Reviewed by: Scribit Mater: Mary and the Language Arts in the Literature of Medieval England by Georgiana Donavin Frances Beer Georgiana Donavin. Scribit Mater: Mary and the Language Arts in the Literature of Medieval England. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012. Pp. xii, 315. $69.95 cloth. As Georgiana Donavin points out in her introduction to Scribit Mater, Marian studies have undergone some notable changes in the course of the past half-century, with many postmodern critics treating the emphasis on Mary’s virginity as signal evidence of patriarchal misogyny, its determination to encourage women’s passivity, and the repression of female sexuality. More recent scholarship has aimed to reconsider and to recuperate Mary’s authority within the Christian tradition, and has relied on a wide range of medieval Marian literature. This scholarship [End Page 302] has also revisited the entire ideal of virginity, which, it has argued, may in fact be seen as empowering. We all remember from Hali Meiðhad the vividly portrayed woes of marriage and the attendant advantages of virginity. In the literature considered by Donavin, the sapient Virgin is shown not only to be free of the duress of the conventional married state, but also to be enthroned as the inspiration for the trivium: “a steeping in Marian language … resulted in representations of the Virgin as a purified grammarian, an accomplished rhetorician, an inspired muse, and a mentor for writers” (17). Donavin’s introduction is thorough in its presentation of the points that will be made in the course of her study’s six chapters, which cover a wide range of medieval English literature, from “The English Lives of Mary” to “Margery Kempe and the Virgin Birth of her Book.” At the introduction’s close, Donavin explicitly challenges “the paradigm of Kristeva’s abject mother,” as she announces her own determination to counter the “scholarly denigration of medieval constructs of virginity.” Scribit Mater “represents the Virgin as a powerful linguistic intermediary and occasionally as a force for a radical literature that realigns spiritual and social roles” (26). Indeed, Donavin’s work proves to be an effective refutation to the commonly accepted stereotype of the submissive Mary. Her goal is clarified by the first sentence of her first chapter: “[In the course of this book] I will show how throughout medieval English literature, the Virgin Mary is associated with academic and narrative arts of speech, … her superior knowledge and its impact on salvation history” (27). Specifically, the chapter is dedicated to a consideration of a variety of lives that focus on Mary and her “superior spiritual understanding” (74). In the English lives considered by Donavin, the Virgin is anything but a passive vessel: she explains the Christian mysteries, and is the crucial “vehicle for Christ’s coming to earth, … a teacher of providence’s progress” (29, 30). Her virginity is an active source of strength. The chapter covers a broad chronological period, from the Anglo-Saxon Advent Lyrics to Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady. While this might at first seem a rather wide net to cast, Donavin, to the contrary, convincingly establishes a pervasive tradition that “illustrate[s] the divergent audiences—ecclesiastical and lay, courtly and popular—that took Mary to be the mother of wisdom” (28–29). Scribit Mater’s next chapters deal with John of Garland and his pedagogical [End Page 303] poetry: Walter of Wimborne, John of Howden, and Richard Rolle, and how they contributed to “northern medieval English traditions for a Marian meditative poetry” (115); and “Chaucer and the Dame School,” in the “era when primary education took place under the Virgin Mary’s wing” (163). Donavin focuses on Garland’s Epithalamium Beate Virginis Marie and Parisiana poetria, both of which reveal the Virgin to be instrumental in the teaching of the liberal arts, and of writing itself. “[His] Mary—his book, muse, and teacher—embodies both Wisdom and Word, attributes of Christ, as she bears the Christ child” (113). Garland, attributing his own rhetorical powers to the Virgin’s inspiration, figures her “as a warrior for Christian virtues [whose] divine message … depends on conquering the vices”—“an icon of … learning and a Christian Lady...