Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages by Nancy Caciola (review)

REVIEWS 192 the king’s prerogatives. The subsequent revisions and reissues of the Provisions largely reflect a struggle over who would get credit for the reforms, the king or the barons. For the generalist, chapters 1, 2, and 3, plus the conclusion are the most useful . Chapter 1 outlines the process of drafting the original Provisions, including the forming of the Committee of Twenty-four in order to do so, while chapters 2 and 3 present the broader social and legal context out of which the individual clauses of the Provisions came. The succeeding chapters deal, in painstaking detail, with the enforcement of the Provisions of Westminster from 1259–1263, then with the revision and reissuing of the Provisions in 1263 and then again in 1264, and then with the enforcement of these revisions. The first half of the book wraps up with the final revision and reissue of the Provisions as the Statute of Marlborough in 1267. The second half of the book (about 200 pp.) is taken up with the enforcement and interpretation of the Statute of Marlborough. The commendably thorough Table of Contents will help the generalist pinpoint the portions of the book that will be of the most use to her. For the specialist, Kings, Barons and Justices provides a detailed account of how individual clauses were introduced, altered, and/or deleted during the drafting of the original Provisions of Westminster and up through the later revisions . Here Brand draws on a much wider array of sources, including unpublished manuscripts, than have previously been brought to bear on the subject. Brand also includes many individual case studies which show how the laws were (or were not) put into practice and the various interpretations of the laws at different places and dates. A very useful appendix includes the text of the original Provisions, as well as the text of the revisions of 1263 and of 1264, and finally the text of the Statute of Marlborough. Brand gives both the Latin text and a translation into English , and he also indicates which portions of the Provisions have been altered in each revision. The changes to the preamble in each reissue are particularly interesting, as they show King Henry’s gradual taking over of the legislation for his own side. Brand’s book is not for the dilettante, but for the legal specialist, or for the generalist in need of more background information about thirteenth-century legal and social culture in England, the study is invaluable. MARGARET LAMONT, English, UCLA Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 2003) 327 pp. Nancy Caciola’s Discerning Spirits is a valuable contribution to the study of discernment in the Middle Ages. Caciola’s text brilliantly traces the history and rhetoric associated with the investigation of medieval women’s claims towards divine and demonic possession. According to Caciola, “the discernment of spirits was a long-term labor of social interpretation that sometimes never reached final resolution, even after the death of the person concerned” (2). Her text, therefore, “aims to unpack both the specific content of the discernment dispute and the wider cultural tensions and ideals that it expressed” (3). Caciola ’s well-argued introduction frames the cultural history surrounding this phenomena. Her study avoids using the trite and often misunderstood term REVIEWS 193 “mystic” and uses such phrases as “divinely inspired” or “divinely possessed” instead (19). Discerning Spirits departs from traditional studies of discernment with its focus on women in the Middle Ages. Expanding upon Hildegard of Bingen’s claim that “in truth, this is an effeminate age,” Caciola maintains that “this pattern seemed to some observers to be an inversion of the natural order of the sexes, and the perception that the world had entered into an effeminate age, in which women were usurping traditionally male avenues of authority, could lead to bitter recriminations” (16). Interestingly, men who underwent trances were judged differently than their female counterparts (18). Caciola, however, argues that her study is not solely about women, and instead is an examination of the ambiguous nature of this phenomena concerning demonic possession and fraud (22). Caciola urges her...