A History of Women: Silences of the Middle Ages.

Having edited the popular "History of Private Life" series with the late Philippe Aries (also published in this country by Harvard), Georges Duby is now editing with Michelle Perrot a "History of Women in the West" series, of which this is the second volume. It was originally published in Italy in 1990. Like Duby's earlier series, this one promises to give us very handsomely produced volumes on a timely topic, illustrated with black-and-white reproductions of art, apparently intended to give the non-specialist a glimpse into recent scholarship. It is based on a conscious effort to concentrate less on notable or exceptional people and more on the "ordinary." Also like the volumes in the earlier series, this volume is made up of twelve quite disparate essays (the majority by French scholars), some very technical, others on specialized topics, several of which contradict each other. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber tries hard but unsuccessfully to tie all of this together with her general introduction and notes to each section; her comment that the volume deliberately avoids any "particular thesis," "new information," or "synthetic overview" is a game attempt to make a virtue out of fragmentation. What seems to have been intended as an epilogue or conclusion by Duby turns out to be long quotes from a woman's confession of her relations with a priest, extracted by the Inquisition after the Albigensian Crusade.

The overall theme of the book is that language is an instrument of domination and judgment and that women's voices were silenced in the Middle Ages--hence the subtitle. Therefore, although the book is about women, medieval women are seen primarily through the lens of men's words, and, according to many of the authors, these words were primarily about women's sinful nature and second-class status. This theme is stated most unequivocally in the final essay, by Danielle Regnier-Bohler, in which she argues that medieval women were kept from literacy, even though other articles discuss the writings of medieval women and their role in the early education of both their sons and their daughters.

Here is one of the central difficulties with this book, a sense that the authors of many of the articles felt they already knew the answers before they started asking the questions of historical documents, and that the chief answer was that medieval women were always oppressed. The medieval church is singled out for special mention as an entity which, at least according to some authors, considered women, sexuality, and marriage as automatically evil (somewhat ironically, the cloister is also portrayed at several points as one of the few places where women could find autonomy and protection from male domination). Perhaps the worst offender here is Chiara Frugoni's essay, "The Imagined Woman," in which a series of nicely-reproduced iconographic images are interpreted as much more misogynist than they actually are. For example, a ninth-century illustration of the story of Adam and Eve is said to heavily underscore the negative role of women (although the illustration merely follows the Bible, with Adam and Eve being forbidden the fruit and then both eating it anyway after the serpent urges it on Eve), and the final panel, in which Eve nurses a child while Adam hoes, is said, highly inaccurately, to show that men's labor "was one way to open the closed doors of paradise".

Additionally, although many topics are touched on in this volume which have formed part of recent scholarship, such as the role of women in late medieval guilds or the questions of whether Mary can be seen as a "typical" mother or was always considered radically unlike other women, no one who has been paying attention to the feminist scholarship of the last ten or fifteen years will find anything new or surprising here. The most successful essay, that by Suzanne Fonay Wemple on early medieval women, is essentially a condensation of her 1981 Women in Frankish Society.

The Wemple piece is one of three that give a chronological overview of the history of medieval women, in an oddly positioned and oddly named Part Two, "Family and Social Strategies." The essays on the high and late Middle Ages, by Paulette L'Hermite-Leclercq and Claudia Opitz respectively, attempt to summarize recent findings about women in these periods but end up being little more than unfocused collections of snippets on such topics as demography, the nunnery, nursing practices, contraception, and social stratification. Part Two also includes a rather curious essay by Duby on fine amour, in which he announces that "the rules of courtly love were adopted in the twelfth century by the feudal aristocracy", even while also repeating the valuable caveats of recent scholars that Andreas Capellanus was writing an anti-flirtation satire, not a handbook of rules on romance.

But most of the book treats women topically rather than chronologically, giving the impression that the editors assumed there was a single set of experiences for women across a thousand years of the Middle Ages. Only toward the very end of the period, several authors suggest, did women's status improve or even change. This topical arrangement does, however, allow for some very focused essay, such as the one by Diane Owen Hughes on sumptuary laws in the Renaissance and Elizabethan periods. In this piece, the most interesting in the book, we learn about chopines and farthingales, the ridiculously high platform shoes and the wide hooped skirts which became very fashionable even while they were preached against. (Here one wishes for illustrations.)

The articles originally written in French, Italian, or German had to be translated for this edition, and while most of the translations are good there are some awkwardnesses; for example, the text of Claudia Opitz's essay gives "feudal lords" and "vassals" where the context makes clear that she meant "landlords" and "peasants". The book is completed by a bibliography which while it does not include all the works cited in the notes (or any primary sources) does give a very good selection of recent secondary works on medieval women. Curiously, the bibliography lists the translations of only a few of the European works, even though almost all of Duby's books, for example, are available in English, and the general audience to whom this book seems directed is unlikely to read French fluently. However, this audience would get a more coherent picture anyway of women in the Middle Ages, also based on recent scholarship (cited this time in translation), by reading Frances and Joseph Gies, Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages (1987).

Constance B. Bouchard University of Akron