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

An example of a debatable point can be found in the way Staley accepts too quickly the thesis of Colledge and Walsh that Julian was highly educated in Latin theology and was widely read in vernacular texts. Staley presents this view as "speculation" (p. 156) but then proceeds to treat it as fact. It seems to me that much, and perhaps all, of Julian's theology can be accounted for by the kind of theological commonplaces that might be gleaned from sermons, catechisms, and the liturgy itself. Another debatable point is more problematic. Staley persistently characterizes Church teaching as "objective" and Julian's revelation as "subjective." This leads her to characterize Julian's book as "the result of subjective inquiry into her own experience" (p. 163). Such language is highly misleading, tied as it is to post-Cartesian accounts of certainty and selfhood. While Julian clearly distinguishes bet,veen what she was taught in her revelation and what she had been previously taught as Church doctrine, she does not consider the former subjective and the latter objective. Certainly Julian does not think of her revelation as "subjective" in the typical modern sense of "true-for-me-but maybe-notfor-you," or in the sense of an "ineffable mystical experience."

These and other complaints do not undercut the value of this important volume. By Aers's and Staley's own estimation, the worth of their book "rests in the variety of questions generated by our inquiry into some of the authors of late fourteenth-century English culture" (p. 246). By this standard they have produced an invaluable book that should occupy theologians, historians, and literary critics for some time to come.

FREDERICK C. BAUERSCHMIDT

Loyola College Baltimore, Maryland

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