Intersections of Sexuality and the Divine in Medieval Culture: The Word Made Flesh (review)

This volume is more focused than the title’s “medieval culture” suggests. Ten of the eleven essays (setting aside a brief introductory chapter) focus on English vernacular texts of the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries, the exception being a discussion of Latin writings by Gertrud the Great of Helfta, who died just after 1200. The aim of the book, as the editor puts it, is to seek “a broader focus upon both sexuality and spirituality within the larger field of Medieval Studies . . . [and] to analyze not only the sexual in spirituality, but also the spiritual in sexuality” (3). This is an important project. Historians like Caroline Walker Bynum and John Boswell, whose works are frequently cited here, have drawn attention to the relationship between the spirit and the flesh in medieval Christian thought and practice, alerting us that the link was far closer than a modernist perspective suggests.

Drawing on such observations and on literary and cultural theory, the authors proceed according to a time-honored method of literary analysis: close reading of texts. These range from the familiar, including Chaucer’s “Merchant’s Tale,” Pearl, and the York Plays, to the obscure, such as two late-fifteenth-century poems on alchemy. The authors differ among themselves in approaches to and understandings of the juxtaposition of the sexual and the divine in their texts. Alexandra Barratt’s discussion of Gertrud of Helfta’s Herald of God’s Loving-Kindness, for example, finds that conjugal and erotic images are often “anemic and lack sensual energy. . . . They are . . . conventional and inoffensive” (109). Such imagery demonstrates not sublimation but “an innocent eroticism, unfallen, unrepressed, and guilt-free” (107). Quite different is Michelle M. Sauer’s discussion of the mystical treatise A Talkynge of the Loue of God. This text, aimed at men, was mostly appropriated from earlier guides for women. Since little of the sexual language or imagery was changed, Sauer, drawing on s/m theory, finds it intensely and intentionally homoerotic. Either argument is open to criticism. Even if Gertrud produced highly sexualized material without personal sexual experience, why could innocence not be as carefully fashioned as her erotic images of sensual union with the divine? One wonders if Sauer, who dismisses Brian Patrick McGuire’s subtle reading of the relationship between Aelred of Rievaulx’s spirituality and sexuality as “waffling” (165), is more provocative than serious in her suggestion that A Talkynge imagines and fosters a group of celibate gay male foot fetishists who yearn for a long-term partnership with Jesus in which both parties are sexually versatile (168–73). In short, questions of how literally sexual imagery should be taken, what details about it are important, and even what counts as sexual imagery get different answers in these pages. Nonetheless, the collection as a whole makes a convincing case that late medieval English secular and religious writings, from poetic narratives to conduct literature to guides for mystics, frequently and without embarrassment juxtaposed sexual and spiritual language and imagery.

This book probably serves best as a contribution to Middle English studies. Often long passages of original texts go untranslated, which makes discussions of Pearl, for instance, rather formidable. Some authors are generous to the uninitiated. Susannah Mary Chewning and Julie E. Fromer translate all the texts they quote; Liz Herbert MacAvoy does such a good job explaining Margery Kempe’s story and language that translation of the (not terribly difficult) late medieval English prose is superfluous. In most cases there is very little historical or sociological background; the essays by M. C. Bodden on “The Merchant’s Tale” and Sauer on A Talkynge do discuss literary antecedents, but neither traces specifically the path from those texts, many in Latin, to the vernacular ones on which they focus their discussion. Rather than go into more detail about the contents of individual essays and their relations to one another, for the readers of this...