This is an important but frustrating study of a phenomenon that has long deserved the attention it here gets: discretio spirituum or the ability to distinguish true from false visions and revelations. My advice to the reader is to skip the polemics and generalizations of the first chapter "Women and Vision: The Devil's Gateway" and to concentrate on the last two chapters, dedicated to Bridget of Sweden (who I will call Birgitta of Vadstena) and Margery Kempe.
Rosalynn Voaden's thesis is clear and simple from the start: when female visionaries accepted the authority, discipline and guidance of churchmen, they were able themselves to gain power and authority in the medieval church. This was the case with Birgitta. When a female visionary was inconsistent in her response to authority and decided to go her own way, she called forth an ambiguous and sometimes hostile response, as was the case with Margery Kempe.
The paradox of female power is thus, in my mind, the same paradox that lies at the very heart of the Gospel: those who exalt themselves will be humbled, while those who humble themselves will be exalted. The virtue of Rosalynn Voaden's treatment of this paradox is the richness of the detail she provides especially in showing how Margery failed to learn this lesson and instead became, as in the title of Chapter Four, "The Woman who would not go away".
It is here, when Voaden allows herself to show her abilities as a textual scholar and goes into detail, that she moves beyond the myriad studies of Kempe that already exist and have made Margery into a growth industry. Margery's "negotiation with authority" is seen, for example, in a discourse with a monk (pp 129-132) which Voaden presents beautifully. The same is the case with the 1501 fragment of Margery that makes her into an obedient woman, by cutting away controversial passages in the text. Voaden's comparisons between these excerpts and the original Margery make for fascinating reading ("Exit the woman", 145-154).
Chapter Three, "The Lady Vanishes: Bridget of Sweden, Exemplary Visionary" is not as successful as the Margery chapter, for Voaden reduces Birgitta's rich and varied visions to a "vanishing act", where her body disappears from view. In a footnote she refers to the Birgittine scholar Roger Ellis for substantiation of this observation, but Ellis was talking about Birgitta's "disappearance except, so to speak, as a pair of eyes and ears taking everything in" (p. 105, note 103). Birgitta does not completely disappear: she becomes all-seeing eyes and all-hearing ears, ready to pick up the visual and aural sensations that Christ, Mary, and the saints send her. I thus find Voaden's reading of Birgitta to be distorted. The "troublesome female body" which is so important for Voaden did not exist for Birgitta, who made use of her physical and mental powers to see what she wanted and needed to see.
I do agree, however, with the Voaden thesis that for Birgitta and other women like her, the discernment of spirits "both restricts and empowers". (73) By surrounding herself with confessors and scholars, Birgitta, like other late medieval visionary women, made it possible that her insights were taken seriously. But I would not characterize such behavior as both "meek and submissive". (129) Birgitta, after all, criticized bishops and exhorted popes, as seen by the Third Book of her Revelations. In being meek and telling the world that she was nothing, she could thunder against the powerful and the proud, a practice that clearly brought her into line with the Gospel language of Christ himself.
What disappoints me greatly in this book is that a study on such an important topic as the formal and informal relations between learned clerics and visionary women starts out with a string of cliches about medieval misogynous males. We begin with a citation from Jean Gerson at his worst, worried about female visionaries. (7) But this Gerson could have been balanced by the loving brother who wrote the Montaigne de contemplacion and insisted that women can have deep theological insight, or who in his Theologia mystica practica (2.4) praised women for being specially endowed with "the tranquility of contemplation".
For every nasty statement about women's "nature" to be found in church writers, one can usually counter with an opposite and much more positive statement. Thus the use of Augustine is standard material from 1970s polemics against the mistreatment of women in medieval history, with no sense for how Augustine in his De bono conjugali rehabilitated marriage from the Manicheans and spoke of friendship. The picture of the development of the Cistercian Order in its reluctance to accept women ignores Cistercian research of the last twenty years. Today we know that the official distance of the Order to women was more than compensated for by close personal bonds between male and female houses, from the early decades of the twelfth century. Bernard of Clairvaux is quoted for his one most misogynous statement and Jean Leclercq's defense of Bernard on women is dismissed as apologetic.
But is this chapter not also apologetic? We see the misogynous Dominic but not the lover-of-women Jordan of Saxony. Francis of Assisi is seen in his desire to restrict women but is ignored in his equally restrictive attitudes towards his brothers. There is a massive dependence (33) on R. W. Southern's by now outdated portrait of the Beguines and the assertion that Pope John XXII went on a "virtual witch hunt" against them. But there is no reference to the classic study from the 1950s by McDonnell, where John XXII, not my favorite cup of tea, is shown as having done his best to defend the Beguines of the Low Countries.
Let the reader call me misogynous, but I thought such collections of nasty statements about women by medieval writers belonged to the 1970s, in a necessary liberation of women historians from a male-dominated past. Thirty years later, many of us, both female and male scholars, see more nuances. Churchmen who express a generalized fear of the female can often complement and contradict themselves in their fascination and attraction to individual women. In many medieval men, such as Bernard and Gerson, there is a doubleness in their affective lives, areas of inconsistency which for me simply make them human and believable.
The book also includes an edition of a Middle English Epistola solitarii ad reges taken from a British Library manuscript. It unsettles me that quotations from Birgitta's Revelations are taken from the Middle English and not from the Latin edition.