LAUSR

not constituted in relation to masculine fantasies or demands. Rather than nightmares of women’s affective and embodied fluidity, this romance instead charts the ways that an impenetrable feminine body produces desires that cannot be contained by masculinist fantasies of penetration or manipulation. It is only with his Thisbe, whom Allen-Goss considers alongside Ariadne in Chapter Five, that Chaucer creates a narrative of feminine innocence that might exceed the phallic logic that a masculinist hermeneutic demands. By reading these women’s relation to veiling and reading, Chaucer’s legends entertain the possibility of lesbian-like erotic that admits feminine desire through gaps and openings in edifices conventionally drawn to render women’s bodies as available to men’s sexual domination. By circumscribing the desire Chaucer associates with these women, these legends mark feminine eroticism as deviant in a way that assures Chaucer’s own gendered authority. In Chapter Six, Allen-Goss turns to the late fifteenth-century romance, Undo Your Door, to argue that ‘female sexuality [is] represented as a transgressive yet creative force, which . . . assembles its own objects of desire from inanimate materials and from mechanisms disturbingly reminiscent of the objects medieval writers associated with same-sex desire and female autoerotic satisfaction’ (p. 166). By showing how women’s desire is associated with inanimacy, this popular and influential romance critiques the conventional procreative impetus of the genre, particularly its reliance on women’s passivity. This study is groundbreaking for its willingness to rethink how overlooked genres—romance and legend—might admit female same-sex desires that are usually proscribed or overwritten. Yet the analysis of romance is more persuasive, mainly because Allen-Goss explains how the very marginality of such stories might be conducive to an alternative hermeneutics. With Chaucer, Allen-Goss is convinced that women’s desire is ultimately conscripted to support a version of masculinist auctoritas informed by Jerome’s misogynist version of hermeneutics. I disagree, mainly because I am more interested in where women might take these narratives than where ‘father Chaucer’ wanted them to go. Despite this difference, I view AllenGoss’s call to consider feminine desire outside or beyond the structures of masculine fantasies as one of the most important interventions in feminist critical thought for late medieval English literary studies.