Hollywood, Amy M.

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Renaissance and Baroque Prints (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1990); Diane Wolfthal, "'A Hue and a Cry':Medieval Rape Imagery and Its Transformation," Art History March 1993, 62 n. 12.3 See Pamela Shelngorn, "Medieval Drama Studies and the New Art History," Medievaiia: A Journal of MedievalStudies 18, 143·162 for a recent analysis of the New Art History.Wiethaus, Ulrike, Ecstatic Transformation: Transpersonal Psychology in the Work ofMechthild ofMagdeburg. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996.Ulrike Wiethaus' ambitious goal is to make medieval mysticism intellectuallyaccessible to a modem western audience (2).To do this, she draws analogiesbetween modem psychologies open to the existence and significance of "alteredstates of consciousness" and the accounts of ecstasies and visions withinMechthild of Magdeburg's The Flowing Light of the Godhead. The study is dividedinto two parts, the first focusing on ecstasy and the second on visions. After anintroduction in which Wiethaus outlines her method and makes somepreliminary claims about the context for Mechthild's book, Chapter 2 describesMechthild's understanding of ecstasy, particularly as found in Book 1 of TheFlowing Light. This is followed by two chapters describing contemporarypsychological accounts of ecstasy, in particular the work of humanisticpsychologists Abraham Maslow and Roberto Assagioli and thepsychotherapeutic approaches of Arthur Deikman and Claudio Naranjo.Wiethaus suggests both the explanatory power of these models forunderstanding and making accessible Mechthild's work and subjects thecontemporary psychologies to critique from the perspective of Mechthild's work.Chapter 5 again returns to Mechthild, describing the visions found in Book 2 ofThe Flowing Light. Wiethaus closes her book by arguing that contemporarypsychophysiological approaches to visionary phenomena offer fruitful-although crucially limited-modes of access to medieval experience.This brief synopsis merely suggests the wide array of topics on which Wiethaustouches in her brief book. She clearly knows The Flowing Light well, and offersinsightful readings of important aspects of the text. Any of a number of mysticaltexts would have served for Wiethaus' project, yet I find her most compellingwhen she focuses on the particularities of Mechthild's book. Although on firstreading I was troubled by Wiethaus' assertion that "self-actualization" and"altered states of consciousness" could be taken as "approximatetwentieth-century equivalents" for medieval conceptions of deificatio, visio,alienatio mentislfruitio/raptus, she is careful throughout her study to note bothpoints of analogy and disanalogy, reiterating the divide between Mechthild's textand twentieth-century assumptions. Most crucially, Wiethaus keeps firmly inmsight the divergence between Mechthild's belief in a deity that transcendshumanity and the human-centered work of contemporary psychologists.What these contemporary psychologists offer, according to Wiethaus, is a wayfor contemporary audiences to begin to understand the power, authority,fruitfulness, and self-fulfillment Mechthild attained through her ecstasies andvisions. Yet understanding occurs through a thorough acquaintance with thelanguage and context of the text. For this reason, and despite my lack ofcompetence to judge the plausibility of the psychological theories Wiethausdiscusses, I remain unconvinced that she needs them to make her argumentabout Mechthild's book or that contemporary explanatory theories can ever helpus understand medieval texts more fully. Modern psychology may offer causalexplanations of aspects of the text, but as Wayne Proudfoot shows in ReligiousExperience, this is another project. Wiethaus is not always clear whether hercomparison of medieval and contemporary views is meant only to serve as anilluminating analogy, or whether she understands modern psychological viewsas explaining the medieval text in this more precise sense. As I will mentionagain below, she suggests in places that modern views explain the physicalphenomena, while the understanding and significance of these phenomenachange in diverse historical and cultural contexts.Some readers working on medieval mysticism may also question Wiethaus'ssharp distinction between ecstasies and visions. She recognizes that for manymedieval women the visionary imagination and ecstatic union merge, yet insiststhat the enormous number of visions and auditions that occur in The FlowingLight without mention of ecstatic transformation demands a differentiationbetween the two phenomena (122-23). The point is well taken, yet the reader stillwonders about the relationship between the two.This issue is raised again by Wiethaus's approach to The Flowing Lightas awhole. In her discussion of the text's ecstatic elements, particularly as found inBook I, Wiethaus usefully argues that readers might best approach the book as"a manual of ecstatic transformation" (33). Even more strongly, Wiethaus arguesthat Mechthild "intended her writings as instructions for others rather thanobjective descriptions of experiences" (81). In her reading of the visions of Book2, however, Wiethaus giv~s a slightly different account of the text's genre andintent; "Mechthild's ecstasies ... were intended to be reexperienced by heraudience, but visions were her exclusive and unique property" and merelyprovided the reader with information (123). The claim that the visions areintended to give practical moral and religious advice to a readership not gracedwith such extraordinary experiences seems at odds with an account of the bookas a whole as "a manual for ecstatic transformation." Marianne Heimbach arguesfor a tighter relationship between the ecstatic and the visionary within TheFlowing Light, both for the speaking "I" of the text and for the reader, in that thevisionary material gives the cosmological, theological, and practical elaborationof and context out of which the ecstatic emerges and reemerges. AlthoughHeimbach may assert greater coherence to Mechthild's text than it possesses, asone who knows the book well Wiethaus might usefully return to this question.She suggests something like this relation, when she writes that "Mechthildinterpreted ecstasies as existentially and intellectually transformative events ...Visions, on the other hand, are the medium in which the relationship between ahuman being and the divine is translated back into the fabric of 'ordinary' life"(121). Unlike Heimbach, however, Wiethaus denies the transformative quality ofvisionary experience.Wiethaus presents her work as preliminary and, like The Flowing Lightitself,open-ended. In that same spirit I would like to raise an issue broached in the finalpages of Wiethaus' study-one which I think warrants further reflection fromthose interested in bringing together contemporary explanatory frameworks withmedieval texts. Throughout her study, Wiethaus assumes that some account ofexperience--whether ecstatic or visionary---ean be unproblematically deducedfrom the text. With regard to ecstasies Wiethaus reads Mechthild as guide andtheoretician, whereas the visionary accounts are taken as simply descriptive. Yet inboth instances, that which lies behind or beyond the text is deemed accessible tothe modern reader. Despite her attempt carefully to note analogies anddisanalogies between Mechthild's experience and that described in contemporarypsychologies, moreover, she does assert a common core of shared experienceuntouched by the interpretative overlay of differing cultural contexts. In a movemarkedly divergent from most of the perennialist philosophies with which sheshares this opinion, for example, Wiethaus equates the unchanging aspect ofvisionary phenomena with the body and its significance with the influence ofreligious and secular teachings and traditions (149).In the final pages of her book Wiethaus briefly touches on the debatessurrounding the relationship between experience and interpretation recentlyreopened by the work of philosopher of religion Steven Katz. She sides withPeter Moore and Philip Almond, who argue, according to Wiethaus, that"religious experience is crucially, but not necessarily, dependent on a beliefsystem" (613). I am not sure what the distinction is between "crucially" and"necessarily," nor, more importantly, how religious experience can be identifiedas such without some reference to systems of belief and practice. Moreover, bothMoore and Almond operate with a distinction between experience andinterpretation that has been subject to continued attack by philosophers ofreligion interested in mysticism and religious experience. Given the intensity ofthe debate and its extreme relevance to the questions Wiethaus raises, simplyasserting her agreement with Moore and Almond seems inadequate.mAs Frank Tobin has recently demonstrated in Mechthild ofMagdeburg: A MedievalMystic in Modern Eyes, a related debate runs through the work medievalists havedone on mystical and visionary literature. Here the argument is betweenhistorians, who-to put the matter far more simply than do any of the scholars inquestion-assert that we can talk about the mystical and visionary experience ofmedieval men and women on the basis of textual accounts (Peter Dinzelbacherand Caroline Walker Bynum) and literary historians who insist on the fictionalityand artfulness of medieval visionary, mystical, and hagiographicalliterature,thereby calling into question the extent to which we can claim an historicalreferent for the experiences recounted within them (Siegfried Ringler and UrsulaPeters). Wiethaus begins with a very perceptive account of the genre ofMechthild's text, yet goes on to infer the nature of her experience withoutadequate attention to the ways in which that experience has been textuallyshaped. Or perhaps more aptly, Wiethaus sometimes reads Mechthild as atheoretician of her own experience parallel to modern psychologists andsometimes suggests that the textual shaping is the interpretative overlay beneathwhich some "raw experience" can be discerned. Yet within the wealth ofmaterial Wiethaus presents, I am not sure that she offers a theoretical account ofhow this can be done. Perhaps before a fully compelling understanding ofMechthild of Magdeburg's experience (and that described by contemporarypsychologists) can be attained, we need some theoretically plausible account ofthe literary nature of her text, the degree to which it allows us to talk about herexperience, and the manner in which this process of recovery is to take place.Such an exploration might also untangle the relationship between analogy,understanding, and explanation in Wiethaus' thought-provoking work.Amy M. HollywoodDartmouth Collegem

Ulrike Wiethaus, Ecstatic Transformation: Transpersonal Psychology in the Work of Mechthild of Magdeburg. Syracuse University Press, 1996

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Ulrike Wiethaus, Ecstatic Transformation: Transpersonal Psychology in the Work of Mechthild of Magdeburg. Syracuse University Press, 1996

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