NANCY BRADLEY WARREN. The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350-1700.

Abstract

Nancy Bradley Warren transcends various disciplinary boundaries, both implicitly and explicitly, throughout her excellent book The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700. The title alone, with its plural ‘spiritualities’ and ‘orthodoxies’, as well as its expansive time frame, gives some sense of how Warren is challenging notions entrenched in medieval and early modern studies. It is fitting that Warren's book is one of the first in the new series, ‘Reformations: Medieval and Early Modern’, put forth by Notre Dame, which promises to broadly address the question of periodization in our discipline. Further, Warren rightly notes that there has been very little work on the survival and study of medieval female spirituality in the early modern era. Her book rectifies this by bridging the gap not only between medieval and early modern, but also between Protestant and Catholic as well. Warren opens her book with an anecdote outside of her temporal boundaries, however: the 1716 disinterment of Margaret Wake, an English Carmelite nun in Antwerp, whose miraculously whole and sweet-smelling body inspires the prioress to commission the writing of the lives of the Antwerp nuns. Warren argues that the produced texts weave the individual with the community, the spiritual with the textual, the English with the Continental, and the past with the present in a way that functions as a metaphor for her project entire. In her introduction ‘From Corpse to Corpus,’ Warren writes: The events of 1716 manifest a set of foundational concepts that cast long shadows simultaneously forward and backward through medieval and early modern religious cultures Catholic and Protestant, orthodox and heterodox. These concepts are incarnational piety, incarnational epistemology, incarnational textuality, and incarnational politics, and through the subsequent chapters they constitute the bones giving form to the corpus of this book’ (p. 7).