Download PDF | Thelma S. Fenster, Clare A. Lees (eds.) - Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance- (2002).
294 Pages
INTRODUCTION
Toril Moi's What Is a Woman?, which makes a strong case for liberating the word "woman" from its "binary straitjacket" of essentialism on the one hand and social constructivism on the other, marks an important stage in modern theoretical debates about women. Those who argued for the constructivist view had often interpreted Simone de Beauvoir's thinking in The Second Sex as providing crucial support, but Moi brings a welcome qualification to that idea, stating that for Beauvoir the "body both is a situation and is placed within other situations."2 Moi points out that "most feminist theories today rely on a universalized and reified concept of'femininity,"' whereas Beauvoir herself had written: "Surely woman is, like man, a human being, but such a declaration is abstract.
The fact is that every concrete human being is always in a specific situation."3 The essays collected in Gender in Debate explore the particular, that is, the local (both temporal and geographic) inflections of a larger human preoccupation with self-definition in terms of gender and, even more pertinently, with the uses to which that can be put. Medieval and early modern debates about women were conducted overwhelmingly by men (always excepting Christine de Pizan, of course, to whom we will return shortly, and a number of humanist-trained women in Italy who wrote in Latin during the Trecento and Quattrocento4), with all that may imply reflexively, if silently, about their authors' notions of self. Modern theoretical debates, conducted largely by feminist women scholars, necessarily stand in a different relation to medieval ones. It goes without saying, however, that medieval debate literature is a historic part of the ways in which "woman" is put into question in the West; that narrative, however much it may be bound up with the history of misogyny, has significance for modern debates.
It is a history rich with continuity-for example, debates over woman's "sameness" or "difference" with respect to men, which is discussed even toda/-as well as discontinuity, by apparent progress as well as by regression. After all, What Is a Woman? was published during an extensive (and ongoing) period of sociopolitical backlash against feminism. Our collaborators on Gender in Debate locate other resemblances between medieval and modern debates about women. In varying ways, both stated and implied, the articles engage with modern feminist thought, converting the recovery of a past debate-important in its own right-into a present dialogue about women. As Moi emphasizes, Beau voir recognized how the question of woman always raises a further question, that of "the relation between the particular and the general." This collection, therefore, which emphasizes the historical and theoretical particularities of literature about women, also points toward Beauvoir's statement, toward understanding it in ways that make sense in both medieval and modern contexts.
Not Just Christine If Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex can be said to initiate modern feminist intellectual philosophy (as Moi argues), then the moral genre of the querelle des femmes, or debate about women, is often said to have begun in France in the early fifteenth century with Christine de Pizan's participation in the querelle de laRose [debate of the Rose, 1401-04] or perhaps with her slightly earlier Epistre au dieu d'Amours [Letter of the God of Love, 1399], a courtly, narrative poem in which Cupid "excommunicates" men who vilify or trick women. Perhaps because the Rose debate was conducted by real people who exchanged letters written in prose and not in courtly verse, and perhaps because Christine was a woman, the debate about gender that it transmits is frequently interpreted as a foundational event without precedent in French or in other medieval cultures. 6 Conjointly, Christine has been praised for the content and shape of the defense arguments she deploys, particularly in the Epistre, then later in such works as the Cite des dames [City of Ladies]. In these ways, Christine's particular work is made to stand in for the more general and diffuse cultural debate.
In the past few years, however, new research, and in particular Alcuin Blamires's The Case for Women in Medieval Culture, has contributed to undermining that view by showing that a body of material in Latin and in French preceded Christine. Unquestionably, Christine took the debate into new territory; at the very least, her intervention as a historically situated, actual woman with a palpable commitment to articulating a defense in ways relevant to her and to her public anchors the discussion in the "real" world in a way that had not been done before. Nonetheless, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that Christine de Pizan did not begin the debate, nor is she in herself representative of the breadth and depth of it. Julian Weiss's bibliography of debate literature in medieval Spain in this volume, even if it had to stand alone as _demonstration, would indicate how misleading the emphasis on Christine-and on France (or concomitantly, England)-can be from the perspective of medieval studies. For all these reasons, we include no single article on Christine alone, although, as is appropriate in a collection that explores the relationship between the general and the particular, her work is present in word or in spirit throughout.
Shaping a Debate7 Alcuin Blamires's The Case for Women in Medieval Culture, to which anumber of essays here refer, reconstructs in outline the juridically fashioned and theological-sounding defense or 'case' for women in Christian tradition, whose formal features appear in one combination or another in much debate literature. Blamires defines these formal features as follows: The formal case has a quasi-judicial flavour and expressly sets out to promote women's cause and to exonerate them from slander. Its typical features are these: it questions the motives and morality of misogynists, who seem to forget that women brought them to life and that life without women would be difficult; it denounces antagonistic generalization; it asserts that God showed signs of special favour to women at creation and subsequently; it revises the culpability of Eve; it witnesses women's powerful interventions throughout history (from the Virgin Mary and scriptural heroines to Amazons and modern notables); and it argues that women's moral capacities expose the relative tawdriness of men's. 8 To this we add the observation that such debate, centered on Adam and Eve in the Genesis story, reflects rather a medieval Christian view. That is, Jewish commentary on Genesis "focuses on different moments, explores different options, and asks different questions."9 In Christian tradition the issue of Eve's purported pride and desire to equal God was much debated, from Augustine to Aquinas and beyond. By contrast, according to one modern understanding of Genesis commentary in the Midrash, it is the snake, not Eve, who appears to be prideful, for in his arrogance he hopes to remove Adam and seduce Eve. 10
A good example of a formal debate from the French corpus-that is, paired pieces pro and con-can be found in the short narrative poems called the Bien des fames [Virtues ofWomen) and the Blasme des fames [Vices ofWomen], which have been arranged to resemble a debate by their placement together in three extant manuscripts (London, British Library, Harley 4333; Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, fonds fran~ais 837; Rouen, Bibliotheque Municipale 671 [ancien A. 454]). The Bien, just under one hundred lines, leans toward a courtly platform (lauding women for inspiring men to great martial deeds, as well as to dancing and to writing songs celebrating women), but also toward a biblically derived idea of sweetness and kindness in women, as well as toward women's motherhood of men; it claims that Christ raised the Virgin Mary above the angels (see further below, the "privileges" of women). The Blasme, a little more than one hundred lines and arguably more vigorous than the Bien, takes the opposite tack:
The snake re-formed woman in its image; women cause strife and make men take up swords; woman is sweet on the outside, evil on the inside; she tricks and takes advantage of men; she's weak-minded, irrational, and given to anger. Read in conjunction, these texts exemplify the binary modes into which literature about women in this period is often distributed: Arguments for and against turn on different sides of the same binary coin. It is striking, however, that a defense of woman alone can put the more general conversations about women circulating in the Middle Ages into the particular shape of a debate, and not only because of the chronological precedence of accusatory literature. As Pamela Benson in her essay here suggests, a defense, even when it did not explicitly rehearse the arguments against women before refuting them, necessarily implied its opposite, for making full sense of a defense required knowledge of the accusatory corpus-and, as woman's imperfections constituted a medieval cultural given, such knowledge could be safely assumed. Authors for the defense, therefore, could not have avoided tacitly reminding audiences of the arguments against women. Seen from the perspective of an emerging cultural space for exploring the question of woman, such arguments, whether defamatory or defensive, were remarkably fluid and adaptable, lending themselves to a range of courtly, learned or semi-learned, didactic, and moralizing discourses (not always themselves neatly cordoned off from one another, of course).
The dynamic variation of their manuscript contexts confirms the adaptability of this material, as the contents of the three extant manuscripts containing the Bien des fames and the Blasme des fames make plain. In the London manuscript, said to have been compiled in the late thirteenth century, the dit is in the company of a number of short works on mixed subjects: fabliaux, short stories, a religious play (Miracle de Theophile), poetry by Rutebeuf, and of course the anti-woman Blasme des fames. In the Paris manuscript, however, dated from the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, the Bien des James appears in learned company, that is, with a large number of theological works in Latin as well as with some works in Old French, including two sermons, and again, the Blasme des James; in the opinion of one of its modern editors, the Bien and the Blasme are "no doubt included to provide additional material for sermons." 11
The Rouen manuscript, executed in the second half of the thirteenth century, records vernacular works with a didactic thrust, such as Marie de France's Fables-as well, of course, as the Evangile des James, an anti-woman text. Equally interesting is the manuscript configuration of Robert de Blois's L'Honneur des dames, a one-hundred and fifty line poem that, in one manuscript, occurs near the beginning of a "Miroir" poem written to advise the nobleman on right acting; in another, it acts as prologue to the same work, but in two other manuscripts it accompanies a poem concerned with women's behavior, called the Chastoiement des dames. 12 Scrutiny of manuscript contents, and especially of the way they place or arrange those contents, can be richly revealing in other crucial ways, as Ann Marie Rasmussen here demonstrates for German material.
New Words As we have already indicated, we want to avoid having Christine de Pizan's writing speak for other work about women in modern critical thinking on the debate. Nonetheless, without appearing to backslide, the French corpus can sometimes be used, with judicious selection and a critical eye, as a tool with which to explore other debate literature. Many essays in this volume, for example, take a large and somewhat uniform corpus like the French one13 as their starting point, frequently to show how discourses of gender differed elsewhere. Yet even a cursory look at the history of this material usefully illustrates how its principal themes find their parallels, necessarily modified, in other medieval cultures. We can argue for a panEuropean genre of debate literature, therefore, so long as we pay attention to its particular instances, and to the critical tensions that are generated by moving from particular to general, and vice versa.
We begin with the French defense texts that started to appear in profusion in the thirteenth century and were preceded in the twelfth by Latin passages flattering to women, such as those found in writing by Peter Abelard and Marbod of Rennes (who, working in the tradition of the binary mode, also wrote a text against women). Because they were composed in Latin, however, these works belonged to an "international" clerical culture more than they did to any proto-national culture. 14 But at the same time, the increasing status of the French vernacular beginning in the twelfth century and the taking up of gender issues in courtly compositions created a wider audience for formal debates. In the thirteenth century, French became established as a language of learning, elbowing out Latin for some things. Jean de Meun's scholastically informed Roman de Ia Rose, widely regarded in the French Middle Ages as soubtil, or "learned," is probably the best-known example, especially apt in the context of this volume. Even speakers of other European languages chose to write learned works in French, such as the Italian author Brunetto Latini, who wrote his Livre dou Tresor15 in French; presumably, its encyclopedic thrust would otherwise have dictated composition in Latin. Differences between secular and learned, Latin and vernacular modes of debating, defending, or asserting knowledge about women are crucial to understanding the nature of debate literature in other cultures too, as the essays by Blamires (for Middle English), Rasmussen (for German), and Weiss (for Spanish) illustrate. Latin material also points to the ways in which different institutional modes shape and transmit material that comprises the conventional content of much debate literature. Abelard, for example, used (but did not invent) a set of defense arguments that, in modern criticism, have come to be known as the privileges. 16
In formal defenses they became pervasive. For the purposes of this brief discussion, we shall let them represent the larger "defense of women." These advantages, honors, or favors, as they may also be seen, focused on the Creation story in the Book of Genesis, just as women's detractors did, and they tapped features of the Creation narrative that could be fashioned into points flattering to women. The two most popular arguments for women's superiority were that God had made Eve out of bone, whereas Adam was composed of mud, and that Eve had been created in Paradise, whereas Adam had not. Two others argue that Christ was born of woman and chose to reveal himself first to a woman after the Resurrection.
Yet another, not in Abelard's corpus, holds woman to be God's triumph, for she was created lastY (It was left to the twentieth century to rephrase that idea to fit on bumper stickers and T-shirts: e.g., "When God made man, he was only practicing.") This set of refutations, give or take one or two, resembles somewhat the concept of 'redoctrination' that Blamires in this volume imputes to work by Chaucer and Marie de France: that is, the deriving of "profeminine hypotheses (of a sort) from various misogynistic notions of feminine deficiency." Whereas redoctrination stands negative beliefs on their heads, however, the privileges rely upon finding aspects of the Creation narrative that had not been tapped previously to enhance woman's image. The privileges made the rounds, cropping up again in Latin but also in Italian vernacular literature, in Middle English, in Catalan, and no doubt elsewhere.
The privileges were not a medieval discovery. They were instead a form of traditional knowledge about women formulated by the church fathers and institutionalized by clerical culture. The argument-from-place, to take one example, can be found in the De paradiso by Ambrose, bishop of Milan and Augustine's contemporary, but Ambrose did not construe it to suggest woman's goodness. 18 In fact, he seems to have thought of it as a conundrum: Why did God create Eve in Paradise and Adam outside it, given that Adam was the superior being? Ambrose concluded that the dignity of place meant little compared with inherent virtue: Adam, created in an inferior place, was better than Eve, who had let herself be seduced by the snake. 19 Ambrose's thinking was, along with Augustine's, often cited in the Middle Ages. Just the same, about nine hundred years later the Dominican preacher Humbert of Romans presented the argument-from-place in a different light.
As a Dominican committed to the importance of preaching, Humbert compiled a collection of ad status model sermons in Latin to be drawn upon by other preachers, who would then deliver them in the vernacular. One of these, designated "For Women in General," begins by stating that "the Lord has given woman many advantages ... even over men."20 He then lists the privileges21 and concludes: "All of this ought to encourage women to love the God who gave them all this, and to pursue for love of him all that is good in a woman; it should also deter them from all that is evil."22 Women who would follow Humbert's advice were required to be devoted to God as well as modest in dress, restrained in speech, kind toward the poor, and industrious; and they should not go gadding about or tell fortunes. Humbert's recording of the privileges in his sermon has prompted his modern biographer to comment upon the "more constructive approach" of the sermons, for Humbert's other writings and his activities as fifth master general of the Friars-Preachers, which involved him in the cura mulierem dispute, show that he shared with his contemporary male religious a view of women as "a species which members of religious orders would do well to avoid completely."23
In other words, the privileges never seemed to suggest to Humbert that the Church should revise its thinking about relative gender status or about gender roles, nor is there reason to suppose that Humbert's own religious view of women departed in any important way from Ambrose's. Humbert's particular stand conforms to a point made here more generally by E. Ann Matter, who states that in the medieval church itself there was no "properly theological" debate about women and their status as created beings. Matter's essay amply exposes the ideological contradictions upon which much clerical thinking about women rested, whereby aspects of female behavior (their spirituality, for example) were overvalued in a system that formally undervalued women. It is striking that secular imaginative literature, not religious treatises, surfaced to point a way beyond that impasse, a point amply demonstrated in the essays by Helen Solterer and Alcuin Blamires, which we shall come to below. Humbert's sermon gives us a glimpse at how the church in France contributed indirectly to the growth of debate literature in this culture by encouraging the use of French, not Latin, for the dissemination of biblical knowledge (of course, that also made the Church responsible for a twotiered system of exclusive theology in Latin on the one hand, and its vulgarization on the other). Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt have referred to the "parole nouvelle" of the thirteenth century, meaning in part the use of the oral vernacular in preaching, and with it the elaboration of advice to preachers on effective language for reaching their audiences. 24
Consequently, as orders like the Dominicans took the title of "preaching brothers," the word of God as interpreted into the vernacular was heard beyond church walls, in open spaces such as the grande place of the city.25 Even earlier, however, the monastic reforms effected in Anglo-Saxon England in the late tenth century had aimed at a similar dispersal beyond the monastery of clerical knowledge in the vernacular. Humbert's sermon does accord to women a small measure of official approval in the rhetoric of later preaching absent from the earlier evidence, however. Rarely indeed does the early medieval church address women as a collective group, as Humbert urges preachers to do. In fact, Lees and Overing here query, on the basis of Anglo-Saxon material, whether early medieval clerics had even formulated "woman" as a general category: 26 Yet, as we know, Humbert's concessions (like similar concessions evident in defense literature) had little or no impact on social structure, either secular or religious. Matter reminds us that the question of women's status stood as Augustine's reading of Genesis had left it: Even though men and women were theoretically equal in their humanity, the order of creation also allowed for men's superiority and women's subordination. Men's superiority and women's subordination thus remained naturalized. What we might call a "real" or material exchange on the issues, that is, one with social, political, or economic consequences, was never contemplated. In granting women a measure of goodness, therefore, Humbert promised women something that could be activated only within the framework of Christian teaching, and only for as long as women remained obedient to it. Humbert's sermon reminds us that what woman "is"-how she is viewed and what gender work she performs--depends heavily on the nature of the institution that frames her.
In the cases both of the early medieval clerical literature and of Humbert ofRomans we see how the church worked to maintain, and thus contain, a very particular (that is to say, partial) form of knowledge about women as a general tradition. Woman, Knowledge, Power If the defenses (whether or not formally staged as debates) were to have no direct, material effect on women's status, for what reason were they written? Principally-and arguably even in the case of Christine de Pizandebates encouraged good conduct on women's part and exhorted men to treat women better, but they never advocated a political upheaval in the established social order. Perhaps, when we consider aspects of debate literature in the way that Lees and Overing do-its deliberate deferral of closure, for no winner is announced; its control of the moral sphere and moralized knowledge; concomitantly, its foregrounded display of learning (in the sense of book learning) as a means of maintaining both class and superiority-it becomes clear that men, those theologians, preachers, and secular poets and writers who talked or wrote about women, could in this way reaffirm their claim to knowledge of women, and therefore their intellectual supremacy, while conceding the moral need to respect women.
The contradictory nature of knowledge about women (when deployed in the intellectual or moral spheres, for example) made it all the more important to control. Supremacy therefore lay in circumscribing knowledge, sharing it with an elite caste of other men and apportioning it out to women (and to men in general). No doubt there is some general truth in this, but at the same time some essays here also suggest that thinking about the category of'woman' is also a means of thinking about other categories with which that of woman is imbricated, such as sexuality, ethnicity, belief, and governance. Barbara Weissberger, by recovering the historical particularities of Isabel the Catholic's reign that the generalities of debate literature serve, highlights some of the ideological functions both of queenship and of woman in late medieval Spain. Rasmussen, by contrast, demonstrates how thinking about gender as a category can help elucidate the particularities of medieval manuscript compilation and variation. Then again, Helen Solterer's article on freedom suggests the power of imagining a different status for women. Weiss berger's essay on the literature of the reign of Isabel the Catholic strikingly lays bare the ideological uses to which knowledge about women can be put by both women and men. Isabel, according to Weissberger, fosters a contradictory sense of herself and of her queenship that performs useful and, it must be said, conservative political work for her. Analysis of Spanish debate literature, when contrasted with Christine de Pizan's defense of women in France, for example, also underlines its broad national, proto-national, and geopolitical uses. In another register, comparison of Christine with Humbert of Romans helps us to understand more clearly the general context of Christine's interventions. In fact, Christine would probably have found nothing to disagree with in Humbert's sermon on women. The very same arguments advanced by Humbert, or their spirit, can also be found in her writing, and more than once. In this instance, then, what is the difference between his sermon and Christine's own ethic? If at least one of the points about this literature was to display knowledge and hence affirm it, then Christine, having demonstrably mastered "men's" knowledge, could now herself display what she knew, and she was in a position to dispense moral knowledge generally as it affected both men and women,27 which she did, in work after work. In spite of great distance over time, comparisons between Christine and Simone de Beauvoir seem inevitable, as we have already implied. Moi, probably Beauvoir's most sustained modern supporter, borrows a concept from Stanley Cavell to talk about the philosopher's arrogation of voice: that is, as Moi defines it, "to claim for oneself the right to appeal to the judgment of others." Cavell's formulation deliberately conflates arrogation, or the presumption of undue claim, with arrogance.
Moi therefore writes about Beauvoir that: "[t]he arrogance in her claim lies in the fact that she dares to speak at all, that she arrogates to herself the right to speak."28 Christine de Pizan was not a philosopher but a moralist, and like medieval moralists she was not so much appealing to others' judgment as she was to their sense of rightness, which all Christians could be presumed to share. Nonetheless, like Beauvoir, Christine markedly "arrogated" to herself the right to speak. The question of voice, of the claim to speak for women, is central to critical analysis of the debate literature. Beyond this, however, and taking the long view, the issue is not simply that a woman arrogates the right to speak (as does Christine), but how many centuries have to pass, how many ideological formations have to change, before the category of woman can be explored without its traditional accompanying structure of defense. Nevertheless, some changes in debate literature are discernible within the medieval period itself. In Anglo-Saxon England as in later medieval Germany, for example, conversations about women and gender did not take the shape of defense or debate. But even in France, as Roberta Krueger argues here, looking only at formal debate literature limits the available cultural evidence: Courtly genres, for example, make ample use of the woman question. Indeed, with the elaboration of courtly literature in Old French, theological discourse was borrowed into the secular realm, perhaps not too surprisingly, given its ready adaptability to the sort of rumination about gender that courtly literature was already engaged in.
The development of certain romances, with their persistent foregrounding of issues on gender-what Krueger describes as an invitation to readers "to ponder the nature of sexual identity and to reflect on gender as cultural production"-acted sometimes as antecedent, logical corollary, and com panion to the explosion of French debate texts. The didacticism alone of some courtly works, particularly of rich and sophisticated narratives such as those of Chretien de Troyes, could make the romance (for one) closer in spirit to debate texts than they might otherwise seem; but Chretien's deep concentration upon the requirements for aristocratic manliness makes absolutely clear his concern for male and female gendering. Weiss takes our earlier point about the enmeshing of the category of woman with other ideologies a couple of stages further when he argues, using Castilian evidence, that this convergence not only made it impossible to isolate 'woman' as a category, but was also a remarkably effective hegemonic effect of misogyny: Indeed, when we peruse the relevant texts from fifteenth-century Castile, we soon see that although the debate over gender is most explicitly a debate over "woman," it is never exclusively so. Occurring in a variety of discursive situations (within the court; within the medical and academic professions; in sermons, and so forth), the praise and blame of woman is often a way of rationalizing or naturalizing hierarchies within a particular "field." ...
The debate over woman certainly does enact patriarchal ideologies of gender, and no feminist will underestimate its debilitating effects upon the lives of real women. But the debate is also inextricably intertwined with a range of other ideologies that structure social castes and classes, notions of race, morality or medicine, or such practices as courtliness and the literary ... It is this complex interweaving of ideologies that makes misogyny so powerful and pervasive, such a towering, yet also such an elusive target: like the Woman it despises, "Ia misoginia e movile." Weiss's observations are borne out by other essays in this collection. Defining women is often a means of defining men, of a certain standing. Pamela Benson's study of the 'cases' for women in the literature ofTrecento Florence and Margaret Franklin's art historical discussion of two portrait panels, studies that complement each other, offer parallels with the Castilian evidence. Benson explicitly links changing definitions of woman with the passage from a feudal to a republican ethic. She shows that vernacular texts in the earlier part of the century, whose courtliness was associated with a feudal aristocracy in which women could and did inherit, better tolerated a view of woman as not necessarily man's inferior. The mercantile values that dominated Florence later in the Trecento, however, offered women no opportunities for public action and therefore squelched whatever potential for reform may have existed in the earlier defenses. (That potential was in fact taken up by Petrarch and Boccaccio, according to Benson; we might add that Christine de Pizan's Book if the City if Ladies, which now tends to eclipse Boccaccio's catalogue of women in modern feminist thinking, might arguably have not been written without Boccaccio's Concerning Famous Women; in spite of Boccaccio's ambivalence about women, disinterested historical investigation would concentrate upon outlining what was rather a European phenomenon exhibiting both continuities and disruptions and, above all, multiform expression.) Franklin takes the discussion into the Quattrocento to demonstrate that republican and aristocratic values clashed in visual portrayals as well, in this instance portrait panels of mythographic women. When Franklin contrasts these portraits with those of mythographic men, we see how important gender is 111 the articulation of political values.
Men on Women The preceding considerations can be supplemented by reflection upon events related more specifically to male gendering. Feminist historian Jo Ann McNamara has argued that a restructuring of gender relations occurred in the century between 1050 and 1150. That is, new professions created by the Church, as well as by the growth of towns and of secular government, required "new identities that had to be gendered as well as classed." 29 These changes undermined any easy definition of masculinity, such as exploitation of the "most obvious attributes of manhood" (e.g., being a warrior) granted. What could these new men do to continue defining themselves above all as "not women"? As McNamara asks, "If a person does not act like a man, is he a man?" And in the case of the clergy, how could men who repudiated relations with women still be men? Further, for men to be men, women themselves had to remain gendered as women, or else "the whole male effort would collapse."30 McNamara's argument offers interesting food for thought. On the one hand, it is clear that the category of 'man' is qualified by class or status, as is that of 'woman'; on the other hand, that there is no genre of literature about men as highly developed as that for women makes clear the imbalance between these two categories. By naturalizing these powerful ideological asymmetries, by making it seem perfectly ordinary to discuss only the woman question, debate literature often serves misogynist interests. An understanding of the asymmetries between the categories of man and woman also qualifies the ways in which we think about voice.
What happens, for instance, when a male voice arrogates the right to speak about women? Could a secular, perhaps courtly, male author have written an enlightened and benign defense of women without seeming to eradicate the boundaries between himself and woman, thus not only compromising his own masculinity but also the hegemony it and his status gave him? A preacher like Humbert could peg his defense to a higher authority like the Bible, arrogating the voice of the church, and therefore presumably leave his own personal masculinity unquestioned. But what of the individual courtly poet taking up the defense of women: Would he risk being thought too much like a woman himself, thus effeminate, or not fully heterosexual, or would such risks be effectively naturalized by the "arrogance" of his class and learning? What is clear is that the debate acted as an effective means of accumulating cultural capital, as Weiss observes. Karen Pratt's essay here illustrates what can happen when a male authors a courtly work in defense of women. In some instances, medieval authors have given an authoritative voice in defense of women to a female character, and sometimes the device seems genuine-but not in the hands of Jean LeFevre in his long work in defense of women called the Livre de Leesce, which Pratt concludes is best understood as a form of"play." From the beginning, the Leesce shows its courtly, masculine point of view by praising women's physical beauty and implicit sexual desirability (it seems banal to say so, but by comparison, no such portrait of women can be found in Christine de Pizan's work). According to Pratt, LeFevre deploys a number of strategies to undermine his defense; chief among these is what he does to reduce Leesce's effectiveness as an advocate for women.
On the other hand, we may also want to ask what, if any, cultural work is achieved by using a playful stance? Does it, at the very least, "indicate the impossibility of discussing in serious terms the proposition of women's equality," as Ian Maclean proposed some time ago31 (a point also dealt with, though differently, by Benson in her book)?32 Indirectly, Pratt's essay raises another issue, discussed here by Helen Solterer: the resonance of courtly texts in the "real" world. In her analysis of Franchise in Alain Chartier's Belle Dame sans merci, Solterer argues for the "promise of fiction," that is, its power to change "the ways of evaluating people symbolically." Chartier's poem provides an imaginary space where women could contest the principle of freedom, for before freedom could happen, it had to be truly envisaged. Solterer's original take on the nature of fiction here breaks through a dead end, an impasse, in the study of debate literature, for it intersects with a vision of what debate literaturespecifically Chartier's-could effect extratextually. We might push her particular argument in a more general direction: Despite all the caveats we feminist medievalists may issue about masculinity, class, and misogyny, and in spite of what we believe authors may have intended, the literature on gender breaks off from its creators and breathes on its own. It exists as a cultural space wherein the woman question can be imagined, handled, articulated, and tested; this in turn recalls Emile Durkheim's observation about the ''imaginary" he envisaged, a place where the mind was offered no "resistance."33 It is this creation of a cultural space, however it is used, that perhaps makes medieval gender debates the antecedents of their modern counterparts.
Since the articles in this volume show how multivalent are the uses to which the woman question was put in the medieval and early modern periods, we cannot draw from this collection any single or overarching conclusion: In this way, modern critical analysis seems to mimic the open-ended nature of the debates themselves. The essays collected here explore the idea of gender debate in roughly three ways, however: First, some articles (such as those by Benson, Franklin, Weiss, and Weissberger) tell us how elements of the debate in its formal contour spread beyond the French and Middle English cultures, the ones generally assumed to be the central if not the exclusive witnesses; second, some articles abandon the category of form as it has been given in order to discern a "debate" being conducted in other ways (such as those by Krueger, Lees and Overing, Rasmussen, and Franklin); third, some articles also address or challenge the ways in which modern criticism has approached the categories of debate (for example, Blamires and Matter).
In this third category, the analysis of debate literature can be a critical tool for exploring, and hence beginning to change, the traditional dominance of certain fields and certain genres within medieval studies, as Rasmussen points out. It would thus appear that some essays travel a long way from the study of the woman question. To the contrary, however, Rasmussen's essay, like the collection as a whole, confirms the structure of the category of woman as comprising in itself both the particular and the general. This structure can be seen as both problem and potential: Woman in debate literature can be the object of the most virulent misogyny, but she can also be the way, however tentative, of imagining a new order of things, a new relation berween the particular and the general.
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