Book Reviews: Julian of Norwich and Related Materials

Christopher Abbot. Julian of Norwich: Autobiography and Theology. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1999. Studies in Medieval Mysticism 2. xiv + 197 pp. Bibliography, index. ISSN 1465-5683

When Catholic Sister Ritamary Bradley titled her book, Julian's Way: A Practical Commentary on Julian of Norwich, she called attention to the need to not only study, but live, Julian's contemplative life, not only to analyse, but to practice it. On the other hand, Anglican Sister Benedicta Ward proclaimed that Julian was never a nun. Christopher Abbott has bravely sailed into the eye of this storm and written an academic book that overflows narrow boundaries, bringing to it his sharing of Julian's contemplative life, himself knowing both worlds, of the university and of the monastery. He reads Julian in lectio divina and his reading is wide and deep.

Much Julian scholarship is secondary, scholars quoting scholars, and thus building upon faulty premises. The major fault of most of these studies is the commonly believed ordering of the texts, the Short Text first, the Long Text later, and the Westminster Text ignored. A thorough study of all the Julian of Norwich, Showing of Love, manuscripts and their true ordering, garnered from primary research, is about to be published. Christopher Abbot has mercifully not set about proving the progress from one text to the other, but instead has sought to understand Julian.

On page 8, Christopher Abbot queries 'xxx' as being 'yowth'. But in the Lynn, Norfolk, Promptorium Parvulorum (Early English Text Society, Extra Series 102, 'Agis sevyn', column 7), we are given the Roman sense of youth as up to fifty, certainly beyond thirty, years of age. In his careful reading of her text he becomes aware that she is speaking of an earlier time and desire, prior to her vision and her writing of the Showing. He parallels her autobiographical strategy to John in his Gospel. He notes parallels also to Catherine of Siena and Birgitta of Sweden 's writings. And he speaks of Benedict's Rule, Guigo II's Scala, Augustine's Confessions, Bernard's On the Song of Songs, Aelred's De Institutione Inclusarum, Catherine of Siena's , on contemplative lectio divina .

Especially fine is his perception, albeit pretentiously worded, p. 45, 'The mystical coinherence through Christ of the personal and the ecclesiological implies a dissolution of the gap between Julian as differentiated subject of religious experience and the total community of her fellow Christians'. His chapters on Incarnation I. the Lord and the Servant, use Anselm and Augustine, and are especially illuminating on the slade as also the Virgin's womb, as Julian states, and II. The City of God, enclosing Adam/Christ. 'Human nature was/is created in a primary sense for Christ himself so as to be shared with all human beings, the adopted children of the Father and Christ's own brothers and sisters', p. 114, then citing Julian, 'Thus our lady is our moder in whome we are all beclosid and of hir borne in Christ; for that she is moder of our savior is moder of all that shall be savid in our savior', p. 160. He continues by saying, 'much more imporant to Julian than the details of Mary's appearance are "the wisedam and the trueth of hir soule', for she is 'fulfillid of grace', translating Gabriel's words 'Ave Maria, gratia plena', p. 161. He ends with the womb image, the birthing, the beginning, citing the work of my former colleague, Edward P. Nolan .

David Aers and Lynn Staley. The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-271-01542-X. 310 pp. Bibliography, index.

A English Marxist and an American Feminist come together to do Theory upon Wyclif, Piers Plowman, Julian of Norwich and Chaucer. The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture is thus an important, and deeply scholarly, book. But excised from it is the Power of the Holy, the reason for being of medieval literature, architecture and art, which then so clearly transcended merely mortal authority that it has now become suppressed everywhere. Today's fashionable academic discourse upon Julian is clearly uncomfortable with theology, and struggles, paradoxically, to win authorized approval through having co-opted Marxism, while obliterating its Gospel, and Feminism, while obliterating its Liberation. Nevertheless, in the final pages of this book all these obtain a shadow victory.

What is especially interesting in many of the scholarly books that follow in these review pages, by Baker, Beer, Glasscoe, is their thesis that the Short Text is earlier than the Long Text. Nicholas Watson in two brilliant Speculum articles has argued for the Short Text as later, but still earlier than the Long Text. In Aers and Staley there is uneasiness about the accepted paradigm, but not yet a willingness to shift, this anxiety being particularly noted in the footnote to p. 79, where they take issue with Watson's pushing of the dating of the Long Text into the reign of Henry V. Far better would be for all concerned to returned to what Julian's texts and manuscripts themselves say, that the Long Text was originally finished 20 years after the 1373 Revelation, in 1393; and that the Short Text was originally finished when Julian was still alive, 'yet on live', the manuscript's text giving that year as 1413. That date accords with everything that Watson has demonstrated concerning the anxiety of that period. While the Long Text accords with everything that Watson says about the halcyon confidence of the earlier period about 1393. Had this brilliant pair worked with the other, and historically likely, ordering they could have carefully demonstrated the suppression that takes place, in lieu of 'development', within Julian. And they could have celebrated Julian's courageous St Cecilia-like compliance/countering even of that suppression. The paradox is that it is in countering that censorship against women doing theology that Julian autobiographically enters the foreground of her text as visionary, as censored, as gendered. She is seventy. She will not be silenced. She speaks like Anna in the Temple, like Magdalen in the Garden.

David Aers, p. 95, rightly senses Julian's use of Piers Plowman's allegorical mode of thought in her Chapter 51 on the Lord and the Servant. Both texts are seeped in Wyclif's milieu. (Lynn Staley will note the relation to orthodox Thomas Brinton's Sermons 99, 100, pp. 151-152.) He also brilliantly notes how Julian counters other women's feminist use of milk and blood in relation to Christ. Lynn Staley begins her Julian chapter discussing the chronology of the writing of the various layers of the Showings, again with the premise that the Short Text is early. As before, Watson is discussed, pp. 110-112. By p. 126, Staley states correctly that the Long Text is clearly of the fourteenth, rather than the fifteenth, century, in so doing disagreeing with Watson, because its serenity would not be appropriate to the tensions of the Lancastrian period. On pp. 118-120 she falls into the slade of misreading 'soul' as 'soil', excrement. There is only one reading in the Middle English Dictionary of 'soul' in any way connected with filth, where 'foul' was written of a festering wound, but where the 'f' failed to get crossed, leaving it a long-tailed 's'. This accident has given rise to a generation of textual misreading that fall foul of the substance of what Julian wrote. Staley is particularly good on the context of the 'Lord and Servant' Parable. Indeed, throughout, the pairing of their work is always complementary one to the other.

Aers and Staley are correct in their dating of the Long Text's composition, Watson, in his of the Short Text. However, the proof of this ordering is given in the publication of the 2001 edition and translation of Julian of Norwich's Showings.

Denise Nowakowski Baker. Julian of Norwich's Showings: From Vision to Book. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-691-03631-4. xi+215 pp. Bibliography, Index.

A young scholar's book, and perhaps the one which most profoundly discusses the influence of Pseudo-Dionysius and other Patristic material upon Julian of Norwich's Showings. Yet its thesis could have benefitted from even greater scholarship, combining its theological study with that of paleography and codicology, questioning its own thesis about the development of 'From Vision to Book'. An investigation of the Amherst, Westminster, Paris, Sloane and Stowe Manuscripts themselves of Julian's text of the Showings, or of their contexts, or of both, seriously undermines the standard assumption of Julian's textual development, of Vision, then Short Text, then Long Text, all of which is the premise of this particular book. Princeton University Press 'spams' the Internet with this book rather annoyingly!

One hopes Denise Baker will continue to write on Julian of Norwich, deepening her insight through the study of Julian in her medieval context, as well as that of the patristic world.

Frances Beer. Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love, Translated from British Library Additional MS 37790; The Motherhood of God, an Excerpt, Translated from British Library MS Sloane 2477, with Introduction, Interpretive Essay and Bibliography . Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1998. The Library of Medieval Women. ISBN 0 85991 453 4. viii + 93 pp. Bibliography and index.

Frances Beer had already edited the Amherst Manuscript Short Text of Julian of Norwich's Showings, from British Library Additional Manuscript 37,790, excellently, publishing that work in 1978, with Carl Winter of Heidelberg. This introduction and translation gives both that text and an excerpt from British Library Sloane 2477 on the Motherhood of God. Throughout, Frances Beer acknowledges the pioneer editing carried out by Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P. She observes that the Short Text is a fine introduction to Julian studies.

Like most modern scholars, though not earlier ones, Frances Beer considers the Short Text early, the Long Text late and the work of Julian's 'greater spiritual maturity'. (Yet she puts the XVI Showings of the Long Text, into the Short Text's 25 chapters, indicating these in square brackets, as if the XVI Showings' structure already existed at the time of the supposed earlier writing.) She adheres to Julian as having participated in Benedictine contexts, which Sister Benedicta Ward, S.L.G., denies. She carefully notes Augustine and Dionysius on mystical experiences as used by Julian. She also discusses the Ancrene Wisse cluster of texts, Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton and the Cloud of Unknowing cluster of texts in relation to Julian. (In this last instance the bracketed citation to 'Johnston' has one hunt in the Bibliography to find 'Johnson' given as translator of The Cloud of Unknowing, the reference being to William Johnston, S.J.; likewise 'Sara McNamer' p. 74, versus 'McNamer, Sarah', p. 86, both of which can be corrected in a subsequent printing. ) She discusses the careful attention given to autobiographical detail characteristic of the Short Text, and elaborately plots out the correspondences between the two versions. But she does not mention or study the second earliest Julian manuscript, that of Westminster , which again is different from the Short or Long Texts, and likewise a fine introduction for students to Julian, concise, yet giving the hazel nut/Nativity/Annunciation scene, God in a circle and as 'I it am' and the entire presentation of Jesus as Mother.

Francis Beer's translation begins with the head note about Julian being alive in 1413 at the time of the text's writing. She footnotes that statement to say it is not the date of composition but the year in which this copy was made. Yet the Amherst Manuscript begins, in the same hand, with texts dated as written in 1434 and 1435, and which are Richard Misyn's translations of Richard Rolle for the anchoress Margaret Heslyngton. The possibility Julian could have written or dictated this text when she was seventy is not entertained at all. The next footnote is to the 'paintings of crucifixes', noting that Norwich had fine wall paintings, but not discussing Archbishop Arundel's stress upon worshiping painted rood screens in churches as indicative of orthodoxy in this later period. The footnote to St Cecilia could have noted that the Norwich Benedictine, Adam Easton, friend of Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena, was Cardinal of the Basilica of St Cecilia in Rome, and by 1413, buried near St Cecilia's tomb. It was in this period also that Archbishop Arundel sternly forbade laypeople, especially women, from teaching theology and reading the Bible in the vernacular. In a note Frances Beer discusses Nicholas Watson's arguing for a later date for the Short Text.

The translation is excellent and a labour of love. As one reads it one is struck again by Julian's brilliance and compassion. A similar note to 'I it am', here translated 'It is I', could have been given on the order of that for 'reparation' as having been 'aseth'. For Julian's 'I it am' transcends gender yet stresses presence, oneness; the modern rendition changing the 'I am' of God into 'it is' thus branching away from Julian's stress upon the Hebrew meaning of God's name.

This shall be a fine volume to put into students' hands. But could Boydell and Brewer reconsider the cover? It presents four faces taken from different periods and different countries, one an angel, the others of women, as a quatrefoil upon black. Excellent for the Short Text would have been the Crucifixion from the Despenser Retable in Norwich Cathedral. It and Julian's coeval writing belong together.

I remember first reading Julian's Way: A Practical Commentary on Julian of Norwich in St Deiniol's Library in Wales and being entranced by it. In my poverty I am afraid I shamelessly begged Sister Ritamary Bradley for a copy. I here attempt to repay a debt

Ritamary Bradley, having given on its cover a painting of a wise woman, book and medicinal jars at hand, begins with the paradox that the practical mystic is the one who is the real mystic, while the one who studies mysticism theoretically remains outside of its hermeneutic circle of meaning.

Ritamary Bradley brings to her reading of Julian profound depths of theology and poetry, ancient and contemporary. A subtle, unacknowledged, and splendid agenda is, of course, that in Julian's Way we have a woman writing on a woman writing on God. Because the context of both women, the one in the fourteenth, the other in the twentieth, is that of monasticism, being oned with God, the first as authorial anchoress, the second as professor and nun, this subtle awareness works. It has all the openness and humility of Mary at prayer, and of her Magnificat. Quietly, the title takes over as Julian and Ritamary together live theology, not merely study it, and with their words the reader too is swept up into the circle of Wisdom.

Martin Buber. Ecstatic Confessions: The Heart of Mysticism. Ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr. Trans. Esther Cameron. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996. The Martin Buber Library. ISBN 0-8156-0422-X. xxxv + 160 pp. Bibliography.

I am asked to review this book for 'Mystic-L: Academic Discussion of Mysticism', and I realize that in that context both this book and I transgress boundaries. In Academicism the first person is expunged as being too emotionally involved to see issues objectively and clearly, and such writing, such study, is condemned as the 'personal heresy'. In my work on medieval pilgrimage poets I have discussed how the presence within the poem of the poet as pilgrim, as with Brunetto Latino, Dante Alighieri, Juan Ruiz, William Langland, Geoffrey Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, creates a sacred paradigm in which what is said in the first person of the poet is mirror-reflected within the soul of the reader of the poem, engendering mystical experiences shared by writer and reader. Similarly, for this ecumenical collection of first person mystical experiences collected and introduced by Martin Buber, the reader finds him/herself gazing into first the kindly eyes of the editor himself, pictured on the paperback cover, then into the souls of the writers whom he bares in this text. This book is a living confession with God and neighbour, of 'I and Thou', across time, space, religion, gender, death itself.

Paul Mendes-Flohr's brilliant introduction tells us that Martin Buber's Ekstatische Konfessionen was first published in an exquisite art volume in 1909. Martin Buber's doctoral dissertation had been on individuation in Nicholas of Cusa and Jakob Böehme, then, following a study of Jewish mysticism, he had also worked in Chinese, Finnish and Welsh literatures, including the Kalevala, the Mabinogion. Martin Buber in general translated his selections himself, Esther Cameron translating these likewise from his German into our English. Martin Buber's own introduction interrupts itself with the story of St Bernard's sermon interrupting itself while it was being preached, to confess in first-person ectasy, '"When I gazed out, I found it beyond all that was outside me; when I looked in, it was further in than my most inward being. And I recognized that what I had read was true: that we live and move and are in it; but he is blest in whom it lives, who is moved by it.'"

Martin Buber's Selections from Ecstatic Confessions, which repeat in a myriad ways Bernard's ecstatic confession, begin with Indian mystics, then Sufi, for whom the only example is the woman Rabi'a, Greek, then European monastic mystics, such as Hildegard von Bingen, the Franciscans, Mechtild von Magdebourg, Mechtild von Hackeborn, Gertrud von Helfta, Heinrich Seuse (Suso), Cristina and Margareta Ebner, Adelheid Langmann, a song attributed to John Tauler, entries from the German Sister Books, many of these from the convent of Töss written by Elsbeth Stagel, Suso's friend and supporter, Birgitta of Sweden, Julian of Norwich, Gerlach Peters, Angela of Foligno, Catherine of Siena, Catherine of Genoa, Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi, Teresa de Jesus, Anna Garcias, Armelle Nicolas, Antoinette Bourignon, Jeanne Marie Bouvieres de la Mothe Guyon, Elie Marion, Jakob Boehme, Hans Engelbrecht, Hemme Hayen, Anna Katharina Emmerich, with a Supplement of selections from the Mahabharatam and from Chinese and Jewish mystics, from the Church Fathers as mystics, and from the 'Sister Katrei' ascribed to Meister Eckhart. That the entries may be so heavily overweighted on the distaff side is likely due to women's exclusion from university training, and thus, as with monastic men, being drawn more purely from lectio divina , from contemplative practices. Strangely the volume lacks the major exemplar, Augustine's Confessions. But then so does Dante's Commedia.

Though first published almost a hundred years ago this book is both mint-new and transcends beyond the bounds of time. Unerringly Martin Buber has chosen the best passages both for himself and for us, in a marvellous generosity. Let me select from his selections from Julian of Norwich's Showings:

Robert H. Calderwood. Julian's Challenge. New York: Vantage Press, 1995. ISBN 0-533-11143-9. 102 pp. Appendices, Bibliographies.

This book came to me from Stella Maris, from two Anglican Hermits closely associated with Roman Carmelites, in the wilds of Canada.

The book is written by a male Anglican clergyman who delights in Julian's Wisdom of God as Mother and Wisdom and in her cherishing of the sacredness of the 'person' in relation to the cosmos. He places Julian of Norwich in the context of modern feminist theology and current issues, such as abortion, and he employs strategies similar to Julian's own, presenting arguments 'doubly', giving both what is acceptable and what is challenging, allowing the two sides of the debate full play against each other, while omitting his own determination concerning them, a strategy Julian had needed to employ in her day.

I was concerned to find on page 75 that Rev. Robert H. Calderwood gives the Hebrew for Wisdom as 'Hokinah'. Had he given his printer or typist a manuscript with 'Hokmah ' and not adequately proofread the text? Or is the error his own? I quibble over these jots and tittles, because he is right where he sees that Julian had had 'well-learned cleric tutor', p. 2. Julian's Master and Rabbi was likely the Norwich Benedictine, Oxford Master, and Roman Cardinal Adam Easton, whose Hebrew was better than that of St Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin. For the Lady Julian displays a better knowledge of the Hebrew Bible than does the clerical writer of this book. This is not Rev. Robert H. Calderwood's fault so much as it is that of the Church of England, which is the one Lutheran Church that has officially abandoned the study of Hebrew and Greek for priestly ordination.

The author of this study is right to see that 'shalom' in its sense of wholeness, wellness, peace, is a concept in Julian's vocabulary of ideas. With only a little further study the book's author could have recognized that phrase, 'Shalom' 'All is well', 'And all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well' as from 2 Kings 4. 23, 26, where it is used concerning Elisha and the raising of the dead child of the Shunamite woman, at first with the greatest sarcasm, then the word coming into its true and peaceable meaning.

I had treasured that use by Julian of 'Shalom', for it embodies the grief, then joy, not only of the Shunamite, but of her Syro-Phoenician counterpart, and of the widowed mother of the dead son at Nain, and of Mary's own loss of her cherished son to the Roman soldiery's cruelty in Jerusalem, followed by Easter joy. Then, the other day, at an old Carmelite monastery here, now inhabited by Australian nuns, I looked at the frescoes, realising that one is of Mount Carmel and of Elisha and his raising of the dead child. We know that Julian not only had Benedictine associations but that also Margery visits her straight after talking with a saintly Carmelite in Norwich, William Southfield, who had likely sent Margery on to Julian for counselling and consoling.

Though Rev. Robert H. Calderwood's book is somewhat loose in its structure, and perhaps too careful in not giving an opinion to issues that it raises, it does point to another area in which Julian's wisdom can console: to the parents of dead, even aborted, children, who carry with them a haunting burden of guilt, blame, and sorrow. In this Rev. Calderwood is not unlike his predecessor, the saintly Norwich Carmelite William Southfield, who understood that women are in need of the wise counsel of women.

The Cloud of Unknowing. Ed. Patrick J. Gallacher. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Western Michigan University, 1997. TEAMS: Middle English Texts. ISBN 1-879288-89-3. ix + 132 pages. Introduction, Bibliography, Text with Textual Gloss, Notes, Glossary.

The Middle English Texts Series is designed for classroom use, making available texts adjacent to the readily available classics by Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet and Malory. The Cloud of Unknowing is already available in an excellent edition by Phyllis Hodgson for the Early English Text Society, Original Series, 218, and thus shelved in most academic libraries. But the present edition has an excellent introduction placing the Middle English text in the context of mystical theological writings, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite , the Victorine, Thomas Gellus and the Carthusian, Hugh of Balma, an up-to-date, though brief, bibliography. Its text, presented without the Middle English manuscripts' thorns, yochs, and italicized contractions, makes for easier reading for the undergraduate student. It is pleasing that the editor chose to bold the chapter headings, which the EETS editor had not done. Medieval manuscript scribes took care to differentiate their scripts by engrossing, bolding or rubricating in this manner.

Phyllis Hodgson consulted all manuscripts but chose as base text one that did not reflect East Anglian/Scandinavian area characteristics. Similarly the three manuscripts Gallacher consulted do not come from those families. The manuscripts of those families tend also to include 'doctrine schewyde of god to seynt Kateryne of seene [Catherine of Siena ]. Of tokynes to knowe vysytacions bodily or goostly vysyons whedyr thei come of god or of the feende'. Neither Hodgson nor Gallacher comment on the probable gender of the recipient of this and its related texts. A lively literature had grown up in the British Isles and elsewhere in which men counseled women how to live the anachoritic or enclosed life. Where they did so to fellow men they wrote in Latin. But to women they wrote generally in the vernacular, referred to both 'men and women' in their examples, and cited scriptural texts concerning women. All this the Cloud Author likewise does in his texts. The Cloud Author is himself shrouded in a cloud of unknowing. But there was a Norwich Benedictine, Adam Easton , who taught at Oxford University, became Cardinal of St Cecilia in Trastevere, defended St Birgitta of Sweden' s canonization on the basis of her visionary writings, the Revelationes, who also knew St Catherine of Siena and the spiritual director to both women, the Bishop Hermit, Alfonso of Jaén, whose text on spiritual discernment was copied out in its own right into Middle English in a Norfolk manuscript, as well as being restated in the Cloud Author's Epistle, and being repeated in Julian of Norwich's Showing.

Adam Easton wrote many works, some extant, others lost. Among those which are lost is a Treatise on the Spiritual Life of Perfection and various other texts in the vernacular. Besides all of which Adam Easton, O.S.B., when preaching to the laity in Norwich and later, owned and intensely used a thirteenth-century manuscript of Pseudo-Dionysius ' Works, now at Cambridge University Library. Its prayer invocation to the Trinity in the Mystic Theology has a most beautiful Gothic T intertwined in green and gold leaf. That invocation the Cloud Author feminized for his recipient, having the Trinity become the Sovereign Goddess Wisdom, where he translated that text in Dionise Hid Diuinite. He had also addressed her in the opening of the Cloud of Unknowing as the Bride of Christ, language frequently used of anchoresses and by Saints Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena. It is just possible that the Cloud Author and the Cardinal are the same person. It is even just possible that he wrote for a Norwich anchoress who may have once been herself a Benedictine at Carrow. St Julian's was under Carrow's Benedictine Priory, which in turn was under Norwich Cathedral's Benedictine Priory. Again and again reading the texts of Julian of Norwich and of the Cloud Author one comes across the same words, oneing, noughting, sovereign, and the same concepts. Especially these swirl about the feminizing of the Trinity, of God as Mother. Likewise the Prologue to the Cloud is echoed in the Envoi to the Sloane Manuscripts' Showing.

This review, in a shorter version, is appearing in Arthuriana, which graciously gives permission for its republication.

Membership in the International Arthurian Society-North American Branch, and its Journal, Arthuriana, may be obtained by writing to Professor Joan Grimbert, Department of Modern Languages, Catholic University, Washington, DC 20064.

Marion Glasscoe. English Medieval Mystics: Games of Faith. London: Longman, 1993. xii+359 pp. ISBN 0-582-49517-2. Bibliography, Index.

The Virgin at the Annunciation , when told of the Word become Flesh, was often shown as in the act of reading, and as reading Isaiah's contemplative prophecies concerning the Messiah. St Augustine in his Confessions spoke of his conversion wrought through a child's voice, as if in play, telling him to take up a book and read. Marion Glasscoe has written such a playful book about books of contemplation, games of spirituality, for us to take up and read. She studies in turn (and closely studies their texts), fourteenth-century Richard Rolle and Walter Hilton writing for women recluses, the unknown author of the Cloud of Unknowing writing supposedly for a Carthusian novice, and East Anglian Julian and Margery's books of showings of revelations, written for women and men everywhere.

Marion Glasscoe has access to important materials, her University of Exeter having inherited the Syon Abbey library of Brigittine books: Danzig/Gdansk, to which Margery went on pilgrimage, was and is a major Brigittine pilgrimage shrine; St Birgitta's marriage to Christ was the model for Catherine of Siena and for Margery Kempe. This study could have discussed the pattern in which books self-referentially prompt books, engender books, for instance St Birgitta's Revelationes as model for Julian and Margery's Showing and Book.

Marion Glasscoe has written a finely detailed book on the English Mystics, playfully harnessing for her purpose T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets as touchstone and some, but not all, modern critical theory. One can read this book as a scholar, or one can read this book as a contemplative, and, in either category, gain from it a fresh vision of the authors and texts it discusses.

Its extensive and careful use throughout of manuscript texts is of great value (though it omits the Wesminster Cathedral Julian Showing manuscript). The typesetting is sometimes difficult to read. The cover design, with the Virgin at the Annunciation from Thomas Boleyn's alabaster tomb in Wells Cathedral, repeated again on the book's spine, is excellent and well encloses this timely book.

Hilton, Walter. The Scale of Perfection. Edited by Thomas H. Bestul. TEAMS: Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000. Pp. vii + 289. $18.00 (pb). ISBN 15804406801.

The image of Western Europe in the fourteenth century has been properly etched in modern consciousness as a civilization trembling into disarray from the successive shocks to the contemporary ethos. Familiar cultural patterns, social traditions, and essential assumptions about truth and reality, were continuously disturbed throughout the century, and thereupon often transformed with the accretion of change. Certainly all civilizations experience challenges to established norms, and all civilizations respond to such challenges according to different strategies: by rejecting out of hand any changes that might emerge; by adopting certain aspects of some changes while decrying others; and, finally, by fully absorbing such transformations into the existing patterns and parameters of culture. Fourteenth-century Europe, however, witnessed a civilization in such broad disarray that it seemed perched on the very edge of final dissolution. The disquiet was a widespread social and spiritual disorder that reached into every village and city of Western Europe. Although the history of the period may be overly familiar, a few critical events bear repeating.

From 1337 until well past the turn of the fifteenth century, the Hundred Years War ravaged the nations of England and France, and caused not only carnage to peoples and places, but gradually corrupted as well the human spirit with despair and cynicism. Within a decade after the inception of the Hundred Years War, the Black Death began its gruesome stalking of Europe, and before it settled into its tentative dormancy by the 1360s, it had consumed nearly a third of the total population of Europe. Moreover, the plague had so savaged the populations of cities and villages that, in many places, a brutal lawlessness and general disregard for order reigned. Such dissolution of accustomed standards and the blatant rejection of traditional figures of authority had impetus from another catastrophic disturbance to the societal structures and religious parameters of the fourteenth century. The spiritual edifice that was Rome was crumbling before the stunned gaze of the faithful. Early in the century, the papacy had suffered the grievous humiliation of the "Babylonian Captivity" in the dislocation of the papal court to Avignon. Thereafter, in the latter quarter of the century (in fact, until 1417), western Christendom staggered under the onus of what would be known as "the Western Schism," the implausible horror of the Church enduring the presence of two popes: the lawfully (although, subsequently, for many of the cardinals, regrettably) elected Urban VI and, by 1378, the more compliant, yet finally moot, Clement VII of Avignon. The schism thrust many believers into a spiritual confusion and a hardened distrust of ecclesiastical process that eventually emerged as desperate complaints for reform, as well as open challenges to papal authority, and for some, to the very legitimacy of the papacy. A noxious chill of fear and bafflement crept through and among the peoples of Western Europe in the fourteenth century and addled despair to the soul of a civilization already besieged with too many disturbances.

In addition to the general discord of the time, England suffered as well from her own particular set of troubles. During the course of the fourteenth century, two anointed monarchs of Great Britain (Edward II, d. 1327, and Richard II, d. 1399) were deposed, imprisoned and murdered; moreover, throughout the century, there were significant episodes of political intrigue and competition, social unrest, and class hostility that troubled the governance of the realm. Smoldering resentment of the imperial rule, notably that of the Commons with the royal courtiers, resulted in louder voices of rebellion against and impeachment of the authority of the throne. Adding a bitter sting to English woes was the persistence of Scotland, under Robert the Bruce and later under his son David, in its bid for independence; throughout the century, Scotland continued to worry England, especially in the villages of her northern border. In 1381, sparked by the final insult of the levying of a poll tax on a population already fueled with angry discontent and unrest, the common people of England erupted into the Peasants' Revolt, propelling a stormy mob of frustrated commons towards London and towards the hapless young King Richard II. However, it was not only in the political arena that the general populace felt betrayal, disconnection, and frustration. Among the faithful in England, there had been a growing discontent with the power and wealth of the clergy and, in 1327, as the monarchy was overthrown, so also were both Bury St. Edmunds and St. Albans abbey the scenes of mob violence and attack. Yet dismay with the church reached far more deeply than the secularized affairs of the clerical hierarchy. A robust movement for ecclesiastical and theological reform took hold of English souls; indeed, the rise of John Wyclif and the Lollards, England's first 'real" heresy, can be considered a response to the troubling disorder and anarchy and confusion of the times. The fourteenth century in England then, as throughout Europe, was a time of turbulence, awakening, fearsomeness, fearfulness, and possibility. It was in this world in which Walter Hilton lived and wrote.

Walter Hilton, like his European contemporaries Johannes Tauler, Henry Suso, and Catherine of Siena, and his countryfolk Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, and the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing, responded to the general social unrest and religious dissatisfaction by turning away from the public, ecclesiastical forms of Christianity, and toward the more affective tradition of Christianity, the interior path of the mystic that relies upon personal reflection and private contemplation for spiritual nourishment and enlightenment. While never divorcing themselves officially from the Church and from the essential doctrine of Church teachings--indeed, most remained steadfastly committed to the authority and primacy of Rome--the mystics of the fourteenth century opted for a spirituality as old as Christianity itself, yet roundly discounted by ecclesiastical authorities and influential schoolmen as bending too far from approved church structure and, therefore, from the necessary direction of the ordained clergy. Still, impassioned mystics like Rolle and spiritual directors like Walter Hilton encouraged the validity of personal devotion, and wrote treatises that posited the interior life of the individual believer as an authentic locus of salvation. They insisted that the pedantic intellectualism of the schools were insufficient to sustain the life of the spirit, and must be enriched by a program of humble penance, devout prayer, and loving contemplation of the person and the passion of the Christ. Only through an active participation of the spiritual faculty in Christ, they emphasized, can an individual achieve the full measure of a meaningful existence. Hilton himself wrote that:

     Jhesu is tresoure hid in thi soule; thanne yif yow fynde
     myght Hym in thi soule, and thi soule in Him, I am siker
     for joie of it thou woldest gyve alle the likynges of alle
     ertheli thinges for to have it. Jhesu slepeth in thyn
     herte gosteli...Doo thou so stire Him bi praiere and waken
     Hym with criynge of desire,and he schal ryse sone and
     helpe thee. (I, 49, 1437-1442)

As the Hilton excerpt indicates, the use of the vernacular was fundamental to the intent of the spiritual guidance, for texts written in the contemporary language of the people would be available to a more broadly based and more diverse audience than if they had been written only in the traditional Latin. In fact, by the fourteenth century, it was quite likely that few prelates in England, except those in the highest clerical ranks, and even fewer lay people, with the obvious exception of illustrious scholastics, were thoroughly conversant in Latin. Therefore, in order to facilitate its access by both clerical and lay devotees, a book of spiritual direction such as the Scale would find its widest distribution if it were composed in the language of the people. A treatise that instructs the faithful how best to pray should, reasonably, be in the language in which the faithful will pray.

To their great credit, Thomas Bestul and the TEAMS committee have provided both students and scholars with an edition of Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection in its original Middle English, and the distinctions in tone, idiom, meaning, and affect between the many modern English "translations" and the authentic ME text are remarkable, to say the least. With the turn of each page, the text and its author, and the fourteenth-century panorama of faith and spiritual practice, come to life as never a modern reading would be able to capture. In addition, Bestul has wisely provided the modern reader with both a linguistic apparatus of modern English, on the bottom of each page, for those words and phrases that are the least accessible or intelligible to the modern idiom, as well as an abbreviated but quite welcome glossary of about 150 of the most frequently cited words. For those readers of Scale who are not scholars of Middle English dialects or medieval English literature, such as scholars of religious history or medieval spirituality, the availability of such critical details will prove invaluable in making use of the TEAMS text. Also for novices to the intricacies of fourteenth-century English Christianity, Bestul has appended to the fourteen page Introduction a five page "select" bibliography which affords the student fundamental sources and secondary references for further study of Hilton and his works. The bibliography is serviceable, but somewhat dated, and should not be considered (nor does it claim to be) an exhaustive review of Hiltonian studies; nevertheless, it offers the reader new to Hilton's Scale essential secondary references to Hilton, his works, and the context of medieval English mysticism.

Still, the author of Scale endures as a shadowy figure in the realm of medieval writers. Little can be actually verified about the life of Walter Hilton-- which is, as one suspects, as he preferred. It is generally accepted that by 1375 or so, he was a canon of the Augustinian Priory of Thurgarton in Nottinghamshire; it is also likely that, much prior to his residence at the Priory (where he continued to live until his death in 1395/96), he had been a student of theology at Cambridge. Less verifiable, but not at all unlikely, is the speculation by some scholars that Hilton himself had, at some point, led an eremitical life, a life not dissimilar from the one led by the anchoress whose need for spiritual counsel formed the pretext for the composition of Scale. While there is no proof of that possibility, the text itself does evidence an authentic ease with and clear-sighted understanding of the spiritual life of a solitary, as well as a keen regard for the psychological and physical complications that trouble the isolated pilgrim. Whatever the facts of his life, Hilton's Scale of Perfection is known to have been one of the most popular spiritual texts in late medieval England, as the number of extant manuscripts (about forty-five) demonstrate. It was translated into Latin by about 1400, and it was that Latin version that soon found its way to Europe, particularly among communities of (male and female) Benedictines and their more ascetic brothers, the Carthusians. In England, the original Middle English tract was copied and "amended" over successive centuries, with the result that no one manuscript can claim primacy. For the TEAMS volume, Dr. Bestul selected a fifteenth-century manuscript from Lambeth Palace, London, MS 472. This manuscript is, in fact, a collection of works by Hilton, including Eight Chapters on Perfection and Mixed Life, as well as Scale.
Bestul notes (8) that the Lambeth manuscript he used is interesting for reasons apart from its contents. MS 472 exists, in fact, as an example of a fifteenth-century "common profit" volume, that is, a manuscript incorporating several spiritual writings and works of religious counsel that was commissioned by a lay person (in this case, one 'John Killum, grocer') hoping to enrich his/her life of faith, and the lives of those descendents to whom the original owner later bequeathed the manuscript.

The textual history of the Scale is complicated not merely by scribal emendation, or geographical and cultural variance. At some later date from the initial publication, Book One of the two-book Scale seems to have undergone a revision, an embellishment of the original text with a more personal Christology, with the result that at least two versions of Book One of the Scale are extant. Some scholars suggest that Hilton himself may have revisited his work, in his later and, possibly, wiser years, and altered the text himself; however, most scholarship rejects that claim and prefers to attribute the apparent changes in language and focus to the deliberations of zealous scribes. Nevertheless, it is indeed a testimony to the fluidity of the treatise, in consonance with the spiritual journey it delineates, that Hilton (purportedly) advised his readership that, "thise wordes that I write, take hem not to streiteli, but there as thee thenketh bi good avysement that I speke to schorteli...I prey thee mende it there nede is oonli" (Scale, I, 92). Hilton understood that the spiritual advice he was providing would probably not be effective simply as a fixed manual of instruction, but must be able to evolve continually as the context and culture demanded.

That Hilton's work today no longer enjoys the popular esteem in which it was held in its own time is due in no small part, it seems, to the proclivity of the modern age to be overly impressed with Richard Rolle's mystical passion or to be absorbed by Julian of Norwich's evocative examination of her vibrant "showings." Walter Hilton's style is one which bespeaks a teacher: deliberate and considered, almost placid in its order and rationale, and generous in its broad applicability, notably to the laity. Written ostensibly to a cloistered anchoress who sought from him guidance in her chosen devotion to the contemplative life, Hilton's Scale of Perfection opens with a tacit recognition of the universal application of its rationale: one must embark upon the interior journey of spiritual perfection because

     ...a wrecchid man or a woman is he or sche that leveth al
     the inward kepinge of hymself and schapith hym withoute
     oonli a fourme and likenes of hoolynesse, as in habite and
     in speche and in bodili werkes... wenynge hymsilf to be
     aught whanne he is right nought, and so bigileth hymsilf.
     Do thou not so, but turne thyne herte with thy body
     principali to God, and schape thee withinne to His
     likenesse bi mekenesse and charite and othere goostli
     vertues, and thanne art thou truli turned to Hym.
     (I,1)

Hilton asserts that it is incumbent upon every Christian to "turn" heart and body to God; each Christian, he insists, and not just those literally walled from society, enjoys the capacity of that turning (conversio) to God, which is the familiarly medieval paradigm of the ascent to the Divine. The activity of the ascent must be motivated toward the sure condition of authentic contemplation, which Hilton accords three parts aspects: the "knowing" of God and spiritual matters through study, instruction, and rational discussion of Scripture, cognition empty of true emotion, "unsavery and cold" (I, 4); the pure "affection" for God, most apparent among the devout who, though sincere, possess faith without "undirstondynge of gosteli thynges" (I, 5), and, thirdly, the contemplation of God that lies in both cognition and affection, "in knowyng and in perfight lovynge of God" (I, 8). However, such a contemplative state is, as Hilton says, like a "mark bifore the sight of thi soule" (I, 14), resting on a spiritual height that requires preparation for the soul for so lofty a climb. The individual must first work toward an inner transformation, a personal reformation of his/her condition of virtues, for, as Hilton laments:

     (t)here is many man that hath vertues, as lowenesse,
     pacience,...and siche othere, onli in his resoun and wille
     and hath no goostli delite ne leve in hem...he doth hem by
     strenghte and stirynge of resoun for drede of God. This
     man hath vertues in resoun and in wille, but not the love
     of hem in affeccion... (I, 14)

Walter Hilton rightly distinguishes between the life of virtue based on reason and fear, which is, in fact, not true virtue at all and so would impede the journey to God, and the life of virtue based on affection and love, which is essential to aid the questing soul toward contemplation, and its final resting in God. The virtues to which he refers are common enough, although Hilton makes a particular point to emphasize meekness, spiritual patience, and purity of heart. Indeed, it is perhaps a cautionary reminder for the modern age that Hilton singles out "meekness," or humility, as the virtue upon which all others build, and the one to which all other tend.

     This partie of mekenesse thee bihoveth for to have in thi
     bigynnynge, and bi this and bi grace schalt thou come to
     the fulhede of it and of alle othere vertues...(a)s mykil
     as thu hast of mekenesse, so mykil haste thou of charite,
     of pacience, and of othere vertues...(mekenesse) is the
     first and the laste of alle vertues...(d)oo thou nevere so
     many good dedis,...yif thu have no mekenesse it is nought
     that thou doost. (I,18)

One cleanses and thereby strengthens the soul through the authentic inculcation of loving virtues, gifts of the Holy Spirit, a continuous process that does include activities commonly associated, but not exclusively, with the cloistered life, particularly study of the sacred w(W)ord (Lectio), meditation (Meditatio), and prayer (Oratio). Hilton centers true spiritual growth on meditatio and oratio especially, the one a thorough appraisal of one's character, faith life, and capacity for change, and the other a formal recognition of being ultimately helpless in the spiritual journey without being "touchid and lightned of the goostli fier which is God", which "lightening" occurs most at the core of prayer.

Book One of Scale, then, delineates quite carefully the arduous ascent to God by extolling the purification of the soul in stages, and, thereupon, by assessing the spiritual activities of study, meditation, and prayer, that ready the soul for loving contemplation of God. Book II focuses with greater clarity and even urgency upon the human soul as image of God, and the need for reforming one's soul corrupted and lost in sin and debasement. In Book II, Hilton acknowledges with the conviction of experience that such spiritual reform cannot be achieved by humanity itself, but must rely upon the abiding presence of Jesus Christ to affect change: "...for I wot wel that oure Lord Jhesu bringeth al this to the ende...(f)or He dooth al; He formeth and he reformeth. He formeth oonli bi Hymsilf, but He reformeth us with us..." (II, 28). The soul restored to its original condition of light in all its simplicity and love is then able to contemplate by means of grace the Love that is God/Christ, and so abide perfectly in eternal peace and joy.

Julia Bolton Holloway. Saint Bride and Her Book: Birgitta of Sweden 's Revelations. Translated from Middle English, With Introduction, Notes and Interpretative Essay. Newburyport: Focus Texts, 1992; Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1998. xv + 164. Now Boydell and Brewer.

Of use for placing Julian's Showings in her context of continental writings by women of Revelations, including Birgitta of Sweden's Revelationes. The text translates a manuscript at Princeton University which originally came from Syon Abbey, whose nuns also preserved Julian's texts, in the Amherst, Westminster and Paris versions. She was asked to write this book by Professor Jane Chance, the series' editor, because of her previous work, The Pilgrim and the Book: A Study of Dante, Langland and Chaucer.

Julian of Norwich. Showing of Love. Translated by Julia Bolton Holloway. London: Darton Longman and Todd, 2003; Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2003.

The definitive scholarly edition of Showing of Love is here presented in a form for the general reader, without sacrificing academic rigour. One is able to flow into her mind, for, as far as possible, the rhythms, style and dialect of Julian's East Anglian English of c1400 have been retained. To have translated her slavishly into modern English would have negated that closeness with her experiences and meditations which we enjoy here. A twenty-seven page Preface provides more than adequate background information about Julian, her contemporaries, the theology she and they expound, and the history of the manuscripts used. The 'chapters' into which her meditations were divided, permit leisurely and profound 'lectio divina'.

Horrox, Rosemary and Sarah Rees Jones, eds. Pragmatic Utopias: Ideals and Communities, 1200-1630. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. ix + 286. $60.00 (hb). ISBN: 0-521-65060-7.

Reviewed, Jesse G. Swan University of Northern Iowa jesse.swan@uni.edu

A festschrift, by definition, celebrates and honors a scholar of immense noteworthiness by publishing, ideally, exceptional
essays by equally exceptional intellectuals on topics or methods drawing on those of the honoree. Impressively,
Rosemary Horrox and Sarah Rees Jones have accomplished this with their volume for Barrie Dobson, Pragmatic Utopias.

As a practice of interpretation, historical criticism is a matter of reading. What is read and how one reads usually
distinguishes historians, and it is one of this volume's best qualities to provide an ample complement of readings.
Accordingly, the volume presents essays that deal with non-literary documents -- by far the bulk of the collection-- as
well as some that treat literary texts. Such a division between literary and non-literary texts is not the editors'--
they organize the essays chronologically according to subject matter-- but it highlights many important issues the book
engages, including the modern disciplinary division that the honoree variously contributed to and sought to cross, the
different sorts of conclusions usually drawn from various forms and genres, the value of crossing disciplines by thinking of
individual texts in terms usually applied to other documents, and, perhaps most suggestively, the possibilities available to
those who can advance from crossing disciplinary manners of reading into transcending them.

Some essays express overtly an anxiety over crossing lines, such as when, in attempting to resolve the apparent "historical
paradox" of the decision of Hugh of Balsham, Bishop of Ely, to found a college "not for his monastic brethren, but for secular
clerks," despite his order's concern "to provide a university education for its most promising young monks" (60), Roger
Lovatt denigrates the evidence of "tone and language" in favor of "precise injunctions" (77), a methodological gesture that
removes him from paradox and places him in singular, if qualified, conclusions, such as, "We can only say with
reasonable certainty that he founded in Cambridge an independent college-- its independence perhaps forced upon him
against his better judgment-- for poor, secular scholars who were to follow as appropriate the rule of Merton" (77).
Similarly pursuing "continuity and singleness" (175), Peter Biller's "Fat Christian and Old Peter: ideals and compromises
among the medieval Waldensians" deals with, in order implicitly to reject, the records that remain-- they are only "the views
of the extremists, the polemicists and the dreamers" (184)-- so as to propose a vision of most Waldensians as compromising
their ideals in order to continue as an order. Biller writes that the "frustration is that there is only silence from men of
probably middling views, such as Fat Christian and Old Peter" (184), by which he means there is no document purporting to
report first-hand the views of these two dissenters, who are referred to by others in the inquisitorial records.

Other essays draw on various non-literary records in an effort to re-appreciate experiences of groups of people or people's
experiences of certain late medieval and early modern institutions. Janet Burton, in "The 'Chariot of Aminadab' and
the Yorkshire priory of Swine," shows how, in "acting under acute financial pressures," "the way in which [the prioress and
nuns of Swine] responded somewhat redresses the picture of medieval religious women as unable to act for themselves" (38).
Burton accomplishes this by suggesting that the "evidence from wine does not suggest that the canons were there in order to
occupy positions of authority, but rather to provide spiritual succour and literacy" (37). Also taking finances to be of
prime, real importance in defining significance, rather than spiritual or academic "ideals," Malcolm G. Underwood's "A cruel
necessity? Christ's and St John's, two Cambridge refoundations" and R. N. Swanson's "Godliness and good learning: ideals and
imagination in medieval university and college foundations" compare the foundations to modern business and suggest how the
statutes for the universities are not prescriptions as much as safeguards against economic difficulties. Also addressing a
perceived problem with previous readings of records, but addressing the issue of popular relations with the nascent
judiciary, Anthony Musson, in "Social exclusivity or justice for all? Access to justice in fourteenth-century England,"
finds that the poor had much more "access" to "justice" than many have assumed to be the case: "Indeed, far from bringing
alienation from the king's courts, the widening scope of royal justice observable over the course of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries (in terms of opportunities for redress and in the range of legal remedies available) not only provided
greater access at the local level, but also catered for the litigious tendencies of at least some sections of the peasant
and urban communities" (137). More broadly, and taking an ideal from Thomas More's Utopia, Claire Cross traces and
poses some explanations for the correlation between the reduction of ordinands and the rise in their formal educational
credentials in "Realising a utopian dream: the transformation of the clergy in the diocese of York, 1500-1630."

Two essays treat documents commonly associated with historians, but they do so in a sensitive, literary manner. In a
remarkable essay that should draw many readers to the volume, P. J. P. Goldberg carefully attends to the wording and
structure of a set of ordinances of the city of Coventry for 1492 and revised in 1495 in context of the attendance records
of the leet court, "the medieval imagination" (105), and the politics of "Lollardy," understood as "a particular set of
values rather than a specific creed" (103). By this method, Goldberg is able to make several astute observations, such as,
"The economic imperative of depression and a scarcity of employment is thus seen not as the cause of vagrancy, but
rather as a consequence. In a godly city where all who are able labour honestly, prosperity will follow" (110), and,
through them, to justify the contention that the ordinances together form a "programme" that "represents a radical reform
manifesto associated with one particular faction characterized by marked Lollard sympathies. The ordinance directed at single
women was thus a key plank in a utopian vision of a godly and ordered society in which all knew their place and all worked to
the common good" (97). Patrick Collinson matches Goldberg's sensitivity in a short essay on a sermon, A caveat for
clothiers, by Thomas Carew of Bildeston, entitled "Puritanism and the poor." It was, Collinson discloses, Carew
who "first drew me to the subject of Puritanism and poverty . . . [when he] plucked my sleeve as I browsed in the Huntington
Library in California with his Certyane godly and necessarie sermons, published in 1603" (242). In the essay,
Colllinson defines terms, such as "Puritanism" and "the poor," and justifies speaking "anachronistically" of Carew's
"christian socialist agenda" (249). Carew, it seems, was up to something other than, or at least in addition to, castigating
the rich and relieving the poor of his town, Bildeston, with his sermon's deployment of facts and figures, which is the
feature of the sermon most uncannily Victorian and thereby inspires Collinson's supposed anachronisms, since the "evidence
of wills and inventories suggests that the town was by no means as polarised as Carew's sermon alleged" (252).

With similar literary sensitivity, two essays concentrate on literary texts in historical contexts. Explaining some
features of More's Utopia, such as the thematic issue of governing a society in which most people do not have property,
Sarah Rees Jones, in "Thomas More's 'Utopia' and medieval London," indicates how, in its negative-positive
juxtapositions, Utopia imitates, even parodies, the language of London written customs. Through this appreciation
of the language of the work and the language of London culture, Jones is able to show how some of the ideals of Utopia
reflect London's pre-humanist civic writers: "More's vision of a utopian 'future' was built upon foundations drawn from
London's idealised past" (130). With similar adeptness, but with a broader view, Derek Pearsall's "'If heaven be on this
earth, it is in cloister or in school': the monastic ideal in later medieval English literature" explores William Langland,
Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Lydgate in terms of how the monastic ideals expressed in their work result from an incipient and
then an advanced decline of such possibilities.

While all the essays take varying degrees of cognizance of literary and non-literary texts, and while most of the essays
concentrate on one or the other type for interpretative, rhetorical, and, perhaps, disciplinary purposes, three essays
seem most adept on drawing on both literary and non-literary texts in ways mutually illuminating, deferential, and
ennobling. Drawing on 15th-century ballads and legal records, A. J. Pollard's "Idealising criminality: Robin Hood in the
fifteenth century" indicates how Robin Hood as "a forester turned poacher and highwayman" (167) was "paradoxically . . .
both a thing of the past and of the future" (168), while Miri Rubin's "An English Anchorite: the making, unmaking and
remaking of Christine Carpenter" draws on film and archival records to illustrate how different forms of historical
knowledge of women's lives are effected through different means: "For these, and more, links with the past we must be
grateful to thoughtful film-makers such as Chris Newby. Scholars such as Barrie Dobson will make it possible for us to
know enough, from the strong testimonies of archival sources, to be able to contextualize and correct; but to view, and thus
sense, the loneliness of the night spent in an anchorhold is an experience which even the most professional of medieval
historians cannot, should not, do without" (217). Margaret Aston's "Imageless devotion: what kind of an ideal?" draws on
many texts, among them St. Bernard's Sermon on the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Peter Smart's Short Treatise of
Atlases, and the poetry of John Donne, to suggest how "the task of reforming mental imagery" (195) was accomplished during
and after the Reformation's destruction of physical images. Aston's dexterity and perspicacity yields much, including the
realization that, for the Re-forming religious visionary, "The ideal was a kind of white blankness, an openness to the divine
essence untrammelled by physical form" (198).

Drawing on nineteenth-century literature to read a set of fifteenth-century almshouse statutes, Colin Richmond, in
"Victorian values in fifteenth-century England: the Ewelme almshouse statutes," writes the most progressively postmodern
essay of the collection. While some readers might find the essay's structure mechanical and the sections' sentences
inelegant, and while these readers might feel that their patience is left unrewarded by recognizable explanations, other
readers no doubt will appreciate the participation elicited and the possibilities opened by the same features. Richmond shows,
by comparing the Ewelme and Heytesbury statutes, that the former are quite unusual, and then suggests, by an adroit
comparison, that the principal founder of the almshouse, Alice Chaucer, "seems more like the wife of a Victorian industrialist
than the widow of three husbands who had fought in the Hundred Years War" (236). Through his essay's sections, Richmond is
able to see the designated beneficiaries in a different, critical historiographical light, namely, that the "Ewelme bedesmen" were, the
proto-Victorian arrangement suggests, "the new secular workhorses of prayer, employees of a hard but fair task mistress who was
adamant she would have her twopenny worth and for whom the moral probity of her workers was essential to the success of a quasi-
commercial, quasi-industrial, quasi-religious enterprise" (237). Also, and quite illuminatingly, the last section of the essay, entitled
"Memorials and Modernity," offers a brief, pre-modern ejaculation of sorts on the problems of modern historiography, problems that
occlude many forms of historical knowledge, especially those "connected to eternity," something modern historiography and "Round-
the-Clock Capitalism has no time for" (237). Richmond's views require an astute, talented, literary capacity to perceive and indite,
just as they evoke such qualities in his readers. This essay surely will be variously the most valued and the most detested of the
collection, according to individual readings.

Such is the rich collection, complemented by a warm appreciation by John Taylor and a handy "Bibliography of Barrie
Dobson's published works." The editors are to be commended for many things, not least of which is their success in securing
essays by talented scholars and devising a broad, diverse collection reflecting the interest and humanity of the honoree.
We are all fortunate to have the honoree and his contributions to scholarship, just as we are all fortunate to have this
collection inspired by him.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Deeana Copeland Klepper. The Insight of Unbelievers: Nicholas of Lyra and Christian Reading of Jewish Text in the Later Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Jewish Culture and Contexts, ed. David B. Ruderman. Appendix: Manuscripts Consulted Containing Nicholas of Lyra’s Quaestio de adventu Christi, pp. 135-142, Notes, pp. 143-196, Bibliography, pp. 197-216, Index. Illustrations. viii + 225 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8122-3991-1.

This is a timely book, given the increasing awareness of Nicholas of Lyra’s presence as Hebraist in western medieval Christian theology. Deeana Copeland Klepper works closely with his texts, limiting these to his Hebraic materials, largely derived from RASHI (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, d. 1105), whom Nicholas of Lyra quarries for his Postilla litteralis super Bibliam (completed, 1332) and his Postilla moralis super Bibliam (completed, 1339), a lifework that was to be profusely propagated from the University of Paris throughout the Latin Christian world.

The book is especially illuminating in noting the Hebrew attributes of God, Power, Wisdom and Love, or Power, Wisdom and Goodness, p. 93. These attributes are used by Dante Alighieri on Hell Gate, by Marguerite Porete, by Julian of Norwich, and by Victorine theologians who were exposed to Hebrew learning, but very rarely by the standard Church Fathers, Aquinas explaining that it is paradoxically heretical to so divide the Unity/Trinity of God.

The book is excellent, given its narrowed focus. But there are omissions. While noting several times that two persons were burned in the Place de Grève on the same day in 1310, a lapsed Jew and the beguine theologian Marguerite Porete, an event likely witnessed by Nicholas of Lyra, and who had certainly participated in Marguerite Porete’s trial, Klepper’s book does not discuss Nicholas of Lyra’s very influential misogyny. Nor does she mention the earlier funding and collaboration by Paula and Eustochium in the translation of Jerome’s Vulgate. Instead, she discusses a student in an illumination of Nicholas of Lyra teaching in Paris as being a woman, though this is hardly likely, the figure being more likely of a male adolescent. Freidrich Heer, The Medieval World: Europe 1100-1350, trans. J. Sondheimer (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1961), sees a clear relationship between women and Jews in the Middle Ages, a relationship which certainly needs exploration in Nicholas of Lyra studies.

The section on Nicholas of Lyra’s students is skimpy, mentioning merely as an example the young Catalan Franciscan Poncio Carbonell and the consequent proliferating of Nicholas of Lyra’s texts in that land, pp. 118-119. Another student had been the Swedish Magister Mathias who, on returning to his homeland, powerfully translated the Bible from Hebrew into Swedish for Birgitta of Sweden, commenting on the Apocalypse, and encouraging her writing similar apocalyptic visions. For her 1391 canonization (she had died in 1373, following her pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where she visited the site where Jerome, Paula and Eustochium had translated the Vulgate from Hebrew into Latin), Adam Easton wrote her Defensorium, while quarrying from and countering Nicholas of Lyra’s misogynist attack on Marguerite Porete in his dialectic. The Norwich Benedictine Adam Easton in turn had been a great Hebraist, teaching Hebrew at Oxford, and translating all the Bible from Hebrew into Latin, John Bale tells us. Instead of being under RASHI’s influence, likewise that of RAMBAM, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon or Maimonides (d. 1204), Easton had used the teachings of RADAK (Rabbi David Kimhi, d. 1235), who saw Hebrew philology and theology as intricately interwoven, and who wrote of God as both feminine and masculine, as mother as well as father. Adam Easton is associated strongly with the circle about Birgitta of Sweden, Catherine of Siena and Julian of Norwich and seems to be responsible for the presence of the manuscript (anonymously so) in Middle English of Marguerite Porete in the latter’s hands in the British Library Amherst Manuscript. It could therefore be profitable for Deeana Copeland Klepper to investigate the proliferation of Nicholas of Lyra manuscripts by way of Master Mathias in Sweden and elsewhere in a later volume.

All in all, this is an excellent book, opening important avenues in medieval studies, as had been the case with its subject, Nicholas of Lyra.

M. Diane F. Krantz. The Life and Text of Julian of Norwich: The Poetics of Enclosure. New York: Peter Lang, 1997.

Diane Krantz came to my lecture on editing the Westminster Manuscript in the context of Brigittine Syon Abbey, given at Berkeley, 19 April 1993. She was then writing her thesis which became this book, and we shared our stories, I then a veiled Anglican nun, she a former Catholic one. She had been let go with a thousand dollars, I was to be let go with zilch. Not quite, I was given £100 by my Mother Superior with which to buy a new wardrobe, my Sisters having already given away my secular clothes, including my beloved cloak, to their cook, but Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, CP, had just come to stay and was being expected to pay, so I gave her that £100 and have never regretted the gift.

Diane's book is good and worth reading. These are its errors. It accepts the erroneous material in print about the manuscripts of Julian's Showing of Love, not knowing from Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, its first and best editor, and from A.I. Doyle, England's best paleographer, that Paris is an Elizabethan manuscript with Flemish watermarks, thus likely produced by Syon Abbey nuns in exile, nor that the second Sloane manuscript, according to its watermarks, and so ascertained by the British Library, predates the first Sloane manuscript. So she speaks of the Long Text as existing in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century manuscripts. These errors are not Diane's faults, but those of publishing 'scholars' who did not do their homework in paleography and codicology, in particular Eric Colledge, misleading a further generation of Julian scholars, such as Alexandra Barrett and Hugh Kempster. Nor did Diane Krantz realize that Edward Peter Nolan's Cry Out and Write: Feminine Poetics of Revelation published my transcription of the Westminster Manuscript and that he, in prescience, foresaw Diane's perceptions of birthing and womb imagery in Julian.

Diane ably studies Julian's text philologically. She falls into the slade many other Julian scholars do, believing that Julian writes of natural functions when the word in the Middle English Dictionary is a mistake, taking 'foul', of an infected and festering wound, and believing this to be 'soul' (from an uncrossed long-tailed s) as meaning the products of elimination, when in actual fact Julian is talking of the spiritual soul as enclosed and stored up during one's lifetime in one's physical body, as 'in a purse full fair', then released at death into God's enclosing. That concept is mirrored in Julian's words to Margery on the body as the temple of the Spirit. Diane is exceptionally good on Julian's imagery of 'enclosing'.

Where Diane speaks of Julian's womb imagery, she, like Edward Nolan, are the exact contrary of Hugh Kempster, who in his essay on 'A Question of Audience: The Westminster Text and Fifteenth-Century Reception of Julian of Norwich', published in Sandra J. McEntire, Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, and in his edition in Mystics Quarterly, argues that the Westminster Manuscript's opening of Mary as pregnant with Christ, stressing the 'wisdom and truth of her soul', is unworthy of Julian's physical and virile Christology and therefore must be the work of a male editor of that text. Yet, as Diane shows (and as I also had in my 1995 Lambeth Thesis ), this imagery is deeply embedded and enclosed in all versions of Julian's text, Westminster, Paris, Sloane and Amherst.

Diane carefully studies the theological background to Julian, noting the influence of Aristotle, where women do not contribute to the child and lack souls, though earlier Galen had prevailed on sexual equality in engendering. But she does not note the Friends of God nor their predecessors, apart from Hildegard of Bingen. She could have found Julian's imagery of 'flowing from the Godhead' in Mechtild of Magdebourg, the imagery of the creature paradoxically pregnant with the Creator in Marguerite Porete, and the imagery of God within us, we within God, as wombs within wombs, in Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler, influenced as they were by these women writers and all of them by the Gospel.

As I read Diane's words, I recall my Anglican spiritual director, a Community of the Resurrection monk, recalling the Piero della Francesca fresco above his dead mother's tomb, of pregnant Mary, the Madonna del Parto. Significantly this great painter has for surname not that of his father, but of his mother.

Andrew Lee. The Most Ungrateful Englishman: The Life and Times of Adam Easton. Gloucestershire: Andrew Lee, 2006.

This is a splendid book about a forgotten but magnificent Englishman. It is self-published. It has problems. There is only one reference in it to Julian of Norwich. It ignores the Westminster Abbey 5664* document in which Adam Easton is already Cardinal of St Cecilia by the date of 27 June 1383. It only knows of four surviving manuscript books owned by Adam Easton, O.S.B. It does not mention the typical use of dialogue preceding the Defensorium Ecclesiastice Potestatis, including the Dialogarum of Gregory the Great on St Benedict or that by Petrus Alfonsi in which the Jewish convert to Christianity has his Jewish self, Moyse, dialogue with his new Christian self, Petrus. It has Queen Margaret, not King Magnus, be Birgitta of Sweden's monarch. Queen Margaret is later and effects Birgitta's canonization. It does not know that Birgitta's body had already been returned to Vadstena soon after her death, while being correct concerning the exchanging of holy relics, of body parts. It does not believe Easton returned to Norwich following his imprisonment by Urban VI, despite the usual bills paid by various persons for the transport of his books, as had been the case earlier in his journeys between Oxford and Norwich. It fails to consult Leslie John MacFarlane's 1955 University of London thesis which includes the Cardinal's Will, naming members of his household. It would have been preferable in the book to have used contemporary images of Urban VI, Edward III and Richard II, rather than later engravings of them. The book does not realize that the admittedly fine tomb was not built at the Cardinal's death but later, likely at the time of the 1414-1418 Council of Constance, the sculptor being one Paolo Romano or Paolo Salvati, the tomb possibly ordered by the Bishop of Hereford.

Despite these minor drawbacks it is a most important book for breaking through a barrier of silence about the Benedictine monk of Norwich who became Cardinal of England, Adam Easton, O.S.B., and who was likely Julian of Norwich's spiritual director, having known both Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena. I learned much from this book, particularly the greater details concerning Adam's Easton's imprisonment and torture by his Pope, and about the design of the tomb before its changed position in St Cecilia in Trastevere as having had a canopy upon great twisted columns. Comparing this tomb with that of Edward, the Black Prince, in Canterbury Cathedral is particularly helpful. I especially applaud Andrew Lee's admiring study of Adam Easton's tolerance towards women and Jews. After researching the documents in the case, Andrew Lee then travelled to all the places where Adam lived and worked and his colour plates of these are excellent. I recommend also his website: http://www.adameaston.info, which is indeed full of information about Adam Easton and which evidences ongoing corrections and care with his materials, in particular supplying the necessary documentation in Latin and in English translation. A book, and its errors, is an artifact frozen in time; a website is far more flexible and wikifiable. I thank Andrew Lee for doing Adam Easton justice. Both men deserve praise.

C. S. Lewis: Memories and Reflections by John Lawlor (Spence Publishing, $22.96, hardcover, 132 pp.) While this book is not "nearly as valuable as one by Lewis himself" (Walter Hooper, Forward), it is an entertaining and well-written work by Professor Lawlor, a former student of both Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.

Part I, "Memories", looks at Lewis as tutor and discusses the Magdalen College and undergraduate life at Oxford in Lewis's day. Part II, "Reflections", is an overview with comments on Lewis's space novels, Narnian stories, approach to romanticism (especially "friendship") in his thought especially and some of his works, and a discussion of some of Lewis's literary works. The book is enhanced by a previously unpublished photo of Lewis at age 21, right after he returned home after being wounded in WW1, holographs of letters from Lewis to Lawlor, and copies of annotated pages from a book Lewis owned and read often (around 1940), Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich.

Dr. Lawlor (now emeritus professor of English language and literature at the University of Keele in England) recalls Lewis "in his habit as he lived" by offering his account of taking tutorials under Lewis, and "passing from dislike and hostility to stubborn affection, and then to gratitude for the weekly bout in which no quarter was asked or given." He also draws on his recollections of undergraduate life at Oxford between the wars, shares several fascinating anecdotes and stories about Lewis's friends, including a close comparison with Tolkien and a not-so-flattering picture of Hugo Dyson, "that curious figure." Charles Williams is mentioned as an "unsettling figure" who encouraged Lewis to write science fiction; Colin Hardie is "the most reserved of men", and David Cecil is "a listener rather than a talker."

Dr. Lawlor deals with Lewis the writer in a literary sense, not in a Christian sense, but generally has high praise (but not unstinted) for most of his works. He mentions the Narnian stories very favorably (except for two minor problems with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), Perelandra ("incomparable"), The Allegory of Love, An Experiment in Critcism, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, and Rehabilitations ("quite perfect").

Asphodel P. Long. In a Chariot Drawn by Lions: The Search for the Female in Deity. London: Women's Press, 1992. 279 pp. ISBN 0 7043 4295 2. Bibliography, Index.

I was running a theological library in an Anglican convent in Sussex, and repairing thousands of dilapidated books and shelving them so they could once again yield treasure. Suddenly a group of students appeared, women studying theology. The teacher of their teacher was Asphodel Long. So she also came later to explore the library and to talk and to lecture and to be for us the presence of Wisdom. She loaned us a book, Hear Our Voice: Women Rabbis Tell Their Story, which I should dearly love to see reviewed here. The first woman Rabbi, like Edith Stein , died at Auschwitz. In its different essays one learns that the Song of Solomon is composed by a woman, that women Rabbis' ministry truly works, and about the need to heal the cracks of the world

Asphodel Long had written this book, In a Chariot Drawn by Lions, as a Thesis in Theology. They rejected it because she would not remove a statement critical of Christianity's rejection of Judaism. Published now in paperback in a delightfully lurid cover, it is, deceptively, a most scholarly study of God as Wisdom, Hochma, Chokmah, in Hebraism, and which profoundly explains Julian's concept of God as Sovereign Wisdom . If one takes this modern book and the medieval writings of Rabbi David Kimhi, which Julian's Adam Easton possessed and taught, it is to find the source for God as Mother lie in the materials Christ himself knew and used.

Another King's College theological student also appeared, this time Roman Catholic, rather than Jewish. Plus Quakers and Methodists. Our band of library readers came to realize we were reliving the medieval Friends of God movement, transgressing all boundaries. So we renamed ourselves 'Godfriends'. We had so much to teach each other. And this all came about through Julian.

But this was seen as threatening by our Bishop, who ended the Community, and my Novitiate, and placed the building and its books in a Charitable Trust that can only be used by those within the Anglican Communion according to its terms. For a long time the books gathered dust, vandals came, finally they were packed up in boxes and are in storage, I am told, somewhere in London. But when I had to flee my convent and its magnificent library, we came to reform ourselves in cyberspace. Contact Julia Bolton Holloway if you wish to subscribe to Godfriends-L.

Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays. Edited, Sandra J. McEntire. New York: Garland, 1998. Garland Medieval Casebooks 21. xvii + 341. Bibliography, index. ISBN 0-8153-2529-0.

Like Professor McEntire's earlier case book, Margery Kemp: A Book of Essays, this is an uneven collection, of gold amidst dross, and the gold largely at the end. The Introduction and passim in the remainder of the volume adhere to the Short Text as written first, the Long Text later, and all the Long Text manuscripts written circa 1650, not knowing the Paris Manuscript is Elizabethan, circa 1580, copying a Syon Tudor fair copy text readied for publication, circa 1533, and furthermore holding the Westminster Manuscript to be the result of late-fifteenth, early-sixteenth editing for a lay audience. Nicholas Watson's important contextual querying of the dates of the Long and Short Texts is ignored for the purposes of this volume. I found the most valuable essays to be those written by Brad Peters, Cynthea Masson, Jay Ruud, and Brant Pelphrey.

Though Sandra J. McEntire, Denise N. Baker and Nicholas Watson base their interpretations of Julian largely upon Augustine, a deeper insight into the writings of the two theologians' lectio divina is to be found in Christopher Abbot 's Julian of Norwich: Autobiography and Theology. Denise Baker's essay 'The Image of God: Contrasting Configurations in Julian of Norwich's Showings and Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection' observes that Julian's use of Augustine is deeper than that of Hilton, that they develop that influence in antithetical ways and were likely uninfluenced by each other, though both resided in East Anglia and wrote at the same dates. Denise Baker concludes that Julian's Revelation is from God, Hilton's the result of priestly, scholarly study. Nicholas Watson notes the important Augustinian distinctions concerning corporeal, imaginative and intellective visions in his commentary on Genesis, as present in Julian and in Alfonso of Jaén's Epistola Solitarii, failing to note that Alfonso of Jaén's colleague, the Norwich Benedictine Adam Easton had access to that text, using it in his own Defensorium Sanctae Birgittae, written out in Norwich at the same date that Julian was writing her Long Text Showing of Love, and that it currently exists in a Norfolk mansucript as well as in The Chastising of God's Children.

Susan K. Hagen's essay could have substantially benefitted from primary scholarship, for instance that the Cardinal of England and Norwich Benedictine Adam Easton's titular basilica in Rome is Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, and that by 1413, which is the stated date of the Amherst Manuscript, and which carefully engrosses St Cecilia's name, he was buried in a tomb near that of St Cecilia's, both bodies being later found incorrupt. Likewise there is a problem with St John of Beverly in the Long Text, for that saint was much beloved by Henry V and Syon Abbey, following Agincourt, and could well be an interpolation into the text, which is copied and preserved at Syon Abbey, according to the study of the surviving manuscripts. St Cecilia became an important figure for both men and women to cite for the right of the laity to preach theology under the Arundel Persecution of Lollardy, especially by the Short Text's stated date of 1413, the year of the Oldcastle Revolt.

Interestingly in this volume the feminist studies by men outweigh those by women. Brad Peters, like Christopher Abbot, sees the need to study Julian through lectio divina, which requires sensuous love and desire, linking that ancient mode of reading with Lacan. He notes that Christ becomes maternal, and (m)Other, while the 'Feend' is clearly male. Cynthea Masson's essay, 'The Point of Coincidence: Rhetoric and the Apophatic in Julian of Norwich's Showings' is excellent on time and space, on 'point' and 'touch' in Julian's concept, continuing on to Julian's use of chiasmus, though only glancingly alludes to Pseudo-Dionysius and omits Boethius on this score. (While she cites the Englishman Geoffrey de Vinsauf, she ignores the Englishman John of Garland, whose works the Lynne Dominican Anchorite, author of Promptorium Parvulorum, owned and consulted. Both discussed ordo naturalis and ordo artificialis.) Jay Ruud, in a chiasmus, returns us to the theme of the Feend as male, and, moreover, as Other, as rapist, as Muslim, as Jew, while seeing Christ not as (m)Other, but Lover. David Tinsley studies 'Julian's Diabology' in the light of German mystics' writings. He discusses Henry Suso and Elsbeth Stagel at length, not aware that Suso's Horologium Sapientiae is excerpted in the Amherst Manuscript and may have been in Julian's library.

Alexandra Barratt unfortunately tends to repeat the worst of Edmund Colledge and James Walsh's errors, on the dating of the Paris Manuscript, for instance, and the reading of 'soul' as 'soil'. The Middle English Dictionary notes only one instance, speaking of an infected wound as 'soul', and as an error for 'foul', the scribe having forgotten to cross the long-tailed s. Julian is speaking of the soul as enclosed in the body until released at death, not of defecation. Hugh Kempster's essay is a serious problem. The volume of essays is beautifully bound with a photograph enlarging a detail of the opening folio of Julian's Showing in the Westminster Text, 'OUre gracious & good lorde god shewed me in party the wisdom & the trewthe of the soule of oure blessed lady saynt mary . . . this wysdom & trowthe . . . ' When I examined that Westminster Manuscript at the beginning of this decade it was to find it has the date '1368' on its first folio, though clearly written later, circa 1500, at Syon Abbey, and copying out a text written circa 1450, at Syon Abbey. I gave up my American Professorship to edit it in Julian's context of prayer. Only to find it had already been so edited and excellently by Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P. Our co-edition of its text was published in 2001. It was preceded by hers in 1956; followed by my 1991 transcription published 1994, in Edward P. Nolan's copy-righted Cry Out and Write: Feminine Poetics of Revelation (New York: Continuum, 1994); by Hugh Kempster's 1996 University of Melbourne thesis, published in a 1997 Mystics Quarterly, which fails to cite these prior editions; and by an excellent 1997 University of Glasgow thesis by Marlene Boel-Cre editing all the Westminster Manuscript and correctly placing it at Syon Abbey. The Westminster Manuscript was not edited by a male for a lay audience of the fifteenth- or sixteenth-century as this volume of essays claims, p. xvi, but instead seems to show that contemplative nuns at Syon Abbey, who preserved Julian's text for centuries, sought to reconstruct Julian's original, pre-1373, theological treatise, for their use in lectio divina . the manuscript's layout indicates they were preparing it for printing, blocked by Thomas More's beheading and the Reformation. The Manuscript continued to be associated with Syon Abbey through the nineteenth century. The Paris Manuscript was in turn written out by Syon Abbey nuns in exile in Flanders circa 1580, copying a circa 1533 fair copy Tudor manuscript at Syon Abbey intended likewise to be printed. The numerous comments throughout this volume referring to Julian's use of 'womb' and birthing, culminating in the magnificent Orthodox lectio divina of her text by Brant Pelphrey, are substantiated and borne out in the photograph that binds and enfolds it, which opens with the Advent Great O Antiphon, 'O Sapientia', said by the pregnant Virgin to her unborn Child, in contemplative lectio divina of the Word become flesh within us, this 'nought' from which all is created. In the Westminster Manuscript the letter O is in blue, the ornamental pen-work flourishes in red, the text written in brown ink

It would be advisable for Garland to drop the --, appropriate in typewritten text, but not for printed typescript in published books, which instead use n and m dashes. Garland could also investigate a better font than the one awarded Brant Pelphrey's fine use of Greek.

Morris, Bridget. St. Birgitta of Sweden. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1999. Studies in Medieval Mysticism 1. xi + 202 pp. Appendices, index. ISBN 0-85115-727-0.

Bridget Morris’ new biography of St. Birgitta of Sweden doesn’t break new ground in Birgitta studies: Morris doesn’t unearth any surprising facts about Birgitta’s life, theology, or monastic calling, nor does she come to any shattering conclusions about Birgitta’s sacred writings or ecclesiastical impact. What Morris does do, however, is long overdue: she performs a blessed act of synthesis. Birgitta studies (including biographies) range from the hagiographical vita written by her confessors shortly after her death in 1373 to the hardly more reliable two-volume biography by Johannes Jørgensen (1954); from the lifetime’s scholarship devoted to the saint by Tore Nyberg, Birger Bergh, and Claire Sahlin to Kari Elisabeth Børreson’s influential feminist essay, “Birgitta’s Godlanguage” (1991); to all the translations, editions, and interpretations of Birgitta’s life and work that represent a continuum of critical cogency and reliability. Morris manages, very succinctly (the biography sans appendices is only about 175 pages), to cull from these works, as well as from the divine Revelations of Birgitta herself, a clear, thorough, and thoughtful portrait of the saint and her legacy.

Birgitta’s approximately seven hundred revelations represent the whole of her passions and theology, and so Morris wisely weaves them into the narrative of Birgitta’s life. But because the visions revealed to Birgitta were chiefly a phenomenon of the second half of her life, Morris does not discuss them as sanctioned Revelations until the “calling vision” Birgitta received shortly after her husband Ulf’s death (ca. 1344). Thus, Morris does not address specific books of the Revelations until page 74—a strategy that effectively mirrors the role these visions had in Birgitta’s life, and certainly one that provides the reader with the context and background necessary for a richer understanding of the intensely personal and politically charged Revelations. For example, Book 2 of the Revelations is mainly an elaboration of the public and political messages of Book 1, but the power of these messages depends upon Birgitta’s visionary authenticity, established in the Prologue to Book 1. The author of the prologue, and the man to whom Birgitta was instructed to turn in her “calling vision,” is Master Mathias Övidsson, scholar and theologian, who vehemently defended Birgitta’s faith, orthodoxy, and divine inspiration; in the Prologue he becomes, as Morris describes him, the “guarantor” of the visions’ authenticity (75). But Birgitta, perhaps the least reticent of medieval mystical women, desired his authentication only so that her often radical message of political reform—regarding everything from the Swedish King Magnus’ alleged homosexual activity to Pope Clement VI’s pro-French position during the Hundred Years War—could be delivered to the largest audience possible.

It is no surprise that Birgitta outgrew Mathias, given her royal family background and her privileged position as the wife of a well-placed statesman, aspects of Birgitta’s life for which Morris provides extremely detailed and sensitively interpreted accounts. The loss of Birgitta’s mother when she was a girl and the responsibilities she faced later as the head of a large household (she and Ulf had eight children, and there were significant duties associated with Ulf’s political life) explain in part not only her later devotion to the Virgin Mary but also her dogged persistence and self-reliance, qualities that would serve her well when she left Sweden for Rome. Her falling out with Mathias precipitated the journey to Rome, a destination to which she was called in a vision. As Morris describes it, by the end of the 1340s Birgitta’s “compulsion to speak out on public matters had not waned. Her horizons had now extended beyond Sweden to the whole of an integrated Christendom” (92). She came to Rome to agitate for the papacy’s return (it had been quartered in Avignon since 1309). But at the same time Birgitta (along with other reformers) was demonstrating for papal restoration, she was also urging the voluptuary Avignon pope Clement (who would have probably liked to return, but who was inured in French politics and society) to restore the papacy to its position of holy purpose and secular disdain. Clearly, Birgitta did not tolerate dissension from or compromise with the sometimes inconsistent divine demands she channeled. She never confused her personal feelings for powerful figures with her spiritual expectations, and her popularity in Rome was subject to long periods of erosion because of this.

One of the real strengths of Morris’ work is her emphasis on Birgitta’s Mariology and woman-centered Christology, an emphasis that is to my knowledge lacking in other biographies. In my own studies of Birgitta (and I am not primarily a Birgitta scholar) I have always been surprised at the extent to which she identifies herself with Mary in all her aspects—wife, mother, spiritual mediator—and to which she is responsible for helping to popularize Marian devotion throughout Europe, via the success of her monastic Order of the Most Holy Savior, her extensive pilgrimages, and her influence on other visionary women. Morris devotes the last three chapters to the effects of Birgitta’s pilgrimages, her sainthood, and her legacy, and as she does with the Revelations, makes the events of Birgitta’s life a prerequisite for understanding her spiritual heritage—her stormy relationship with daughter Katarina, who worked side by side with Birgitta and pressed for her canonization, for example, and the audacious claims Birgitta made for the establishment of her Order. As Morris notes, the divinely revealed Rule for the Order borrows freely from the Benedictine and Dominican Rules, but “introduces innovative elements, which, while not necessarily unparalleled . . . are given a new emphasis. Although the Cistercians, for instance, made the Virgin their patroness, the Birgittines placed her in a position central to their entire monastic existence, from the liturgy . . . to the architecture” (166).

This quotation seems to sum up Birgitta’s modus vivendi. Always operating within a masculine system of authority, she shocked the men by using their authority and then, often, simply leaving them behind. I think Morris’ biography shines in this regard; she is very conservative in and scrupulous about her claims for Birgitta’s life and work, believing generally Birgitta’s prophetic “style” to be less innovative than emphatic. This may irk Birgitta scholars who are convinced their favorite saint is far more subversive than Morris allows; on the other hand, Birgitta—in her private and public personae—is undeniably complex and often contradictory. Her own works and what is known about her from the works of others suggest a woman who was relentlessly theocentric and at the same time her own most astute public relations consultant.

In sum, I feel this biography makes a welcome contribution to Birgitta studies. It is thoughtfully and elegantly put together (and includes a lengthy introduction to Swedish history, geography, and culture). Most importantly, Morris gets the tone of Birgitta’s life and work just right. I am particularly impressed with her sensitivity to the tension of Birgitta’s later spirituality: as the inner woman grew increasingly devout and meditative the political woman became increasingly strident. A few caveats: This work probably will not satisfy Birgitta scholars, particularly in this age of multi-volume biographies. Morris cannot, in fewer than 200 pages, adequately convey the scope and variety of the Revelations nor the impact of her Order in all its worldwide permutations. There are a few discussions which Morris might have footnoted more extensively—some of her historical assertions about the papacy in Chapter 6, for example. Finally, this is one of the most attractive volumes in this series that I have seen, with a lovely typeface and very few typographical errors.

Mysticism and Spirituality in Medieval England. William F. Pollard and Robert Boenig, ed. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer; Rochester,
NY: Boydell and Brewer, 1997. 260pp.

Reviewed by David A. Salomon, University of Connecticut

Medieval spirituality is "hot." Well, not as hot as interactive Barney or those virtual pets kids are carrying everywhere. A visit to any
bookstore (whether it be one of those ever-pregnant superstore chains or what is left of your local independent booksellers) will reveal
the usual biographies of the rich and not-so famous, as well as the latest soon-to-be-a-blockbuster-movie novel. But something else can
be found way in the back, behind the remainders, next to the craft books--the religion section. And even the shelves of this section are
growing; in fact, some publishing analysts project that religious publishing will experience the largest growth of any other subject between
now and the year 2000. The truly interesting thing is that this section is growing beyond what used to be called "New Age Spirituality" or
"Inspirational Fiction. You'll find here a growing number of new editions of Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Margery Kempe,
Richard Rolle, and even Walter Hilton. Medieval spirituality and mysticism are finding themselves in book discussion groups, on Oprah
Winfrey, and onto radio talk shows.

The women, especially, are experiencing a renaissance, and college courses reflect this interest. Hildegard of Bingen, Margery Kempe
and Julian Norwich, along with the Ancrene Riwle and the Wooing Group, are increasingly the subject of courses in religion,
literature, history, and women's studies.

Enter into this discussion a new collection of eleven essays edited by William F. Pollard and Robert Boenig. This volume covers a vast
array of Medieval spiritual authors and texts focusing on England, from Anselm to Rolle, from the Pseudo-Dionysius to Julian of
Norwich. The volume is organized thoughtfully. After a brief unsigned introduction, Thomas H. Bestul takes up the question of
antecedents of Medieval English Spirituality, particularly Anselm and the Cistercians St. Bernard, William of St. Theirry, and Aelred
of Rievaulx. Bestul concludes that "the spiritual writers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries are thus deeply significant for us"
(20). Well-documented (78 footnotes in 20 pages of text), the piece lays the groundwork for later essays in the volume.

No fewer than four of the eleven essays address issues in women's spirituality and mysticism, and they do so splendidly. Denis
Renevy's discussion of the so-called "Wooing Group" is timely indeed, given the recent publication of the critical editions of the texts
(also published by Boydell and Brewer: _Ancrene Wisse, the Katherine Group, and the Wooing Group, _Bella Millett ; with
the assistance of George B. Jack and Yoko Wada [Boydell and Brewer, 1996]). Renevy shows us the ways in which these texts helped to
shape what we now term "Medieval English spirituality." The theme is continued in Anne Savage's essay on the Ancrene Wisse, the
Katherine Group, and the Wooing Group. Study of the critical texts of the Ancrene Wisse is sure to be aided by this essay in which
the spirituality in these works is related to the role of the anchoress, what Savage terms "the solitary heroine."

Robert Boenig discusses the mysterious and ever-difficult Pseudo-Dionysius both as the sixth-century Syrian monk we believe him
to have been and as the greatest single influence on English Medieval mysticism. Boenig explains that his essay is not an
explication of Dionysius (one might do well to look at Paul Rorem's work for that), but is instead meant to serve as a bridge from
sixth-century Syria to fourteenth-century England. This bridge, the via, is a well-constructed and insightful exploration of both the