Women’s Lives: Self-Representation, Reception and Appropriation in the Middle Ages ed. by Daniel Armenti and Nahir I. Otaño Gracia (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women’s Lives: Self-Representation, Reception and Appropriation in the Middle Ages ed. by Daniel Armenti and Nahir I. Otaño Gracia Catherine Powell-Warren Daniel Armenti and Nahir I. Otaño Gracia, eds., Women’s Lives: Self-Representation, Reception and Appropriation in the Middle Ages (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2022), 325 pp. Mysticism, in the abstract, conveys notions of self-improvement, of fore-knowledge, of healing, and of peace, notions that are as appealing today as they likely ever were—evidenced, for example, by the popularity of shops selling healing and energy crystals that dot most high streets. This mysticism, however, is altogether different from the deeply religious form of mysticism that animated the likes of Hildegard of Bingen and St. Catherine of Siena. To these women and their medieval contemporaries, mysticism was above all a state of being, a mechanism of transmission through which they became conduits for God. Importantly, as Elizabeth Petroff revealed in her extensive studies and writing, being recognized as a female mystic had critical implications for these women’s ability to exercise agency, autonomy, leadership, and authority—qualities otherwise impossible due to their gender. The essays collected in Women’s Lives: Self-Representation, Reception and Appropriation in the Middle Ages are appropriately dedicated to her. In her seminal work Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (Oxford University Press, 1994), Petroff revisited and expanded upon her already considerable body of work on medieval female mystics. She examined what she termed the “rhetoric of transgression” that animated much of the writings of the female mystics and the circumstances of their daily existences. Petroff concluded that medieval women’s mysticism was significantly tied to freedom: the freedom to live lives outside of marriage and motherhood, the freedom to lead religious communities, and the freedom to write and engage with a number of public spheres, none of which would have been possible outside of the path between conformity and transgression that the mystics navigated carefully. The editors of this volume write in the introduction that Petroff, in an echo (or perhaps an homage) to the mystics who attempted to (re)negotiate the boundaries of gender, displayed a “passion to help women and minority individuals to study medieval literature and culture.” Given the lack of inclusivity and diversity that continues to pervade not only medieval studies (together with many of the humanities), this is indeed a legacy worth acknowledging and celebrating. The volume consists of an introduction, a helpful reproduction of the first and eighth essays from Petroff’s Body and Soul (“Women and Mysticism in the Medieval World” and “Male Confessors and Female Penitents: Possibilities for Dialogue”), and ten essays divided into three thematic groupings: “Self-Representation,” “Reception,” and “Appropriation.” True to Petroff’s ethos, the editors have gathered contributors from a variety of backgrounds, geographic locations, and career stages. For the most part, their essays fit coherently within their respective groupings, which allows the volume to offer a good overview of key topics in medieval women studies. The introduction, although endearingly personal, is not a particularly helpful guide to understanding and situating either Petroff’s critical and theoretical impact on medieval studies nor that of the essays that follow. The reader comes away with a clear idea of the personal significance of Petroff to the authors, but with a rather limited and vague (if any) sense of Petroff’s scholarship over the arc of her career (i.e., beyond Body and Soul) and of the contributions to the [End Page 205] scholarship made by the volume’s essays. Under the rubric “Self-Representation,” three authors examine how early modern mystics could exercise agency and manage their self-representations. Borja de Cossío argues that Teresa de Cartagena’s self-representation as a talented author (and not the plagiarist she was accused of being by the Inquisition) was effected through association with her patron Juana de Mendoza. Andrés Amitai Wilson reexamines Hildegard of Bingen’s writings not only as the unique product of a polymath, but as the work of a sophisticated author who appropriated the concept of auctoritas so as to imply that her texts and visions were imparted by...