Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. - 400 p.

Barbara Newman, an American medieval scholar, professor at Northwestern University in Illinois, a brilliant translator and prolific scholar, is known as the author of new translations and critical editions of several important medieval sources, including the correspondence of Abelard and Heloise 1, and as a prolific researcher of medieval Western Christianity and the female role, the female theme in it. Thus, her first monograph, Sister of Wisdom: The Feminist Theology of St. Hildegard (1987), focused on female imagery in the teachings of Hildegard of Bingen, an influential abbess and mystic of the High Middle Ages, and her later book, God and Goddesses (2003), on female figures in the medieval Christian pantheon, according to Caroline Bynham, "changed the world of women." our view of medieval Christianity " 2, shedding light on its feminine side, little known and underappreciated.

Her new book, too, has been praised by colleagues and critics alike for its conceptual novelty, as well as for the eloquence and sophistication of Newman's style as an author and translator.3
The book is devoted to the relationship between the sacred and the secular in various genres of medieval literature. In the type of correlation between these two fundamental categories, the main difference between sov is seen-

1. Making Love in the Twelfth Century: "Letters of Two Lovers" in Context. A new translation with commentary by Barbara Newman. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

2. Bynum C.W. God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (review) // Common Knowledge. 2006. Vol. 12 (3). P. 517-518.

3. See, in particular, the reviews of X. Grunge in French Studies, 2014, 68 (2): 235-236, and R. McDermott in Modern Philology, 2015, 113 (2): E69-E72.

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a different worldview from the medieval one: for us, the secular is the norm, and the sacred is the exception, the domain of the Other, while in the Middle Ages people supposedly perceived and felt the opposite.

The topic of the relationship between the sacred and the secular in medieval studies is certainly not new, but in recent decades, as Newman notes with regret, with the exception of "vernacular theology" performed by Nicholas Watson in English and Jean Gerson in French, it has been little developed: scientists "turned away from it in complete exhaustion" and took up other subjects following linguistic, feminist, and queer turns.

Newman contrasts the "exegetical" approach introduced half a century ago by D. W. Robertson - to decode chivalrous romances with the help of theological treatises, to read the sacred in the profane, separating one from the other - with the approach of Jacques Ribar: to understand the profane as sacred, to integrate the former into the latter when reading medieval texts. However, Newman rejects both. She sees the relationship between the sacred and the secular in medieval literature and mentality differently, and suggests the concept of crossover as a starting point for analysis - a crossroads, intersections, overlapping and even merging of the sacred and the secular in their various forms. Metaphorically, she describes their relationship as follows:"sometimes the sacred and the secular flow like oil and water, in two separate streams, while at other times they mix like water and wine." Secular literary genres can be reinterpreted in sacred categories: for example, the French Beguine, mystic, and writer 4 Marguerite of Poretania transforms profane, carnal love from the "Romance of the Rose" into spiritual, sacrificial love for God, and the text itself into esoteric mystical dialogue; and vice versa, sacred genres - lives, hymns, etc.passiones and sacred toposes are often used in a secular context and even parodied, such as the Passion of Christ in The Passion of the Jews of Prague. If the allegorical view takes a completely mundane narrative to heaven, the parodic view takes it back to earth.

4. Newman, as a philologist, insists on a philological perspective, in particular, calling for considering Marguerite of Poretania or Juliana of Norwich not only as women mystics, but also as writers.

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Newman opposes the hermeneutics of "grain and chaff", which calls for rejecting the external, secular meaning as a shell and searching everywhere for the sacred core; against the tradition established in medieval studies to see in all Latin texts or, at least, in sacred genres - exegesis and hagiography - a predictable, uninteresting, orthodox norm, and in venacular texts-to look for the sacred core. revolt against this norm; and in general against the choice of any one meaning. She urges not to lose this duality, considering it intentional: "the double coding of writers required double understanding by readers."

"If modern scholars cannot agree on the true intentions of Andrew the Chaplain or Chaucer [ ... ], it is likely that medieval readers did not have a common opinion," as evidenced by the heated polemics about certain "cult" texts like Querelle de la belle dame sans merci or Querelle de la Rose.

Instead of the "grain and chaff" hermeneutics, Newman develops a hermeneutics of "both/and"based on the medieval tendency to paradox. The most striking example of such an approach, when the author and the reader in the same plot or hero are able to simultaneously see the profane, the sacred, the low, the high, the bad, and the good, is the concept of felix culpa, a "happy mistake" - a sin that has received favorable consequences. in the eyes of readers, the heroes of such sinners as Lancelot, Tristan or "Saint Merlin". Another principle often used in anti-Jewish and supersessionist (substitutionary) constructions is the principle of allegorical inversion, when the Old Testament heroes are perceived as prototypes of the New Testament ones, and they receive a completely opposite assessment: for example, in King David who sinned in the story of Bathsheba, we should see the prototype of Christ, and in his innocent victim Uriah - Jews.

The relationship between the sacred and the secular is complicated - or enriched - by the presence of a pre-Christian stratum. Don't underestimate the medieval people's fascination with pagan heritage, including Celtic mythology, which attracted them just as classical antiquity attracted Renaissance humanists. Therefore, in many, even the most theologically impeccable chivalric novels, magic ships sail,

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and enchanted swords stick out of the rocks, and, as Newman believes, the dialectic of the sacred and profane is no longer double, but triple, since the sacred, in turn, is constructed by the dialectic of the Christian and pagan.

After outlining the history of the issue in the first, theoretical, chapter and formulating the principles and basic concepts of his approach, in subsequent chapters Newman describes different types of interaction between the sacred and the secular in medieval texts - both programmatic and little-known. The second chapter is devoted to "double coding" on the example of the famous series of prose knight novels "Lancelot-Grail", where Christian concepts are clothed in pagan images and both sacred and worldly values are affirmed. The third chapter describes the" conversion "or" transformation " of courtly love literature into spiritual mystical and carnal love into sublime love for God by example

"The Mirror of Simple Souls" by Margarita Poretanskaya. Chapter four, to which we will return, deals with parody and its various types and intended purposes. The fifth chapter analyzes the" convergence " of the sacred and the secular in the case of the allegories of Rene of Anjou, where erotic adventures and spiritual pursuits lead to the same end. In all the chapters and, accordingly, in all the types of interaction identified by Newman, the sacred and the secular do not subordinate or absorb each other, but co-exist and co-exist.

In conclusion, the author summarizes the approaches to understanding the dialectic of the sacred and profane that were first proposed and tested during close reading from various sources, and expresses the hope that further research will appear within the given paradigm: "the achievements of a book are measured not only by what it reveals, but also by the prospects that it outlines." And reviewers, comparing the book with D. W. Robertson's Introduction to Chaucer, predict that it will be even more productive and influence other researchers, not only in the field of medieval theology and philology, but also in the field of epistemology of modernity; in particular, Newman's analysis of contradictions and paradoxes in late Medieval literature seems to be extremely relevant for many researchers. studying the transition to the New Time.

For the theme of this issue of the magazine, - blasphemy, its poetry-

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First of all, the fourth chapter of Newman's book is relevant, which is devoted not to the "rise" of the genre (from Trouver's love lyrics to the singing of divine love), but to the reverse transformation - parody. Reviewing existing studies of this genre, Newman notes that the essence of parody eludes a definition that is clearer than"imitation with a critical difference." With a few exceptions, scholars have focused mainly on the great masters of medieval parody - Jean de Maine, Boccaccio, or Chaucer-but not on the genre itself. The exceptions are the works of Paul Lehmann and Martha Baylis devoted to well-known Latin texts preserved in many lists, which are in line with the tradition of clerical humor, built on the inversion of Scripture, liturgy and hagiography. Newman, on the other hand, refers to much less well-known texts that have been preserved in a single or several lists: "Le on Iniores", "The Dispute between God and His Mother" and "The Passion of the Jews of Prague" 5-and reveals other, not always comical approaches to resolving the conflict between the sacred and the profane. These three texts show that in the Middle Ages nothing and no one was immune to parody - neither the sacrament of the Eucharist, nor the passion of Christ, nor the Virgin Mary.

Narrowing the genre field, Newman refers to the term parodia sacra ("sacred parody"), which became widely used thanks to M. M. Bakhtin, who understands this as the use of sacred texts or toposes in a profane context in order to reduce them and(or) ridicule them. It is noteworthy that initially this term, which originated in the early Modern period, in the mouths of humanists meant something completely different - the use of pagan, classical texts for Christian purposes, for example, in such works as "Christian Horace" or "Reborn Martial". This epistemological digression already hints at the variability of parody intentions. Unlike the cases described by Bakhtin, the texts analyzed by Newman were not associated with rituals of social or liturgical inversion and did not necessarily include a folklore (vernacular) element - after all, the main one

5. "Lai d'Ignaure", "La Desputoison de Dieu et de sa mère", "Passio Judaeorum Pragensium".

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the corpus of anti-clerical satire was created by the clerics themselves. Newman believes that medieval sacred parody added humor to the parodied text and claimed some distance, but did not completely cancel the solemnity and, in fact, the sacredness of the parodied content, and that the hermeneutical principle "both/and", or sic et non, also works here, allowing not to choose one meaning or one intended intention of the author, but to read the text is polyphonic.

In "La o Iniores", which tells how one gallant knight was the lover of twelve ladies at once, until their husbands-barons did not find out about it, did not kill him and did not treat their wives to a meal from the penis and heart of their lover, the image of twelve, devoted to one, the motives of betrayal for money, detention in prison is guessed. the garden, confession, fasting before communion, and communion with the body of the beloved. Newman suggests that this is not so much a parody of the Eucharist itself as a misogynistic mockery of the religiosity of women, especially Beguines, who insisted on daily communion, practiced long fasts, and ecstatically worshipped Christ as the Beloved, the divine Bridegroom.

In the " Dispute between God and His Mother," " God " before the papal court in Avignon accuses his mother of appropriating the lion's share of his father's inheritance, leaving him nothing of value: all the best cathedrals in France belong to her. If we see here a kind of allegorical dispute - body versus soul, churches versus Synagogues - we can see Jesus as the personification of the Mendicant position, which includes criticism of the richness of the Church, with a bit of Proto-Protestant criticism of the hypertrophied Marian cult. The" bourgeois " opinion of the Virgin Mary, which the judge of the avaricious papal curia later agrees with, is that poverty is not a virtue, but a sign of laziness and stupidity, spendthrift and debauchery, with which her son sins. Comparing this source with the well-known anonymous author of the "Dispute" "La on War", where War, the daughter of Satan and the goddess of Hell, partly expresses similar arguments against the "Grace of God", Newman suggests not to identify the author's opinion with the victorious position of Mary, but to see here the" double-edged sword " of satire - and on poor life

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Christ, and a down-to-earth consciousness unable to understand this life, as well as the Marian cult, apostolic poverty, judicial corruption, and the Avignon captivity. But at the same time, judging, for example, by the completely conventional neighbors in the anthology chosen by the scribe ,the "Dispute" was perceived as piquant mischief with a hint of blasphemy, but not as a subversion of the foundations, the author's goal was rather to have fun and amuse the reader, rather than seriously polemicize or, even more so, provoke a real controversy. the revolt of the poor masses against the " fat " Church.

The third source analyzed in this chapter, unlike the Disput, is by no means cheerful, and its macabricity, unlike the macabricity of the La o Iniores, has quite real grounds. Using the example of "The Passion of the Jews of Prague", a short description of the Prague pogrom of 1389 in the categories of the evangelical and liturgical narrative of the Passion of Christ, Newman shows that parody can be not a comic genre, but a hate speech genre, express not a "progressive" revolutionary protest against church corruption and bigotry, but quite trivial, traditional anti-Judaism, unless that marginalised by its high degree of radicalism.

The seven-page Passion of the Jews of Prague quotes more than 90 Bible verses, more than half from the Gospel of Matthew, and most of them are inverted so that a blessing becomes a threat, salvation becomes destruction, and a victim becomes a criminal. For example, a fragment of the famous Exsultet prayer recited at the beginning of the Easter Vigil: "This is the night that now, throughout the world, those who believe in Christ, freed from the vices of the world and the darkness of sin, are restored to grace and gathered into the communion of the saints. [...] O truly blessed night, which robbed the Egyptians and enriched the Jews. O truly blessed night, in which the earthly and the heavenly, the human and the divine are united!" - rewritten as follows: "O truly blessed night, which robbed the Jews and enriched the Christians! O our most sacred Easter, in which the true believers [ ... ].. those who were freed from the chains of sin [ ... ] did not spare the Jewish children or their gray-haired old men."

In his analysis of The Passion of the Jews of Prague, Newman uses the material of a Christian source to do the same as the above-mentioned author.

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Yisrael Yuval and the unmentioned Jeremy Cohen use Jewish sources to reconstruct - or imagine - a certain Judeo-Christian continuum, a common cultural field, where the Prague cleric, for all his Judeophobia, should imagine the customs of Purim, and the Mainz Jewish chronicler-the iconographic image of Piet. This approach certainly makes the picture of Jewish-Christian relations more voluminous and multidimensional than once traditional studies of legal discrimination and episodes of physical violence. If the greatest Catholic theologians of one period could learn from the Jews the correct understanding of the literal meaning of Scripture and ask themselves whether the Jews are truly human, whether they should not rather be attributed to the animal world, then the rioters could also know the content of the Passover haggadah. This, however, disavows the traditional argument that Jews are partly to blame for medieval Judeophobia: the hermeticism of Jewish communities gave rise to distrust of the unknown, hostility and aggression; the walls of the ghetto were quite permeable, but this did not stop the aggression, which means that it was provoked not by the unknown, but by something else. On the other hand, there is often no concrete evidence of medieval authors ' familiarity with the neighboring culture, and this continuum, based on similarities and parallels, is rather a reflection of the source continuum in the minds of scientists.

And regarding not only The Passion ,but also other sources and other chapters of Newman's book: to what extent does its complex and subtle philological analysis reflect the authors ' intentions and coincide with the reader's reaction? Did they mean double inversion, reverse typology, ambivalent satire - or, as Newman puts it several times, were certain tasks achieved "subconsciously"?

Perhaps, working in the technique of Centon, the author of" Passion " simply writes in evangelical and liturgical language, using verses suitable for the plot, but changing characters, details and epithets to actual ones? How radically does this parodic, inverted quotation distinguish The Passion from many other medieval texts, both Christian and Jewish, also replete with Biblical quotations or paraphrases-

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for them and also substituting for the biblical peoples and heroes - modern ones?

Why did the authors write these parodies? What did the author of "Passion" want? Perhaps, realizing the anti-canonical nature of the pogrom, he wanted to justify himself not so much before the earthly court as before the heavenly court, sacralizing sinful actions with biblical allusions? Was entertainment a sufficient cause for creativity, as suggested in the "Dispute between God and His Mother"? Or is it possible to see here a kind of" symbolic resistance " to the prevailing ideology and institution, which manifests itself in mockery of different positions within this ideology?

Finally, can we reconstruct the medieval reader's perception of the text at all? On what grounds does Newman suggest that readers who caught the parody of the Eucharist "felt obvious discomfort"? Can we agree with Martha Beilis, who does not see in "The Passion of the Jews of Prague ""not the slightest humorous component"? And what is the use of discovering the "textual subconscious" if it was hidden from both the medieval author ("but even if it was not John's intention to allude to the Book of Esther, this allusion still exists in the textual subconscious of the Passion") and the medieval reader? Deconstructive reading can be unproductive, deconstruction for deconstruction's sake, if the analysis of the text into many components that are not provided for by the authors and contemporaries occurs only in favor of the logic of philological analysis, which seeks to name more and more new sources and parallels.

With a skilful and detailed discussion of duality, transformation, inversion, and convergence, Barbara Newman brilliantly answers the question of the boundary between the sacred and the profane, saying that it as such - a stable boundary - did not exist. First of all, with regard to parody, I would like to raise another question: where was the borderline between the comical and the non-comical, at what point did the medieval reader become amused? Perhaps this is one of the prospects mentioned in the conclusion for further research, which is closely related to the dialectic of the sacred and profane described by Newman.

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