Les Comédies bibliques. Marguerite de Navarre , Barbara Marczuk , Beata Skrzeszewska , Piotr TylusHélisenne de Crenne: At the Crossroads of Renaissance Humanism and Feminism. Diane S. Wood
Contextualizing Zayas' polemical posture in relation to doctrinal and scientific discourses of her time, Greer recognizes her subversion of essentialist definitions of woman. Her oblique protest is, furthermore, manifest in her transformation of the novella tradition. In her representation of the honor code, courtly love, and supernatural agency, she departs significantly from figures like Cervantes and Lope de Vega. Her fictions do not radically undo the Oedipal master plot (involving maternal absence), insofar as women are limited within the paternal order either to marriage or convent. However, in their choice for the convent, they are motivated, not by a longing for God, but by a "psychic attachment to the mother" (354). Where the application of psychoanalytic categories to seventeenth-century texts might, to some, seem methodologically questionable, Maria de Zayas Tells Baroque Tales of Love and the Cruelty of Men stands as an extraordinarily productive instance of this practice. Our understanding of the cultural dimensions of the texts and of their paradoxical nature is immensely enriched. Impressive in its lucid weaving together of twentieth-century and early modern definitions of the psyche, Baroque aesthetics, as well as Counter Reformation ideology, the study is a most valuable addition to the growing bibliography on Zayas. To all those interested in this author, and, more generally, in questions of subject and gender in Tridentine Spain, it will prove an inspiring source of reflection. ARIADNA GARCfA-BRYCE Reed College, Portland, OR