Mary Dunn's multilayered study focuses on one key moment in the life of the seventeenth-century mystic and missionary, Marie de l'Incarnation (1599–1672): her decision to leave her eleven year old son, Claude, in the care of her sister and brother-in-law so that she might enter the Ursuline convent in Tours. In all of Marie's writing and in the story of her life written by Claude after her death, this decision, referred to repeatedly as an “abandonment,” figures prominently. Dunn takes her own discomfort with Marie's decision, one that mirrors the disapproval of those around Marie, and uses it to help us understand what was at stake for Marie in making it. Dunn then moves from the historical to the theological, asking whether there might be better ways to think about motherhood and Christianity than those that were available to Marie in seventeenth-century Roman Catholic France. Throughout, Dunn's reflections on her own experience of mothering provide the reader with a glimpse of the existential stakes of the kind of historical-theological work in which she engages.

Dunn's historical argument is extremely persuasive. Bringing together important strands of scholarship on women, marriage, and sanctity in early Christianity and the Middle Ages, she contextualizes the “abandonment” within the history of seventeenth-century French family life, the broader Christian tradition's marginalization of motherhood, and the centrality of the theme of abandonment in seventeenth-century French spirituality. The result is a finely grained and valuable argument for the theological significance not just of Marie's story but of the way she and her son tell the story and the specific language involved in their rendition of her act

Following Barbara Newman, Anneke Mulder-Bakker, and others, Dunn shows that the Christian tradition, at least through the Middle Ages, had no way of understanding motherhood itself as a mark of sanctity. Dunn suggests that the problem starts with Jesus, or at least the sayings tradition of Jesus, and that the issue is not sexuality or the body but the family. In the context of apocalyptic expectations for an immanent transformation of the world, familial cares keep one from focusing attention on God and therefore are to be eschewed. Although likely inadequate to the complexities of the earliest Christian traditions, this is undoubtedly a message conveyed within parts of the New Testament, one easily deployed toward the end of problematizing, even rejecting, familial life.

We see this happen quite explicitly in the lives of the saints, as Dunn shows. Although the high and late Middle Ages begin to show signs of valuing motherhood—representations of certain saintly women with their children appear, together with devotion to the holy family and the rise in the number of married women saints—it remains the case that motherhood is a problem for women who pursue a life of Christian perfection. Crucial to the hagiographical tradition, Dunn demonstrates, is the transformation of love for one's biological children into love for one's spiritual children, often at the expense of basic care for the former. In the lives of widowed and married women saints, moreover, the sacrifice of love for their children becomes part of their self-sacrificial love for and imitation of Christ. Just as Christ gives himself over to be killed out of love for humanity, so Marie, like other women before her, gives up her beloved child out of love for Christ.

In an even more compelling twist to her story, Dunn shows that seventeenth-century France was drenched with the language of abandonment of the self to God, rendering the terminology Marie uses to describe her decision to leave her son even more theologically salient. As Dunn notes, “the conspicuous and repetitive terminology of ‘abandonment’ . . . is altogether absent from the hagiographic narratives” of other holy women who were mothers (113). Although also a legal category, Marie's “relinquishment of maternal responsibilities” for her son, no matter how criticized by those around her and strenuously objected to by Claude himself, comes nowhere close to meeting the standards for “abandonment as it was understood and prosecuted in early modern French law” (114). Marie gave Claude over to her sister and brother-in-law, arranged for his education, and maintained regular contact with him even after she left France for Canada. Although she does not leave funds for his adulthood, a point she worries over repeatedly and which would have been seen as problematic within the terms of French family life of the time, it is not clear that she had such resources to give. (Dunn leaves the reader with some questions on this point.) Even this, however, is read theologically: just as she abandons herself to God, so also she abandons her son—and his future—to God.

It is this idea—of the abandonment of one's children to the future—that resonates repeatedly with Dunn's own story. Dunn has four children, but it is with the birth of the youngest, Aggie, who is diagnosed with a genetic difference that poses unusual challenges for her development, that Dunn comes to realize how little she can know or control any of her children's' futures. The precarious nature of parenthood, the need to give of one's self not knowing what will come in return, becomes itself for Dunn a site of sanctity. Is this peculiar to motherhood, as Kristeva, whose work Dunn deploys here, claims? Does it depend on the heterosexual dyad become triad evoked by Jeffrey Kripal in lines Dunn cites at the end of her book? I worry about the possibilities potentially foreclosed here. Yet Kristeva is surely right that pregnancy and childbirth are marked by a liminality and doubleness that render the birth mother a profoundly powerful—and frightening—figure; hence the continued abjection of motherhood within Western culture. Dunn asks what it would mean to render this abjection holy, a potent question with which I will continue to wrestle