Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages by Dyan Elliott (review)

REVIEWS 219 in late medieval books and other contemporaneous European art, which may have served as sources for illustrations. One is the marriage ceremony and the other the depiction of black Africans. Both offer important information about a society undergoing a period of major change. However, using one example, the wedding that, while social, is primarily local and intimate, and one reflective of the greater awareness of the world’s diversity brought about by increasing trade and exploration, serves to help reveal to Driver’s modern reader the scope of the interests, tastes, and beliefs of the late medieval consumers of the new, widely circulated printed books. These books and the increased literacy they promoted contributed to bringing about major social changes, but book illustration itself became a point of contention in the ensuing turmoil. The Protestant Reformation raised again a recurrent issue for Christianity: at what point do images cease to serve a didactic purpose in conveying the message of Christ to the illiterate and semi-literate and become idolatrous objects of veneration? In England, political consideration also forbade the production of certain images, especially depictions of St. Thomas Becket. Driver addresses these issues in her last chapter, “Iconoclasm and Reform: the Survival of Late Medieval Images and the Printed Book,” showing not only how printers such as de Worde and Payson dealt with these social changes, but also how the owners of now suspect books often reacted by defacing or annotating them, rather than destroying them outright. The Image in Print is a valuable contribution to the history of the printed book, a field now receiving the scholarly scrutiny once lavished primarily on hand-lettered and illuminated manuscripts. Driver’s notes are informative and extensive, her bibliography broad and up-to-date. The British Library has chosen to print this handsome and abundantly illustrated volume on a cold white dull-coated paper. This gives the woodcuts a rather different visual effect than the hand-made laid paper that originally would have used to print them. It is, however, the correct choice for its crispness allows the viewer to easily see the sometimes subtle differences between an English cut and its continental source, or the effects of wear, which enable scholars to track the history of the usage of a specific illustration. LAWRENCE B. HOBSON, English, Arizona State University Dyan Elliott. Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2004) 350 pp. In her latest book, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages, Dyan Elliott makes yet another foray into the complicated but fascinating world of late medieval spirituality. While her focus on gender in this realm of cultural history is nothing new, her approach— jointly examining spirituality and heresy, inquisitorial procedures and their effect on the devotional practices they were intended to evaluate—proves novel in comparison with the majority of current historiography. For in following the recent scholarly endeavors of Richard Kieckhefer, Peter Dinzelbacher, and Barbara Newman, she challenges the traditional divide between the oftenopposed categories of heretic and saint. Elliott’s work thus leads to greater insights into, in her own introductory words, why the later Middle Ages experi- REVIEWS 220 ences the “gradual criminalization of female spirituality” and “the progressive efforts to constrain and even persecute women” (1). Central to this new monograph, as the title suggests, is the question of proof—what constitutes evidence of sanctity, or alternatively heresy, in a postordeal age that saw the beginning of inquisitional procedures. The present work traces, first, the role of women as proofs of orthodoxy, then the increasing importance of the inquisition as the primary means of determining truth, and finally the use of the inquisition to prove (and increasingly disprove) women. Consequently, one of Elliott’s main arguments is that, in a time of great social and cultural upheaval, ecclesiastical leaders and particularly clergy began to seriously question the very concept of proof until inquisitional procedures eventually undermined the spiritual veracity of the women who originally proved spirituality. Dyan Elliott commences her study with a chapter on confession. Here, setting up the three sections that comprise her book, Elliott briefly examines how...