Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators

Church History, Dec, 2008 by Patricia Z. Beckman

doi: 10.1017/S0009640708001716

Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators. By John W. Coakley. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. xiv 357 pp. $45.00 cloth.

This a book about men's worlds and writings. Through nine case studies, Coakley follows "collaborative-hagiographers," that is, men who included themselves in their accounts of women's Lives, to find "men's perspectives on their own lives and the significance that saintly women held for them" (4). He presents a trajectory from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries of variations on a "two-sphere model of authority," which moves from early caution, to the climax of role reversals, and back to a transformed caution of women's discrete authority. The male authors present themselves divergently as confessor, adviser, co-teacher, spiritual subordinate, and even faithful hunting dog. At times the men and women share parallel spheres of authority, and at times subordinate ones. Simply to read the texts with these questions in mind invites us into the complex undercurrents in already intriguing texts. Coakley joins a central conversation among recent scholars such as Andre Vauchez, Amy Hollywood, Dyan Elliott, and Jodi Bilinkoff. One leaves with a short history of the recent studies of power, authority, mysticism, and gender.

We thus inhabit with Coakley the "important place women could occupy in clerics' thinking about their own authority," that is, the "place of the female saint in that clerical imagination" (220). Coakley offers analysis not about each actual woman, but about "the way [the male author] decides to present her, and his relationship with her" (6). This means that "the person whose religious experience finds by far the most explicit expression here" is the male author (103). He is careful to note that we have access not to the "actual experiences" of the women but to the image of the women as the texts present them (268). So while he does not think we can necessarily access the lives of real women by reading these texts, we can nonetheless access something real about medieval life. Not the saints' real experiences, but rather "acts of hagiographers" (6), are what emerge from the texts of their interaction. Perhaps, though, this is indeed a book about women. It tells of women whom we can no longer access, and who had the charisma and compelling personae to become objects of such adoring craftsmanship. Training us to read with this distinction in mind is itself a major contribution to feminist reconstruction projects and the understanding of medieval conceptions of sanctity. And here Coakley works without complex technical literary jargon, but with a plunge into vivid medieval texts themselves--full as they are with sneezed-out hosts, bloodied women's bodies, and paranormal phenomena.

Embedded in Coakley's fine case-study chapters are, when extant texts make possible, comparisons between women's portraits of their own authority and male authors'. For example, he notes Hildegard's contrast of her prophetic authority to Guibert's priestly (60), and Christine's emphasis on demonic experiences over Peter's concern for her Christological experiences. They reflect competing concerns. Mapping the careful dance between male and female collaborators allows him to map nuanced conceptions of authority and holiness.

Coakley masterfully untangles two intertwined kinds of authority in his subjects--unofficial and official. He leans heavily on this distinction from Vauchez, with the slight correction that Vauchez's dichotomy of "informal" (personal charism) against "institutional" powers does not fully explain a late medieval world that saw offices themselves as charismatic. His male objects of study "conceive of the women's authority as in some sort of balance or interaction with their own" (17). Are women a placeholder for some kind of non-institutional, non-threatening power that can supplement these male author's experiences? (19). Perhaps, but never simplistically. Without reducing these figures to modern psychoanalytic types, he teases out possible envy, awe, and wonder in the authorial record.

We track "new fashions in hagiography" increasingly concerned with "privileged subjective experience of the divine" rather than miracles, charity, or asceticism. Here Coakley must, of course, address the gendered dimensions of both the medieval texts and contemporary scholarship. For it is broadly acknowledged that revelation and prophecy become women's "particular specialty" (13). So he asks why clerics tolerated (or, I might ask more forcefully, encouraged) informal powers. He answers that power was never just in an institution because medieval Christians always located it in the Spirit itself. Thus, informal and institutional powers formed a "dialectical tension" (a la Vauchez). The "collaborative-hagiogaphers" of this study found themselves drawn to both poles.

Coakley embeds several other helpful, seemingly minor distinctions, which matter greatly in analysis. See, for example, the distinction between saints and blessed (8). This reflects a method of bracketing a normative church's designation of veneration to consider broader conceptions of religious authority. Add to this his emphasis on class differences (bourgeoisie and ruling class), new religious orders, and laity, and we see distinctions within both the medieval and current scholarly categories. So sanctity in this period was not just for nuns and queens anymore. Our scholarship should reflect that. We are let into the process and construction of sanctity.