Strong Women: Life, Text, and Territory, 1347–1645 (review)

“Literature is the truest history,” begins David Wallace in his introduction to Strong Women, because historians produce their own accounts of history based on compiled data, while literary scholars “must give way to voices from the past” (xv). Although I can imagine historians clamoring in protest at this provocative claim for literary scholarship, I would also expect a measure of unease among feminist and queer scholars of the past, who would consider “giving way to voices of the past” a negotiated process. This debatable position of the literary scholar, however, serves for Wallace as the schematic complement to the “premodern speaker [who] awaits her turn on the page.” Given the fact that women have had less access to the written page than men historically, Wallace asserts that “it takes a strong woman . . . to secure bookish remembrance in future times; to see her life becoming a life” (xv–xvi). Wallace cites the mulier fortis of Proverbs 31, a medieval stereotype of female virtue, but one that was regulatory and punitive as well (or humorous, as in Chaucer’s perversion of the idea in the Wife of Bath). How odd, then, that Wallace chooses this stereotype as the title of his book and the centerpiece of his theme that only strong women “secure” their lives in written forms, tell their own stories. Even lacking the proverbial and medieval contexts of the mulier fortis, the “strong woman” argument seems willfully disengaged from feminist scholarship of the past twenty-five years, which has documented and theorized the multiple ways in which an individual woman’s strength might not be the whole story. But again, Wallace insists: “Each of these women is a mulier fortis, a strong woman: had she been otherwise, her life would never have been written” (xix). Take that, Judith Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf!

The strengths of Strong Women, however, are many. First, the book straddles two premodern periods, the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, in a diptych structure: the first part consists of Dorothea of Montau (1347–94) and Margery Kempe (c. 1373–c. 1440); the second takes up two English women, Mary Ward (1585–1645) and Elizabeth Cary (c. 1585–1639). All four women chose the religious life in some form, whether that involved mystical revelations (Dorothea and Kempe), founding their own movement (Mary Ward), or converting to Catholicism and writing plays (Elizabeth Cary). All four are also compatible across their historical and geographical distances for their power to “shock and surprise” (xix). Other connections that Wallace draws among them are that they all struggled with masculine authorities (“for a strong woman to emerge, and get her story written, a man must die,” 228); and they all bore up in distinct ways under the pressures of female enclosure and social expectations, particularly with respect to marriage. In addition, however, Wallace is especially interested in inserting these women’s lives in historical (and geographical) contexts, implicating them in contemporary events in new ways. Even more important is his attention to the afterlives of the work of all four women as their lives become reshaped by twentieth-century political pressures in the process of their recuperation. In both respects, his book makes significant and fascinating contributions to the study of premodern women’s religious writing and their twentieth-century afterlives. The “time” of each of these women and their lives is, in Wallace’s analysis, now, insofar as they came to serve twentieth-century religious and nationalist agendas.

Wallace begins his study with Dorothea of Montau, the Prussian mystic who was a contemporary of Margery Kempe. Dorothea’s “life,” that is, her biographical trajectory, includes her early self-inflicted asceticism, her arranged marriage, and finally, her enclosure to become Prussia’s first anchoress. Wallace seems uncomfortable with Dorothea’s mystical practices, such as her severe self-mortification, which causes him to wonder “What is Dorothea’s jouissance?” (34) in an uncanny echo of Freud’s “What do women want?” Considering the wealth of feminist [End Page...