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

Abstract

Reviewed by: God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages Virginie Greene God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages. By Barbara Newman. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2003. Pp. xv, 446. $42.50.) In God and the Goddesses, Barbara Newman addresses the intrusion of female polytheism in a male monotheism. Newman insists that the issue at stake is not the status of women in medieval Church and society, but the status of femininity in "religious imagination" (p. 38). Newman starts with five examples of medieval goddesses: Saint Francis's Lady Poverty, Mechthild of Magdeburg's Lady Love, Henri Suso's Eternal Wisdom, William Langland's Lady Church, and Christine de Pizan's female Trinity of Reason, Right, and Justice. Thus Newman underlines "the scope and pervasiveness of the goddess phenomenon in medieval writings" (p. 25). She divides the numerous medieval feminine personifications (vices, virtues, arts, etc.) into "mere rhetorical tropes" and "Realistic or Platonic personification." The goddesses belong to the latter group and are defined as "epiphanies or emanations of a superior reality" (p. 33-35). This I can admit, but I am not convinced by Newman's linking of medieval allegory to philosophical realism (p. 30). Between "humanity" as a reality transcending each human individual and Lady Nature as God's daughter, the connection is far from obvious. The rest of the chapter lays out the four main functions Newman attributes to medieval goddesses: [End Page 147] allowing safer discussions of loaded theological questions; mediating between various religious experiences; dramatizing God's contradictory aspects; expressing "gender-specific psychological and cultural needs" (p. 39). Chapter 2 introduces Natura as goddess of the cosmos. In Bernard Silvestris's Cosmographia and Alan of Lille's De Planctu Naturae and Anticlaudianus Natura plays a central and contradictory role: powerful and submissive, visible and mysterious, virginal and sexy. Bernard views Natura as a mediator between a Neo-Platonist cosmos and the Christian Creator (pp. 59-60) while Alan connects Natura to Christ and salvation (p. 66); both use Natura to define a "distinct realm" under her "dominion" (p. 89). In Chapter 3, Natura appears as the "goddess of the normative." In the anonymous Latin poem Altercatio Ganymedis et Helene Nature and Reason judge between heterosexual and homosexual love. In Jean de Meuns's part of the Roman de la Rose, Nature is opposed to Reason and depicted as a wrong guide for sexual norms. Jean's Nature is certainly an ambiguous goddess presented ironically, but I am not sure that she is "play[ing] the role of a deluded beguine" and must be seen primarily as a satirical figure (p. 108). In Chaucer's Parlement of Fowles, Nature is entangled in social and sexual ambiguities whereas Christine de Pizan reconciles Nature with Reason. In Heldris of Cornwall's Roman de Silence, Nature and Nurture debate over a transgendered heroine who trumps both. All these texts use Nature to discuss "frankly" social, sexual, and ethical norms in a "semi-autonomous realm of discourse" (p. 137). Chapter 4 presents the case of "Love," a more complicated goddess because Amor, Amour, Minne, Caritas, Cupiditas, Eros, Venus never cohered in a unified, consistently feminine representation. Religious discourses about love were certainly influenced by courtly love, but Newman overlooks the fact that Fin'Amor never became an equivalent of Frau Minne. Chrétien de Troyes's Amors is not "a female personage" (p. 151): it is hardly a personage at all and its gender varies (rather feminine in Yvain, rather masculine in Cliges, undetermined in Erec et Enide and Lancelot). In Romance vernaculars, Love floated between trope, allegory, and concept. This is probably why Dante had to almost deify Beatrice to propose a Christian, female substitute to the Ovidian God of Love and to courtly Love (pp. 181-189). The goddess Love appears in full gear in northern Latinity and Germanic vernaculars. In Hildegard of Bingen, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugh of Saint Victor, and Richard of Saint Victor, Caritas represents in turn God "in female guise" and an "omnipotent goddess" capable to rule over God (p. 148). Mechthild of Magdeburg, Lamprecht of Regensburg, and Hadewijch of Brabant borrowed Frau Minne...