This monograph sets out to discuss, describe, and provide reasons for changes to the classification of nouns with respect to whatever is meant by “gender”. The author explores in some detail the discrepancies of various types that can arise in a language like early English, where nouns appear to be classified in the user's lexicon with reference to criteria that, on the whole, are nonrecoverable. That grammars of early English group nouns into three “types” (not altogether helpfully labeled masculine, feminine, and neuter) probably reflects an awareness of a typology based (among other things) on the value of a particular noun's stressed vowel (long, short, front, back, and so on), a basis that over time, altered by the workings of phonological change, has become opaque to the language user, so that what has turned out (possibly completely randomly as a three-, rather than a two- or four-way grouping) represents a fossilization of a previously transparent set of alternations. That this three-way grouping of nominal elements is mapped onto a pronominal system that, at least partially, is also tripartite, leads the observer, and perhaps also the language user, to seek some kind of correlation between the two sets. And since pronominal usage in English, possibly at all periods of its history, can be mapped onto extralinguistic concepts such as sex and animacy differences, there is the obvious temptation to likewise categorize the fossilized nominal divisions along the same kinds of lines. Thus, we find a situation in the earliest English where the majority of male and female referent nouns belonged to the masculine and feminine gender groups, while type three—the neuter—was the domain of the inanimate referent. Ross (1936) claimed that this “imperfect” match was rectified in late Old English through the reclassification of those female and masculine gender nouns that represented nonhuman or inanimate entities into the neuter category, a process Ross called neutralization. The main subject of this book encompasses the debate centering around this claim, particularly as it affects the relationship between the surface form of the third person pronouns he, she, and it in relation to the sex/gender specification of their referent noun.

But we have to wait for many pages before this issue of syntactic and semantic change is fully addressed. Much of the introductory chapter is given over to praise for the usefulness of feminist linguistic theory (although it is never quite clear subsequently how this model affects the central issue of the book), while the reader is expected to share the author's enjoyment of the fact that the pronoun she was voted “Word of the Millennium” by the American Dialect Society: “She as a feminine linguistic marker represents a fundamental social category and its ascendance can be seen as symbolic of the gains by women at the end of the millennium. … She is just the kind of word that is the focus of this book” (1). In fact, this last claim is not the central issue of this monograph: its scope is much wider than that. Yet it is difficult to see what relevance such blatantly political statements have for what that central issue turns out to be. Chapter 1 makes a useful contribution to the debate on defining English gender, and the author is to be commended for setting to one side some worn-out theses concerning gender classifications (especially those resulting from often farfetched personifications) and for stressing the importance of attitudinal (often socially motivated) criteria. She is to be commended too for highlighting the serious difficulties involved in attempting classifications that are binary rather than scalar, although she could have done more to develop this important issue. Yet the discussion of the history of gender description and analysis in English through time is very disappointing and marred by comments which, at best, can be described as unfortunate. Although Mark Twain's views on the complex issues of gender reclassification can safely be ignored by the serious scholar, Curzan's claim that the observations by scholars such as Jespersen and Baugh on this topic are motivated by “the assumption of English's obvious advantages or superiority” (38) are surely misguided. At the same time, one would like to see Curzan's rationale for statements like “[l]anguage histories, much like dictionaries, are ways to legitimize, if not glorify, a language. And the loss of grammatical gender is often presented as a tribute to the English language and to the English mind believed to have molded it” (41). One wonders if this author would be so ready to make such a claim about grammars and dictionaries of Inuit or Navaho. In particular the criticisms of Jespersen are wholly unnecessary and taken out of the context of his work as a whole as well as that of the period in which he was writing. The present-day community of historical linguists would be the richer if it could boast a scholar of Jespersen's caliber.

The author recognizes that gender change affects morphological as well as pronominal agreement in the late Old English period and, for reasons that are never quite made clear, claims that these two phenomena are interdependent. But it is the claim that “[n]atural gender is, therefore, able to triumph should morphologically determined gender break down” (44) that can only be described as a non sequitur, especially given the evidence from early Middle English texts such as the Peterborough Chronicle where, alongside massive changes to adjective and noun morphology (rather than any breakdown to the same), gender classification in pronominal usage according to some kind of biological animacy/sex distinction is active. Again, in a late Old English Northumbrian gloss like the Durham Ritual, the glossator is prepared to innovate in his own language by producing a contrast like pissum/passum (the a on the analogy of the object feminine pas shape) to translate the Latin gender contrast hoc/hac. But it is particularly disturbing to read (45) of “the introduction of the new pronoun she” in the Peterborough Chronicle. There is no reason whatever to believe that there is anything other than evidence for phonological change in this case, certainly not for lexical innovation. The Old English he/heo contrast merely surfaces in Middle English as he/scae/she/sho as a result of a change such that [heo] through diphthong stress shifting, is interpreted as [hjo] with the [hj] component interpreted as [S]. While she recognizes Britton's work in this area, the author still sees such a development as phonologically “unnatural” on grounds she never explains; she ought to have known that for many Scottish English speakers, for instance, lexical items such as she and shoe/Hugh are homophonous.

The history of gender alternation is bedeviled by appeals to a variety of influencing factors. Genuswechsel is attributed to a wide range of sources, many of them completely fanciful, but language contact is an area worthy of consideration. Curzan explores, only to more or less reject, the creole theory for language change (especially morphological depletion) in late Old and early Middle English, while some of her observations on the status of English and its dialectal variants are too obvious to be worth stating: “This recognition of dialectal variation immediately disrupts any linear conception of English as it affirms that ‘English’ is, in fact, a conglomeration of related dialects, not one standard language with subsidiary dialects; the history of English is the history of its dialects” (54). Since the beginnings of major changes to the Old English gender system appear in Northern dialectal texts—notably in the Lindisfarne Gospels and Durham Ritual—it would not seem unreasonable to posit a scenario where a northern speaker might utilize a gender classification of a noun under the influence of a contemporary Norse word; so too Southern speakers might be similarly influenced by Norman French. But the problem with such suggestions lies in their untestability; why do language “borrowers” target a particular foreign word as synonymous with their native one, thus changing the latter's gender? What happens if there are several near-synonyms in the foreign language for native speakers to associate with their native lexical item? Which one do they chose? Why do they not always go for the foreign item whose gender is shared with their native word? How do they come to know the gender of the foreign word in the first instance?

Curzan reiterates the well known fact that the majority of male and female referent nouns in Old English were classified as masculine or feminine respectively. Even in those (well attested) cases where this match is not found, “nouns such as the masculine noun wifmann ‘woman’, and the neuter nouns wif ‘woman’, mægden ‘young woman, maiden’, bearn ‘child’, and cild ‘child’, for which the biological sex and grammatical gender do not correspond—natural gender almost always prevails in the anaphoric pronouns” (62). Curzan points out (64) that other factors are involved as well when such mismatches occur, factors such as age: “Through cnihthad ‘boyhood,’ the child is hit, but upon hitting gioguphad ‘youth, adolescence,’ it becomes he”; she feels compelled to continue “and continues to be he until he hits old age, blindness, and the other rewards of the gendered adult world” (whatever this last phrase means). But there is no doubt that she is correct in stressing that gender shifting (if this is really the most appropriate term in such cases) is influenced by a multitude of factors in addition to biology. Curzan's emphasis on factors relating to discourse are very important and will deserve further detailed investigation, and it is helpful to see suggestions that lexical factors are also an issue, “resilient” nouns being less ready to show the same degree of anaphoric reference variation. Curzan makes the interesting suggestion too that the gender content of anaphoric reference may well be constrained by what she calls the relative “distance” from the pronoun in the discourse from its nominal referent. She rather crudely assesses the number of words separating pronoun from antecedent as a factor in the selection of the former, whereas an equally important factor may well be the syntactic complexity or otherwise for the discourse itself. Is pronominal agreement influenced by the degree of embedding (syntactic distance) from its antecedent: Is there a “default” pronoun in such cases? Better this, surely, than a suggestion like the one that there is a “passage in which the feminine noun punorrade ‘thunder’ is referred back to with a masculine pronoun, probably because it directly follows a passage about punor ‘thunder’, a masculine noun” (102). In any event, she never explores the basis on which such low-frequency items like punorrade are assigned a gender value in the first place: Does the native speaker actually “know” what all the correct genders of all the items in the lexicon actually are? Can variance be ascribed to unfamiliarity?

Curzan, probably correctly, concludes that before 1250 “grammatical gender agreement appears robust in the anaphoric pronouns, and after this period, grammatical gender agreement appears infrequently and mostly with resilient nouns” (106). This has been the opinion of scholarship in this field for over fifty years. But there are two problems: Why did this system break down, and why did it break down in the way it did? The first question she answers by the claim that as long as adjective/noun gender agreement was robust, so too was that for anaphora. When the former began to change, that left the way open for mutations in the latter. The rationale for the second question Curzan states as follows (107):

And again (111): “Ambiguity with the masculine form undoubtedly plays a role in the replacement of dative him, by accusative hit with reference to neuter nouns; this ambiguity also seems to drive the ‘culprit’ ambiguous forms his and him out of use for both masculine and inanimate nouns.” But this is surely an oversimplification as an explanation for “case syncretism” in the third person pronoun. The loss of a possessive marker for inanimate marking in pronouns is hardly surprising given the semantics of inanimate possession, where that of the inalienable type is all that is (nonmetaphorically) appropriate. Indeed, the subsequent history of the inanimate possessive shows that an s-morpheme was a late arrival (recall it lifted up it head in Hamlet), while even today, wherever it occurs, its is still graphically confused with it's. There is also some evidence from sixteenth-century materials for the (mis)interpretation of the s-morpheme as a contraction of the his pronoun: vide Cleopatra his beauty as a rendering of Cleopatra's beauty. On the other hand, a strong argument could be made for interpreting such pronominal syncretism as being “driven” by case marking (that is, noun/verb relationships) rather than factors relating to animacy “ambiguity.” For instance, the female pronoun is, by early Middle English, characterized by an agentive (she) versus nonagentive (hire) bifurcation; the neuter/inanimate by a system whereby only relationships like possession versus nonpossession are marked (an agentive being “inappropriate” for inanimates; it moved infers ‘some agent caused it to move’), the possession component itself subsequently effaced. Only in the male third person pronoun do we find a wide range of case marking with agentive he, possession his, and a location/absolutive conflation under him. Taken in its entirety, this set of changes has one defining characteristic: There is no longer any unique way of marking the absolutive/objective case in third person pronouns in the early Middle English period.

The sections on changes in the lexical fields of sex/gender indicating lexical items like wif, wifmonn and mann in the early history of English represent one of the few attempts in recent scholarship to trace the important semantic innovations and refinements taking place under a variety of influences, social as well as linguistic, although Curzan is careful to leap to (perhaps otherwise attractive) explanations in this area (163): “that the Norman Conquest and the subsequent imposition of a feudal system wrested away the more equal rights that woman had enjoyed in Anglo-Saxon times … could well be reflected in the lexical developments of gendered words; in retrospect, however, it is difficult to determine—and probably dangerous to assume—any straightforward connection between, for example, the loss of economic independence of women and the specification of wife from ‘woman’ to ‘married woman, homemaker’.”

It is difficult for this reviewer to see the relevance of the last section of this book, “Implications for nonsexist language reform,” on its central arguments. Curzan concludes: “The details presented over the past few chapters about the history of gender in English pronouns and selected nouns depict in part a history of sexism in both the English language and in grammars describing the English language. They also demonstrate the complexity of grammatical and semantic change—that generic he did not arise in a cultural vacuum or as the simple result of prescriptivism, and that the historical generic meaning of man does not transparently transfer to Modern English. One of the goals of this book is to make this kind of linguistic information more accessible to a wider audience who may chose to participate in discussions of how we wish to negotiate the relationship of gender in our speech community and gender in our language” (183–184). And given the emphasis placed upon the evolution of generic he, it is disappointing that this study fails to look at relative pronoun pe/pat distribution in early Middle English as it may, or may not, reflect the sex/animacy/gender of its antecedent, especially when there are such interesting cases in texts like the Lambeth Homilies appearing to attest “generic” constructions using the neuter form of the reflexive: pe mon pat ‘the man who (that is, anybody who)’. There are also two major omissions from the bibliographical section: Wyss 1982 and Millar 2002. That there is any real sense in which the English grammatical tradition is overtly sexist is never convincingly demonstrated in this book, while it fails to offer a sustained and testable solution to Ross's claim (1936:321) that “[t]he loss of grammatical gender in later English is one of the most difficult problems of English philology.”