Marilynn Desmond, Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), XVI + 206 pp.

摘要

The provocative title of Marilynn Desmond’s recent book belies its disap-npointingly flawed, presentist argument. While Ovid’s Ars amatoria has longnbeen accepted as one of the misogynist sources for the medieval texts thatnDesmond examines in five separate chapters—the twelfth-century letters ofnHeloise and Abelard, Jean de Meun’s late thirteenth-century continuation ofnGuillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose (particularly the section involving LanVieille, the Old Woman), fourteenth-century Geoffrey Chaucer’s character ofnthe Wife of Bath and the prologue to her tale in the Canterbury Tales, and thenearly fifteenth-century Querelle de la Rose concerning Jean’s Rose and com-nprised of letters between royal, ecclesiastical, and university officials andnChristine de Pizan—Desmond’s theoretical take on this literary genealogy ofnOvid mistakenly interprets domestic violence against women in the Wife ofnBath’s prologue (and elsewhere in antiquity and the Middle Ages) as a man-nifestation of sadomasochism and the fantasy role-play of sexual desire. In hernrhetorical positioning of various ancient and medieval sources as illustrationnfor the ideas of other theorists and critics, Desmond, on the one hand, ingen-niously presents conclusions that seem to support her conflation and, on thenother hand, slights arguments voiced by others about the specific texts thatnmight have anticipated (and, therefore, diminished) the importance of hernown.