E. Ann Matter

The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity

The Song of Songs, eight chapters of love lyrics found in the collection of wisdom literature attributed to Solomon, is the most enigmatic book of the Bible. For thousands of years Jews and Christians alike have preserved it in the canon of scripture and used it in liturgy. Exegetes saw it as a central text for allegorical interpretations, and so the Song of Songs has exerted an enormous influence on spirituality and mysticism in the Western tradition. In the Voice of My Beloved, E. Ann Matter focuses on the most fertile moment of Song of Songs interpretation: the Middle Ages. At least eighty Latin commentaries on the text survive from the period. In tracing the evolution of these commentaries, Matter reveals them to be a vehicle for expressing changing medieval ideas about the church, the relationship between body and soul, and human and divine love. She shows that the commentaries constitute a well-defined genre of medieval Latin literature. And in discussing the exegesis of the Song of Songs, she takes into account the modern exegesis of the book and feminist critiques of the theology embodied in the text.

Creative women in medieval and early modern Italy : a religious and artistic Renaissance

Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy is a collection of essays on the flowering of womens participation in the religious and artistic life of Italy from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. It brings together scholars of religious studies, history, literature, music, fine arts, and philosophy from both Italy and the United States. Several essays document and discuss new discoveries, such as the extraordinary collection of musical compositions written by women in Bologna and Milan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the convent theater of sixteenth-century Tuscany. Other essays, in contrast, offer new interpretations of well-known figures such as Catherine of Siena and Angela of Foligno, or radical new assessments of the early modern debates over concepts of womens sanctity and the boundaries between holiness and heresy. E. Ann Matter and John Coakley and the contributors to this volume richly demonstrate that women in the late Middle Ages and early modern period were able to carve out creative space, most successfully in the religious sphere. They show that women did indeed speak with a creative voice in this period, and furthermore, that they were not entirely defined and limited by their marginality.

The Undebated Debate: Gender and the Image of God in Medieval Theology

This essay examines the strange lack of debate about women’s role in the classical theological treatises of the Middle Ages. The reason for this may well be the predominant influence of Augustine of Hippo, who set up a condition in which women are equal to men (and therefore in the image of God) according to our humanity but NOT according to our female embodiment. The consequences of this paradoxical formulation can be seen in women’s spiritual writings from medieval Europe.

The Lamentations Commentaries of Hrabanus Maurus and Paschasius Radbertus

In the study of Carolingian Christianity, biblical commentaries are a vast and largely untapped resource. Exegesis, whether for teaching or homiletical purposes, dominated the ninth-century school tradition; in this world, nearly all theologians were primarily expositors of the Bible. It is one of the ironies of historical inquiry that the non-exegetical treatises of such figures as Hrabanus Maurus and Paschasius Radbertus have been studied to the exclusion of their biblical commentaries. Although this situation is beginning to change, much remains to be done, beginning with the crucial work on the texts. Meanwhile, in the absence of critical editions of any of the major works of the Carolingian exegetical tradition, all scholarship in the field is a mere suggestion as to what might be discovered when the primary materials have been better presented. This study is no exception. The two treatises discussed here have received practically no attention from modern historians, and are printed only in the uncritical editions of the Patrologia Latina. It is my hope that this analysis will encourage further inquiry into Carolingian exegesis by showing some ways in which two commentaries, the first in the Latin tradition on the book of Lamentations, reveal the theological and pastoral concerns, and the exegetical methods, of two generations of ninth-century monastic authors.

Theories of the Passions and the Ecstasies of Late Medieval Religious Women

It is well known to those of us who share a passion for the lives and reconstruction of the lives and actions and thoughts—the gestures, behaviors and emotions—of medieval men and women that the people we study did not necessarily understand themselves the way we understand ourselves. This is especially true with regard to the interpretations given to emotions and passions. Even the way I began the last sentence, with the assertion that we share “a passion” evokes a modern psychological conception of how human beings work. It can, however, be instructive to remember that medieval Christians categorized much of what we think of as “passions”—anger, jealousy, lust—among the Seven Deadly Sins. Our common assumption about human passions, like almost all post-Freudian ideas about human nature, is essentially interior, consisting of concepts that begin within the human psyche—or heart—or soul. In contrast, people in the pre-modern world, from classical antiquity and continuing through “the long Middle Ages” into the middle of the seventeenth century, understood human nature in a different way— if not exactly as a result of, then at least intrinsically allied to, external forces. This “humoral theory” of human nature explains human existence as linked to an enormous, cosmic, series of interrelated phenomena: the stars, the cardinal directions, the essential elements of all creation and the essential humors of the human body. A review of theories of microcosm and macrocosm from the first century to the dawn of the modern era is not possible here, although I would like to make some observations on this philosophical and theological tradition. Suffice it to say that many influential cosmological theories influenced the Latin West; they mostly originated in the Greek world, with Plato as a starting-point, and were directly influential at least through the sixth century, and in a secondary way from the ninth century onward. The basic concept is a parallelism between small and finite Theories of the Passions and the Ecstasies of Late Medieval Religious Women

A Convent Tale: A Century of Sisterhood in Spanish Milan. By P. Renée Baernstein. New York: Routledge, 2002. Pp. xxii+270.

Women left husbands because they were mistreated; they sued for formal separation a mensa et thoro.Women’s departure harmed their husbands’ economic position and reputation; husbands thus might countersue for adherere to make them return.Wives’ very act of departure was a challenge to the social order, breaking up a household in an act that was anything but subservient. So women had to make the case that, in face of a husband’s flagrant abuse, they were upholding social order by their departure.Courts were fairly sympathetic to their claims when presented with the evidence.

27.50.

In 1431, barely three decades before the definitive fall of Christian Asia Minor with the entry of the Turkish armies into Constantinople, Alberto Alfieri, a schoolmaster in the Genoese colony of Caffa on the Black Sea, wrote a series of eight dialogues on just rulership, the virtuous life, and the nature of the afterlife. This odd set of dialogues, totally carried out by deceased members of the Visconti and Adorno families, is named for its eight parts, Ogdoas.1 The text is extant in only one manuscript, now in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana of Milan.2 This essay will explore the thoughts on virtue espoused in this text, especially from the point of view of Alfieri’s role as a teacher concerned with moral leadership.

Teaching Virtue from the Ignoble Nobility: Alberto Alfieri’s Ogdoas (1421)

tion of the socio-economic environment and relevant political factors. For example, Stalin’s rural policies were not just an extension of anti-rural Marxism, but also evolved in response to a hostile international environment, the need to feed a burgeoning urban population, and the political requisite to control the countryside. The crucial question, therefore, is: to what degree was policy an extension of ideology and to what degree were Soviet leaders pragmatic? Only in the Brezhnev era does the analysis consider political factors in depth, but by then most agree that ideology in the Soviet Union was all but dead. Second, discussion of the Khrushchev era is somewhat muddled and inconsistent. The reader is told that Khrushchev was responsible for the departure from Stalinist urban bias, and that it was ‘Khrushchev alone’ who understood the problems of the countryside and made rural development a priority. Yet, at other points, his achievements are downplayed, leading to what Melvin terms ‘an urbanist rural policy’ under Khrushchev. The author seems not to appreciate the political context in which Khrushchev operated – if he were in fact the lone spokesman for agriculture, then modest achievements would be expected. Melvin also underestimates the importance of far-reaching policy changes made under Khrushchev (rather than Brezhnev, as is suggested) in procurement prices, in MTS policy, in agricultural tax policy, in policy toward private plots, and in agricultural wage policy – to name just a few. Finally, the conceptual structure of the book is not entirely clear. Part 2 (Chapters 3–5) constitutes the substantive core and presents a chronological analysis from 1946 to the end of the 1960s. Part 3 (Chapters 6–8) then looks at various specialist groups and their role in rural policy. Chapter 8 resumes the chronology from the early 1970s and carries through to the Gorbachev era, although in much less detail than in Part 2. Generally speaking, however, Melvin has produced an interesting study. It succeeds in presenting a well-known story in a new light, and will be suitable reading both for graduate seminars on Soviet history and historians of the Soviet era.

Catholicism: The Story of Catholic Christianity

The last book of Christian Scripture, with its vivid imagery and sweeping promises of the triumph of the faithful over the persecutions of Antichrist, has always captured the imagination of Christians.1 Some contemporary groups fully expect to see the Last Days soon, and they offer exacting interpretations of the clues hidden in the last book of the New Testament for how this could happen. Sometimes these interpretations take the form of fiction.2 This is a long tradition. In fact, the Apocalypse was among the first biblical texts to be systematically explicated in Latin, even as it was one of the last to be accepted into the canon of the New Testament and given a liturgical role.3

Exegesis of the Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages

This eight-volume history of scholarship on the Bible, the first such compendium since the Cambridge History of the Bible (CHB) was completed in 1970, presents a remarkable challenge to the reviewer. The staggering size of this project alone (5,249 pages compared to the 1,805 pages of the Cambridge volumes) defies summary and subjects generalizations about the contents to the interest and expertise of an individual reader. Acknowledging these perplexing inherent difficulties, this review will nevertheless begin with an overview of the scope and organization of the eight volumes as a whole and then briefly evaluate the contents of each volume before turning to some concluding remarks about the strengths and weaknesses of this collection as a tool for teaching and scholarship. In this final consideration, a comparison to the Cambridge History of the Bible will set Bible de tous les temps in the context of twentieth-century scholarship on the Bible and the study of the Bible. As a collection of scholarly essays, Bible de tous les temps has doubtless set