Gender and History in Medieval English Romance and Chronicle. by Laura D. barefield. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Pp. 135. $53.95.

In Gender and History in Medieval English Romance and Chronicle, Laura D. Barefield argues for a new reading of familiar materials, from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. "By juxtaposing the study of selected chronicles and romances," Barefield writes in her introduction, her book proposes to "unearth new possibilities for how gender and ideology are constructed in this pivotal period" (p. 9). Barefield considers a series of texts dealing with the legendary Trojan and Arthurian origins of Britain, and concludes that such origins are never the unproblematic guarantors of political and genealogical stability that they appear to be. Rather, she argues, these narratives of origin constantly reveal the tenuous nature of patriarchal genealogies and authority; this instability is always clearest when women, either as mothers or as female heirs, intrude upon the narrative. This may be true, but it is only the first in a series of truths which will seem to many readers to be self-evident; it may indeed be time for a more attentive look at the operation of sexual politics in chronicle, as opposed to romance, but this study does not advance our understanding of that operation very far.

Maud Burnett McInerney
Haverford College