Review: [untitled] Author(s): Robert E.

Lerner Reviewed work(s): The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart by Amy Hollywood Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 78, No. 1 (Jan., 1998), pp. 113-114 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1205838 Accessed: 08/09/2009 11:16
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Book Reviews
and manipulation, and the moral leadership of the monks vanished from general view. E. ROZANNEELDER,Instituteof CistercianStudies. TheSoul as VirginWife:Mechthildof Magdeburg,MargueritePorete, AMY. HOLLYWOOD, and MeisterEckhart.Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. ix+331 pp. $32.95 (cloth).

This book is a "marguerite," a pearl. It can be read as a major contribution to our understanding of Mechthild, Marguerite, and Eckhart, and also as a major contribution to the study of women's religion in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As if that were not enough, it is also studded with telling theoretical observations and enlivened by a running dialogue with a large array of current work in critical theory and feminist studies. The paradoxical concept of soul as "virgin wife" stated in the title is an emblem for Hollywood's central argument regarding her three authors. For Mechthild of Magdeburg the soul is "housewife." Married to Christ in a transcendence of the body, it seeks to be "well ordered," that is, to remain steadfast in view of an inevitable oscillation between divine presence and divine absence, ecstacy and despair. Once the soul is steady in joy and sorrow, it is able to partake properly in active works in the world. Marguerite Porete's "simple soul" maintains a spotless apophatic virginity. United to God without distinction, this soul lives "without a why," attaining absolute innocence, indifference, and changelessness. Hence it has no interaction with the world. (Hollywood wants to save Marguerite from the charge of pure quietism but recognizes that the task is not easy.) The synthesis of the two positions comes with Eckhart, who himself employs the term "virgin wife." Eckhart's mystical logic ignores the Aristotelian principle of noncontradiction: the soul gives birth to God and the soul gives birth to nothing; the soul is united with the personal loving Son of mainstream Christianity and is also united with the undifferentiated divine ground of Neoplatonism. In consequence Eckhart offers an "ethics of detachment"; Mary and Martha meet because action is intrinsic to contemplation and because the interior act-"in the midst of things but not in things"-produces true justice. Hollywood's main argument about women's religion pertains to the role of suffering. In a preliminary chapter that must count as one of the most original and important contributions to medieval women's history in recent years, she argues against the view that an emphasis on bodiliness and suffering was characteristic of thirteenth-century female spirituality. According to Hollywood, evidence for the association of women with bodily asceticism appears plentifully in the work of male hagiographers writing about female saints but not in the expressions of the women themselves. With great resourcefulness she demonstrates that an anonymous male writer's reworking of autobiographical passages by Beatrice of Nazareth differs from the original in emphasizing corporal experiences rather than internally apprehended states, and she points out that Thomas of Cantimpre's account of the incredible self-tortures of Christina the Astonishing was meant to describe Christina's acts performed in a resurrected body to benefit other souls rather than while she was alive in her mortal body to benefit herself. The sum of Hollywood's reappraisals leads her to conclude that thirteenthcentury male-dominated culture presupposed the suffering of religious women as a means for the redemption of both men and women. Her three authors op-

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posed this orientation (Marguerite and Eckhart most of all), but the fourteenthcentury outcome was to show that they could not alter it. Reading this book is a source of marvel from start to finish. Hollywood is skilled in reading Old German, Old French, and Old Dutch. She masters "both Eckharts": the abstruse Latin ontologist and the flamboyant German preacher. She locates relevant historical detail when necessary-even such detail as when mirrors began to be made from glass. She pursues genre theory (autobiography, confession, allegory), and she pursues gender theory in its most recent expressions. A typical footnote will range from Gilligan, to Piaget and Rawls, to Kant, to Eckhart, to the latest book on "Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy." No matter how difficult her material, Hollywood always strives to be clear; no matter how firmly she disagrees with other scholars, she always refrains from polemics. Still another virtue is her determination to present new viewpoints: if we thought Mechthild's mode of discourse was heavily subjective we should recognize her objective traits; if we thought Eckhart was more objective, we should see how he may really be talking about himself. Most important of all, Hollywood carries off her comparative strategy with complete success: her reading of Mechthild, Marguerite, and Eckhart against the backdrop of the spiritual context and in light of each other enhances our understanding of each; her progression from chapter to chapter culminates in a persuasive synthesis. In view of the author's name I cannot resist concluding: a star is born.
ROBERTE. LERNER,Northwestern University.

NIRENBERG,

DAVID. Communities of Violence:Persecutionof Minoritiesin the Middle Ages. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996. viii+301 pp.

This is a very important book that provides us with an original and provocative perspective on the textured relationships between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Crown of Aragon (Valencia, Aragon, and Catalonia) and the French Pyrenees region, largely in the fourteenth century. It is based on the kind of close acquaintance with judicial archival records (largely royal) that should be the envy of any social historian or student of intercommunal relations. David Nirenberg takes us from the well-trod territory of scholastic and learned polemic to the more graphic and personal level of everyday contacts between these religious minorities and other marginal groups such as prostitutes, lepers, the young, shepherds, foreigners, and others. Such interaction was generally well controlled and contextualized through royal authority, which could often exploit these groups for its own economic ends and which had in the past even occasionally sanctioned some degree of ritualized violence (such as on Good Friday or during the dramatic reenactment of the stoning of Saint Stephen), providing that its own property and interests were not damaged. Nirenberg focuses on several instances during which the delicate balance broke down and brutal, cataclysmic violence was unleashed against Jews, lepers, and others who had been the objects of longstanding, although dormant, resentment, suspicion, and prejudice: the Shepherds' Crusade of 1320, the Cowherds' Crusade of 1321, Holy Week processions, the Plague of 1348, and cases of alleged miscegenation. He indicates how the precarious position of the Jews as fiscal agents of the crown often fed local resentment and led to the kind of massacre of 337 Jews which occurred at Montclus in 1320. Nevertheless, although mutual fears and accusations may have been the common language of intercommunal discourse, local documentation indicates

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