Contemporary feminist readers have argued that old French literary
representations of women--from the excessively beautiful lady of courtly
romance to the lascivious shrew of fabliau and farce--are the products
of misogynous male imagination and fantasy.
In Bodytalk, E. Jane Burns contends that female protagonists in
medieval texts authored by men can be heard to talk back against the
stereotyped and codified roles that their fictive anatomy is designed to
convey. She investigates key moments in which the words of these
medieval women dissent from and significantly restructure the
conceptions of female sexuality, wifely obedience, courtly love, and
adultery that are so often used to define and delimit femininity in the
French Middle Ages. Burns provides the feminist reader of medieval
literature with a strategy for reinterpreting the female body in its
stereotyped, fetishized, and fantasized for. Arguing that the gendered
body mattters in our reading of female protagonists, she shows how women
characters can rewrite, through their attributed speech, the narratives
that define and contain them.
Bodytalk is an incisive, polemical, sophisticated, and often witty
book about the gender issues that are raised by the very presence of
female characters in male-authored texts. It brings recent feminist
theory to bear upon the discussion of medieval texts, and contributes
significantly to current feminist criticism by offering historically
specific accounts of some of the founding moments of western conceptions
of love, desire, and sexuality.
A volume in the New Cultural Studies series.
