Reference Publications

Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Saints' Lives and Women's Literary Culture, c.1150-1300: Virginity and its Authorizations

Medium Aevum, Spring, 2002 by Ruth Evans

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). xvi 314 pp. ISBN 0-19-811279-3. 55.00 [pounds sterling].

This impeccably scholarly and busily factual book resists easy summary or appraisal. The focus is on Anglo-Norman texts that had an especial importance for women: vernacular hagiographies. But the book also excavates a vast amount of historical material relating to laywomen and enclosed women (largely of the seigneurial class) as patrons, translators, writers, and audiences of these texts--women such as the married Lady Elena de Quenci (d. 1274), or Clemence of Barking, translator of a life of St Katherine, or the socially powerful and avid-for-learning Isabella, Countess of Arundel (d. 1279), an Anglo-Norman widow who successfully avoided remarriage and who commissioned biographies of male saints. These women are important because they create and participate in a vibrant literary culture in which models of virginity are appropriated as templates for both the texts they read and their own lived lives. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne argues for a greatly expanded notion of `virginity'. For her, the virgin martyr passion was `a, perhaps the, major Western form of representing women' (p. 3), and so the form underwrites a wide range of female social and even sexual performances. It spreads to married women and repentant harlots (Mary of Egypt, Mary Magdalene), with the implication that `lost virginity is recoverable' (p. 140), and is invoked by the non-virgin abbess-foundresses of the period as a figure for female monastic leadership.

Vigorously informed by a feminist politics, this study is a virtuoso redrawing of our map of post-Conquest English cultural history and of Anglo-Norman women's place within it. Middle English specialists have been mesmerized, perhaps, by the singular importance of Ancrene Wisse and its associated texts but, equally, Anglo-Norman scholars of the literature have not attended to this rich vein of English social and literary history. So disciplinary boundaries have made this language and its culture `largely inaudible' (p. 2). Its women too. Wogan-Browne urges us not to read their lives nor the virginity-narratives they lived by through the lens of clerical misogyny: virginity's conceptual models offer polysemous desires and identifications. Her aim is to represent thirteenth-century British nunnery culture as every bit as vital as that of the beguines in the Low Countries. Important here are manuscript anthologies and their affiliations: Campsey, Barking, and Romsey (Amesbury, too, though no manuscripts associated with women survive from the period).

But the sheer amount of data (exhaustive tables of contents of manuscripts; dense footnotes) sometimes makes it hard to follow the argument. And not every footnote earns its keep. For example, the reference to fantasy on p. 39 is not relevant to the point about reading against the grain. And the language is sometimes quirky: `chiastically inverted collocations' (p. 28); `impossibilism' (p. 137); `filicide' (p. 236). It is astonishingly typo-free (but Albina and her sisters (p. 58) are not virgins). Though this is not a theoretical book there are pointers to future interpretations: Mauss on gifts (p. 75); Freud's fort-da game (p. 127); Girard on violence, the sacred, and sacrifice (pp. 107-8). This is a book whose very breadth of reference and rich range of material are its raison d'etre, offering new facts but also new arguments and syntheses to be worked through from them.