Goddesses in the Middle Ages

Robert Lerner reviews Barbara Newman ‘s God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages in the March 19 issue if the TLS . Newman’s book analyzes the female deities and allegorical figures of medieval literature and belief, including Nature, Lady Love, Holy Wisdom, and Mary. As Lerner explains, “She proceeds chronologically: Nature in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (eg, Alan of Lille and Jean de Meung respectively); Love in the thirteenth century (eg, Hadewijch); Wisdom in the fourtheenth century (eg, Heinrich Suso); and Mary in the fifteenth century (iconographic sources above all). Whereas Nature descends from abstruse Neoplatonism to the Romance of the Rose , Love ‘ascends’ in the thirteenth century from realm of the secular to the intensely sacred. Wisdom has a different trajectory because the Old Testament term used first by Paul to refer to Christ was then appropriated in the liturgy to refer to Mary. Newman’s scheme therefore entails a fourteenth-century ‘feminization of Christ’ and a primarily fifteenth-century ‘divinization of Mary.’”

One of the interesting things about the review is that adherence to goddesses and other mediators began to fade shortly before the reformation, “when it was supplanted by a more easily recognizable monotheism.” Thus, in this sense at least, the Reformation was the culmination of movements in late medieval theology and piety, rather than the abandonment. This also suggests that the move from high medieval piety, with its various feminine mediators, to the late medieval and Reformation is a move from a way of life under the STOICHEIA into a life fully in the New Covenant.