Spiritual Economies: Female Monasticism in Later Medieval England (review)

Reviews 243 detailed but unfortunately not only are they presented as endnotes, but the notes pages lack running headers referring back to the text, meaning that finding and keeping one's place between the notes and the text isfrustratinglydifficult. Overall this book gives a detailed and sustained account of Elizabeth de Burgh's life and would be useful as a text for upper level undergraduate and postgraduate students of women's history, economic and legal history because of its detailed explanations and examples of legal, economic and social circumstances. DiHall University of Melbourne Warren, Nancy Bradley, Spiritual Economies: Female Monasticism in Later Medieval England (The Middle Ages Series), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001; cloth; pp. xii, 276; R R P US$55.00; ISBN 0812235835. Medieval English nunneries, until recently neglected, are now attracting from medievalists of all scholarly hues. In her contribution to this resurgence ofinterest, Nancy Bradley Warren argues that late medieval women's religious houses were in every way an integral part of society, 'enmeshed in material, symbolic, textual, political, and spiritual economies'. Consequently she uses varied source-materials, many of them unfamiliar, in thefirstpart of the book, 'Monastic Identities in Theory and Practice'. Her analysis of liturgical texts shows the different ways in which Benedictine, Franciscan and Brigittine profession ceremonies present the nun as bride of Christ. Her examination of regulatory texts argues that the various Middle English translations made for nuns of the Rule of St Benedict (originally written for men in Latin) and the contrast with the Brigittine mle (originally dictated to St Bridget in her vernacular, then translated into Latin, from which i t passed into English, but always aimed primarily at women) shaped nuns' identities. Accounts and legal documents illustrate the relative financial independence of Brigittine and Franciscan nuns in particular and the extent of their business dealings (sometimes abrasive) with the local community, while even conventual seals help present the nunneries' self-fashionings of maternal authority. In the second part, 'Beyond the Convent Wall: Female Monasticism in Later Medieval Culture', however, the book's focus becomes less tight This 244 Reviews section is more concerned with nuns as image or metaphor - or, as Warren puts it, the 'symbolic capital available from female monasticism and holy women'. Although she rightly stresses the 'permeability' of convent walls, one has to point out that to slide from nuns to 'holy women' is not really playing by the rules. If nuns had a particular identity (as Part 1 illustrates) this cannot be silently transferred to other women, however holy. But this elision enables Warren to consider at length Margery Kempe, who had 'many profitable interactions with w o m e n religious', particularly Brigittines and Franciscans, and was much influenced by the former and their foundress, and, more briefly, three noblewomen who had links with Syon. This 'symbolic capital' was open to exploitation by men, too, in various ways, and Warren reads the devotional treatise Book to a Mother in this light. She also has a suggestive and original chapter on the political uses made of 'holy women', both alive and dead, by powerful men. But once again one has to demur that the York recluse E m m a Rawghton and Bridget of Sweden, let alone Richard II's queen, Anne of Bohemia, or St Anne herself, are not nuns. A further shift occurs in the next chapter, on 'holy women and the literary economy'. This discusses Lydgate's Life of Our Lady and Bokenham's Legendys of Hooly Wummen, both texts that 'mobilize female saints in connection with political concerns'. So Warren's attention has now shifted from 'holy women' to 'female saints' (the Virgin Mary in particular), with the nuns coming a poor third. Lydgate's poem may well be a neglected text, but this book does not seem to be the obvious place to rectify that. Bokenham's less neglected poems have female patrons and dedicatees as well as subjects, but none of them are nuns. Finally, and most surprisingly, w e conclude with none other than Joan of Arc, one of 'theflip-sidesof the symbolic coin of female spirituality'. She had defied the authority of the Church on earth...