20463788

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Review Author(s): Caroline Jewers Review by: Caroline Jewers Source: Speculum, Vol. 81, No. 2 (Apr., 2006), pp. 581-583Published by: Medieval Academy of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20463788Accessed: 21-05-2015 07:14 UTC

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Reviews 581

areas over the fifteenth century, and the number of dual-purpose houses increased. In resi dential structures the elaborately decorated entrance into the palacio lost its importance, as the exterior front door gained significance as an indicator of status. The culs-de-sac of the Islamic city disappeared as they were overtaken by private houses. In some small houses, the portales became kitchens or dining rooms, whereas the townhouses at times were con structed with a large, enclosed kitchen. The number of interior portales increased, and more upper floors and interior balconies for circulation were built, reducing the area of courtyard. Passini's analysis focuses on the metamorphosis of house plans but never ex plains why the adaptations noted might have occurred. References to anthropological con cerns, such as the demographics of fifteenth-century Toledo and differences between Mus lim and Christian lifestyles, or to historical events and their economic implications would elucidate the functions and transformations of these spaces. However, these issues are be yond the scope of the author's stated intent and must be left for future scholars. In terms of urban space, the author has located previously unidentified sites in the Muslim neigh borhood, such as public baths, the slaughterhouse, and the fish market, which were over taken for the construction of the cathedral.

The catalogue, alone, stands as a major contribution to the study of medieval urban space in western Europe. The first part of this exceptionally well documented survey is dedicated to domestic structures found in ten commercial locations and the second part to eleven solely residential neighborhoods. Each section presents plans and photographs of the zone, locating the footprint of each house or shop studied, including additional struc tures not found in the Book of Measures. Observations are noted in a description of the overall area and of groups of housing, accompanied by transcribed documentation, pho tographs, and plans of the present-day structure, plans reconstructing, as closely as possi ble, the fifteenth-century form of the house or group, and interpretive remarks.

Passini is to be congratulated for bringing each entry in the catalogue to an equivalent level of completeness, a major undertaking for one individual working in a field of imprecise and variable physical evidence. The author's skills as an architect are made evident in the rigorous and meticulous analysis of each building and in the plans and occasional axono metric drawings he created, which are graphically clear and presented in a pleasing palate. The scale of the catalogue is extensive and the information provided detailed; therefore the reader must depend upon Passini's analysis in the first part of the book for a synthetic understanding of the preserved material.

In conclusion, Passini has succeeded admirably in reconstructing a good portion of the fifteenth-century city, to which future scholars of medieval architecture and urbanism will be indebted. His classification of house types and their arrangement of spaces reveals an enticing glimpse into the daily life of the inhabitants of medieval Toledo yet leaves room for additional critical inquiry.

SHELLEY E. ROFF, University of Texas, San Antonio

LISA PERFETTI, Women and Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Pp. xiii, 286; 2 black-and-white figures. $57.50.

In her energetically argued comparative study Lisa Perfetti chronicles the antics of selected courtly ladies, ladettes, and desperate housewives to create a herstory of what their sub versive laughter and bawdy wit might have meant for contemporary readers/spectators and what we can usefully construe from it. Beginning with Chaucer's Wife of Bath, she devotes a second chapter to Boccaccio's Decameron, another to Dunbar's Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, a fourth to Ulrich von Lichtenstein's Frauendienst, a fifth to the figure of the French farce wife, concluding with a consideration of the verbal and physical


582 Reviews humor of the "Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies" from the Arabian Nights. Perfetti's sampling thus ranges wide in time and place, but she finds commonality not just in the texts of her ludic florilegium but also between medieval and modern times and the way in

which women's laughter is generated, repressed, and received: "[I]t is women who have been told that their refusal to laugh at jokes made at their expense shows that they don't have a sense of humor at all. So a woman has to assert her right not to laugh at offensive jokes but simultaneously prove that she is capable of laughter or risk being seen as a spoilsport: a balancing act requiring a quick wit" (p. viii). Perfetti shows that when, how, why, and what to laugh at was a consistent subject of medical treatises, theological writings, and conduct literature (all naturally conservative and concerned with restraint)-and il lustrates how their social prescriptions and proscriptions are worked through in imagina tive literature (more liberated and invested in social experiment). Laughter is a social con tract, a bodily function, a transaction, a transgression, a sign of carnivalesque disorder and

misrule, a form of resistance: it can be rebellious, subversive, cathartic, or corrective; it "contests and enforces social and cultural boundaries" (p. 17); and in its performativity it is always revealing of gender politics. Of her selection of material, Perfetti says, "Each text features a female character who laughs and makes jokes about men or uses her wit to joust verbally with men" (p. 3), and it is clearly a case of "woman on top" and the pathetic fallacies of pathetic phalluses.

But even if women are literally and metaphorically on top, are they not still screwed? The author contends with the fact that the extant body of work was largely written by and for men. Can we, then, find authentic voices or matter that tells us something "real" about women's laughter and its uses? Perfetti's pragmatic answer is that, faute de mieux, we may as well speculate: her approach is to regard each author as colluding with the female characters he creates and then to allow the characters full autonomy in creating a discursive space within the text, permitting us in turn to conjecture with metaphorical promiscuity what the implied audience response might be, since "[m]edieval texts create gendered po sitions for their readers; to argue for gender as an important factor in reader interpretation is not to impose a contemporary concept on a medieval context" (p. 24). In privileging the feminine, Perfetti takes account of the masculine perspective and underscores that "medi eval comic literature, often labeled misogynous, could in fact offer pleasures to both women and men" (p. 27), since "[t]he laughter of medieval heroines is most striking in its un masking of the fundamental structure underlying medieval concepts of gender difference: the binary pairs of male/reason/head versus female/body/passion" (p. 21).

Perfetti's introduction provides a solid and interesting theoretical ground for her sub sequent chapters. While there is nothing revolutionary in her assertion that the Wife of Bath is a true subversive who toys with authority and antifeminist tradition as she does with men, Perfetti rehearses the reasons why with rekindled energy. Similarly, her Boccaccio chapter's conclusions that "[h]e allows his women to laugh at sexually explicit tales, but in having them blush, shows the pressures that women face in order to remain ladies" (p. 97) and that "the greatest insight we gain from studying this work is to see that women could actively participate in the humor of medieval texts because their wit was the tool that allowed them to engage in the game" (p. 98) seem self-evident, but the journey on which she accompanies his travelers reveals some fresh twists and turns. Most enjoyable, perhaps, are the roads less traveled in her analysis: those unfamiliar with the absolutely fabulous "experienced matriarchs" behaving badly (p. 124) in Dunbar's poetry will be happy to make or renew the acquaintance. Perfetti argues, "Dunbar's poem . .. allows us a glimpse into a feminine space of laughter, or counterculture, that offered women a kind of shelter apart from the dominant culture of antifeminism" (p. 125). Misogynist authors and their feisty creations are allowed their cake and to eat it, too. Frauendienst, Perfetti says, is a playful mise-en-question of the concept of service to a lady, a literary parody, and


Reviews 583

a gender circus so multilayered that "the audience can no longer be sure whom they are laughing at, and whom they are laughing with" (p. 167). Her meditation on the triumphant farce wives of Le Chaudronnier and the Porte Bode's, texts that legitimate "female unru liness" (p. 202), leads her to conclude that "women with their own wit and sense of humor

may have turned the dramatic performance into a comic performance of their own, telling jokes to each other at the well, at the public oven, or on the way to the tavern" (p. 202).

Her amusing and insightful analysis of the Thousand and One Nights story of the bawdy Baghdad sisters continues in the vein of highlighting the "disruptive social potential of women's laughter" (p. 241) and reminds us that medieval Arabic literature should be an integral part of the medievalist canon. Perfetti's critical approach is informed by common sense and feminist criticism, carefully

eschewing the more traditional/masculinist treatments of her chosen works and subject (Philippe Menard's Le rire et le sourire merits a lone footnote [p. 8], for example). In the final analysis, what she extrapolates is speculative and necessarily selective and of a general, universal nature-after all, her works cover several centuries and six cultures. But her textual analysis is surefooted and engaging, and this fresh look at women's laughter is a useful contribution to feminist and gender studies of the Middle Ages.

CAROLINE JEWERS, University of Kansas

HERMAN PLEIJ, Colors Demonic and Divine: Shades of Meaning in the Middle Ages and After. Trans. Diane Webb. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Pp. xi, 124 plus 20 color figures. $29.50. First published in 2002 under the title Van karmijn, purper en blauw: Over kleuren van de Middeleeuwen en daarna, by Prometheus.

This is both a fascinating and an infuriating book. It is packed with interesting detail and information, yet its universalizing stance on the Middle Ages causes it to lose form and shape.

It is a slim book of seven chapters. The central theme is perhaps whether and how colors were perceived as instruments of the devil or ornaments of God. The opening chapter offers a brief discussion of many themes, including medieval notions of color, the ways in which colors are and were described, links between color and light, and the fluidity of color symbolism. The book then considers color in everyday life, how colors could denote social status and emotions, especially through clothing, and how, gradually, bright colors were, in aristocratic circles, replaced by dark colors. The third chapter deals with the relationship between colors and enjoyment, touching on aesthetics and definitions of beauty, and the fourth builds on this through a discussion about colors, adornment, and beautiful women. This is all the positive side of color. Pleij then shifts his focus to the negative, considering the devil's pernicious palette, that is to say, the earthly nature of color when set against pure white (if God had meant man to wear colors, he would have created sheep in a variety of hues, p. 68) and the evils of a multiplicity of hues, for multicoloredness indicated insta bility. Building on this, Pleij looks at the dangers of yellow, red, green, and blue in particular and closes with a discussion about the progress of decoloration, the shift from a colored world to one of blacks and whites, led by the church. All of this is accomplished in ninety eight pages.

Pleij is very aware of the ambiguity of colors; as he says, every color is ambiguous, but some colors are more ambiguous than others. He conveys a very clear sense of this chang ing, unstable world. But it is a universalizing world. To take the opening chapter on me dieval notions of color, within three pages the reader is moved from Isaac Newton, Thomas Aquinas, and Aristotle to Vincent of Beauvais, Bernard of Clairvaux, Middle Dutch lin guistics, and Isidore of Seville-in that order. This bewildering and rapid progression is


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Issue Table of ContentsSpeculum, Vol. 81, No. 2 (Apr., 2006) pp. 325-670Front MatterRoman Geography and Ethnography in the Carolingian Empire [pp. 325-364]Saracen Silk and the Virgin's "Chemise": Cultural Crossing in Cloth [pp. 365-397]Figures of Thought and Figures of Flesh: "Jews" and "Judaism" in Late-Medieval Spanish Poetry and Politics [pp. 398-426]"Iudicium Dei, iudicium fortunae": Trial by Combat in Malory's "Le Morte Darthur" [pp. 427-462]ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 463-464]Review: untitled [pp. 464-466]Review: untitled [pp. 466-467]Review: untitled [pp. 468-469]Review: untitled [pp. 470-471]Review: untitled [pp. 471-472]Review: untitled [pp. 472-474]Review: untitled [pp. 474-476]Review: untitled [pp. 476-478]Review: untitled [pp. 478-479]Review: untitled [pp. 480-481]Review: untitled [pp. 481-484]Review: untitled [pp. 484-485]Review: untitled [pp. 485-487]Review: untitled [pp. 487-488]Review: untitled [pp. 488-489]Review: untitled [pp. 490-491]Review: untitled [pp. 491-493]Review: untitled [pp. 493-494]Review: untitled [pp. 494-496]Review: untitled [pp. 496-497]Review: untitled [pp. 497-499]Review: untitled [pp. 499-501]Review: untitled [pp. 501-502]Review: untitled [pp. 502-504]Review: untitled [pp. 504-505]Review: untitled [pp. 505-507]Review: untitled [pp. 507-509]Review: untitled [pp. 510-511]Review: untitled [pp. 511-513]Review: untitled [pp. 513-515]Review: untitled [pp. 515-516]Review: untitled [pp. 517-518]Review: untitled [pp. 518-519]Review: untitled [pp. 520-521]Review: untitled [pp. 521-523]Review: untitled [pp. 523-524]Review: untitled [pp. 524-526]Review: untitled [pp. 526-529]Review: untitled [pp. 529-530]Review: untitled [pp. 530-532]Review: untitled [pp. 532-533]Review: untitled [pp. 533-536]Review: untitled [pp. 536-537]Review: untitled [pp. 537-538]Review: untitled [pp. 539-540]Review: untitled [pp. 540-543]Review: untitled [pp. 543-544]Review: untitled [pp. 544-546]Review: untitled [pp. 546-548]Review: untitled [pp. 548-549]Review: untitled [pp. 549-551]Review: untitled [pp. 551-553]Review: untitled [pp. 553-554]Review: untitled [pp. 555-556]Review: untitled [pp. 556-557]Review: untitled [pp. 557-558]Review: untitled [pp. 558-560]Review: untitled [pp. 560-562]Review: untitled [pp. 562-564]Review: untitled [pp. 564-566]Review: untitled [pp. 566-569]Review: untitled [pp. 569-570]Review: untitled [pp. 570-572]Review: untitled [pp. 572-573]Review: untitled [pp. 573-575]Review: untitled [pp. 575-576]Review: untitled [pp. 576-578]Review: untitled [pp. 578-579]Review: untitled [pp. 580-581]Review: untitled [pp. 581-583]Review: untitled [pp. 583-584]Review: untitled [pp. 584-585]Review: untitled [pp. 585-587]Review: untitled [pp. 587-588]Review: untitled [pp. 588-590]Review: untitled [pp. 590-591]Review: untitled [pp. 591-593]Review: untitled [pp. 593-594]Review: untitled [pp. 594-596]Review: untitled [pp. 596-598]Review: untitled [pp. 598-599]Review: untitled [pp. 599-600]Review: untitled [pp. 600-601]Review: untitled [pp. 602-603]Review: untitled [pp. 603-605]Review: untitled [pp. 606-606]Review: untitled [pp. 606-608]Review: untitled [pp. 608-609]Review: untitled [pp. 609-612]Review: untitled [pp. 613-615]Review: untitled [pp. 615-617]Review: untitled [pp. 617-619]Review: untitled [pp. 619-620]Review: untitled [pp. 620-622]Review: untitled [pp. 622-623]Review: untitled [pp. 624-625]Review: untitled [pp. 625-627]Review: untitled [pp. 627-628]Review: untitled [pp. 629-630]Review: untitled [pp. 631-632]Review: untitled [pp. 632-634]Review: untitled [pp. 634-635]

Brief Notices [pp. 636-662]VariaBooks Received [pp. 663-670]

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