The Unorthodox Imagination in Late Medieval Britain, ed. Sophie Page

Abstract

The period of the later middle ages saw increasingly concerted attempts to impose black and white judgements on various intellectual and religious spheres. In attitudes to images, heretics, magic, the sacred, and the landscape, among many other phenomena, the period was marked by categorisation, definition, and attempted ‘normalisation’. But did this drive for certainty and safety create a safe and certain world? This is a subject which has attracted a great deal of interest in some quarters, notably those concerned with the study of female religion—one thinks immediately of Dyan Elliott’s work on the inquisitorial investigation of female visions—and of heresy. In this volume Sophie Page brings together research in disparate fields to show quite successfully that there is more comparative and synthetic work to be done on the ‘unorthodox’ in late medieval Europe, and that there are some big questions waiting to be addressed. By ‘unorthodox’ Page means not only heretical, but also magical, unusual, proscribed, abnormal, marginal, and profane. The open-endedness of this category is fertile. The better of the essays in this volume (and it is a mixed bag, as one would expect from a set of conference proceedings) all touch on similar themes: a growing concern with the categorisation of belief and experience into good and bad, and concern with the ‘grey areas’ which this creates. In some ways it might seem as if the Huizinga thesis, of a world struggling to come to terms with stark contrasts, is emerging here, but, if so, it is different from Huizinga’s picture in an important respect. The writers in this volume assume that cultural categories and moods are the products of rational activity and cognition, and they also assume that these categories do not encompass the whole of reality. This makes for an interesting series of investigations.