Varieties of Devotion in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (review)

Reviews 199 Parergon 21.2 (2004) of Early Modern women and gender. The analysis of women as the agents of patriarchy is powerful, the evidence of those who resisted it far outweighed by the examples of power women exerted over each other in discovering pregnancy, supervising childbirth and ensuring the parish was not burdened with illegitimate children. This study of the wider definition of the body makes it clear that social and material conditions made women’s bodies what they were. Conflict between the public and the private view of the body largely defined the social meaning of the female body; the politics of sex and reproduction were at the juncture of the household and the state. Sally Parkin Kentucky, New South Wales Karant-Nunn, Susan C., ed., Varieties of Devotion in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 7) Turnhout, Brepols, 2003; hardback; pp. xv, 213; RRP €55; ISBN 2503513891. As the record of an interdisciplinary conference on Christian devotion between the fifth and seventeenth centuries, this is a heterogeneous collection of papers on religious history, literary criticism, art history and archaeology. In 451, the Council of Chalcedon caused a Syrian and Egyptian schism, the Monophysite churches believing that they remained true to the orthodoxy of Nicaea. They required a liturgy that emphasised the centrality of the Eucharist, and their own ecclesiastical hierarchy. Leslie MacCoull examines papyrological evidence for the Monophysite Church’s efforts at self-legitimation, including Eucharistic miracle stories and the ritual for consecrating an anti-Chalcedonian church. A recently discovered late sixth-century Alexandrian church has Biblical decorations including Isaiah’s burning coal, thought to represent Christ’s united divine and human natures, and depictions of Constantine, related by MacCoull to his role at Nicaea. LailaAbdalla summarises the legends of early female transvestite saints who became monks or hermits. Previously, they have been thought to show women as only able to be saved once they reject their bodies. ForAbdalla, ‘passing’as chaste male religious provides an unproblematic outlet for their (arguable) feminine need to nurture, without the complications of secular life. Peter Dendle compares the suffering of saints in Bede’s eighth-century Latin 200 Reviews Parergon 21.2 (2004) Martyrology and in Old English poetry including Andreas (the martyrdom of St Andrew) and the two versions of the St Margaret legend. Over time, he traces a move away from the Classical Greek belief in wisdom purchased through suffering, like the agony experienced by Andreas and by Bede’s martyrs, drenched in their own tears, to the Roman view that suffering signalled defeat. In the eleventh-century St Margaret legend, the dragon swallows her and she is obliged to rip it open to escape. By the twelfth century, the so-called ‘anaesthetic’ school of hagiography has rewritten her experience in the Roman style. The dragon cannot touch her and the two spar only verbally. Dendle links this to the replacement of trial by ordeal, as the judicial standard, with trial by duel or jury during the same period. Two very different modes of religious authority are contrasted in John Ott’s description of the power struggle witnessed in Le Mans in 1116, when the wandering preacher Henry attempted to displace Bishop Hildebert of Lavardin. A canon of the cathedral recorded the events two decades later, while Henry was still active in southern France. ‘The author’s concern with the usurpation of legitimate authority is not restricted to his account of Henry and Hildebert’ (p. 110), but his detailed description of their conflict perfectly illustrates the problem of distinguishing the false from the true shepherd.After licensing Henry to preach on ‘voluntary poverty, chastity, and consensual marriage’ (p. 105), Hildebert left for Rome, whereupon Henry’s sermons incited the populace against the clergy. Only a public catechism by Hildebert exposed Henry’s lack of scriptural authority and, hence, credibility. Andreas Rüther charts the development of the Carmelite Order from the late twelfth-century hermitages of Western pilgrims on the slopes of Mount Carmel. After the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem instructed them to live communally near Haifa, the Order survived a Canon of the Fourth Lateran...