Gender, Reading, and Truth in the Twelfth Century

The twelfth century witnessed the birth of modern Western European literary tradition: major narrative works appeared in both French and in German, founding a literary culture independent of the Latin tradition of the Church and Roman Antiquity. But what gave rise to the sudden interest in and legitimization of literature in these “vulgar tongues"? Until now, the answer has centred on the somewhat nebulous role of new female vernacular readers. Powell argues that a different appraisal of the same evidence offers a window onto something more momentous: not “women readers” but instead a reading act conceived of as female lies behind the polysemic identification of women as the audience of new media in the twelfth century. This woman is at the centre of a re-conception of Christian knowing, a veritable revolution in the mediation of knowledge and truth. By following this figure through detailed readings of key early works, Powell unveils a surprise, a new poetics of the body meant to embrace the capacities of new audiences and viewers of medieval literature and visual art.

Powell Morgan :

Dr. Morgan Powell is a scholar of the media history of the Middle Ages and Lecturer of English at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences and Arts.

Isabel Barros Felix:

[Morgan Powell] montre la façon dont l’expérience de la femme dans la narration renouvelle et rend présente l’expérience mariale en tant que corps du Verbe. Amenés à s’identifier avec la femme et avec sa faiblesse face à Dieu, les laïcs ont désormais accès à la gnosis féminine. Le xiie siècle propose alors une lecture alternative visant à rendre accessible le savoir à un public nouveau. Celle-ci se développe dans un processus de translation où latin devient vernaculaire, lecture devient performance, et liturgie se transforme en instruction poétique. Ainsi, suivant le parcours analytique de l’A., depuis le Cantique des Cantiques jusqu’aux textes vernaculaires, la lecture s’étend du milieu monastique au milieu laïque grâce à la femme, médiatrice d’une nouvelle poétique sensorielle du savoir.

Sara S. Poor:

Morgan Powell begins this impressive, well-written volume by taking issue with the connection made in German scholarship (and in that of other European languages) between the emer- gence of vernacular literatures and the evidence of women’s involvement in bookish culture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The corresponding argument that an increase in women’s literacy arises from this emergence is, Powell finds, fatally flawed. With broad strokes he sweeps this “literacy hypothesis” aside, at least as far as the long twelfth century is concerned.[...]

Some readers might stumble at the language of originality and genius that filters in and out of Powell’s narrative, particularly in the chapters focusing on Chrétien and Wolfram. Yet, when we consider that all writers at this time learn to read or write in a religious context regardless of gender, the notion that a mode of knowing emerging out of this context would also manifest in what we call secular literature is one of those insights that is as profound as it is obvious, once it is pointed out.

Alison L. Beringer:

Morgan Powell’s Gender, Reading, and Truth in the Twelfth Century: The Woman in the Mirror is a meticulously written and highly sophisticated book that argues for a re-evaluation and new understanding of the act of reading and of the meaning of a female reader (including in the form of an iconographic representation in manuscripts and as a textual motif) in the long twelfth century. Eschewing binaries such as literate/illiterate, vernacular/Latin, oral/written, male/female, and even text/picture, Powell’s approach offers a much more complex and ultimately convincing approach to understanding the rise of vernacular literature and the role women--or rather “the woman”--played in the twelfth century.