Women's Monasticism and Medieval Society: Nunneries in France and England, 890-1215 byBruce L. VenardeReview by: Jo Ann McNamaraThe American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 4 (Oct., 1998), pp. 1238-1239Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2651239 .

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1238 Reviews of Books

that devotional texts are, like all texts, the products of social processes. Of course, this is so, but one is left to wonder whether devotion as cultural practice is rele- vant for understanding the surprising qualities attrib- uted to these texts, such as their relative freedom from the authoritative associations of their Latinity, their tendency to be read in ways that contravene their authors' intentions, and their susceptibility to alter- ation and reattribution.

Finally, this book deserves a conclusion. This is not a request for a unifying statement flattening the com- plexities into coherence but a plea for further reflec- tion on the interplay among these disparate themes. Given Bestul's sophisticated analysis, I would have welcomed the insights that a conclusion might elicit. Nonetheless, the book is a major contribution: its erudite command of a sprawling body of literature undergirds its rich insights and provocative claims.

ANNE L. CLARK

University of Vermont

BRUCE L. VENARDE. Women s Monasticism and Medi- eval Society: Nunneries in France and England, 890- 1215. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1997. Pp. xix, 243. $42.50.

The centerpiece of Bruce L. Venarde's book is a database described at length in Appendix A, with a handlist of 850 women's monastic foundations be- tween 400 and 1350. It covers the dioceses of England and most of modern France, centering on southern England and northwestern France, particularly houses subject to Fontevraud. The list includes the names and dates for foundings, closings, restorations, and other information gleaned from charters, with the best available printed source constituting a useful reference for any research in the subject. The word "monasti- cism" in the title should be taken seriously. The database can only accommodate monastic communi- ties large enough, wealthy enough, and stable enough to leave a paper trail. Small communal arrangements that rarely left a record are recognized but could not be incorporated into a book heavily based on statistical analysis.

Venarde has followed other recent historians in mining economic records, which reflect the behavior of secular supporters, and these have disclosed that fe- male foundations grew most rapidly in times and places where women were able to take the initiative. Thus, he documents a modest rise from the tenth century reaching a crescendo in the twelfth and shrink- ing in the thirteenth century, although foundations remain at a high level compared to the tenth-century nadir. As women in the twelfth century gradually lost control of their own fortunes and found their family situations weakening through adjustments in the mar- riage and inheritance laws, their ability to endow new foundations also declined. On this point, some of the conclusions might bear a more searching analysis.

Venarde tends to perpetuate the bias of the sources in crediting secular men with the patronage of women's communities. He does not take account of the trend to make men the actors of record in the assignment of their wives' fortunes.

I do not think that anyone would dispute the claim (p. 91) that the collection of difficulties called the Frauenfrage began in the twelfth century. Venarde insists on the traditional framing of the question as a problem of too many women rather than as a problem of too few opportunities for women commensurate with those that opened for men (and encouraged them to celibacy or late marriage). I agree unconditionally that the history of women religious must be treated on its own terms, not as an adjunct to men's experience, but lack of comparison obscures inherent gender prob- lems. The failure of women's houses to ensure a steady flow and increase of endowments, for example, de- mands comparison with male success. Only when it is clear that women received far more modest endow- ments, poorer properties, or income rather than in- come-producing donations tied to a family strategy of supporting relatives can their economic activities be adequately assessed. Only when the success of the developing orders is highlighted can we understand the significance of women's exclusion.

Venarde has a tendency to see mysteries and con- troversies where they do not exist. He distorts studies that were originally pointed in a different direction to justify a contention that previous scholars have seen a setback for female monasticism in the twelfth century. I am at a loss to name the "historians of women and religious life" who depict the twelfth century as a period of retrenchment followed by expansion in the thirteenth. Certainly the imposition of clerical celibacy and a heightened emphasis on sacramental spirituality created restraints on women's religious activity. But no one has seriously challenged Jacques de Vitry's narra- tive outline dramatically incorporating women into the reform enthusiasm of the twelfth century followed by attempts at their exclusion in the thirteenth. Venarde's interpretation of women's exclusion from the new orders as proof of their autonomy and creativity is an original one. The prevailing opinion is that women were at a severe disadvantage in relationship to the equally skyrocketing male foundations precisely be- cause they were forced to remain "institutionally inde- pendent of the contemporaneous movements with which church historians are usually concerned" (p. 54). Despite his enthusiasm for female agency, however, Venarde uncritically accepts the idea that women's foundations were inspired by the energies of men (preachers or bishops) rather than women looking for official sanction.

The major weakness in this book is its lack of historical context, which could easily have been sup- plied from the growing historiography on twelfth- century women. Despite its conceptual weaknesses, I recommend it for its splendid documentation: both the

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1998

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Medieval 1239

database and the anecdotal material gleaned from the charters.

Jo ANN MCNAMARA Hunter College, City University of New York

IAIN MACLEOD HIGGINS. Writing East: The "Travels" of Sir John Mandeville. (The Middle Ages Series.) Phila- delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1997. Pp. ix, 335. $49.95.

This very carefully prepared and entertaining book exemplifies reader-response criticism. lain Macleod Higgins details a skilled contemporary reader's re- sponses to the Travels of the probably fictive John Mandeville and also deals with the responses to the French original (ca. 1356) of successive medieval copyists and translators both anonymous and known, like Michel Velser and Otto von Diemeringen. For Higgins, each rewriting or "overwriting" produced a new Mandeville just as good or bad as the original.

These collective overwritings of Mandeville's "multi- text" are "intertextual" (p. 12) "dialogic response[s] to previous and contemporary writings about the East" (p. 11) offered by a variety of different sensibilities. Higgins is less interested in the vexed question of Mandeville's borrowings from actual traveler narra- tives like those of Odoric of Pordenone and William of Boldensele (he skirts the plagiarism issue by seeing the Travels as a traditional medieval compilatio) than he is in the Mandeville author's own "representation of the multiple East." The compilatio technique shows the author's "at once bold and conservative attempt to fashion a single, more or less coherent textual and geographical world out of the diverse works" (p. 51) of his predecessors, a claim argued more forcefully in chapter three. Although there are few discoveries about either Mandeville's identity or the textual his- tory of his book here, what we do have is a response to the Travels by one who has obviously read and com- pared their many versions and variants, offering us an extremely detailed discussion of the various overwrit- ings and their historical results. For Higgins, the Travels are a "new kind of work that attempts to entertain, instruct, persuade, chastise, challenge, and console its imagined audience by providing" a fuller and more "theologically correct" (p. 13) picture of the world than that of Marco Polo.

Behind his critical approach is the assumption that "no text is ever simply given; it is always construed and constructed in the act of reading" (p. 16), a belief grounded on Bernard Cerquiglini's notion that "medi- eval writing does not produce variants; it is variance" (p. viii). Thus, Higgins is interested not only in what the Mandeville author actually wrote but also in the work's different versions, which omitted or interpo- lated material (for example, the story of Ogier the Dane) or rearranged it for heightened rhetorical ef- fectiveness.

This book can best be described as an extended

commentary on the Travels, which pauses along the journey to provide detailed analysis of certain key sections. Chapter one offers a general history of the book and its putative author, recent critical responses, and in brief compass the "stemmata" of the text, its variants, and translations. Chapter two considers the book's prologue (which Higgins places in the accessus ad auctorem tradition) with special attention to its rhetorical strategies as crusade propaganda-as a knight, Mandeville is bound to defend Christendom and expand its scope-and as an exploration of "the earthly place of Christianity [and] the extent of Latin Christendom" (p. 33). Indeed, the Mandeville author spends so much time on doctrinal matters and creedal differences because his "audience is defined as a religious community" (p. 42). This chapter also studies how the variants offer us different Mandevilles. Chap- ter three treats the Mandeville author's stop in Con- stantinople as a first stage on a pilgrimage route and shows that the Travels differ from more orthodox pilgrimage how-to books of the period by, among other things, adding the fascinating series of alphabets at the ends of sections describing different countries. Chap- ter four shows how the Travels rework William of Boldensele's material on Egypt, suppressing the orig- inal's animosity toward Saracens by seeking to human- ize them through the narrator's encounter with the Sultan. Chapters five and six treat the borrowings from Odoric in the portions dealing with India, China, the Tartary of the Great Khan (an exploration of earthly power), the beliefs of Caucasian Christians, the threat of Jewish escape from the walls of the land of Gog and Magog, and, finally, the Land of Prester John. Chapter seven considers Mandeville's "generous embrace of pagan piety" (p. 205) and his journey through the Vale Perilous as both an example of his ability to spin a tall yet compelling tale and an illustration of his personal piety before the one God who rules all men. The book's final chapter considers the Travels' coda: Mandeville, old and gouty, impelled to write by a Liegeois physician and getting his book validated by the pope in a personal audience.

Higgins's view of the Travels' purpose as "instruct- ing, chastising, challenging, and consoling [the] pro- jected Christian audience" (p. 267) is genial and appealing. Anyone journeying through this book will find, despite a few stops where the analysis seems more than the episode can bear, that the voyage is a rewarding and thought-provoking one.

JOHN B. FRIEDMAN

Kent State University

COLIN RICHMOND. The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century: Fastolf's Will. New York: Cambridge Univer- sity Press. 1996. Pp. xii, 276. $59.95.

This is the second of what will be at least three books by Colin Richmond devoted to the history of the Pastons. The first, The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century: The First Phase, appeared in 1990. Both works

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1998

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