Professor Felice Lifshitz’s scholarship serves as a model for historians, such as myself, who appreciate doing fine-grained analysis of “serious” medieval sources but who are also, as it turns out, irrepressible film nerds. This is a collection of essays, part of Routledge’s prestigious Variorum series, which bundles together scholarship published previously in other edited books or academic journals into a type of monograph that sums up the thematic concerns of an entire scholar’s career. The book is divided into three parts, each containing between three and five essays, which consider the workings of medieval women’s lives as spiritual authorities, nuns, virgins, queens, and fictional characters, whether in hagiography or in contemporary media.
The first part, “Missionaries, Monasteries, Martyrs, Medieval Studies: Reading Gender through Historiographical Critique,” has standout essays, particularly the one newly translated by Lifshitz herself, “Women Missionaries: The Example of Frankish Gaul,” originally published in French in 1988 in the Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique. This essay, which is also suitable for an undergraduate class on medieval women and gender, is a highly accessible examination of how to read deeply into historical sources, past the skepticism of male clerical authors and the modern historians who have been all too ready to believe in their doubts. It uncovers the activities of women missionaries in early medieval Gaul. Lifshitz untangles a complex web of myth, topoi, and biblical references in hagiographical and historical accounts of female saints to expand on how we typologize early medieval missionary activity. We find here not only the near-solitary figure of the monachus leaving his cloister to face a wilderness of unknown dangers, but also women who exercised their considerable influence on unconverted populations in ways that were not merely ancillary to the larger work being done by their male counterparts. Examples abound: St. Benedicta and her virgins who traveled to Gaul on their apostolic mission, a story that Lifshitz argues we should take seriously despite Benedicta’s hagiographer doubting the veracity of the event; the elite women who provided crucial resources for the survival of other missionaries, work that was typically downgraded because it was feminized, even though such “hostesses” were critical to the success of evangelizing work in this period; and queens like Clothild and others who brought about the conversion of entire courts and battled against the creeping scourge of pagan practice.
These are compelling examples, which go some way toward answering a provocative question, originally posed by Joan Kelly, that demonstrates how core feminist concerns inform Lifshitz’s scholarship: did times of crisis or instability for men allow women slivers of opportunities for leadership positions and the ability to exercise more agency? Lifshitz finds that this early period of missionary activity could favor men as well as women, and one group’s prosperity in this realm did not have to come at the expense of the other.
The second part, “Manuscripts, Methods, Medieval Studies: Reading Gender through Manuscript Evidence,” consists of five essays, the last of which, “Apocryphal Acts and Legends of the Apostles as ‘Feminist’ Narratives,” was originally published in German in 2014 and appears for the first time here in an English translation provided by the author. As the title suggests, Lifshitz brings to bear her talent for examining a wide selection of medieval manuscripts, mainly with material dating to the Carolingian era (there is, I should note, a substantial list of manuscripts from archives in France, Belgium, England, Austria, Germany, and the Vatican in the back matter). The analysis in this part consists of reading gender through liturgical, hagiographical, homiletic, and martyrological manuscripts, as well as exemplaria, litanies, and passionaries, as part of Lifshitz’s broader feminist project to lay bare the boundaries of women’s roles in religious practice and the extent of their spiritual leadership.
The last part, “Modern Movies, Novels, and Plays: Reading Gender through Medievalism,” consists of three essays examining vengeful women in the fantasy pictures Die Nibelungen (1924) and Excalibur (1981), the ambivalent positioning of women in Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code (2003), and race, ethnicity, and gender as depicted in the classic film Becket (1964), based on Jean Anouilh’s play of the same name. The latter essay was especially formative in my thinking when I taught the film in an undergraduate class some time ago; it is the type of scholarship that demonstrates the insights that historians can bring to the subfield of cinematic medievalism, as a piece that is particularly perceptive about the historical and historiographical context that informs the narrative of a popular film like Becket.
Lifshitz’s career is nicely encapsulated in the book’s title: “Reading Gender.” Reading gender, whether in sources from the Carolingian era or through the visuals of twentieth-century medievalist film, taps into similar impulses that dictate how we read, or understand, what is not always apparent--how we wrest the gendered subtext from a work, bring it to the surface, and complicate its authorial intent. This book allows Lifshitz’s impressive body of work to be better appreciated by not only those of us who populate the worlds of cinematic medievalism and women’s and gender studies, but also by scholars who work in Medieval Studies, grounded as it is in the principles of interdisciplinarity.