Female Saints Research Articles

Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints' Lives in Late Medieval England. Catherine Sanok

<i>Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints' Lives in Late Medieval England</i>. Catherine Sanok

Hala Sultan Tekke, Cyprus: An Elusive Landscape of Sacredness in a Liminal Context

The funerary shrine of Umm Haram, a holy woman of Islam, at the mosque of Hala Sultan Tekke near Larnaca, Cyprus, is the most important pilgrimage site for Muslims on the mostly Christian island of Cyprus. Its location at the interstices of the Muslim and Christian worlds, and amidst an unusually charged landscape of holiness for both religions, has also determined its role as an outpost within a liminal cultural space. The aspect of sacredness at the shrine itself can be seen as a poetics of “resistance” to Western attempts at viewing, description, analysis, and “possession” through comprehension. Moreover, Western travelers adopted different strategies of presentation and representation for reporting on Hala Sultan Tekke and their accounts regarding the female saint at the shrine are impressively inconsistent. One associated the monument with the grave of Mina, mother of Mohammed, another with a Turkish princess, and others with the grandmother of Mohammed. Surprisingly, only one traveler mentioned the “exotic,” yet elusive megalithic configuration of the actual grave, whereas none referred to the foundation story and the rich local lore about the miraculous properties of the shrine. The idiosyncratic nature of travelers’ encounters with this site reflects both their implicit rhetorical aims and the limitations imposed on their attempts at understanding by pragmatic circumstances such as language, inability or unwillingness to visit, and control of information. Travelers’ accounts and other sources reveal the embeddedness of Hala Sultan Tekke within a complicated landscape of sacredness. This landscape also accommodated practices of cultic confluence and cross-cultural sharing, such as the veneration of the saints and holy sites common to Christians and Muslims of the Larnaca region.

Sandra Lowere, The Cross-Gressing. Female Saints in Wynkyn de Worde’s 1495 Edition of the Vitas Patrum

Caxton a traduit du Francais (edition incunable de Lyon chez Nicolas Philippi et Jean Du Pre, 15 janvier 1486 = 1487) les Vitas Patrum (sic) en Moyen Anglais. Il nous est ici propose une edition commentee de quelques vies choisies. SL s’est attachee aux Vitae de cinq femmes qui, a l’aube du monachisme chretien oriental, ont abandonne leurs vetements de femmes et le « Monde » pour vivre et mourir travesties. Ce motif du cross-dressing est un theme fort en vogue depuis quelques dizaines d’annee...

Female saints and the practice of Islam in Sylhet, Bangladesh

ABSTRACTUnlike the saintly power of her male counterpart, which is conceived as an attribute of the individual, the spiritual power of the female saint in Sylhet, Bangladesh, is attributed to a supernatural entity that is temporarily affiliated with her. This difference cannot simply be regarded as an example of gendered domains of religious practice, in which men study the Qu'ran and women traffic with spirits, as in Sylhet, male healers practice with the aid of spirits. I describe how one woman's saintly status allowed her to resist the virilocal rule of residence, a patriarchal structure that is said to underpin women's subordinate position in Bangladesh. Her story demonstrates that Islam cannot be conflated with patriarchy and that it may support women's emancipation from structures of male authority. The meaning of Islam is context dependent and revised through practice. [Islam, gender, agency, sainthood, Bangladesh, spirit possession, healing]

Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints' Lives in Late Medieval England (review)

Reviewed by: Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints' Lives in Late Medieval England Kathleen Ashley Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints' Lives in Late Medieval England. By Catherine Sanok. [The Middle Ages Series.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2007. Pp. xviii, 256.) In Her Life Historical, Catherine Sanok offers a penetrating review of the concept of exemplarity, using lives of female saints to articulate exciting new ideas about how exemplarity could function in later medieval culture. Given the unexamined assumptions usually in play when "exemplary" texts are read by modern critics, Sanok's elegant study is a much-needed analysis of the complex nexus of hagiographic, historical, and gender issues to be found in the popular genre of female saints' lives. Although Sanok's work builds productively on the preceding generation of hagiographic scholarship, she also offers fresh perspectives that undermine earlier truisms about gender and history. Most fundamentally, she questions the paradigm that tends to put female vernacular spirituality at odds with historical reflection. Of the genre's supposed ahistoricity, she says, "The exemplarity of vernacular hagiography depends on the fantasy that gender ideology and Christian practice are continuous, even transhistorical, but this is clearly not true" (p. 22). Her initial comparison in chapter 1 of the ways women readers "imitated" their saintly models—saints Cecilia, Mary Magdalene, Margaret, and Katherine—reveals that figures like Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe or male writers of prescriptive texts in fact used such saintly models very flexibly. The feature to be imitated was often carefully selected from a range of narrative possibilities in the legend, leaving other features either explicitly or tacitly as unimitable. For example, the typical virgin saint's adamant rejection of marriage and sexuality, her challenge to male authority, or her defiant public preaching were rarely presented as traits the woman reader should mimic. Instead, such narrative features were often allegorized into ethical virtues that could be emulated. Sanok traces the "incommensurability" of ethics and narrative, the continuities and discontinuities of history, through a variety of topics in the following [End Page 572] chapters. Chapter 2 calls attention to the way female saints' lives "ask women to read as women" (p. 24), and this makes women visible within literary history as patrons and readers. As Sanok points out, saints' lives were the sole genre "universally endorsed as women's reading" (p. 27) throughout the late Middle Ages. However, she goes further with the poststructuralist insight that female saints' lives created "the very category of women's literature, and they helped to inscribe female readers in the discursive—and so in the historical—arena of late medieval England" (p. 32). If hagiography allowed the imagining of women as an interpretive community, then the community defined by devotional literature could function as an alternative to other kinds of political (often male) communities, as Sanok demonstrates in chapter 3 on Bokenham's Legends of Holy Women. Devotional discourse directed to a celestial realm provides an explicit alternative to the discourses of the social world for Bokenham. Sanok argues that he sees the stability and beneficence of feminine spirituality as a protection from political instability and repression of the public sphere, which Bokenham denigrates as "outlawry." In particular, Bokenham represents both the female saints and his contemporary women patrons as literary muses so that "the ethical imperative in the legendary—as figured by his patrons' imitation of the saints—is literary production" (p. 81). The remaining chapters focus on individual hagiographic works that illustrate the connections between imitating the saints and historical identities: English identity in Bradshaw's Life of St. Werberge (chapter 4), female holiness as challenge to dominant social ideologies in the Book of Margery Kempe and the Life of Christina of Markyate (chapter 5), and, conversely, the idealized feminine that underwrites royal authority in the 1501 entry of Catherine of Aragon (chapter 6). Whether examining well or lesser known texts, Her Life Historical will reward its readers with new and cogently articulated insights. [End Page 573] Kathleen Ashley University of Southern Maine Copyright © 2008 The Catholic University of America Press

Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints' Lives in Late Medieval England (review)

Reviewed by: Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints' Lives in Late Medieval England Nancy Bradley Warren (bio) Catherine Sanok . Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints' Lives in Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2007. 280 pp. ISBN 0-812-23986-5, $55.00. Catherine Sanok's book is a welcome contribution to the currently vibrant study of hagiography in later medieval English culture. Her Life Historical adds some important new considerations to the conversation. In particular, as [End Page 463] her title suggests, she directs our attention to the ways in which hagiography provides a locus for thinking historically in later medieval Eng land. The history with which Sanok is concerned is both literary and sociopolitical; indeed, one of the book's greatest strengths is the ways in which it attends to the mutually informing dimensions of these types of history. Sanok begins by exploring the complicated, flexible functions of exemplarity as a mode of interpretation. Considering a wide range of Middle English texts, in her first chapter she analyzes diverse figurings of relationships of past and present, examining the implications of such representations for ethical practice. She argues that "hagiography and its exemplary hermeneutics did not . . . provide one model of history but a vehicle for exploring and contesting a variety of such models" (19). Sanok's second chapter addresses the processes through which, and the reasons for which, female saints' lives invent a feminine audience. She presents a diverse body of evidence, including textual accounts of patronage or commission and testamentary records, for the strong association of female saints' lives with female readers. This association is not, however, necessarily "proof" of women's "agency in the genre." Rather, it attests to an association between women and the genre "in the late medieval cultural imagination" (37), an association that the texts themselves work to produce. Female saints' lives create "if only in theory . . . an interpretive response proper to female readers. Female saints' lives . . . ask women to read as women" (25, emphasis in original). In doing so, they do not fully control reception, but they do create expectations. In her third chapter, Sanok turns to Osbern Bokenham's Legends of Holy Women to examine the feminine audience it creates in "a political context" (51). She argues that Bokenham crafts "fables of commission and reception" (55, a concept she borrows from Seth Lerer) that elide both class differences and differences of political allegiance among women. He seeks to create a unified feminine community sharing devotional commitments and literary interests during an era of political strife. His agenda, therefore, is not to regulate women's devotional activities or reading practices, but rather to foreground a stable community in the face of contemporary political division. Chapter Four, entitled "Exemplarity and England in Native Saints' Lives," centers on Henry Bradshaw's Life of St. Werburge. Sanok reads Bradshaw's text through the lens of the work of Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha on "the nation." Like Bokenham, Bradshaw figures a unified feminine audience for his vernacular legend; his aim is to represent "the transhistorical continuity and coherence of English identity" by linking a native English saint with contemporary English women. The Life is concerned, as Sanok notes, [End Page 464] not only with national issues but also with local ones concerning Chester and Bradshaw's abbey; Chester becomes, however, a metonymic representation of England. Chapter Five turns to The Book of Margery Kempe. While Bradshaw's mobilization of exemplarity upholds "fictions of community" (116), the Book of Margery Kempe illustrates the ways in which imitating female saints can serve as a mode of social criticism. Sanok considers Margery's imitation of various saints, especially Mary Magdalene, Katherine of Alexandria, and Margaret. Her reading of the scribe's refusal to acknowledge likeness between Margery Kempe and Mary Magdalene, whom he replaces with Marie d'Oignies as "a more proximate example of a late medieval holy woman," is particularly interesting. Margery's imitatio is disconcerting because it highlights troubling similarities between the past of saints' lives and her present moment. Margery Kempe also exposes incoherence within her community by calling attention to the ways in which it privileges ideals of feminine sanctity in...

Jane Eyre as Hunger Artist

In this essay, the author applies Mikhail Bakhtin's carnivalesque theory and Mary Russo's concepts of the female grotesque to a reading of Jane Eyre which situates Jane's hunger within a mid-nineteenth-century context of self-imposed female hunger, which was largely religious in nature. Drawing on the work of Caroline Bynum, whose Holy Feast and Holy Fast examines the lives of female starving saints, the author argues that Jane Eyre, whose hunger has often been equated by critics with anorexia nervosa, exhibits the motivations of the starving saints, or what the author terms ‘female hunger artists’, who often rebel against injustice while paradoxically displaying temporary female spiritual power by attracting attention through spectacle. Unlike most of the earlier hunger artists who point out their intense personal relationship with a God who sustains them, Jane's hunger artistry denotes a need for earthly justice, sustenance through books and female community, all of which, if realized, would make earth a heavenly home.

Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators. John W. Coakley

<i>Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators</i>. John W. Coakley

Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators. By John W. Coakley

Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators. By John W. Coakley

Women, Men &amp; Spiritual Power: Female Saints &amp; Their Male Collaborators (review)

Reviewed by: Women, Men & Spiritual Power: Female Saints & Their Male Collaborators Elizabeth Dreyer (bio) Women, Men & Spiritual Power: Female Saints & Their Male Collaborators. By John W. Coakley. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 354 pp. $47.00 Women and men have been collaborating on what would become the Christian project since the time of Jesus. Information about male participation in this project has been duly recorded and passed down, creating a legacy of male agency and influence. Knowledge of women's involvement has remained in the shadows, due in part to the private nature of much female ecclesial work, and also to the lack of importance attached to women's writing and activity. This gender discrimination has meant that, until recently, little scholarly attention has been given to women, much less to female-male cooperation—and even less to women's partnership with other women.1 [End Page 111] For several decades now, these lacunae have been filled through an explosion of scholarship dedicated to the recovery and critical assessment of the works and contexts of Christian women from all periods of history. For the medieval period, a few key names include Caroline Walker Bynum, Elizabeth Petroff, Katharina Wilson, Jo Ann McNamara, Grace Jantzen, Barbara Newman, Amy Hollywood, Catherine Mooney, Susan Mosher Stuard, Peter Dronke, Derek Baker, and Daniel Bornstein. Their work calls attention to women's contributions in medieval church and society, including diverse relationships and collaboration with men (often learned clerics). In cases where female religious experience has been chronicled by men, scholars lament the difficulty of sorting out "he said, she said" issues. And yet they have drawn closer to women's actual voices than ever before. As this recovery of medieval women's history has matured, it is fitting that scholars also attend to the portraits of the men inscribed in these works. In Women, Men & Spiritual Power: Female Saints & Their Male Collaborators, John W. Coakley asks how men, whom he describes as "collaborator-hagiographers," placed themselves explicitly in these narratives (4). He reads with an eye to the way the texts are shaped, as well as to the choices made by their authors as they present the women and their experiences. He examines texts from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries that are the fruit of nine female/male relationships They include Ekbert and Elisabeth of Schönau; Guibert of Gembloux and Hildegard of Bingen; James of Vitry and Mary of Oignies; Peter of Dacia and Christine of Stommeln; "Friar A" and Angela of Foligno; Giunta Bevegnati and Margaret of Cortona; Henry of Nordlingen and Margaret Ebner; Raymond of Capua and Catherine of Siena; and John Marienwerder and Dorothy of Montau. Coakley focuses his detailed textual analysis on the issue of authority. He wants to know what the texts reveal about the relationship between the formal, official, institutional authority of the ordained, and the informal, experiential, charismatic, prophetic authority of holy women. The women's authority was based on their extraordinary direct access to God in revelations, visions and ecstasies—phenomena that intrigued and drew the men into their orbit. Male authority rested on their ability to teach, preach, and celebrate sacraments. Coakley also inquires about whether or not there were limits to either form of authority. When did official authority trump informal power and when was informal power perceived as outside clerical direction? In other words, how did these two types of power coexist? Coakley does not force the material into a pre-ordained grid, but allows a nuanced picture to emerge. In the twelfth century, Eckbert and Elisabeth cooperate in the dissemination of her visionary experiences, but Eckbert exercises clear authorial influence on her theology. In contrast, Guibert of Gembloux sees himself working with Hildegard in a spirit of monastic collegiality. In later centuries, clerics underlined their spiritual inferiority, seeing themselves as lacking the women's intimate, graced revelations from God (James of Vitry, Friar A.). They describe what Coakley calls "role reversals" in which the female directee/penitent becomes the director/confessor of her male counterpart. She might call attention to his spiritual deficiencies, direct his ministry, or provide access to the divine that the men would not otherwise have. Men thus...

Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints' Lives in Late Medieval England (review)

Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints' Lives in Late Medieval England (review)

Hong Mai’s Record of the Listener and Its Song Dynasty Context by Allister D. Inglis (review)

150 Journal of Chinese Religions For the history of religions the chief value of this book is its portrayal of a fundamental conflict between Buddhism and traditional Chinese family and political values, a conflict that ends with the complete victory of Buddhism. The dialogues between Miaoshan and her father are intense and sharp, as when he visits her in prison. When the emperor says, “How is one different from animals, birds and beasts if one does not follow a father’s instructions?”… Marvelous Goodness replies, “My father, the emperor, dear daddy, you are misled and deluded and unenlightened, and your perverse heart is all ablaze. This is not the behavior of a lord and emperor in possession of the Way! ...If you cannot control your family, how can you control the nation? If you are a Son of Heaven and an emperor of men, how would you, a father, ever think of entering into this side palace at midnight? How would it look if the world came to know this?” (pp. 110-111). In reply to one of her sisters the princess says, “One road leads to heaven, the other to hell. It is up to you to choose which one you want to go. I for sure will walk the road that leads to heaven. You are tied to the road to the prisons of hell!” (p. 77). And to the officials sent to persuade her she says, “Your fame may be spread throughout the wide world, but you will not escape from the cycle of birth and death….For all your smarts you’ve lost both body and mind. What is the use of your world-famous essays and writings? They’re shackles of fame and profit, utterly useless!” (p. 81). Here Buddhist ideas are the subversion that orthodox Confucians had always feared, still strongly expressed after 1400 years! The author also provides a translation of The Precious Scroll of Good-in-Talent and Dragon Girl, a short text that provides a scriptural basis for Guanyin’s chief acolytes, Shancai 善財 and Longnü 龍女, as well as a story about the White Parrot that is often portrayed with her (pp. 161-189). In the Introduction, Professor Idema also comments on a comparison of the Miaoshan story with stories of thirteenth century French female saints who courageously retained their virginity in the face of temptations and torture (pp. 14-18). In sum, this is an excellent book and translation that deserves to be read by students of Buddhism and of cultural conflicts. The only error I found in it was twice listing my name as David Overmyer, an honorable name, but not my own! DANIEL L. OVERMYER, Professor Emeritus, University of British Columbia Hong Mai’s Record of the Listener and Its Song Dynasty Context ALLISTER D. INGLIS. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006. xiii, 257 pages. ISBN 978-7914-6822-7. US$21.95 paper. The Yijianzhi 夷堅志 (Record of the Listener) by the Southern Song scholar Hong Mai 洪邁 (1123-1202) has always been an important source for the study of Song social and cultural Book Reviews 151 history, but this voluminous collection of Song anecdotal literature itself has remained little explored in English until Allister D. Inglis’ book-length study. In delving into some key features of Yijianzhi, ranging from its authorship, readership, themes, and genre to its textual transmission and contexts, Inglis enriches our understanding of the Yijianzhi in particular and the nature of zhiguai 志怪 writing in general. Inglis’ book opens with a general introduction to Hong Mai’s life and his compilation of Yijianzhi. It recognizes Yijianzhi as a “compendium of amateur or informal story-telling” (p. 2), drawing for its sources on both oral and written literature and from a wide range of social groups. It then traces the compilation of Yijianzhi’s original 420 chapters in 32 installments throughout Hong Mai’s lifetime and how it survives into the 207 chapters in its modern editions. In particular, Inglis uses several of Hong’s own family stories to illustrate the rich religious world in which Hong lived and therefore his enduring interest in collecting stories about the strange and the spirits. Chapter 2 focuses...

The Woman Saint in Spanish Golden Age Drama (review)

Bulletin of the Comediantes • 2008 Vol. 60 No. 2 161 Reviews____________________________________________________________________ Gascón, Christopher D. The Woman Saint in Spanish Golden Age Drama. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2006. 203 pp. The Woman Saint in Spanish Golden Age Drama is an ambitious and relevant piece of scholarship that synthesizes two areas of interest in comedia studies: the representation of women on the early modern Spanish stage and hagiographic theater. Diverging from previous critical tendencies, which typically mythologized the legendary qualities of the saint, Gascón examines the female religious figure through her specific characterization within the play and analyzes how this depiction interrogates contemporary society. For the purpose of his analysis, the author proposes three categories to describe the female saint: as a desiring subject, as the object of desire, and as the mediator of desire. Acknowledging the mutability of such a classification, he also points out how the character may correspond simultaneously to more than one of the categories or how she may start in one and end in another. Gascón’s introduction briefly discusses recent scholarship on hagiographical studies and gender issues in the comedia. Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical frame used to analyze the plays. In the Baroque comedia de santa, he explains, the woman saint’s relationship with desire—either her own or that of others—is at the center of the conflict that drives the plot. She represents the point “where worldly and religious desires collide” (23). The female ascetic’s situation is more complex and precarious than her secular counterpart because she must face not only the unique set of challenges tied to her holy vows but also those that all women confront as a result of their gender. It is necessary, therefore, to examine the character in terms of her function within religious and social contexts. Gascón then asserts that “[b]aroque religious drama brings passion and intensity to its exploration of the potential of worldly desires to cause personal or societal schism and of the power of religious desire to redeem humanity and establish peace” (31), an undeniable conclusion based on the careful contemplation of the dramatic texts—and the genre as a whole. Using as a point of departure Victor Turner’s conception of the similarities between ritual and theater, Gascón points out the ritualistic features of the comedia de santa, highlighting in particular the “liminal processes and self-reflexivity” caused by religious crisis (26). He notes how Turner’s four stages of social drama: breach, crisis, redress, and restoration, also structure the comedias de santa. Gascón recalls Peter Brooks’s theory of textual energetics to explain how the comedia de santa helped to resolve personal 162 Bulletin of the Comediantes • 2008 Vol. 60 No. 2 ____________________________________________________________________ Reviews religious conflict (32-33). Finally, René Girard’s conception of religion describes the social function of religion in society that is represented on the stage (36-37). The remaining chapters develop his arguments and are divided by the different roles assigned to the saintly woman in the plays. Chapter 2, “The Woman Saint as Desiring Object,” examines sor Marcela de San Félix’s Muerte del apetito and Félix Lope de Vega Carpio’s Vida y muerte de Santa Teresa de Jesús. Gascón’s analysis skillfully demonstrates how the playwrights present the protagonists in a state of conflict. To varying degrees, the women are troubled not only by their inner struggle with passion but also with external, societal forces that attempt to influence them. This struggle with desire is resolved as they embrace Christian virtue as the foundation of their identity. The third chapter, “Woman Saint as Forbidden Fruit and Christ Figure,” explores the woman saint’s relationship with society in her attempt at self-definition. Here he looks at Ángela de Azevedo’s La Margarita del Tajo que dio nombre a Santarén and Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s El mágico prodigioso. In both cases the women characters are objectified, and metaphorical parallels between the “forbidden fruit” and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ become evident. Once again, she is the point of contention, this time of others’ worldly desires, and her sacrifice is the...

Women, Men and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (review)

Women, Men and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (review)

Her life historical: exemplarity and female saints' lives in late medieval England

Her life historical: exemplarity and female saints' lives in late medieval England

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Breaking Old Habits: Recent Research on Women, Spirituality and the Arts in the Middle Ages

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Breaking Old Habits: Recent Research on Women, Spirituality and the Arts in the Middle Ages

Writing Medieval Biography: Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow (review)

Reviewed by: Writing Medieval Biography: Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow Anne J. Duggan (bio) David Bates, Julia Crick, and Sarah Hamilton , eds. Writing Medieval Biography: Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006. 262 pp. ISBN 184-38-3262-3, £60. In this splendid book, sixteen distinguished authors, most of them biographers in their own right, have collaborated to honor a seventeenth, Professor Frank Barlow, whose lives of Edward the Confessor, William Rufus, and Thomas Becket are models of their kind. Taking the writing of medieval biography as their theme, the sixteen discuss critical questions about the sources which form the core of their subject. How should a modern scholar evaluate the account of women saints whose vitae have allegedly passed through the double filter of translation from a vernacular into Latin and possible manipulation by male authors (Barbara Yorke on Anglo-Saxon female saints)? What chance is there of approaching a subject for whom there is little written evidence (Simon Keynes on Æthelred the Unready), or where it is problematical (Janet Nelson on Charlemagne's "private life"). Can one reconstruct a chronicler's own biography from his writings on others (John Gillingham on Roger of Howden)? What explains the absence of biographies of the early Plantagenet kings (1154–1272), when their Capetian contemporaries were well recorded, and is the contrast significant (Nicholas Vincent, "The Strange Case of the Missing Biographies")? How far is it possible to find the individual inside the single or multiple roles which persons of status had to play (Pauline Stafford, "Writing the Biography of Eleventh-century Queens")? [End Page 387] Stafford concludes that medieval biography "is difficult, but both possible and important"; and she and her fellow-contributors amply demonstrate its possibilities. David Bates brings great depth and subtlety to his reassessment of the earliest narrative sources for the life of William the Conqueror (William of Poitiers, the 'D' version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, William of Malmesbury), and leaves the reader waiting expectantly for the "new narrative and [the] new biography [that] will emerge" (140); Edmund King re-assesses the accuracy and value of the Gesta Stephani; David Crouch offers a probing study on the "History of William the Marshal"; and Lindy Grant provides a splendid essay on Geoffrey of Lèves, the bishop of Chartres who employed Arnulf, later the long-lived and exceptionally talented bishop of Lisieux, whose letters Frank Barlow edited in 1939. From Christopher Holdsworth there is a new (and more sympathetic) reading of Bernard of Clairvaux's Vitae; and Elizabeth Van Houts explores the influence of Flemish authors (the author of the Encomium Emmae, Drogo of Saint-Winnocksbergen, and Folcard and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin) on English biography in the eleventh century. Jane Martindale's insightful examination of the remarkable "autobiographies" of two powerful French nobles, William, count of Poitou and duke of Aquitaine (1071–1126), and Fulk le Réchin of Anjou (1043–1109), the one in Occitan verse and the other in Latin prose, is an exemplary demonstration of the way in which subtle analysis can force known texts to reveal more secrets. To interpret the written record, the historian must first understand its form and function, and establish the purpose and reliability of its author. This demands exceptional skill in the interpretation of the written sources, and requires not credulity, but an open-mindedness towards them. It is refreshing to read that Richard Abels had been persuaded away from his own preconceptions by giving the sources their due, rather than attempting to impose a provocative thesis upon them, all the while remembering their ambiguities ("Alfred and his Biographers" 73–75), and Marjorie Chibnall's conclusion that, "however reasonable it may be to speculate about the medical or psychological condition influencing the career of an individual, there is a point beyond which speculation should not go in the face of positive evidence," although she allows "controlled speculation" when that evidence has been mastered ("The Empress Matilda as a Subject for Biography" 194). At the same time, the biographer of a medieval person has to be in command of the full range of surviving materials—narrative, diplomatic, administrative, legal, and...

From Holy Hostess to Dragon Tamer: The Anomaly of Saint Martha

The official version of the life of Saint Martha depicts her as Christ's hostess and one of his first followers. Her popular appeal, however, stems less from her biblical role, than from her position in medieval legend. In the Middle Ages, Martha is reinvented as a Gallic saint whose most celebrated feat is taming a dragon. It is this legend that has often displaced Martha's original role, both in text and in iconography. Unlike most depictions of female saints, Martha's power derives from her soul, not from her body. The denial of corporeality as the source of holiness defies the traditional role of the mulier sancta. Martha, as depicted in the texts of the Middle Ages, is a holy person, not a holy vessel. In this article, I am positing a third ‘category’ of female saint: one not defined by her corporeality, that is, her virginity or her physical martyrdom, but by her character, which I claim is indicative of the influence of popular spirituality on the more formal teachings of the Christian church.

Women of God and Arms: Female Spirituality and Political Conflict, 1380-1600 (review)

Reviewed by: Women of God and Arms: Female Spirituality and Political Conflict, 1380-1600 Larissa Juliet Taylor Women of God and Arms: Female Spirituality and Political Conflict, 1380-1600. By Nancy Bradley Warren. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2005. Pp. x, 264. $55.00.) I must preface my review of Women and God and Arms by stating that I am an historian and the author is a literary scholar. My comments therefore reflect my expectations as a historian. In this book, Warren explores the ". . . central roles played by 'women of God'—female saints, devout lay women, and monastic women—as 'women of arms'—rulers, fighters, diplomats and participants in propaganda" (p. 2). Using primarily literary sources, she argues that the roles were interdependent, for female spirituality was explicitly or implicitly used by women for political and sometimes military goals. The book covers a wide range of women, from Colette of Corbie, Margaret of York, Anne d'Orléans, Margaret of Anjou, Christine de Pizan, Isabel of Castile, [End Page 386] Elizabeth Barton (the Nun of Kent) to Elizabeth I. These are important case studies to test Warren's hypothesis that notions of female spirituality empowered political figures, but the choice of subjects was not obvious to me as an historian. Warren emphasizes Spain, England, and Burgundy, with forays into France. Why not the Italian peninsula? By simply pushing the coverage dates back a bit, she could have added Saint Catherine of Siena. Joan of Arc, who is mentioned in a chapter title, seems to fit perfectly with the goals of the book, and yet her role is limited to serving as the "missing link" between Christine de Pizan and Margaret of Anjou. Why not explore Joan, like Isabel of Castile, as a woman who embodied spiritual, military, and political goals? I suspect the answer is that Joan of Arc does not fit Warren's classification—instead of employing symbols of female spirituality to gain power, Joan combined non-gendered religious symbols and beliefs with the emblems and accessories of knighthood and chivalry. Warren explores at length the concept of symbolic capital, by which women could use spiritual power to serve political and even military ends. That women in power (of any sort) used such symbolic capital is not in doubt, and Warren provides excellent examples. Similarly, she demonstrates the discomfort level this could provoke in men. As an historian I would like to have seen more non-literary sources used to support what is essentially a historical argument about politics and gender. The strongest of the case studies is Warren's Chapter 4, on Isabel of Castile and the construction of queenship, which examines in greater depth areas she explored in Isabel the Queen: Life and Times. The author argues that Isabel cultivated ". . . a persona of pious queenship . . . [and that] female spirituality and sanctity served to clothe Isabel's political power in a non-threatening guise and to make it culturally acceptable" (p. 89). She analyzes the importance of Martín de Córdoba's Jardín de nobles donzellas, which helped Isabel present and re-present herself at critical time periods during the reign. The Jardín speaks of female inferiority; yet by using the list of qualities Martín de Córdoba offers as appropriate to pious women, Isabel is able to be a "shining example" who acts as a "holy warrior on a mission from God." The juxtaposition of pious feminine virtues counterbalances the potentially threatening image of the warrior queen. In the final chapters, Warren uses sixteenth-century English examples to show that ". . . the medieval past persisted in animating the present into the seventeenth century, even among Protestants. "[M]anifestations of medieval female spirituality continued to shape contemporary political relations and to provide a battleground upon which conflicts to define identities were fought" (p. 167). I agree fully that medieval prototypes of holy women and warriors continued to shape gender representations at the highest levels among both Catholic and Protestant women. To some degree, however, I would suggest that Warren does not give enough credit to the actual power of some of the women she studies. While using literary exemplars to extend and legitimize [End Page...

The State of Women's and Gender History in Eastern Europe: The Case of Hungary

The State of Women's and Gender History in Eastern Europe:The Case of Hungary Andrea Pető (bio) and Judith Szapor (bio) In November 2003 fourteen women academics, all members of the Hungarian Historical Association (HHA), signed the founding charter for a section of Women's and Gender History, only to be voted down by the general assembly of the Association. A year and a half later the new section was finally incorporated, but with the understanding that it should not expect any financial or organizational support from the HHA.1 This episode is characteristic of the state of women's and gender history in Hungary today: it demonstrates the infrastructural vacuum and institutional resistance against which a few committed practitioners of women's and gender history have been struggling to establish a foothold. To attribute this lamentable situation to patriarchal power structures in academia would not do justice to the complex origins and motives of this resistance; here we can highlight only a few of them. Mainstream Hungarian historiography had long been known for its resistance to theory in general and reluctance to break with the positivist tradition in particular. From at least the late nineteenth century, representatives of the historical profession had been tied to the political leadership of the day to a degree unthinkable for Western academics. The tradition of antidemocratic political leaders and their ideologies willingly supported by leading historians continued after 1945, with the relationship between power and academia becoming even cozier, and the uses of history harnessed more directly than ever before. Shortly after 1945, a complete overhaul of academic infrastructure resulted in Soviet-style institutes, staffed with the best and the brightest but judged politically unreliable to teach. With a strict control of university personnel and curriculum, the artificial separation of the teaching and research of history had been thus complete.2 Yet for all its revolutionary zeal, when it came to women as subjects of history, the new, Marxist historiography displayed a remarkable continuity with the old, nationalistic historiography. Their respective pantheon of eminent women almost completely overlapped, from the heroines of the centuries of battles for independence to the writers and educators of the Hungarian Enlightenment and progressive national revival. To these were added the heroines of progressive causes of the recent past, with a few pioneers of women's emancipation thrown in for good measure. In keeping with this curious continuity, the new, Marxist version of Hungarian historiography buried even deeper the memory of the bourgeois women's rights movement of the [End Page 160] early 1900s than the prewar Horthy regime. After all, was not "the woman question" superseded and solved, once and for all, by the Marxist-Leninist state and "statist feminism," and bourgeois feminism, along with the liberal notion of women's rights, condemned to the dustbin of history? Following the deep freeze of the Stalinist years, from the late 1970s the historical profession experienced a gradual renewal while the university curriculum kept lagging behind. During this period, historical research benefited from a relative liberalization of academia, marked by increased tolerance for East-West academic relations, the rehabilitation of the previously banished field of sociology, and interdisciplinary methodologies in general. In the early 1980s, the historian Péter Hanák led a charge on the traditional, positivist, and vulgar Marxist frameworks, challenging the long-entrenched divisions of political, ethnic, social, and economic history. He reintroduced cultural and intellectual history and inspired a host of younger scholars to embark on the study of urbanization, domesticity, and the family.3 With the establishment of a chair of Cultural Studies, he even managed to break the seemingly unassailable walls of Budapest University. Around the same time, the methodologies of economic history, historical demography, and sociology embraced by historians paid dividends in investigations into the roots of economic and social modernization, including historical studies on women's employment and specific female occupations.4 Meanwhile, historians of the medieval and early modern period quietly joined the Annales-influenced European mainstream with studies on witches and female saints.5 The widespread influence of the Annales—as in other East-Central European countries in the period of state socialism—while indicative of the traditional...