Barbara Newman’s book begins with an ambitious inquiry: “What does it mean to be a person, a human self?” (1). Newman explores this question through the distinct lenses of five medieval relationships: those between teacher and student, saint and sinner, lover and beloved, mother and child, and possessed persons and the supernatural others who inhabit them. As its structure suggests, the book is largely uninterested in identifying a concrete definition of the individual, instead exploring the impossibility of such a definition in material, theological, and cultural senses. To be a person, the book concludes, is to be instantiated through—and therefore vulnerable to—other people.
Newman approaches personhood through the concept of coinherence, a state of indwelling or being within one another that occurs in “interpersonal relations at a certain pitch of intensity, where the boundaries between persons seem to blur” (1). The focus on coinherence allows the book not only...
