Book Review

Gendered Voices:
Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters

Ancient and Medieval

This collection of essays manages to do what other collections only claim to do: to make a single, coherent argument. The premise of the collection, suggested by Caroline Bynum in her foreword, is that saints together with their biographers and audiences socially construct themselves. Historians of the 1970's dealt with this concept by synthesizing saints' histories to find recoverable patterns; in the 1980's, scholars reduced saints' vitae to single-case microhistories. This group of essays focuses on female saints of the later Middle Ages and asserts that women's own holy voices are recoverable, as is the process of negotiation between female and male religious that led to the recording of women's vitae. Mooney, the volume's editor, sets out the three main questions addressed by the volume: How to get at the voices of female saints and male interpreters in co-authored texts? How are these various voices gendered? And what were the influences of genre upon the lives of medieval saints? [End Page 497]

Every essay in the book treats the same process whereby a woman and man (or men) worked together to produce texts about saints. Barbara Newman treats the versions of Hildegard of Bingen's life, beginning with Hildegard's own autobiographical material and the subsequent revisions practiced by her three biographers. Anne Clark, working on Elisabeth of Schönau, describes the mutual dynamic by which Elisabeth and her brother Ekbert produced a sometimes conflicting picture of Elisabeth as religious activist and passive female mystic. Catherine Mooney's extraordinary essay compares St. Clare's own vision of herself as an imitator of Jesus with later, dubious texts attributed to Clare which cast her instead as a feminized imitator of Francis; Franciscan writers were determined to refashion Clare and her followers as typical female religious practicing imitatio Mariae rather than active practitioners of the imitatio Christi like Francis himself. Amy Hollywood uses her study of Beatrice of Nazareth to criticize historians' identification of women's religiosity with the physical body. She shows how women resisted this form of religious experience prescribed to them by male-authored texts. While male authors exteriorized her interior ecstasies as bodily experiences, Beatrice's own texts insisted upon an intense interiority that freed her soul entirely from all bodily restraints.

John Coakley, meanwhile, shows how Christine of Stommeln and Peter of Dacia worked together to create a two-point program of sanctity for Christine. Peter cast her as a bride of Christ, but Christine herself focused on her direct mystical contact with God. Peter theologized and appropriated Christine's experience by casting himself, in his writings, as sister of the bride. Together, the two presented insider and outsider versions of Christine's sanctity. Frank Tobin analyzes the co-operative vita produced by Henry Suso and his assistant, Elsbeth Stagel. In a reverse of the usual process, Elsbeth's writings contributed to Suso's own auto-hagiography. Although modern scholars take Suso's reports of Elsbeth's help as a topos, Tobin insists upon Elsbeth's actual participation in the text. Karen Scott, in her essay on Catherine of Siena and her confessor Raymond of Capua, contrasts Catherine's 300-plus letters, which portray her as a woman of direct political speech and action, with Raymond's organization of her mystical experiences into a normative narrative, in which a woman dead to the world was inspired by God to save souls. As Scott points out, scholars have previously assumed that we can amalgamate such different perspectives on Catherine or have denied the possibility of recovering the authentic voice of Catherine. Perhaps, Scott suggests, Catherine and Raymond portrayed different sides of the great mystic and politicker; perhaps Raymond wrote of things too personal for Catherine herself to mention in letters, and maybe Catherine showed herself too aggressive a participant in religious affairs to make an acceptable saint. Finally, Dyan Elliott's essay on Dorothea of Montau and John Marienwender tells how the holy widow was able to articulate her spirituality only after the interrogation of John, who gave meaning to her life of widowed penitence through his written words. [End Page 498]

In all these essays, men translated women's lives into the Latin "home" of literacy and truth. They exercised the kind of scholarly editorializing that shaped and sometimes wholly revised women's own experiences and texts. In the process, these male interpreters created the kind of late medieval female saint and mystic so familiar to scholars today: the women whose inner ecstasies took somatic form, and who practiced Christianity in a way that men professed not to understand. By writing these women as "different" from male saints, scholars, and mystics, the writers of women's vitae created peculiarly feminine saints. Yet, the essays in this book insist, we can disentangle the threads of women's own influence upon the shapes of men's writing, and even recover the negotiation that made the vitae. In the practice, we can even catch echoes of the real voices of real women, thus questioning the "typical" body-oriented woman mystic of the period.

If there is a flaw in this volume, it is that each essay makes much the same argument by the same methods as all the others. Any single essay would serve to enlighten a student of hagiography about the mistakes we all have made in reading women's vitae. Any one of these pieces would enlighten a graduate student as to the important methodology informing the volume. If I had to choose the best of the lot for a graduate seminar, I would point my students to the essays of Newman, Clark, Mooney, and Scott, but all the pieces here contribute new information about individual female saints and male writers. Bynum is quite right in her foreword: the entire volume demonstrates that the study of hagiography leads the way in the development of historical methodology, particularly the relation between men's and women's voices in texts from the past, and the frustrating intertwining of gender and genre.

Lisa M. Bitel
The University of Kansas