From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature by Barbara Newman (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 525 Small defects are common. BFLL numbers would have helped identify hagiographical texts. Factual errors include the claim that Cluny was "the papacy's most powerful monastic ally" in the investiture struggle (p. 95);that the head of St. Wandrille is at Maredsous (p. 146); and that St. Peter's in Rome and St.James' at Compostela were the only "apostolic" shrines in Europe (even disregarding Constantinople, Paul and Bartholomew were allegedly in Rome, Barnabas in Milan, the almost-apostolic Mark inVenice, and a plethora ofpseudo-apostles all over France). True, such mistakes are concomitants of a bold attempt to move beyond traditional art historical boundaries. Nevertheless, one wishes that Abou-El-Haj had told her story less tendentiously and more quickly. John Howe Texas Tech University From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature . By Barbara Newman. [Middle Ages Series.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1995. Pp. vi, 355. $39-95 cloth; $18.95 paper.) Barbara Newman has written an erudite and wonderful book. Drawing on and in many ways surpassing the flood of work on medieval religious women produced in the past fifteen years (a torrent within which her own Sister of Wisdom was a significant stream), she gives us a set of learned, thoughtful, and interrelated essays, written in lucid and beautiful prose. Truly interdisciplinary in her instincts, Newman has a gift for close and subtle reading of texts without straining to place them in the dichotomies that have too often dominated feminist and non-feminist interpretation of the Middle Ages—secular versus religious , masculine versus feminine, literary versus theological, heterodox versus orthodox, praxis versus belief. Although her tone falters occasionally in the first two chapters, with chapter three she hits her stride. "Crueel Corage," which studies the theme of maternal martyrdom and child abandonment against the context of patriarchal social structure, literary trope, and hagiographical stereotype; "On the Threshold of the Dead," which assembles new texts to demonstrate earlier scholarly work on the special relationship of women to purgatorial suffering; "La mystique courtoise" an interpretation— rare in its delicacy—of three of the major mystics of the Middle Ages; and the witty yet ultimately serious readings in chapters six and seven of thirteenthand fourteenth-century sectarian movements and of Cornelius Agrippa as feminist , more than feminist, and other than feminist: these are studies to treasure and re-read. Newman's title From Virile Woman to WomanChrist perhaps misleads, and although the last three pages of her introduction are a model of how introductions should be written, she elsewhere shortchanges her own readings. Patristic and early medieval ideas cannot be summarized under the rubric "unisex" or "virago," which are in any case not the same thing, and the term "womanChrist" with its echoes of current goddess spirituality does not really 526 BOOK REVIEWS do justice either to Newman's own nuanced interpretation or to so much as a line of Hadewijch or Marguerite Porete. Moreover, since these are separate studies , each based on a limited number of texts without overmuch attention to chronology or to social and institutional setting, there are occasional over-generalizations and omissions. As Newman herself admits at the opening ofchapter five, "beguinal mysticism" is sometimes used too broadly. The "atypical" and "marginal" (p. 135) become, not fully consistently, the "tip of the iceberg" (p. 136). Reading Heloise "as" a "mystic manquee" (this reviewer is always troubled by the sleight-of-hand permitted by current notions of "reading as") seems inappropriate not only because it projects thirteenth-century categories back into the twelfth but also because careful attention to what Newman actually argues shows that it is Abelard's Heloise not Heloise's Heloise who can be so read. Finally, one is surprised not to find Herbert Grundmann in the bibliography , since the interpretation of Newman's epilogue is surely (and rightly!) a return to his. Nonetheless, whatever is lost in textured background by Newman's focus on individual writings, her interpretations of the writings themselves are exquisite . From Virile Woman to WomanChrist should be required reading in every university-level Women's Studies course—for its method, its substance, and its prose. Caroline Walker Bynum Columbia University Lanfranco...