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Although I liked Blamires' book, I only read small parts of it. So many books, so little time.

      "The formal case has a quasi-judicial flavour and expressly sets out to promote women's cause and to exonerate them from slander. Its typical features are these: it questions the motives and morality of misogynists, who seem to forget that women brought them to life and that life without women would be difficult; it denounces antagonistic generalizations; it asserts that God showed signs of special favour to women at creation and subsequently; it revises the culpability of Eve; it witnesses women's powerful interventions throughout history (from the Virgin Mary and scriptural heroines to Amazons and modern notables); and it argues that women's moral capacities expose the relative tawdriness of men's" p. 9

1.       "The formal case may be distinguished from the incidental case, by which I mean the appearance of one or more arguments or exemplifications characteristic of the formal case in a work not otherwise presented as a forma case. Incidental cases occur in patristic and medieval moral treatises or biblical commentary (on widowhood for instance, or on the female disciples' role during the Crucifixion and Resurrection). The Lives of female saints are a further major medium for incidental defence, whether in narrative or (in Hrotsvitha's innovative writings) dramatic form. Exemplary tales, represented in this book by Chaucer's Clerk's Tale, often provide an incidental case for women. Finally there are many romances which involve calumniation of the heroine -- normally because she is accused of sexual betrayal -- and yield an incidental case for women in rebutting the calumniation.

         Clearly the survey in this book can only include a selective and perhaps uneven exploration of the wide range of writings which provide an incidental case. Even so, some readers may be surprised that the elevation of the courtly lady or dompna in medieval lyric as well as romance has not qualified for inclusion. Why not argue, in Diane Bornstein's words, that courtly love 'celebrated woman as an ennobling spiritual and moral force', expressing 'a new feminism that contradicted both the antifeminism of the ecclesiastical establishment and the sexual attitudes endorsed by the church'? That view is increasingly open to doubt. First, because the courtly lady of lyric so often functions essentially as a mirror, projected by the male speaker, in which to explore not her feelings but his -- to imagine the means to his own potential perfection (indeed, 'honouring ladies' came to be a proverbial definition of male honour). Second, because the deification of woman in lyric or romance can be construed as an etherealizing misogyny which locates her virtue in her status as virgin indefinitely deferred from human intercourse. third, because the pathos of the heroine presumed in romance to require chivalric protection trivializes her, incapacitates her as a decorative object of exchange, and hence reinforces masculine supremacy. And finally because the posture of the unrequited suitor aspiring to prove his worthiness by sustained courtly service merely masks inter-male competitiveness and ambition.

         On these grounds courtly 'exaltation' of women is skirted in the present book, as a controversy requiring other books all to itself. But the first thing to acknowledge about even the formal medieval case for women is that strictly it, too, satisfies few feminist criteria. Some readers may have been horrified by what they have glimpsed of it so far. " pp. 9 - 11

2.       "I believe that pre-modern texts which develop constructions of 'woman' which are positive according to the cultural ideology of their period ought logically to be called not 'profeminist' but profeminine. That term will therefore be preferred in this book." p. 12

3.       "Although what I have called the incidental case for women is quite pervasive in medieval culture, the available pool of formal defences with which I am so far conversant is much less extensive and cannot easily be pursued further back than the end of the eleventh century. around this time Marbod of Rennes, a teacher and bishop whose career spanned the eleventh and twelfth centuries, wrote an undated poem of 125 lines in praise of women, known variously as 'De matrona' or 'De muliere bona', as the fourth of the rhetorical set-pieces in his Book with Ten Chapters. Its juxtaposition with a preceding poem attacking women ('De meretrice', or alternatively 'De muliere mala') may imply an already solid tradition; along with the topic of old age in the ensuing poem, it may have been related to student assignments at the cathedral schools of Angers where Marbod had taught. . . .

         Peter Abelard's contribution to the genre in the 1130s, The Authority and Dignity of Nuns, is perhaps a borderline instance as its title would imply, but an extraordinarily interesting and substantial one." pp. 19-20

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   last updated Dec 1, 2000