Claire
M. Waters.
Angels and Earthly Creatures: Preaching, Performance,
and
Gender in the Later Middle Ages.
Philadelphia:
Universit of
Pennsylvania
Press, Dec 2003.
The Middle Ages Series.
248pp.
Hardback ISBN
0812237536.
Publisher's
recommended price $55.00s/£38.50
Texts by,
for, and
about preachers from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries reveal an
intense interest in the preacher's human nature and its intersection
with
his "angelic" role. Far from simply denigrating embodiment or excluding
it from consideration, these works recognize its centrality to the
office
of preacher and the ways in which preachers, like Christ, needed
humanness
to make their performance of doctrine effective for their audiences. At
the same time, the texts warned of the preacher's susceptibility to the
fleshly failings of lust, vainglory, deception, and greed. Preaching's
problematic juxtaposition of the earthly and the spiritual made images
of women preachers, real and fictional, key to understanding and
exploiting
the power, as well as the dangers, of the feminized flesh.
Addressing
the
underexamined bodies of the clergy in light of both medieval and modern
discussions of female authority and the body of Christ in medieval
culture, Angels
and Earthly Creatures reinserts women into the history of preaching
and brings together discourses that would have been intertwined in the
Middle Ages but are often treated separately by scholars. The
examination
of handbooks for preachers as literary texts also demonstrates their
extensive
interaction with secular literary traditions, explored here with
particular
reference to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
Through
a close
and insightful reading of a wide variety of texts and figures,
including
Hildegard of Bingen, Birgitta of Sweden, and Catherine of Siena, Waters
offers an original examination of the preacher's unique role as an
intermediary
- standing between heaven and earth, between God and people,
participating
in and responsible to both sides of that divide.
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