Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late-Medieval England

Medium Aevum, Fall, 1998 by John C. Hirsh

Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late-Medieval England, ed. Rosalynn Voaden (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996). xiii 197 pp. ISBN 0-85991-425-9. 35.00 [pounds sterling].

Contains: Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, `Hildegard and the male reader: a study in insular reception'; Nicholas Watson, `Melting into God the English way: deification in the Middle English version of Marguerite Porete's Mirouer des simples dines anienties'; Rosalynn Voaden, `The company she keeps: Mechtild of Hackeborn in late-medieval devotional compilations'; Roger Ellis, `The visionary and the canon lawyers: papal and other revelations to the Regula Salvatoris of St Bridget of Sweden'; Joan Isobel Friedman, `MS Cotton Claudius B.I.: a Middle English edition of St Bridget of Sweden's Liber celestis'; Janette Dillon, `Holy women and their confessors or confessors and their holy omen? Margery Kempe and continental tradition'; Denise L. Despres, `Ecstatic reading and missionary mysticism: The Orcherd of Syon'; Diane Watt, `The prophet at home: Elizabeth Barton and the influence of Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena'; Ian Johnson, `*Auctricitas? Holy women and their Middle English texts'.

This book contains nine particularly good essays on a particularly (and usefully) well-focused topic, described in the subtitle. Almost without exception, these studies are helpful and serious contributions to the field, likely to engage all who are interested in the development of late medieval British (but also continental) spirituality, and it is no discourtesy to the contributors, several of them eminent in the field, to note that the book as a whole must appear, at least to one who has published her biography, as representing important continuations of the work of Hope Emily Allen (d. 1960), to whom several contributors refer with evident esteem. Hope Allen was generally concerned, like these scholars, with the impact which continental visionary and devotional texts had upon what she called the `native English' tradition, a tradition she identified in no small part with the Ancrene Riwle. About the time of her 1936 identification of the Book of Margery Kempe, however, her interest in, and sympathy for, continental visionary texts increased apace, and though the range of topics contained in this collection goes well beyond the brief she had allowed herself, essays like the ones printed here, with their focus on manuscript affiliation, women's history, and specific practitioners, were very much what, in her mind, constituted the way forward.

Although without the now somewhat parochial concern for `Britishness' which motivated some of Hope Allen's work, the studies in this volume provide welcome openings to the study of the reception of continental visionary and other texts, and indicate influences whose importance is only now beginning to be understood. If there is a single unifying feature of this book, the topic apart, it is its engaging, and perhaps rather British, empiricism. When `Holy Women' are being treated, gender as a topic receives only a secondary emphasis (though figuring to different degrees in Despres, Dillon,and Kerby-Fulton); Lollards appear without the newer symbolic concerns (though under a different heading, Ellis and Watson are both keenly aware of the importance of social nuance); manuscripts figure prominently, but for the most part (Despres and Kerby-Fulton apart) as transmitters of texts rather than as indicators of either communities or ideology. This focus is certainly no bad thing, and the book will in any case engage those whose interests conform to other motions; indeed its sturdy empiricism should commend it to all who attend to developments in spirituality, and specifically in the religious and devotional literature of Britain, whatever their orientation.

It is a pity, and it is also surprising, to see a book of this complexity, cost,and interest issued without an index.

JOHN C. HIRSH

Washington, DC