Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings by Sarah Beckwith (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER I want to consider Peter Happe's concluding chapter on criticism of the medieval theater in conjunction with the "Select Bibliography" supplied by Beadle and Happe. Not only is the evaluative essay by Happe a most enlightening introduction for the uninitiated student of the medieval En­ glish drama, but the bibliography, which is documented by means of a reference key in all the essays, provides the reader with a large overview of scholarship and criticism under appropriate headings. To be sure, there are errors in citation (e.g., Milla Riggio's edition of Wisdom is forthcoming, not published in 1986), but the citations by and large are fully reliable. The only important cavil I wish to enter concerning the coverage not only of these last two chapters but of the book as a whole is the total disregard of contemporary interest in the plays as social text. As a result, there is simply no concern with issues raised by feminists, cultural critics (especially the cultural anthropologists), and social historians (Miri Rubin and Charles Phythian Adams, to cite two prominent examples, are disregarded). In my view this is where the action lies for the present generation ofstudents and scholars. Perhaps another book is needed to discuss this important turn in the ongoing criticism of the English medieval drama. MARTIN STEVENS CUNY Graduate School SARAH BECKWITH. Christ's Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Me­ dieval Writings. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Pp. xii, 199. $74.50. Sarah Beckwith's densely argued and disarmingly fearless book begins with Luke's Gospel as epigraph: "Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me here" (Luke 24:39). This is a brilliant study of Christ's body-incar­ nate, physical, and suffering---as the symbolic template for understanding late-medieval devotional texts, but it is especially a study of the material and social politics of the emergent lay readership that beheld and handled, that shaped and was shaped by that embodied symbol. This is a book much more about cultural anthropology than about theol­ ogy, a book that substitutes materialist readings for the familiar idealist ones, and it is a book unflinchingly postmodern in its vision of a medieval 172 REVIEWS world whose authority is constantly contested and fractured. Beckwith explains her first chapter, "The Transcendent and the Historical: Inventing the Discourse of Mysticism," as a "ground-clearing exercise designed to show how the ascription of 'mystical' to many of the texts that are central to my analysis has distorted our understanding ofthem" (p. 5). She builds here on Lee Patterson's claims about our modem invention of an idealized Middle Ages by charging that our poignantly needy "modem construc­ tion" of the discourse of mysticism has not only dismissed many crucial religious texts as "the aberrant idiosyncrasies of emotional women" (p. 15) but fallen into wistful but ahistorical readings. "What would it mean," she asks and answers with this book, "to see the incarnation of religion as an insistently this-worldly activity, a set of structuring symbolic practices and processes in which human relationships, sexual, social, symbolic, are in­ vested?" (p. 18). The aim ofthis chapter and ofthe whole provocative book is to "restore the world, the body and the text" to Middle English religious texts, to reveal them as being much less about spiritual transcendence than about social and political conflict. In such a reading of late-medieval religious texts, Christ's body becomes the "contested social arena in late medieval English society, one that func­ tions in complex and multivalent ways" (p. 26). In chapter 2 ("Christ's Body and the Imaging of Social Order") and chapter 3 ("'Diverse Imag­ inaciouns of Crystes Lyf': Subjectivity, Embodiment, and Crucifixion Piety"), Beckwith refutes both the claims ofwhat she terms medieval "cler­ ical fantasy" and the recent influential assertions of social historians and anthropologists that the body of Christ functioned as unified or unifying symbol in medieval culture. Beckwith insists instead that the body of Christ was the locus of furious debate about both sacred and social power...