Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis by Theresa Tinkle (review)

Aimed at an audience of scholars of medieval literature (rather than theologians of historical Christianity), this book offers a salutary reminder to its readers that Biblical interpretation during the Middle Ages included diverse views and took a variety of literary forms. Theresa Tinkle’s discussion ranges from the theological polemic of Saint Jerome’s Adversus Jovinian, to the homilies of Saint John Chrysostom, to the patristic compilations in the Glossa ordinaria, to the Prologue to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale (Chapter 2); to Saint Augustine’s autobiographical and proto-novelistic Confessions (Chapter 3); to the liturgical drama of the Fleury Slaughter of Innocents (Chapter 4); to the marginal comments in manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales (Chapter 5). Versions of Chapters 4 and 5 have previously been published, as has a portion of Chapter 2.

What holds the chapters together is the exploration of a single theme, that of the “woman on top” (a phrase Tinkle borrows from Natalie Zemon Davis). Tinkle understands the “inherently ambivalent” notion of the “woman on top” (p. 3) to function in three different ways in the exegetical texts she studies: (1) as “a trope of gender inversion” (through which a humble male exegete identifies himself with an admirable, virtuous woman), (2) as “a sign of misrule,” signaling disorder in the psychological, moral, and social hierarchy, and (3) as a “sexual position” (p.4). Tinkle finds the first to be operative in Augustine’s descriptions of his mother Monica; the second, in Jerome’s and Chrysostom’s respective interpretations of 1 Timothy 2: 8–15; the second and third, in the Wife of Bath’s Biblical commentary on marriage, The fourth chapter—on the Slaughter of Innocents—shares some themes (for example, that of a mourning mother) with the third chapter, but its central argument concerns not the “(s)exegesis” (p. 20) of the previous chapters, but the “affective exegesis” (pp. 75–76) of an anti-Judaic play’s performance, its teaching of contempt for the Jewish Other, and its anti-Semitic repercussions.

Guided by feminist theory and by theories of the performance of gender (Judith Butler, Michel Foucault), Tinkle joins the ranks of literary critics such as Lawrence Besserman (Chaucer’s Biblical Poetics), Carolyn Dinshaw (“Eunuch Hermeneutics”), Michael Kuczynski, and Larry Scanlon, who value a properly historicized “exegetical criticism” (to rescue a term once much maligned) in their approach to vernacular literature. Tinkle, who names herself “an agnostic feminist” (p. 7), professes a “hermeneutics of suspicion” concerning the doctrine discovered by historical exegetes in the Scriptures (p. 11). As markers of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” that keeps her from aligning her viewpoint too empathetically with that of the Christian writers she studies, Tinkle typically uses the vocabulary of “Christian ideology” (not “Christian belief” or “faith”), of “deity” (not “God”), of “Pseudo-Paul” (in reference to the writer of 1 Timothy). She also generally avoids reference to the hermeneutical principles known to have guided patristic and medieval exegetes both in their discovery of veiled meanings in Biblical texts and in their rejection of certain readings. She follows Jacques Berlinerblau in promoting a “sociohermeneutics,” wherein the exposition of the Biblical text itself is set aside as a “distraction” for the critic, who scrutinizes instead “the interplay between a polysemous sacred text and culturally positioned interpreters” (qtd. p. 11).

Despite her avowed feminism and her passing references to historical women’s preaching and Biblical interpretation, Tinkle does not include in this book any study of a medieval woman who is known to have interpreted Biblical passages in writing—e.g., Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, Gertrude of Helfta, Heloise of the Paraclete, Christine de Pisan. She does not study female saints whose legenda celebrate them as preachers, teachers, exegetes, and defenders of the faith. Nor does Tinkle mention directly the erudite Roman patronesses of Saint Jerome’s work as a Biblical translator and commentator—women like Marcella, who wrote to Jerome to ask him about...