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Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity. By Brown Peter. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. x + 182 pages. $45.00 (paper $12.95).

Demers' book started its life as a series of lectures and this accounts for both its strengths and its weakness. It is eclectic and far-ranging, fascinating in its sheer diversity. After an initial chapter in which she carefully sets out her goals and limitations and examines the theoretical frameworks which influence her, she has three chapters in which she discusses the works of: (1) medieval visionaries (from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries), (2) three Protestant women from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Marie Dentiere, Anne Askew, and Jane Lead), and (3) nineteenth-century authors of didactic material for children. The references in these chapters (to both primary and secondary materials) are so rich and so diverse that they suggest a myriad of subsequent investigations to be undertaken by intrigued students. Her fifth complete chapter contains her own reading of the work of feminist hermeneutics. Its congruence with what had come before was, to me, a bit obscure, though she says, in the "Conclusion," that she believes that "feminist hermeneutics . . . gains a special resonance by being heard as part of the continuous and reformative enterprise of women's interpretive activity" (155). Scholars will not find a great deal that is helpful in Demers' work here. There is not the kind of textual and methodological study of individual writers as exegetes that one hopes will be forthcoming. It can, however, be a stimulating introduction to the topic for undergraduate students.