Women and the Divine in Literature before 1700: Essays in Memory of Margot Louis (review)

As the title indicates, this collection of essays is dedicated to the memory of Margot Louis, a scholar whose primary publication interests were in the field of Victorian literature but whose “first love, and … abiding passion” was for medieval literature (vii). The volume’s dedicatory framework is appealing in its sincerity and its heartfelt tribute to Louis as a scholar and a teacher, with memories of Louis in these capacities infusing the contributions from her colleagues, friends, and former students. As Kathryn Kerby-Fulton makes clear in an elegant preface to the volume, these essays seek to offer new scholarship that nevertheless captures the particular bent of Louis’s own approach to medieval literature: namely, explorations of “the role of allegory, myth, visionary experience, and the feminine divine in the medieval imagination” (viii). The eleven essays (including the introduction) offer a cohesive critical approach while covering a wide range both temporally and generically. Kerby-Fulton notes that the collection is envisaged for use by scholars and teachers, and indeed the volume would be a useful supplement in classes on visionary and mystical experience in the Middle Ages or on medieval women’s writing more generally. The essays introduce and contextualize their subject matter sufficiently to make them accessible to advanced undergraduate students or non-specialists while concurrently maintaining a level of scholarship that make them attractive for scholarly researchers.

Kerby-Fulton’s introductory essay, “Skepticism, Agnosticism and Belief: The Spectrum of Attitudes Toward Vision in Late Medieval England” does the work of introducing the controlling vision of the collection (the reception of women’s divine writings), concisely reviews recent scholarship on medieval reception of visions and visionary experience, and offers an intriguing link between skepticism about visionary experience and religious doubt more generally. Kerby-Fulton argues that women’s visionary experiences were taken seriously by their male redactors with some, like Birgitta of Sweden, being “seriously authorized” by their transmitters and others, like Julian of Norwich (as discussed in Jonathan Juilfs’s contribution to the volume), undergoing a process of containment through “abridgement and revisionist biography” (2). Linda Olson’s exceptional contribution to the volume is concerned with representations of Monica both by her son, St Augustine, in his writings and by later medieval readers. Olson’s essay considers written sources as well as visual representations of Monica and argues that she is depicted in these medieval sources far more frequently than would be suggested by her presence in Augustine’s Confessiones. Monica is an important spiritual leader in her own right, and Olson is justified in hoping that this essay will help to draw her “once again from the enormous filial shadow where scholarship has too frequently and too complacently left her” (42). Thea Todd’s contribution reads Christina of Markyate’s Life in the context of her redactor, who, Todd argues, seems to have revised the Life “in light of much later developments of ecclesiastical thought on marriage” (49). Todd provides a detailed and thoughtful reading of the way in which this author uses dramatic dialogue informed by the thinking of the primary authorities of Church and community (authorities often in tension with one another) on questions of marriage and consent to present Christina’s Life.

As is evident thus far, many of the essays in the volume are concerned with the hagiographic tradition and with the visionary experiences of historical figures. Adrienne Williams Boyarin’s “Sealed Flesh, Book-Skin: How to Read the Female Body in the Early Middle English Seinte Margarete” continues this theme, as do the contributions of Johanne Paquette, who offers a fascinating reading of the Book of Margery Kempe and the marginalia of the text’s red ink annotator, and Jonathan Juilfs, who considers the textual transmission of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love from the mid-fifteenth century Amherst manuscript through its first printed manifestation in Hugh Cressy’s edition of 1670.

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