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Reviews 971But these are small quibbles and very occasional blemishes, which hardly impair the thoughtful and meticulous scholarship of the present edition. This fine work makes Hilton's Latin writings for the first time available in their original form, in a critical text, and presents much helpful material about their relation to medieval spirituality and to Hilton's English masterpiece. Students of the fourteenth-century English mystics owe the editors a great debt.

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About the time I began to teach a course in the Women's Studies curriculum (with two daughters just beginning their careers), the US was plunged into conflict over an individual woman's right to decide whether to interrupt her pregnancy. The Washington marches, and long cold mornings picketing to keep the Boston birth control clinics open, combined with teaching new courses from an ever-expanding number of exhilarating texts, made me realize what it might be to bring all one's life's convictions to bear on research, to no longer be a woman well taught to think like a man, severing historical questions from politics. Nostalgia for the physical settings and the material beauty of medieval works of art has lessened with age, but not my fascination with new interrogations. I feel as though I am answering a new call, one that is difficult and costly and immensely rewarding at the same time. Some feminists have called for help from historical work to dislodge the false unity of "women." Medieval case studies are ideally suited for this, because the dominant notion of sexual difference (the onesex model as Laqueur has called it) allowed great variation in the construction of masculinities and feminities. And the canon of art history needed changing, not just by adding women and stirring (as artists, as images etc.), but to subvert our patriarchal discourses; in the basic art history survey course, for example, I now depart from the textbook to discuss Hildegard of Bingen's text and image in Scivias of ensoulment occurring just as the fully-formed child is ready to enter the birth canal (at that time, the pope who examined her work must have agreed that the soul did not enter the womb at conception). More than feminists, the young in the US need to know that truth claims do ideological work, and to recognize their workings in late capitalism. Enlisted in this project, research/ teaching, academe/the "real" world, are no longer binaries that I have to choose between. Nostalgia for the past and longing for the future are the same.