The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200 – 1500 by Dyan Elliott (review)

With yet another book characterized by her distinctive combination of wit and learning, Dyan Elliott solidifies her claim to be the foremost historian of medieval religious women in the Anglophone world. Analyzing the many changes in content and context of the phrase “the bride of Christ,” which she terms, in a marvelous aside, “predatory symbolism,” Elliott joins detailed explication of well- known theologians such as Tertullian, Thomas of Cantimpré, Jean Gerson, and John Nider to studies of more obscure figures such as Odilia of Liège and Martin Le Franc. Much of the basic story will be familiar to medievalists and historians of Christianity—from Tertullian’s complex assimilation of actual virgins to metaphorical brides, through high medieval appropriations of the term sponsa Christi for the somatic and spiritual experiences of female visionaries, to the fear of fifteenth- century confessors and inquisitors that ecstatic women might literally be brides of the devil—yet many of Elliott’s interpretations of specific figures, such as Radegund or Abelard and Heloise, are fresh and original.

As Elliott admits, “this is a book about language.” As such, it recognizes but combats the pattern of much recent work in cultural studies, where discussions of metaphor all too often assume that image is itself the institution or status or process it describes. Understanding that images may not so much mirror facts as reverse or betray them, Elliott is careful to avoid slippage from text to context. She manages this in part by considering exactly where the authors she treats do slip into making image literal and in part by being herself thoughtfully explicit about where—even in their use of metaphor as gloss on, not equation to, life—authors allow assumptions and ambivalences they are not fully aware of to creep in. Occasionally she may neglect to treat literature as literature, forgetting that it is not only the explicit content of writing but also its style, sensual power, and even how it is performed in religious ritual that influence whether it remains a multivalent text or becomes a template for specific behaviors. Nonetheless, Elliott’s Bride of Christ should be essential reading for medievalists and students of comparative religion, both for its argument and for its method. It adds a crucial dimension to her earlier studies of spiritual marriage and of late medieval processes of discerning (that is, evaluating and all too often condemning) women’s religious responses.