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

Abstract

202 Reviews Parergon 21.1 (2004) know that I will be referring to several of these works both in my own teaching and research. Hopefully the production problems were limited to just a few copies of the published book, and that other readers will be able to enjoy the full benefits of this generously illustrated collection. Judith Collard Art History and Theory University of Otago Newman, Barbara, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003; cloth; pp. xv, 446; 49 b/w illustrations; RRP US$30; ISBN 0812236912. This is a rich and important book that explores one of the most patently obvious, yet strangely neglected phenomena of medieval literary and religious culture, the ubiquity of female personifications, functioning alongside God, conventionally gendered as masculine.Newman argues that the feminine figures of Poverty, Nature, Love, and Wisdom are more than simply literary constructions. Her claim is that these figures are not as far removed from those male personifications of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as both literary critics and orthodox theologians might imagine, and that they should be seen as developing an imaginative theology, worthy of respect alongside that of monastic and scholastic theologies. In a panoramic survey of medieval literary epic and devotional writing, she extends to a vast canvas interests first sketched out in Sister of Wisdom (University of California Press, 1987), her pioneering study of Hildegard’s theology of the feminine and then in essays, some of which were published in From Virile Women to WomenChrist (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). In a short review, it is impossible to identify the full range of literary texts she explores, whether by learned Latin scholars like Bernardus Sylvestris or Alan of Lille, or by vernacular authors, like Jean de Meun, Christine de Pizan, and Julian of Norwich. It is precisely the wide range of Newman’s subject matter that makes her study so valuable, making unexpected comparisons between texts normally bracketed into different compartments. Newman argues that rather than interpreting immortalised female figures as an artificial inventions, distinct from religious belief, we need to seem them each as heuristic devices expounding some greater truth, whether about human nature, Scripture, or theology itself. Newman reads what Christine de Pizan has to say about the Reviews 203 Parergon 21.1 (2004) visionary revelation of a figure like Justice as not as removed as one might imagine from the writing of Hildegard or Julian about Charity or Mercy. In the process, she throws out any number of fascinating reflections on medieval conceptions of Nature, Love, and Wisdom. Not everyone will agree with her proposal that these female personifications should be called goddesses. The classic Christian creeds leave no room for doubting that God is one, and that there are only three personae or faces to God. Newman’s exploration of what she identifies as the neglected goddesses of medieval religious belief is clearly driven by contemporary unease with the masculinity of presentations of the Christian God. She is not arguing, however, that medieval Catholicism, venerated a single goddess. The title of her book indicates that she is concerned both with God and the plurality of feminised personifications of such eternal principles as Nature, Love, and Wisdom. She takes pains to point out that many of the authors whom she studies were fiercely committed to classic Christian orthodoxy. Feminine images allowed a freedom of reflection never perceived as undermining the Christian creed, because it was articulated without any sense that a feminised principle contradicted orthodoxy. There is so much in this monograph that excites the imagination, that there is no point in trying to summarise the range of insights that she presents in prose that is often elegant and moving in its presentation. I was particularly interested in her discussion of the interaction of secular and religious ideas of love in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Perhaps, the originality of so much of the mystical literature of this period would be even more apparent if comparisons were made with the theological and religious writing of Late Antiquity, above all that of Augustine. It would be churlish to argue that such a...