Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition, c. 1100–c. 1500 ed. by Alastair Minnis, Rosalynn Voaden (review)

REVIEWS 276 Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition, c. 1100–c. 1500, ed. Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers 2010) xii + 748 pp. This is an impressive and ambitious collection of new essays on medieval mulieres sacrae, all in English but authored by a nationally-diverse array of scholars. The description “holy woman” for the purposes of the collection has a wide scope, including not only “visionaries” like Julian of Norwich who received special revelations from God, but also those women, in the editors’ words, “whose lives were redolent of exceptional devotion and wisdom, who found theological voice and profoundly influenced the spiritual practice of those around them, together with women who, within their communities, were generally regarded as holy, and who were believed to have spoken and acted in ways worthy of emulation and of preservation in writing” (7). Refreshingly, the editors approach their historically distant subject with a note of contemporary urgency, citing some contemporary journalistic accounts of religious women whose voices were suppressed by ecclesial powers as evidence of the contemporary need to display the riches of medieval feminist spirituality and theology. The book is primarily intended to be a work of reference, and the editors tout it as the first comprehensive reference book on the subject (2). The contributors , for the most part, write in a style which is comprehensible to a nonspecialist audience, as the editors envisioned (5). The bibliographies which follow each chapter offer information about the relevant manuscript traditions, the best means of accessing the major texts, and the essential secondary literature . These bells and whistles make the volume useful for the specialist as well as the student. After an excellent section of five introductory essays, the book is organized into seven parts, each part named after a geographical region of Europe and highlighting the holy women from that region. The regions are: the British Isles, France, the German territories, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia. Each part includes one survey of the holy women of its respective region, and all but the Iberian Peninsula and Scandinavia include essays on individual holy women. The introductory sections includes essays by Dyan Elliott (“Flesh and Spirit: the Female Body”), Alastair Minnis (“Religious Roles: Public and Private”), John Coakley (“Women’s Textual Authority and the Collaboration of Clerics”), John Van Engen (“Communal Life: the Sister Books”), and Peter Biller (“Women and Dissent”). Of special interest to me was Minnis’s piece, which briefly traced the evolution of the notion of ordination toward its contemporary extension to sacerdotal functions, arguing that women were simply “defined” out of ordained ministry, and going on to develop the idea that, with a few famous exceptions (especially Hildegard of Bingen), holy women expressed their holiness outside of public institutions. The section on the British Isles includes essays on Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, by Liz Herbet McAvoy and Anthony Goodman, respectively. In her survey essay, Anne Clark Bartlett argues that modern scholars have been too quick to link sanctity with the degree of a holy person’s isolation from the world; that medieval religious vocations were far more fluid than has commonly been supposed; that holy people of both sexes maintained productive working relationships, despite prohibitions and polemic in much ecclesiastical REVIEWS 277 discourse; and that the post-Conquest hagiography of pre-Conquest holy women functioned politically as a way of inculcating “Englishness” (168). The section on France includes essays on Heloise and Marguerite Porete by Constant J. Mews and Michael G. Sargent, respectively. In the survey, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski argues that French holy women were more isolated than their German and Flemish counterparts. Few knew each other, and there were few mutual influences in their religious ideas, practices, or writings. French holy women are also an economically diverse bunch diverse bunch who produced relatively few religious or mystical writings (241). The section on the German Territories is by far the longest. It includes essays on Hildegard of Bingen (by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton), Elisabeth of Shönau (by Anne L. Clark), Margaret Ebner (by Barbara Koch), Mechthild of Magdeburg (by Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman), Mechtild of Hackeborn (by Rosalynn Voaden), Gertrude the...