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Lady Godiva: A Literary History of the Legend by Daniel Donoghue (review)
- Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies
- UCLA, CMRS Center for Early Global Studies
- Volume 34, 2003
- pp. 222-224
- 10.1353/cjm.2003.0040
- Review
- Additional Information
REVIEWS 222 property of the public sphere” (187). Conversely, in William Thorpe’s narrative of his inquisition by Arundel, Copeland locates a disjunction between the intellectual leaders of the Lollard movement and the community as it continues after 1407 and the restrictions brought by Arundel’s Constitutiones. She writes that Thorpe “speaks for a movement that is on the verge of losing its strong university identity, its leadership passing into the hands of unbeneficed lower clergy and self-taught laymen, with few direct links to its original academic center” (196). One result is that, while Thorpe speaks for the Lollard movement, he has more ties with academics —both Lollard and orthodox—than with the dissenting lay community. Intriguingly , Copeland even suggests that Thorpe has more in common with Arundel than with lay dissenters. She writes, “The Thorpe ‘Testimony’ performs , as public and exemplary spectacle, the private transcript of the dominant class negotiating, within its own ranks, the limits and contradictions of exegetical power” (215). But, Copeland argues, the loss of the university center was by no means the end of the movement. She writes, “In effect... vernacular communities could carry on their own textual activities without further links with university intellectuals” (213–214), even though such hermeneutic equality was, she admits, always confined within the movement itself and did not spread to the larger political and legal community. Despite this shortcoming, she locates a powerful message in the successful move of hermeneutics from university to lay control. She writes that Thorpe’s text “demonstrates how the work of intellectuals defines itself through the project of teaching. And the products of intellectual labor, the pedagogical apparatuses that are exportable from one milieu to another, once set in motion, can long outlast the power of the individual teacher to teach” (218–219). This last quote, which ends the book, leads the reader back to the epigraph with which Copeland opens her Introduction: “For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” (Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 5). Copeland’s project is not simply to elucidate the pedagogy of a particular medieval sect, the Lollards, but to argue that such a study is relevant to our historical present, not, as she says, “in order to explain modern conditions of teaching and intellectual labor” (1), but to see our own concerns reflected in the past. Copeland’s conviction of the importance of the past for the present fills this book with energy, and, reading it, I could not suppress an increased excitement about pedagogy in the modern university. In her depiction of Lollardy ’s hermeneutical leap from the academy to the public, she presents modern scholars with a formidable (but rather thrilling) benchmark for the vigor and effect of our teaching. This added element leads me to suggest that Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Middle Ages deserves the attention of not only medievalists, but scholars of other periods as well. MARGARET LAMONT, English, UCLA Daniel Donoghue, Lady Godiva: A Literary History of the Legend (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers 2003) x + 159 pp., ill. Donoghue’s history of Lady Godiva is a luxurious, gratifying read—one feels upon finishing it that one has become quite the expert on this slightly naughty REVIEWS 223 topic! The author battles sparse and scattered historical documentation and literary references to give renewed continuity and depth to a legend who, despite wide dissemination in the modern commercial world, has lost or become disassociated from many of the most compelling particularities of her past. We rediscover, thanks to Donoghue, intriguing motivations not only for Godiva’s ride, but for the generation and appropriation of a narrative that, over many centuries, has allowed us to articulate questions pertaining to the relationship between the female body and the male gaze. The first chapter is dedicated to resituating the historical Godiva in a time, place and identity from which she has widely drifted in the collective memory. Godgifu of Mercia, anachronistically christened “Lady Godiva,” is revealed to be a substantially different person from what one might imagine based on the modern (and, Donoghue argues, decaying) legacy...