Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380-1589. (Reviews).

Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380-1589.

Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. x + 274 pp. n.p. ISBN: 0-226-78013-9.

By focusing an historical lens on the concept of the early English woman writer as "lost," Jennifer Summit is able to argue, strikingly, that the consignment of the female literary presence to the periphery of English literary tradition was in fact integral to the development of that very tradition. Whereas much recent scholarship assumes that pre-modern women were denied recognition as writers in order "to protect an institution that was already fully in place and fully masculinized" (5), Summit takes a more complicated approach to this issue. Her thesis encapsulates a paradox: that for centuries male authors deliberately exploited the status of the female writer as outside the literary mainstream so as to ensure a masculine genealogy for English vernacular literature. Thus what Summit's book would explore is the development of a male-dominated literary tradition in which the figure of the woman writer (fictional and non-fictional) played an essential but marginalized role.

Focusing specifically on "historical processes through which women's writing was culturally defined, circulated, and assigned value"(5), Summit examines both texts (chiefly works of Chaucer, Puttenham, Chistine de Pisan [as adapted by the English], Marjorie Kempe, John Bale, and Queen Elizabeth), and para-texts, such as prefaces, printers' notes, and the interventions of editors and translators. Given the chronological arc of her argument, her choices of illustrative material are astute. Neatly pairing Chaucer and Puttenham as apologists for a vernacular literature, Summit argues that both invoke female figures to symbolize the developing status of English letters. For Chaucer, keenly aware of the disjunction between the stability of the classical canon and the precarious future of his own literary models, the woman writer (as seen in Criseyde) signifies the threat of ephemerality, of loss -- even as a kind of stand-in for Chaucer's personal anxieties. For Puttenham, writing in a more self-confident artistic climate and under the aegis of a female poet-monarch, the same metaphor of female exteriority signals the independence of a new literary tradition tied to an emerging national identity. By analyzing this hermeneutic inversion in her first and last chapters, Summit establishes a chronological framework for examining the woman writer as cultural symptom for shifting concepts of English literary history.

The remaining three chapters examine early modern appropriations by men of women writers themselves -- through reconstructions of their authorial personae, and for through interventions in the transmission of their texts. Summit's range of evidence here is impressive. For example, in a chapter dealing with "The Reformation of the Woman Writer," she demonstrates how the London printer Henry Pepwell altered a selection from The Book of Margerie Kempe so as to reinforce the Reformist overhaul of Catholic devotional practices; and how John Bale's edition of The First Examination of Anne Askew repositioned her Protestant martyrdom in an "imaginary history" of learned medieval women who left a "legacy of dissent" against the Catholic Church (148-49). Just as importantly, in exploring these and other rewritings of women's history in Protestant publications, Summit makes clear their connection to the larger project of the Reformation, that is, "the transformation of the object of idolatry into the object of historica l memory" (143).

For me, this insistence on reaching beyond the parameters of a more narrowly defined women's history is Summit's strongest intellectual asset, one which promises original insights into even such a well-analyzed subject as Christine de Pisan. In a scrupulously researched chapter on this medieval French writer ("The City of Ladies in the Library of Gentlemen") Summit examines the paratextual apparatus through which de Pisan's "carefully wrought authorial self-portrait" is transformed and re-directed in the English reception of her works. Following closely the progress of de Pisan's texts through a succession of English printers, translators, and editors (including, most notably, Caxton, Pynson, Thynne, and Pepwell), Summit argues convincingly that the position of cultural arbitress which de Pisan claimed for the woman writer was arrogated by these intermediaries to an emerging aristocratic community of male courtiers. Here again, while demonstrating the centrality of the female author to the formation of male l iterary identities, Summit characteristically provides a much broader cultural analysis -- in this case, of early modern book production.

Despite these considerable accomplishments, however, Summit has only partial success in confronting the perennial problem of how to look for historical difference without measuring it in terms of familiar conceptual categories. Certainly she is aware that identifying female authors in the early modern period can be greatly complicated by pseudonymous substitutions, textual interventions, and the vagaries of manuscript circulation and transmission. More fundamentally, she recognizes that early modern concepts of "gender" are themselves notoriously slippery to pin down. Nonetheless, Summit states early on that she hopes to identify "the particular qualities that mark a text at a given point as the work of a woman or a man" (20).

Admittedly, such an aim seems appropriate to her attempts to differentiate between texts ascribed, at least originally, to women (such as the manuscript of de Pisan's Cities), and deliberate alterations to these texts by men. But analysis of the texts themselves is a more problematic matter, as can be seen most easily in Summit's attempts to describe fictional personae in gendered terms. How, for example, does one differentiate male and female inflections in Chaucer's representation of Criseyde as a "woman writer," or for that matter in the shifting viewpoints of Chaucer's narrator; and how, given the delicacy of these distinctions, can one extrapolate, as Summit would, a gender-based theory of literary tradition that may be confidently ascribed to Chaucer the author? To my mind, Summit's close textual analysis in the Troilus and elsewhere reveals, if unwittingly, the difficulty of accommodating the gender instabilities of textual representations (especially early modern ones) to the aims of her study. Althou gh this kind of difficulty is implicit in any historical analysis, it does warrant tougher theoretical consideration than Summit gives it.

There are as well some minor stylistic flaws in the text that might have been smoothed over with further revision, such as Summit's tendency to repeat herself, and to cite works in the footnotes that are used only indirectly, if at all, in the text. But perhaps this is to quibble: Summit's wide-ranging bibliography is unquestionably informative, and indicative, from another perspective, of her intellectual curiosity and her strength as a researcher. It is in fact these qualities, together with a persistent and imaginative impulse to push beyond conventional premises, that are most noteworthy throughout Summit's remarkable book.