This volume in honor of literary and religious scholar Barbara Newman edited by her former students bears testament to the spectacularly wide range of Newman’s scholarship. The introduction by Steven Rozenski, Claire M. Waters, and Joshua Byron Smith highlights Newman’s position at the forefront of the ‘religious turn’ in medieval studies and, simultaneously, of the feminist recovery of woman authors inspired by second-wave feminism. In line with this feminist recovery, Newman’s first monograph, Sister of Wisdom: St Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (University of California Press, 1987) introduced the now well-known Hildegard of Bingen to English audiences. The editors also note Newman’s role as a founding editor of the Medieval Feminist Newsletter, which has now become the journal Medieval Feminist Forum. The editors track Newman’s subsequent career, which they say “demonstrates the vibrant, beautiful, generative strangeness of medieval texts that the conjunction of religious studies and women’s studies has been instrumental in bringing more fully to light” (15). Finally, the editors draw attention to Newman’s role as a teacher, sharing memories of her creative and dynamic work with students.

In a second introduction, Jerome E. Singerman, Senior Humanities Editor, emeritus, of the University of Pennsylvania Press, discusses his experiences publishing four of Newman’s books—From Virile Woman to WomanChrist (1995), God and the Goddesses: Visions, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (2003), Making love in the Twelfth Century:‘Letters of Two Lovers’ in Context (2016), and The Permeable Self: Five Medieval Relationships (2021).

Following these opening introductions, the volume is divided into three further sections each of which focuses on an area of Newman’s scholarship: “Mystics and (Revisions),” “Goddesses and Their Legacies,” and “Crossovers and Afterlives.” The first section contains essays that honor Newman’s contributions to studies of mysticism. For instance, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s essay gestures back to Newman’s first book as it highlights the influence of Romanesque enamels on Hildegard of Bingen’s illuminated manuscripts, countering a more reductive assumption that Hildegard’s miniatures represent her experience of migraines, a theory that Newman also contested. Jesse Njus’s article on the Feast of Corpus Christi, whose first office was composed by Juliana of Cornillon, reveals a “mimetic connection between the feminine and the body of Christ” (82), echoing and extending Newman’s argument for Juliana’s authorship. Nicholas Watson’s essay is perhaps most in the spirit of a dialogical engagement with Newman’s work as it extends Newman’s hypothesis that Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love is not based directly on a vision but on an intermediate B version of A Revelation of Love, which Watson calls “Sixteen Shewinges.” Watson uses Newman’s hypothesis to revise his own earlier arguments about Julian’s work and goes further to determine how the “Sixteen Shewinges” was revised into A Revelation, demonstrating that “Julian return[ed] to earlier materials to clarify illuminate, and in some cases correct after years or [sic] further reflection” (152), much as Watson himself is doing in this essay. Laura Saetveit Miles also builds on Newman’s work on Julian of Norwich by comparing Julian and Philip K. Dick, both of whom had visions that produced writing, a juxtaposition that takes inspiration from Newman’s comparison of Julian and William Langland (“Redeeming the Time: Langland, Julian, and the Art of Lifelong Revision” Yearbook of Langland Studies 23 (2009): 1–32).

The second section of the book, “Goddesses and Their Legacies,” engages with the legacy of God and the Goddesses. Essays in this section include Maeve Callan’s on the Blessed Virgin Mary’s cult in medieval Ireland, which was fluid and flexible enough to include an anti-Marianism that was used as a pretext by the English to burn the Irish as heretics as well as a (albeit brief) force of unity between English and Irish devotees. Katharine Breen’s essay draws on Newman’s argument that many of the embodied abstractions of medieval literature can be read as goddesses to look at pagan divinities, which Newman does not consider. In particular, Breen examines the appearance of Fame in the writings of authors from Hesiod and Virgil to Chaucer, arguing that Fame should be understood as having real as well as rhetorical power. Susan E. Phillips’ and Claire M. Water’s essay further builds on Newman’s work on Christian goddesses by examining courtesy books. Phillips and Waters uncover a small group of these books that incorporate allegorical feminine figures, taking Newman’s “cue not to take the goddess’s presence for granted and forget to ask why they are there” (292). By asking this question, the authors show how a group of courtesy books used goddesses such as Dame Curtasy, Mary, Facecia, and Elizabeth to supplement and critique their predecessors and navigate the interplay and crossover between sacred and secular, an argument that also gestures to Newman’s work in Medieval Crossover.

The final section of the book “Cross-overs and Afterlives” focuses more directly on the legacy of Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013). Carissa M. Harris’s intriguing essay focuses on the presence in medieval religious texts of what she calls “obscene pedagogy,” “an instructional mode, focusing on bodies and appetites that uses colorful verbs, vivid similes, alliteration, internal rhyme, violent physicality, and graphic details to teach lessons about sexual behavior” (320). Newman’s work on medieval crossover gives Harris a framework for thinking about how religious authors used obscenity for moral instruction. Finally, Dyan Elliott’s essay, the last in the volume, operates in line with Newman’s argument about goddess, which Elliott calls “a female principle concealed within the bastion of patriarchal theology” (377). Elliott argues that the cult of relics also harbors such duality as it contains residual paganism, joining irreverence with reverence.

If this volume appears eclectic, this is because the range of Newman’s work is so vast that, like many of the topics Newman herself explored, it exceeds categorization. These essays bear witness to a vibrant career as a scholar and teacher that has left a lasting mark on the field.