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Joel T. Rosenthal, ed., Medieval Women and the Sources of Medieval History (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990), xvii + 384 pp., ISBN 0-8203-1226-6. $40 hardcover, $20 paperback.
Beginning with the premise, as stated in the Introduction, that most medieval authors either "wrote explicitly about women ... to denigrate them" or "wrote for other purposes [and] were apt to give them short shrift" (viii), this collection of fourteen essays reconstructs the history of European women by reanalyzing various types of medieval texts and applying such analyses to a particular geographic location and time, to a particular literary genre, or to gender relations between spouses or members of particular religious and secular communities.
This prodigious collection opens with Brigitte Bedos-Rezak's "Medieval Women in French Sigillographie Sources," an in-depth examination of seals (some illustrated) used by both secular and religious women as well as men in twelfth and thirteenth century France. Although Bedos-Rezak traces an increased use of seals by women during that time, she argues that not only the seals themselves but also their functions reveal "a medieval society conforming to patriarchal views of sexual division and social order" (2). For example, while women's seals only validated transactions of their own, men's seals were used to lend credence to community members' transactions as well as to validate their own.
In terms of women's representation in a particular literary genre, the next essay, "Exemple/: A Discussion and a Case Study," argues in Part I (Jacques Berlioz's Exempla as a Source for the History of Women) and demonstrates in Part II (Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu's Mulier and Femina: The Representation of Women in the Scala celi of Jean Gobi) that, while exempla tend to present women negatively, much can be gleaned from them about how men viewed women. The essay ends nicely with the question, "Might we not see this sort of representation of women ...as indicating, simultaneously, a fascination and a repulsion for the being who, in her procreative function, holds both the power of life and the power of death?" (60).
James A. Brundage, on the other hand, in the collection's third essay, "Sexual Equality in Medieval Canon Law," posits the notion that, with respect to desires and acts, canon law not only recognized women...