Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, The

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 1997 by Woods, Richard

The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart. By Amy Hollywood. Studies in Spirituality and Theology, vol. 1. Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996. x + 331 pp. $32.95 (cloth).

Subvert and its Anglo-Saxon cousins, undermine and undercut, appear some four dozen times, by rough count, in Dr. Hollywood's dazzling study, suggesting that "The Mystic as Textual Subversive" might have been an apt alternative title. For Hollywood aims to show that these three controversial medieval mystics were keen practitioners of deconstruction, subtly, even sometimes unwittingly eroding the authority of the male-dominated ecclesiastical hierarchy and academy by destabilizing the rule of reason, the subordination of women, and the place of bodily suffering and visionary experience. More explicitly, she argues that Meister Eckhart was not only greatly influenced by the Beguines in thought and writing but espoused their agenda.

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Similarities between Mechthild, Porete, and Eckhart have been probed for fifty years by scholars, including Edmund Colledge, Oliver Davies, Herbert Grundmann, Romana Guarnieri, Bernard McGinn, Michael Sells, and Frank Tobin, among others. Still, Hollywood notes, "Echkart's debt to the women beguines and religious of the twelfth and early thirteenth century its consequences and implications, have been largely ignored in studies of late medieval mysticism" (p. 5). Insofar as Hollywood sets out to correct this ignorance, she does so admirably, taking on a host of miscreants, including some well-known feminist authors.

The Soul as Virgin Wife develops Dr. Hollywood's doctoral thesis under Bernard McGinn at the University of Chicago. Not surprisingly, it is a densely-packed chest of mystical and theological plunder, ribbed with vigorous argument and reinforced by ninety pages of notes and a twenty-seven page bibliography. Almost everyone of note appears in the latter, excepting John Giles Milhaven, whose insightful volume Hadewijch and Her Sisters: Other Ways of Knowing and Loving (Albany, 1993) would have enriched her early chapters on the Beguines.

Generally, Hollywood's argument is persuasive. "Influence," however, assumes many forms. If taken to mean "textual dependence," the case for the women's "influence" on Eckhart is shakier than if construed in a weaker sense. But to say Eckhart "followed" one or the other is ambiguous. Even to assert that he "adopted" or "echoed" their positions requires thorough substantiation. In the case of Porete, Hollywood expertly rehearses the available internal evidence and scholarly opinion. Even so, the differences between Eckhart's teaching and "parallels" found in The Mirror of Simple Souls are greater than Hollywood seems willing to admit, particularly the triumph of love over reason and the problematic of quietistic insouciance. This is even more the case with topoi shared by Echkart, Hadewijch, Porete, and others such as mystical "annihilation" and "living without a why." Concerning Mechthild, Hollywood concedes that textual evidence of influence is lacking, but subscribes to the notion that "external evidence" adduced by Oliver Davies suggests that Echkart may have read The Flowing Light of the Godhead in a Latin transcription. Such "evidence," however, is circumstantial and inferential. Without textual support, it also remains conjectural.

That Eckhart was aware of, responded to, and even incorporated ideas and themes current in the volatile atmosphere of early fourteenth-century Rhenish and French spirituality is now indisputable. The value of Hollywood's analysis lies less in establishing "influence" among these great mystics, or even in proving subversive intent regarding prevalent doctrines and attitudes, than in her illumination of obscure regions of their teaching by carefully comparing and contrasting passages tantalizingly similar in expression, if not always in intent.

If Hollywood's final assessment of Eckhart (p. 205) goes subversively beyond the lapidary precision of her preceding argumentation, overall her study stands out as a scintillating and heuristic contribution to the critical literature surrounding three pivotal figures in the mystical revolution of late medieval Europe.

RICHARD WOODS, O.P.

Loyola University of Chicago

Chicago, Illinois

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Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, The

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 1997 by Woods, Richard

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