God's Word, Women's Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late-Medievel Women Visionaries (review)

God's Word, Women's Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries. By Rosalynn Voaden. Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 1999. 204 pp. $75.00.

Over the past fifteen years, studies of medieval women mystics by scholars trained in literature (rather than in theological disciplines) have proliferated. Voaden's monograph follows in this genre. Her main thesis is that to avoid condemnation, medieval women visionaries had to become expert in conforming to the norms of the discourse of discretio spirituum (discernment of spirits). "Successful" visionaries, therefore, learned how to employ this discourse effectively as a blueprint for the production of their texts. Voaden studies St. Bridget of Sweden as an example of a fourteenth-century woman visionary who achieved success in this way, then contrasts her with her near contemporary, Margery Kempe, whose nonconformity led to disparagement in her own lifetime and for many centuries after her death.

Voaden employs Augustine's distinction among corporal, spiritual (i.e., imaginative), and intellectual visions to make her own distinction between "mystics," defined as those who have intellectual visions, and "visionaries," defined as those who have imaginative visions. On this basis she characterizes mystical experience as cerebral, imageless, and incommunicable. Since this form of mysticism was particularly nurtured by the Latin texts of the Dionysian tradition, she believes it was much less common among medieval women than among theologically educated males. She also asserts that this kind of mystical experience carries within itself an absolute certainty that it is of God, and for that reason does not require discernment. Thus, Voaden affirms that she is not addressing the discernment of mystical experience.

Her concern, rather, is visionary experience, which she defines as involving things felt, seen, or heard. Often, visionaries believe that they have a prophetic call to bring a message to others. During the period in question she sees visionary experience as particularly nurtured by Franciscan traditions of affective and visual meditation, which were promoted for popular devotion and especially for women. Voaden reviews how women, as well as any spiritual experience having a bodily or sensual cast, were regarded as profoundly inferior and even as "the devil's gateway." For all these reasons, women's visionary experiences were highly suspect in the eyes of ecclesiastical authorities, and were typically subjected to intense scrutiny according to the norms of discretio spirituum.

My main criticism of this book is that Voaden's distinctions are consistently oversimplified and do not do justice to the complexities of issues such as spiritual experience, gender, and the history of spiritual traditions. The Achilles heel of her scholarly focus on "discourse" seems to be a strong tendency to be too easily satisfied that she has discovered a definitive "system of language use" (her definition of discourse) that structures whatever phenomenon she is studying. An obvious example is the way she uses Augustine's distinction of three types of visions to neatly divide up the entire field of mystical and spiritual experiences. On that basis, she can go on to say that "The discourse of discretio spirituum . . . is concerned exclusively with vision and visionaries" (45). Such bald and categorical characterizations will be jarring to those who, having been trained in theological disciplines, are familiar with the varied and intricately nuanced discourses surrounding discernment.

The strength of Voaden's approach is that she presents her own "system of language use" clearly and straightforwardly. Reading this book is rather like attending a lecture in which the speaker makes only one or two useful points, but does this so well that one goes away feeling well prepared to make use of the ideas, and to place them into dialogue with other perspectives. The key useful idea in this book is that of discernment as a "discourse." Voaden does a...