In The Unspeakable, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval Literature, 1000–1400, Victoria Blud offers readings of a number of Old and Middle English texts informed by the theoretical work of Giorgio Agamben, Hélène Cixous, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan. Blud's introduction considers the problem of speaking the unspeakable as explored in the apophatic tradition of medieval mysticism, but her case studies focus on unspeakable sin, sexuality, and gender.
Blud presents Chapters 1 and 2 as a thematic unit, "coalesc[ing] around the analysis of sin, suppression of speech, and the dialogic relation of speech and silence, principally in relation to cultural constructs, particularly confession"(15). Chapter One, "Speaking Up and Shutting Up: Expression and Suppression in the Old English Mary of Egypt and Ancrene Wisse," explains how male confessors urge female interlocutors to confess their sins with just the right amount of speech; "thus an unspeakable sin, which must be articulated and spoken in confession, only becomes truly unspeakable post-confession"(58). In Chapter 2, "What Comes Unnaturally: Unspeakable Acts," Blud explains that along with heresy, sodomy was the sin that was both unspeakable and required medieval authors to spill much ink "guaranteeing sufficient condemnation"(68). Because sodomy was also considered unnatural, Blud opens the chapter with Alain de Lille's De Planctu Naturae. She then moves from Chaucer's Pardoner, "now probably the most notorious (possible) exponent of the unspeakable sin in medieval literature"(78), to Gower's Iphis and Iante, and the Roman de Silence. As Blud explains, "Where women come into the equation, the unspeakable act becomes even more unspeakable, and the conversion of bodies into discourse is even more pronounced in its ramifications, since the alteration or 'correction' of gender in the narratives and the gendering of the nouns is so prominent and is presented as naturalising and necessary to the completion of the story"(105). The chapter cleverly concludes with kisses, which "represent turning points in all three texts, and are unspeakable precisely because one cannot speak a kiss"(104).
Blud sees Chapters Three and Four coalescing "around analysis of political life and law, the non-human and dehumanising, and the dynamic of exile and return, principally in relation to socio-legal structures and the operations of power"(15). Chapter Three, "Crying Wolf: Gender and Exile in Bisclavret and Wulf and Eadwacer," is perhaps the least solely focused on the theme of the volume, but it is also one of the most rewarding. In exploring the werewolf, Blud introduces themes from animal studies, and in exploring exile, Blud "trace[s] the implications of Giorgio Agamben's work on sacratio and bare life for the women in these texts, drawing on Kristeva as a counter to Agamben's somewhat genderless, or presumptively gendered, model"(16). These themes come together, of course, in the infamous sentence of exile in English law: caput gerat lupinum 'let his be a wolf's head', (107) "the quintessential performative utterance"(109) that evokes and controls banishment. In her reading of Wulf and Eadwacer, Blud focuses largely on similarities between Wulf and the poem's female speaker, leading her to conclude, "The markers of exception and exclusion that indicate Wulf's separation also distinguish the speaker, neither with nor without her people…Connected and yet disconnected from those around her, the speaker who misses Wulf so keenly becomes the counterpart he leaves behind – a 'wolf-headed' woman in the place of the exile"(135). Her reading of Bisclavret likewise reminds us that "Bisclavret is also the tale of Bisclavret's wife"(118). Even before her own banishment, Blud reads her as "a more marginal figure than her husband"(136). Further, in light of Bisclavret's redemption, Blud argues, "If the originary activity of sovereignty is the creation of the bare life against which it is defined, then to maintain the status quo, the outlaw who came in from the cold must be replaced"(122). So "[a]lthough the male figures in these texts are described as wolves," and although "both texts concern themselves more with the situation of the 'wolves' than of the women," ultimately it is "the women, not the men of these stories" who serve as "the wolves' heads"(136). In Chapter Four, "Taking the Words Out of Her Mouth: Glossing Glossectomy in Tales of Philomela," Chaucer and Gower take center stage with Blud's analysis of the "Tale of Tereus" in Confessio Amantis and the story of Philomela in the Legend of Good Women. Though Chaucer has Philomela speak only three lines (154), and "refuses to address the end of the tale" (155), for Gower, "[t]hough the supposedly passive, suppressed Philomela cannot speak, through her performance of unspeakable modes of discourse, she never stops being heard" (153)--for example through a "piece of needlework [that] attests unspoken speech intelligible only to other women" (153) and "in the most eloquent but 'unspeakable' act of the story" when she reveals the head of Tereus' son Itys (153).
Though I have followed the author's coupling of her first two chapters and last two chapters in this review, the volume's themes allow for alternate pairings. For example, Chapters Two and Four focus primarily on Chaucer and Gower. But one of the most important interventions Blud makes is through her "engage[ment with] another near-inexpressible phenomenon--the process by which Old English is divided (and separated off) from Middle English"(18). Thus, she considers Anglo-Saxon and later medieval texts side by side in Chapter One, "Speaking Up and Shutting Up: Expression and Suppression in the Old English Mary of Egypt and Ancrene Wisse," and in Chapter Three, "Crying Wolf: Gender and Exile in Bisclavret and Wulf and Eadwacer." These last two chapters also share an interest in places open and enclosed, and the ways in which speakers can and cannot speak as they can and cannot move.