Frances Beer

Beer states in her introduction that the premise of this book is to establish how "certain women managed to transcend the virulent misogyny that so dominated their cultures." While I would certainly agree that the imagery employed by the great mystics Hildegard of Bingen, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Julian of Norwich is ripe for analysis from such a perspective, I don't think that her book manages to live up to its claims. It's a pretty traditional literary summary and analysis of its subjects' main writings. Beer occasionally pauses to assert that in their writings, Hildegard, Mechthild and Julian never shunned their "womanhood" or their "femaleness", but she never really defines what she means by that, or gets to grip with it on any meaningful level. It read as pretty out of date, even by the standards of feminist scholarship in 1992; it might be a useful intro for undergraduates to the sometimes dense prose of medieval mystics, but otherwise I wouldn't recommend this.… (plus d'informations)