Helen Solterer

The Master and Minerva.

Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture

California University Press 1995

Stron XII+301, format: 15x23 cm

Can words do damage? For medieval culture, the answer was—unambiguously—yes. And as Helen Solterer contends, the representation of women exemplified the question of injurious language. The conventions of depicting female personae and women's knowledge provided a test case for assessing such damage and bringing authors to pub¬lic account.
Solterer investigates the verbal injury of women in the context of the medieval dispu-tation. She argues that the debates over women between masters and their disciples cul-tivated the agonistic force of language. It was the figure of the woman respondent who challenged such language and revealed a significant change in the conceptions of injury. Across a broad range of Old French literature to the early modern Querelle des femmes, Solterer shows how this figure became an instrument for disputing as slanderous the dominant models of representing women. The respondent exploited the criterion of injurious language that so preoccupied medieval masters, bringing it to bear on canoni¬cal writing. In the controversies over the Roman de la rose and the Belle Dame sans merci, she charged master poets ethically and legally with libel. By placing the question of injurious language in the framework of a woman's response, Solterer recasts an early, decisive chapter in the history of defamation.
"Solterer discovers what may well prove to be the beginning of the history of libel. . . . This is an entirely new finding with extremely broad implications related to the current legal preoccupation with linguistic forms of sexual harassment. One of the more fasci¬nating aspects of Solterer's work is the way she demonstrates the use of the inscribed female figure in male texts as a self-generated contestation of their own ideologies. This raises the compelling question of why such texts interrogate their own privilege." —Gabrielle M. Spiegel, author of Romancing the Past
"A rich and eminently plausible thesis. ... An extraordinary book: innovative, incisive, challenging, clear, beautifully written, and (dare I say it?) masterful." —Jody Enders, author of Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama


Contents


List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
PART 1    PROFILES IN MASTERY
1    Ovidian and Aristotelian Figures 23
2    The Trials of Discipleship: Le Roman de la poire and Le Dit de la panthère d'amours 61
3    The Master at Work: Richard de Fournival's Bestiaire d'amour 79
PART 2    PROLIFERATING RESPONSES
4    Contrary to What Is Said: The Response au Bestiaire d'amour and the Case for a Woman's Response 97
5    Defamation and the Livre de leesce: The Problem of a Sycophantic Response 131
6    Christine's Way: The Querelle du Roman de la rose and the Ethics of a Political Response 151
7    A Libelous Affair: The Querelle de la Belle Dame sans merci and the Prospects for a Legal Response 176
Coda: Clotilde de Surville and the Latter-Day History of the Woman's Response 201
Notes 217 Bibliography 269
Index 295