Divine Domesticity: Augustine of Thagaste to Teresa of Avila.

Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle, (Studies in the History of Christian Thought, 74.) Leiden and New York: E.J. Brill, 1997. x + 295 pp. $103.50. ISBN: 90-04-10675-8.

The domestic household underwent a sanctification in the nineteenth century when the cult of family values became a stable refuge in a tumultuous, forboding world. But the notion of home meant something very different in the Christian world of the previous centuries, as Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle demonstrates in her new book. Indeed, for the earlier Christian there could be no domestic permanence in an alien world where the natural state was to be cast adrift, a bare and windscourged figure of sin. Only the kingdom of heaven could provide that ultimate resting place. But where then did this leave the earthly home? Exploring domesticity and all its attendant associations - architecture, doctrine, family kinships, the public and the private - Boyle ambitiously sets out to answer the question and succeeds in occasionally brilliant ways.

Christian scorn for the earthly home, according to Boyle, was not to be found in the Bible since the gospel abounded in images of Jesus entering homes to preach, heal, and join others in supper (including, of course, the last one). Boyle's claim here is somewhat problematic for it tends to simplify a gospel whose attitude toward home can be read any number of different ways. Nevertheless, for Boyle such a claim is necessary in establishing her argument in chapter 1 that Augustine was the first to really sever the terrestrial from the celestial and shift Jesus' location (and thus "home") "from a material architectural place to an immaterial spiritual space" (33), thereby rendering earth nothing more than a temporary waystation for the rootless Christian.

In the middle ages, Bernard of Clairvaux would create another kind of construct in his luminous Cistercian sanctuaries. According to Boyle, however, even they were not homes but rather liminal places, made so by a perpetual unprocreating "youth" whose natural state was always "in departure or on route" (85). So effective was Bernard at drawing individuals away from their familial abodes that "mothers hid their sons, wives detained their husbands, and kin averted their kinsmen" (80). Women, however, could be equally home-hating, choosing instead to transfer their roles onto a spiritual plane as wife, mother, and daughter of God. Margery Kempe, for example, never even named her children or husband in her autobiography, as she contrasted the "cleanliness of her imaginary marriage with Christ" to "the foulness of her actual marriage to anonymous" (135).

For Petrarch in his exiled Vauclusian villa, on the other hand, the household and the holy were not quite antithetical, just as the sacred and secular were no longer so rigidly divided. Alberti especially viewed the resurrected

classical villa as a place of nurture and familial devotion, dominated by a morality that harmoniously fused the civic and the Christian. Even so, the Renaissance villa "was not an entirely moral dwelling," Boyle writes, but also a place of scheming and amoral machinating behind varying degrees of walled privacy and privilege, where women had only marginal roles at best (156).

The web of associations that Boyle weaves throughout her book can at times turn labyrinthine, and she is not altogether successful in moving back and forth between doctrine and history. Nevertheless, her book utilizes a huge range of reference to enlightening and creative effect. Her interpretations are especially strong in the last chapter when she discusses castles, including Philip II's own creation, the Escorial, which was not a residence so much as "a dynastic tomb, like the Egyptian pyramids" (239). The most famous castle of all, however, was Teresa of Avila's interior palace of the mind, looming and shimmering in diamond crystalline light on foundations of works and humility. But even Teresa's edifice was never a home, and certainly not secure; on the contrary, Teresa's castle was a place of aerial demons diabolically combatting for her soul, bringing her to "suppose danger everywhere" and leading her, in the end, not to heaven, "but only [to] purgatory: burning" (278).

SARAH COVINGTON City University of New York, The Graduate School and University Center