Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis (review)

Theresa Tinkle’s study of the politics of biblical interpretation is wide reaching in its historical trajectory (the age of Augustine through the late Middle Ages) but organized around a series of case studies linked to “three crucial moments” in the history of exegesis: the establishment of the discourse during the so-called patristic period, its development of (illusory) univocal authority in the twelfth century, and its fragmentation during the ecclesiastical turmoil of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (12). The book’s premise is that medieval biblical interpretation was never a disinterested use of scripture, that the operations of exegesis are inevitably shaped by the author’s conscious or unconscious agenda and by the political, ecclesiastical, and social circumstances of its production. In Tinkle’s words, “exegesis, like politics, is always local” (127).

The range of texts analyzed (Jerome’s Against Jovinian, two of Chrysostom’s sermons, Augustine’s Confessions, the Glossa ordinaria, the Fleury Slaughter of Innocents, and The Wife of Bath’s Prologue) reveals one purpose of this study, which Tinkle directly articulates in a call for an opening of the exegetical canon. Acknowledging the debt that exegetical study owes to the work of Beryl Smalley and scholars following in her wake, Tinkle contends that we can significantly expand upon their work (which focused almost exclusively on academic exegesis) by considering the impact of poets and playwrights on the medieval understanding of scripture. Literary exegesis should not be considered subordinate to academic exegesis; rather, these two modes of writing should be studied intertextually, for they perform similar cultural work in shaping a community’s understanding of biblical meaning (Chapter 4, on the Fleury Slaughter, illustrates this point especially well).

The narrower focus of this study is the exegetical use of gendered hierarchical inversions, which Tinkle suggests is motivated by the challenges implicit in the call to imitatio Christi. The image of a crucified deity necessarily raises questions about the nature of true authority and power, which may not find its basis in traditional masculinity. Tinkle argues that some exegetes respond to this call by inverting hierarchical social models and speaking through feminine or childlike personae. This use of the “woman on top” trope establishes spiritual authority via its difference from traditional social order, but the trope can also be used for the purpose of disparaging assertive, authoritative, and vocal women by exegetes who want to exclude these characteristics from their own self-fashioning. The book’s first chapter, “Women on Top in Medieval Exegesis,” introduces this topic and establishes Tinkle’s methodology as historically informed feminist literary study.

Chapter 2, “Subversive Feminine Voices: The Reception of 1 Timothy 2 from Jerome to Chaucer,” is, in a sense, the book in miniature, for it presents the study’s historical trajectory and models its overarching argument through a diachronic analysis of interpretations of a single biblical passage (“But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to use authority over man: but to be in silence”). As Tinkle points out, this passage invites readers either “to side with the apostle, to stand with him in the aura of religious power” or “to dwell imaginatively on those provocative women and to conceive of their unutterable words” (18). The chapter examines the rhetorical strategies that Jerome, Chrysostom, the producers of the Glossa ordinaria, and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath use to rescript the biblical text’s anxiety about feminine speech and subversion. These texts reveal, though in tellingly different ways, a power struggle between ecclesiastical men and lay women. Each constructs a social and gender hierarchy but also exposes the fact that it is contested.

The next three chapters offer sustained engagements with single works from each of the book’s three historical periods, in which the trope of the woman on top is instrumental to exegetical authorization. Chapter 3, “Gender Trouble in Augustine’s Confessions,” demonstrates how Augustine’s contradictory performance of gender is part of his authorizing strategy in Confessions. When fashioning his episcopal identity, Augustine rhetorically...