For many years now Thomas Bestul's studies of medieval spirituality have enlarged and informed our understanding of the varieties and significance of medieval religious values, attitudes and assumptions. Touching most of the medieval centuries, but perhaps most often the late medieval period in and around Britain, Professor Bestul, formerly at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and now Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, has both edited revealing texts and commented with great insight on the movement and associations of ideas which produced, or at least assisted in the production of, many of the forms which late medieval spirituality came to take. His work, which has extended from such studies as his fine edition, for the Toronto Medieval Latin Texts Series (no. 18) of A Durham Book of Devotions (1987), and continued through such magistral studies as his article, in Speculum 64 (1989), concerning the play of late medieval meditative traditions on Chaucer's Parson's Tale, now culminates, but hardly concludes, in this fine book, which will no doubt both continue to enlarge the terms of our discussions, while at the same time attracting new voices to the table.
From the beginning, Bestul is concerned to point out that his study is one which "examines a single mode of expression in isolation from others," that of "prose treatises in Latin intended for the uses of private devotion" (2), primarily from the eleventh through the fifteenth century. The reader need have no fear of narrowness, however, nor of tedium. In five considered chapters Bestul first establishes his own theoretical position, then surveys the (largely unchartered) Latin passion narratives themselves, showing their power and their omnipresence in late medieval culture; his final three chapters, each one of real interest, deal with individual topics: the representation of Jews, of women, and of the tortured body of Christ. The book concludes with two appendices: an edition and translation of the Latin Meditation on the Lamentation of the Blessed Virgin from British Library MS. Cotton Vespasian E.i, fols. 196v-202r, and a preliminary catalogue listing 41 medieval Latin passion narratives, from before 1100 through the fifteenth century.
It is important that Bestul's first chapter is also his Introduction (or more fully: "Introduction: Methodology and Theoretical Orientations"). In it, he makes large but persuasive claims for the tradition he is concerned with, rescuing it from simply being dealt with as "background," or as "literary context." He describes the "primary but not exclusive" audience for the earlier Latin texts as "ecclesiastical, male and monastic" (8), but notes that, beginning in the thirteenth century, things began to change dramatically. Throughout, Bestul is keenly aware of competing voices, many of them twentieth-century and scholarly. Thus he is careful to "avoid undue privileging of Latin literary culture," while at the same time dissenting from Aron Gurevich's insistence on a very great split between Latin literary and popular culture: the operative and problematic word here is "undue," though Bestul is no doubt right to urge that Latin can no more be equated with authority than vernacular can with popularity. Bestul describes his own approach as indebted to Mikhail Bakhtin and Raymond Williams, and, concerned as they were with historical and social context, he is aware of the power of process to address and even to transform both "social attitudes and religious values." This engaged historicism he cogently sets in the face of the temporal transcendence claimed by many of the texts he is concerned with, finding it useful, as he says, "to recognize the textuality of history, to grant that context as much as text requires interpretation and analysis for understanding, and that it is often productive to adopt, in dealing with each, similar interpretive strategies" (22).
The second chapter deals with the Latin narratives of the passion, and concerns itself in the first place (though briefly) with the representation of the passion in gospels, liturgy and biblical commentary, before turning, with equal dispatch, to devotional writing in the early medieval period. These summaries are followed by slightly more detailed examinations of the tradition in Anselm of Canterbury and John of Fecamp (readers of this review will understand that accent marks are not yet possible in this medium), in Bernard of Clairvaux and Aelred of Rievaulx, in Ekbert of Schoenau, Stephen of Sawley and Edmund of Abingdon, and then, in a section which is particularly important for what is to follow, an extended treatment of Bonaventure, the Franciscans and the thirteenth century. Bestul then turns to the tradition in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, in Latin devotional poetry and in the vernacular. The treatment to be sure is necessarily summary (the Celtic contribution, for example, is not much examined), but it is also cogent, informed and to the point. This is an area in which Bestul is deeply informed, and my summary does scant justice to his. One of the many advantages throughout this book is that the details and examples brought forward in support of the general points are often either quite new or newly considered, and that, from a welter of evidence, Bestul again and again educes particularly revealing points. Occasionally, to be sure, we may pause: did the powerful and well-known Good Friday reproaches, the "Improperia," really have the "great influence on the Passion narratives of the later Middle Ages" (29) that Bestul believes, and if so, why do they not receive some at least of the extended emphasis he reserves for the "Quis dabit" tradition? Do not the connections between and among the more important of the several traditions (and authors!) Bestul cites run somewhat deeper than appears here? But whenever he pauses over a particular text Bestul's reading is confident and assured. Citing Aelred of Rievaulx, for example, he draws upon not only a range of biblical, patristic and (subsequent) liturgical allusion, but also upon the imagistic, literary and symbolic character of the passage. Throughout, Bestul is deaf neither to the intellectual traditions nor to the religious impulse which moved these devotions.
The third chapter offers a treatment of the representation of Jews in these narratives which is both critical and astute. In this, and in the next two chapters, Bestul offers readings which cannot fail to be of interest, invested as they are not only in the realities of his topic, but also in the realities of our own time. Racism, sexism, judicial insensitivity by no means came to an end in the early modern period, and if they are rarely taken up in medieval scholarship, and particularly in scholarship concerned with religious devotion, that is not because they have no place there, but rather because traditional academic conventions sometimes have inhibited, rather than encouraged, such explorations, particularly perhaps among younger scholars (a distinction which neither Bestul nor I can now claim). It is true that in recent years certain of these topics have been accommodated (there is now a newsletter for, and considerable interest in, medieval feminism; the phrase "new philology" has attracted at least some favorable interest), though usually as an exception to the rule rather than, as here, as an integral part of a larger, in some ways traditional, study. In the present circumstances, then, it requires a degree of integrity and of concentration for Bestul to have written as he has, and it is appropriate to acknowledge that fact, and to welcome not only both the approach and the contribution itself, but also the impulse behind them. As always, Bestul is particularly good at identifying important and interesting details which link his topics, and is aware that there are problematic aspects to them. He unexceptionably notes, for example, that "the new interest in Christ's humanity led to an intense hunger to know the details of his earthly life . . . especially his suffering and death" (71), but then focuses on details (a few of them, like the linking of Jews' spittle to poison, somewhat problematic), remarking in particular the worsening plight of European Jews during the thirteenth century, and even more pointedly, the role of Bonaventure (1217-74), who became Master General of the Franciscans in 1257 (that order's association with the growth of anti-Semitism remains a subject of discussion). Bonaventure was active in Paris in 1240, the year in which the Talmud was found guilty of teaching false doctrine, and ceremonially burned at the stake. Two years later, 24 wagon loads of Jewish books, perhaps as many as ten thousand manuscripts, were similarly burned in the Place de Greve, and in 1248 the original verdict was confirmed by a commission led by Albertus Magnus (92). Bonaventure's own devotional writings certainly give evidence of anti-Semitism, and though Bestul is reluctant to cite the trial of the Torah as providing "the occasion" for these texts, he usefully suggests that they took place within a Parisian "textual environment," and cites Paul Strohm's language when referring to "a broad array of roughly contemporary statements and gestures" (93), which may have informed their composition.
Perhaps the broad margins of cyberspace will permit a relevant digression, for what do we mean when we say or imply that religious devotion had an influence on late medieval anti-Semitism? Evidence of the anti-Semitism in and among these devotions is not far to seek, and anyone who works in this period will have examples to offer. Who of us has not been offended by such images? It is not surprising, then, to consider this connection, or even to assume it, since it is familiar to us in modern dress as well. Thus the American Civil Rights movement was aided by those Southern newspaper editors who supported it, and so lessened the amount of violence it encountered, and hurt by those who opposed it or remained neutral: in those places the violence was worse. In Washington today, congressional offices pay particular attention to correspondence received from "opinion makers" (a category which is said to include teachers), believing that such persons can influence the way things happen in our society. Do the same imperatives apply to medieval audiences and texts?
In some ways, I believe, they simply do, though connections are hard to establish, and no doubt it is possible as well to argue that such causal connections are finally hard to fix, and that, in certain cases at least, modern examples may apply only imperfectly. Still, it is clearly possible to argue that certain forms which late medieval religion took may be held accountable, at least in part, not only for an intellectual insularity, but also for the actual violence which the racism they encouraged or incited brought about. Bestul does not make this charge explicit, but it is clearly implied, perhaps particularly in his treatment of events in the Rhineland associated with the Black Death, like the only semi-judicial murder of two thousand Jews in Strasbourg on February 14, 1349, events which Bestul indicates may have had an association with the Carthusian Ludolphus of Saxony, and the representation of Jews in his Vita Christi. Such associations and implications are notoriously hard to document, and there is a kind of "post hoc ergo propter hoc" reasoning which attends upon any such examination. Still, the associations Bestul educes are as convincing as any, and goes far to validate the cultural history on which he has centered his work. He avoids, it seems to me, the imputation of essentialism, and with it the charge that it was Christianity alone which precipitated the events to which he refers, though equally there is nothing in his text (apart, perhaps, from a reference to a 1348 Papal bull--but as Bestul must know, Grayzel has rightly taught us to be somewhat skeptical of such documents) to suggest that there was any continuing influence within Christianity itself to counter the events he describes.
When the evidence for religious influence on social events is conflicted, it usually is easier to convict than to exculpate. Religion takes many forms, and the specific devotional perspectives from which Bestul's book proceeds are rooted in individual responsiveness, not in public utterance. But this only makes the matter worse. It is quite bad enough to find anti-Semitism in sermons, publicly preached from the pulpit. But it is even worse, somehow, to find it in devout texts, for it is devotion that seems at least to reveal the deepest religious motivation (or simply the deepest motivation), and to locate racism here seems to be particularly powerful. More than newspaper editorials or letters to our representatives, devout texts seem to inscribe the direction of our hearts, and what we find there counts. The perspective which emerges, if only by implication, in Bestul's book, undoubtedly warrants further examination, and cannot be lightly dismissed, for example by a concern for essentialism. It might have been useful to have had more explicit discussion of it than appears here, but one advantage of Texts of the Passion may be to provoke such discussion, particularly in the field of Middle English studies, where such matters, at least in a devotional context, rarely emerge. Still, it certainly is high time that these issues were addressed seriously, in Middle English studies and elsewhere. Changes having been made, certain of these issues reappear in the subsequent chapter on gender representation. I have already noted Bestul's investment in the "Quis dabit" tradition, indeed the examination of this topos may be said to be one of the several important contributions of this volume. The first of his appendices very usefully prints an edition and translation of the "Meditation on the Lamentation of the Blessed Virgin." This is not the first appearance of this text (as Bestul scrupulously notes), but readers will be glad to find it readily available here, as it helps to focus the argument which emerges. Bestul's reading of the text emphasizes its male associations, and acknowledges Caroline Walker Bynum's thesis that the loss of status which overtook late medieval women came about largely because of "an increasingly professionalized male clergy jealous of its prerogatives" (137). Bestul ably fits the "Quis dabit" lament into this formulation, suggesting, among other things, that it "might have functioned as a potent antidote to male apprehensions that were likely to have been raised by the literature of women's visionary experience" (136).
I do not wish to be misunderstood in my reaction to this analysis, which Bestul pursues with his usual discrimination. I understand the importance of grasping the relationship of women and power in the late medieval period, perhaps particularly in terms of religious expectations and practices, but increasingly, I think, there is a danger that, in privileging the role of women's power to the exclusion of most other considerations in these areas, we stand in danger of ignoring different, sometimes less evident associations which women have discovered and maintained in religious and devotional traditions, associations which are by no means hidden in some of the texts which have concerned Bestul here. In some ways, after all, the "unorthodox" nature of devotion is less theological than social, presenting a contending view of reality to the one which flourishes generally, and it is one which privileges neither power nor social circumstance. I understand that in some circumstances religion has proved altogether adaptable to the setting in which it has found itself (and even helped to bring it about), but in other cases it has not. I offer this caveat less as a contradiction to what Bestul has written than as an extension to it, but the relationship between devotion and power is nothing if not complex. In an earlier chapter, after all, Bestul had argued that devout texts "most often encode, rather than subvert, prevailing social and cultural norms" (18). But of course, depending on the practitioner and the context, religious orthodoxy has often subverted a dominant paradigm, and by no means extinguished its own orthodoxy in the process. There is no reason to assume that orthodoxy and social repression go hand in hand, even when, or especially when, one is writing with cultural context in mind. This is by no means an academic point: When was anti-Semitism an extension of orthodoxy, when a violation of it? In another case, the ways in which women have realized religious attitudes do not suggest that they have internalized their oppression, but rather that they have discovered something in them which has eluded at least some medieval, and perhaps some modern, commentators. Texts like the one Bestul prints could indeed have functioned as cultural mediators, irrespective of authorship, in the way he suggests. But it may be somewhat condescending towards those religious attitudes which medieval women maintained to attach them, in such important ways, to the development of a professionalized male clergy.
The fifth chapter concerns the relationship between Christ's passion and the institution of torture which was employed in civil and ecclesiastical courts, and records Bestul's belief that the two were connected. "We know that a rich array of textual commonplaces as much as lived experience contributed to the intertextuality of the Passion narratives;" Bestul writes, "and it is also possible to see that these powerful narrative (and pictorial) depictions of Christ stretched and pulled, sustained or reinforced, if they did not inspire, the means of causing pain to the human body" (156). Bestul cites Pope Innocent IV's 1252 bull "Ad extirpanda," which permitted the use of torture to extract confessions from heretics as a turning point, and notes that many thirteenth- century passion meditations "include highly detailed and innovative descriptions of the horrible stretching and pulling of Christ's limbs in order to fit him onto the cross; another, related commonplace is to describe Christ as squeezed in the winepress of Isaiah 63:3" (155).
I should probably say at once that I did not find this the most compelling chapter in this really quite admirable book. For one thing, the causal connections Bestul educes seem to me somewhat thin: there are few centuries, including our own, in which human beings do not torture each other, and I should be more inclined to acknowledge an influence if there was less torture, not more. The dynamics of the situation also seem to me to run quite the wrong way: Christ is at the center of these narratives, and he is by all accounts a suffering innocent, not a heretic. Bestul candidly acknowledges these difficulties--"Christ himself is certainly intended to be an object of our sympathy and compassion and not our revulsion" (157)--but insists that the narratives he is concerned with "do not merely reflect these new social conditions but reinforce and give shape to the reality that surrounds them and of which they are a part" (158).
Well, it is good to be reminded that the public spectacle of Christ's passion would have found a resonance in the late medieval period unknown today, and it is equally true that "a profound transformation" (159) had reformulated the narrative of that passion between the late ancient, and the late medieval world. But the details of that narrative moved quite away from the rigor of a justly enforced punishment, and emphasized instead the innocence of suffering savior, suffering worse than anyone had ever suffered before, because, in one account, since Christ had been conceived without a human father, his pain would have been particularly acute. Further, the instruments of the passion, the very familiar "Arma Christi," became objects of veneration during this period, and if there were to be legal overtones to Christ's suffering it is reasonable to expect them to be emphasized there. Other details Bestul notes, like the use of confessions and the role of "intimacy, exposing what it had been usual to conceal" (162), present in both mysticism and the passion, seem to me not sufficiently unique to be convincing. Still, nothing Bestul writes is without interest, and the larger public role he finds in and for passion narratives certainly requires more emphasis than it has usually received.
In the end, then, I can only urge my readers to leave the library copy of Texts of the Passion for students, and to buy this excellent book for themselves--though it would be a help, no doubt, if it were to appear in paper. If you have not many books on medieval spirituality in your collection then this is the one to add, as an introduction to the topic which is also an extension of it, a searching and thoughtful study of a particularly central tradition. If, on the other hand, like me, you have perhaps too many, add it anyway, as a model of learning and insight which will make any library richer.