Scholastics, Mystics, and Secondary Intellectuals

Abstract

When scholars try to evaluate the merits of particular works in intellectual history it is helpful to remember the goal of such history. That goal may be expressed in various ways and with innumerable different emphases, but ultimately the goal is simply to discover those elements in the past that contribute to the making of that society’s intellectual culture. The easiest path to follow in so doing is to identify and assess those writings that deal explicitly with intellectual themes. This explains the dominance of philosophy in intellectual histories. Philosophy confronts rational and speculative thought head-on; there is no mistaking its relationship to intellectual history. We have repeatedly seen that women rarely approached intellectual matters in the same manner that men did and that they did not often explicitly or self-consciously engage in speculative thought. For too long this lack of direct philosophical engagement has contributed to scholarly neglect of women’s intellectual contributions. This need not be, and thus we ask here, along with Dorothy Koenigsberger, why the historical contributions of any group should “be confined only to an assessment of the self-conscious goals or activities of that group.”1 It may be that the way women’s ideas are presented accounts for the greatest difference between women’s intellectual contributions and men’s. Medieval women intellectuals present their thoughts overwhelmingly through description and narration. They rely more on the authority of their personal experiences and their imagination than on the authority of past masters. This too has contributed to scholarly neglect of women’s thought, for given Western historians’ long tradition of favoring reason over imagination,2 it is not surprising to see women’s experiential, imaginative approaches to issues not fully appreciated.