Living Saints of the Thirteenth Century: The Lives of Yvette, Anchoress of Huy; Juliana of Cornillon, Author of the Corpus Christi Feast; and Margaret the Lame, Anchoress of Magdeburg ed. by Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker (review)

The Brepols series 'Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts' has provided a variety of edited and translated sources relating to the lives of medieval saints and holy women. Living Saints of the Thirteenth Century makes another contribution to this splendid enterprise. Anneke Mulder-Bakker, well known for her scholarship in medieval texts by and about medieval women, has here brought together translations of three Lives of holy laywomen written during the thirteenth century.

Jo Ann McNamara made the translation of the first text - The Life of Yvette, Anchoress of Huy by Hugh of Floreffe - for Peregrina Press in 1999. Mulder-Bakker has included this translation unchanged, adding only recognition of more recent scholarship to the references. The second text is The Life of Juliana of Cornillon, the translation of which, also previously published by Peregrina Press in 1998, has been revised to incorporate insights gleaned from Jean-Pierre Delville's 1999 edition of the Vie de Sainte Julienne de Cornillon. Barbara Newman has updated its introduction. Likewise, the translation of the third text, The Life of Margaret the Lame, by Friar Johannes (originally published by Peregrina Press in 2001) has been revised and updated by Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Tilman Lewis.

Where the book makes its impact is in the Introduction. Mulder-Bakker makes two key points in relation to the Lives of the medieval holy women and men of the Southern Low Countries in the thirteenth century: firstly, that a significant proportion of them were lay; and secondly, that the Lives were written about them as living exemplars of a holy life rather than as dead candidates for canonisation. Of the twenty-seven known surviving Lives written about holy women and men in the period, nine are based on the lives of laywomen, and two on lives of laymen. (A full list of the surviving Lives is provided on pp. 43-45.) The generic term mulieres religiosae, often used to encapsulate the various forms of informal religious expression of women who lived outside the cloister, is disassembled in Mulder-Bakker's analysis to remind us of the differing life choices made by these holy women. Holy virgins, beguines, widows, matrons, and anchoresses undertook various sorts of religious vocations outside the cloister, participating in spiritual networks in the distinctive urban conditions of the twelfth to thirteenth centuries.

The early works of James of Vitry, who perceived the 'sanctifying agency' of holy women for their urban communities (p. 1), and recorded their exemplary experiences, provided inspiration for other clerical writers who sought to represent other women's holy lives. The Lives were based in a variety of sources; some of the women recorded their own experiences, or female and male confidantes reported them, to be then captured by the authors of the surviving Lives. All these texts were composed, not as many saints' Lives were written, for the purposes of canonisation, but to provide audiences with models of a 'new saintliness' (p. 33). The reader will seek in vain for posthumous miracles in these Lives: it is the everyday experiential holiness of heroic women and men living in their secular communities that show the possibilities for saintliness for ordinary laity.