Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book: Gender and the Making of Textual Authority

Church History, Dec, 2005 by Patricia Zimmerman Beckman

Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book: Gender and the Making of Textual Authority. By Sara S. Poor. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. xvi 333 pp. $55.00 cloth.

Why does the medieval German mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg gradually disappear as author from her book? One might argue that medieval misogyny consigns female authors to oblivion. Poor argues that Mechthild disappears not because she was a woman (though strategies for justifying her authority as woman were employed throughout her text and later transmissions). She disappears, rather, because (1) she excelled at a new form of writing that privileged direct dialogue with God, but deemphasized the author, (2) medieval authority did not always include attribution because texts often traveled in topical collections, and (3) tradition conflated her with another more famous Mechthild (of Hackeborn). "Mechthild's fall into obscurity thus began with inclusion despite being a woman, not exclusion because she was a woman" (130). She is erased, in the end, by her own success.

In addition to a Germanist's detailed reading of manuscripts, Poor's book offers an analysis of gender as a factor in medieval religious authority, the role of material culture (how books traveled and were produced), and conflicts in church leadership (secular/mendicant; universal/local). Poor challenges that modern scholars' enthusiasm for women's mystical texts relies on a Romantic rational/emotional dualism that posits women as spontaneous and emotive rather than active agents engaged in particular historical worlds. She advocates instead "a critical and historical method for interrogating the category of tradition itself" (15). By exposing "ideological power of the tradition-forming process" along with its "historical mutability" (16), she proposes historical method as an antidote to history's own patriarchal past.

Current valorization of heretics and mystics as freedom fighters against monolithic, centralized authority, she argues, merely projects academic, twenty-first-century values onto Mechthild's text. The author asks us to hear both our own biases (or priorities) and Mechthild's. Poor's inventive phrases bring us through paradox into understanding the medieval world of authority: "defiant conformity" keeps Mechthild as an agent, but one of her own historical period and its priorities (55); "aestheticizing dissent" locates Mechthild's writing style as specific to her role as simultaneous dissenter and defender of the church (40); "conformist dissent" jars our presumptions and gets to the heart of the reformist program and collaboration of emerging groups such as the Dominicans and beguines in the thirteenth century (49), while also carefully exploring what it means to be writing on the geographical and institutional frontier.

The author joins many scholars in stressing that a key to understanding Mechthild's text is not just on the conceptual level, but also the formal. Mechthild's "enchanting lyricism" and "poetic prose" is not only "indisputably new" (12), but shows how formal qualities of rhyme and meter can reinforce theological and social critique. She provides exegesis of numerous key episodes in Mechthild's text to ably prove her positions.

Poor brings into English much of the untranslated, rich German scholarship of this material, relying especially on the life work of Hans Neumann and his successor with the project Gisela Vollmann-Profe. She examines the five essential manuscripts (chapter 3) in addition to eleven manuscripts that anthologize and condense selections. Chapter 4, her primary addition to earlier manuscript tracking, is a discovery of a few more instances of one storyline showing up in other collections or Sammlung, a genre that means literally "scattering" (168). Her real insight lies more fully, however, in tying this genre to her overall analysis of Mechthild's status as a named female author and the new territory of vernacular religious writings and their audiences. Increasingly women drove the market for readership, production, and distribution of vernacular works. We must ask, reminds Poor, how these books work and for whom. Here Poor offers an especially important contribution--requiring all scholars to take genre and production as seriously as content.

Many Mechthild interpreters insist that Mechthild herself addressed the anxiety of female authorship and authority within her text, and Poor agrees. Mechthild's "relentless thematizing" (59) engages directly her culture's disrespect for the female body and authority. Here comparisons might prove helpful. How often does the problem of female authority arise in comparison to, say, discernment of right images and visions, or theological formulations on divine and human nature? Is Mechthild truly "relentless" on this issue? Without a doubt, when compared to other women writing for officially sanctioned groups of enclosed women, she does thematize gender and authority more frequently. So perhaps the tension and direct address of the writing process surfaces more fully in Mechthild's text than in regularized women's texts because Mechthild was not in a formalized order. With the ambiguous hybrid (and increasingly suspect) status of beguine, perhaps authorship questions inevitably arose even when they may not have been the author's primary concern. Further work on beguinal authority will help tease apart this question of self-understanding (such as we can access from a later translation of her text), and Poor's guiding questions will be essential in directing the conversation.