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444BOOK REVIEWS the earlier Middle Agesjews were increasingly cast as enemies of the Christian faith and traitors to civil society, with the usual unpleasant consequences. The second group of texts deals with Jewish converts who subsequently apostatized from their adopted faith. A third and much larger deviant group comprised those who flouted medieval sexual conventions, with whom Goodich rather oddly classes those who suffered from leprosy. Fourth in this catalogue of the despised we find mentally unstable persons thought to be possessed by the devil and his minions, including those unfortunate souls whose derangement led them to suicide. Next come heretics of various stripes, from Waldensians and Cathars to Guglielmites and the Brethren of the Free Spirit. As his final specimens of medieval marginality Goodich introduces us to texts that deal with persons who deviated from social and religious norms temporarily , often at some critical transition point in their life cycle. Thus we are introduced to Canon Thomas de Mathia, who doubted the efficacy of relics of St. Thomas Aquinas until personal experience of their power convinced him of his error. St. Clare of Assisi appears here in an account of the antagonism that her designs for a community of poor nuns aroused among more conventional Christians. Similarly Goodich treats us to Salimbene da Adam's description of the troubles he experienced with his family when, to their astonishment and horror, he decided to become a Franciscan friar. He closes his book with a passage from the canonization records of St. Nicholas of Tolentino that illustrates the circumstances in which individuals might invoke the aid of the saints to rescue them from desperate situations. The texts assembled here illustrate the problems of just a few groups who lived at or beyond the margins of medieval society. We hear nothing of the voices of numerous other marginalized groups—thieves and murderers, widows and orphans, prisoners and slaves, or prostitutes and charcoal burners, to cite just a clutch of examples. Nonetheless, within the limits that Goodich sets, the reader will encounter an array of documents that convey a vivid impression of the perils of liminality in medieval Christendom. James A. Brundage The University ofKansas Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages. By Dyan Elliott. [The Middle Ages Series.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1999. Pp. xii, 300. $49.95 clothbound; $1995 paperback.) As its subtitle indicates, Fallen Bodies deals with pollution, sexuality, and demonology in "the high and later Middle Ages" (p. 6). These themes are examined in six chapters: nocturnal pollution and men's bodies (chap. 1), women's bodies (chap. 2), sex in holy places (chap. 3), priests' wives after the Gregorian Reform's insistence on clerical celibacy (chaps. 4 and 5), later conceptualiza- BOOK REVIEWS445 tions of the nature of demons (chap. 6). Although Dyan Elliott says that each chapter could be read separately, she also insists "the book as a whole demonstrates the ways in which these issues resist separate treatment and interpenetrate one another" (pp. 12-13). The interpénétration results from the author's reading of a wide variety of medieval texts that goes beyond "interpretations that medieval authors would themselves 'approve'" (p. 8). This is accomplished through a penchant for a psychoanalytical reading of texts. The book abounds with the language of impulses , fantasies, dreams, guilt,fears, anxieties, repression, the subconscious. The following comment on an exemplum is illustrative: "This radicalization (and oversimplification) is initially resorted to as a defense mechanism against feelings of guilt, ambivalence, and anxiety . . ." (p. 32). The overall thesis of the book seems to be that in the course of the Middle Ages a subtle development occurred in the conceptualization of women and demons. Demons came to be thought of as intellectual, evil spirits, women as material, impure temptresses. They both came together in the witch, the servant and consort of the devil well expressed in the late fifteenth-century Malleus maleflcarum. This is a textuaily rich book reflecting considerable acquaintance both with medieval and contemporary literature. There are insightful analyses of pollution and ritual purity, virginity, and demonology, and interesting attempts to relate the developing cult of Mary and the doctrine of eucharistie transubstantiation to these...

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