Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image. Edited by Emma Campbell and Robert Mills. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pp. viii + 243; 17 illustrations. $65.

This collection of original essays originated at a 2002 conference in London called "Seeing Gender: Perspectives on Medieval Gender and Sexuality." Eight of the twelve essays address continental texts, two examine English devotional writings, and two focus on painting. The title invokes the work of Judith Butler to suggest that, as the editors put it, "the visual encounter is the site of a particular kind of trouble" (p. 2) that disrupts the look's own official assumptions. For visual methodologies the essays draw primarily on twentieth-century psycho/social theorists: Freud, Lacan, Foucault, and Žižek. Representations of vision, these essays argue, engage the reader (or viewer) in a complex negotiation between licit and illicit desires; acts of looking in the texts and objects examined here challenge any assumptions we might have about a medieval male gaze or its female object.

Sarah Stanbury
College of the Holy Cross