Content area
Full Text
Dark Age bodies. Gender and monastic practice in the early medieval west . By Coon Lynda L. . (The Middle Ages.) Pp. xi+390 incl. 42 figs+8 colour plates. Philadelphia-Oxford : University of Pennsylvania Press , 2011(10). £42.50 ($65). 978 0 8122 4269 0
Sex, gender, and episcopal authority in an age of reform, 1000-1122 . By McLaughlin Megan . Pp. x+277 incl. 4 ills. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2010. £55. 978 0 521 87005 4
Gender is well established as a tool in the reading and interpretation of texts. Both these books use the concept in this way, with Lynda Coon's texts extending to visual artistic expressions and architectural space, including theoretical space as envisaged in the - unrealised - monastic plan of St Gall. Such reading can enrich and develop our understanding. But as with the application of any interpretative framework, it demands methodological clarity and rigour.
Coon's reading of Carolingian monasticism begins from the Rule of Benedict, viewed in the context of recent work on late antique masculinity, an area of Coon's strength. The result is not entirely novel; but it reveals how far Benedict's rule embodies and transmits the classical/late antique gender system, with its prioritising of the male and masculine, rather than any Christian subversion of this. The gendered content of that Rule is seen as intensified by the Carolingian commentaries of Smaragdus and Hildemar of Civate, but expressed also in monastic art and architecture, through, for instance, Fulda manuscript illumination or the Corvey westwork. Hrabanus Maurus, his work on the cross and his corporeal imagery and exegesis, frames the book.
A gendered approach to Hrabanus' imagery, or to the Corvey representations of Ulysses confronting Scylla and the Siren, should pay...