach has given rise. Each essay contains a short bibliography of the relevant critical works, making this a fine collection for anyone attempting to become conversant with the contributions recent feminist criticism has made to medieval studies.