The Concept of Woman, Volume 2: The Early Humanist Reformation, 1250-1500 (review)

This comprehensive volume comes as close to being an exhaustive treatment of what philosophers and theologians in the High Middle Ages of Christian Europe had to say about women as we are ever likely to get. It includes a useful discussion of the Aristotelian background so important to philosophical thought in this period, as well as substantial treatments of the thought of Robert Grosseteste, Albert the Great, Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, Giles of Rome, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Nicholas of Cusa, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and many less well known philosophers and theologians. It also includes helpful accounts of the views on gender identity of prominent women thinkers of this period, such as Bridget of Sweden, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena, and Margery Kempe. It includes a chapter on the "Philosophical Content in Early Satires about Woman" and a chapter on important literary figures of this period, such as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and what they had to say about women.

The author sees the Aristotelian tradition as promoting the idea of "gender polarity," where the feminine pole is characterized negatively as deficiency and failure to come up to the male standard. Thus women are thought of by Aristotle and his followers as imperfect, deformed, or failed men; they are considered to have a deliberative faculty that is, as Aristotle puts it in Politics A13, "without authority," and to be incapable of any real self-control. Sister Prudence also shows how these and other denigrations of women are either exaggerated or inverted by the satirists of the period.

One of many fascinating topics Sister Prudence treats in this unbelievably rich review of conceptions of gender identity is the way Marsilio Ficino's fresh translation of the Platonic dialogues in the late fifteenth century made the idea in Plato's Republic that "there are no philosophically significant differences between women and men in an ideal society" (pp. 862-863) generally available to educated readers of the time. Apparently, reading Plato was both cause and effect of a more open and enlightened exchange between men and women on issues of gender identity. Yet in this same period women were burned to death as witches, and the gender-polarity theory was even incorporated into a published manual on witchcraft.

Sister Prudence's unparalleled work gives deserved attention to the unique contributions three "women humanists" made to the philosophy of gender. Thus Christine de Pizan (1363-1431) maintained that gender-polarity arguments of the Aristotelians are inconsistent with the existence of a perfect Divine Creator. Isotta Nogarola (1418-1466) tried to show by reductio ad absurdum that gender-polarity arguments are outright incoherent. And Laura Cereta (1469-1499) tried to establish that the gender-complementarity theses she argued for support the claim that "women should steal time and sequester space from domestic service for the study of humanist texts, science, and art" (p. 1088).

This volume is an invaluable guide to all the philosophical and theological thinking on gender difference in Christian Europe from 1250 to 1500. But one of its very special contributions to the thoughtful consideration of its topic is to give full attention to what women authors of the period had to say about womanhood and to illuminate their role as living counter-examples to Aristotle's dismissive treatment of women as failed men. "By example as well as by philosophical arguments," Sister Prudence writes, "women authors demonstrated that the gender polarity premises of women's weak intellect, disordered will, and natural subservience to men were false" (p. 1065).