The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture

Theological Studies, Sept, 1997 by Penny J. Cole

By David Aers and Lynn Staley. University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University, 1996. Pp 310. $45; $19.95.

The subject of this book is the humanity of Christ, its manipulation by the Church, and the political implications of this for the structures of power and authority in late medieval English society.

While the title suggests a broad study, the authors' historiographical purpose is specific. They desire to demonstrate on the evidence of vernacular writings (particularly by John Wycliffe, Langland, Julian of Norwich, and Chaucer) that during the late 14th and early 15th centuries, the image of the suffering Christ, of the tortured, lacerated body on the cross, was superseded in emphasis by the image of the politically active Christ, the consummately radical social reformer, a marginalized man, bent upon subverting the structures of oppressive authority in the interests of justice and freedom.

The late medieval English Church, Aers and Staley argue, had ceased to be true to Christ and to his gospel of reform. The aim of churchmen was not to protect the integrity of Catholic orthodoxy but to secure the hierarchical status quo. To this end, and to avert opposition, their argument goes, the clergy concocted a "dominant model" (76) of Christ's humanity to ensure that lay piety and devotional expression would be shaped by the figure of Christ the crucified, pacific, obedient, and suffering Servant. That the Church failed, however, to achieve completely its agenda of repression is the principal contention of this study.

A. and S. are committed deconstructionists, applying a hermeneutic method of linguistic analysis to decipher what they believe was a coded language of resistance to entrenched ecclesiastical authority and to symbol of that authority in the crucified humanity of Christ. Thus in Piers Plowman A. discerns a Christ presented in terms of his "mission, message, and lifestyle"; this, he contends, is evident mutatis mutandis in the "verbal, active and public" (63) Christ of Lollardy, the imitation of whom demanded vernacular preaching, organized communal study, worship, and reading of the Bible. While A. distorts the nature of the tension and evinces a skewed understanding of the broadly based relationships of late medieval society when he speaks of "transgressing officially policed boundaries between laity and priests" (ibid.), his findings are not without interest. Clearly, there were various ways of thinking about Christ's humanity and of expressing devotion to it, and A. and S. may well be correct to claim that in some contexts, vernacular writing on the nature of Christ was viewed with misgivings by the ecclesiastical authorities. To conclude from this, however, that the Church was homogeneous and resistant to reform, insisting stubbornly upon a single mode of imitatio Christi which excluded, as is implied here, broad ethical and moral obligations, is untenable.

Much attention is devoted to Julian of Norwich's Book of Showings. In a close analysis of the Paris version of the Long Text, S. constructs a plausible, if not altogether convincing, case for a subtext in which was hidden Julian's expression, on her own authority, of a "complicated truth" (109). What were the factors that prompted or, more accurately, necessitated recourse to such a literary subterfuge? Again, the demon is established authority. S. argues, probably correctly, albeit on flimsy evidence, that Julian was not out of touch with contemporary events and was alive to the fact that they afforded neither a safe nor encouraging environment for idiosyncratic reflections, especially of a theological nature. Out of a combination of fear and devotion, therefore, and with an eye on Wycliffe and other critics, she undertook, according to S., a creative process of "fictional self-fashioning," inventing "a mode of vernacular expression that would communicate the complexity of her own inner experience" (ibid.) without appearing to embrace heterodoxy. Through the filter of this consciously crafted textual persona, she was able to use her contemplative experience as "a screen . . . to explore alternatives to contemporary views about subjectivity, about sin, and about the divine nature" (ibid.). But, Julian's theological project was fostered by more than personal insights. S.'s deconstruction of Revelation 14 reveals that beneath the professions of simplicity and unsophistication in letters lurked a determined polemicist; S. declares that Julian was "profoundly polemical" (110).

There is no doubt in S.'s mind that Julian's polemic was uncommonly subtle, a skillfully crafted hermeneutic devised over the course of 20 years, and throwing open to criticism matters pertaining to theology, epistemology, exegesis, and the contemporary hierarchical structure of authority and gender. The absence of any suggestion of heterodoxy was essential to her polemical stategy. For if Julian was to give an authoritative expression of the truth which she had come to know as "the result of subjective inquiry into her own experience," and if she was to resolve "the tension between her interior knowledge of God and the church's teachings about him," it was crucial to appear "pristinely orthodox" (164).