From Virile Woman to Womanchrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and LiteratureWhy did hagiographers of the late Middle Ages praise mothers for abandoning small children? How did a group of female mystics come to define themselves as apostles to the dead and end by challenging God's right to damn? Why did certain heretics around 1300 venerate a woman as the Holy Spirit incarnate and another as the Angelic Pope? In From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, Barbara Newman asks these and other questions to trace a gradual and ambiguous