Doreen Fischer. Witwe als weiblicher Lebensentwurf in deutschen Texten des 13. bis 16. Jahrhunderts.

(Europaische Hochschulschriften: Deutsche Sprache und Literatur, 1:1820.) Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002. Pbk. 296 pp. bibl. $47.95. ISBN: 3-631-38748-2. Like the three social estates of noble, cleric, and peasant, images of women during the Middle Ages consistently relied on three conceptual categories: virgin, wife, and widow. Of the three stereotypes, the widow has received the least attention from scholars, at least according to Doreen Fischer's 2000 dissertation from the University of Greifswald. Her proposed remedy may be broken down into three parts: first an overview of ancient Christian writings on the subject, then the heart of the book, an analysis of three longer texts and several shorter ones from the high to late Middle Ages, and finally a summary of the legacy among sixteenth-century Protestants, followed by a discussion of recurring themes. It probably says more about the reviewer than the author that I found the two bookends more interesting than the main event, but the material in question as well as the analysis offered both also played roles in this preference.

The preliminary section, for instance, is fascinating, detailing how early Christian authors appropriated the Roman vidua--a term originally applied to all single women, unmarried, widowed, or divorced--and limited it to the sole meaning of a woman whose husband had died. This was not a random distinction but rather one that reflected the new emphasis on chastity and thus the identification of widowhood as a religious vocation of sorts. By the time this thinking had reached its zenith with Jerome and Augustine, the widow had taken her place in the oft-repeated 100-60-30 schema, where her estate earned her only sixty percent of the heavenly rewards of a virgin--which was still better than the thirty percent granted married women. Key passages in Paul's letter to Timothy were called into service on the question and remarriage was discouraged, particularly by Jerome, who saw the very act as sexually motivated and instead recommended avoiding public places and men in general. Like that other in-between place, purgatory, the spiritual estate of widowhood had been born and would continue to influence all religious thinking on the subject for the next thousand years.

This is where the narrative breaks down a bit for me, since Fischer does not discuss widows in any of the medieval epics (already studied by Gisela Gerhard) or other literary works, but instead confines herself to principally theological works. There are some interesting tidbits, such as the fourteenth-century Dominican Ulrich Boner wondering about which husband a multiply married woman would be joined with at the Last Judgment (conveniently ignoring Matt. 22:30 where Jesus says "there will be no marriage at the resurrection of the dead") but these are never fully contextualized or pursued. There are also very few texts examined in any depth. The pseudo-Berthold von Regensburg's thirteenth-century sermon on marriage and the fifteenth-century "widow book" of Erhard Gross receive the lion's share of attention and each summary/analysis does offer some important observations. Both subscribed to the spiritual vocation tradition of widowhood but Berthold wrote more imaginatively, lumping together all women who had lost their virginity, whether or not they lived chastely. Surely this conceptualization had very little social impact but did it have any literary impact? Such contextualization is not really a concern of Fischer's. Gross' work, on the other hand, was clearly more practically oriented, typical of many fifteenth-century vernacular guides offered to a lay audience. It explicitly addressed sexual urges and the pain of loss but also recommended avoiding a repetition of that loss as well as the bitterness of marriage. In the end, then, Gross' use of a dialogue between a widow and a monk as well as many exempla simply offered different expressions of the ancient 100-60-30 formula.

These two analyses are followed by a study of the German translation of a work of the Spaniard Juan Vives (a bit of a stretch there), a smattering of other late-medieval German texts, and a summary of some Protestant texts. Luther and his followers naturally denied the "good work" of chastity and thus encouraged remarriage but even there made a distinction between young and old widows in terms of vulnerability to desires. How important were Protestant beliefs about original sin in the reconceptualizing of widowhood? Fischer herself admits that it is hard to know the wider influence of any of these writings and one "must remain at the level of language" (270). Even so, I was quite surprised that in a study of the female ideals of male authors, that there was no serious consideration of gender aspects of the discourse and in general little theoretical apparatus until the penultimate chapter (and even here it was more a discussion of topoi). Fischer has clearly spent a lot of time with the texts in question and has a convincing thesis about the long traditional appeal of the 100-60-30 formulation. It would have been more of a scholarly contribution, though, to offer more literary if not social implications of her selected texts and not just present them as ultimately isolated variations on a theme.

JOEL F. HARRINGTON

Vanderbilt University