Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models.

Tackling a subject such as this is a courageous undertaking: it involves not only relating literary texts to social, economic and litical contexts with which they interact, but also covering ground that in the last twenty years has undergone repeated and often repetitive exploration. The Querelle des femmes is an amalgam of genres, arguments, appeals to textual authority and rehearsal of examples of historical women; both established writers and obscure provincials contribute to it; it is characterized by the use of what were known as 'probable' arguments which might have been inspired by deep personal conviction, but might also reflect a delight in paradox for its own sake. For Constance Jordan, feminist texts have all these features; but they share also the claim that women are treated unjustly, and this thematic link makes the discourses of politics and law especially good contexts in which to read them. Man and woman were of course given separate status in these discourses (man being the acquisitive creature destined to command, woman ideally the conservative, irenic figure who, if she did obtain authority, usurped it and exercised it in a tyrannical way). But male and female moral qualities could be associated with either sex: so each was "bigendered", which implies not only that women had the capacity to fill male political functions, but also that "for a man to be fully human, he had to accept his own obligation to cultivate the feminine virtues and recognize male virtues in women". This meant that the major arguments against patriarchy were all rehearsed in the Renaissance: nature and its creatures are heterogeneous, each sex is bigendered, man and woman can be equal in human society. Jordan shows this by investigating seriatim texts from Italy, France and England, together with some books by international humanists such as Erasmus, Agrippa and Vives. Her strongest sections are those on Italy and on late sixteenth-century England. The exploration of the political status of women in treatises of domestic economy, and of sexual difference in divine and natural law, are particularly illuminating. Jordan shows lucidly how arguments from cultural relativism affect gender characterization, and how the question of equality relates to social rank and the notion of equity; she concludes that Renaissance feminist discourse is pan-European and transgeneric, never producing an 'actionable program', but succeeding in 'feminizing society'.

There are many strengths to this account. Jordan has read both her primary and secondary literature with care, and is scrupulous in her contextualization of arguments. She rightly treats 'national' literatures as the sum of texts available in any country, not just those produced by natives. But in neglecting detailed questions of production and reception of texts, she has been led to treat with equal weight self-financed and largely ignored texts (which include even Marie de Gournay's Egalite) and commissioned works for great patronesses such as Agrippa's De nobilitate, which had an international circulation. Both are of course equally valid as expressions of frustration and desire for change; but the latter bear on quite different political questions, as Jordan herself concedes. Her notion of androgyny is also open to the critique that it does not take into account the argument drawn from medical discourse that the sexes overlap in their capacities rather than constitute different moral and physical categories. She concludes that the free enjoyment of their own property by women is the essential precondition for social change: a precondition met in the twentieth century, but not in the Renaissance. Other preconditions spring to mind--the organization of women in labor, the secularization of society and the weakening of the institution of marriage, Weber's polytheism of values in capitalist society: but their merits will have to be strongly argued if they are to shake the authority of this excellently researched and meticulously argued book.

THE QUEEN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD