Selected Writings by Marguerite de Navarre

One could have however wished him to mention Carolyne Larrington's still-relevant Women and Writing in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook (1995), which offers an even wider geographical and generic range of texts than Classen's monograph. He also mentions, in another context, Ann Klinck and Ann Marie Rasmussen's edited volume Medieval Woman's Song: Cross-Cultural Approaches (2002) and that of Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace ( The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women's Writing, 2003)-which, though mainly focused on women's writings in Middle English and Old French, sets its essays in a much broader context. The author is right to note in his review of the relevant scholarship the dearth of scholarly volumes on female writers in the medieval West spanning more than one region, citing Peter Dronke's Women Writers of the Middle Ages (1984) and Joan Ferrante's To the Glory of her Sex (1997) as notable exceptions. The size of this 'map' cannot however do justice to regional or chronological specificities, for instance the comparatively important number of female scribes in medieval Germany, the fourteenth-century nonnenbücher, or East Anglia as a fertile ground for fifteenth-century women's involvement in writing. As Classen himself states, 'in many respect the present project will not really offer profoundly new insights or introduce us to female writers who have been entirely unknown so far' (38), his aim rather being to present 'a literary map with numerous islands populated by meaningful, powerful, insightful female writers.to the new student generation interested in women's issues and literature' (39).

In many ways, the breadth of the subject is both this book's main strength and its Achilles' heel: Classen's multilingual expertise enables him to treat sources that are very seldom if ever dealt with together, but the scope of the monograph does not allow for much in-depth discussion of each writer, or for the introduction of a particularly original argument.

Juliette of the eight chapters that constitute Albrecht Classen's new book offers an introduction to and summary discussion of a different medieval European female writer, spanning from the tenth-century Hrotsvitha to the sixteenth-century Marguerite de Navarre, and deals with a variety of literary genres, in Latin as well as in the medieval vernaculars of France, Germany, Spain, and England.

Selected Writings by Marguerite de Navarre