This is a spellbinding book. McNamer has taken on one of the biggest questions there is in medieval studies: why the shift from worshipping a triumphant Christ to meditating on a suffering savior? The only other person ambitious enough to attempt to answer this question directly in recent years is Rachel Fulton, who memorably argued in From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003) that it was a theological response to anxiety incurred by the millennium of Christ's passion. For Fulton, as for most scholars, the key instigators of the change were male theologians, spurred by their own fear. By contrast, McNamer argues that the change was instead motivated by women, and by society's changing conceptions of marriage in particular. It is a stark contrast, and a classic case of what Joan Scott long ago proclaimed gender history could do: enable us to see old problems in a new light, and to demonstrate that gender can make all the difference. Not coincidentally, this study also rids marriage of its mustiness, presenting the hoary institution as both catalyst and register of complex cultural change.

If McNamer puts more emphasis on culture and gender than theology, it is in part because she, like John Corrigan, believes that religionists have too readily conflated religious emotions with theological ideas. McNamer redresses this problem by starting with the assumption that emotions, including religious emotions, are habits produced through cultural scripts. Scripts change as cultures change, and thus the history of emotions requires cultural analysis. But McNamer's own mode of analysis yields original conclusions because she pursues her historical argument not only by analyzing context but also form. It is in and through her attention to genre—here the broadly conceived genre of affective meditations and, in the last chapter, the more specific form of devotional lyrics—that McNamer shifts the focus from theological sources to textual effects. Given what these texts do, what might we conclude about why they were written?

What McNamer finds is that, above all, these texts provide readers with proof that their love for Christ is real. She takes seriously, then, that in many devotional texts the reader is presented as a bride betrothed to Christ, seeking assurance that this promise of marriage will be fulfilled. In the legal parlance of the time, the fulfillment of the promise was contingent on proofs of love. McNamer persuasively demonstrates that this bridal language was not solely or even primarily allegorical. Because these texts were written for and, in some cases, by nuns and recluses who were ritually and legally betrothed to Christ as sponsae Christi, it is important to recognize that much of the language addressed a literal situation. The Song of Songs is not the only, and often not the dominant, source. As McNamer puts it in a characteristically deft description of her methodological assumptions, sometimes marital discourse was literalized because “sometimes bodies do make a semiotic difference.” While the identity of sponsa might be a “provisional persona” for men, “female religious—precisely because they were female—could participate in another signifying system, this one social and historical: if the standard rituals were enacted, chastity observed, and, crucially, the fitting feelings repeatedly performed, female religious could become literally, by which I mean legally, married to Christ—not only in this life but for all eternity” (28). This claim to literalism may sound naïve to those of us accustomed to insisting upon the allegorical nature of all bridal motifs in Christianity (and Judaism), but McNamer's sophisticated textual analysis should assuage most doubts.

The first four chapters, in particular, are filled with compelling arguments about texts both well known and obscure. A close reading of The Wooing of Our Lord, a puzzling Middle English alliterative prayer, demonstrates how the prayer scripted the inner disposition necessary for the anchoresses who wished to prove to themselves and others that they were worthy to marry Christ. McNamer's analysis of the prayers of John of Fécamp and Anselm conclusively shifts attention from the narrator's “impassioned I”—the voice that has long fascinated scholars—to the intended readers, most likely aristocratic religious women seeking to become brides of Christ. The argument about the authorship of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditations on the Life of Christ—one of the most widely circulated texts in medieval Christianity—challenges the widespread assumption that devotion to the suffering Christ was a thoroughly Franciscan phenomenon. McNamer's interpretation of the “affective dissonance” in the Meditations, a point illustrated with a persuasive readings of the text's two versions of the crucifixion—with one version expressing a typically Franciscan desire to temper the dangers implicit in worshipping a vulnerable divinity and the other thoroughly exploiting the emotional connection this vulnerability enables—is a tour de force. The claim that a nun authored one part of the text that was integrated into the Meditations is more speculative, but it is not essential to her overall argument about the centrality of women and women's concerns to the development of medieval interest in compassion. And although her reading of Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ may seem to rely uncritically on gender binaries by arguing that it, like other vernacular devotional texts, taught readers how to feel compassion by putting them in female subject positions, her astute focus on the centrality of the verb behold offers a revealing and convincing account of how the text engendered emotional responses.

In the final two chapters, the readings are put to service of more speculative arguments about how the texts challenge rather than reinforce social norms. Here McNamer's analysis is both more conventionally literary and less persuasive in moving from the specifics of the text to broad social claims about a) pacifist challenges to a prevailing bellicosity and b) the inadequacies of late medieval Catholicism and a new fixity in gender norms and norms of masculinity in particular. On the latter point, John Boswell is her primary source, and she fails to engage the important, and more recent, studies about homosociality in late medieval and early modern England (for example, Alan Bray, author of Homosexuality in Renaissance England [New York: Columbia University Press, 1995], is invoked only as author of The Friend [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006], and the nuanced arguments by Bray, and those he inspired, about same-sex relations are not addressed). In these chapters, arguments about the fluidity in the texts themselves largely substitute for the kind of social analysis that buttresses her argument in the first half of the book. Nevertheless this is, as I said at the outset, an enormously exciting book, and should inspire us all to reconsider platitudes about the Franciscan revolution and our assumptions about what motivated male theologians and lay Christians to worship the crucified savior.