Seeing and Knowing: Women and Learning in Medieval Europe 1200-1550 (review)

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by: Seeing and Knowing: Women and Learning in Medieval Europe 1200-1550 Elizabeth Freeman Mulder-Bakker, Anneke B., Seeing and Knowing: Women and Learning in Medieval Europe 1200-1550 (Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts, 11), Turnhout, Brepols, 2004; cloth; pp. x, 204; 1 b/w figure; R.R.P. €60.00; ISBN 2-503-51448-0. This is an interesting collection. Its aims are to challenge the view that (male) scholastic learning was the most important means to knowledge from the High Middle Ages to the early Reformation and, relatedly and more importantly, to point out the importance of (female) informal learning and knowledge (and, in the process, to elevate our opinion of this 'informal' teaching and learning culture). By 'knowledge' the authors mean knowledge about God, hence the emphasis on the perennially popular area of religious women, semi-religious women, and the extent to which their access to God was mystically-driven. While Anneke Mulder-Bakker's Introduction points out that it was not always a case of visionary women and learned men, by and large the essays do work from the premise that official learning was a male enterprise and mysticism a female one. Werner Williams-Krapp's essay reassesses the purpose and function of the Dominican Henry Suso's fourteenth-century Vita. Not a hagiography designed to facilitate the German Suso's canonisation, the vita was instead an exemplary model, aimed 'primarily at women' (Dominican nuns especially). It encouraged its audience to follow the Desert Fathers' example and not to overdo their ascetic practices. In particular, asceticism was presented as but a preliminary step before the later steps of contemplation and spiritual development. Wybren Scheepsma's essay on 'Beatrice of Nazareth: The First Woman Author of Mystical Texts' provides a very valuable contribution to scholarship on this southern Netherlands author of mystical literature. While recent scholarship has focused on matters such as the somatic (or not) nature of Beatrice's experiences of God, Scheepsma makes a timely return to some basic (and important) textual matters such as just how certain we can be of Beatrice's authorship of The Seven Manners of Love in the first place and, if Beatrice was the author, what her goals in writing may have been. Anne Bollmann conducts a close reading of Alijt Bake's autobiographical writings from the mid fifteenth century. Prioress of an Augustinian convent in Ghent, Bake was clearly an important figure in the Modern Devotion. Scholarship continues to add and subtract writings from her oeuvre, but what seems consistent is the way Bake used writing to defend her rather brash decision to claim herself as [End Page 213] a model for others who might imitate Christ. Believing that the vita activa needed to coexist with the vita contemplativa, Bake recorded her spiritual struggles in the world as well as her mystical ascents. Also examining the Modern Devotion, Thom Mertens rebuts the argument that listeners never copied out sermons. Focussing on Dutch canonesses from the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, Mertens shows that the sisters not only had the literary skills to copy and collate sermons but, more interestingly, that they even added material based on auctoritates and assumed the preacher's authority for themselves. Kirsten M. Christensen presents a thought-provoking essay on the ways in which male Carthusians and Jesuits accepted and indeed disseminated the writings of the mid-sixteenth-century beguine Maria van Hout. Brought to live with Carthusians in Cologne, Maria wrote what one might call 'old-fashioned' treatises (eg on Mary, on the wounds of Christ), but in the new world of the Counter Reformation old-fashioned traditional ideas were precisely what the Carthusians and Jesuits wanted. The point to ponder, of course, is whether this means that the Counter Reformation actually granted new authority to women's devotional writings or whether it just quarantined them in another new informal category. Bert Roest examines the rise of the fifteenth-century female Colettine reform. While past scholarship has seen male control behind the rise of the French Colette of Corbie and her followers, Roest believes there was more female participation than hitherto recognized. Colettine sisters had a rich vernacular literary culture. The sisters...