Women and Mystical Experience in the Middle Ages

Medium Aevum, Fall, 1993 by Bella Millett

Frances Beer's Women and Mystical Experience is a feminist study of Hildegard of Bingen, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Julian of Norwich, emphasizing both the ways in which they 'managed to transcend the virulent misogyny that so dominated their cultures' (p. 2) and the distinctively 'womanly' character of their work. She also draws on some writing by men for female religious -- Ancrene Wisse and its group, and some of Rolle's works -- for comparative material, arguing that the 'manipulative' approach of the former is succeeded by the 'new respect for women's spiritual potential' seen in the latter (p. 118). A feminist approach which, like Caroline Walker Bynum's, sets up a dialogue between modern and mediaeval ways of thinking could provide valuable insights into the relationship between these mystics and their culture; Beer's approach, however, tends to slip into a 'vulgar feminism' which finds what it expects to find, minimizing rather than actively investigating those aspects of the evidence (like the female mystics' deprecating references to their sex) which might seem to question the validity of her general thesis, and underestimating the real complexities of mediaeval culture. Beer presents her work modestly as an 'introduction' (p. 158), with quotations in translation only and a short, mainly English-language, bibliography, so it is perhaps unreasonable to judge it by the same standards as the Exeter symposium; but, as the Exeter papers by Watson and Jansen demonstrate, lucid basic exposition is not incompatible with far-from-elementary material, and Beer's book seems by contrast like a missed opportunity.

BELLA MILLETT Southampton