Amy Hollywood assembles here ten essays originally published between 1999 and 2006, prefacing them with three new ones and closing with a fourth. Writing as both a theorist of religion and a historian of medieval Christianity, she challenges each discipline to engage with the other by bringing medieval women, such as Beatrice of Nazareth, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Christina the Astonishing, into dialogue with modern figures ranging from Sigmund Freud to Henry Adams, Talal Asad to Dipesh Chakrabarty. Hollywood reads all her authors generously, at the same time subjecting the modern thinkers (including herself) to sympathetic yet searching critique. Keenly self-aware, she writes with crystalline clarity, enabling historians and theorists alike to find their way around each other's turf.
Hollywood's trademark is a penchant for asking subtle, unanswerable questions:
“What does it mean to say that the object of religious devotion is real? If something is real, are propositions about it also true? If such propositions are true, in what way are they so?” (2).
What if not only trauma, but also joy, defies ordinary language? “Are we no longer capable of telling stories in which the unspeakable is the site of jubilation rather than lamentation?” (62).
Does writing “subaltern history” require us to believe the subaltern, even when she denies her own agency and ascribes it to God? “Is there any way—or any reason—for a twenty-first-century feminist historian to take seriously Mechthild's claim that God speaks directly through her?” (118).
Most of Hollywood's essays begin by delineating a theoretical problem, such as the nature of religious experience or the relationship between ritual and belief, as formulated by modern thinkers. She then introduces one or more medieval women, showing how their texts complicate the issues at stake, challenge our prevailing assumptions, and, at times, suggest unforeseen solutions. Her dialogical method highlights the continuing value and relevance of the medieval. In Hollywood's view, the radicalism of certain past texts and practices still outstrips our categories for thinking about them. This is especially true in the realm of sexuality and gender, where she often circles back to the seminal work of Caroline Walker Bynum, as well as Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler. Hollywood uses the remarkable fluidity of medieval devotional language and imagery to disrupt binaries that still prevail even in some contemporary queer theory. At the same time, her essays challenge medievalists to view their material in a wider context, opening it to more searching theoretical inquiry and unexpected comparisons.
The fourteen essays inevitably contain repetition, so instead of trying to summarize them, I will highlight two themes. One is Hollywood's sturdy anti-reductionist approach to religion. Despite her intensive engagement with psychoanalysis, she accepts Michael Warner's trenchant aphorism: “You can reduce religion to sex only if you don't especially believe in either one” (149). She critiques such books as Wayne Proudfoot's Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) and Pamela Sue Anderson's Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) because, in different ways, both disallow (or at best, evade questions about) the ontological reality of the divine. It is not that Hollywood herself writes from a faith perspective. Rather, she demands that theories of religion account for it in ways that do not belie or belittle the experience of religious people, past or present. In one extreme case, she even wonders if reading the thirteenth-century mystic Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls—a precocious critique of pure reason—requires the critic to “annihilate” her own reason in the name of love, as Marguerite does. “How can I critically engage with a text,” she muses, when its “critical force rests on the abdication of reason?” (144). The question is not rhetorical; Hollywood constantly probes the sore points where critique risks its own self-cancellation. In a closing essay she asks, “What is it, finally, that feminist scholars seek in and from the past? … Are there ways in which the past can move us—and move us in ethically, politically, and religiously efficacious ways—that may abrogate the rules of right reading and interpretation put in place by historical scholarship?” (253–254).
Being “moved” in such ways requires not only rigorous honesty toward the dead, but an ethical praxis of justice in the present. Hence another recurrent theme is the priority of embodied practice over belief—whether the meditative disciplines of medieval monks, beguines’ use of devotional objects, or modern rituals of mourning. In her title essay, “Acute Melancholia,” Hollywood contrasts the psychoanalytic praxis of mourning (through gradual decathexis from the lost object) with the opposing practice of mystics like Margaret Ebner, who deliberately cultivated a longing for death by internalizing Christ, their own “lost object,” ever more deeply. The essay includes a poignant elegy for Hollywood's brother, couched in a story about Martha and Mary. Fittingly, then, the last chapter returns to those biblical sisters—allegorical figures for the active and contemplative lives. An insistent medieval debate over their relative merits loosely parallels contemporary arguments about theory and praxis. Returning to the terrain of her first book, The Soul as Virgin Wife (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), Hollywood ends with Meister Eckhart, who broke radically with tradition when he exalted Martha above Mary. Eckhart's Martha, who is so perfect in contemplation that she never forgets God even in the midst of action, can stand in for Hollywood's own ideal: “life demands both place and movement, action and contemplation, saying and unsaying. Work—God working in and through human beings—is everything” (269).
