Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism

Medium Aevum, Spring, 1996 by David Lawton

Elizabeth Avilda Petroff, (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). xii 235 pp. ISBN 0-19-508454-3, 25.00[pounds] (hard covers); ISBN C-19-508455-1, 10.95[pounds] (p/b).

Elizabeth Avilda Petroff admirably fulfils the apparently disparate aims she sets herself: to provide an advanced introduction for general readers to the women mystics of the later Middle Ages, and simultaneously to produce theoretically informed new readings for specialists.

The sheer range of Petroff's reading is impressive: she examines the writings and lives of medieval women visionaries from France, Italy, Germany, the Low Countries and England, and her work is full of unexpected and illuminating juxtapositions. She has a rare feeling for narrative, summarizing and retelling with flair; and she is a methodical close reader, attentive to style, who lays out the process of her own judgements. She is also a good historian. Her combination of skills enables her to revisit the lives of Umbrian and Tuscan women saints from the thirteenth century, on which she published a monograph in 1979, and to present them as a secondary cycle based on the Vitae Patrum and imbued with `the rhetoric of the desert' (ch. 7). She adds a receptiveness to modern theorists of an exemplary kind, which has her unfussily testing new perspectives and looking for new questions to ask.

Although the essays in this book were compiled over time, and some for different occasions, the book has a perceptible structure. After an excellent introduction, Petroff offers a chapter on `Unmasking women', in which she brilliantly focuses on passages `devoted to ladies who have died (the wife of Jacopone da Todi, Beatrice, Laura, Clorinda)' (p. 40) in order to establish an uncomfortable and persuasive conclusion that `the drive to unmask derives from medieval misogyny' (p. 43). The chapter's argument is subtle, as are its obiter dicta: for example, that the Griselda story allows an audience to have it both ways, participating not only in Griselda's virtue but also in Walter's `compulsion to unmask' (p. 27). The circumscription of women in these texts is then implicitly contrasted with the love expressed by medieval Beguines (ch. 3) and the Rule of St Clare (ch. 4), both of which emphasize equality and empowerment.

The book moves from masculine constructions of women as weak and unknowable, to women who speak in independent voices and shatter the stereotypes of good nuns and good wives. Its middle section, `The tradition of holy women: change and continuity', charts this movement towards a subversion of gender as constructed in masculine discourse: most effectively in chapter 6, `Transforming the world: the serpent-dragon and the virgin-saint', in which virginity is represented as a means of resistance. The third and final section,`Women mystics and the acquisition of authority', completes the movement through a series of well-focused essays (a relative disappointment being the treatment of Margery Kempe in chapter 8). Best of all is Petroff's careful argument in chapter 9 about the need for women saints to be transgressive `if only to become visible' (p. 166), and in order to assume the powerful roles of public leadership that their biographers minimize. Petroff's work here helps one understand why so many later medieval women visionaries chose to be extra-regular, and why, as she maintains, `many of these female-authored texts are radically uncanonical' (p. ix).