The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700 (review)

Nancy Bradley Warren’s The Embodied Word boldly and often brilliantly examines an array of texts that express and depict female spirituality in the medieval and early modern periods. Her study predominately focuses on different types of life stories by and about religious women. Whether autobiographical or biographical, these texts model spiritual practice for readers across continents and centuries, specifically creating “a vehicle through which others’ lives can be re-embodied, brought to life again in the reader’s life” (3). This resurrection through reading is an exemplary instance of Warren’s core concept of incarnational piety, which effectively collapses distinctions between the past and present. For instance, the eponymous protagonist of The Book of Margery Kempe, in Jesus’s opinion, does not imitate Mary Magdalene because of her devotion; Kempe actually reincarnates Mary Magdalene, becoming indistinguishable from her, even if only momentarily, and this erases any temporal difference between events portrayed in the scriptural past and in Kempe’s present (173). Warren tracks the implications of this form of piety by also examining incarnational epistemology, textuality, and politics. Her overall aim is to reevaluate the interpretive power of key binaries, specifically distinctions between medieval / early modern, Catholic / Protestant, domestic / foreign and orthodox / heterodox.

Chapter 1 chiefly contends that the separation between medieval Catholicism and early modern Protestantism is less fixed than we usually presume. First, she demonstrates that in the fourteenth century, St. Birgitta, St. Catherine, and Julian of Norwich all express an incarnational piety in which, for example, Christ’s physical torments generate an “intersubjective relationship” between devotees and the divine, a connection grounded in women’s experience of pain when meditating on the cross (35). Then, Warren posits that in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), the early modern Protestant poet Amelia Lanyer echoes this emphasis on embodied spirituality in her work portraying Christ’s redemptive suffering, and Lanyer allies this pain to women’s reproductive capacity, affirming an expressly female power. Chapter 2 builds on these findings by revealing the incarnational patterns that emerge when Warren compares texts by Julian of Norwich, the English Benedictine nuns at Cambrai and Paris, and Grace Mild-may. In the process, Warren documents that in the early seventeenth century, Benedictine nuns not only copied and read Julian’s text, but one of those nuns, Margaret Gascoigne, incorporates Julian’s words into her own religious meditations.

That nuns on the continent utilize Julian’s writing indicates how women’s religious texts can challenge the opposition between foreign and domestic, a challenge that lies at the heart of chapter 3. In the first part, Warren turns to the English Briggitines who settled in Spain after the Reformation and to a very late sixteenth-century text that they produced, The Life and Good End of Sister Marie, about one of their order, Marie Champney, who returned to England in the Elizabethan era to fundraise in support of the monastery. Warren demonstrates that Champney’s biography dramatizes both her and her sisters’ suffering as “re-embodiments” of Christ’s pain, an image that resonates with the depictions of incarnational piety found in previous chapters (111). This shared pain potentially points to an oppositional nationalism since the nuns’ suffering was meant to inspire the redemption of England, just as Christ’s pain redeems humanity. The second part of this chapter scrutinizes the letters and life story of the Spanish noblewoman Luisa de Carvajal y Mendosa, who like Marie Champney, enters Protestant England for the Catholic cause only to suffer and die, becoming a martyr who, if only briefly, brings new life to the English Catholic community.

By comparing depictions of the mystic Margery Kempe, the prophet Ana Trapnel, and the Catholic recusant Elizabeth Cary in chapter 4, Warren reveals that gender often shapes the meaning of religious activity. Margery Kempe and Ana Trapnel’s religious speech in public spaces results in charges of immorality since they upset a patriarchal norm...