Maps of Flesh and Light: The Religious Experience of Medieval Women Mystics ed. by Ulrike Wiethaus (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER tially the same, the first readers of Piers were not unanimous in their under­ standing of the status of the poem's final lines. Vaughan demonstrates that there is a "distinct possibility" that the poem "achieved closure on its own terms" (p. 240). He argues, furthermore, that "we might do well to recover those terms rather than insist on our own" (p. 240). In making this volume available, Vaughan has helped Piers scholars in their efforts to "recover those terms" and has paid fitting tribute to an eminent colleague. KATHLEEN M. HEWETT-SMITH University of Richmond ULRIKE WIETHAUS, ed. Maps ofFlesh and Light: The Religious Experience of Medieval Women Mystics. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1993. Pp. xii, 206. $34.95 cloth, $17.95 paper. Maps ofFlesh andLight is a superb collection of essays. Thoughtful, provoc­ ative, and generously diverse in its critical approaches and disciplinary perspectives, this book charts a fascinating topography of the religious practices and cultural contexts of·medieval women. Jo Ann McNamara's essay, "The Rhetoric of Orthodoxy: Clerical Au­ thority and Female Innovation in the Struggle with Heresy," opens the collection by analyzing how medieval theologians made use of the extra­ institutional authority of female mysticism for their own pedagogical and polemical purposes. The visionary gifts of women such as Marie d'Oignies, Hildegard of Bingen, and Elisabeth of Shonau were pressed into service in a variety of strategic contexts. Their discernment could expose hidden sin in reprobate clergy, their approval could validate the elections of abbots and abbesses, and their ascetic practices could protest specific heretical doc­ trines. In some of these activities the women themselves initiated and controlled their activities; in most, though, they were directed, even ma­ nipulated, by men. This appropriation of the female voice was a delicate enterprise, however. Ecclesiastical officials treated the visionary women whom they recruited with suspicion, "fearful of empowering women to invade.the male preserves of theology and liturgy with their own innova­ tions" (p. 9). Moreover, there were dangers involved for women allied with men in the battle against heresy. For example, while female preaching was 274 REVIEWS enthusiastically pressed into service against heretical movements, this same activity was also itself considered proof of heresy (p.10).The theological controversies that offered women a public forum in which to exercise spiri­ tual gifts and intellectual innovations thus represented a double-edged opportunity. Laurie Finke's "Mystical Bodies and the Dialogics of Vision" also takes up the question of female authority in a male-dominated, ecclesiastical culture.Like McNamara, Finke argues that mysticism is "a site of strug­ gle" between the visionary woman and the social institutions from within which the mystics spoke.Finke, however, chooses to view this contest through a Bakhtinian lens that foregrounds "the authoritative, monologic language of a powerful institution and the men and women who came under its sway and sometimes resisted it" (p.29).Finke also points out a crucial paradox: that visionary women (by virtue of their unmediated link to God) necessarily delivered their prophetic messages from an extra­ institutional position.At the same time, however, these women could be heard and validated only if they fit into an approved place within the church's hierarchical structure.As a result Finke refuses to take at face value the self-characterization of medieval women writers as "mouthpieces of God. " The silence of medieval visionaries about resistance and subver­ sion may well signify a strategic reticence, or a lack of full awareness of their motives, rather than simply an abject obedience (p.41).Taken to­ gether, the first two essays effectively complicate any overly simple inter­ pretation of the "mapping" of women's religious experience as suggested by the title of this collection. Both Fink:e's and McNamara's analyses pro­ vocatively call into question traditional notions of centrality, marginality, boundaries, and transgressions. Ellen Ross's "'She Wept and Cried Right Loud for Sorrow and for Pain': Suffering, the SpiritualJourney, and Women's Experience in Late Medieval Mysticism" charts the changing attitudes toward suffering in two eras, illustrated respectively by the vitae of the early Christian martyrs and the autobiography of Margery Kempe...