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Agnes Blannbekin, Viennese Beguine: Life and Revelations. Translated from the Latin by Ulrike Wiethaus, with introduction, notes, and interpretive essay. [Library of Medieval Women.] (Rochester, New York: D. S. Brewer. 2002. Pp. vii, 184. $60.00.)
Agnes Blannbekin (ca. 1244-1315), Austrian mystic, may be little-known today because she was once briefly notorious. Like her more famous contemporary, Angela of Foligno, she dictated her revelations to an anonymous Franciscan confessor. One of those revelations, which the beguine herself was reluctant to disclose, involved the relic of Christ's circumcision. On the feast commemorating that event, Agnes felt the Lord's foreskin on her tongue, thin as the membrane of an egg, and swallowed it with great sweetness "about a hundred times" (p. 35). Christ then revealed to her that his foreskin had been resurrected...