Reform and Resistance: Formations of Female Subjectivity in Early Medieval Ecclesiastical Culture by Helene Scheck (review)

Medievalists have long recognized that ecclesiastical reform movements were periods of instability and cultural change, and that reformist mandates affected both lay and religious women’s lived experience, as well as social and institutional understandings of gender. So, too, the interdependence and close comparisons between early Continental and Anglo-Saxon reforms have been amply demonstrated by a range of scholars, among them art historian Robert Deshman, and historians Joanna Story, Barbara Yorke, and Catherine Cubitt. Yet Helene Scheck’s ambitious study of female subjectivity in early medieval ecclesiastical culture is the first major monograph explicitly devoted to examining the gendered implications of reform movements through an interdisciplinary and comparative lens. This challenging new book urges scholars to think hard about female personhood and its elusive relationships to hegemonic discourses on women and femininity, while modeling the difficulties of this kind of scholarly inquiry and the complex conceptual frameworks in which it must be conducted.

Scheck writes that her goal is “not to trace historical moments . . . but to understand how women were perceived, and how they perceived themselves, within their particular social and historical circumstances—the ‘Real’ conditions of their existence. In other words, to consider whether women are able to emerge as autonomous subjects during these moments and, if so, how” (p. 19). To that end, Reform and Resistance examines three different periods of reform: the Carolingian reforms under Charlemagne in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, the Alfredian and Benedictine reforms in late ninth- through early eleventh-century England, and the Ottonian reforms of tenth-century Saxony. Scheck marshals a dazzling array of sources, from conciliar mandates to coronation ordines, from vernacular poetry to Latin plays, to contend that early periods of Christian conversion tended to foster active and autonomous female subjects, with later periods of reform dramatically restricting women’s agency and rendering them “abject” or, at best, “supplementary” beings. Yet she also cautions against viewing reformist discourses on female subjectivity as wholly debilitating, arguing that “resistance to reform can be detected . . . even in the most restrictive periods” (p. 18), and, further, that to accept uncritically recorded hegemonic ideologies as universal is to risk replicating and promoting them.

The book opens with an overview, “Women in/and Ecclesiastical Culture,” that outlines Biblical teachings on women, Augustine’s views on the gendering of the imago dei, women’s roles in early Christian conversion, and modern theoretical work on subjectivity by scholars such as Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler. The six chapters that follow are organized as discrete pairs, with two chapters each devoted to the Carolingian, Anglo-Saxon, and Ottonian reforms. Individual chapters analyze the broader contours of these reform movements and provide close readings of key texts and reform players, with particular attention to Alcuin of York, Ælfric, and Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim.

Chapters 2 and 3 begin from the premise that the Carolingian church was “in crisis” (p. 22), and that reformers responded to this sense of chaos and fragmentation by adopting one of two positions: the “official Roman ecclesiastical position” that limited opportunities for women religious in the interest of establishing uniformity within the Church, and the “more popular Celto-Germanic position” that resurrected earlier Church ideals conducive to female agency. Scheck finds that the Carolingian reforms created a climate that was generally unfavorable to the emergence of strong female subjects, pointing to reformers’ efforts to enforce stricter enclosure of women religious and to limit women’s intellectual and ecclesiastical freedoms by expanding earlier laws on ritual purity. Conservative reform orthodoxy is especially evident in Charlemagne’s capitularies, as well as in the court poetry of Theodulf of Orléans, whose verse equates feminine virtue with passivity, physical beauty, and attendance to familial duty. Nevertheless, the key reform player, Alcuin of York, emerges in this story as a “liberal voice” whose “more egalitarian yet still...