Much is revealed by what sorts of information are and are not footnoted in a work of scholarship. This book includes notes that define the basic meaning of terms such as “Levant” and “leonine hexameter,” yet very little guidance is provided to help readers cope with the large, undigested chunks of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek that are present in some chapters. The book's editors appear to be envisioning readers who are capable of navigating foamy seas of abstruse theory, but who at the same time have little factual knowledge of the world they live in and its literary traditions. It seems strange that a book concerned with genre theory in general, and the epic genre in particular, would draw almost as extensively from Lacan and Žižek as from theorists who are concerned specifically with epic—M. M. Bakhtin, Georg Lukács, Simon Gaunt, Masaki Mori. I suppose it is a sign of the zeitgeist that Northrop Frye receives no mention whatsoever in the book.

Though I regret the disregard for Frye, the essays that make use of other genre theorists include some of the better contributions to this collection, for example, Christine Chism's study of female characters in some Middle English Alexander poems and Sarah-Grace Heller's study of women in the medieval French poems of the Crusades cycle. Other essays in this volume avoid engagement with genre theory and simply concern themselves with women characters occurring in texts that happen to be more or less epic in nature. This category contains some very good contributions, notably William Layher's study of maiden warriors in Old Norse sagas and Kathryn Starkey's study of women in the Nibelungenlied; it also contains the essays that are the most jargon-ridden and Lacanian/Žižekian—William Burgwinkle's study of the Provençal Girart de Roussillon and, egregiously irksome for its cant about “phallogocentricity,” Thomas Caldin's study of women in the medieval Spanish Cid cycle.

Irksome in a different way is Kate Olson's “What Hrotsvit Did to Virgil.” An approach that focused on women's issues while examining Hrotsvit's poetry closely for lines and half-lines that allude to the Aeneid in their phrasing might, I suspect, reap a bountiful harvest—but instead, Olson has chosen a coarser-grained approach that merely juxtaposes the events of the Aeneid with the events that take place in Hrotsvit's narratives. This approach too could yield some interesting insights, but Olson's understanding of the role played by Dido in Virgil's epic is, unfortunately, reductionistic and lacking in nuance; Olson accuses Virgil of “disrespect” for Dido and the other female characters in the Aeneid (132) and seems to assume that plot developments involving a character's death necessarily betoken condemnation of that character by the author and the author's desire to punish the character. That Virgil might be making use of Dido's death scene to express his tender regard for this character and his ruefulness over the sufferings unjustly inflicted on her, thereby offering an implicit indictment of the inhuman rigor mandated by Aeneas's pursuit of imperial Roman destiny, never occurs to Olson; nor does she take into account the possibility that one purpose for including Dido's death could be to lead the way toward Aeneas's subsequent encounter with her ghost—a devastating experience for Aeneas, as the ghostly Dido disregards his words of grief and turns away to embrace the ghostly Sychaeus. This episode has implications antithetical to Olson's reading of the Aeneid as a harsh and misogynistic work, and, accordingly, her essay cannot acknowledge the episode; yet Olson seems to relish the inverted patterns of plot development that she points out in Hrotsvit's Primordia—the fortuitous deaths of husbands, unlamented by their widows, who, “undaunted” and “driven by religious zeal” (130), subsequently take advantage of their inheritances and their unattached status to become involved with the Gandersheim convent. When the tables are turned, evidently, a ruthless and inhumane attitude toward the opposite sex is justifiable.

I could argue with equal vehemence against some of the underlying assumptions in “Monstrous Mates: The Leading Ladies of the Nibelungenlied and Völsunga saga,” by Kaaren Grimstad and R. M. Wakefield, but for brevity's sake I will merely state that Paul Zumthor's concept of mouvance could have been helpful in their handling of the international variants of the Sigurd/Siegfried legend; that making use of Torfi Tulinius's finely nuanced account (found in chap. 7 of The Matter of the North [Odense, 2002]) of the relative importance of contractual obligations and loyalty to blood kindred in thirteenth-century Iceland, and of the significance these matters have for Völsunga saga, would have enhanced Grimstad's and Wakefield's handling of the same issues; and that thirteenth-century German poets and audiences really should not be expected to have had an awareness of the Scandinavian variants of the Nibelung legends commensurate with Scandinavians’ awareness of the German variants. “Monstrous Mates” is an essay that I would categorize as problematic yet interesting, along with the quirky essay by Lisabeth Buchelt on the character of Eve in Anglo-Saxon religious poetry and the essay on women in Icelandic family sagas and fornaldarsögur contributed by Jana Schulman, who also coedited this collection.

Unquestionably, the most distinguished contributor to the volume is Dick Davis, who offers a fascinating study of female characters in the Persian epic The Shahnameh. My only complaint about this chapter is that I wish it could have been longer; Davis was obliged to leave out too many women, such as the remarkable Queen Qaydafeh.