Arguing that historians must write in a comic mode, aware of history's artifice, risks, and incompletion, Caroline Walker Bynum here examines diverse medieval texts to show how women were able to appropriate dominant social symbols in ways that allowed for the emergence of their own creative voices. By arguing for the positive importance attributed to the body, these essays give a new interpretation of gender in medieval texts and of the role of asceticism and mysticism in Christianity.

Caroline Walker Bynum, a MacArthur Fellow and winner of the Schaff Prize for Church history for her Holy Feast and Holy Fast, is Professor of History at Columbia University.