Medieval Holy Women is an excellent resource for anyone seeking orientation to women's religious activity in medieval Europe, a field of study that has expanded rapidly in the last few decades. The book is the first volume in the series Brepols Collected Essays in European Culture, which offers "definitive surveys of key subject areas in medieval studies" (back cover). While the word "definitive" can be problematic, Minnis and Voaden's offering comes about as close as could reasonably be imagined to living up to this promise. With twenty-eight essays by recognized scholars of medieval women's religious practice, this book is bound to be useful to a broad range of readers.
The volume addresses what it claims is a generally neglected area in medieval European literature and culture. "Holy women," in the context of this collection, are not only mystics and visionaries; the category also includes notable nuns (such as Heloise) and women who were simply considered particularly pious or Christ-like (such as the murdered Margaret of Roskilde and Magnhild of Fulltofta, both of whom are described in Claire Sahlin's chapter, "Holy Women of Scandinavia: A Survey"). It therefore offers opportunities for making connections between various forms of medieval piety without asserting anachronistic divisions between them.
The book is divided into eight sections: a set of Introductory Essays and seven sections of essays on the women themselves, organized geographically (British Isles, France, German Territories, Iberian Peninsula, Italy, Low Countries, and Scandinavia)--an organizational structure that was intended to allow for investigation of differences and overlap between regions. Each regional section begins with a survey of that area's holy women, which is followed by essays on a few individual women. Each section also includes a chart listing holy women from that geographical region, including their marital statuses, dates of birth and death, socioeconomic class, and monastic affiliation, if any. These charts--along with the extensive bibliographies in each section, which include manuscripts, editions, and translations as well as secondary sources--are enormously helpful; students and seasoned scholars alike will benefit from these resources. The essays are, in general, geared towards an audience that does not have extensive knowledge of medieval holy women; however, the scope of the book is broad enough that most readers will find something new and interesting. Personally, I was particularly intrigued by the story of Guiglielma of Milan and her followers, including "Pope" Maifreda da Pirovano, which is compellingly told across E. Ann Matter's "Italian Holy Women: A Survey" and Barbara Newman's essay, which follows it.
Because discussing each essay in this volume would be impossible, I will focus on the introductory essays, then treat the regional sections--which, with twenty-two chapters, make up the bulk of the book--as a group.
The introductory essays provide an accessible guide to some major issues in the critical study of medieval women's religious practice. Minnis and Voaden's introduction defines terms and explains the purpose of the book, including their decision to limit its range to the years 1100-1500. They chose this range, they state, because of the increasing gender polarity in the later middle ages, which came about in part because of a shift in terms of the meaning of "ordination" (ordinatio) to exclude women. They also make a strong case for the contemporary relevance of medieval antifeminist attitudes and women's roles in spiritual practice, pointing to disturbing recent examples of religiously affiliated institutions' excluding women's voices.
Dyan Elliott's "Flesh and Spirit: The Female Body" is a succinct and yet comprehensive survey of many of the issues pertaining to embodiment in medieval Christianity, including asceticism, the association of women with the flesh, virginity and chastity, the female's role as "a special medium for communication with the incarnate Christ" by virtue of her association with the body (21), medical and scientific legitimation of women's embodied spirituality, beguines, and affective piety. In addition to this daunting list of topics, the essay provides a cogent overview of current and recent scholarship on embodiment in medieval female spirituality--also no small task. Particularly insightful is Elliott's review of the pathologizing tendency of some twentieth-century criticism, which, she argues, "continued to use the Pseudo-Dionysian tradition as the measure for what constituted real mysticism" well into the last century (30). She concludes by speculating on the increased focus on clerical rather than female agency in the construction of medieval mystical texts and on what this could mean for twenty-first-century literary scholarship. Elliott thus raises important questions about scholars' presuppositions regarding mysticism, holiness, and gender, and how these can affect modern critical reception--a danger of which we all ought to be aware.
In "Religious Roles: Public and Private," Alastair Minnis explores the relationship between "public" and "private" in women's lives and writings, particularly the prohibition on teaching and preaching that many medieval holy women had to negotiate. His essay problematizes these categories--Minnis points out the arbitrariness of designating a convent "private" and a school, from which women were prohibited, "public"--and argues that modern critical use of the term "preaching" to describe medieval women's speech has been loosened too much from its medieval meaning. The essay works to debunk several other misconceptions regarding medieval women's religious practice, as well. For example, in pointing out that the concession that women could prophesy was not empowering for the majority of women, but that it contributed to an exceptionalism that prevented ordinary women from speaking up, Minnis curtails anachronistic claims regarding the proto- feminism of the medieval church. However, Minnis makes it clear that medieval women could play a public role, for example by helping inept priests, understanding Scripture, and resolving questions concerning the Eucharist, and he stresses the authentication of relics as one under-explored role for medieval holy women.
Another major issue in the study of medieval holy women is textual production. In reading through the essays on individual women, in fact, one is struck by how often the authorship of their vitae and even of their first-person accounts is fraught with questions. John Coakley's "Women's Textual Authority and the Collaboration of Clerics" introduces these issues. Exploring the interaction between male clerics and the women with or about whom they wrote, Coakley argues that clerics do not simply try to control or limit their subjects, but that they are also invested in finding ways of asserting and staking out these women's authority. One limitation of this essay is that it does not address books composed by women without the intervention of men. John Van Engen's chapter, however--"Communal Life: The Sister-books"--fills in some of this gap. Covering both the Dominican and Devotio Moderna sister-books, Van Engen provides a general introduction to the genre--its history, apparent purposes, authorship, and relevant scholarship. Unfortunately none of the introductory essays explicitly takes on issues of authorship in first- person visionary or mystical literature, but this topic is amply covered in some of the essays about individual women.
Peter Biller's "Women and Dissent" cogently situates medieval holy women with respect to contemporary heretical movements. Although he defines "dissent" as including a wide range of behaviors, from unbelief to extreme devotion and even dissent from popular heretical movements, Biller focuses on participation in "organized heretical sects," which was its most common form (135). Of the three major sects that he discusses--the Cathars, Waldensians, and Lollards--he de- emphasizes Lollardy because it has been the object of more study, thereby drawing attention to under-explored areas of female participation in religious movements. The essay comprises a discussion of the medieval church's impression of women's heretical activity, an exploration of what kinds of roles women occupied within each of these three sects, and a review of post-medieval scholarship. Until recently, Biller observes, academic discussion promulgated a number of stereotypes regarding heresy: for instance, that women were inherently attracted to heresy or that heresy was more "woman-friendly" than the orthodox church. The essay helpfully orients the reader to three major heresies of the later Middle Ages and surveys both the medieval and modern literature on women's involvement therein, pointing out the need for more study of women's roles in the Waldensian and Cathar movements.
On the whole, the introductory essays constitute an excellent review of the state of the scholarship on medieval women's religious practice. The heart of the book, however, is made up of the twenty-two essays on the women themselves. Most of the essays include a brief vita of the holy woman in question, a survey of existing manuscripts and textual dissemination, and discussion of her particular brand of holiness, her writings, and/or her influence within her historical moment. On the whole, these essays succeed in presenting the women in a way that is accessible to someone who does not have prior knowledge of them, while also including (in most cases) some sophisticated insight into their theology and spiritual practices.
One minor--but inevitable--disappointment is that the essays are not evenly distributed over the different geographical regions. While the German Territories are very well represented, the Low Countries only contain a survey and an essay on Hadewijch; such notables as Christina Mirabilis and Beatrice of Nazareth are confined to the survey. The Iberian Peninsula and Scandinavia have no focused essays at all, only surveys. This uneven distribution is in some cases the result of a paucity of sources, but primarily, I imagine, it stems from the limits of a single volume; at more than 700 pages, Medieval Holy Women could not support many more essays than it already contains. These limitations are also compensated by the extensive bibliographies in every section and at the end of each survey. Thus, while the book cannot be all things to all readers, it does provide the tools for fleshing out one's knowledge of those regions that are treated more briefly.
In addition to being an extremely useful resource, Medieval Holy Women, by bringing together into a single volume in-depth explorations of so many facets of medieval female spirituality, allows for exciting comparative work across regions and periods of later medieval religious culture. While most readers probably will not read all of the essays in this volume, doing so (or at least reading widely within it) draws attention to recurring themes in these women's lives, in hagiography, and in medieval conceptions of holiness. Questions of authorship--what authorship means in this period, given the state of female literacy in the middle ages and medieval conceptions of authorship and literary agency--arise repeatedly in the essays; likewise, strategies of spiritual and textual authorization are a major concern. Another issue of interest is medieval holy women's influence on each other. This is particularly evident in the section on the German Territories, where the sheer number of female mystics makes such influence visible, but we also see it in Birgitta of Sweden's influence on Margery Kempe and on her own daughter, Catherine, and in various other women's lives and vitae.
Another issue that can be discerned is the variety of ways in which female saints and visionaries could be used to advance political agendas. Dorothy of Montau, presented by Ute Stargardt, emerges as a striking example of this phenomenon, and Elliott's chapter on embodiment describes instances in which this occurs, as well.
Finally, an invaluable aspect of this book is its authors' concern to point out areas of the field that are in need of further scholarly exploration. The authors succeed in generating a sense of the excitement of pursuing these areas: This is work that urgently must be done. Rather than being "definitive" in the sense of signifying the end of a closed conversation, Medieval Holy Women extends a compelling invitation to students and scholars to continue engaging with this fascinating topic in medieval European cultural history.