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varied widely accordingto locationtime and political and social factors.The second part of the book investigates some of the contemporaryepistemological issues concerningcorporeality spirits and sex difference. By mapping the semantic fieldfor sex-linked words Caciola demonstrates that women were believedto be more vulnerable to possessionthan men because female bodieswere considered more malleableand porous. This porosity due tothe female humoral complexionmeant that women s bodies were

more easily penetrated by spirits.The physiologicalbasis for thebeliefin women s greater susceptibilityto possession led to an attempt toinstitute intellectual categories fordivine and demonic possession.The model ultimately fell short as itlacked practical criteria for reconciling the interior states of the subjectwith the exterior manifestations ofher symptoms. Finally in Part IIICaciola chronicles the shift fromthe conditions ofpossibility ofeitherdemonic or divine possession in thethirteenth and fourteenth centuriesto the assumption in the fifteenthcentury that all possession wasexclusively demonic. As discernment shifted toward exorcism thecorrelation between the priest asdivine and the possessed womanas demonic not merely demoniac

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intensified and ultimately solidified.Although many of the peo

ple claiming visionary status werewomen the author examines howmale and female possessed were tested using different assumptions and criteria as well as whyclaimants were eventually embodiedas exclusively female. Sheis acutelyaware of how status and prestige-of the individual the communityand the hurch may have shapedboth the claims of visionaries andtheir reception by their communitiesand the Church. Additionally Ca

ciola acknowledges the problems inherent in relying on hagiographicalsources yetskillfully minesthemforevidence about the attitudes towardand reception ofa would-be saint byher community. Her analysis drawsattentionto the difficulties ofbridg

ing the gap both in themedieval

period and now historiographicallybetween the internal experienceof the possessed and the externalevaluations of those women on thepart of the Church yet she succeedsin her attempt as far as one can byreading vit e hagiographies canonization trial records and othersources in a way that is criticallyinformed by the literature of subjective experience and by posingquestions about the nature of medieval categories of religious identity.

In a book as thoughtful as

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this one, and as carefully attunedto the ways in which social pressure,self-interest, political hierarchy, andinstitutional ideology can influencethe formation, both by self and other, of religious identity, it isstartling that questions of class arenot more prevalent. In theIntroduction, Caciola provides the standardbackground to the social revolution of the post-rnillennial period

into the mid-twelfth century, andnotes that shiftsin inheritance practices among the elite, the growingmiddle class, increased urbanization, and intellectual expansionall contributed to a surge in layreligious groups and increasedparticipation by women in thosegroups. What is missing, however,is a mention that these new lay religious groups were more likely todraw their members from the newmiddle class or underclass (as wasthe case with the Waldensians andearly Fontevrists). The author

convincingly posits that the Churchattempted to control the categoriesof possession and the process ofcanonization as a response to theincrease in lay religious communitiesin the later Middle Ages. wouldbe interesting to know if part of thisprocess of control mapped onto thesocio-economic struggles betweenthe lay elite and the burgeoningmiddle class. However, thisisacaseof an ambitious and well-executedproject raising the reader s expectations, rather than meeting them. iscerning pirits contributes much

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that is new and provocative to thefields of medieval history, women shistory, and religious studies.

E.R. TRUITTHARVARD UNIVERSITY