Sections of this book are brilliant and deserve a wide readership. However, taken as a whole, it is not entirely clear that the material was sufficiently new, extensive and coherent to warrant publication as a monograph. Three of its four substantive chapters (beyond the Introduction and a brief Afterword) either have been or will be published wholly (Chapters Four and Five) or partially (Chapter Two) in other venues. The fact that the parts of the book could so easily be torn asunder reflects the tangential relationship they bear to one another. Nor does the introductory chapter, "Women on Top in Medieval Exegesis," written specifically for the volume, succeed in bringing the chapters together, largely because the trope of the "woman on top" (which reappears in the "Afterword") is a misleading and unnecessarily narrow distraction from Tinkle's broader approach: to recognize the work of biblical (re)interpretation and reaccentuation done by a wide variety of texts not normally regarded as theological, and to analyze the sociohermeneutics of a handful of such texts by attention to their socially situated authors and readers. The reader who approaches the book as a collection of essays on gender and exegesis will be richly rewarded with important insights into biblical exegesis in general, Augustine's Confessions, liturgical drama, and the reception of the Wife of Bath's Tale.
Chapter Two examines how four separate exegetes (Jerome, Chrysostom, the Glossa Ordinaria, and Chaucer) effectively rewrote--in the guise of commenting on--the pseudo-Pauline prohibition against women teaching or having authority over men (among other points) in 1 Timothy 2:8-15. "Taken together, these works exemplify the culturally specific nature of exegesis, the broad range of interpretations possible for a single brief text, and the methods, both subtle and obvious, by which exegetes reaccentuate scripture....each exegete rewrites not only his predecessors but also the Bible" (19). This chapter could profitably be used in any number of courses and contexts (perhaps combined with a similar chapter on patristic exegesis of 1 Corinthians 7 in Elizabeth Clark's 1999 Reading Renunciation) to demonstrate some very sophisticated, yet fundamental, critical points concerning biblical exegesis, such as how much even the most "literal" exegesis rewrites scripture, through a variety of hermeneutic devices, to serve the exegete's own agenda (30-31). We see how Jerome takes off from the biblical passage's (apparently) straightforward assertion that "woman...shall be saved by child- bearing" to argue in favor of sexual abstinence, and for the spiritual priority of virgins, thus distorting scripture to serve his own ascetic agenda. We see Chrysostom jump on an entirely different detail of the passage to rail against anything that a woman might do (intentionally or unintentionally) to make herself alluring--and thus dangerous--to a man. We see the authors of the Gloss (compiled c. 1130-1160) jump on the reference to Eve and the Fall in the passage to delegitimize vocal women teachers of the era by defining women's speech as inevitably deceptive and dangerous. And we see Chaucer call into question all the teachings of 1 Timothy 2 by having the Wife of Bath comically present them as views shared by drunken husbands. Yet, Tinkle demonstrates, in every case, "those who articulate power-- 'Paul,' Jerome, Chrysostom, the Gloss compilers, the husbands of Bath- -at some level recognize 'feminine' resistance to their programs. Each work suggests that such speakers reach for something beyond their grasp...Far from naturalizing men's authority, these works represent it as tenuous, contingent and anxious..." (47).
Chapter Three, concerning Augustine's Confessions, is the only portion of the book that must (and should) be read as part of this volume. It is an excellent contribution to the large field of scholarship on women and gender in Augustine, "the man whom feminists love to hate." [1] Tinkle's Augustine is undeserving of that negative reputation; instead, "he challenges the basis of masculine power, subverts traditional gender norms, and disturbs the naturalness of gender identity. He in fact disrupts precisely the hierarchical gender scheme usually attributed to 'the Church Fathers'" (53). The root cause of the gender instability that Tinkle rightly discerns in the Confessions is Augustine's Neoplatonic philosophical orientation; from this perspective, gender can only be "a transitory feature of mutable bodies, not...an aspect of being" (59). Furthermore, it cannot pertain to God, a purely immaterial Being whom Augustine treats sometimes as male, sometimes as female, depending on circumstances. Finally, his own self-presentation evidences similar instability, in response to particular discursive problems. "When he seeks to establish his Christian identity against that of his pagan father and dominant culture, he enacts the role of humble dependent. To put distance between himself and the Manicheans, he plays the part of traditional catholic man...his shifting self-presentation demonstrates a Neoplatonic truth: gender is relational and performative, never an aspect of being" (68-9).
Chapter Four, an earlier version of which was published under the title "Exegesis Reconsidered: The Fleury Slaughter of Innocents and the Myth of Ritual Murder" in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology in 2003, fits uneasily in this book (although readers who missed the 2003 article might as well read it here). Tinkle shows brilliantly how affective, annually repeated liturgical dramas such as the Fleury Interfectio Puerorum formed part of the nasty emotional brew that helped turn legends of murdered child saints into popular and royal action against Jews. Tinkle justified including this material in a work on gender by singling out the character of Rachel, who laments the slaughtered children, both as an "exegete" and as "the affective center of the play" (77). This female figure "articulate[s] her grief at anguished length" (89) and ultimately quotes a Good Friday antiphon, which "reinforces the connection between the child martyrs and the Crucifixion, a key element in the myth of ritual murder" (91). Thus, a female exegete models the inconsolable grief and rage that emboldened enemies of medieval Jews to exact vengeance for the linked slaughters. While some readers may be satisfied with the characterization of Rachel as an "exegete" and the elevation of her character to such a central position, everyone should notice that Tinkle was unable even to allude to the trope of "woman on top" in this chapter. This portion of the analysis is reserved for the "Afterword," where Tinkle explains that "the play carries the trope of woman on top to an extreme: Christians appear in the guise of slaughtered Innocents and Rachel, weak and vulnerable victims" (121). How this is an example of "the woman on top" is simply beyond me; but then, "the woman on top is an unpredictable trope" with "no settled meaning" (124-5).
Chapter Five, a version of which was also published under the same title ("The Wife of Bath's Marginal Authority") in Studies in the Age of Chaucer for 2010, is likewise a fantastic piece of scholarship that will reach a wider audience than Chaucer specialists through its simultaneous inclusion is this essay collection than it would have garnered through publication in the specialist review alone. Tinkle studies how fifteenth-century scribes glossed copies of the Wife of Bath's Prologue in such a way as to treat her as an authoritative interpreter of scripture. Chaucer's Alison (the Wife of Bath), a lay woman from the artisan class, repeatedly cites biblical sources in vernacular translation, and utilizes them to support her own arguments. The very notion that a lay woman should interpret the bible as part of a public performance would have been considered heretical in many circles at the time, so Chaucer's creation of this character clearly represented his way of engaging in "contemporary debates about vernacular scripture and lay hermeneutics" (102). Tinkle's extraordinary discovery is that fifteenth-century scribes universally endorsed "Alison's" subversive expertise by commenting earnestly upon her biblical interpretations and providing extracts from the Latin biblical text in the margins of their manuscripts. Tinkle's close reading of the Middle English text in connection with its fifteenth-century Latin glosses is absolutely convincing and should be a model for future studies along similar lines. Readers in search of a quick example will find an excellent one at the bottom of p. 108. The fact that scribes surely recognized Chaucer (a man) as the true author of "Alison's" views did not diminish the impact of a woman preaching to men "in the realm of fiction" (114). Tinkle thus concludes that the fifteenth-century glossed manuscripts "serve[d] as midwives to the idea of an authoritative woman exegete" (114).
The implication of Tinkle's imagery of "midwifery" is that real-world female exegetes were only born after the age of Chaucer. Yet so many women had already contributed to the development of Latin theology before the fifteenth century, as specialists on Marie de France (who wrote on purgatory), Hildegard of Bingen and Catherine of Siena (to name but three famous examples) well know. Had this book been a true monograph, it might have tackled some of their writings. Of course, there are many other things a monograph might have done as well. This volume, as noted, is no monograph, but a loose collection of (individually stunning) essays which claims to "pursue the trope of the woman on top through major literary-exegetical works" (back cover). Given that "the discursive value of the trope is its flexibility" (125) it can be invoked in almost any circumstance to give the appearance of coherence, but it cannot actually do the job of forging this material into a whole.
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NOTES
1. Judith Chelius Stark, "Introduction," in Stark, ed. Feminist Interpretations of Augustine (State College, PA: Penn State Press, 2007), pp. 1-45 (at p. 21).