Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism

Theological Studies, Sept, 1995 by Janet K. Ruffing

In her Medieval Women's Visionary Literature (1986), Petroff did more than any other feminist scholar to make the historical record of mystical women available by creating an anthology of texts by and about these women. Her introductory interpretations and analyses which preceded each section began a project to which she returns in this collection. This time, she offers skillful close readings of many of the same texts and develops new themes in the material, which reveal the linguistic and rhetorical strategies adopted by these women, authorized by their mystical experiences in order to "transgress" the limits imposed on them by their deeply misogynist society and teach publicly without being unduly penalized for their audacity.

The essays are grouped in three sections, dealing with backgrounds, change and continuity, and the acquisition of authority. The analyses are literary and historical more than theological. Essays circle around several figures who are introduced in the first section in a more general way against the background of the conditions which fostered mysticism and which led or enabled women to write against otherwise overwhelming odds. Subsequent essays develop motifs and themes in the same writings through close literary analysis of selected passages, drawing on a variety of theoretical perspectives.

P. accounts for the emergence of the new feminine spirituality in the 12th to 13th centuries, typified by the Beguines, but also expressed by lay tertiaries in Italy. By analyzing the motifs in the vitae of these Italian saints and the texts written by the Northern Beguines, she uncovers both the mystical innovations of these women and their points of continuity with the tradition, revealing at the same time how their writings depart from the standard literary canon.

Drawing on French feminist literary theory of "writing the body," P. explores the entirely new terrain revealed through analysis of the way the gendered body and its gestures functions in the writings of three of the women, enabling them to say the unsayable through bodily analogies and metaphors. P. discovers in the writings she presents "what is missing in the literature of the rest of the medieval world - a female subject, living autonomously in a world she defines, speaking a language she invents and controls" (21). Thus, she argues for the way women's mystical writings expand and challenge the notion of literature and the expectations of mystical writing. She offers particularly strong and unique insights into the Beguine literature, poetically, thematically, and theologically in the pair of essays which treat these texts.

Despite its subtitle, P.'s volume is less about the experience of mysticism itself than about its effects on the lives and writings of women saints whose mysticism was a condition of and an impetus for their textual creation. It is an important contribution to our understanding of female mystics and accounts for some of the reasons why their writings continue to be neglected or dismissed in standard studies on mysticism, namely, "because they derive from a different experience of the body, a different epistemology, and a different relationship to language" (ix).

JANET K. RUFFING Fordham University, N.Y.C.