JOHN W. COAKLEY. Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators. New York: Columbia University Press. 2006. Pp. x, 354. $45.00 and JODI BILINKOFF. Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450-1750. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2005. Pp. xi, 181. $45.00

Abstract

In recent years, medieval and early modern female spirituality has burgeoned as a field of scholarly interest. John W. Coakley and Jodi Bilinkoff provide welcome additions to this lively critical conversation. Their books extend the discussion of a wide range of topics, including women's strategies for crafting religious authority, women's ascetic practices, forms of female mysticism, and conflicts between holy women and the ecclesiastical establishment. They also both address another set of important issues that has received comparatively little attention: the lives and perceptions of the male confessors so intimately involved in the careers of holy women, and the ways in which these male clerics' perspectives, self-conceptions, and desires shaped the forms of female holiness they created in their texts. Coakley's book covers the period from 1100 to 1400, featuring nine pairs of men and women chosen because each “man wrote about the woman in such a way as to include himself extensively” (p. 3). Coakley sets out to provide neither a comprehensive study of female holiness, nor an overarching account of the relationships between holy women and their confessors. What he does give us is a sustained exploration of female and male modes of religious authority as well as of strategies of (self) representation. His methodology is to focus on holy women's own writings in dialogue with men's writings about them; in the process he devotes admirable attention to modes of collaboration and cooperation alongside investigations of tension and competition.