Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society by Thomas H. Bestul (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER THOMAS H. BESTUL, Texts ofthe Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Pp. viii, 264. $39.95. The Christocentric nature oflate medieval devotion has drawn increas­ ing attention from both literary critics and historians. As evident in the work of Sarah Beckwith, Miri Rubin, and Caroline Walker Bynum, the study of Christ's body has allowed scholars to examine the materialism ofmedieval spirituality. Thomas Bestul joins these scholars with a com­ prehensive and insightful account ofChrist's Passion in Latin devotional texts written between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. His study could be broadly characterized as recuperative. It recuperates Latin de­ votional texts from critical neglect, and it returns them to the historical context from which they claim to be exempt, from "the ideals of tran­ scendence embodied in the texts, their proclaimed intention to remove the reader from the temporal, the historical, and above all the material" (p. 20). The introductory chapter lays the theoretical groundwork for this "cultural contextualization." Drawing on New Historicist views oftexts as "products ofsocial processes" (p. 20) and current debates about canon formation, Bestul wants to complicate "background/foreground" and "transmitter/receptor" models for the relationship between Latin and vernacular texts. The texts he has chosen occupy a middle ground be­ tween Latin scholastic texts (whose language they share) and vernacular texts of devotion (whose popularity they share). His view of all popular devotional texts as participants in a multilingual and multilayered con­ versation about devotion certainly provides grounds for further inquiry, particularly as it relates to the translation debates of late-fourteenth­ and early-fifteenth-century England. His second chapter offers a helpful survey of the Latin narratives of the Passion: he begins with Gospel ac­ counts and traces the tradition through to the fifteenth century. As he states in his introduction, such a survey can suggest an unproblematic linear evolution; however, the survey helps to illustrate the popularity and the continuity of the Latin devotional treatises. The survey is sup­ plemented with a bibliography of these texts in appendix 2. After thus outlining the defining characteristics of the Latin devo­ tional tradition, Bestul turns to an analysis ofthe changes made between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries in the representation of Jews, 318 REVIEWS women, and the tortured Christ. Although Bestul argues that these changes reveal the "inevitable impress ofhistory upon the text" (p.24), he does not inform the reader whether these are the only changes, or only the ones that he finds most interesting.Chapter 3 examines the texts' increasing anti-Judaism, "the evolving consciousness among Chris­ tians ...that the Jew was the other, a threat to the well being and purity ofthe social order" (p.79).He characterizes this anti-Judaism as a "semiology of the concrete" in which Jews were rendered completely physical, often described as animals or in terms ofbodily functions.In tracing the historical context for this semiology, Bestul begins with the broader picture-ecclesiastical decrees and literary texts contemporary with the accounts.He then turns to the texts' more particular context, their authors and the communities in which they lived and worked.His discussion includes Ekbert ofSchi:inau's Stimulus amoris (late twelfth cen­ tury), the Vitis mystica ofBonaventura (late thirteenth century), John of Pecham's Philomena (mid- to late thirteenth century), and Ludolphus of Saxony's Vita Christi (mid- to late fourteenth century). His analysis of Ekbert is representative ofhis approach: "Ekbert used his learning, his command ofhistory, his rhetorical and literary skill, not exclusively, but frequently, in the creation ofthe categories ofotherness" (p.82).In ar­ guing for the authors' role in creating these categories, Bestul follows R.I.Moore's thesis (in Formation ofa Persecuting Society [1987}) that we should understand persecution not as a natural part ofmedieval society but as a process encouraged and established by institutions. In his fourth chapter, Bestul discusses representations of the Virgin Mary in the Passion sequences.After surveying the critical debate over the position of women in medieval texts, he cautions against critics' tendencies to view devotional texts as either "uniformly misogynous" or as "emancipatory and transgressive" (pp.116, 117).His persuasiveread­ ing ofthe...