Dyan Elliott
John Coakley's Women, Men, and Spiritual Power is as timely as it is erudite. Not only does it make an important contribution to contemporary debates over female authorship, but the reconstruction of the process responsible for the representation of the female subject and her revelations sheds unprecedented light on the clerical fascination with holy women. While sensitive to the question of gender and power, Coakley never loses sight of the human relationships at the center of any collaboration. It is a wonderful book.
— Dyan Elliott,, Vanderbilt University, author of Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages
Karl F. Morrison
Coakley has made a breakthrough in three central fields: religion, gender, and literature. His masterly case studies of how men and women collaboratively negotiated religious power during the Gothic Age reformat creative imagination as a social dynamic in religion.
— Karl F. Morrison, Rutgers University, author of "I Am You": The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art
Amy Hollywood
John Coakley's Women, Men, and Spiritual Power is a beautifully crafted study of the interactions between medieval Christian holy women and the clerics who were close to them and who wrote about them. In nine carefully chosen case studies, Coakley provides a nuanced account of the relationship between male clerical authority and holy women possessed of charismatic gifts. After Coakley, historians of medieval Christianity will no longer be able to justify simplistic characterizations of male control over religious women.
— Amy Hollywood, Harvard University, author of Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History
