Women and Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre, and the Limits of Epic Masculinity

Modern Language Review, The, April, 2008 by Carolyne Larrington

Women and Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre, and the Limits of Epic Masculinity. Ed. by Sara S. Poor and Jana K. Schulman. (The New Middle Ages) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2007. xii 299 pp. 45 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 978-1-4039-6602-5.

'Epic' is defined rather broadly in this new collection of essays, which ranges in scope from medieval Persia to Iceland, unsettling expectations about the roles women habitually play in epic. The women who are the focus of these studies certainly can be construed as victims or as prizes for heroic achievement, sidelined by the aggressively honour-oriented practices of epic masculinity, but the rereadings are highly productive. The texts under consideration are largely vernacular, though Hrotsvit's treatments of Otto I and the foundation of her own monastery of Gandersheim were composed in Latin. Kate Olson makes a convincing case that Hrotsvit regarded her two works as epic; they engage with foundation stories, and celebrate the immediate national past. Hrotsvit notes that it is not the place of a frail woman (fragilismulieris) to narrate stories of war: thus she redefines the genre for her own purposes. Hrotsvit is the only female author under consideration; the other essays examine women as

characters. Some of the most interesting essays are, perhaps unexpectedly, on little-known texts. This raises the problem of how much plot paraphrase is required for the analysis to make sense; different authors solve the problem in different ways. Confining plot summaries to footnotes is rather unsuccessful; Thomas Caldin's discussion of Poema de Mio Cid and Mocedades de Rodrigo becomes confusing for the non-expert reader. Dick Davis's account of women in the Persian Shahnameh integrates plot summary and discussion much more clearly and holds the reader's interest. One or two essays are heavily inflected by theoretical approaches: William Burgwinkle offers an engrossing account of Berthe in Girart de Roussillon, despite substantial summaries of Lacan, as interpreted by Zizek, and finally it is the brief deployment of Judith Butler which persuades. Lisabeth Bucholt makes use of Mary Carruthers's work on memory to structure her discussion of Eve in Junius 11; her lively argument gestures towards a longer piece which would set out the case for regarding the manuscript as a single four-chapter narrative more clearly.

The contributors are mostly assiduous in giving the original text as well as translation; the exception, oddly, is an essay by one of the editors. Jana Schulman cites only translations of the sagas of Icelanders and of the Poetic Edda, making no reference at all to the Icelandic text, though the Icelandic laws appear in unnormalized citation. Schulman's article is part of a group of essays at the end of the volume dealing with Germanic material. The case for regarding the sagas, whether fornaldarsogur (sagas of ancient times) or Islendingsogur (sagas of Icelanders), as epic, since they are prose works, only loosely dealing with the subjects typical of classical epic, remains to be made. However, this flexibility of definition permits a thoughtful close reading of two rarely discussed sagas in William Layher's essay, a rather too introductory but nevertheless useful account of feasts in the sagas of Icelanders, a structuralist comparison of Brynhildr and Kriemhilt across the Middle High German and Norse traditions, and an intriguing account of the significance of the ruler's smile in the Nibelungenlied in which the combination of close reading and awareness of recent work in the psychology of emotion pays dividends for Kathryn Starkey.

Christine Chism compares the depiction of Olympias, Alexander's mother, and the formidable queen Candace across the Middle English Alexander romances, while Sarah-Grace Heller argues that the romances of the Old French Crusade Cycle evidence the actual historical experience of the thousands of women who journeyed with the Crusaders to the Holy Land.

The introduction by Poor and Schulman largely signals the essays to follow, rather than offering a theoretical overview, but given the book's ambition and scope, it is clear that, whatever models of vernacular epic might have been elaborated, they would swiftly be dismantled by the individual contributions. The variety of literatures, texts, and approaches which this collection embraces certainly puts paid to unconsidered generalizations about women in epic. It is a welcome and imaginative treatment of a too-little investigated topic.

CAROLYNE LARRINGTON

ST JOHN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD