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Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages. Edited by CINDY L. CARLSON and ANGELA JANE WEISL. The New Middle Ages, edited by BONNIE WHEELER. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. Pp. ix + 270. $49.95 (cloth).
Widows and virgins in medieval western Europe shared the benefits and vulnerabilities of the unmarried state. Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages is a collection of eleven essays that explore these issues as they are revealed in the literature of the period. The book's three sections discuss the connections between widows and virgins, the varieties of virginity, and the constructions of widowhood.
The editors' introduction sets out the paradoxes probed in the subsequent essays. Virgins, often portrayed resisting assaults on their chastity, represent both inviolate purity and enticing temptation; they submit abjectly to God's will yet oppose male control. Chaste widows embody virtue yet coopt masculine authority. Both kinds of women attain the admiration of society and a measure of autonomy by rejecting their sexuality; in doing so, they become both "arbiters of virtue and potential sites of vice." Their bodies become "contested spaces," places where transgression threatens to occur.
The first section, "Widows and Virgins," opens with Anna Roberts's essay, "Helpful Widows, Virgins in Distress: Women's Friendship in French Romance of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries." Roberts explores romance fiction and Christine de Pizan's ballads, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century philosophical treatises on friendship, and recent historians' work on interactions among networks of women to argue that both widows and virgins-ostensibly vulnerable women lacking necessary male protection and guidance-in fact enjoyed many varieties of emotional and practical support from relations with other women, often other widows or virgins. Roberts maintains that while the romances sometimes portray women's friendships as "willingly and knowingly undermin[ing] men's sovereignty" by allowing widows and virgins to live the autonomous lives that married women could not, overall these works present an overwhelmingly positive view of friendship and solidarity among women. This characterization contradicts that advanced in philosophical treatises, which generally discount the possibility of friendship among women on the grounds that as social subordinates women cannot interact as "disinterested equals," the fundamental criterion for amicitia vera, true friendship. Roberts also demonstrates parallels between the fictional and historical accounts she examines, concluding...