God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages by Barbara Newman (review)

Abstract

1OOARTHURIANA nonchristianists in the collection, discusses the connection between Wolfram's Parzival and the Crusades in the general context offeudal politics and economics. Deborah Rose-Lefmann's closing essay demonstrates ways in which late medieval mystical writers drew upon Arthurian and courtly imagery for their depictions of the love between Christ and the soul. The diversity ofperspectives contained in this volume should make it useful and interesting not only to Arthurians, but also to students ofmedieval literature, history, and theology. It presents a broad range of interpretations covering texts from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries, and could be especially useful as a textbook for upper-division undergraduate courses in medieval disciplines. WANDA ZEMLER-CIZEWSKI Marquette University barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Beliefin the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Pp. xvi, 446. isbn: o— 8122-3691-2. $42.50. Barbara Newman is best known for her two books on Hildegard of Bingen—Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegards Theology ofthe Feminine (1987) and her edition and translation of Symphonia: A Critical Edition ofthe 'Symphonia Armonie celestium revelationum (1988). Recently, in From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Religion and Literature (1995), she surveyed thirteenth- and fourteenth-century women mystics and theologians in relation to her concept of the 'virile woman.' Her new book, God and the Goddess: Vision, Poetry, and Beliefin the Middle Ages (2003), argues that a feminized God—and not just a figurative depiction of his personified attributes as imagined in poetry and visions—actually informed medieval theology. To get to this point, she uses female personifications ofdivinity primarily found in the theology ofwomen mystics from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as a gloss on those of the twelfth-century French Platonist philosophers. She then argues that, 'in the most imaginative and provocative texts, both Latin and vernacular, they [these personifications] add an irreducible fourth dimension to the spiritual universe. As emanations of the Divine, mediators between God and the cosmos, embodied universals, and not least, ravishing objects of identification and desire, the goddesses substantially transformed and deepened Christendom's concept of God, introducing religious possibilities beyond the ambit of scholastic theology and bringing them to vibrant imaginative life' (2-3). In this project, Newman renders women mystics and thinkers—less than mainstream in the Middle Ages—as part of what would have had to have been a monolithic philosophic tradition, one more conventionally associated with the scholastic philosophy (not theology) ofthe universities in the twelfth century than is now believed to have existed. In introductory and concluding chapters, on God and the goddesses and then on the goddesses and the One God, Newman discusses St. Francis's Lady Poverty, Mechthild of Magdeburg's Lady Love, Henry of Suso's Wisdom, William Langland's Lady Holy Church, and Christine de Pizan's Lady REVIEWS??? Reason, Lady Right, and Lady Justice. In the intervening chapters between the introduction and conclusion, roughly chronological in order and leading up to the Reformation, she shows the relationships between the twelfth-century figure of Natura as handmaiden of God, Hildegard of Bingen's Natura, and Nature in Christine de Pizan (chapters 2 and 3); Love (Caritas) and Hadewich of Brabant (chapter 4); Sapientia and Julian ofNorwich (chapter 5); and Mary and the Trinity (the Holy Family) (chapter 6). Her grand mistake here is to construe these goddesses as 'introducing religious possibilities beyond the ambit ofscholastic theology' (3) for all late medieval poets and philosophers, male and female, and to disengage the literary and religious history of the mid-thirteenth to the fifteenth century from those poets' and philosophers' antecedents in the twelfth. From what scholars have understood about the use of such personifications, there was no verifiable 'emotional force' or 'religious import' beyond the pleasure ofthefigura and its instantiation within a poetic or prosimetric text (like the Depianeta Naturae [The Complaint ofNature] ofAlan ofLille or the Roman de la Rose [The Romance ofthe Rose] ofJean de Meun). In a book arguing for the historical influence oftwelfth-century Neoplatonic practice, I would expect an introductory chapter to explain the use of such personification allegory in the twelfth century (many books have been written on these periods and the...