Things of the Spirit: Women Writers Constructing Spirituality (review)

Fourteen essays written by women, all but one with degrees in English, claiming to explore women writers from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries "constructing spirituality" presents this reviewer with quite a challenge. What do they mean by spirituality? What evidence in a text counts, for them, as a manifestation of spirituality?

Is this anthology an attempt to cash in on the current popularity of books on spirituality when the focus would more accurately be described as women writers reconstructing the meaning of "the feminine"? The majority of these authors are beginning scholars. All are writing about texts written from explicitly Protestant or Catholic religious traditions with hardly a footnote indicating background in theology or religious history.

Groover, associate professor of English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, claims in her Introduction that all seventeen writers studied by these thirteen contemporary authors are "doing theology" (3). Theology here means exploring the nature of the sacred, especially women's relation to the sacred ("sacred" meaning "coming into relationship" [3]). The kind of relationship is not indicated except by exclusion: not necessarily to a transcendent God or spiritual realm apart from human experience. In other words, spirituality means "the action of forming relationships; whether with God, fellow human, nature, or an element of the self" (3). Having defined theology, the sacred, and spirituality as meaning the same thing—forming relationships—Groover then asserts that the terms theological and literary artificially separate disciplines (3). At this point, all the basic terms are so inclusive that nothing sets this work's perspective apart from any discipline dealing with humanity. Only then does Groover make a connection with Christianity. "While all of these writers challenge, revise, or dismiss aspects of Christian orthodoxy, they nonetheless struggle with this shared religious culture" (4). The rest of the Introduction links these essays with the aims of feminist theology defined principally by Carol Christ, then by Carol Ochs, Elizabeth Dodson Gray, and Naomi Goldberg, all of whom critique patriarchal Jewish and Christian religion by separating spirituality and the sacred from religion and understanding women's spiritual growth as self-appropriation for the sake of relationships that affirm women's worth and power and find special affinity with goddess-nature worship. Rosemary Radford Ruether appears briefly as the one example of Christian feminist theology. Although the Introduction presents "spirituality" and "theology" understood primarily from the perspective of feminist psychology and pantheism, the thirteen authors take on the task of interpreting literature written within the context of Protestant and Catholic religious faith.

Elizabeth J. Adams, with a degree in religion from Temple University, examines Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle (1577), embracing a common assumption that this is an "instructional manual of mystical experience for women" (18). Adams's focus, however, is Teresa's rhetoric. Although there is just one mention of Alison Weber's pioneering work, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (1990), Adams work resembles Weber's methodology. It aims to show Teresa building empathy between readers and herself in a way that has both journey toward the central dwelling place where God resides (20). There is no mention of the term spirituality. Rhetoric building solidarity with Teresa's audiences is the primary focus.

Sue Matheson studies Amelia Lanyer's collection of religious verses, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), which is a bid for court patronage and part of the seventeenth century inquiry into women's nature. Matheson contends the poem is a protest demonstrating women's worth by challenging the Pauline notion of subservient marriage and claiming women's capacity for "higher reason" (55). It is a construction of spirituality insofar as it promotes "the spiritual equality of the sexes" (65).

Sheila T. Cavanaugh examines Lady Mary Sidney Worth's romance, Urania (1621), claiming the work "accommodates Christian elements with the occult" (79). Examples of occult are "otherworldly events, including enchantments, pilgrimages, and restorative leaps into treacherous waters" (75). These...