Truitt, E. R.

English

ScholarWorks at WMU

NANCY CACIOLA. DISCERNING SPIRITS: DIVINE AND DEMONIC POSSESSIONIN THE MIDDLE AGES. (CONJUNCTIONS OF RELIGION & POWER IN THEMEDIEVAL PAST.) CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS. 2003. PP. XVI, 327.Discerning Spirits is a religious authority and the naturevital addition to the recent cohort of of devotion. especially feminine. asbooks about medieval corporeality, well as in response to changes indemonic and divine possession. and philosophical and medical theoriesfemininity, such as Stuart Clark's about corporeality and sex differ-Thinking with Demons, Dyan ence. At the same time, CaciolaElliot's Fallen Bodies. and Gerhild illustrates that the relationship be-Williams' Defining Dominion. In tween discernment and its culturala study that is both broadly con- context was in some ways sym-ceptual and narrowly contextual. biotic: As accounts of possessionNancy Caciola offers a nuanced ac- increased during the later Middlecount of the medieval phenomenon Ages, laypeople, religious communi-of possession, both demonic and ties, and Catholic church officialsdivine, and the practice of discern- sought new interpretative frame-ment. or testing, used to determine works which were at times comple-the source of the possession. Ca- mentary and sometimes in conflict.ciola deftly unpacks the questions Discerning Spirits com-of social and religious epistemology prises three parts; each one is bothinherent in testing spirits (or, as it a stand-alone extended inquiry intoappears, testing the subject). By an aspect ofpossession and discern-concentrating both on the politics ment as well as part of the largerof knowledge production and the argument of the book. The authorformation of categories necessary begins with disputes over discern-to discernment, and also focusing ment in the late medieval periodon the content of the discernment and the larger cultural implicationsdispute itself, the author illustrates that such disputes engendered. Bythe ways in which questions of pos- examining the characteristics ofsession are intricately bound up bothdemonic and divine possessionwith social. religious, and political and three case studies of posses-currents. The book concentrates sion, Caciola adroitly sketches theon the period between the thir- ways in which discernment was ateenth and fifteenth centuries and process involving factors of identityoutlines how methods and criteria politics. community prestige. andfor testing spirits changed in this political alliances. Furthermore.period. These methods and criteria the case-study approach underlinesevolved in response to social. politi- the pointthat despite papal bullsorcal. and ecclesiastical concerns over theological ideologies. testingspirits54varied widely according to location,time, and political and social factors.The second part of the book inves-tigates some of the contemporaryepistemological issues concerningcorporeality, spirits, and sex differ-ence. Bymapping the semantic fieldfor sex-linked words, Caciola dem-onstrates that women were believedto be more vulnerable to possessionthan men because female bodieswere considered more malleableand porous. This porosity, due tothe female humoral complexion,meant that women's bodies weremore easily penetrated by spirits.Thephysiological basis for thebeliefin women's greater susceptibilityto possession led to an attempt toinstitute intellectual categories fordivine and demonic possession.The model ultimately fell short, as itlacked practical criteria for reconcil-ing the interior states of the subjectwith the exterior manifestations ofher symptoms. Finally, in Part III,Caciola chronicles the shift fromthe conditions ofpossibility ofeitherdemonic or divine possession in thethirteenth and fourteenth centuriesto the assumption in the fifteenthcentury that all possession wasexclusively demonic. As discern-ment shifted toward exorcism, thecorrelation between the priest asdivine and the possessed womanas demonic, not merely demoniac,55intensified and ultimately solidified.Although many of the peo-ple claiming visionary status werewomen, the author examines howmale and female possessed were"tested" using different assump-tions and criteria, as well as whyclaimants were eventually embodiedas exclusively female. Sheis acutelyaware of how status and prestige--of the individual, the community,and the Church-may have shapedboth the claims of visionaries andtheir reception by their communitiesand the Church. Additionally, Ca-ciola acknowledges the problems in-herent in relying on hagiographicalsources, yetskillfully minesthemforevidence about the attitudes towardand reception ofa would-be saint byher community. Her analysis drawsattention to the difficulties ofbridg-ing the gap both in the medievalperiod and now, historiographically,between the internal experienceof the possessed and the externalevaluations of those women on thepart of the Church, yet she succeedsin her attempt as far as one can byreading vitae, hagiographies, can-onization trial records, and othersources in a way that is criticallyinformed by the literature of sub-jective experience and by posingquestions about the nature of medi-eval categories of religious identity.In a book as thoughtful asthis one, and as carefully attunedto theways inwhich social pressure,self-interest, political hierarchy, andinstitutional ideology can influencethe formation, both by .. self" and.. other," of religious identity, it isstartling that questions of class arenot more prevalent. In theIntroduc-tion, Caciola provides the standardbackground to the .. social revolu-tion" of the post-rnillennial periodinto the mid-twelfth century, andnotes that shiftsin inheritance prac-tices among the elite, the growingmiddle class, increased urbaniza-tion, and intellectual expansionall contributed to a surge in layreligious groups and increasedparticipation by women in thosegroups. What is missing, however,is a mention that these new lay re-ligious groups were more likely todraw their members from the newmiddle class or underclass (as wasthe case with the Waldensians andearly Fontevrists). The authorconvincingly posits that the Churchattempted to control the categoriesof possession and the process ofcanonization as a response to the in-crease in lay religious communitiesin the later Middle Ages. It wouldbe interesting to know if part of thisprocess of control mapped onto thesocio-economic struggles betweenthe lay elite and the burgeoningmiddle class. However, this is a caseof an ambitious and well-executedproject raising the reader's expec-tations, rather than meeting them.Discerning Spirits contributes muchS6that is new and provocative to thefields of medieval history, women'shistory, and religious studies.E.R. TRUITTHARVARD UNIVERSITY

Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages. Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past. Cornell Press, 2003

https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1165&context=mff

Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages. Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past. Cornell Press, 2003

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