The Representation of Women's Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Modern Language Review, The, April, 2007 by Andrew Breeze

The Representation of Women's Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Ed. by LISA PERFETTI. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2005. vii 222 pp. $65. ISBN 978-0-8130-2829-3.

Lisa Perfetti deserves congratulation. She has discovered a new subject, an aspect of early literature most of us have never thought about. She thus spurs enquiry, not least in her comments (p. 2) that 'few texts of the medieval period are known to have been authored by women, and so in many cases we are looking at emotions described by men', and that one may thus ask if female authors were 'more likely to resist stereotypical discourse on women's emotions in their own writing'. We shall return to this.

Her book has an introduction by herself and essays by seven collaborators. E. Ann Matter discusses the spiritual ecstasies of female religious, which learned clerks (p. 28) tried to restrain. James Paxson sets out the construction of female feelings in Hildegard of Bingen, especially as regards literary devils and personification, which latter (p. 45) 'dissipates ontological solidity and disrupts epistemological stability' (in de Manian theory). Elena Carrera analyses emotion and the spirit in Mechthild of Magdeburg, Angela of Foligno, and St Teresa of Avila, the last becoming something of a feminist icon, who (p. 84) confounded her male detractors. In an account of anthropological value, Katharine Goodland examines English miracle plays on Lazarus for their depiction of women's grief. Wendy Pfeffer considers women's emotions in Old French lyrics, especially in anonymous ones that she feels sure (p. 120) are by unknown women trouveres. Kristi Gourlay describes Floripas, the pugnacious Muslim heroine of Fierabras. Sarah Westphal details a bizarre (though fictional) voyeurist incident in Sachsenspiegel, set in the legal context of the USA and medieval Germany. Valerie Allen discusses shame and the female body (with clerical attitudes to it) in Ancrene Wisse and other Middle English writing.

The editor chose her contributors well. With texts from many countries, they provide a varied and comprehensive survey. They also offer a range of ideas on gender, physiology, psychology, shame, guilt, spirituality, demonology, literary theory, and social order and power. On this they variously cite the work of Aristotle, Galen, Augustine, Aquinas, Savonarola, Ignatius Loyola, Rabelais, Freud, Bakhtin, Barthes, Derrida, Paul de Man, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, and Helene Cixous.

Their subject prompts enquiry for other literatures. In the Celtic languages, for example, Ceri Lloyd-Morgan and Dafydd Johnston have written on Gwerful Mechain (1462?-1500). Her poems, once ignored but now in the foreground (and including a declaration of female sexuality unique in early Welsh), contrast with much in Lisa Perfetti's book. One wonders why. Also in Welsh, the twelfth-century Four Branches of the Mabinogi (showing signs of female authorship) describe women's emotions with restraint, despite incidents of (supposed) child murder and (genuine) male violence, rape, and adultery. The women of the Mabinogi appear as individuals, whether as a chaste wife, a cool-headed and resourceful bride-to-be, a perjurer and her accomplices, a foster-mother, a scorned queen, a rape victim, a child-abuser, or a married woman falling in love with another man. Presented without sensationalism, they still have rare power and conviction; possibly because their creator was a woman. Hence, perhaps, the avoidance of that 'stereotypical discourse on women's emotions' referred to by Lisa Perfetti.

In short, The Representation of Women's Emotions supplies a wealth of profitable data. It will be fundamental for the study of writing about and by women in the period 1200 to 1600.

ANDREW BREEZE

UNIVERSITY OF NAVARRE, PAMPLONA