SAMUEL FANOUS and HENRIETTA LEYSER (eds), Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth-Century Holy Woman

CHRISTINA OF MARKYATE, A TWELFTH-CENTURY HOLY WOMAN, makes an important contribution to our understanding of options available to an English woman who felt called to serve God in the early years following the Conquest. As Henrietta Leyser points out in the introduction to this rich collection of essays, during Christina's lifetime (c.1096–c.1160) ‘opportunities for women to lead the religious life increased dramatically’; between 1130 and 1165 more than eighty-five new communities for women were founded. Indeed, it was in this century that Gilbert of Sempringham, initially at the request of seven women, was to found an order; and, not long after, three sisters wishing to become anchoresses asked their confessor to provide them with a guide or rule. The resulting Ancrene Wisse, or Ancrene Riwle, circulated in English, French, and Latin up to the Dissolution. Less well known until the edition of C. H. Talbot in 1959 (rpt. 1987) is the Vita of Christina by an anonymous monk of St Albans, and even then, as Douglas Gray observes in his consideration of the work's literary background, historians of spirituality have given it more attention than students of literature. In attempting to situate the Vita in terms of genre, Gray demonstrates how the work crosses literary boundaries. Especially intriguing in this regard is his discussion of the ‘dramatic nature of Christina's experience and visions’, suggesting links with drama of the period. Neil Cartlidge, using the episode of the ‘mysterious vanishing pilgrim’, expands on the idea of dramatic performance in the Vita. He shows how drama, a ‘means of connecting symbols with reality’, provides a way of conveying simultaneously the actuality of events and ‘the significances that they disguise’, and he points out that, in insisting on the literal re-enactment of biblical events, Christina's Vita foreshadows the later medieval mystical tradition of imagined presence, culminating in figures such as Margery Kempe and her participation in the Nativity or Crucifixion.

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