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From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature. By Barbara Newman. [Middle Ages Series.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1995. Pp. vi, 355. $39.95 cloth; $18.95 paper.)
Barbara Newman has written an erudite and wonderful book. Drawing on and in many ways surpassing the flood of work on medieval religious women produced in the past fifteen years (a torrent within which her own Sister of Wisdom was a significant stream), she gives us a set of learned, thoughtful, and interrelated essays, written in lucid and beautiful prose. Truly interdisciplinary in her instincts, Newman has a gift for close and subtle reading of texts without straining to place them in the dichotomies that have too often dominated feminist and non-feminist interpretation of the Middle Ages-secular versus religious, masculine versus feminine, literary versus theological, heterodox...