"Virtue and Venom 'traces a general history of .,. the catalog of women - focusing especially on ... the close of the Middle Ages' (1). McLeod defines catalogs of women as 'lists - sometimes found in other works, sometimes found alone - enumerating pagan and (sometimes) Christian heroines who jointly define a notion of femineity'. The assumption that the women included in catalogs 'define a notion of femineity,' a term she uses to rid her book of the connotations of 'femininity', is central to McLeod's study. ...

Chapter One, 'A Fickle Thing is Woman,' surveys the catalogs of women in Hesiod's Eoiae, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Plutarch's Mulierum virtutes, Semonides of Amorgos' On Women, Juvenal's Satire Six, and the Heroides . According to McLeod, the catalog 'could invoke, mocle, transmit, and transform the authoritative view of womankind, or it could associate that view with other peripheral concerns'. Most of Chapter Two, 'Woman's Particular Virtue,' is devoted to a well-judged discussion of Jerome's Adversus lovinian wn. ...

Chapter Three, 'The Mulier Clara,' defines Boccaccio's De Mulieribus Claris as a 'scholarly florilegium'. Perhaps because of this generic identification, McLeod does not provide an analysis of Boccaccio's structure or rhetorical methods (as she does for Jerome, Chaucer, and de Pizan). ... In contrast to Chapter Three's concentration of the text's attitude towards women, Chapter Four, 'Ai of Another Tonne,' says almost nothing about the 'notion of femineity'. MCLeod asserts that 'Chaucer uses the good woman to explore the problems and potentials of a changing notion of poetry'; she discusses the two versions of the prologue, the development of the persona of the narrator, and the connection between the prologue and the legends. Chapter Five, 'The Defense of Gender, the Citadel of the Self,' examines Christine de Pizan's Cite des dames...'--review by Pamela Benson, Rhode Island College, via ://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1620&context=mff.