Women, Men & Spiritual Power: Female Saints & Their Male Collaborators (review)

Women and men have been collaborating on what would become the Christian project since the time of Jesus. Information about male participation in this project has been duly recorded and passed down, creating a legacy of male agency and influence. Knowledge of women's involvement has remained in the shadows, due in part to the private nature of much female ecclesial work, and also to the lack of importance attached to women's writing and activity. This gender discrimination has meant that, until recently, little scholarly attention has been given to women, much less to female-male cooperation—and even less to women's partnership with other women.¹

For several decades now, these lacunae have been filled through an explosion of scholarship dedicated to the recovery and critical assessment of the works and contexts of Christian women from all periods of history. For the medieval period, a few key names include Caroline Walker Bynum, Elizabeth Petroff, Katharina Wilson, Jo Ann McNamara, Grace Jantzen, Barbara Newman, Amy Hollywood, Catherine Mooney, Susan Mosher Stuard, Peter Dronke, Derek Baker, and Daniel Bornstein. Their work calls attention to women's contributions in medieval church and society, including diverse relationships and collaboration with men (often learned clerics). In cases where female religious experience has been chronicled by men, scholars lament the difficulty of sorting out "he said, she said" issues. And yet they have drawn closer to women's actual voices than ever before.

As this recovery of medieval women's history has matured, it is fitting that scholars also attend to the portraits of the men inscribed in these works. In Women, Men & Spiritual Power: Female Saints & Their Male Collaborators, John W. Coakley asks how men, whom he describes as "collaborator-hagiographers," placed themselves explicitly in these narratives (4). He reads with an eye to the way the texts are shaped, as well as to the choices made by their authors as they present the women and their experiences. He examines texts from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries that are the fruit of nine female/male relationships They include Ekbert and Elisabeth of Schönau; Guibert of Gembloux and Hildegard of Bingen; James of Vitry and Mary of Oignies; Peter of Dacia and Christine of Stommeln; "Friar A" and Angela of Foligno; Giunta Bevegnati and Margaret of Cortona; Henry of Nordlingen and Margaret Ebner; Raymond of Capua and Catherine of Siena; and John Marienwerder and Dorothy of Montau.

Coakley focuses his detailed textual analysis on the issue of authority. He wants to know what the texts reveal about the relationship between the formal, official, institutional authority of the ordained, and the informal, experiential, charismatic, prophetic authority of holy women. The women's authority was based on their extraordinary direct access to God in revelations, visions and ecstasies—phenomena that intrigued and drew the men into their orbit. Male authority rested on their ability to teach, preach, and celebrate sacraments. Coakley also inquires about whether or not there were limits to either form of authority. When did official authority trump informal power and when was informal power perceived as outside clerical direction? In other words, how did these two types of power coexist?

Coakley does not force the material into a pre-ordained grid, but allows a nuanced picture to emerge. In the twelfth century, Eckbert and Elisabeth cooperate in the dissemination of her visionary experiences, but Eckbert exercises clear authorial influence on her theology. In contrast, Guibert of Gembloux sees himself working with Hildegard in a spirit of monastic collegiality. In later centuries, clerics underlined their spiritual inferiority, seeing themselves as lacking the women's intimate, graced revelations from God (James of Vitry, Friar A.). They describe what Coakley calls "role reversals" in which the female directee/penitent becomes the director/confessor of her male counterpart. She might call attention to his spiritual deficiencies, direct his ministry, or provide access to the divine that the men would not otherwise have. Men thus...