Alicia Spencer-Hall, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens:
Divine Visions as Cinematic Experience. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
2017.
Reviewed by Daisy Black (d.black3@wlv.ac.uk)
Three pages into Medieval Saints and Modern Screens, we are
greeted with a dissection of the sensory processes involved in the interaction
between a reader and a book:
‘Even in the most superficially two-dimensional interaction
between reader and book, for instance, we find the visual (the words on the
page), the haptic (turning the page), the imaginative and intellectual
(processing the words’ meaning), and even the olfactory (the smell of the
book).’ (p. 13).
Arguing that sensual engagement is a fundamental quality of
hagiographic literature, the book goes on, with each soft crackle of the
printed page, to make a compelling case for text as a visual, tactile and
cinematic medium. Noting that studies
have for some time been likening the narratives of female saints to
screenplays, films, and even pornography, Spencer-Hall takes this argument to
the next level. Medieval Saints is an
innovative exploration of the themes, topics and desires expressed in medieval
saints’ vitae and in modern visual cultures.
Claiming that ‘mysticism, or at least a desire for mysticism […]
continues to exist in and as cinema’ (p. 12), it offers a striking
interrogation of the thirteenth-century Latin biographies of the holy women of
Liège.
The introduction ‘Ecstatic Cinema, Cinematic Ecstasy’
provides a welcome history of the religious women of thirteenth-century
Brabant-Liège. This covers the
socio-economic factors leading to the growth of non-monastic female spiritual
communities as well as their relationship to the male, clerical powers which
advised, and ultimately defined them through writing vitae of certain exemplary
women. The problems caused by our own
scholarly projections upon this comparatively under-studied area – most
particularly the propensity to group holy women under the homogenising label
‘beguine’ – become an important focus here.
Spencer-Hall also stakes out alternative ways of theorising the
relationship between subject and object, gaze and agency, arguing for the
possibility of a mutual, agape-ic gaze.
This kind of exchange, she finds, is as present in the modern
cinema-goer’s gaze at a screen as it is in medieval visionaries encountering
God. While discussions of mutuality in
spectatorship and performance are also currently emerging in early drama
criticism, this theorization successfully challenges Mulvey’s often-reproduced
yet under-challenged theories of cinematic spectatorship as always inherently
objectifying. Shared elements between
hagiographic and cinematic processes and genres support Spencer-Hall’s
challenge. These include the repetition
of recognisable themes, tropes, events and patterns; the inter-textual and
inter-visual incorporation of prior texts and images; claims of authenticity
and the imitation of reality; the role of both as popular cultural sources and
the possibility for transcendence offered by both medieval female mysticism and
modern cinematic and digital cultures.
Drawing parallels between the ways in which the ‘truth
claims’ of photography, film and saint biography are destabilised by their own
authorial construction, the first chapter interrogates how both the photograph
and the saint’s life appear to operate outside linear time. This proves a useful way to explain medieval
conceptions of earthly time and eternal sacred time. Temporal and a-temporal forms, Spencer-Hall
argues, intersect in the visions of Margaret of Ypres, Ida of Léau, Juliana of
Mont-Cornillon and Elisabeth of Spalbeek, all of whom interact with figures
from the biblical past. The apparent
ability of film, with its ability to preserve, repeat and rewind events is then
linked to the deaths and resuscitations of Christina Mirabilis through a
striking discussion of Nolan’s 2008 film The Dark Knight. Spencer-Hall reads Heath Ledger’s Joker and
Christina as purgatorial bodies existing between presence and absence. Through a series of close readings of the
vitae of Lutgard of Aywières and Alice of Schaerbeek, Spencer-Hall highlights
the ways percussive textual elements and repetition similarly work to
temporally dislocate their audiences.
This constitutes a refreshing development of theoretical approaches
which have until now chiefly examined religious temporality in relation to
figures such as St Augustine, whose works explicitly address theologies of
time.
The second chapter engages with current discussions
concerning medieval optics, embodied spectatorship and the power dynamics at
play in theories of intromission and extromission. Its primary focus is the concept of sight as
mutual touch; particularly when the ‘object’ gazed upon by the saint is
God. Providing a useful overview of medieval
vision, including Bacon’s model of synthesis and its origin in Arab scientist
Alhazen’s work Kitab al-manaziŕ, Spencer-Hall highlights how much this differs
from the modern ocular-centric view of the active, objectifying ‘male gaze’. Engaging with theories of embodied cinematic
spectatorship, she considers how Beatrice of Nazareth, Juliana of
Mont-Cornillon and Margaret of Ypres achieve spiritual, synesthetic and often
viscerally physical fusion with the objects of their visions. As modern DNA research shows that
manuscripts retain traces of all who touch them (including parchment makers,
scribes, readers and the animal whose skin bears the text) Spencer-Hall makes a
compelling case for the academic textual gaze as equally subject to the embodied
synthesis of touch. This provides an
interesting development of arguments concerning the medieval body-as-vellum,
and will no doubt provide fertile ground for the newest work emerging on the
queer qualities of manuscripts.[i]
Chapter three focuses on the relationship between
hagiographer and saint via modern processes of ‘celebrification’. Focusing on Jacques of Vitry and Marie of
Oignies, this highlights how the hagiographer manipulated Marie’s vita to
produce ‘an A-list holy icon’ (p. 147).
Examining Marie as a textual product enables Spencer-Hall to consider
the functions that product was designed to perform – in this case, as Crusade
propaganda, as a model of holy behaviour for other laywomen and as a means of
advancing Jacques’ own ecclesiastical career.
The discussion of the utility of saint’s lives as legitimising models
for other women is one of the most exciting aspects of this book. Margery Kempe’s attempt to mirror the events,
actions, tropes and tears of her own life with those of Marie are analysed
alongside the auto-celebrification processes employed by ‘reality’ stars such
as Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian-West.
The discussion of Kempe and Kardashian-West’s ‘ugly crying’ hints at
transtemporal and misogynist resistance towards women ‘taking up space’ with
their emotions. Meanwhile, the popular
disgust engendered by both women’s manufacturing of their own divine/secular
fame produces a striking insight into why both have tended to generate a range
of emotive responses in their popular and academic audiences.
Throughout, Spencer-Hall calls attention to the textual and
physical labour involved in saint/star-creation. Towards the chapter’s close, she reveals the
mechanics of her own academic process, reminding us that, although Kempe failed
in her bid for holy auto-celebritization, she still holds currency as an
academic celebrity. If we are to
continue with the theme of utility, it would be fair to suggest that this
chapter is likely to be highly useful to teachers of medieval devotional culture
and of Kempe due to its perceptive use of current celebrity culture to examine
the complex processes involved in saint-formation.[ii] Yet it also provokes a larger discussion of
academic critical processes by identifying how academics themselves act as fannish
agents of celebrification.
The final chapter considers the collapsed times inherent in
medieval visionaries’ access to ‘the communion of saints’ via the lens of
online virtual spaces. Through a series
of interviews with Christians who practice their faith online in the virtual
environment Second Life (SL), Spencer-Hall examines the experiences of saints
who were able to ‘log in’ to the spiritual realm and even, like Elisabeth of
Spalbeek and Marie of Lille, encounter one another there. This provides a welcome re-examination of the
immersiveness of medieval devotional practices; in particular, the individual’s
desire to insert themselves into major events from the Bible. This is particularly resonant in the discussion
of a virtual crucifixion, which encourages its users to undergo a virtual form
of imitatio Christi. A useful resource
might be found here by those working on liturgical drama as well as later lay
religious performances, which likewise encouraged participants and audiences to
immerse themselves in biblical chronologies.
The parallels between modern and medieval forms of media
experience were a little less cohesive here than in some of the earlier
chapters. This was partly because the
more accessible online community environments do not as comfortably align with
what the monograph’s prior discussion of Kempe had convincingly demonstrated
was the highly exclusive, barely accessible position of
hagiographically-sanctioned female visionary.
Nevertheless, the chapter’s analysis of the collapse between avatar and
individual, creator and reader and between audience and performance calls for a
thorough reconsideration of the kinds of terminology we use to describe
hagiographical, textual and performance production forms. The subversive potential of the virtual is
never far away; particularly when medieval spiritual and modern online
environments are used to bypass (male) clerical gatekeeping of the Eucharist.
Medieval studies, and more recently, medievalism, have long
considered themselves among the most interdisciplinary fields. This work, however, manages to reach
something beyond that. Probing the
interconnections between medieval women and their biographers as well as
between texts, times, celebrities and media, Medieval Saints constitutes a rare
example of someone working outside medievalism producing an important and
insightful comparative reading of medieval and modern popular and spiritual
cultures.
Medieval Saints produces a robust response to decades of
neglect of hagiographical sources.
Through her trans-temporal, transmedia study, Spencer-Hall repeatedly
demonstrates how much the narratives of holy women might contribute to a number
of studies outside the direct field of hagiography, including lay theology; the
theorisation of vision and time; discussions of medieval self-creation; textual
production and performance studies.
While the lives of these women have frequently been marginalised in
scholarship Spencer-Hall powerfully demonstrates their immediacy and relevance
for our current times.
One of the most interesting approaches adopted by
Spencer-Hall is the critical decision to reflect on the process of constructing
her own argument, including which texts the book privileges and excises, which
forms of visual and textual encounter are interrogated, and how the author’s
own perspective has shaped the work. By
exposing the (wo)man behind the curtain, the monograph makes important progress
in the movement away from the misleading pretence of practising objectivity in
historical criticism; recognising that all historical approaches are informed
by the values, perspectives, bodies, and even pop-cultural backgrounds of the
historian. While Medieval Saints and
Modern Screens provides a solid argument for cinematic and saintly encounters
as forms of bodily transcendence, the academic body remains something we cannot
honestly claim to transcend.
[i] See
the forthcoming essays contained in Roberta Magnani and Diane Watt, ed., ‘Queer
Manuscripts’, postmedieval 9.3 (2018).
[ii] There
is of course, some irony in that, given time, the memory and significance of
these reality stars will be usurped by other figures.
Daisy Black
University of Wolverhampton
