The Life of Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth-Century Recluse ed. by C.H. Talbot (review)

124ARTHURIANA of the inquisitofial mindset, and to expose the yawning disproportion between the clerics' use of criminal confession tactics and theit prisoner's simple assertion of personal inspiration. Where Sullivan falls into error, however—and this is a serious reservarion about the book—is in trying to equate the interrogation at Rouen with the earlier one at Poitiets. Joan suffered whenever she was interrogated, but one must not fail to differentiate between the tigots ofa probe conducted according to the dictates ofthe doctrine of the discernment ofspirits (discretio spirituum) and a trial conducted by a hostile party to investigate the public report of heresy. The investigation at Poitiets applied the orthodox counsel of ? John 4:1: 'Believe not every spirit but try them if they be of God' to Joan's case, investigating first the life of the individual and then looking for evidence of a miracle, some achievement beyond human undetstanding. Thus the Rouen clerics' constant effort to reduce Joan's inspiration to objective human experience, with which Sullivan demonstrates some sympathy, stands in stark contrast to the way ecclesiastics tested spirits from early Christianity to the hearing at Poitiers. Early in her book, Sullivan acknowledges that she is 'skeptical ofclaims to direct contact with a metaphysical realm ofreality' (p. xxiv), but this must not allow her to discount ot disregard the aching sincerity of those who did believe in such contact, and in the fifteenth-century that was nearly everyone. DEBORAH FRAIOLI Simmons College c.H. talbot, ed. and trans., The Life ofChristina ofMarkyate: A Twelfth-Century Recluse, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959; repr. Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching, 39. Toronto and Buffalo: University ofToronto Press, in association with the Medieval Academy ofAmerica, 1998. Pp. x, 204, ii. isbn: 0-8020-8202—5. $14.95. In an appendix to volume 2 of his edition of the lives in London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius E. 1, Parts 1 and 2 (Nova Legenda Anglic, 1901), Carl Horstman writes ofthe Life ofChristina in a prefatory remark to Nie. Roscarrock's account of the manusctipt that 'in the absence ofanother MS., it will be impossible to decipher, the MS. having been badly damaged by fire' (2.532). The manuscript is tathet damaged, with the leaves—most shrunken and with edges broken off—mounted in paper frames. And so it is all the mote remarkable that C. H. Talbot was able to produce such an excellent edition in 1959, accompanied by an accurate and entirely fluid translation. The edition was reprinted as part of the Oxford Medieval Text series in 1987, and it is for this edition that the Board included addenda and corrigenda (pp. 194-6; also included in the present reprinting). But readers should also consult Michael Winterbottom's 'The Life of Christina of Markyate' (Analecta Bollandiana 105 [1987], 281-7) f°r additional notes and suggested emendations. Talbot's edition has given rise to a small industry ofcritical writings on Christina. Indeed, no work that treats spiritual biography in the Middle Ages in England can now overlook this recluse who lived in the area of Huntingdon and St. Alban's in REVIEWS125 the twelfth century. Her Life, with which readers are by now well familiar, recounts a world of familial and social extremes set against Christina's personal relationship with Christ and her desire to maintain her virginity. The events ofher life read like hagiographical romance: Ranulph, bishop of Durham, who had a long affair with Christina's aunt, Alveva, by whom he had a number of children (after which he found for her a suitable husband), soon desired Christina, whom he solicits. She rejects him, ofcourse, and we learn that the only way he could take revenge was by depriving Christina of her virginity, either by himself or by someone else' (43). That 'someone else' is Burthred, a young nobleman egged on by the bishop to seek Christina's hand. When Christina spurns marriage to Burthred, het parents drive her naked from the house, after which her mother persecutes het with 'unheard-of cruelty' (73): 'In the end she swore she would not care who deflowered her daughter, provided that some way of deflowering her could be found' (73...