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Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, Body & Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. xii - 235 pp. ISBN 0-19-508455-1 (pbk.). $21.95

Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, Body & Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism. New York: Oxford... 95 Book reviews , Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, Body & Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. xii - 235 pp. ISBN 0-19-508455-1 (pbk.). $21.95. In the preface to this collection of essays, Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff describes the writings of medieval women mystics as "a window onto a lost world of experience of thousands of women from late antiquity until just before the Renaissance" (ix). However, she warns, this experience "is recuperable by us only if we radically challenge prevailing ideas of what constitutes literature and what is the nature of reality" (ix). Body & Soul is such an exercise. Employing an assortment of contemporary theoretical tools, Petroff asks new questions of the relatively familiar medieval works by and about women mystics in England, France, the Low Countries, and Italy, questions whose answers reconfigure received notions of literature and medieval women's lives. Petroff begins by questioning traditional attempts to situate women's writ- ings within the canon of medieval literature. To her it seems obvious that "many of these female-authored texts are radically noncanonical" (ix). They "will not fit into a traditional Western notion of literature, because they derive from a different experience of http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Method & Theory in the Study of Religion Brill

Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, Body & Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. xii - 235 pp. ISBN 0-19-508455-1 (pbk.). $21.95

Lee, Becky R.
Method & Theory in the Study of Religion , Volume 8 (1): 95 – Jan 1, 1996
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Publisher
Brill
Copyright
© 1996 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN
0943-3058
eISSN
1570-0682
DOI
10.1163/157006896X00134
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

95 Book reviews , Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, Body & Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. xii - 235 pp. ISBN 0-19-508455-1 (pbk.). $21.95. In the preface to this collection of essays, Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff describes the writings of medieval women mystics as "a window onto a lost world of experience of thousands of women from late antiquity until just before the Renaissance" (ix). However, she warns, this experience "is recuperable by us only if we radically challenge prevailing ideas of what constitutes literature and what is the nature of reality" (ix). Body & Soul is such an exercise. Employing an assortment of contemporary theoretical tools, Petroff asks new questions of the relatively familiar medieval works by and about women mystics in England, France, the Low Countries, and Italy, questions whose answers reconfigure received notions of literature and medieval women's lives. Petroff begins by questioning traditional attempts to situate women's writ- ings within the canon of medieval literature. To her it seems obvious that "many of these female-authored texts are radically noncanonical" (ix). They "will not fit into a traditional Western notion of literature, because they derive from a different experience of

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Method & Theory in the Study of Religion – Brill

Published: Jan 1, 1996

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