:Women’s Friendship in Medieval Literature

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewWomen’s Friendship in Medieval Literature. Edited by Karma Lochrie and Usha Vishnuvajjala. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022. Pp. vii+299.L. M. C. WestonL. M. C. WestonCalifornia State University, Fresno Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreWomen’s Friendship in Medieval Literature is one of those rare collections in which each article not only stands on its own as a provocative piece of scholarship but also contributes to an integrated whole. The contributors, that is, have become collaborators in a shared argument, so that the volume models the social and textual work of women’s friendship that it explores. As Lochrie and Vishnuvajjala make clear in their introduction, there is quite a scholarly history of engaging with friendship.1 But these engagements have focused primarily on friendships among men and on a public, Ciceronian definition of amicitia. Consequently, the editors and contributors to this volume argue, women’s friendships—even when not deemed theoretically impossible—have been recognized mostly as exceptions that prove the rule of an inherent masculinity. What happens, then, when gender is taken into consideration? In what different textual encounters might friendship among women become visible? And if masculine friendship is ideologically aligned with masculine virtue, essential likeness, and public politics, where—in what forms and practices—might women’s friendships reside?The collection’s conversation plays out in three movements. The first, “Varieties of Spiritual Friendship,” roots the discussion in what may be the most visible examples of friendship, those in monastic communities and witnessed by texts associated especially with visionary spirituality. Jennifer N. Brown’s “Female Friendships and Visionary Women” starts by reconsidering three cloistered women whose vitae and correspondence (as well as visions) are relatively well known—the twelfth-century Hildegard of Bingen, the fourteenth-century Catherine of Siena, and the women commemorated in late medieval schwesternbücher—and how textual evidence of their lives and careers both echoes and varies from male models of spiritual friendship as theorized by Aelred of Rievaulx, stressing the women’s participation in supportive communities of teachers, students, scribes, and monastic sisters. Brown then uses her analysis to shed light on records concerning the lesser-known post-Reformation English Sister Marie. In the following chapter (“The Foundations of Friendship: Amicitia, Literary Production, and Spiritual Community in Marie de France”), Stella Wang similarly thematizes the “vibrant networks” (37) through which women supported each other, looking for their presence in Marie’s descriptions of the historical Ely of La Vie Seint Audree and the fictional abbeys of Le Fresne and Eliduc. Taking discussion of such networks a step further in “Friendship and Resistance in the Vitae of Italian Holy Women,” Andrea Boffa notes the way such connections not only support and nurture women but also allow them to disrupt patriarchal control within female spaces. Finally, in “Sisters and Friends: The Medieval Nuns of Syon Abbey,” Alexandra Verini offers a nuanced study of how friendship in community underwrites texts composed within a particular late medieval English convent.The second movement, “Feminine Space, Feminine Voices,” shifts the conversation from monastic to secular women. Lydia Yaitsky Kerz begins, in her “‘Amonge Maydenes Moo’: Gender-Based Community, Racial Thinking, and Aristocratic Women’s Work in Emaré,” to trace the connections among women across racial and class as well as generational lines as reified in the textiles of the anonymous Middle English romance. Usha Vishnuvajjala’s “Women’s Communities and the Possibility of Friendship in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur” engages with the often silent (and therefore overlooked) women who surround romance characters like the stanzaic Morte’s Gaynor. Taking her cue from recent scholarship on affect and emotion, Melissa Ridley Elmes interrogates (in her “Female Friendship in Late Medieval English Literature: Cultural Translation in Chaucer, Gower, and Malory”) the ways in which (male) authors altered their sources to appeal to female readers, and what this suggests about female desires for and experiences of friendship and community.Engagements with medieval texts become more speculative in the volume’s third movement, “New Modes of Female Friendship.” Building on the previous interrogations, these articles (re)visit medieval sources through modern analogues. In “Cultivating Cummarship: Female Friendship, Alcohol, and Pedagogical Community in the Alewife Poem,” Carissa M. Harris looks beyond the elite women of the romances to women celebrated (and sometimes castigated) for forging relationships through tavern gossip, likening their culture of pedagogy and counsel to twentieth-century lesbian bar culture. Karma Lochrie likewise calls upon modern popular culture in “‘All These Relationships between Women’: Chaucer and the Bechdel Test for Female Friendship.” In “The Politics of Virtual Friendship in Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies,” Christine Chism addresses the way the late medieval author constructs an alternate feminine community through her transtemporal collation of portraits derived from classical and Christian patriarchal histories. Laurie A. Finke’s “Prosthetic Friendship and the Theater of Fraternity” draws upon the history of occult societies and their role in the development of later twentieth-century feminist wiccan communities to address women’s co-option of masculine fraternal spaces for female homosocial relations. Tellingly, the final essay in this section is the work of long-time collaborators and friends Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing. Their especially luminous essay, “Conversation among Friends: Ælfflæd, Iurminburg, and the Arts of Storytelling,” takes inspiration from contemporary female poets and fiction writers to imagine a friendship that, albeit not explicitly witnessed in extant sources, can nevertheless be (re)created through rigorous interrogation of the very texts that silence the women.The volume—if not the conversation it provokes—concludes with an afterword on “Friendship at a Distance,” in which Penelope Anderson situates the work within our own contemporary world, pondering how our pandemic-era anxieties about maintaining connection despite physical separation can prompt us as scholars (and women) to imagine relationships across time as well. Ultimately this volume does not seek, let alone claim, to offer the final word on female friendship in the Middle Ages. It seeks, rather, to provoke its readers to ask further questions by providing models of scholarship that will facilitate the discovery and examination of other relationships, other entanglements of past and present.Notes1. Foundational studies include Alan Bray, The Friend (University of Chicago Press, 2003); C. Stephen Jaeger, Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Julian Haseldine, ed., Friendship in Medieval Europe (Stroud: Sutton, 1999); and Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge, eds., Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Explorations of a Fundamental Ethical Discourse (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 120, Number 4May 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/724337 Views: 122Total views on this site HistoryPublished online February 08, 2023 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected].PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.