From Virile Woman to Womanchrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Middle Ages Series)

Rating:
Summary: Influences that shaped the lives of medieval women.
Review: In this book, many early and late medieval texts, mostly on Christianity as intended for and lived by female religious, are put into historical context. It is Barbara Newman's perspective that these texts hold the imprints of authentic human experience and beliefs, filtered by the cultural and religious climate at the time of writing. This perspective is evident in the lively, often stirring, way in which she presents the facts about and implications of the texts. I consider the essays well-balanced in the treatment of both the contemporary climate and the comments on the texts by critics in recent years, some of whom are exposed as male biased.

At times Barbara Newman fills a gap in the written tradition. For example, in the section "Expositio in Heliossam", she pictures the outlook on life that the young Heloise probably had on the basis of her talents, education and perception of her sexuality. This poses the implicit question how Heloise would have lived her life, had she been granted the possibility of a lasting intimate relationship with the man she loved. Barbara Newman makes the reader acutely aware of the distance between this possibility and the actual life of Heloise as it emerges from the letters she as abbess exchanged with her former lover and abbott Abelard. She also makes a convincing case that Hadewijch probably perceived this distance as well, and considered it a shortcoming in Abelard, however inevitable.

Barbara Newman makes the medieval texts come alive by showing how they hang together and express deep emotions, if only implicitly. Thus the appetit is wetted for reading these allegedly arid texts in full. My own interest for - and indeed attachment to - the book is in the insight it offers into the social, cultural and religious circumstances that made many women choose a life which implied sublimation of their womanhood into a male-inspired ideal that was approved by the church and deemed to lead to mystical union.