Meditations on the Life of Christ: The Short Italian Text by Sarah McNamer (review)

Few medieval religious texts enjoyed greater influence than the early fourteenth-century Meditationes Vitae Christi(MVC), often known as "pseudo-Bonaventure" because so many manuscripts credit the Franciscan saint. Mary Stallings-Taney, editing the text in 1997 for the Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, ascribed it instead to an obscure Tuscan friar, Johannes de Caulibus. In this revisionist study, Sarah McNamer turns all previous inquiries into authorship on their head. On her telling, the original core of the lengthy MVC was a short Italian text preserved in a single manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian MS Canonici Italian 174). This brief devotional work meditates only on Christ's infancy and passion—by far the most popular parts of the Meditations—from a markedly feminine point of view, with casual references to "our sweet spouse" suggesting that the writer and her intended audience were nuns. In a long, tightly argued introduction, McNamer posits that this Italian author was a Poor Clare from Tuscany, whose work was soon afterward Latinized and expanded by one or more clerics.

The book presents an edition and facing-page translation of the Canonici text, prefaced by a study addressing the textual history of the MVC, its authorship, date and place of composition, and the manuscript itself. A linguistic analysis by Pär Larson is also included. McNamer's thesis, first aired in a 2009 Speculumarticle, has already sparked controversy; she is engaged in ongoing debate with two Hungarian scholars, Dávid Falvay and Péter Tóth. Space does not allow a full discussion of the issues here, but no one with an interest in affective piety or the vicissitudes of women's authorship can overlook this volume.

As McNamer rightly observes, only the absence of close reading maintained the priority of the received Latin text for so long. Single authorship for the MVC is difficult to support in view of the work's sharp tonal and stylistic contrasts. Its deeply affective meditations on the infancy and passion have little in common with the much longer, central portion on Christ's public ministry, which is heavily didactic and includes numerous citations from St. Bernard and other authorities. Unlike the Italian text, the public ministry section pointedly calls attention away from women and low-status people. The Latin redactor, McNamer argues, also deleted a long, sentimental scene in which the Virgin kisses Christ's body from head to toe—a compelling case of a male cleric toning down feminine affectivity. It is no wonder that his material proved less attractive to a growing lay audience, hungry for devotions that could move them to tears. If McNamer is right, our broader narrative about the Franciscans' role in the evolution of lay piety will have to change, for everything that Johannes de Caulibus or another friar added to the nun's meditations was designed not to produce an affective text, but to neutralize one.

Much is at stake here, and it will take time for Italianists and Franciscan scholars to give these issues the thorough vetting they deserve. In the meantime, McNamer's compelling arguments have already changed our understanding of the MVC and its reception. Marshaling the revisionist potential of textual scholarship at its finest, her monograph won the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Award for the best work of the year in Italian literary studies.