Gender Roomours I

6      Chapter 3 and 4 consequently trace the complex legal history of slander, thus "bring[ing] into dialogue the scholarship of traditional legal historians with the sensibilities of literary criticism" (43). In English jurisdiction, slander was originally treated as an equivalent to physical assault. It was dealt with by the ecclesiastical courts and punished almost regardless of the fact whether the imputation was true or not. In the later course of the Middle Ages, the actual content of a slander became increasingly important and defamation jurisdiction was gradually taken up by secular courts. At these, "a most precarious situation" (47) resulted, in which slander as a criminal offence that endangered the public peace was based on the illocutionary equation of word and deed, whereas in private cases more modern, 'perlocutionary' assumptions concerning the instability of language were applied. It was exactly through the latter field, i.e. (practised) civil law rather than public law or legal writing, that slander jurisdiction came to play a major part in what Habermann sees as a humanist turn of the law, an equitable and experimental treatment of individual cases. Later, however, this culture of debate also served factional dispute and institutional closure, thereby facilitating male 'homosocialization' of the legal system.

7      Chapter 4 analyses the - passive as well as active - role of women in the legal discourse of slander. Within the complex entanglement of official and unofficial, juridical and ritual, forms of conflict settlement in the early modern period, Habermann reconstructs the important function of women as "brokers of oral reputation" (chapter title), which was, however, played down in legal treatises by men and strongly curtailed by an increasingly 'textualised' legal system. "[S]ocial ritual and forensic inquiry" finally "m[et] on the early modern stage" (67), and the theatre, in dramas such as Webster's The Devil's Law Case and Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, displayed and analysed not only a whole range of slander discourses but also the involvement of women in the practices of oral reputation. Both dramas posit the theatre as the supreme and most 'equitable' site of legal conflict settlement and women as important participants in these theatrical solutions, both for themselves and for the community as a whole. Implicitly, however, female power remains strongly contained and feminine settlements subtly disparaged, and so comedy emerges not so much as a critique of patriarchal institutionalisations of the law - let alone a counteracting force to them - but rather a mitigation of the consequences of this development.

8      The plays under consideration in chapter 5 are in the tradition of Guarini's Il Pastor Fido and therefore of a more ambitiously literary nature, linking slander to the question of authorship itself. In these dramas, women become the object of a courtship symbolic of "the uncertainties of social advancement through persuasive rhetoric" (79). As touchstones of male success in a modern, increasingly individualist society, they are strongly fetishised and occupy a limbo position between praise and slander. In The Faithful Sheperd, femininity is posited as the origin of the instabilities in a contemporary society recast as a pastoral world. Only one female character can be "[p]roperly husbanded" (86f.) and so engenders a re-semantisation of the Petrarchan language of desire into a discourse of property that in its turn can be connected to the author's own "struggle for patronage and advancement" (88). Ben Jonson's The Devil Is an Ass projects femininity as a "(tragi)comedy in which men play all the parts" (92), ultimately testifying to both the male power to create (fictional) women and to the function of these fictions in a patriarchal society. Mary Wroth's Love's Victory, however, goes another way. By recasting female slander as brokerage of oral reputation and as a genuine negotiation of gender relations, rather than simply an authoritarian expression of them, the narcissism and cruelty of men's sexual politics are exposed and criticised.

9      However, in contemporary (male) treatises on defamation, which Habermann analyses in chapter 6, slander is not only again heavily feminised but also written onto the body. The corporeal epitome for the spirit of detraction is the tongue, an "unruly member" (108) routinely associated with women. Slander is variously described as an evil force, disrupting both the community and the state as a whole, and as a "technology of power" (104), against which another technology, "the discourse of science" (105), has to be pitched. Although slander treatises, as a generalisation of particular cases (often connected to the authors themselves), stand in a reciprocal relation to slander plays, which particularise the general phenomenon, Habermann discovers a fascinating fusion of the two genres in the university play Lingua. As suggested by the title, Lingua is an attempt to concretise and thus to pin down the elusiveness of social communication in a twofold manner: by making the very scientific embodiment of an unruly female orality, the tongue, appear on stage as a female character. Hence it is not surprising, as Habermann impressively argues, that slander again came to function in an epistemic metadiscourse of the period in that, by being variously characterised as physical assault and 'intelligent' strategy, it embodied the transition from the medieval mind-body communio to a period in which "the modern dichotomy between mind and body" (113) began.

10      The pastoral writings examined in chapter 7 deepen the misogyny displayed by the scientific discourse on slander and thus reveal the more sinister - and authoritarian - side of the power practices of the church compared to the ecclesiastical jurisdiction explored in earlier chapters. The key image of a religiously motivated language scepticism is the notion of "government of the tongue," title of several pastoral treatises. "The tongue comes to stand as pars pro toto for the sinning Christian who must be governed, cured, examined, disciplined and punished" (122) and who is generally feminine, i.e. a woman or an effeminate man. Women's religious writing of the period avoided both the rhetorical eagerness of this discourse and the image of the tongue and instead developed a sober and meditative language of the heart and soul, which addressed God rather than the shallows of the world, but which nevertheless became quite acceptable and marketable. In this context, psalm translation emerged as the site not only of female self-fashioning but also of ambitious literary projects. In her translation, Mary Sidney Herbert both dissociates herself from slander and re-claims 'the tongue' in an impressively confident performance of authorship. The religious discourse as appropriated by women writers thus comes back to invigorate the very female (authorial) tongue it had set out to slander.