A History of Women in the West.

The essential paradox in the history of women in the west occurs when women are on top (as Natalie Zemon Davis concisely defined that reversal in her article so titled, most conveniently read in her 1975 collection of essays Society and Culture in Early Modern France). The third volume of the enormous collection of essays under the general editorship of Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot (the one of particular interest to Renaissance specialists) scratches the soil of 300 years in search of golden grains of evidence of female initiative and nonconformity. These are found at the extremes: at one end prostitutes, actresses, and criminals, the infanticidal poor, accused witches, crowds driven to riot by frustration, humiliation and desperation; at the other, aristocratic women, especially those who were educated, widowed, sexually adventurous or inclined to revolution.

Take the case of female protesters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. According to Arlette Farge, they were (as terrified male critics charged) frenzied and ruthless in their behavior, leaders and instigators and not mere mindless followers of mob violence. Though they battled against unjust hikes in the price of bread or the prophylactic snatching of their adolescent children by police intent on preserving order, their concerns were not only domestic: for national independence or civil liberties, too, they would drop their baskets and needles and mount the barricades.

Their purpose, as the author unravels it, was dual: first, to protest injustice, just as male protesters did; and second, to protest their perduring condition of subordination. "This sudden passage from the private to the public domain revealed not only an understanding of the event but also a fierce determination to assert a collective identity that was normally ignored, not to say mocked" (496). The bloodletting over - the pure blood of the enemy spilled as a kind of ritual response to the perceived impurity of menstrual blood? - they returned to their homes, to their menfolk, and to submission.

Other rebels against patterns of male domination are featured by Claude Dulong (the precieuses and salon hostesses, female intellectuals able to come to the fore as literary culture shifted from technical disciplines and Latin treatises to vernacular works directed to large audiences); Nina Rattner Gelbart (female journalists, an astonishing group of eighteenth-century pioneers); Jean-Michel Sallmann (those witches again, quintessential women for the most part hated for their departure from the norm); Kathryn Norberg (prostitutes, seen as rebels against authoritarian structures); and Nicole Castan (female criminals, less numerous, less violent, and less often executed than their male counterparts). Women who conformed outwardly to social strictures are often seen as subverting or resisting or finding alternatives to those chains in essays by Olwen Huften (on "Women, Work, and Family" - every woman was a worker): Sara F. Matthews Grieco and Veronique Nahoum-Grappe (two works on perceptions and representations of beauty and the body); Martine Sonnet (on the education of daughters, often best accomplished by fathers and brothers); Elisja Schulte van Kessel (on female spirituality as an assertion of independence); and Natalie Zemon Davis (on the women who were able to do at least something in the political realm).

The ways in which women were perceived, and the ways in which those who perceived them also limited their choices, are described by Francoise Borin (a catalogue of visual images, including startling ones of a seductive nun and a rebel who tried and lost dissolved in a frightening silence); Jean-Paul Desaive (on the literary record), Eric A. Nicholson on women and theater (where Racine studied them, where the actress Isabella Andreini excelled, and where the playwright Aphra Bern broke through to a true female consciousness); Michele Crampe-Casnabet (on the philosophes and philosophers, among whom Rousseau would keep women down while Helvetius and Condorcet would put them on top, at least half the time); and Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore (on the voices of doctors and scientists who finally found out, in the seventeenth century, about the ovum and the sperm and had to realign the hypotheses of two millennia). In two brief passages at the end by Davis and Farge, two contemporary women - a Jewish merchant and a Parisian artisan - speak compellingly in their own voices.

There are more conformists than protesters in this volume, more gentle subverters than bloodthirsty revolutionaries - for a reason. Most women did not break out of ancient patterns of female subordination which endured into the age of Renaissance and Enlightenment. These pattems crystallized in the Middle Ages and, even earlier, in antiquity.

They probably go back even earlier than the Greek and Roman periods chiefly studied in Vol. I of A History of Women in the West. In this volume, several leitmotifs of women's experience emerge. Among these useful studies, Giulia Sissa notably shows how Plato, Aristotle, the physicians, the biographer and moralist Plutarch joined in establishing the foundations of the western view of women as essentially inferior, while Thomas Yan demonstrates how their incapacity in civic life was encapsulated as a principle of Roman law. Claudine Leduc and Aline Rousselle place women in the social worlds of Greece and Rome, where their roles are determined by their relationships to men, especially in marriage. An abundance of female deities, Nicole Loraux argues, does not mask the continued worship of the "Mother Goddess' if there ever was one, and does not exalt the status of mortals of the female gender. Louise Bruit Zaidman, John Scheid and Monique Alexandre examine women's involvement in Greek, Roman, Jewish and early Christian religious ritual and action. The religious sphere was uniquely open to women in antiquity, as it would be in the next age.

Volume II of A History of Women in the West is aptly entitled Silences of the Middle Ages, edited by the woman who is unparalleled in comprehending them. Silence was the appropriate response to the dead weight of prescription pried on medieval women: how to walk, how to think, how to be a good wife, how to serve God, how to eat and drink, how to dress. These messages, delivered by the frocked male theoreticians of the age, are examined by Jacques Dalarun, Claude Thomasset, Carla Casagrande, Silvana Vecchio, and Diane Owen Hughes. Paulette L'Hermite-Leclercq and Georges Duby show how even aristocratic women - despite the rituals of courtly love and the gestures of chivalry - were subordinated to men, as were certainly the ordinary women, equipped with their ubiquitous scissors and needles, described by Francoise Piponnier.

Danielle Regnier-Bohler studies the dialectic of women and language from every perspective (women as poets, gossipers, blasphemers, translators of spiritual vision into words). The wonderful illustrations gathered by Chiara Frugoni include the inevitably sinful Eves and Mary Magdalenes but also, in a kind of visual denunciation of the authoritarian voice, women cooking, knitting, studying, writing, receiving and bestowing books - not least, a depiction of Saint Anne teaching the little virgin Mary to read. Sweeping syntheses by Suzanne Fonay Wemple and Claudia Opitz survey women's lives from the fifth to the tenth and the tenth to the fifteenth centuries respectively.

In all, these three volumes offer 40 splendid essays on women's lives in European history, not counting editors' and sub-editors' introductions and postscripts. There are not only no weak contributions, there are no ordinary nor unnecessary ones. The authors present the products of their specialized research in language free of obfuscation - a blessing in this generation of illegible prose. The total is a summary of the state of the field arrayed in non-linear form. The reader will find here neither a chronology nor an encyclopedia. Insights and explanations dart and glance about in a pattern that illuminates but does not systematize. For students and non-specialists, the lack of synthesis may be a defect. To supply the over-arching themes not spelled out in the text, the reader may consult the index for the usual headings: mothers; wives; widows; beauty; body; chastity; sexuality; virginity; dowries; children; marriage; love; prostitution; saints; goddesses; sorcery; witchcraft; spirituality; education. Expected heads such as beating; death; illness; insanity; punishment are omitted or lightly referenced in this relentlessly positive work.

The focus is European - "We would like to see a history of Oriental and African women written by Oriental and African women and men" (1:1819), comment the two French series editors (one male, one female). Indeed, the focus is French and English, the northwestern corner of Europe. The attention given to Italy and the first phase of the Renaissance is slight - even the volume which names the Renaissance in its title leans closer to the other pole of the French Revolution. About these tendencies the reviewer feels only a little regret.

MARGARET L. KING Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York