Much of the initial interest in medieval women's religious lives and writings focused primarily on the bodies of women and women's extraordinary embodied experiences of God. Medieval women writers were initially viewed primarily as saints, mystics, and visionaries, or as exemplars of a distinctively feminine spirituality, and it is only in recent decades that attention has shifted to the properly theological content of their writings, as well as the deceptively simple question of what is meant by “the body” in our interpretation of those writings. As Amy Hollywood has shown, in their own words women frequently show less interest in bodily experience and phenomena than is often attributed to them. Preoccupation with embodiment may be less a feature of medieval women's writings than of contemporary scholarship.

In her Promised Bodies: Time, Language, and Corporeality in Medieval Women's Mystical Texts, Patricia Dailey continues this nuanced reevaluation of medieval women's writings. She asks readers of medieval women's texts to reconsider the way in which embodiment appears in their writings, particularly in light of the temporal dimension of their experience. With primary focus on the thirteenth-century visionary and poet Hadewijch of Brabant (often taken as the exemplar of embodied, feminine, erotic bridal mysticism), but including passing reference to Hildegard of Bingen, Marguerite d'Oingt, and Julian of Norwich, Dailey suggests a new way of reading women's mysticism in light of a twofold anthropology that more firmly situates medieval women's writings within the mainstream (masculine) Christian tradition. Drawing on Pauline and Augustinian anthropology, Dailey notes that for Christians, the body is always twofold, both inner and outer. While the inner person is made in the image of God and renewed in Christ, and the inner spiritual senses encounter God in extraordinary, if momentary, visionary or mystical experience, the outer person is slowly transformed in time through good works, and only gradually conforms to the promise of union. What at first glance appears dualistic is in fact the temporal dimension of the embodied human person stretched between the “already” of the Trinitarian imago, the “occasional” of extraordinary mystical experience, and the “not yet” of full conformity to Christ or union with God.

For medieval women such as Hadewijch, this temporal disjunction both gives rise to writing and must be read. Bodily experience must be “read” in light of the exegetical tradition, through both language and time, and writing, for Dailey, manifests both the remembrance of a momentary union and the promised unity of the temporal body with the eternal God. While theological writing surely contains its own temporal disjunctions and paradoxes in its attempt to say what cannot be said, Dailey is right to link the body with the letter through the necessity of reading and interpretation. In order to discern the imago within, human experience must be read according to the inner person; the promised body is always mediated through language and within textual communities of women and men. What Dailey calls the “poetics of embodiment” connects the bodies of medieval women to the literary and theological context in which they lived—and the theological to the literary in general.

In this thoroughly researched, clearly written, and persuasively argued study, Dailey succeeds in situating medieval women's mystical writings more firmly within both their contemporary context (Bernard of Clairvaux and the Victorines) and the Western Christian tradition (Paul, Origen, Augustine, and Gregory) in order to argue for the continuity of women's writings with the theological tradition. In Dailey's approach, medieval women evidence remarkable theological insight and literary creativity that is largely contiguous, if not devoid of all tension, with the masculine Christian tradition. While the notion of “promised bodies” might hint to Christian readers at the general resurrection, Dailey's focus is firmly in this world: the promised bodies of women and men that are transformed in time, both already and not yet, as the outer body conforms to the inner and becomes the living manifestation of Christ. This work of historical theology will be essential for libraries, graduate students, and scholars of medieval theology in general and of women's mysticism in particular, along with all those interested in the question of embodiment and the relationship between theology and poetics.