Customer Reviews

God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (The Middle Ages Series)

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Barbara Newman's study of the amazing Hildegard of Bingen (Sister of Wisdom) remains one of the best in the field. In this book, she introduces us to imaginative theology and reveals that the God of medieval Christendom was the Father of one Son but also of many daughters -- including Lady Philosophy, Lady Love, Dame Nature, and Eternal Wisdom. Newman shows us that these goddesses are not just pagan survivals but are distinctive creations of the Christian imagination. Dense and scholarly, this book is also a pleasure to read and has ramifications for our own age of self-conscious struggle with the language and symbols of the Divine.

I discovered this book some months ago, and have been reading it steadily ever since. It is one of those books that synthesizes so much of what has gone before, but is almost revolutionary in its insight. Barbara Newman has discovered something that has been "hidden in plain sight" throughout the last few centuries of Christianity: how goddesses could co-exist with the one God and of the presence of many varied forms of the "divine feminine" in medieval Catholicism. These include the virtues who were daughters of God, Mary, often seen as his bride, the divine Lady Love, or Frau Karitas, which is identified with both Christ himself and the love that is in the Christian soul. Most fascinating of all is the treatment of Sapientia, Sophia, or Wisdom, a very important figure in both the Old and New Testaments. The very first Christology identified the Second Person of the Trinity with Sophia-Wisdom. While many of the attributes of Wisdom passed over to the Virgin Mary when Christ became definitively identified with the masculine Logos, the memory of Christ as Sapientia was passed down to the Middle Ages and embodied in a number of forms, including the Jesus as maternal wisdom in Julian of Norwich, and Christ-wisdom as the bride of the monk's soul in the Horologium Sapientiae of the fourteenth-century Dominican Henry Suso. The allegorical poems and the many fascinating examples of art that are included in the book show how thoroughly and with what depth these female figures informed medieval "imaginative" theology. I wish that all the Dan-Brown loving neo-pagan goddessess worshipers who write such unscholarly mush about Sophia (without actually knowing any ancient or medieval texts), and who believe that the "divine feminine" has no embodiment in Christianity could read this book. In fact, everyone should read this book if they want to be informed about this fascinating subject.

Barbara Newman's "God and the Goddesses" is a gold standard for what top-notch scholarship about medieval religion should be. She combines deeply learned accounts of standard and lesser-known texts with provocative insights, never sacrificing rigor for trendiness nor textual evidence for ideological goals. She lets the texts speak, and the story they tell is riveting. Although I find it very confusing that so many people are not medievalists, I suspect this book will help tilt the balance in our favor.