Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages

Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). xiii + 350 pp. ISBN 0-691-11860-4. £16.95.

Dyan Elliott's new book, Proving Woman, examines the rise and fall of the female mystic in western Europe in the High and Late Middle Ages. Following on from Elliott's previous monographs - Spiritual Marriage (1993) and Fallen Bodies (1999) - this study is primarily concerned with the close relationship between holiness and heterodoxy. Drawing on a range of sources, including records of canonizations and heresy trials, manuals of confessors and inquisitors, theological treatises, saints' lives, and chronicles, Elliott sets out to explore why, towards the end of the Middle Ages, female spirituality became gradually but increasingly pathologized and criminalized. She argues that the procedures for proving both saints and heretics, the processes of canonization and inquisition, developed in...