Saints, Scholars, and Politicians: Gender as a Tool in Medieval Studies

Church History, Sept, 2006 by Zrinka Stahuljak

Saints, Scholars, and Politicians: Gender as a Tool in Medieval Studies. Edited by Mathilde van Dijk and Renee Nip. Medieval Church Studies 15. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. viii 263 pp. 5 black-and-white illus. 60.00 [euro] cloth.

Saints, Scholars, and Politicians is a collection of essays written in honor of a Dutch medievalist, Anneke Mulder-Bakker. According to the introduction by Mathilde van Dijk, Mulder-Bakker "was the first [in Dutch academia] to realize the value of researching women and then of gender for medieval studies" (2). It is from this homage that the focus of the volume on gender, clearly stated in the subtitle, emerges. The volume's main objectives are "to show how the use of gender as an analytical tool focuses the medievalist's perception of the past and to enhance the value of gender for our understanding of the Middle Ages" (2). While it is beyond any doubt a praiseworthy and (still) necessary task to undertake "fine-tun[ing] gender as a tool, criticizing how it has been used in the past" (2) and to "assert the indispensability of gender for the construction of the past" (6), this volume suffers from a disparity of views on what "gender" stands for--the volume's title is a reflection of trying to unite what is "a series of case studies" (2).

Several essay pay only lip service to "gender," without in any way engaging with the stated purpose of fine-tun[ing] of gender as a tool, and most of the essays understand and use "gender" as a synonym for "woman." This is particularly striking since in her introduction van Dijk cites Joan W. Scott's "famous article 'Gender: A Useful Category in Historical Analysis'" (1) (as does Pauline Stafford in "The Meanings of Hair"). Indeed, the subtitle to the book--Gender as a Tool in Medieval Studies--is an explicit reference to it. But Scott's article criticized already in 1986 precisely the way "'gender' is a synonym for 'women'" (Joan W. Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," The American Historical Review 91:5 [1986]: 1056). Instead, the brunt of Scott's argument was to propose "gender [as] a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender [as] a primary way of signifying relationships of power" (Scott, 1067). For the most part this volume does not rise to the challenge of its own subtitle, and it thus becomes a somewhat standard and, to quote Scott's more recent critique of the use of gender, "predictable stud[y] of women, or ... of differences in the status, experience, and possibilities open to women and men" (Joan W. Scott. Gender and the Politics of History [New York: Columbia University Press, 1999], xii).

Rather than understanding the particularities of medieval gender, its discursivity, and its implication in the very constructions of power (so important in the Middle Ages), the volume falls back upon the assumption of a predetermined "natural" or biological division between "men" and "women," that is, the difference of the sexes as a transhistorical and universal category and not a historically variable one. Biological sex is not synonymous with gender, and to talk about, for instance, the "educational literature for the religious education of young people, regardless of their sex" (Gabriela Signori, "Johannes Hertenstain's Translation [1425] of Grimlaicus's Rule," [58]) does not answer how these texts gendered the sexes (for example, if it is "regardless of their sex," were the "two" sexes gendered as one?). "Gender as a tool" calls for an understanding of how both men and women were gendered in particular historical situations, rather than telling us only what women did/could and did not/could not do.

There is one notable exception. As a co-editor of this volume, van Dijk wrote an excellent article and arguably the best of the volume, "Henry Mande: The Making of a Male Visionary in Devotio Moderna," in which she fully deploys "gender" as a critical category in order to "challenge the way at religious practices have been labelled as either male or female by medieval scholarship" and "to show how supposedly female practices could be entirely male, depending on the context" (7). She successfully does both to the point that a reader can legitimately ask whether a visionary, whether of male or female sex, may be a gender unto itself in the Middle Ages.

When this critique of the volume's objective, "gender as a tool in medieval studies," is put aside, there are several essays remarkable for their engagement with and contention against widely accepted assumptions in medieval women's history. Notably, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne's "Women's Formal and Informal Traditions of Biblical Knowledge in Anglo-Norman England" reveals to us a whole new "francophone world of holy writings by and for women" (94-95), so that "what was once thought a barren era of declining Latinity before the growth of women's reading and writing in English" (87) is transformed into a very rich and lively landscape. Pauline Stafford's "The Meanings of Hair in the Anglo-Norman World," despite its assumption of the meaning of "true men" (169), parses out different threads of gender, race, and class through a fascinating reading of discursive deployments of "hair," and Katrinette Bodarwe's "Gender and the Archive: The Preservation of Charters in Early Medieval Communities of Religious Women" provides a thought-provoking analysis of the "'differences caused by gender in the transmission and conservation of certain types of sources--particularly different chances of survival" (111-12). As the subtitle to his article "Ignorantia est mater omnium malorum" states, Bert Roest provides a very interesting discussion of the "validation of knowledge and the office of preaching in late medieval female Franciscan communities." Kate Cooper gives an excellent overview of virginity and gender, and her analysis of the Passion of Eugenia further calls into question "the effect of the ideal virgin on historical women" (24). Finally, Geert Warnar, Gabriela Signori, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, and Renee Nip each respectively offer interesting case studies of Dutch devotional literature, Grimlaicus's Rule, twelfth-century papal schism, and Jacqueline of Bavaria.