Female Desire in Chaucer's “Legend of Good Women” and Middle English Romance. Lucy M. Allen-Goss. Gender in the Middle Ages 15. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. ix + 226 pp. $99.

Abstract

also through the interplay of both texts taken together. Anselm Havercamp's penultimate chapter turns to "Hegel's reading of Shakespeare" as perhaps the "foremost instance of what it means philologically, in terms of method, to read literature philosophically" (168), and finds that "Hegel deciphered in Shakespeare's theatre an epistemological drama of objective history, rather than of lived experience" (178).For the final chapter, Paul A. Kottman takes Hegel's commentary on bliss in Christian art, most fully realized in "the religious love, the passionless love, of Mary for her son, Christ" (187), as the framework for a perceptive reconsideration of Stanley Cavell's reading of The Winter's Tale, foregrounding instead the crucial role of "maternal grief and maternal love" (195) in Leontes's conflicted path toward acknowledgment and restoration. An afterword by Charles McNulty offers a closing rumination on the challenges and rewards of staging King Lear, a play sometimes figured as more readable than performable in its philosophical complexities.All told, Entertaining the Idea collects original, engaging essays that deftly handle the unique pressures the phenomenology of performance can exert on the history of ideas and the matter of embodied ethics.