Angela of Foligno's Memorial (review)

260 Short Notices was a crucial aspect of the development of academic medieval literary studies in the late nineteenth century. This decision does, however, throw less familiar texts into the limelight. Some will be familiar to many readers, such as Ritson's famous condemnation of Lydgate as 'this voluminous, prosaick, and driveling monk' (p. 103). But it is a revelation to read from Scott's introduction to his edition ofSir Tristrem. There are also perverse pleasures to be found in reading these scholars' debates against each other in an era preceding our own very formal academic prose. So, for example, in 1767, Percy condemns the antiquaries 'who have revived the works of our ancient writers' as 'for the most part men void of taste and genius' (p. 77), while in 1783 it was Ritson's rum to launch an ad hominem attack on Percy. The Invention ofMiddle English is a companion volume, certainly, to The Making of Middle English, but like all good anthologies it does not foreclose research; rather, it opens up the history of medieval studies by making so many of its key texts so readily accessible. Stephanie Trigg Department ofEnglish with Cultural Studies University of Melbourne Mazzoni, Cristina, trans., Angela ofFoligno's Memorial (The Library of Medieval Women), Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 1999; paper pp. xi, 132; R.R.P. US$19.95; ISBN 085991562X. The new translation of Angela's Memorial is a welcome addition to the growi literature about this fascinating thirteenth-century mystic. The full text allows the English reader to place in context the much-cited single passage when she swallows the leper's sore as an imitation of the Eucharist. To many modern tastes, aspects ofAngela's life must seem hysterical or neurotic. However, her biography shows a woman of complexity and deep spirituality, and allows a more complex understanding of a particular w o m a n and her time. Angela has increasingly become the focus of feminist studies and Cristina Mazzoni provides an interpretative essay to explore Angela's Christology in terms ofm o d e m feminine theology. In addition, she furnishes an annotated bibliography of feminist (and other) analyses of Angela that will be useful to scholars of mysticism and of gender studies. The Memorial provides, on one level, Angela's description of her visions, Short Notices 261 but is written by a scribe who admits that he wrote what he did not always understand . The seeming dialogue of the two could be studied as a dialectic between male/female, physical/divine or literal/allegorical interpretation. Angela protests the blasphemy of describing her ineffable experience, but nevertheless conveys a significant degree of meaning. It provides arichore for literary analysis. Angela's choice of language to describe her spiritual experiences, her references to food and to the smell of the divine, is attributed by Mazzoni to a female's interest in food and the body. However, the ancient mystical tradition described God's word as food to be digested, and divine wisdom was regarded as sweet, or sweet-smelling. Perhaps one should be cautious about ascribing a particular gender to what may be a more general, albeit embodied, experience. The most powerful of Angela's early mystical experiences followed her meditation on the Gospel (the sweet food of the word, p. 31). Food, for Angela, may then have a divine referent (the word) as well as being a metaphor for the divine. Concentration onAngela's physical metaphors sometimes obscures thefrequentlymentioned divine metaphors of thefieryjoy in the soul, or as she says: 'an understanding of the Gospel was so very delightful that anyone who understood it, would not only forget all worldly matters, but would also completely forget one's own self (p. 31). Mystical experience is certainly individual, and expressed in terms ofone's experience, including gender. Yet the commonality of experience, conformity to which validates the authority of the individual mystic, should not be ignored. However, this excellent edition allows the reader to interpret the words ofAngela for herself. Rosemary Dunn School of Humanities James Cook University Morgan stern, Anne McGee, Gothic Tombs of Kinship in France, the Low Countries and England, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000...