5
1
Hardcover
$84.95
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
84.95
In Stock
Overview
Exploring literary representations of women's laughter from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, this volume offers an intriguing look into a culture of women's laughter, illustrating the many contexts that shaped the way women told jokes, as well as the ways their joking reflected their limited position in a society dominated by men. The book also considers the uses male authors made of the laughter of their fictional creations and the pleasures offered to both male and female audiences.
This study is the first to investigate women's laughter as a particular kind of "talking back" to medieval discourse on women, the subject of recent feminist medievalist studies. Female characters openly embrace women's laughter, associated with the body and castigated for its unruliness in conduct literature. Acknowledging that comic works were grounded in antifeminist traditions and that their female characters were in fact targets of laughter for male authors, this study argues that female characters who laugh and tell jokes also offer traces of how women might have used their laughter to respond to negative pronouncements about women in medieval culture. Both laughable and laughing, the female protagonists studied in this book will engage modern readers with their witty, sometimes bawdy jokes, allowing us to imagine the pleasures that medieval comic literature, so often labeled misogynous, offered to women as well as to men.
Lisa Perfetti is Assistant Professor of French, Muhlenberg College.
This study is the first to investigate women's laughter as a particular kind of "talking back" to medieval discourse on women, the subject of recent feminist medievalist studies. Female characters openly embrace women's laughter, associated with the body and castigated for its unruliness in conduct literature. Acknowledging that comic works were grounded in antifeminist traditions and that their female characters were in fact targets of laughter for male authors, this study argues that female characters who laugh and tell jokes also offer traces of how women might have used their laughter to respond to negative pronouncements about women in medieval culture. Both laughable and laughing, the female protagonists studied in this book will engage modern readers with their witty, sometimes bawdy jokes, allowing us to imagine the pleasures that medieval comic literature, so often labeled misogynous, offered to women as well as to men.
Lisa Perfetti is Assistant Professor of French, Muhlenberg College.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472113217 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2003 |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Lisa Perfetti is Assistant Professor of French, Muhlenberg College.
Read an Excerpt
Women & Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature
By Lisa Renee Perfetti
University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2003 Lisa Renee PerfettiAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0472113216
I "Myn entente nys but for to pleye" - The Game of Antifeminism and the Wife of Bath's Invitation to Laughter
But yet I praye to al this compaignye,Chaucer's Wife of Bath is undoubtedly the most famous unruly woman of medieval literature, and she has generated more debate among literary scholars than any other medieval fictional character, a debate that has focused above all on questions of gender. While some argue for viewing her as a kind of feminist avant la lettre because she so thoroughly attacks the antifeminist corpus, others insist that she is an embodiment of all the misogynous cliches of Chaucer's time. Much of the discussion on this question has centered around the intentions of the author. Could Chaucer himself have been a sort of feminist who had a sympathy and respect for women uncharacteristic of men of his time? Or did he mean the garrulous and libidinous Wife to serve as a satirical example of the reasons men must be on guard against women? Was the Wife, in effect, the victim of a joke at her own expense, a joke between Chaucer and his male readers?
If that I speke after my fantasye,
As taketh not agrief of that I seye,
For myn entente nys but for to pleye.
(III.189-92)
It is not difficult to imagine that medieval readers might have found the Wife laughable, yet her declaration that her intent is only to play, announced early on in her prologue, invites us to consider the precise nature of the laughter she generates. Much attention has been given to how her "woman's voice" belongs to Chaucer's larger preoccupation with the "social contest," but little has been done to place her contesting voice within his interest in laughter and play. Examining how the Wife's laughter and playfulness intersect with Chaucer's own use of these elements throughout the Canterbury Tales will help us to understand the complexity of Chaucer's use of his female character as well as to consider what the Wife tells us about the possible uses of playfulness by women in medieval culture.
The word pleye as used in the Canterbury Tales, like our modern word play, encompasses several meanings. In addition to signifying the playing of a musical instrument, playing or acting a part, and flirting, it can also mean to amuse oneself and to jest or be playful. It is these last two meanings that are most relevant to the Wife's declaration. As early as the General Prologue the Wife's laughter and joviality are highlighted: "In felaweshipe wel koude she laughe and carpe. / Of remedies of love she knew per chaunce, / For she koude of that art the olde daunce" (474- 76). This portrait is ambivalent, for the statement that she can "carpe," or find fault and complain, links her laughter with the stereotype of the quarrelsome woman. Her laughter is also linked to her sexuality since she knows the arts of sex ("the olde daunce"), is dressed in scarlet clothing, has a red face, and is "gat-tothed," which in medieval culture signified a large sexual appetite. All of these characteristics combine to create a portrait of the "bad girl" whose excessive female sexuality is linked to wide-mouthed laughter and joking.
The Wife's laughter is coded as feminine in its carnality, but it is also connected to the Canterbury Tales' larger preoccupation with communal play. Her carping is done in "felaweshipe," part of a convivial and friendly exchange. Her disposition puts her in line with the Host's invocation to the pilgrims as they set out for Canterbury that they shall tell stories and "pleye," since "confort ne myrthe is noon / To ride by the weye doumb as a stoon." He further pledges to "maken yow disport" and "doon yow som confort" (I.771- 76). The Wife's ability to laugh and play, described early in the General Prologue, thus aligns her with the festive context established for the storytelling game. As Glending Olson has shown, this literature as game or play topos of the Canterbury Tales should be understood in the context of medieval theories of recreation whereby play is justified as a useful means of refreshing the mind, a temporary release ultimately allowing a return to seriousness and work. When Chaucer reminds his readers before the Miller's Tale that "men shal nat maken ernest of game" (I.3186), he is essentially taking up the second half of the Horatian formula justifying poetry for profit or pleasure (prodesse aut delectare), announcing the goal of such fiction as recreative rather than instructive, thus distinguishing it from his other fictions, but in itself useful for the appropriate space of the journey to Canterbury. This temporary space of play is illustrated in the structure of Chaucer's work, for while mirth rules over the course of the pilgrimage, and the Host castigates pilgrims for breaking the festive tone set at the beginning, both pilgrims and Host alike ultimately assent to the return to seriousness enjoined by the Parson as the journey to Canterbury reaches its final goal. Play may be enjoyed for the delight it brings, but it is ultimately justified by the ethical context provided by the recreative theory.
But Olson also notes that Chaucer does more than simply reiterate the well-worn notion of recreative literature as solace, since he will ultimately "subject the theory of recreation, so comfortably announced and endorsed in the appropriately merry circumstances of after-dinner confabulatio, to the strains of human tension, to dramatize the difference between idea and motive." It is in the context of this human tension that the other important meaning of pleye comes to bear. Pilgrims hide behind the excuse of play as a communal activity in their personally motivated jests or insults at the expense of others, usually those of competing social orders. Despite the storytellers' claims that their stories or comments should not be taken in earnest, their listeners do take offense, and Chaucer dramatizes, through these exchanges, the risks entailed by using jest as a vehicle for expressing earnest intent. When the Wife begs her audience to "taketh nat agrief " what she has to say because her intent is only to play, she is serving notice that some of her listeners are not going to like what they are about to hear. That she delivers her protofeminist defense under the cover of play only renders more ambiguous the earnestness of her message. Indeed, Olson comments that for the Wife, "the line between private motives and public entertainment becomes deliberately difficult to draw" (159). How does the Wife take the stage and use the storytelling contest to promote her "private motives?" How do the competing meanings of play--festive, convivial, amusement of the public versus (tendentious) jesting of the private--complicate the Wife's message relating to one woman's life story and the larger story of antifeminism into which she weaves it? And for what reason does Chaucer allow his Wife to play such a game?
Antifeminism as Game
Toward the end of her prologue, the Wife recounts how her fifth husband, the clerk Jankyn, would read to her nightly from a compendium of antifeminist texts, a book of "wikked wyves." Seeing that he would not desist from his readings, the Wife ripped three pages out of the book. In retaliation, Jankyn boxed her on the ear, causing her to become partially deaf. This scene stages how the antifeminist tradition accessible to the clerical elite educated in Latin could make its way to an uneducated woman's ears. The harm that the intrusion of clerical antifeminism into the domestic sphere could do to women is described more explicitly by Christine de Pizan. In a letter to Pierre Col about the Roman de la Rose, Christine says that she has heard about a highly educated and respected man who, whenever he was angry with his wife, would "go and find the book and read it to his wife; then he would become violent and strike her and say such horrible things as 'These are the kinds of tricks you pull on me. This good, wise man Master Jean de Meun knew well what women are capable of.'" The fact that Jankyn is a clerk at Oxford is significant. It was the university-trained clerks who inherited, reworked, and transmitted misogyny to society at large, for their writings were collected and used as the source not only for preachers but for individual men who commissioned collections such as Jankyn's book of wicked wives. Numerous illustrations in the margins of medieval manuscripts depict jousts between clerks and women, attesting to the prevalence of this notion of women and clerks as traditional enemies (fig. 1).
Perhaps the most interesting, but often overlooked, detail relating to Chaucer's scene is that Jankyn laughs while reading his collection: "He hadde a book that gladly, nyght and day, / For his desport he wolde rede alway; / He cleped it Valerie and Theofraste, / At which book he lough alwey ful faste" (669- 72). Jankyn reads the book not only to lecture his unruly wife but also for his own "desport." Clerical antifeminism appears here like a kind of joke passed from man to man. Indeed, a text that evokes this male coterie of humor is Richard De Bury's The Love of Books (Philobiblon), written in England in around 1344. De Bury imagines books talking about women who enviously curse them because the clerks who buy books could be spending their money on hats and furs for their lady friends instead. The books note the irony of women's cursing of clerk's books, for it is what they say about women, rather than their cost, to which women should object: "And with good reason, if she could see what lies within our hearts, if she had attended our private deliberations, if she had read the book of Theophrastus or Valerius, or if she had only listened with comprehending ears to the twenty-fifth chapter of Ecclesiasticus."
The joke is on women since because they do not know Latin, they do not have the "comprehending ears" that would allow them to understand antifeminist discourse. The reference to Theophrastus and Valerius in De Bury's anecdote recalls the Wife's description of Jankyn's book: "He cleped it Valerie and Theofraste." However, in Chaucer's scene, the distinction between Latin and the vernacular, the written and the oral, is elided, for the Wife is both witness to and victim of the allegedly private joke between men, since Jankyn reads to her from the book and laughs openly in front of her.
The scene then invites the question: if antifeminism is a joke between men, how can women respond to it? The Wife's earlier warning that her listeners should not take offense at her words because they are offered under the guise of "pleye" should alert us to the fact that she is ready to play the game, rendering tit for tat. But even more important, the Wife makes clear that the playing field is unequal since women have not written a history of their own:
For trusteth wel, it is an impossibleIn asking who painted the lion, the Wife is alluding to a fable in which a lion and a man look at a portrait that shows a man killing a lion. If the man appears to be the stronger, it is simply because it is a man who painted the portrait and who thus controls the story about men and lions. By implication, the Wife is suggesting that women, denied access to the clerks' "oratories," have not been able to write a history of their own and thus to respond on equal footing to men's defamation of women. Furthermore, by noting that clerks only speak highly of saints but not of any other women, the Wife attacks the tradition that allows no place for the majority of women like herself who are not saints. In the Wife's use of the term "mark of Adam" we get a glimpse of how the Wife's own response will work, for with it she has slyly returned the charge made against women as the mark of Eve. More than defending women against clerk's attacks through logical refutation, she attacks the clerical establishment itself, characterizing their writing as nothing but the jealous raving of impotent clerks: "The clerk, whan he is oold, and may noght do / Of Venus werkes worth his olde sho, / Thanne sit he doun, and writ in his dotage / That wommen kan nat kepe hir mariage!" (707- 10). While the Wife views the clerks' waning sexual powers as the motivation for their misogyny, Christine de Pizan later identifies the (hyper)sexuality of clerks: "And all those clerks, who said so much against them [women], were, more than other men, maddened by lust, not for a single woman only but for thousands of them."
That any clerk wol speke good of wyves,
But if it be of hooly seintes lyves,
Ne of noon oother womman never the mo.
Who peyntede the leon, tel me who?
By God, if wommen hadde writen stories,
As clerkes han withinne hire oratories,
They wolde han writen of men moore wikkednesse
Than al the mark of Adam may redresse. (688- 96)
In addition to showing that women have not had equal access to the playing field, the Wife demonstrates how the rules of the game are always skewed against women. Women are consistently defined as excess, occupying opposite ends of a spectrum:
Thou seist to me it is a greet meschief
To wedde a povre womman, for costage;
And if that she be riche, of heigh parage,
Thanne seistow that it is a tormentrie
To soffre hire pride and hire malencolie.
And if that she be fair, thou verray knave,
Thou seyst that every holour wol hire have.
(248- 54)
Continues...
Excerpted from Women & Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature by Lisa Renee Perfetti Copyright © 2003 by Lisa Renee Perfetti. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
What People are Saying About This
E. Jane Burns
Women and Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature provides a fascinating
and timely study of medieval attitudes toward women's laughter in religious
and didactic literature as well as philosophical and medical treatises,
while foregrounding the unruly laughing heroines in comic texts. Perfetti's
careful readings of English, French, Italian, German, and Arabic texts help
us to imagine women's laughter in comic texts as a possible response to
varied medieval debates about gendered identities.
— University of North Carolina
From the B&N Reads Blog
Page 1 of