The Contested Theological Authority of Thomas Aquinas: The Controversies between Hervaeus Natalis and Durandus of St. Pourçain by Elizabeth Lowe (review)

REVIEWS 239 Krug completes the book with a chapter on nuns and literate culture at the Bridgettine convent Syon Abbey. Charting changes related to reading habits and book ownership from the convent’s founding to the sixteenth century, Krug’s main argument unfolds the ways in which spiritual advisors harnessed feminine notions of family and reading habits imparted by the aristocratic household to shape literate practices within the greater community. The process resulted in a special emphasis on private devotion and a heightened awareness of the material importance of personally owned books to the institution’s collective identity. When a woman entered Syon, she exchanged one family for another, breaking ties with her worldly family and forging new connections with her spiritual one. Problem was that Syon recruited its members from a fairly limited pool of candidates, so often sisters had blood relatives in their midst, a fact that sometimes hindered bonding with the rest of the convent. Thus select devotional texts were to help them envision kinship as vehicle to enlarge religious experience and to “redirect emotional attachments from the secular to the spiritual” (182). Additionally, the program created a strong connection between the reader, the book, and God. Looking at a volume prepared for Joan Sewell, Krug apprehends that reading privately evolved into divine conversation, the act of hearing and speaking to God. Eventually, Krug contends , these literate practices turned around and influenced lay reading habits. This fact is significant because it substantiates the existence of the ideological permeability of cloister walls and unimpeded exchange between women, something often oversimplified, misunderstood or disregarded even in current scholarship . For quite some time, many have wondered why so few women produced textual works, when enough of them possessed the necessary skills. Most attribute the lack to the incompatibility between femininity and the authority of the written word or to our too narrow and uninformed definition medieval authorship (as acts of resistance and submission for women). Krug’s book offers a different explanation. She believes that our assumptions as to why someone learns to read—in order to generate texts—interfere with our ability to accurately comprehend what literate culture meant medieval women and how it impacted their lives. Krug rightly believes that we arrogantly see literacy too much in terms of “consumption” and “production,” an outlook which has come to negate or depreciate the “transformative” experience of written texts. For this alone, Krug’s book is worth reading. Some might complain her approach is overly Darwinist, but her refreshing perspective sheds light upon the many varieties of literacy and the choices involved in developing literate skills, making it a wonderful contribution to both women’s history and the history of literacy . STEPHANIE VOLF, English, Arizona State University Elizabeth Lowe, The Contested Theological Authority of Thomas Aquinas: The Controversies between Hervaeus Natalis and Durandus of St. Pourçain, Studies in Medieval History and Culture 17, series ed. Francis G. Gentry (New York: Routledge 2003) xviii + 259 pp. When the Dominicans weren’t bickering with the Franciscans in the early fourteenth century, they appeared to enjoy bickering amongst themselves. Duran- REVIEWS 240 dus of St. Pourçain particularly exasperated his opponent and mentor Hervaeus Natalis by calling him an “idiot” and a “carping critic” and referring to his proThomistic arguments as “asinine” (72, 79). In The Contested Theological Authority of Thomas Aquinas: The Controversies between Hervaeus Natalis and Durandus of St. Pourçain, Elizabeth Lowe merges the perspectives of intellectual and institutional history to explore the intra-fraternal dispute between Natalis and Durandus, investigating how their quarrel contributed to the Order’s eventual appropriation of Thomistic theology and philosophy, along with his auctoritas. Between 1307 and 1323, Natalis defended the teachings of Thomas Aquinas against the attacks of Durandus, but this perhaps conveys too gentle a description of their debate: because of the opponents’ “shared propensity to rant and rave,” “vitriol has rarely been engaged with so much dash and vigor” (74). In her first chapter, Lowe elucidates the early development of the Dominican intellectual tradition by scrutinizing how the friars perceived their role within the church and how their administrative and educational structures contributed to their sense of a corporate identity...