God's Words, Women's Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries

Medium Aevum, Fall, 2000 by Lynn Staley

Rosalynn Voaden, God's Words, Women's Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries (York: York Medieval Press, 1999). xi 204 pp. ISBN 0-9529734-21. 40.00 [pounds sterling].

In God's Words, Women's Voices, Rosalynn Voaden argues that the doctrine of discretio spirituum, by which the origin and hence nature of visionary experience was subjected to ecclesiastical enquiry, not only controlled women's spirituality but served as a template for the fashioning of social and textual identities. In the appendix, she includes an edition of the only extant Middle English translation of the Epistola solitarii ad reges of Alfonso of Jaen, St Bridget's spiritual director and editor, who wrote the treatise as an eighth book to the Liber celestis imperatoris ad reges.

The edition is welcome, as is Voaden's delineation of the doctrine of discretio spirituum. However, she seems not to recognize the very issues her topic raises and spends too much time proving already accepted views. Thus, her first chapter, `Women and vision: the devil's gateway', though a good summary of the subject, does not go beyond what scholars like Alcuin Blamires have already documented. Her second, `Seducing spirits', which scrutinizes the doctrine itself, admits the politics of saintly identity-making but fails to take seriously the relationships between art and sanctity or art and vision that the chapter raises. The third chapter on Bridget of Sweden is the strongest. There is good historical evidence for Bridget's life and for the textual process by which her life and visions were composed. With Margery Kempe, the ground is less firm, and Voaden at once tries to point up the possible fictions of the book and treat it literally, as an autobiographical narrative. While her bibliography contains references to much recent work on Kempe's Book, she does not engage in her text with the arguments of Karma Lochrie, Gail McMurray Gibson, and others, including myself, who have argued not simply for Kempe's agency as regards either her legend or her life, but for an intentional social and political valence to the text. Thus, simply to invoke discretio spirituum as a rule constricting Margery's visions and behaviour is to take the book literally in ways increasingly called into question by others, as well as by her own underlying argument about the politics of sanctity. Nor is it helpful to compare one actual woman (Bridget) with one whose reality is possibly more textual than actual (Margery Kempe) without a more sophisticated methodology of comparison, or at least a more historical argument about the politics of hagiography in late medieval England.

LYNN STALEY Hamilton, New York