Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book: Gender and the Making of Textual Authority (review)

In the early years of the last century, scholarly interest in vernacular writing by medieval religious women was mostly philological, for their works are some of our earliest examples of various European languages. When attention was paid to the content, it was often to characterize such works as psychologically or spiritually aberrant—as hysterical or heretical. From the 1970s, interest turned to the fact of female authorship but became implicated in arguments, spawned mostly by French feminism, about whether it was possible for women writers to speak in a voice of their own. At last we begin to have scholarship—of which Sara Poor's book is a stunningly good example—that combines sophisticated philology and astute feminism to explore the making, reception, and influence of woman-authored texts.

Mechtild of Magdeburg's Flowing Light of the Godhead is one of a handful of great works of medieval German poetry and prose, and it is available to us not in the original Middle Low German but in two translations—one High German, the other Latin. (Even this summary of the textual history is a little oversimple.) Sara Poor's study of Mechtild's book not only gives careful attention to the beauty, originality, and power of Mechtild's spirituality but also teases out of the history of its reception both something of Mechtild's own motives in writing and a complex story of influence in which later excerpting of the text in devotional compendia gradually eclipsed its female authorship and its daring. Thus Poor's monographic study raises some large issues about the formation, preservation, and questioning of literary canons.