New Directions in Medieval Mystical and Devotional Literature. Essays in Honor of Denise N. Baker

This volume of essays is a wonderful tribute to the scholarly achievements of Professor Denise Baker. Its coverage reflects her broad interests during a fruitful academic career: the writings of Julian of Norwich and the Cloud author, William Langland, Chaucer, as well as Beatrice of Nazareth, to which she provided groundbreaking insights. They trigger innovative investigations by scholars who benefited from Baker's scholarly generosity under her mentorship or as an academic colleague. The volume is therefore much alive with pieces that, rather than uncritically celebrating her achievements, discuss, refine, and sometimes take issue with her views.After paying tribute to Baker's achievements by tracing her scholarly journey, with a special emphasis paid to her monograph, Julian of Norwich's “Showings”: From Vision to Book (1994) and her Norton Critical Edition of The Showings of Julian of Norwich: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism (2005), the introduction describes the content of the book and how each chapter relates to Baker's own interests. Three chapters deal with the concept of sin in Julian of Norwich's Showings, Langland's Piers Plowman, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The following two chapters deal with sin in medieval vernacular texts while also exploring affirmative forms of virtue. The next two chapters deal with questions of gender, while the final three chapters consider the importance of time within three specific contexts.David Aers's “‘What is Synne?’: Exploring Julian of Norwich's Question” returns to Baker's continued interest in Julian as a theologian. Aers's detailed account of some of the passages dealing with the notion of sin, a question that Julian pondered over twenty years, leads him to question her as a systematic theologian, a title which Aers believes befits Langland rather than Julian. He demonstrates that Julian's anagogic peroration does not serve her to address the question of sin and points out a series of logical mistakes. Aers also highlights discordant views on sin attributable to Thomas Aquinas, whose orthodoxy and ratiocinative expression on the matter are used as the measuring stick in terms of systematic theology. Aers thus directly confronts Turner, and Baker to a lesser extent, in their reading of chapter fifty-one. Julian's views cannot be aligned with the church's orthodox teaching on sin and thus the question “What is synne?” is not answered coherently in the Showings.Sin, more particularly covetousness, links Jessica D. Ward's reflection on Meed and Need in Langland's C-version to the previous chapter. Baker's premise that the dialectic expostulated by the medieval church is not to expose deep-seated contradictions but rather to highlight the integrity and unity of the church serves to show that Langland, by combining scholastic dialectic with allegory, dream vision, and other medieval genres, offers a more nuanced and critical perspective to discuss, for instance, the sacrament of penance. Langland's ideal of an improved society fails because of covetousness, which emerges as meed and need. Lady Mede's valence remains unclear in the C-version, as meed's meaning fluctuates between the notion of due and undue reward. Ward links need and meed to show where covetousness takes root. Will is rather intrigued than repelled by Mede, and Theology teaches him that it is not innately evil. Ward offers a good close reading of the C-version, noting changes between the B- and C-version, where social meed is described as being legitimate. Ward argues for Conscience's difficulty in disambiguating meed and need, thus contributing to the open-endedness of Langland's poem.The practice of charitable and fraternal correction serves as the lens by which the proper performance of reproof is measured by Edwin Craun in his fascinating chapter on some of Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims. Fraternal correction was indeed practiced in the medieval period, but it was easily abused and led to difficult situational moments where the practice of charitable correction became difficult to legitimate when one's own sins were more serious than those of the one who was corrected. This serves as a context for a discussion of how, first, the Reeve “corrects” the Miller, and second, the Yeoman corrects his superior the Canon. It is interesting to note that in the Canterbury Tales, both cases of correction take place in public, thus representing the third and ultimate step in that process. But one can ask oneself to what extent the pilgrims abuse the ethics of pastoral correction only to perpetrate malicious vengeance upon their targets, that is the Miller and the Canon. Craun shows that reading the Yeoman's vituperations against the canon as pastoral correction is fraught with difficulties. First, one should not slander one's own master in public, and second, the Yeoman has not reproved his master in private before, which should precede the public reprimand. The Canon is also absent at that point, which puts into question the whole corrective procedure, especially when one realizes that the Yeoman does not correct himself first. What the chapter shows is that the institutional authority behind the concept of pastoral correction fails to control its use for revengeful purpose.Grace Hamman's chapter returns to Piers Plowman. Hamman focuses on the role played by Patience and the virtuous life, with a specific focus on Passus C.XV-XVII. Emphasis is placed on teaching and the way in which patience comes to full fruition only when it is considered in the larger context of community. Liberum arbitrium, that is the act of choosing to act according to God's will, teaches Will he has forgotten his true nature and invites him to act charitably within and on behalf of community. Langland's masterpiece is configured further and in the company of Augustine and Julian in Jessica Hines's essay on familial trinitarian analogies. From Augustine onwards, discussions of the concept of the Trinity often have recourse to the family analogy of father-mother and child. Hines shows that in De Trinitate Augustine compensates for the weaknesses of the family analogy to describe the divine triune whole by offering a proliferation of additional analogies that add meaning to the complex theology of the Christian trinity. Langland and Julian both make use of, and add to, the Augustinian family analogy. Langland's family model is grounded in social awareness and helps to deploy an extensive meditation on the significance of Christian community, whereas Julian's familial analogy revises the concept of God and community before deploying her image of Jesus as mother, thus questioning medieval misogyny and offering an image of an androgynous God that transcends gender binaries.Turner's chapter discusses the question of mystical theology, defined as a preoccupation with the ineffable, using a language that gestures towards the unsayable. By comparing the Cloud-author and Julian under the lens of that definition, and by going against the usual labels of “hard mystical theologian” for men and “soft spiritual” for women, Turner offers a convincing demonstration of the theological sophistication of Julian in her constant consideration of the theological aporia of love and sin within her contemplative practice. The Cloud-author instead, Turner argues, is influenced by Thomas Gallus's reinterpretation of the Pseudo-Dionysian mystical theology in affectivist terms that exclude or diminish the role of the intellect. In fact, Turner argues that the Cloud-author's notion of the theological can be speculative, academic, scholastic, or rational, but it can no longer be “contemplative,” whereas Julian takes into consideration the central propositions of the Pseudo-Dionysian's mystical theology.Jessica Barr offers an interesting discussion of two different versions of Beatrice of Nazareth's Seven Manners of Loving God. The one that is integrated into her vita is modified by means of personalization, simplification, and flattening. These processes are most visible in the way Beatrice's desire for death is explained as only a desire to be dead to the world. The vita contextualizes this desire within the Cistercian and Bernardine milieu, but it fails to represent her actual theology, which is not just “to die into love, but to live in it” (p. 138).Nancy Bradley Warren begins her chapter with a reference to Baker's edition of Julian's Showings for the nuns of Cambrai and Serenus Cressy's own edition for their daughter house in Paris. Warren investigates nineteenth- and twentieth-century editions of Julian's Showings that, in her view, reanimated seventeenth-century exchanges with a very precise agenda for each of them. She considers the ways in which Parker, the Anglican Stillingfleet, and Anglicans who had converted to Catholicism (Henry Collins and George Tyrrell) appropriated and modulated Julian's theology according to their own religious affinities. The anti-Catholic Parker claimed Julian as part of his effort to bring the whole English medieval mystical tradition into the Anglican fold, in contrast to Stillingfleet, who included Julian's speeches as part of Catholicism's feminine faith. Collins provided a modern English version of Julian's text so that one could enter fully into her mind. Considering Collins’ own religious conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism, one is not surprised to see him positively emphasize the Catholic features of Julian's mystical theology while also mentioning she possibly was a Benedictine nun. George Tyrrell, who underwent a similar conversion, highlights instead the Catholic modernism and provocative aspects of Julian's writings, showing her to be ahead of her time.Gina Marie Hurley looks at the notion of perpetual liturgical commemoration of St. Cecilia and consecrated space in Chaucer's “Second Nun's Tale,” before turning to Theseus as builder (and destroyer) of space in “The Knight's Tale.” She then returns to St. Cecilia's church as a durable symbol of Christian fellowship, arguing that Cecilia's space is enduring and self-affirming, in contrast to the pagan temple of Theseus and the self-consuming pyre of Arcite in “The Knight's Tale.”The volume ends with Lynn Staley's consideration of material and textual space, John of Gaunt's tribute in the shape of the Duchess Blanche's great tomb in London's St. Paul's cathedral, and Chaucer's Book of the Duchess. In both cases, commemoration—a regal one for Gaunt, an authorial one in the case of Chaucer—attest to personal ambition and recognition. The Book of the Duchess therefore participates in making an image of both Chaucer and his patron, using and locating “grief in relation to a carefully conceived future” (p. 195).The volume is testimony to Baker's seminal interests in three major areas of medieval culture. No doubt that these essays on Julian and female mysticism, William Langland, and Geoffrey Chaucer, will contribute further to Baker's own influential and ground-breaking scholarly contributions on these topics.