Women and Mystical Experience in the Middle Ages by Frances Beer (review)

REVIEWS legend, the supposed prioress of Sopwell and author of The Boke ofHunting. The attribution, invented long ago and sustained by males and recently shown to be without basis by a female scholar, was not a prerequisite for including an excerpt from that part of the text that is a dialogue between a mother and her son. The selections from the letters of Margaret Paston give us a fascinating picture of a mother concerned with the "emotional and financial complications" of her children's marriages. It would have been as interesting to see one of the letters that display the strength and bravery of this complicated, difficult woman in holding offphysical and legal assaults on the family's holdings. While devotion to the Virgin is not unnoticed in the anthology, there is no sample of works that invite the female reader to identify with the Virgin, particularly the planctus Mariae. In fact, the an­ thology tends to emphasize the intellectual qualiry of women's devotional­ ism at the expense of its powerful emotional qualiry. Finally, this reviewer is dismayed to find one of his studies mistitled in Barratt's bibliography. All this notwithstanding, the anthology is a very significant contribu­ tion to medieval studies, as well as to women's studies, not least because it presents interesting excerpts from works by Dame Eleanor Hull and Lady Margaret Beaufort, which are not othetwise readily available. GEORGE R. KEISER Kansas State Universiry FRANCES BEER. Women and Mystical Experience in the Middle Ages. Wood­ bridge: Boydell, 1992. Pp. vi, 174. $59.95. In North America and Europe the past few years have seen a major effort to reclaim the vast numbers of female voices that have been lost through the centuries. This book makes an important scholarly contribution to this effort. Without being sexist or antisexist in any way, Frances Beer presents a study of three medieval women, Hildegard of Bingen, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Julian of Norwich, all of whom were mystics. She shows that, while each had radically different temperaments, each transcended the antifeminism of her time-largely as the result of confidence gained from extraordinary spiritual experiences--and recorded her special revelations in her writings. Beer states as her purpose that "the testimonies of these 153 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER women provide a perspective that can, if we are ready to listen, greatly augment our general understanding of the Middle Ages" (p. 1). She accom­ plishes her purpose well. By contrast, she explores in addition the works of two medieval men writing for women to indicate the degree to which their approaches might be informed by antifeminism and to compare their approaches to the expe­ rience of union with God with those of Hildegard, Mechthild and Julian. The method used by Beer is close textual analysis of the works of the three women and two men, supported by such biographical details as re­ main. She presents the social milieu and historical context, as much as known, to help the reader understand each of them as individuals and realize that each of the three mystics, however liberated, was a product of her environment. In the Introduction Beer establishes the context of her study. She posits that we would not want to attempt to comprehend the Middle Ages with­ out such voices as Augustine or Aquinas and then raises many interesting questions about the lack of women's voices. That the established canon of medieval literature has been without female voices for so long raises the question of how full our comprehension has been: Do women, even when writing about the same subjects as men, approach them differently? How might the philosophical inquiries of women modify the re­ ceived "orthodox" position on such questions as a rigorously hierarchical social chain descending through God and King to Husband; the "handmaid" role of the Virgin Mary in relation to Father and Son; the notion of a tripartite God that includes no female component? [P. 1} Then, without any finger pointing or condemnation, she presents the leg­ acy of the antifeminism in the Middle Ages by looking at some of the writings of such authors as Pythagoras and Socrates, the church fathers, St...