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Helene Scheck, Reform and Resistance: Formations of Female Subjectivity in Early Medieval Ecclesiastical Culture

This book addresses a fascinating but tremendously complicated topic: the representation and experience of women in early medieval Germanic cultures, specifically of religious women during the reform movements of the eighth through eleventh centuries. There was a time when the phrase ‘‘early medieval Germanic cultures’’ might have conjured images of shield walls and mead-hall boasting, a culture in which the representation and experience of women were a depressing footnote to the main show; but no more. Thanks to the efforts of feminist scholars, intriguing female figures leap readily to mind: influential queens, learned abbesses, the ferocious heroine of the Old English Judith, and the Terrentian playwright Hrotsvit of Gandersheim and her defiant female saints. Indeed, the pendulum has swung so far in this direction that the period has more recently been seen as a kind of golden age for medieval women, with relatively high levels of female literacy, independence, and legal rights. This is alluring but tricky territory, and not just because whole categories of evidence about women’s lives are decidedly fragmentary or missing altogether. Questions about the relationships between representation and experience, between doctrine and practice, between religious and secular cultures, between aristocratic and nonaristocratic women, are difficult enough in any period, without the additional silences and lacunae of the early medieval record. Helene Scheck’s Reform and Resistance adds another layer of provocative complexity to the subject by focusing on religious women under ecclesiastical reform. Reform movements are especially interesting as