Framing Medieval Bodies by Sarah Rubin; Miri Rubin; Kay RubinReview by: Catherine PeyrouxSocial History, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Oct., 1997), pp. 339-341Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4286445 .

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Reviews

Kay, Sarah and Miri Rubin (eds), Framing Medieval Bodies (I994), viii + 287 (Man- chester University Press, Manchester, ?45.00). Depending on the reader's intellectual proclivities, the heart will either sink or rise upon spying the title of this volume of interdisciplinary essays. The editors' choice of the present participle of the verb signals to the initiated that the essays collected here dwell in those realms governed by theories post-structuralist, deconstructive and psychoanalytic, where meaning is forever deferred and the tale is in the telling. This is exciting and still innovative territory for medieval- ists (and perhaps for the historians especially - literary critics have been more adventurous), who, in the gentle wording of the editors,'so often shy away from theoretical discussion' (3). Moreover, as art historian Michael Camille notes with equal tact, it is only in the last decade that medievalists have been 'freed from a tyrannous propriety that for so long obfuscated the body as a site of cultural meaning' (77).

With a few stellar exceptions, medievalists have scarcely contributed to the lively discussions about situations and interpretations of embodiment that are now reaching a rich maturity in the fields of ancient and modern social history. This is much to be regretted. The body is both a deceptively 'natural' entity, the familiar, intimate, biological site of a self's identity, and also a potent metaphor for models of political and social order that rely on claims about the body's 'natural' hierarchies to justify their authority. As such, the body is a privileged place for his- torical investigations that strive to elucidate the particular and contingent circumstances that have dynamically shaped and refracted notions about self, body and society in the past. And while all pasts may be axiomatically granted the status of being different places, for moderns the medieval past is a peculiarly distant and unfamiliar land, peopled by folk whose apprehen- sions of embodiment should have an especially efficient force in destabilizing our own assump- tions about being in the body. Here I do not mean (or do not only mean), such prize exhibits from foreign shores as oil-oozing mystics, the production of dramatic and liturgical spectacles surrounding the consecration and consumption of the flesh and bodily fluid of an edible God, and the emblematic medieval ailment that linked body and soul, leprosy - though of course these there are in abundance. Rather, our historical imaginations will thrive through exposure to the careful analysis of virtually any sort of evidence about bodiliness left by minds for whom the works of Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Judith Butler and so forth would be unintelligible, and whose translation, in turn, should logically require more than the invocation of common sense or the rote application of critical theory for illumination. The history of the body, so ripe for the politics of retelling, can only benefit from the volume's promised attention to texts, images and spatial configurations that elude and refuse an easy interpretation by the habitual protocols of the present. And surely, if anywhere, here be monsters?

If only there were more. The editors' introductory essay promises defamiliarization in plenty

(7), but in fact the visions of the past refracted through most of the contributors' lenses rarely

Social History Vol. 22 No. 3 October 1997 0307-1022 ? Routledge I997

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340 Social History VOL. 22: NO. 3

manage to surprise. Indeed, it was dismaying to find that, with the exception of Robin Kirk- patrick's stale and actively dehistoricized reading of Dante, the least successful pieces in the col- lection (by which I mean those poorest equipped to answer the question posed by the editors of whether there is 'any way in which medieval bodies are distinctively different from modern ones') are those that rely on critical theory to power the motors of their arguments' narratives. Such essays produce tantalizing but ultimately frustrating historical work. For example, the essay by Roberta Gilchrist provides a pedagogically generous introduction to post-structuralist approaches to pre-modern material culture, but renders only a set of predictable conjectures about how medieval people perceived their bodies in space: lepers were stigmatized through having their hospitals confined to marginal and undesirable land on the outskirts of towns; the bodies of medieval nuns and noble ladies were gendered by association with or confinement to spaces which emphasized chastity and purity (48-9, 57). Miri Rubin's intellectually ambitious assault on claims for the 'determinacy' of bodies affords a catalogue of theoretical assertions but an insufficient historical context to sustain them. In short succession, Rubin introduces a chron- icle narrative that mentions not one but two reputed hermaphrodites in Colmar, a tale con- cerning a malefic hysterectomy-accusation against a Jewish householder in the south of France, and the inquisitional testimony of a recently parturient Provencal peasant woman who could not believe in the eucharist. For Rubin to make her case that 'bodies were created and lived between the authoritative discourses which endorsed order and hierarchy through binary clas- sifications and schemes of practice, and experienced broad and divergent grounding in contact with other people, in connectedness and in imagination' (II5), each - or any - of these should have garnered more patient and systematic attention than was given here. Especially welcome would have been some - any - attention to the medium of the meaning that Rubin distils from these tales, that is, to the role of the texts themselves in producing meaning. Instead, the data is read too literally as the unmediated expression of human experience, although whose experi- ence is at issue is not always clear. I, for one, think that bodies are'created and live between the authoritative discourses [that] endorse order and hierarchy through binary classifications and schemes of practice', etc., but I didn't come to that conclusion through thinking about medieval Europe, and nor did Rubin. The final result of this sort of use of theory is the uncanny triumph of theoretical analysis not as a medium of critical reappraisal but rather as a mechanical device for the generation of transcendent truths; where it is unchecked and untempered here, theory's relentless capacity to make the Other into the Same comes near to vitiating the opportunity for denaturalizing the present that is cast as the book's raison d'Vtre.

In contrast, the truly successful essays in the collection appear to grow out of an author's engagement with an historically situated and textually delimited field of enquiry. Anna Sapir Abulafia's well-contextualized exegesis of a tradition of writing about bodies, particularly Jewish bodies, in Jewish-Christian polemics; Jocelyn Wogan-Browne's patient reading of early thirteenth-century advice-literature for female anchorites (that is, women who chose ascetic seclusion as a devotional programme); Mark Chinca's subtle and slightly horrifying exposition of the gruesome humour to be found in some Middle High German verse narratives; Sarah

Kay's consideration of Jean de Meun's figurations of women's bodily knowledge in the Romance of the Rose; to each of these I would return for guidance in thinking about how some medieval

people enunciated frames for experiencing embodiment. The power of these four essays to make medieval anxieties and assumptions about the body intelligible for present exploration neither derives from nor is impeded by their authors' theoretical engagements, which in fact

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October 1997 Reviews 341

range widely among the contributors: Kay, Chinca and Wogan-Browne use (at least) distinctly feminist approaches, Abulafia a work-a-day critical empiricism. Clearly, theory itself is neither the problem nor the solution in these historians' quest for a past both usable and resistant to modern systems of meaning. This volume offers an open-handed invitation to historians of the medieval past to venture further into theoretically informed self-critical praxis. It is to be hoped that this initial foray will inspire many responses, and that its publication reflects a lessening in medievalists' accustomed absence from the theoretical debates that have so animated other his- torical fields.

Catherine Peyroux Duke University

John Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (1996), xiv + 313 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, ?37.00). English social historians have long considered the I590S an age of crisis, when the pressures of fighting and financing foreign wars, combined with a catastrophic succession of poor harvests, dangerously exacerbated the structural damage already wrought by unchecked population growth. This is the decade of the grain riot and the masterless man, a time of brutal repression yet also of pathbreaking social remedy. John Guy's interesting new collection compellingly argues that Elizabeth's last years were also afflicted by a severe political, religious and cultural malaise. The aging queen's court was riven by factional and ideological competition. Aristo- crats and poets alike felt the pinch of royal parsimony. Bishops and satirists fretted about sedi- tious, eye-rolling Puritans. And malcontents and playwrights took the dangerous Tacitus as their guide to the workings of a corrupted political system. The Elizabethan sun, it seems, set on a paranoid age. As Guy argues, so marked are the differences between the years after and those before 1585 that it makes sense to speak of the two reigns of Elizabeth I.

This collection is divided into three groups of essays, each group exploring a different aspect of the fin-de-siecle malaise. In addition, Jim Sharpe provides an exceptionally lucid and useful survey of recent work on the social history of the I59OS. The first cluster of essays focuses on the nature of faction, competition and reward at court in the years following the deaths of Leicester, Hatton and Walsingham. Simon Adams adds to his influential series of revisionist explorations of court faction some interesting, if dense, reflections on the changing nature of the sixteenth-century patronage system. Natalie Mears and Paul Hammer discuss the struggle between the Cecils and the Earl of Essex, with Hammer making a powerful case for ideologi- cal difference over the conduct of the Spanish war as the major bone of contention in the mid- and late I590s. Linda Peck computes the decreasing rewards available to the aristocracy but rejects John Adamson's suggestion that renewed aristocratic interest in the history of medieval baronial offices betrayed dissident ambitions. Finally, Hiram Morgan makes an entertaining contribution to the history of Elizabethan political sleaze by reconstructing the fall of Sir John Perrot, the former Lord Deputy of Ireland who was framed for treason after falling foul of Burghley and his clients.

No unified picture of court politics emerges from these essays. What does emerge, however, is a sense that the study of court politics may have reached a moment of (healthy) concep- tual confusion, as overworked and underthought categories like 'faction' become muddied, and the nature of patronage and the force of ideological commitment are re-evaluated.

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