Women and the Divine in Literature before 1700: Essays in Memory of Margot Louis by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (review)

Margot Louis (1954-2007) published largely in the field of Victorian poetry, showing a keen interest in the function of gender and myth, as evidenced in the posthumous Persephone Rises, 1860-1927: Mythography, Gender, and the Creation of a New Spirituality (Williston, VT: Ashgate, 2009). But Women and the Divine pays tribute to Louis’s first love, medieval literature, by collecting the work of Louis’s colleagues, mentees, and peers who share her interests in “the role of allegory, myth, visionary experience, and the feminine divine in the medieval imagination” (vii-viii). The organizing principle of Louis’s particular passions, and the broad time span remarked in the title, open a rather breath-taking scope of possibilities for this volume. Kerby-Fulton furthers this editorial challenge by posing the book not just as a reflection of Louis’s influence and interests but also as a trove of new research to interest the accomplished scholar, a teaching tool for undergraduate readers and non-medievalists, an exploration of the relationship of women to literature and religious tradition more generally, and a prompt to investigate “early women as agents of spiritual change” (ix). To gauge the volume’s depth and sincerity as a tribute to Louis is the task assigned to Rosalynn Voaden, who dwells in her epilogue on the range of female interactions and spiritual influence that the historical and literary record affords. But the collection succeeds in other ways, most notably by presenting a set of models for research methodologies and various lines of argumentation, disciplinary approaches, and ways of reading from which apprentice researchers and budding scholars might learn a great deal.

Linda Olson’s essay on Monica, mother of St. Augustine of Hippo, provides a starting point not just in that she begins with the earliest timeframe, fourthcentury Europe, but because she follows most closely the approaches established in Kerby-Fulton’s introduction: a specific emphasis on visionary experiences as an aspect of female devotion and spirituality; an analysis based on close reading, codicology, and the careful interpretation of text and image; and an attention to medieval book production, circulation, readership, and reception that solidly contextualizes historical attitudes, values, and beliefs. Organized chronologically, the essays that follow speak to each other not just on the obvious thematic preoccupation of the book, the intersections between women and spirituality—whether it be the challenges of historical women recording their experiences or of understanding fictionalized or feminized characters—but they also address the act of textual production; the ongoing negotiations medieval codices engage among text, image, historical matter, readers, and annotators present an intriguing subtext to the volume as a whole. Aside from Jonathan Juilfs, who gently chides the editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature as well as medieval and early modern compilers of the Revelations of Love for not fully understanding the Julian of Norwich to which modern scholarship has granted us access (or, one might say, created), reception theory provides a fruitful mode of investigation for several other contributors in this volume. Specifically, the essays by Linda Olson on Monica, Maidie Hilmo surveying marginal depictions of the Prioress and the Second Nun in illuminated copies of The Canterbury Tales, and Johanne Paquette examining sixteenth-century glosses on The Book of Margery Kempe treat manuscript illuminations, marginal imagery, translations and redactions, annotations, textual glosses, and other editorial apparati as real opportunities to examine the values of a historical moment and the imagined purposes for devotional literature. Adrienne Williams Boyarin goes a step further to imagine the Middle English vita of St. Margaret not just as a body-text but as an actual relic, given legal as well as spiritual authority by its imagery of the affixed seal.

Even the chapters that adhere most closely to a single text—Thea Todd’s essay on the Life of Christina of Markyate; Julianne Bruneau’s on Alan de Lille’s De Planctu Natura...