Kate Greenspan

The postmodern embrace of medieval holy women¹ has made legitimate
the study of works formerly dismissed as unworthy of serious attention.
Early researchers in the field regarded women's "spiritual autobiographies,"
vitae, revelations, treatises, letters, and poetry as evidence of an underground
movement of valiant, saintly females, speaking out in spite of patriarchal
prohibitions ( Petroff, Consolation, i). At the same time, the extreme asceti-
cism to which they subjected their bodies, their deference to the authority
of clerics less able than themselves, and their repression of intellectual curi-
osity, of artistic talent, of sexuality, seemed to imply that holy women had
bowed uncritically to their age's misogynist values. In either case, holy
women's writings contained a wealth of otherwise unavailable detail about
everyday life, often informed by an apparently feminist sensibility. For a
long time, the real detail and the perceived feminism seemed to offer schol-
ars unprecedented revelations of women's inner and outer experience. Most
expected to find in these works the individual voices of exceptional women
who defied their culture to speak to us across the centuries.

As women's writing has never been well represented in the medieval
canon, many scholars assumed at first that their literary output was scant.
Some works, dictated by illiterate women to male amanuenses, were re-
garded with suspicion as inauthentic or appropriated. Investigators of the
few works that appeared in modern editions tended either to condemn the
authors as "inevitably given to emotionalism and vivid imagining" ( O'Brien,
118-19), or to characterize them as exceptional women, their writings as
more personal and intimate than those of their male counterparts. But over
the course of the last fifteen years we have recovered so many spiritual
autobiographies by medieval religious women that the notion of their "ex-

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