Women and Experience in Later Medieval Writing: Reading the Book of Life ed. by Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker and Liz Herbert McAvoy (review)

This volume gathers together the preliminary findings of an international workshop, “Book of Life: The Transmission of Knowledge and the Problems of Gender,” hosted at the University of Groningen in 2005. Like that workshop, these seven essays reconsider the paradigm of gendered learning in medieval Europe—that men learned and taught through books of Latin, and women did the same through experience, the Book of Life. But this is far more than a volume of conference proceedings. Mulder-Bakker and McAvoy ensure that each chapter addresses the same organizing themes by situating its female subjects within communities of discourse, a concept they borrow from Bernard McGinn but put to use in innovative ways. Each chapter shares a highly nuanced theoretical language, thus avoiding the problems of unevenness and competing focuses that sometimes plague edited volumes. The editors’ thought-provoking Introduction, the commissioned After-word from Diane Watt, and the disciplined focus across chapters ensure that this volume offers an important joint statement on new developments in the study of late medieval Christianity. The collected chapters intentionally move beyond the now-familiar topics of female mysticism, male-female collaboration and competition, and female authority to examine lay urban women’s experiences, education, and paths to religious authority.

The gathered essays offer readings of women’s life stories as well as devotional literature associated with medieval women. By drawing together Dutch and Anglophone scholars and setting alongside one another the experiences and lives of medieval women from England, the Low Countries, France, and Italy, Mulder-Bakker and McAvoy have provided an important contribution to an ongoing interest in studying medieval religious women within their communities and across linguistic and national boundaries. The women whose lives fill this book remained involved in their families, interacting with the urban elite while cultivating lifelong faith within the world. Each ascended to a position of religious authority within urban spaces, as lay women who taught, wrote, and inspired others. The volume’s focus is thus neither on nuns nor the clergy but the religious collaborations between lay women and clerics that, the editors argue, are at “the center of popular religion” (p. 17).

The volume’s editors have provided a valuable introduction that could stand alone as an important synthesis of emerging areas of inquiry in scholarship on medieval religious women. McAvoy and Mulder-Bakker reexamine medieval Christian understandings of gender roles to challenge long-held assumptions about the interactions between male and female, lay and religious, in late medieval urban spaces. With the exception of Thom Mertens’s chapter examining the song sequence known as the Geestelijke Melody, which focuses on the reception and variant manuscripts of an anonymous devotional, these chapters reconsider the lives of medieval laywomen well-known to Anglophone readers. Ineke van ‘t Spijker’s rereading of the relationship between Heloise and Abelard through their shared education and interiority, Veerle Fraeter’s compelling study of Hadewijch’s Book of Visions as a crafted narrative of personal growth, and Liz McAvoy’s consideration of Margery Kempe’s construction of self and book successfully reconsider questions of education and agency for long-studied female authors. Carolynn Muessig’s contribution posits a dialogue between theologians of the University of Paris and lay Italian female visionaries that privileged experience over scholastic pedagogy, compellingly arguing that women were active and influential participants in theological conversations once thought exclusive to the universities. Koen Goudriaan’s richly detailed contribution on the authority exercised by eight female participants in the Devotio Moderna reconstructs the relationships between women actively engaged in the rapid spread of the movement in the years around 1400. Using legal documents, letters, financial records, and biographies, Goudriaan reconsiders four paths to authority: social status, age, managerial skills, and “natural” and “supernatural” knowledge. Anneke Mulder-Bakker’s contribution juxtaposes the biographies of two beguines...