Send Me God: The Lives of Ida the Compassionate of Nivelles, Nun of La Ramée, Arnulf, Lay Brother of Villers, and Abundus, Monk of Villers by Goswin of Bossut (review)

This is a splendid volume. It comes with its own kit of tools to enrich the reader's scholarly experience. It begins, for example, with a useful bibliographical mapping of the scholarly terrein. It also provides a detailed map of the physical locale in which the saintly subjects of these vitae lived, prayed, and worked. It provides an important preface by Barbara Newman identifying and illustrating the religious culture of the Low Countries and the Rhineland these vitae express, a culture in which spiritual friendships flourished at distance and across the boundaries segregating spiritually serious persons by sex. There is also a second introduction more narrowly focused upon the vitae of Goswin themselves, describing the physical world he would have known, the literary corpus to which his hagiographical efforts belonged, Goswin's position within the life of his community, his relationship to and possible intent for the vitae he wrote, his use of language, and the challenge it presents to the would-be translator. As said, all these tools serve to enrich the reader's subsequent encounter with the translations themselves.

The translations are lucid, even when stretching language and grammar to present something of the feel of the Goswinian originals. Moreover, the translator provides the reader full access to his "study." That is, he takes the time to present example after example of the conundra he faced in dealing with Goswin's Latin, for Goswin was that kind of monastic author who took the patterns of meditative reading (ruminatio) and used them as structural principles of effective writing. That is, he extended word-play beyond all modern sense of decorum; it operates on multiple levels, constituting, at one and the same time, principles of invention, conceptual arrangement, and ductus or rhetorical flow. In addition, the translator uses footnoted italicization in the text to give the reader a sense of the intertextual echoes that constantly sound and resound in Goswin's prose. Most strikingly, he uses his apparatus to let the reader in on the presence of secrets that he has uncovered by virtue of his deep familiarity with the texts and their author. I point especially to his identification of places where Goswin has deliberately suppressed the names of his protagonists' interlocutors. Reading these translations, one enters deeply into the literary and linguistic world of the Latin originals. They constitute an extraordinarily effective rendering.

The vitae themselves deserve mention. They breathe their author's insistence that in the figure of these saints, and in the 'universe' that radiates out from them, heaven and earth are joined and the King and Queen of Heaven walk among us. Moreover, we see that in their world, for all its discursive antitheses, flesh is not body. For, when heaven and earth are joined and flesh is banished into outer darkness, the body remains central to life lived before the face of God. In one vita, it takes on the form of consecrated bread. In another, the pulsing rouge of the flagellated back. In a third, the labile softness of the Virgin's lips. Indeed, body remains the very site of religious encounter. Such corporeal emphasis is, of course, an emphasis we have learned to associate with high medieval women above all. But here we see that body functions similarly in the extraordinary religious radicality of a Cistercian lay brother and monk. Together, these three vitae suggest that we could be more nuanced...