Varieties of Religious Experience: Medieval Women

Book Reviews Varieties of Religious Experience: Medieval Women Sr. Mary Jeremy Finnegan, O.P. The Women of Heißa: Scholars and Mystics. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. ISBN 0-82031291 -6 (cl); $30.00. Penelope D. Johnson. Equal in Monastic Profession: Religious Women in Medieval France. Women in Culture and Society. Catherine R. Stimson, series editor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. 320 pp. ISBN 0-226-40185-5 (cl); $35.00. Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn, eds. Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. xii + 243 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8203-1262-2 (cl); 0-8203-1263-0 (pb); $30.00 (cl); $15.00 (pb). Jo Ann McNamara The present generation of historians has systematicaUy advanced and deepened our understanding of medieval Ufe by imaginative use of a limited body of sources. Innovative methods and theoretical frameworks drawn from the social sciences, uterary and art criticism, and statistics have enabled us to draw new insights from old materials and to use materials once thought to be barren of historical information. This development has, of course, been indispensable to the enterprise of reconstructing the unchrordcled events of everyday life—particularly the historical experience of women—as the books under consideration amply demonstrate. Two of these books, Finnegan's study of the thirteenth-century reUgious community of Helfta in Germany and Johnson's investigation of the cloistered nuns of northwest France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, form a natural and complementary unit. The coUection of essays on the development and spread of the cult of Saint Anne in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has Uttle in common with the first two books. AU three, however, have benefited from the revolution in source usage that characterizes our time. None of them make use of standard narrative sources to any meaningful degree. Finnegan draws her picture of monastic Ufe almost entirely from the mystical treatises of three contemporary reUgious women who came together in a single monastery: Mechtild of Hackeborne, © 1992 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 4 No. 2 (Fall) 162 Journal of Women's History Fall MechtUd of Magdeburg, and Gertrude of Helfta. Johnson deUberately eschews both narrative and prescriptive Uterature in an attempt to draw a more concrete group portrait from "documents of practice": primarily charters confirrning property transactions and the visitation book of the Archbishop of Rouen, Eudes Rigaud, from the mid-thirteenth century. The contributors to Ashley and Sheingorn's anthology, as might be expected, have a larger but equally untraditional pool of sources: folklore, taUsmans intended for easing the pains of chüdbirth, dramatic works, and pictorial evidence of aU sorts. None of these sources, of course, was ever aimed at providing a balanced or well-rounded picture of the sodety they Uluminate. Inevitably, they distort our views severely. Reading the mystical works of the nuns of Helfta, one is persuaded that no harsh notes of rebeUion, worldUness, or even carelessness could have marred the deep religious peace of the community. Surveying Johnson's evidence, the reader can hardly help but wonder when, if ever, the nuns of northwest France could have spared the time for the hours of meditation needed to produce a mature mystic. Just as predictably, the essays concerning Saint Anne cast Ught on isolated events in vastly different areas though the editors have been very persuasive in giving them unity in their introduction. This complaint is by no means intended as a criticism of the authors involved. It did, however, strike me forcibly that we are very far from eliciting a coherent picture of even a small corner of medieval life through these techniques. The Women of Helfta is a revised and updated version of the author's Scholars and Mystics (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1962), greatly benefited by recent feminist scholarship on women's mystidsm, particularly the work of Caroline Walker Bynum. The book is not so much concerned with the mystical content of the works of the three great Helfta visionaries as with the reconstruction of the community that produced them. The monastery was only twenty years old in 1251 when Gertrude of Hackeborne was elected abbess. Its great days ended with...