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From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature. By BARBARA NEWMAN. Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. 355 pp.
This is a study of mystics that has no reservations about the reality of the mystical experience. Newman may test for the truth of a particular experience, but she affirms that individuals express their deepest selves through religion and that, in doing so, unusual individuals may produce astonishing witness to the Divine. By thus freeing herself from any need to relativize the extraordinary lives of her subjects, she is able to place them in the real world in which they lived. The result is a powerful book.
The hook on which Newman hangs a great deal of rich material is a change in the image of spiritually gifted women. She points out that in the early church men praised them for being like men, viragos, degendered, strong because they were no longer women. Beginning in the thirteenth century, however, some women created for themselves a different model. No longer striving to hide their femaleness, they emphasized it, declaring finally that as ecstatic lovers of God, they encompassed something of the Divine in themselves. Some men admired them for the spiritual heights they reached; others condemned them...