Promised Bodies: Time, Language, and Corporeality in Medieval Women's Mystical Texts 9780231535526

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Children of Promise, Children of the Flesh: Augustine's Two Bodies
2. The Mystic's Two Bodies: The Temporal and Material Poetics of Visionary Texts
3. Werke and the the Postscriptum of the Soul
4. Living Song: Dwelling in Hadewijch's Liederen
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Promised Bodies

Gender, Theory, & Religion

Gender, Theory, & Religion Amy Hollywood, Editor The Gender, Theory, and Religion series provides a forum for interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of the study of gender, sexuality, and religion. Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making, Elizabeth A. Castelli When Heroes Love: The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David, Susan Ackerman Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity, Jennifer Wright Knust Naming the Witch: Magic, Ideology, and Stereotype in the Ancient World, Kimberly B. Stratton Dying to Be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts, L. Stephanie Cobb Between a Man and a Woman? Why Conservatives Oppose Same-Sex Marriage, Ludger H. Viefhues-Bailey

Promised Bodies TIME, LANGUAGE, & CORPOREALITY IN MEDIEVAL WOMEN’S MYSTICAL TEXTS

P Patricia Dailey

Columbia Universit y Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York

Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2013 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dailey, Patricia. Promised bodies: time, language, and corporeality in medieval women’s mystical texts / Patricia Dailey. pages cm. — (Gender, theory, and religion) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-16120-6 (cloth: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-53552-6 (e-book) 1. Mysticism—History—Middle Ages, 600–1500. literature—Women authors—History and criticism.

2. Women mystics. 3. Christian I. Title.

BV5080.D35 2013 248.2'2082—dc23 2012050242

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Th is book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Jacket design: Jordan Wannemacher Jacket image: Noli me tangre. Fra Angelico Ca. 1440–1445. Fresco © Scala/Art Resources References to Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To my mother & my daughter, my two Sophia Eleanors

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations

xiii

INTRODUCTION

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1. CHILDREN OF PROMISE, CHILDREN OF THE FLESH : AUGUSTINE’S T WO B ODIES 27 2. THE MYSTIC’S T WO B ODIES: THE TEMPORAL AND MATERIAL POETICS OF VISIONARY TE XTS 63 3. WERKE AND THE P OSTSCRIPTUM OF THE SOUL 89 4. LIVING SONG: DWELLING IN HADEWIJCH’S LIEDEREN 123 CONCLUSION Notes

173

Bibliography Index

245

229

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ACK NOWLEDGMENTS

Books that have spanned a long time in their making are often indebted to people, events, seminars, publications, institutions, and encounters that are noted and archived, as well as to those inadvertent and almost happenstance occasions that could—and do—easily slip from the field of vision. Beginning from the moment I reached for the volume entitled The Complete Works of Hadewijch on a slow day while working in the Abbey Bookstore in Paris in 1989— and determined shortly thereafter that it would be the subject of any future academic endeavor I might undertake—many such lacunae punctuate the memory of my work with Hadewijch. I have not, however, forgotten the question of my MA adviser when I declared to her that I wanted to work on women’s mystical texts: “Is that really literature?” I am, in some odd way, indebted to that unintentionally provocative question. This book has, at various moments in its making, benefited from the following support: the hospitality of the Huntington Library; a visiting professorship from the UCSIA Foundation at the University of Antwerp; a Columbia University Junior Faculty Development Grant; a Morton Bloomfield Fellowship from the English Department at Harvard University; a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship at Northwestern University’s Kaplan Institute for the Humanities; and a Cardinal Flahiff Fellowship at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Versions of chapters were presented at the University of Antwerp, Yale University, UC Riverside, Harvard University, Princeton University, Southern Connecticut State University, and Northwestern University. I am very thankful for the support from these institutions and for the hospitality and helpful criticism of the individuals there. I would also like to express my appreciation to the Warner

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Fund at the University Seminars at Columbia University for their help in publication. The ideas presented have benefited from discussions in the University Seminars on Cultural Memory. Above all, I would like to thank Amy Hollywood, whose thoughtful and provocative discussions, meticulous attention to many drafts, and generosity with her time, support, scholarship, and friendship were essential to making this a better book. I owe great thanks to Nicholas Watson, whose invaluable comments strengthened this book immensely, and to Claire Waters, who read and reread the manuscript with care and tireless insight and provided tremendous guidance for the process of revision. Sally Poor’s comments and support aided earlier versions of several chapters and were critical in helping me refine my argument. I would especially like to thank Susan Boynton, for her unceasing generosity, friendship, and attention to drafts; Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, for their loving friendship, thoughts, and everything else on scales big and small; Veerle Fraeters, for her advice and corrections in the translations from Middle Dutch; Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Kees Schepers, Jim Rhodes, Andrea Denny-Brown, Catherine Sanok, Anna Kelner, and Ying Ling Tiong, for their insight and encouragement along the way; and Chris Baswell, Susan Crane, Jean Howard, Bruce Robbins, and Julie Peters, for their many comments. A special thanks to Lauren Mancia, Abigail Kret, Jillian Tan, and William Jacobs, who helped with footnotes, sources, and other painstaking work, and without whom this book would have hobbled along at a much slower pace. Thank you to Heather Jones for indexing. In the very early stirrings of this project, Ann Hutchison, Robert Sweetman, and Geert Claassens offered very helpful advice. I am also indebted to the participants in the Medieval Writing Workshop and to the editorial team at Columbia University Press, especially Wendy Lochner, senior executive editor, Christine Dunbar, assistant editor, Kerri Cox Sullivan, copy editor, and Susan Pensak, senior manuscript editor. I cannot sufficiently recognize the tireless help and friendship of Marilyn McLaren and the eternal support of Douglas Wade, who built the desk on which the first glimmers of this project became lucid. The process was made all the more felicitous by the friendship of Alessia Ricciardi, Monique David-Ménard, Natasha Korda, Felix Ensslin, Cornelia Nixon, Mark Strand, Claire Nancy, Anne Ellett, Winifred Amaturo, Penelope Deutscher, Paul Strohm, Horacio Amigorena, Sandro Marpillero, Linda Pollak, Laurie Traktman, Antonella Moscati, and Clemens Härle. I also want to recognize the untraceable labor of a group of women without whom this book would not have emerged from its promised state: Regina Antwi, Silvia Gutierrez, Susana Macias, Rosita Monzon, Maria Triminius, and Joanne Trapp.

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Finally, I would like to recognize the late Jean-François Lyotard—who knew well before I did, in 1991, what the seed of this book was—for teaching me of the responsibility associated with writing; and the late Jacques Derrida, who drove me to reiterate this in my own way. Immeasurable gratitude to my mother, in the past promise of her present person, who ceaselessly believed in me, and to my darling Sophia, for telling me, at age two: “Get to work!”

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ABBREVIATIONS

Source text extracts throughout the volume are taken from the following works. Brieven =

Hadewijch of Antwerp. De brieven van Hadewijch. Ed. Paul Mommaers. Averbode, Belgium: Altiora, 1990.

CCCM =

Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis.

CCSL =

Corpus Christianorum Series Latina.

City of God = Augustine. City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. New York: Penguin, 2003. CSEL =

Corpus Scriptorium Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum.

CW =

Hadewijch of Antwerp. The Complete Works of Hadewijch. Trans. Mother Columba Hart, OSB. New York: Paulist Press, 1980.

DC =

Augustine. De civitate Dei. Ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb. CCSL 47, 48. Turnhout: Brepols, 1955.

DT =

Augustine. De Trinitate. Ed. W. J. Mountain and Fr. Glorie. CCSL 50, 50A. Turnhout: Brepols, 1968.

Liederen =

Hadewijch of Antwerp. Liederen. Ed. and trans. Veerle Fraeters and Frank Willaert. Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij, 2009.

List =

Hadewijch of Antwerp. “List of the Perfect by Hadewijch of Antwerp.” Trans. Helen Rolfson. Vox Benedictina 5 (1998): 277–297.

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ABBREVIATIONS

Mgdt =

Hadewijch of Antwerp. Mengeldichten. Ed. Jozef Van Mierlo, SJ. Antwerp: Standaard, 1952.

PL =

Patrologia Latina series. Ed. J.-P. Migne.

POH =

Hadewijch of Antwerp. Poetry of Hadewijch. Ed. Marieke van Baest. Leuven: Peeters, 1998.

Trinity =

Augustine. On the Trinity. Trans. Edmund Hill, OP. Brooklyn: New City Press, 1991.

Vis =

Hadewijch of Antwerp. Visioenen. Translated into modern Dutch by Imme Dros. Ed. Frank Willaert. Amsterdam: Prometheus/Bert Bakker, 1996.

Promised Bodies

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INTRODUCTION

Corps, corpus, corpus hoc est une intraitable folie. —Jean-Luc Nancy

“ THE B ODY ” Seeking to understand embodiment in medieval women’s religious literature is a complex undertaking, in part because it invokes a sensibility that seems so familiar and at the same time remains so foreign to our own. When Hadewijch of Brabant, a beguine mystic of the thirteenth century, writes of unity with Christ in her Vision 7, she does so in terms that seem to place an emphasis on the immediacy of the body and the palpability of the human figure of Christ, rendering divinity concrete and erotically charged. Writing in her native Middle Dutch, she reports: He came in the likeness and clothing of a man as he was on the day when he gave us his body for the first time; looking like a human being and a man, sweet and beautiful, and with glorious appearance. . . . After that he came himself to me, took me entirely in his arms, and pressed me to him; and all my members were satisfied in his full felicity, as my heart desired in my humanity. So I was outwardly satisfied and fully transported. ( CW , 281) 1

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This vision of union with Christ, cited by many scholars, frames her body and Christ’s in ways that appear uncannily familiar. Christ is gloriously incarnate: while his body reflects the splendor of his divinity, he is tangible to Hadewijch according the very measure of her own humanity, just as Hadewijch’s humanity and eroticized femininity seem to reflect the measure of our own gendered and embodied persons. Even if we take into account the complexities associated with the sacramental framing of this vision (intentionally omitted here) and the mediating nature of visions in general, part of the difficulty in properly discerning embodiment in this vision and in women’s mysticism generally lies with the complexity of the concept of embodiment itself as understood within the Christian tradition. In the Christian tradition, the body is not conceived of as a simple organic unity, but rather as a twofold entity partaking of two anthropological registers— the inner and the outer persons—that promises to find its true materiality in a time to come. The body is therefore not conceptualized as a fi xed entity, but as a potentially transformative vehicle; not as a biologically discrete organism, but as a dynamic mirror that can reflect the work of the divine within and substantially alter its own materiality if receptive to divine grace. What appears to be a simple representation of symbolic unity expressed in corporeal terms in Hadewijch’s Vision 7 draws upon the language and registers of inner and outer persons to reflect this theological complexity, making the vision far more difficult to delimit with regard to the nature of embodiment. The writings of Hadewijch engage with this tradition in sophisticated ways, ways that are both singular to her mysticism and shared with the theological milieu of the twelft h and thirteenth centuries. Even more significantly, her way of engaging with and singling herself out from her theological context offer us, as I hope to show in this book, a new means for reading women’s mysticism. Hadewijch has been a central figure in the redefinition of women’s mysticism and of spirituality in general over the past thirty years. In her seminal work, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1987), Caroline Walker Bynum invokes the passage cited above from Hadewijch’s vision to highlight a physicality pervasive in women’s spirituality. Although Bynum is not using the twofold distinction of the body I outlined above, she notes that, given the commonplace Christian association of the flesh with femininity (and the soul with masculinity), women were able to use this gendered identification as a means to redeem their experience of the body in the name of all of humanity. For Bynum, this identification was theologically productive: the association of the body with imitatio Christi obscured distinctions between body and soul, distinctions relevant to the twofold dimension of the body I emphasize. She writes:

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Subsuming the male/female dichotomy into the more cosmic dichotomy divine/human, women saw themselves as the symbol for all humanity. . . . In the erotic passage from Hadewijch, humanity (menscheit) clearly implies body: “and all my members felt his in full felicity, in accordance with the desire of my heart and my humanity.” Such usage tended both to obscure any sharp sense of a body/soul dichotomy (for both body and soul were human) and to imply that humanness intimately involved physicality. It was this sense of humanity as entailing bodiliness (although not reducible to it) that women expressed in expanding the male/female dichotomy from spirit/flesh to divine/human.2

Bynum’s association of women’s spirituality with an incarnational theology marked a critical turning point in the way in which these texts—and bodies— would be read over the next decades. That women’s spirituality emphasizes embodied practices, practices that conflate or obscure distinctions between body and soul, is a claim I will analyze in this book in different terms. Bynum’s attention to embodiment has defined a field, yet where she sees embodiment as essentially related to gender, I will look at embodiment in non-gender-specific terms, reassessing the value of gender as a category.3 The critical discussions that followed Bynum’s work will help contextualize the rationale for my approach. Even before Bynum, different iterations of the interrelation between gender, embodiment, and mysticism were put forth by French feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray, who were often attempting to articulate a difference in the signifying nature of women’s bodies or in the way female subjectivity articulated (nonphallocentric) transcendence.4 Irigaray cites Hadewijch’s Lied 8 as a model for how an immanence in women’s embodiment enacts a transcendence that figures according to the same Trinitarian model for men. At the same time Jacques Lacan footnotes Hadewijch in Encore as a model of feminine sexuality and the nonrelation of woman to her embodied specificity.5 In the United States, a different strain of criticism responded to critical investment in the mystic’s body. Sarah Beckwith’s essay on the Ancrene Wisse, “Passionate Regulation” (1994), counters a materialist feminism that identified with and celebrated the body in medieval women’s religious literature by assuming what she describes as a naive identification with the body: Although women have historically borne the burden of representing immanence for others, that does not give them privileged access to the body as a “woman’s symbol,” for women do not have particular forms of representation that are exclusively their own, but only particular relations to cultural

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representation and discourse. . . . Medieval women’s religiosity has itself arguably become an imaginary realm for feminist criticism, and it has become so partly through an idealized relation that it is presumed to have with “the body,” the natural symbol here produced in all its ontological simplicity and in all of its capacities to be just what it is. Once again, a shortcut has been taken, bypassing an opportunity to elucidate, in the history of the present, an ethics not of the pure subject (a newly ascetic feminism?), but of ambiguity.6

For Beckwith, all this interest in the body was, in a sense, far too empirically determined. In assuming a given materiality—that of an organic body shared by women or by humanity at large—feminists fail to take into account the psychic, cultural, and regulatory processes that produced embodiment as both subjectively experienced and culturally determined, mistaking the promised body for a “natural” product. Where Beckwith turned to Freud, Foucault, Bourdieu, and Lacan, among others, to demonstrate how devotional texts “enact an imaginary anatomy, a body image, which is itself neither mind nor body, neither purely social nor purely psychic, neither natural nor culturally given,” I will turn to a different set of influential thinkers, namely Paul and Augustine, to show how they foreshadow the promise of materiality in mystical texts by means of their varied understandings of a twofold embodiment.7 In yet another twist, Amy Hollywood’s essay “Inside Out: Beatrice of Nazareth and Her Hagiographer” (1994) acknowledged Beckwith’s important corrective to assimilations of women and bodiliness, while noting another problem: Beckwith’s primary source “is a rule written for women by a male cleric,” and “assumes the compliance of the text’s female audience.” For Hollywood, “we cannot take male-authored texts as our primary source of information for women’s ‘relations to cultural representations and discourse,’ particularly when writings by women are available to us.”8 The argument of this essay, which explores this tension in the writings by and about Beatrice of Nazareth, a contemporary of Hadewijch, would be echoed in The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (1995), when Hollywood complicated Bynum’s arguments by making critical distinctions between women’s writing and the writings of men about women, exposing “the dangers threatening the historian who accepts the hagiographer’s account as if it were a piece of modern historical writing, shaped by concerns and conceptions of reality identical to our own.”9 In noting this difference between the ways bodily suffering is treated in the writings of women mystics and of their male hagiographers, Hollywood highlights an ambiguity, showing that male biographers tend to emphasize the body in the

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mode of the “objective and the external,” while the women delineate a more elusive body, one which, in the case of the thirteenth-century mystic Christina the Astonishing, is associated with “a realm of feeling or sensation separable from the body itself, yet not fully identified with the soul.”10 The premise assumed of women’s natural physicality could not be a defining attribute for women’s writing, nor could it be so clearly gendered—unless one associated it with a signifying process. Amy Hollywood brought back the question of gender in terms of a difference in women’s writings, a difference that seems to be of, but not entirely so, the body itself. In his article “Desire for the Past” (1999), Nicholas Watson brought up yet another issue in reading mystical texts—male- or female-authored—that concerns me here. He highlights scholars’ tendencies to focus on the material informing the representations of mystical experience rather than the means of its representation, overlooking the mediated nature of textuality. In his reading of the thirteenth-century Life of Elizabeth of Spalbeek written by Philip of Clairvaux, Watson shows how acting out divinity and Christ’s passion diff uses the relation between the subject and his or her body. He notes: “Elizabeth can be a miraculum in this text only insofar as she is not an agent. While Philip knows he is watching a performance, it is God who is the real actor, inspiring a re-enactment of Christ’s Passion which ‘this virgyne [ . . . ] figures and expounes [ . . . ] in hir body’; what fascinates him, in this life that is ‘alle mirakill,’ is the fusion of sign and signified, text and exposition, body and word.”11 The body’s signifying capacity is attributed not to the intention or subjectivity of the performer, but to an agency ascribed to God, making for a more complicated articulation of agency, embodiment, textuality, and feminine identification, which I will develop at length throughout this book. Throughout past scholarship on mysticism—discussion of much of which I have had to omit here—questionings of materiality, gender, signifying-means, and subjectivity (among other things) have given us reason to doubt these perspectives’ applicability to mystical texts, at least according to the ways in which these terms have been conceived, that is, in relation to immediacy and a determinate materiality. By looking at embodiment as it is conceived by Christian theological and exegetical traditions—as a twofold entity and a transformational process—I hope to show how the tradition itself obfuscates our contemporary understanding of these terms, linking body and letter together. Because of a linguistic and temporal interplay, understanding embodiment in mystical texts is necessarily tied to a poetics, thus inviting us to rethink the relation of embodiment to literature.

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THE B ODY AND LETTER S The inclusion of women in histories of spirituality and theology has been greatly aided by Bernard McGinn’s masterful volumes on the history of Western Christian mysticism, yet despite this ever-growing recognition of the diverse, complex, and informed nature of the use of the body in women’s mystical writings, the assessment of the literary qualities of these texts still encounters an awkward impasse, bound as it is to associations with embodiment that fall short of “the literary.”12 In Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book (2004), Sara Poor points out that anthologies or groupings of women’s mystical texts often fail to look at the literary specificities of such works. Instead, they engage broad and contingent categories as unifying principles (such as gender, the body, experience, or a first-person narrative) and risk falling into the trap of essentializing these writings as exempla of women and their work in a way that places them in opposition to a literary tradition itself complicit with an unwitting marginalization of women’s writings. As Poor notes, the most salient features that emerge from these writings—and seem to serve an umbrella function for categorizing women’s mystical texts—tend to be the emphasis on the body, the pervasive immediacy articulated throughout the texts, and a first- or third-person narrative. Yet these attributes correspond with women’s experiences, and not the literary qualities of the text. As a result, Poor notes, “women writers are assumed to be purveyors of the feminine. Hence while men write literature, women write women’s experience.”13 Poor concludes that the feminist challenge to these texts involves examining why and how women’s texts have been excluded from (and included in) the canon, rethinking the tradition that marginalizes them, and reconsidering the ways in which such traditions are formed conceptually and intellectually. Simply including female authors and supplementing a canon that defines itself according to the same long-standing criteria replicates the schism that has succeeded in differentiating them from canonical texts. Analyses of individual mystical texts attempt in several ways to remedy the dilemma Poor has identified. One involves demonstrating how literary qualities that characterize specific women’s mystical texts are already in dialogue with literary traditions. Barbara Newman’s work on la mystique courtoise shows how, for example, Hadewijch’s songs use the Minnesang tradition to speak of the relation to the divine.14 Nicholas Watson also elaborates on the heterogeneity of Middle English mystical texts and the inextricability of vernacular theology from cultural, political, and literary currents, calling for “a closer attention to the issues common to works thought of as mystical and works that are not” in order to show “the value of integrating mystics scholarship with the rest of literary history.”15

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The body is often invoked as an attempt to valorize the female body or flesh in the name of an authorial function or in the name of a femininity that subverts or counters male-oriented spiritual hierarchies.16 Yet David Aers has noted that this attempt to refer to the body is double-edged, as any focus on “the body” (especially in the name of the feminine) risks reemphasizing and reifying the patriarchal power that produces it if one does not explore “the processes, performative acts, and powers in and through which [these powers] became fi xed, normative, seemingly inevitable.”17 In this book I define and elaborate on the relationship of embodiment to poetics and literary form, by showing their intertwined roles in medieval theology and practice. I engage with past scholarship on women’s mystical writings, arguing for a reconsideration of embodiment as it is understood in the larger Christian tradition, which, while in no way uniform, nevertheless articulates a doubleness of the body that is associated with spiritual transformation. I show that the body, invoked in this context, is not simply one biological entity, not a simple organic oneness, as Beckwith emphasized, but a manifestation of inner and outer persons as conceived of by Paul, Origen, and Augustine, among others. By understanding the mystic’s body as partaking in two bodies related to two persons—one inner and one outer—it becomes possible to relate the body to more than just a biological component. The inner person and inner body are understood as potential manifestations of Christ, the Word made flesh, and thus the inner person is linked to the Word, and eventually to textuality. In following a series of associations involving inner and outer persons, I will show that the qualities that tend to alienate women’s mystical texts from the literary canon—their focuses on embodiment, immediacy, and experience—are crucial to our understanding of these texts, but must be understood as a form of textuality, as a literary mode in themselves. Bodily experience, as it is portrayed in mystical writings, is likened to a form of textuality and draws on a lengthy and well-established literary and theological history that associates the body with the word. In elaborating on this—predominantly through Hadewijch but also relating her to other mystics and theologians—I will show how embodiment and immediacy in women’s mysticism are critical for identifying a poetic and textual operation at work, one that has implications well beyond the category of this particular genre. When we are able to read embodiment, immediacy, and experience as responding to and performing various discursive and hermeneutic functions, another textual medium becomes perceptible, its language able to be heard and understood beyond merely being “embodied.” Understanding this embodied responsiveness as representing an affective or emotional literacy—that is, one that correlates affective responses with textual identifications—is a fi rst step in discerning the

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larger textual role of the body, the long historical chain of associations that condition the body’s interpolation with textual forms. Rather than seeking to isolate the body as an essentially feminine instrument for articulation in medieval mysticism, my concern here is to show how embodiment in Hadewijch and, by extension, in other mystical texts male and female, is conditioned by a Pauline and Augustinian theology that does not disavow the materiality of the body but aims to reconfigure it according to its inner counterpart and the orientation of the soul. In this sense, materiality is not fi xed, but always in a process of becoming transformed. Materiality itself serves ends that do not negate it, but rather refer it to another process at work within. In attempting to make the outer person conform to its interior counterpart by performative and spiritual means, the outer becomes a truer reflection of the divine. If we read women’s mysticism as privileging the flesh and subverting the Neoplatonic trend in mysticism that alienates the body from divine oneness (Philo), we perceive only a fraction of the larger picture. Many women’s mystical texts do indeed counter Neoplatonist tendencies, but they do so according to another strain in mysticism (which I identify in Paul and Augustine) that refashions the body as a spiritual vehicle, transforming its material substance into a means for becoming what one already is: the image of the human aspect of the divine. The outer body thus must be seen, read, interpreted, and experienced according to its inner counterpart. The formulation that posits flesh versus (Neoplatonic) spirit often misrecognizes the spiritual and literary work the outer body performs and runs the aforementioned risk of unwittingly associating women with a corporeality that separates them from the literary canon. With a few notable exceptions (such as Marguerite Porete, whose spiritual body is assimilated to textuality to an even greater degree), medieval women’s mysticism emphasizes embodiment as a means for accessing and expressing another form of literacy and exegesis, one that is not necessarily unorthodoxly subversive in and of itself, that is, in its use of embodiment, but rather, it is an orthodox means for other, at times subversive, ends. At the same time that I emphasize the continuity between body and letter in female- and male-authored works and thus see a greater complexity at work in women’s mystical texts, I want to emphasize the singularity that announces itself in women’s mysticism at the level of a poetics. The Christian association of women with the body clearly played a significant role in how theological ideas were (and were not) communicated to women, and in how women were permitted access to scriptural exegesis. Women’s leaning on the incarnational qualities of language and experience reflects this in ways that do not reduce embodiment to merely being more bodily and experiential. The practice of the liturgy—of hymns, prayer,

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and sermons—links the truer “sense” of embodiment to textuality. While embodiment is always a theological issue insomuch as it relates to incarnation, it is also related to a performative element that yokes body and text together as reflections of one another. I choose to focus on women’s mystical writings not with the aim of showing an underlying “essence” associated with women or the body, but rather to highlight a difference of inflection in relation to embodiment that can enhance how we regard “women’s” mystical texts in their singular and collective specificities.

PAUL To understand more fully this poetics of embodiment, it is crucial to recognize our own habits of thought about embodiment and the ways in which these are ill-matched with an influential patristic and medieval spiritual tradition that saw textuality as deeply and intricately embodied. As contemporary readers, we often privilege a uniform materiality and integrity with regard to the body and thus overlook the temporal and textual network in which the medieval body figures. When we refer to “the body” in conceptualizing the medieval mystic’s body, we habitually presume that the body constitutes one body, even if this designation finds theoretical nuance in terms of its designation as a natural or cultural body, gendered through performative or biological means. Even when the body is conceived of as a site of multiple kinds of constructions (gendered or other), it is thought of as contemporaneous with its spatiotemporal presentation in the world. No matter how porous, permeable, and fragile, the body is still conceived of as a single unit: one body, not more. While this contemporary emphasis finds an uncanny historical resonance, for example, in texts like the thirteenth-century Roman de Silence—whose main protagonist’s feminine body is hidden in order to perform the function of a male heir and becomes a subject of debate between the characters “Nature” and “Nurture”—the body is still conceived of by us as well as by its author, Heldris of Cornwall, as a discrete entity that is a product of its contemporary environment (be it biological or cultural) and is not as multilayered or theologically invested as the mystic’s body.18 At the same time, studies that focus on material or phenomenal accounts of embodiment in mystics’ texts and attempt to locate a historical specificity in the feminine body tend to overlook its multifaceted nature without considering the complex distinctions of inner and outer that yoke it to any series of associations beyond gender itself. That is, in focusing on the materiality, or “natural” femininity, of the body, they tend to undervalue the textual, temporal,

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and religious significations of the body that coexist alongside its complex cultural, ritualized, and linguistic fabric. What I will show here is that the body is more than just a single entity; rather, it is both a material and a spiritual body—conceptually tied to embodiments of inner and outer persons—that must be read according to multiple registers of meaning. In looking at embodiment and immediacy as intimately connected to a poetic and temporal framework, I recast what is often seen as an essentialized and “natural” part of experience in the light of an experience of reading the outer according to the inner. Understanding how reading and embodiment are fashioned together and become inextricable from one another allows us to see the ways in which language and the body mark each other as part of a temporal and poetic operation that is present in but not limited to women’s texts. This interrelation between body and language is not a new phenomenon, nor is it unique to the Middle Ages; it is an essential element of Christianity, which identifies Christ with the Logos, the Word made flesh. The nature of the human being is intertwined with Christ in multiple ways, yet the most pertinent underlying link is through the figure of the Trinity and the imprint, or imago, that a person carries of divinity within. According to Trinitarian theology, divinity is coequal in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and so one following the humanity of Christ participates in divinity in an equal fashion. Since humans are made in the image of the divine, they participate in divinity by means of the humanity of Christ, but only by means of finding, enacting, or activating the imago within and orienting the soul accordingly. This inner figure of the divine finds its basis in the division of the human being into inner and outer persons, the former serving as a means for reflecting the image of the divine. The outer person’s embodiment is not necessarily vilified or denigrated in order to be annulled and done away with for a higher intelligible realm; rather, the outer person becomes the locus for a revision of an individual’s substance. Women mystics will capitalize on this distinction in a way that allows the material body to become an ample vessel for spiritual ends. Th is distinction between inner and outer persons issues from a long Hellenic and Christian tradition; in Christianity, it associates the illumination of the human heart, or inner person, with the word of the Gospel: “You yourself are our letter written in our hearts, known and read by all men” (2 Cor 3:2).19 This written letter is destined to become a writing that manifests itself through the life or works of the outer body and is read like a text. Hellenistic philosophy and literature, from Homer to Plato, often distinguished the body from the soul, which departed (and possibly perished once separated; see Phaedo 69e–70a) its physical vessel after death. Yet the soul was also referred to as that part of the human being that lived on eternally beyond death

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(often characterized as the psyche, psuche, or mind, nous), in contrast to the perishable part of human existence. Likewise, although not in identical fashion, the Christian tradition, especially the Pauline, connects the outer person with the perishing of the temporal body, and the inner with its eternal counterpart. In 2 Corinthians, Paul associates the outer person, or the exo anthropos, with mortal flesh (4:11), the soma, or body (4:10), and an earthly tent (5:1). Elsewhere the outer person is invoked in respect to human genealogical history (Gal 4:23 and 29) and the law of sin (Rom 7:23). The exo anthropos is thus associated with historical time—or, more specifically, with time itself—and the worldly medium in which the human is born, dwells, and perishes in time. In contrast to the outer person, the inner person, or eso anthropos, is aligned with that dwelling not made by human hands which lives on eternally in the heavenly house: “For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan earnestly, desiring to be clothed [ependusasthai] with our house which is from heaven” (2 Cor 5:1–2). The metaphor of clothing seen in Paul will be significant for Augustine, especially in relation to the “holy interior clothing of [the] heart.”20 Likewise for Hadewijch, especially in her Liederen (songs), clothing oneself in Christ is a figure for the process of perfecting one’s person—outer and inner, both at once. The outer person is—as David Aune, Eric Jager, and philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben have argued—not part of a dualism, and neither is it entirely Platonic, for it is “not described as inherently evil or as in opposition to ὁ ἔσω ἄνθρωπος [o eso anthropos] though the outer person and the inner person are clearly in tension, for the latter is ‘sighing under a burden,’ i.e. desiring release from the drawbacks of physical existence.”21 Rather, the outer body works in a dynamic tension—substantially and temporally—with the inner person. By means of the inner, the outer finds a truer measure and means for becoming a spiritual vessel, renewing itself in the measure of the divine: “Thus we do not wear out. Even though our outer person is being wasted away, our inner person is being renewed day by day” (2 Cor 4:16). The inner person does not operate in the dominant rhythm of historical time but, rather, according to the immanent temporality and of law of the divine: “For I delight in the law of God according to the inner person” (Rom 7:22). Even though the law of the divine is associated with the inner person, the inner person and the law of the spirit intersect with historical time, needing renewal “day by day.” Paul refers to fulfi llment of the righteousness of the spiritual law as a form of “walking” according to the spirit (Rom 8:4), claiming a dynamic interaction between eternal and temporal realms, translating the spiritual law belonging to the inner into a manifest way of being in the world.

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While Paul does not systematically equate the inner person with the soul, he does equate its law with the law of the mind (nous) in Romans 7:23 and 7:25: “But I see a different law in my members warring against the law of my mind and taking me captive to the law of sin which is in my members,” and “with my mind I am serving the law of God.”22 Humans operate according to these two laws, in the rhythm of both persons, despite these laws being “at war” with one another. The language of captivity, enslavement, and war speaks to the discord that is constantly threatening to divest the person of hosting his true “home,” that is, the heavenly home promised to the inner person. I use the term “hosting” rather than a possessive term that would signal appropriation, as the subject who performs imitatio assumes this dwelling in a way that dispossesses him or her from any self. The tone of Pauline texts shifts from discord to elation, performing the kind of tension and promise that the inner and outer offer for the human condition and its salvation. The way of making the outer work with the inner involves taking on the garment of Christ, inactivating the outer body (soma) and flesh (sarx) in the figure of the crucifi xion, and letting the power of the divine work via the inner though the outer person: Romans 6:6: “Knowing this, that our old person [anthropos] is crucified with him, that the body [soma] of sin may be inactivated, to the end that we may be enslaved in sin no longer.” Th is deactivation of the outer body, depriving it of its independent agency that inclines toward sin in favor of a dependency on the divine, is signaled by a shift in Paul from the language of captivity into a language of hospitality and adoption. The crucified outer person is equated with dying with Christ, as well as living with him (in the future tense) by belief and faith, not by identification with the materiality of the outer: “If now we die with Christ we believe [ pisteuomen] that we will also live with [suzēsomen] him” (Rom 6:8), and “Always bearing about in the body [sōmati] the dying of the Lord Jesus so that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest [ phanerōthē] in our body [sōmati]. For we who live are constantly delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made manifest [ phanerōthē] in our mortal flesh [sarki]. So death works in us, but life in you” (2 Cor 4:10–12).23 Divinity may work life into the crucified body, transforming it into its promised state. Paul’s use of the subjunctive phanerōthē—from the verb phaneroō, meaning to make visible, known, manifest, clear—shows the contingent nature of this future appearing and its presently veiled state. It is not ever fully substantialized or realized in the body, the soma, until the “face-to-face” encounter with the divine. This encounter is, however, always in a future tense, whether one understands it as messianic or eschatological. The “groaning” Paul refers to in 2 Corinthians 5:2 signals the way one inhabits the outer person. To groan, from the verb stenazō, like stenos, meaning “constricted” or “pushed, compressed,” signals the pressure

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forward in time exerted in the “now.” While the outer person is constantly bearing, or hosting, the “dying” of Christ, the outer person cannot presently confirm or know itself absolutely as such; that is, its epistemological certainty is limited to its own limited agency and purview. The mortal person cannot possess any certainty of making manifest the life of Christ, that is, imitating Christ, even if she is presently doing so, for only the divine fully knows its twofold condition. Creaturely existence cannot know itself as the divine knows it.24 Likewise, the medieval devotee performing imitatio cannot know herself as fully fused with Christ or else, if she thinks she does, her suffering is tinged with hubris and lacks the uncertainty needed for proper compassion. The outer body encapsulates all the aspects of suffering and knowing that are proper to the human condition and its means of salvation. 1 Corinthians 13:12 spells out the imbalance between the knowledge of the divine in one’s humanity and divine knowledge: “For now we see through a glass, darkly [ainigmati]; but then face-to-face: now I know in part; but then shall I know [epignōsomai] even as also I am known [epegnōsthēn].” The knowledge associated with human existence cannot fully grasp the divine; yet man is always fully grasped by the divine, through the inner person. This famous Pauline passage of the future “face-to-face” encounter is echoed— if not cited directly—in countless texts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, especially commentaries on the Song of Songs, and will structure the kind of temporal syncopations witnessed in the “face-to-face” encounters with the divine in women’s visionary texts. The sense of being grasped “by” the divine before one’s ability to understand will be a key feature for visionaries like Hadewijch, Julian, and Hildegard who are seized by visions before they are able to seize and interpret the divine visions in themselves while still preserving the visions’ atemporal mystery and futurity. The mystic hosts a divine vision of unity that she eventually is able to decipher in this life, but the mystic only becomes this unity, embodying the mystery of unity, in a promised future moment. The hospitality implied in “bearing” Christ’s dying in one’s own body will also set a pace for the material and temporal stakes in the performance of imitatio. Paul’s Christological emphasis—his language of being clothed in Christ, putting on, or carrying Christ in oneself and following the law of the sprit of life ( pneumatos tēs zoēs) in Christ (Rom 8:2)—permits a grafting of the spirit of eternal life into historical time, allowing for the stranger rhythm of walking according to the spirit ( pneuma, Rom 8:4) while enduring the living death of Christ. The spirit, which is activated through faith, gives life to the dead letter that one hopes to become and transform in hosting the dying body of Christ. The pace of the spirit is that of a future tense, that of hope and a movement toward a collective “we,” which will form the virtual body of community, ecclesia, known in the Middle

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Ages as the corpus mysticum. This community will also be manifest as smaller communities of believers, like the community of individuals in Hadewijch’s circle. This community—whatever kind it is—is framed temporally by the memory of Christ and a promise of his return, a glance to a time past that is reenacted and a future moment that promises redemption. The use of the future tense, however, as I have noted, does not mean that nothing of the spirit transpires in the outer person. The seemingly contradictory and tortuous prose that we encounter in Pauline texts performs rhetorically the kind of tensions that operate spiritually and materially on and through the outer person. Paul’s prose replicates or conveys the experience of the double bind of being at war in one’s flesh while at the same time being promised grace.25 A person is not presently able to know what he is to become in his own name, but only in the name of Christ. This embodied hosting and ventriloquial grafting is also, as I have noted, a complex temporal enactment: Paul speaks prophetically (1 Cor 14:4) to others so that his speech may build up (oikodomei) the community, that is, so that his language becomes a means for dwelling in the divine for those who need instruction and initiation into divine mystery. Paul’s language works in time, according to the time of the outer, and provides meaning and “fruit” for the mind (nous, 1 Cor 14:14) so that it may generate the work of the spirit in his communities. The aporetic assertions that riddle Pauline texts may seem less instructive than they do beguiling, yet they show in performative language how Christ may live in the person, as he may in language, without the agency of an “I”, but with the desired agency of Christ himself and the law of the spirit that promises eternal life. This kind of prophetic voice is clear, for example, in visionary texts such as those of the eleventh-century abbess and visionary Hildegard von Bingen, which demonstrate how the inner can host the voice and words of God by means of the agency of the divine itself. What transpires in Paul’s texts is a displacement of the “I” who speaks and an enactment of the divine speaking through man. Paul’s language tries to speak this truth in a prophetic voice (as opposed to speaking in tongues, in which one speaks only according to the spirit, and not in the temporal mode of the body or the outer). Paul does not possess the power or authority to speak prophetically in his own name—that is, in the first person—but he can host this power as a person may host the power of Christ, in order to transform his or her body. He says in Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Just as Paul is able to be crucified and allow for Christ to live “in him” so too will he live by faith and speak according to the faith he has in

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what is unseen. He tells us in Romans 8:23–25, “But also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit [aparchen tou pneumatos], even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption [uiothesian] as sons, the redemption of our body [somatos]. For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he already sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it.” As we will see in mystics’ visions, Paul’s prophetic language is hinged between two temporal moments, as are his bodies: just as his language hosts the eternally based truth of the divine in the temporality of language, so too does the outer body work in hope toward its adoption into its new eternal identity as a fully spiritual body. The time of the eternal penetrates the time of the perishable in a way that does not dispense with the outer; rather, the eternal works through the outer, making it groan, allowing it to experience its promised transformed state as a promise, and not yet as the last word. Divine truths promise to be clothed in temporal ones, as the eternal body promises to be clothed in the spiritual one. In other words, both language and the body host promise: they bespeak what may be realized through faith but is not yet fully realized. While we often simplistically equate Paul with the denigration of the body in favor of the spirit, what we actually witness in his writings is a far more complex operation that is intimately connected to the promise of a poetics. In his wellknown work The King’s Two Bodies, Ernst Kantorowicz demonstrated how this Pauline paradigm was exploited in political terms in the later medieval and early modern periods, to allow for a body natural and a body politic of the king.26 Language and embodiment function as temporal and textual bridges, linking the seen and the unseen, the actual and the hoped for, and it is just this kind of bridging that we see at work in the mystical texts of the Middle Ages.27

INNER AND OUTER PER SONS: LITER AL AND SPIRITUAL ME ANING Throughout the Middle Ages, the Pauline language of inner and outer persons, bodies, and senses is invoked in mystical texts, male and female, outlined through the readings of Augustine and Origen (by way of Rufinus and the commentators on the Song of Songs).28 The attributes of inner and outer persons and inner and outer bodies will become more firmly identifiable and quantifiable alongside the development of a hermeneutics and its relation to a mode of living. In the writings of both Origen and Augustine, the inner person and inner body become more explicitly equated with the soul or mens (mind) than we witness in

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Pauline texts. Origen depends upon Pauline anthropology in his development of the qualities of inner and outer persons (especially in his explicit elaboration of inner and outer senses); this will also play a leading part in developing his understanding of the allegorical way of reading scripture. In Origen’s “Introduction” to his Commentary on the Song of Songs, which we receive in the Latinized translation by Rufinus, temporal and bodily disjunctions are again apparent between inner and outer, tensions which will have a direct bearing on the medieval mystic and visionary tradition. For Origen, the soul has its own temporal age and members; likewise with visionaries, who hear a divine voice according to an “inner ear” and see visions according to an “inner eye.” Reading 1 Corinthians 13:11 and Ephesians 4:13, Origen highlights the different ages that can pertain to the natural body—the flesh or material man—and the soul, privileging the soul who reaches full maturity in Christ.29 Visionaries like Julian, Hildegard, and Hadewijch wait until their “soul” matures before they attempt to fully deliver the received vision into words. Spiritual understanding is significant and it has its own age, one that is not identical to the age of the body. Origen’s distinction between inner and outer ages parallels his distinction between inner and outer bodies: “For he knows that all who believe will attain to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. Thus, just as the names of ages we have spoken of are applied with the same designations both to the outer and to the inner man, so you will also find that the names of the members of the body are applied to the members of the soul, or rather they are said of the power and desire of the soul.”30 The members of the invisible soul, Origen specifies, are not necessarily body parts that reside latently in human beings, but are linked to the soul’s power and desires. Part of this “power” involves the ability to read and interpret scripture. Scorning those who do not see the difference between inner and outer, he singles out “certain of the simpler Christians, since they do not know how to distinguish and to keep separate what in the divine Scriptures must be allotted to the inner man and what to the outer man, misled by the similarities in the designations.”31 The complexity of the inner and outer and the very incompleteness I’ve pointed to create the potential for misunderstandings of the language of embodiment that were already anticipated in early Christianity. Our contemporary desire to designate all forms of embodiment as being of the “flesh” risks glossing over a fundamental distinction of inner and outer that applies to both living and reading. The goal, for Origen, in reading the Song of Songs is not to assimilate the literal meaning of the text with an outer fleshiness, but to read it according to the spiritual senses, just as Paul transforms the outer according to a spiritual sense. Quoting 1 Corinthians 15:49, Origen emphasizes that one should be like the bride and “bear

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the image of the heavenly according to the inner man” so that one is “led by a heavenly desire and love.” So too must we read accordingly. For Origen and for the mystical tradition of the Middle Ages, the means of reading and interpreting scripture are directly linked to the faculties of the inner senses. The inner senses, often a synecdoche for the inner person, are linked to (and often equated with) the soul and its invisible yet tangible affective, spiritual, and intellectual properties, engaged in what Origen calls “loving affection” (translated as caritas by Rufinus), or “affectionate love” (dilectio), aspects that will be picked up by the Cistercians and Hadewijch as Origen is Latinized.32 However much the inner senses figuratively mirror the exterior senses, the inner senses are not faculties of perception in the same fashion as those of the outer body, but “gifts” from God nurtured by the mystic or monk that aid in the joining of the sense of scripture with bodily performance and thus connect the mystic (or monk) to a larger collective body.33 For Niklaus Largier, the practice of prayer and contemplation enlivens the inner senses and opens up a “realm of emotions, an affective life which compensates for the lack of intellectual understanding and for the necessary dissociation of inner and outer man in medieval anthropology,” so that the outer senses could become “denaturalized” and then “renaturalized” through the aesthetic experience provided by prayer.34 As Largier implies, inner senses are not exactly a part of the “self ” as we would call it, which would imply agency and identity; rather, they involve a movement of expropriation of the self and the body proper in order to connect with spiritual understanding and divine will. Connected with the corpus mysticum and ecclesia, the inner body presupposes a collective “we” as its ultimate form.35 The inner senses make possible spiritual reading and understanding, cultivating the soul’s spiritual orientation, in turn making possible the guiding and scripting of the flesh or outer body by spiritual principles. The outer body becomes an instrument of the inner, and the body’s instrumentality (mediante)—to borrow a term used by the twelfth-century abbots Bernard of Clairvaux and William of Saint Thierry—is what enables it to be scripted to the Word of Christ through love. The Pauline reconfiguration and transformation of the outer body by the renewal of the inner is recapitulated in a slightly different syntax, but with similar, if not identical, ends. In The Nature and Dignity of Love, a text that will be of critical importance for Hadewijch, William comments on the connection of the inner and outer in temporal, affective, and bodily registers. The inner and outer are not connected “naturally” but through the cultivated movements of the soul. William focuses on the role of various affectus as a way to nurture the imago through the divinization of the will and perfect the inner and outer bodies. Like Origen, William will use the

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language of affection, referring to different affections in the plural, but in a more nuanced and stratified manner. Unlike affections, which are outer-oriented toward “things which vary according to the occurrences of things and times,” the affectus works in the inner, with the aid of the eternal divine as “that which possesses the mind by a kind of generalized force and perpetual virtue, firm and stable and maintained through grace.”36 This dependence on the divine parallels what we saw in Paul in terms of how one is “seized” by the divine, but counters one’s being grasped by God in terms of the grace needed to comprehend, even in a limited fashion, the significance of “being grasped.” Affectus is like a divine stimulus that provides the proper ordering for the human soul and its relation to life, enabling fuller spiritual understanding. The highest affectus, charity, aligns human beings with the inner, even when the outer person stumbles and is at its weakest. Quoting Romans 7:24, 25, and 17, William comments on the “war” within a person in his members, noting, “anyone who is, as blessed John says, born of God, that is, according to the reckoning of the inner man, does not sin, insofar as he hates rather than approves the sin which the body performs exteriorly, because he is preserved inwardly by the seed of the spiritual birth by which he is born of God. . . . He instead rises up and recovers, becoming more fruitful and alive in the hope of good fruit.”37 William follows Pauline distinctions of how the outer may be renewed and reformed by the spiritual rebirthings of the inner, but he does so following his friend Bernard of Clairvaux’s notion of the “instrumentality”—or mediating nature—of charity: “For as the body has its five senses by which it is joined to the soul by the instrumentality of life, so too the soul has her five senses by which she is joined to God by the instrumentality of charity.”38 Even though it is through charity that “we become old through the senses of the body and are conformed to this world,” it is “through the senses of the mind [that] we are renewed to the recognition of God, in newness of life, according to God’s will and pleasure.”39 At its highest moments, the affectus slices through the unstable and changeable temporal worlds to exercise eternal effects on the outer and to enable one to read the outer according to the spirit. Using language that will be echoed in Hadewijch’s Liederen, William notes that “the affectus of charity adheres in judgments according to the light of His countenance, so that she [the soul] may act or perform exteriorly what the good and pleasing will of God speaks inwardly to her. She finds it delightful always to strain towards his countenance and in it to read and to understand, as in the Book of Life, the laws by which she must live, to illuminate faith, to strengthen hope, to enkindle charity.”40 William provides one means for reading the book of life (liber vitae) via the instrumentality of charity and its effect on the soul. Paul, William, and Hadewijch thus work against a Neoplatonism that degrades the material of

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the outer person, even while they privilege the inner’s spiritual powers. Reading the book of life is given direction by the acts of reading and exegesis, but is also given outward direction by charity. A mutually fruitful interplay between reading and life is thus part of this poetics of embodiment, allowing one to work in the light of the other. For Bernard of Clairvaux, in Sermon 85 on the Song of Songs, the soul’s perfect identification with the Word clearly affects internal and external registers, so that “when you see a soul leaving everything and clinging to the Word with all her will and desire, living for the Word, ruling her life by the Word, conceiving by the Word what it will bring forth by him, so that she can say, ‘For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain,’ you know that the soul is the spouse and bride of the Word.”41 Meditation on the Word provides the fruit for acting. This interrelation between the interiority of reading and its effect on living is fundamental to twelfth- and thirteenthcentury Victorine education. Bynum has emphasized the importance of historia for Hugh of Saint Victor, showing that reading and exemplarity are interconnected: “Reading is . . . equivalent to the re-creation of historia in the ark of the reader’s heart.” Grover Zinn further notes that “Hugh’s theology unites in an intimate manner that which is most inward, the renewal of the imago Dei at the innermost core of the human person, and that which is preeminently outer, namely the succession of deeds done in time (ordo rerum gestarum) which comprises the divine ‘work of restoration.’”42 The relation between reading and living, between inner and outer, is critical to monastic spirituality of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as it is for many contemporary mystics like Hadewijch.

LIVING, RE ADING, AND BEING HADEWIJCH OF BR ABANT Hadewijch of Brabant is the first poet to write in Middle Dutch, yet we have little to no biographical knowledge of her. The only traces of her are furnished by her works, which survive in three main fourteenth-century manuscripts, all dated significantly later than her life, which is estimated to have been in the first half of the thirteenth century. Hadewijch’s works—comprising letters (Brieven), visions (visioenen), the List of the Perfect, songs (Liederen; formerly Poems in Stanzas), and rhymed letters (Mengeldichten; also “Poems in Couplets” 1–16)—are bound together, in this order, in her two oldest surviving texts, referred to as manuscripts A (Brussels, KBR, ms. 2879–80) and B (Brussels, KBR, ms. 2877–78), which date from between 1325 and 1350 and from 1380, respectively.43 B adds new materials at the end (poems 17–29 and a treatise), now attributed to another author, designated

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as Hadewijch II, whose works bear a stronger relation to Pseudo-Dionysian forms of Neoplatonism and mysticisms like Eckhart’s. A third text, manuscript C (Ghent University Library, 941), which dates to the end of the fourteenth century, inverts the order, placing the Visions first and altering the position of the treatise.44 She writes at a time when vernacular theology begins to flourish, and does so in her native tongue, Brabant (known as Middle Dutch, or Flemish), yet she intersperses her works with Latin phrases and French words, reflecting the trilingualism of this region.45 Her vernacularity reflects a contact and exchange with Latin texts characteristic of the period. Hadewijch writes during what McGinn declares is “the great age of women’s theology,” the period starting in the thirteenth century, and shares many of the traits of other mystics of the period.46 While we have no biographical information about Hadewijch, Cistercian and Victorine influences are easily traceable in her spirituality, which is not surprising given their prominence in the Brabant regions in this period. The deeply Trinitarian thought of Augustine inherited by Richard of Saint Victor and William of Saint Th ierry is prominent in all of Hadewijch’s work and explicitly articulated in her letters.47 While Hadewijch, like other mystics, focuses on the humanity of God, she nevertheless reminds her readers about the different roles of the Trinity, emphasizing the participation of all three. When Hadewijch cites her Cistercian and Victorine predecessors, she incorporates their work without referring to the sources, but rather including and shaping them to her own idiom and spirituality. One notable exception to this is when she refers to Bernard of Clairvaux explicitly in Letter 15 (“Saint Bernard speaks of this, ‘Jesus is honey in the mouth’ ” [CW, 79]), and includes him in her List of the Perfect as number eighteen, claiming, however, “I know little about him” (List, 284).48 As Paul Mommaers has emphasized, Hadewijch follows the path of Bernard in insisting on the affective and experiential priority in understanding God and on a life that reflects how one reads and interprets the divine.49 All understanding of the divine must manifest itself as doing, becoming the living example of scripture and living out the imitation of Christ. The idea of becoming the living example of scripture is by no means a new one—both Bernard and Hadewijch are elaborating on an aspect of Benedict’s Rule. In the Rule, the outer and inner are appealed to in various ways: monks are asked to listen to the abbot’s rules and to attend to them with the inner ear of the heart: “Listen, son, to the master’s rules and incline the ears of your heart.”50 The abbot is designated as the primary agent of the rule, making the text instrumental and instructional in nature. The “tools,” or instruments for the “inner” (instrumenta artis spiritalis), that enable the monk to do good works with the appropriate spirit are themselves pragmatic interpretations of scripture and provide a

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means for modeling one’s thoughts, words, conduct, actions, and desires on scripture itself via slightly more tangible and private means (through prayer, lectio divina, and the moral guidelines of scripture). While the Rule encourages the fusion of the inner with the outer, as a text it does not claim to serve as a direct means for fusion, but proposes monastic life as that means. Benedict’s emphasis on good works as the ultimate end for spiritual life parallels Hadewijch’s emphasis on werke, as we will see. The abbot, like Hadewijch herself a magister, provides a model through words and works, developing what the rule calls a “twofold teaching” relevant to the cultivation of inner and outer.51 The mapping of words onto an embodied counterpart is part of the implementation of the rule; the abbot, like Hadewijch, provides a double teaching in his words and through his embodied example for the monks to “read.” This correlation between understanding and living the divine is manifest in the larger context of medieval spirituality and impacts the nature of embodiment. As M. B. Pranger argues in his reading of a monastic poetics in works of the eleventh-century abbot Anselm of Canterbury, meditation on texts and prayer prevent “the self from dissolving into the vagueness and diff usion of the world and prepar[e] it for ‘living the way one reads.’ ”52 This mutual interplay between reading and living is highlighted by Rachel Fulton in her work on Marian devotion and the Song of Songs, wherein she shows that “for the monks, texts—and biblical texts in particular—were not so much read as lived.”53 The body is thus conditioned via the mind to become adapted to a text and read accordingly. Likewise, the mind can be conditioned via the body (from the outside in) by means of correct behavior, speech, and discipline. Stephen Jaeger has underscored the role of the inner and outer in medieval education: “For Hugh of Saint Victor discipline began with the control of the body and moved inward. For Bernard the cultivation of virtue begins in the conscience and moves outwards.”54 While this poetics—which operates between inner and outer persons and moves both ways—may not be a belabored, conscious production, a work, or any work, may be steeped in a poetic tradition inherited through cultural and textual milieux.55 The growing tendency, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, to associate an active spiritual life with embodied forms of understanding is critical for understanding how the mystic’s body is read, understood, and connected to spiritual life.56 Hadewijch’s spirituality radicalizes the theme of living as one reads to the extent of dispensing with any exterior vow, encouraging all formal rule to be generated from within. As far as we know, Hadewijch, a beguine, took no ecclesiastical vows, even though her spirituality shows Pauline, Augustinian, Cistercian, and Victorine influence and demonstrates contact with Latinate sources. For Hadewijch, the interiorization of an ecclesiastical vow, a vow that marks and seals

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the admission of an exterior rule, is deemed unnecessary and even obstructing in sealing her union with God. Hadewijch explains, “With a rule of life, people encumber themselves with many things from which they could be free; and that causes reason to err. A spirit of good will assures greater interior beauty than any rule could devise. . . . In desires for devotion, all souls err who are seeking anything other than God. For we must seek God and nothing else” (CW, 54).57 For Hadewijch as for many other beguines, rules imposed from the “outside” do not necessarily reflect the “inner beauty” (in binnen scoendere) that comes out of this autodiscipline and means nurturing the inner. Obedience to an outer rule is put aside in favor of a spiritual exercise—a self-imposed rule in the individual’s desire for devotion. For Hadewijch, as for Bernard, interior beauty trumps exterior form, although exterior comportment may reflect a divinely ordered soul. This emphasis on the inner in Hadewijch, however, does not exempt her from outward manifestations of the “inner beauty” of the soul. Like her contemporary Beatrice, Hadewijch also requires that one live the divine and, like her Cistercian counterpart, that she live the way she reads. The distinction between inner and outer persons and its relation to modes of reading has an existing and uncontroversial counterpart in the recent scholarly recognition and revalorization of the active, the embodied, and the link to hermeneutic and affective practices in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This phenomenon of inner and outer bodies also deploys the deep structure or informing background of such tendencies in very particular and sometimes unexpected ways. As I have been suggesting, while the body appears to be materially present in women’s mystical texts, and while mystics seem to be calling into attention their own bodily experiences, the body of the mystic should not be read only according to the time of sensation, exteriority, and unmediated experience. To do so is to misleadingly detach women’s embodiment from the long tradition of the inner and outer bodies, discussed above, evident in their monastic contemporaries. In reading the mystic’s text solely in terms of the body, we privilege a decontextualized phenomenality that, as I will show, needs to be read in relation to textual mediation (that is, how it is mediated by language) and in relation to an atemporal referent (that is, in relation to what it promises in the register of the eternal) in order to be fully understood. The time of the mystic’s body thus needs to be read—and is often read by the mystic and hagiographer—along the syncopated measure of a time that is not its own, the time of the inner person that animates the body and the memory of an experience or consciousness of divinity that recalls an atemporal moment to which the mystic is bound and seeks to return. This atemporal moment orients and punctuates the mystic’s texts and persons, in turn providing an underpinning that sets a measure for the work.

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This other temporality will be important structurally in the ways I have outlined, but it will also contribute to the significance of song and music in relation to the reconfiguration of historical time. The influential role of the liturgy in women’s mysticism highlights this temporal refiguration. Reading the medieval mystic’s body—an act that is just as important for the hagiographer and the mystic as it is for us, although for different reasons—involves understanding how the present of the text hosts the promise of enlivening the less visible inner person and this other time to which it attests, allowing the body in its multiplicity to resonate in differing temporal and material registers. In examining this culture of hospitality—of times, bodies, texts—in close readings of the writings of Hadewijch and other mystics, I show that this poetics is both particular to women’s spirituality and at the same time relatable to other textual traditions and spiritual practices. Mysticism offers us a more complex idea of the materiality of the body, of the body’s relation to a text, and of the acts of reading and contemplation that join body and text together. The fact that the body makes an—often dramatic—appearance in many medieval women’s mystical texts is often considered in relation to a displaced and subversive form of textual authority (thus aligning the body and experience with a position of an authorial “I”). Yet the reason for this bodily presence may have less to do with such alluring subversion than with the hermeneutic tradition, outlined above, in devotional texts that uses the inner body to connect with scripture. Also important, of course, are women’s participatory role in the liturgy and their partaking in a communal identity, other active forms of devotional practice, and the attention paid by religious communities to controlling and refashioning the body (in its relation to time and place) according to an ideal that is promised in and through the body. In short, women’s “bodily presences” in texts may incorporate what is also conventional and permissible in their positions not as preachers and theologians, but as practitioners and observers of their faith. Women’s access to scriptural exegesis through the practice of liturgy, hymns, prayer, sermons, and regulations of their own bodily practices emphasizes the merging of inner and outer through the means of reading. The body is part of a script (textual and performative), part of a textual and temporal network that allows for its multiple articulation and offers a means for giving up a personal identity in favor of a promised unity with Christ. While mystics, like Bernard, look to the book of experience (liber experientiae)58 or the book of life (liber vitae) for a reflexive understanding of meaning in scripture mediated by their conscience or mind, the point of bodily involvement for women mystics may not have so much to do with the authority of experience, as we understand it (which grants a certain degree of autonomy to its subject and presupposes an active agency), but with the authority of the inner body and the imago Dei which does not properly belong to

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her.59 As William of Saint Thierry reminds his audience, “When man loves God, man is at work, but it is God who works. Not Paul, but the grace of God with him.”60 The divine that acts in the mystic is not yet entirely of the mystic, except in hope and in promise. Since the mystic seeks to immerse herself in a memory of God operative within her, the category of authority is delicately distinct from the category of experience. The category of experience is also problematic in that the mystic undergoes what I call an unlived experience, an experience that does not find its roots in the time and place of the body proper, or the time and space of the here and now, but in the inner body and a promise that will unfold itself in time while never being entirely realized. This unlived experience, the experience of union with God, is experienced as a promise of union, but this union never actually happens in the time of its having been lived, that is, it never fully unfolds in chronological time, or the time that can be pointed to as “now.” Augustine and Paul provide the mystic text with a sense of the atemporal, that is, the eternal time of God, which is manifest in the perspective of the present, and in how a moment outside of time may be hosted by a moment in time without ever being reduced to it.

FR AMEWORK Examining the conceptualization of time, body, and language in Paul and Augustine provides a framework for understanding how these phenomena operate in Hadewijch’s texts, how language plays a part in their elaboration and constitution, and how these conceptual frameworks extend beyond the mystical tradition to appear and operate in other literary and spiritual practices. I am not arguing for a strict Augustinian reading that would completely explain any and all references to embodiment in the Middle Ages, à la D. W. Robertson; rather, I am showing a phenomenon apparent in (while not limited to) Augustine’s reading of the Trinity (initiated before him, as is evidenced in Hilary of Poitiers, Victorinus, and Theophilus of Antioch, among others), a phenomenon that partakes in a Pauline tradition and influences the conception of the Word as it relates to medieval mystical expressions of embodiment and temporality. The influence of Augustine, Paul, and Origen on the mystical tradition, and on medieval literature in general, in its literary and religious facets, is certainly widely recognized if not self-evident, yet the implications of this influence are what I pursue here in relation to the materiality of women’s bodies.61 The work of Hadewijch manifests this influence in ways pertinent to a wide spectrum of mystical texts. Hadewijch’s writings in verse and in Vision 7, with

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which I began, are often cited for their expression of immediacy, corporeality, and eroticism, yet if looked at in light of their Pauline and Augustinian influence, the focus of chapter 1, her work exhibits a subtlety of literary and theological affiliations that challenges this overarching perception. Embodiment becomes intimately related to interpretation and the mediating properties of language, reinscribing the sense of materiality to a future moment and spiritual embodiment. By understanding Augustine’s elaboration of two persons (inner and outer), we can better comprehend the ways in which the united bodies witnessed in mystical texts, such as those of Christ and Hadewijch in Vision 7, are unity promised but never fulfi lled, destabilizing the idea of a body that possesses unity in and of itself. The unusual diversity of genres of Hadewijch’s work—letters, visions, songs (poems in stanzas), rhyming letters (poems in couplets), and a descriptive list of people who have reached “perfection”—presents an opportunity for demonstrating how different poetic and prose forms correlate to different ways of embodying and inhabiting the divine particular to the focus and practice of her spirituality as a beguine. At the same time, the specificity that ties form and content together in her work gives us a measure to gage the singularity of other women’s mystical texts. Focusing primarily on Hadewijch’s Visions, but looking to Hildegard’s and Marguerite d’Oingt’s visionary activity, chapter 2 examines the temporal and hermeneutic roles inner and outer bodies serve in connecting visions to narrative and to embodied experience. Visions place an emphasis on relating the inner person to the outer, helping to shape the embodiment of spiritual life from the inside out. Like the Carthusian prioress Marguerite d’Oingt, Hadewijch partakes of the Cistercian language of spiritual battle; nevertheless, their respective visions’ uses of imagery reflect differences in beguine and Carthusian spirituality, the latter using embodied book-related imagery pertinent to the emphasis on reading and book-learning, unlike the beguine emphasis on an active life. In chapter 3 I explore the importance of the term werke for Hadewijch, a concept related to the Pauline notion of “deeds,” which follows Richard of Saint Victor’s emphasis on the lived (outer) person as the highest means of conformity with the divine. Through werke, the outer body is transformed according to the perfected inner body manifest in the visions. As the visions progress, the way Hadewijch reads and understands the inner informs the nature and experience of the outer material body. Embodiment is thus inextricable from reading, interpreting, and performing textuality, recasting how we conceptualize the role of the body in women’s mystical texts. While visions operate from the inside out, Hadewijch’s Liederen (her songs, or poems in stanzas), the subject of chapter 4, operate primarily from the outside in. Drawing on an understanding of the medieval liturgical uses of psalms, this

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chapter demonstrates how Hadewijch’s Liederen provoke, structure, and provide a hermeneutic means for understanding affect and performing imitatio in a way that informs many women’s mystical texts. Hadewijch’s spirituality is clearly influenced by the Cistercian and Victorine traditions, yet to reduce her role to merely being a sophisticated advocate of these forms of spirituality would overlook the ways in which her writings innovate from within this tradition and also the ways in which her work reflects its gendered audience and milieu. As the following chapters make clear, Hadewijch’s work evidences a complex salvational theology that emphasizes community and suffering particular in both style and content to her life as a beguine, yet exemplary for how we may approach the many other mystics in order to understand singularity of their own spiritual idiom. By comparing her writings to other women’s—Hildegard von Bingen, Marguerite d’Oingt, and Julian of Norwich, among others—all of whom are influenced by Pauline and Augustinian distinctions of inner and outer persons yet manifest this influence in significantly different ways, we may begin to understand a poetics of embodiment. How we read literature is, as always, a product of our own self-fashioning; in our desire for bodies, selves, agency, sexuality, autonomy, teleology, clear periodicity, and well-defined subjectivity, we read only one side of an increasingly complex story. A new set of criteria (of which this study of Hadewijch is one example) bound to a historic specificity and at the same time able to read theologically across mysticism can produce a more consistent means for understanding and assessing the singularity of women’s mystical texts. If we read women’s mystical texts with an eye for two persons, two bodies, two sets of senses, and a theological complexity that yokes these concepts to the means and style of their presentation, then we no longer truncate and isolate their relation to the exegetical tradition of which they are a part. While I do not intend to overlook the productivity of the category of gender as it has been invoked over the past thirty years, it is time to also acknowledge the narrow confines of this designation and the way in which it has paradoxically limited our understanding of women’s writings. If we put aside the concept of gender as an overt “given,” we can ask how it might resurface critically, once similarities between men and women’s writings are established, to help think through differences in style, language, interpretative practices, forms of literacy, and uses of textuality. If we formulate our criteria with an eye to the categories and concerns immanent in medieval texts, these new criteria may generate new categories, a different “order of things,” to echo Foucault, for how we read.

CHILDREN OF PROMISE, CHILDREN OF THE FLE SH AUGUSTINE’S TWO BODIES

Now we, my brothers, as Isaac, are the children of promise. —Augustine, City of God

Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of the announcement. —Paul, Galatians

We ourselves shall become that seventh day. –Augustine, City of God

THE PROMISE OF THE B ODY Whether or not we deem Augustine a mystic, Augustine’s writings are critical to Christian mysticism, especially that of the Middle Ages.1 Augustine’s theological framework and reading of Paul—especially in his later works— provide the grounds for the development of medieval mystical experience, its understanding of the role of the body, the inner senses, and the oxymoronic time of mystic experience.2 In Confessions, On the Trinity, The City of God, On Christian Doctrine, and indeed throughout his work, Augustine strives to provide a theological and textual bridge between a person’s limited status in time and space and the promise of eternal salvation.3 Salvation is linked to a divine essence incommensurate to the outer human senses. How then can a person know of the divine, and, even if he knows of God, how can he know God, given God’s being outside

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the measure of time and space? Augustine’s work tries to answer these questions, explicitly and implicitly. His writing attempts in ways performative and theological to demonstrate how divinity can become manifest to human beings, despite its hiddenness. I say “attempts” because Augustine does not credit his own thoughts with theological certainty—he is conscious of being as limited as the condition he ascribes to all human beings, and his text bears traces of the boundary between human and divine. One of the areas in which this is visible is his rhetorical style and conscious use of language. As in his Confessions, throughout his works he hopes to make truth, to confess it, to make what exceeds him transpire through him by means of language: “I am telling the truth, I am telling it to myself, I know what I cannot do” (Trinity 15.50 [435]) he writes at the end of On the Trinity.4 Like humilitas formulae common to mystics, Augustine’s acknowledgment of his own limitations may, he hopes, function as the sign of a greater truth operating through him. Hadewijch even makes explicit reference to Augustine’s consciousness of his own linguistic limitations in Letter 22, paralleling them with her own: “‘He who knows little can say little’; so says wise Augustine. Th is is my case, God knows” (CW, 94).5 As Augustine elaborates theologically on how the realm of the eternal aligns with the realm of the temporal, he attempts to demonstrably bridge divine and human realms in ways that are audible, visible, and comprehensible for his readers, even when he is doubtful of the truth of this endeavor. His own work itself is an instance of a promised bridging, in that it seeks to be a bridge between two incommensurate realms, making the divine more palpable to the reader even when it is sustained not by certainty, but by faith. Like the “life” of a saint, martyr, or the soul of Augustine himself, the text hosts a possible affirmation of divinity. I use the term “hosts” as it cannot claim or assert this affirmation as its own: divinity may operate through something or someone, such as the reader reading Augustine’s work, Augustine himself, or the mystic who receives God’s word. This act of divine “working through” is conceived of as an act of grace, one that complements human nature. In Christian doctrine, the only one who “owns” or is identical to divinity is the Trinity itself, that is, the Father, the Son (Christ), and the Holy Spirit. The human relation to divinity, even in the experience of intimacy with the divine, is therefore closer to hosting than to possessing a quality of the divine itself. Even divine truth eludes the way we perceive it: for Augustine, the truth associated with God resides with language, alongside language, through language, shadowing it, so to speak; however, truth is not substantially of language, as we will see further on in this chapter. Augustine’s understanding of the Trinity and the trace (vestigium) of the imago Dei, the image of God within all human beings, will provide the theologi-

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cal basis for this hosting, implicitly establishing a correlation between language, the mind, embodiment, and the promise of divinity. The imago Dei, that part of humanity irrevocably linked to its divine creator, is constituted by various trinities that trickle down to leave a trace in the exterior person (homo exterior)—what he will refer to as a means of invoking the Pauline exo anthropos—and its embodied sensible condition. The outer person’s mediation between material entities and the mind will be the first means for locating the Trinitarian reflections of the divine within human beings. For Augustine, the human person and, consequently, the human body and its senses are suspended between multiple addresses, commands, and destinations: the body is part of a corruptible material destined for death, yet in the light of divine truth, through this same body we are promised a glimpse of the image of God and the afterlife of the soul. It is by means of the body, even when claming a negative relation to it, that this ideal imago is traced; even in life, “the ideal is not escape from the body and the world, but reestablishment of inner equilibrium by unification of all one’s levels of being, which includes the body’s spontaneous submission to the soul.”6 Augustine, following Paul, distinguishes inner man (eso anthropos) from outer man (exo anthropos), but in Latin terms, identifying the interior and exterior homo and elaborating a complex regimen of inner and outer senses, building up “a complete anthropology of the inner man.”7 As Brian Stock notes, for Augustine, we perceive outer things “through our bodily senses, but we pass judgment on them by means of a far more important sensory capacity, which can be called the sense of the interior man.”8 Augustine will thus provide a twofold anthropology for the activities of human beings: as they dwell in the world bodily (the outer person) and as the soul inhabits the body while orienting itself toward God (the inner person). Like Paul, who distinguishes between sarx (flesh) and soma (body), Augustine too thinks of corpus (body) as discernible from, while also comprising, caro (flesh), yet ultimately, like Paul, his interests are in the transformation of the body as a whole when redeemed, a transformation that necessarily includes the flesh. While flesh bears the mark of corruption and decay, signaling the fall into sin, it promises to be transformed into a spiritual body. Like his favorite apostle, Augustine does not discard or deny the outer person, nor does he attempt to discard the flesh and efface its contingency on the outer person; rather, he seeks to reconcile the limits of embodiment with the promise of the divine.9 Although the outer person cannot claim the same kind of trinity as the inner, it nevertheless is a lesser form that promises a relation to the Trinity itself.10 Looking to the outer, Augustine notes: “Let us try then if we can to pick out some trace of the Trinity in this outer man too. Not that he is also the image of God in the same way as the inner man; the apostle’s verdict is quite clear which declares that

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it is the inner man who is being renewed for the recognition of God according to the image of him who created him (Col 3:10); since elsewhere he says, Even if our outer man is decaying the inner man is being renewed from day to day (2 Cor 4:16)” (Trinity 11.1 [303]).11 Since human beings are made in the image of the divine, Augustine attempts to show how a trace of the divine is present in both the inner and outer persons, despite their differences and despite the outer person’s inferior nature. An awareness of the traces of the Trinity in both may, he hopes, ultimately help human beings orient their inner and outer persons toward the divine—if acknowledged, nurtured, and put to use correctly. The first step of this orientation toward the Trinity involves recognizing the difference of how we perceive and how divinity is to be understood. Augustine starts with the outer and is quick to remark on the outer’s negative relation to the Trinity. He elaborates on the partial nature of human understanding, showing how divine substance is incommensurate to our habits of equating things spiritual with substantial bodily entities: “Father and Son together are not more being than Father alone or Son alone, but [ . . . ] three substances or persons together . . . are equal to each one singly, which the sensual man does not perceive (1 Cor 2:14). He can only think of masses and spaces, little or great, with images of bodies flitting around in his mind like ghosts” (Trinity 7.11 [230]).12 Although Augustine’s sensual man, or animalis homo, bound as he is to time and space, can only think of things according to his outer senses, conjuring ghosts there where an unfathomable substance is promised, something of this sensual man promises more if perceived as incomplete and incommensurate to the divine. If one conceives of the material body perceived by the senses as inadequate for measuring the divine, then one avoids confounding the divine with a material substance—unlike the Manicheans and other (heretical) cults of early Christian culture. For Augustine, through establishing a relation of the outer human body and bodily senses to the mind, and not in their absolute rejection, a person may begin to discern the figure of the Trinity. Orienting the bodily senses to serve the mind will be the first step in finding the Trinity within.13 The mind (mens) will bridge the limited body with the promise of the divine. Augustine starts with the body and works inward toward the faculties of the mind, tracing out various trinities with each progressive turn.

ORIENTATIONS Augustine’s theory of the human body is intimately interwoven with a Trinitarian theology that seeks to unite a perishable, limited human body with the prom-

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ise of unity and redemption in God. The human body’s materiality is, as I have stressed, indissociable from a future time in which it finds a truer substance and fuller meaning. This promise of unity is articulated in On the Trinity and elsewhere as a “face-to-face” encounter, and, following Paul, becomes actual only in a future moment. At present this unity is not realizable, for now it is only articulable as a hope and a yearning and not yet a sight: “The fact is that the man Christ Jesus, mediator of God and men (1 Tm 2:5), now reigning for all the just who live by faith (Hb 2:4), is going to bring them to direct sight of God, to the face-to-face vision, as the apostle calls it” (Trinity 1.16 [76]).14 In a formulation that will be picked up in an almost literal fashion by the mystics, Augustine explicitly refers to Paul and his evocation of a promised union of knowledge and perception with the divine: “But when that which is perfect is come then that which is in part shall be done away. . . . For now we see through a glass [mirror] darkly but then face-to-face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know even as also I am known” (1 Cor 13:10–12). In the present, this face-to-face encounter is only suggested; it is partially glimpsed through faith, and understood through Augustine’s attempt to bridge perception and knowledge by means of his book, De Trinitate. This encounter occurs in a time that—depending on one’s interpretation—can be described as a future Messianic or eschatological time and is therefore not tangibly present. For the visionary mystics, this time “outside” the present moment will be reformulated in the temporality of visions. Visions are “face-to-face” encounters with the divine, which transpire in a time that is not of the outer person or the sensual man, but of the inner person and its promised unity. Reading the embodied nature of visions will require attention to these differences. Because the human being is both like and unlike God, made in God’s image but unlike God in its mode of dwelling in time and in space, Augustine is faced with the question of how to reconcile the body’s existence in a temporal and changeable medium with the unchangeable and eternal nature of its creator. It is only through loving and understanding what Augustine calls Christ’s “back,” that is, his being as flesh, comprehending Christ’s death in the flesh, and imagining what his front points to that one may be united as a member of Christ in the symbolic body of the Church.15 One has to desire and love that which one cannot see fully. Augustine’s language, which merges Pauline theology with an unusual reflection on Christ’s body, draws on the Pauline notion of walking by faith to illustrate the way in which the body and faith perform together, complementing one another: But while we are away from the Lord and walking by faith and not by sight (2  Cor 5:6), we have to behold Christ’s back, that is his flesh, by this same

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faith. . . . All the surer is our love for the face of Christ which we long to see, the more clearly we recognize in his back how much Christ first loved us. . . . For we look forward in hope to the realization in Christ’s members, which is what we are, of what right-minded faith assures us has already been achieved in him as our head. So this is why he does not wish his back to be seen until he has passed–he wants us to believe in his resurrection.16 ( Trinity 2.28–29 [118])

This gesture of looking forward and walking by faith does not actualize unity in the present; rather, it orients the future “face-to-face” encounter with God. As I have been emphasizing, this orientation for the face-to-face encounter involves temporal and bodily elements. Read without the temporal futurity of hope and faith, the back of Christ does not signify what it should, namely, the promised unity of Christ’s members after death. Christ’s body thus offers human beings a means to comprehend the partial nature of the body and of the time associated with human life. As with the mystics, it is through Christ’s body that the faithful will be led to a “direct sight” of God; through Christ, unity in eternal time is promised. In finding the “trace of the Trinity” (vestigium Trinitatis) in inner and outer persons, people will thus be able to understand the ultimate meaning of Christ’s bodily existence and his relation to the salvation of each person’s soul and body. Women mystics will use this figure of the face-to-face to articulate the encounter with the divine in the time of the vision. And while visions seem like an unmediated encounter with the divine, they are eventually related in mediated form as encounters with divine likeness or similitude—through images and words, accessible in time through narrative. In addition, one of the most popular visionary images is of Christ, God in his humanity, meaning that the vision of the divine is often mediated by this human figure, whom the mystic encounters by means of her inner person. The mystic rarely encounters an absolute “intellectual” vision— the highest in Augustine’s ranking of visions—but rather, a vision abundant in images and sensations.17 God also provides her with tokens of himself that she must then interpret. The body invoked in the vision has to be read cautiously, keeping in mind how language that appears bodily is not reducible to the body, but rather, is mediated by the mind. Likewise in reading Augustine, although Augustine’s use of visual language, in passages like the one just cited, relies on its metaphoric property (he is not talking literally about Christ’s back, or about the Church possessing a material body, or about an incorporeal God having a face), his use of bodily language and metaphor serves a critical function. Bodily language enables us to understand how the body

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and sight are subsumed by thought and the mind, demonstrating how human understanding may eventually grasp divinity. While we begin with the means of the outer, we turn increasingly inward. In On the Trinity, Augustine goes to great lengths to stress that God cannot conform to human measures and attributes, nor can he be presented in the visible register: “In any case, that nature, or substance, or essence, or whatever else you may call that which God is, whatever it may be, cannot be physically seen; but on the other hand we must believe that by means of the creature made subject to him, the Father, as well as the Son and the Holy Spirit, could offer the senses of mortal men a token representation of him in bodily guise or likeness” (Trinity 2.35 [122]).18 Providing a token or a bridge between the body and the promised sight of God becomes essential to Augustine’s theology. Without any means of grasping the divine, humans are bereft of a key element in loving and eventually “seeing” God, for “unless we love him even now, we shall never see him. But who can love what he does not know? Something can be known and not loved; what I am asking is whether something can be loved which is unknown . . . and what does knowing God mean but beholding him and firmly grasping him with the mind? For he is not a body to be examined with the eyes in your head” (Trinity 8.6 [246]).19 Augustine is clearly attempting to bring together two seemingly opposed realms: the limiting nature of bodily perception and the urgency to love God. Loving what one cannot know—while approximating it mentally—and loving love itself will be the means for allowing for a bridge. Not only is love the means by which unity will be promised, but language and representation will play decisive roles in promising to bridge this gap via the mind through contemplation. Understanding the promised “face-to-face” beholding of God must necessarily be mediated by means of the human faculties. Augustine works inward from perception toward the mind through an analysis of the body and the trinities that can be identified within human beings. Unity trickles down to even the lowest. Augustine insists that even divided bodies exist only in relation to the ideal unified nature of the body: “There may of course be some bodies that are quite impossible to cut up or divide; but even so, if they did not consist of their parts they would not be bodies. So even in these the part is so called with reference to the whole, because every part is part of some whole and a whole is whole with all its parts. But as both part and whole are body, these are not only posited relatively to each other, they are also substantially” (Trinity 9.7 [274]).20 Likewise, even though Augustine emphasizes the limited structuring of how we perceive things and experience things in the visual field—wherever you turn to see the whole, “you will see parts”21—the partial, fragmentary nature of vision promises an echo of the greater whole. For Augustine, what one sees in a temporal

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and material world are objects that perish and never exist in the time of the eternal, so long as we see them with our outer eyes. Since God is eternal and created all things at once, the simul, the all-at-once, is what human beings may only falsely translate by succession, by what Hegel would call a “bad infinity” (infinity derived from succession, that is, from our way of measuring time). It becomes evident then, if one interprets this Augustinian paradigm in a wider context, that the importance of vision, of spiritual vision as mystics imagine it, is to try and glimpse the eternity of things, the unity and participation of the part with the whole, through mental and spiritual focus. The relation of the part to the promise of a whole provides the means by which the body can promise more than itself and highlights the mind’s essential participation in the process. The outer promises a relation to the inner, both inner and outer promise some relation to the imago, and the imago in turn promises unity with its maker in a time to come. This underlying logic that ties embodiment to a future unity by means of the mind is part and parcel of what I term an embodied poetics. The body is inextricably linked to the mind and to the mirroring of a divine origin.

TRINITARIAN MIRROR S As a material substance, the body defers its materiality to a promised reflection of the imago Dei. In On the Trinity Augustine demonstrates this relation between the material body and its promised union with its divine origin by dramatizing the body’s interaction with what he calls the “thinking gaze,” which, as the combination suggests, brings mind and sight in contact with the physical body. A series of mirroring effects allows Augustine to move from a material and scopic economy to a spiritual one, a human trinity mirroring a divine one. Augustine starts with the act of seeing. At first, sight actually touches the body, for, following Plato’s idea of vision, the eye is not merely a passive object that absorbs light, but is an active body part that emits a ray and requires the mirroring quality of the mind in order for its power to be grasped: “We see bodies with our bodily eyes because the rays which shoot out from them touch whatever we observe, but we cannot snap off these rays and bend them back into our own eyes, except when we look in a mirror. . . . We certainly cannot see this power with our eyes . . . and if it can be done we grasp even this matter with our minds” (Trinity 9.3 [273]).22 Although this model will become outdated in the later Middle Ages, especially with the optics of the Oxford school Franciscans of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Augustinian influence is pertinent in twelfth- and thirteenth-century mysticism as it will demonstrate the way inner vision merges with

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its object. For William of Saint Th ierry, for example, inner vision touches and becomes what it sees through love.23 While mystics will not necessarily conceive of outer vision as touching its object, the influence of Augustine’s Trinitarian views will persist in other ways. Medieval understandings of the Trinity’s relation to the mind or soul will borrow from Augustine’s triangulations of memory, understanding, and love, although the trinities are often rephrased in different terms. Understanding, for example, is replaced by reason in William of Saint Thierry. Memory, reason, and will are emphasized in Hadewijch and Margery. And the persons of the Trinity are often associated with might, wisdom, and love. In Letter 22, Hadewijch associates the inner trinity of Reason, Memory, and Will with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, respectively.24 Whatever the denomination, trinities abound to mirror how divinity figures within human beings. Arriving at these inner trinities—these truer reflections closer to divine nature—will require several steps. In order to show “that the mind can know itself as in a mirror” (Trinity 10.5 [290])25 Augustine will subsume one material power to a higher nonmaterial one in a hierarchical fashion. In its initial contact with the body, sight is dissected into several components. The eye’s bestowing of form is regarded as a product of both the body seen and the power of sight. Augustine clarifies this dual engendering: “Sight is begotten of the visible thing but not from it alone; only if there is a seeing subject present. Sight then is the product of the visible object and the seeing subject. . . . We cannot say that the visible thing begets sense, but it does beget a form as a likeness of itself, which occurs in the sense when we sense anything by seeing it” (Trinity 11.3 [305]).26 The form of the object, its likeness, is thus engendered by a coupling of the senses and the “seeing subject.” In characteristic fashion, Augustine will introduce a third element, in this instance the will, which “is more spiritual than either of them” (11.9 [311])27 and which will form a trinity between the nonspiritual body seen, the semi-spiritual figure, and the will itself. This triangulation among the material and the spiritual is important for understanding how this initial trinity appears: triangulation mediates all materiality, making it copresent with something spiritual. This trinity is therefore not an image that is substantially present, nor is it an object to behold, to echo Augustine. Augustine makes clear the dangers of taking the trinity of the outer person for a substantial image of God. He warns that “likeness” misguided may motivate sin: “Even in their very sins, you see, souls are pursuing nothing but a kind of likeness to God with a proud and topsy-turvy and . . . slavish freedom. Thus our first parents could not have been persuaded to sin unless they had been told, You will be like gods (Gn 3:5). It is true that not everything in creation which is like God in some way or other is also to be called his image, but only that which he alone is

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higher than. That alone receives his direct imprint which has no other nature interposed between him and itself ” (Trinity 11.8 [310–311]).28 Part of the underlying project of On the Trinity is to hierarchize various likenesses so that motivation and action become part of the equation—inner and outer affecting one another in tangible ways. In this fashion, Augustine ties the imago to more than just a static imprint—he makes it a means of perfecting human nature, inside and out. In positing the way in which a trinity manifests itself in relation to the body, he will simultaneously articulate an ethos of how one should act and live virtuously, the will aligned with God’s. The will provides leverage in the first trinitarian triangulation in that it hoists man out of his embeddedness in the sensible world, giving him the means to orient the flesh by means of a higher power, that of the mind. Given that an element other than sight is required to form this first trinity, in order to love the body (and eventually the body’s unity with its creator), a form of alienation is introduced. Because “something else is presented to the visible body for sight to be formed out of it, namely the sense of the one who is seeing. For this reason to love the body seen means being alienated [ Quocirca id amare, alienari est]” (Trinity 11.9 [311]).29 Unity with the body begins with estrangement and alienation from its materiality. The body perceived is put aside in favor of a perceiving body, part of the sensory— that is, outer—human being. For Augustine, the body—once understood correctly—is marked by this alienation, for something other than how we perceive it, something that is nonmaterial, must participate in it in order to make sense of it. A poetics of the material and the immaterial ensues, one that will be necessary for the “truth” in embodiment to appear. Following Augustine’s logic, what seemed to have come first, sight, actually is preceded by the will, for “the will was already there before sight occurred, and it applied the sense to the body to be formed from it by observing it. However, it was not yet pleased” (Trinity 11.9 [311]).30 The body is caught between the “already” and “not yet” of the will, and sight becomes “the end and resting place of the will, at least in this one particular respect” (Trinity 11.10 [311]).31 The body is, in this perspective, not a simple materiality to be grasped with the eyes of our head, to repeat Augustine’s phrase. When reading mystical texts, we have to keep in mind that the inner will (or “understanding,” “might,” “wisdom,” or otherwise) mediates the materiality of the body to make it a proper reflection of the divine. If we look at the mystic’s body from a pragmatic perspective governed by the senses, we miss its divine reflection entirely. The engendering of a trinity is produced yet again according to Augustine, allowing for a second kind of sight to manifest itself: that of thought gazing on

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internal memory. This second sight is privileged over outer sight, for the exterior person must read the outer material vision in relation to, and only to, the inner. External sight is needed in order to start the chain of engenderings, but it must be read by the inner in order to be put into proper context. Memory becomes the means for substituting the immediacy of sensation with the attention of thought; it becomes the absent body for the gaze of thought. Augustine writes: So it is that in this series which begins with the look of a body and ends with the look which is produced in the thinking gaze, four looks are brought to light, born as it were step by step one from the other; the second from the first, the third from the second, the fourth from the third. From the look of the body which is being seen arises the look which is produced in the sense of seeing, and from this the one which is produced in the memory, and from this the one that is produced in the attention on thinking. So the will couples quasiparent with its offspring three times: first the look of the body with the one it begets in the sense of the body; next this with the one that is produced from it in the memory; and then a third time this with the one that is brought forth from it in the gaze of thought. But the middle or the second couple, while nearer to the first, is not so similar to it as the third one is. For there are in the series two sights, one of sensation, the other of thought. It is to make possible the sight of thought that there is produced from the sight of sensation something similar in the memory which the conscious attention can turn to in thought, just as the attention of the eyes turns to the body in actual observation. That is why I have wished to propose two trinities of this kind, one when the sensation of sight is formed from the external body, the other when the sight of thought is formed from the internal memory.32 ( Trinity 11.16 [316]; emphasis mine)

In discerning this second trinity, Augustine opposes sensation to thought, yet he describes the “sight of thought” as though it operated in a fashion that was parallel to physical sight while being one step removed from its matter, one form of sight operating on a level of what Augustine calls the “outer man” (or the sensual man) and the other on the level of the “inner man” (as mind, or mens). The sight of thought (what one would call “representation”) allows the word, image, or thought to exist as a free presence to the mind. The sight of thought is a kind of metaphorical body in that the inner person retains the model of the outer, each mirroring the other, as though the constitution of each were intimately interwoven with the greater design of creation. Th is division between inner and outer

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bodies will be taken up by the mystics while used for slightly different ends, as we will see, but nevertheless pertinent to becoming closer to the divine by means of the inner image of God within. Augustine gives the inner body metaphoric properties of the outer one: thoughts become “a kind of utterance of the heart, which also has its mouth” (Trinity 15.18 [408])33 the mind has an “inner gaze,” and the memory digests things as does the stomach.34 In On the Trinity, Augustine even refers to the “eyes of love” that will “see God” (1.31 [90])35 and will find a glimpse of him scattered throughout scripture. If one looks at it properly, that is, as Augustine claims to, the power of physical sight retains within itself the promise of the sight of thought, and the power of the sight of thought promises to unite ontologically fragmented material things with the unity of “nonbodily and everlasting meaning.”36 It is from the memory and from the sight of thought that things will be pieced together to form part of a divine truth, that is, an everlasting truth that is not subject to temporal change. For Augustine, this piecing together is possible because “we do make judgments of bodily things in virtue of the meaning of dimensions and figures which the mind knows is permanent and unchanging” (Trinity 12.2 [323]).37 What becomes significant here is that the possibility of thinking and representing the body is the means by which it is promised unity, for in the move from material sight to the sight of thought it is purged of its material substance and given a “better nature.” The power of sight (a kind of material nature) is subsumed by the power of thought and thought’s ability to represent things through language. The truer materiality of the body, the one that is more true to God’s image (the imago Dei or the imago Trinitatis in man), is in fact the body as image, that is, as representation and part of a linguistic and symbolic economy, for “the image of the body in our consciousness is better than the reality of the body itself insofar as it is in a better nature, that is, in a living substance such as the consciousness. By the same token when we know God we are indeed made better ourselves than we were before we knew him, especially when we like this knowledge and appropriately love it and it becomes a word and a kind of likeness to God” (Trinity 9.16 [280]).38 The “living substance” of consciousness provides the truer materiality for the body, and love the best means for becoming a true likeness.39 The imago Dei and the imago Trinitatis are not static, mesmerizing ends, but are part of a series of dynamic engenderings that lead, Augustine hopes, to action: to loving and becoming like God in one’s body and person. Augustine’s understanding of love in On the Trinity will play an influential role in mystical texts, making love a trio and trinity of its own, as we will see later, in the form of love, lover, and beloved. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the

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role of love in uniting lover with beloved will be a central motif in the commentaries and sermons on the Song of Songs, written by Bernard of Clairvaux, among others, to express the ultimate union with the divine. In Hadewijch’s work, Minne means “love” (as noun and verb), “lover,” and “beloved,” and also becomes a multivalent vehicle for expressing the ways in which human beings experience God according to a Trinitarian theology. The Middle Dutch term Minne derives from the Latin mens (related to the English mind ) and can also signify thought.40 In Hadewijch’s poetic works, the term enacts a Trinitarian immersion of its subject in the divine, combining an ethos of how one is to approach the divine, how the divine eludes the human, and how the divine is read and perceived by humans in the promise of an encounter.41 For Augustine, who may not be as poetic here as Hadewijch or Bernard, the systematic progression from one trinity to the next demonstrates the possibility of a theological (and philosophical) truth that one may eventually live. Loving the body as image and, following its transformation into language and reflection, loving the body as an object for consciousness brings the outer person closer to the human likeness of God. Augustine could not be any more explicit about this desired transformation, in which “we are being changed from form to form and are passing from a blurred form to a clear one” (Trinity 15.14 [406]).42 when we come closer to the immortal body that is promised to human beings, “conformed in this respect not to the image of the Father or the Holy Spirit but only of the Son” (Trinity 14.24 [390]).43 The image reflects a more originary state, casting humans outside their being-as-flesh and enabling them to glance outside of a material to a “spiritual” self. This truer, promised, “immortal” body is closer to being-as-Word, paralleling Christ’s being as Word-made-flesh. This promised body is thus hinged in the transformational time between its first appearance as outer material and its later (yet more originary) representation in language, between the time of the temporal and a time that promises an indirect glimpse into the eternal. Like metaphor, it is a body that is caught in passage, in transfer to a promised referential likeness. Granted, Augustine does not want the promised body to be in any way derived from or dependent on the substance of the outer body, but he does want the promised body to be in some way visible (almost already there) in the mirroring effect of the mind. Augustine is subtly proposing that we mediate all things seen with an interpretive “reading” of them through the mind, that is, through the inner person, orienting ourselves toward divinity in the process. This will affect how we read the body, that is, how we discern it and attribute meaning to it, and it will also affect how the body acts. Once oriented by the mind, the outer person will conform more closely to the inner counterpart, acting in accordance with a will aligned with God’s.

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What, however, would the materiality of this promised body be, if it is closer in kind to a word or to an image (and, by contrast, not the literal incarnation of either)? This question will be significant for the mystics, for it will alter the way we conceive of how the mystic hosts and embodies divine truth. The sensory language of mystical writings may seem profoundly material to us, drawing attention to the body’s materiality—as when, for example, Hadewijch sees herself embracing Christ in Vision 7, when they are seemingly “one without difference. It was thus: outwardly, to see, taste, and feel, as one can outwardly taste, see, and feel in the reception of the outward Sacrament” (CW, 281). Yet if we read the body in the vision as fleshy and corporeal, as part of the external person, we miss a fundamental element. In the mystic’s vision, an inner body appears that is markedly different from the body-as-flesh. This inner body only becomes visible or tangible with the vision’s entry into language, that is, it only becomes palpable when the mystic places enough faith in her vision to utter what she saw. In this way, the inner body is strangely co-substantial with language and necessitates faith in order to be granted substance. Its materiality is inextricable from these elements. The message that the inner body hosts—the vision from God—is not identical to the inner body itself; rather, divine grace operates to grant the inner body a glimpse of divine truth and to communicate that truth in mediated fashion through language. Like the materiality of the mystic’s promised body, the “truth” of the promised body will be mirrored in language, that is, it will figure in language. The truth that the body hosts will find its ultimate realization in a time to come, for “at the moment we can bear the same image, not yet in vision but in faith, not yet in fact but in hope” (Trinity 14.24 [390]).44 The promised body hosts this “truth” while never being commensurate to it, always one step away from its metaphorical referent. Inasmuch as the vision is represented in language, language is co-substantial with this promised body, that is, this body as promise, in the time yet to come.45 As McGinn notes, lack of achievement is part of the goal: while “the activity of reforming the image by deepening our awareness of the Trinity active within us will never be complete in this life . . . the process must be begun in this life.”46 Like materiality, mystical experience as it figures in Augustine would not be an experience of self-presence, or an experience of the body’s union with God, but an experience of the promise of presence, an experience of the “not yet” that is hosted in oneself and that promises to unite in and with God.47 For Augustine, language and the mind provide a means to glimpse the promised truer body within the material body of human beings and, simultaneously, it also allows for human beings to step outside of themselves and glance at an originary state to which they hope to return. Through language, Augustine is able to

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catch a glimpse of his image in relation to the originary Trinity and orient his being accordingly. Likewise for mystics, the visionary text attests to an originary moment of unity which will orient how she lives, yet it does so in the context of the sensing of the nearness of the divine, that is, through mystical experience. What Augustine hypothesizes with regard to unity, the mystic enacts. Mystical texts, especially visionary ones, provide an illustration of how the mystic’s ideal promised body—that is, her transformed inner person or soul—unites with divinity and informs how she should place faith in this likeness in embodied life. While women’s mystical texts often use sensual language to describe unity, patterning their desired union with Christ on the tradition of commentary on the Song of Songs, the unity is that of the soul (or inner person) with Christ (or other divine figures such as the Church or groom). While desire may be articulated in a present tense, the unity is always in a future moment, unaccomplished. The description itself may even reenact, in a performative sense, the unaccomplished unity: it may fall short or dissolve into the ineffable, as we see in the case of Hadewijch, pseudo-Dionysius, Eckhart, Porete, and many others who work within the tradition of negative theology. In these instances, language fails to unite with its object but also marks its own failure, promising unity beyond itself in a medium that is even closer to divine nature. This inner person, as I have shown, is linked to the idea of the Word, but also to a way of using words so as to permit human beings to host the promise of a divine reflection. For a seemingly unrelated poet like Dante, who may not be a mystic, but who borrows from the Trinitarian tradition, the capacity to shed the outer person through the medium of a poetics is explicitly stated in the divine meeting ground of the Paradiso. In the first canto of the Paradiso, in a seemingly counterintuitive gesture, Dante invokes Apollo, asking him to make him his vessel for his own “ultimo lavoro” (his ultimate work) of relaying a face-to-face encounter with divine realms which will happen further on in the Paradiso. What is unusual in this plea for divine inspiration is that he asks for a fate like that of Marsyas, that is, he asks to be shed of his skin, not as a punishment, but as a means to accomplish his poetic mission and access a truer promised likeness: “Entra nel petto mio, e spira tue / sí come quando Marsïa traesti / de la vagina de le membre sue” (“Enter into my breast; within me breathe / the very power you made manifest / when you drew Marsyas out from his limbs’ sheath”).48 Even though it may seem odd for any poet to plead for an end like that of Marsyas, it becomes comprehensible in that Dante asks that divine virtue couple with his talents, shedding his outer body, to expose an inscription of the blessed kingdom in his “capo,” his mind.49 In other words, this shedding is not an end, but a means to another end in poetic language by means of the mind and the powers of memory. While Dante’s

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aspired conversion of the body into a poetics may be converting a theology into a poetics, this possibility of poetic language nevertheless borrows from an Augustinian theology that subsumes the vision of material bodies to the future mental representation of the divine. The interweaving of language and the body will enable the outer body to be undermined in favor of the promised body, not completely human and not completely divine. This second body is constituted by and through a poetic interweaving of several elements: the body as it is known corporeally (the outer body), the body as representation (the inner body), and the promise of this representation in the register of the eternal. Given that so much of this depends, quite literally, on representing and sublating the body—that is, on a linguistic bridging between the perception of the body and its representation in the mind—to what extent do these interrelated bodies reflect or engender the reflexive or mirroring qualities of what one calls “language,” and to what extent is this second body co-extensive with language? Is the promised body the body’s eventual transformation into a word? How does the natural body relate to the linguistic one? From what we have seen in Augustine’s Trinity, even though “natural” entities seem to embody the promise of a self-fulfi lling teleology, positing themselves as themselves in a finite fashion and partaking in their literal end, language can undermine the seemingly stable ground from which the natural object issues forth, by being able to represent nature or material bodies outside of themselves. Language puts into question the intentionality behind an object’s naturalness, positing the object as an object for consciousness. In this sense, the junction between eye and object, in the staging of the mind, allows us to see (that is, understand) a prior encounter from which the other, later exchanges between men are derived. This originary scene both includes and excludes the human, dividing the body between its destination for decay (as organic body) and for resurrection (as the immortal body made in the image of Christ). Language’s expropriation of the human body, its casting man’s gaze outside himself, promises to allow man to glimpse beyond the grave and discern his “inner” and “outer” traits. For Augustine, language thus occupies a strange locus of a promise which can never be fully accomplished in nature or in the material body, but which must necessarily promise something that it cannot give. But while the mind seems to promise something accessible, to lure with the promise of true meaning and substance, this contact with the spiritual nevertheless rescinds human touch. In other words, this contact with the spiritual is only possible through language, through this mirror which attempts to divest human beings of external traits. The contact between language and embodiment is obviously not to be thought of in purely phenomenological terms, yet it necessitates a

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phenomenological positing, like Augustine’s outer body, against which it can divide itself. A contact is given between the material and the spiritual so that it can be read and interpreted, but only to the extent that it points to or brings one in contact with that which can never be pointed to directly, that is, the promised body as it would appear when accomplished. Language, in both written and oral forms, promises another materiality (like that of the inner body) that it is ceaselessly in contact with but that it will not realize substantially.50 Language is constitutive of this venture in contact, which casts us both in and out of our human traits. This dividing trait of language that I have outlined here, making use of Augustine but pushing him to an extreme, will allow us to question the relation between body and language for the women mystics, for, in their mystical text, language will promise to speak for a nonhuman (that is, divine) voice that intervenes in the human one. It will promise to mark contact between the human and the nonhuman, hosting this difference in the medium of the text. The text becomes a host, for it hosts a meeting of incommensurables: it will allow for a bridging of what can never come together before one’s eyes (in the time of temporalized life) except in the sacraments. Language (and its ability to signify beyond things as they appear) promises to enable a quasi-second birth that will graft human beings linguistically, genealogically, and spiritually onto a truer medium. This second birth, this birth into the inner spiritual person, will allow human beings to use language to trace the proximity of the divine and to hear divinity resound in an inner ear. Through the mediation of the body by language, the finitude of the flesh can be transformed or grafted into a medium that is closer to the Word-made-flesh. This new medium, which, as I have noted, Augustine defines in Pauline terms— Even if our outer man is decaying the inner man is being renewed from day to day— operates in time, yet through its mediating capacity it allows man a divine echo in his contemplation of the eternal.51 Simply using language does not make for closeness to the divine; as I have noted earlier, one has to align the inner and outer persons according to divine will. Aligning oneself with divine will and making the outer conform to the inner is not only a linguistic operation: it also involves an ethic that will guide how one will live. This closeness of the divine, the echo of divinity that may be heard by the inner ear, is manifest in the City of God, when Augustine differentiates how God speaks to angels from how he speaks to humans. In a passage that will resound in Hadewijch’s understanding of how God relates to time, Augustine writes: And God does not speak to the angels in the same way as we speak to one another, or to God, or to the angels, or as the angels speak to us. He speaks in his

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own fashion, which is beyond our describing. But his speech is explained to us in our fashion. God’s speech, to be sure, is on a higher plane; it precedes his action as the changeless reason of the action itself; and his speaking has no sound, no transitory noise; it has a power that persists for eternity and operates in time. It is with this speech that he addresses the holy angels, whereas he speaks to us, who are situated far off, in a different way. And yet, when we also grasp something of this kind of speech with our inward ears, we come close to the angels.52 ( City of God 16.6 [659–660])

While God’s way of speaking is clearly different from humans’ and has no phenomenality, not a trace of any bodily remnant, the fact that something like God’s speech might be grasped by the inward ear, and thus by the inner person, shows how language allows for a bridging through bodily senses. The body’s figure extends beyond itself; the figure of the inner enables human beings to go beyond the outer, referring back toward a purer origin. Human beings have thus inherited a double destination that bears witness to a fundamental material and temporal displacement: Augustine and Paul describe human beings’ dual heritage as both children of Abraham, that is, as “children of promise” ( promissionis filii), and as “children of the flesh” (secundum carnem natus est). As the child of Hagar, a human being is the offspring of the natural order, “a demonstration of nature’s way” (demonstrans consuetudo naturam), citizen of the earthly city and hence “the vessel of wrath” (vasa irae). But as the child of Sarah, she who is not enslaved but free, a human being is the child of the promise, born in fulfi llment of a promise and hence an embodiment of the “vessel of mercy” (vasa misericordiae).53 Just as the earthly city finds a “double significance: in one respect it displays its own presence, and in the other it serves by its presence to signify the Heavenly City,” so thus does a person’s having a body display two possible directions (not to be confounded with two possible destinies, in the sense of predestination).54 The ideal pursuit is that of striving after Christ to return to a sight unseen. If the earthly is oriented toward the spiritual, it too is promised transformation and redemption. This “double destination” parallels Christ’s two natures and two births into two different temporal orders. In Sermon 214 (repeated in various versions in Sermons 187 and 194, and in his In Iohannis evangelium tractatus), Augustine spells out Christ’s two natures in rhyme, providing an overlap of the eternal with the temporal in a rhythmic fashion: “Th is one is from the Father without a mother; that one is from a mother without a father; this one is without any time, that one, in an accepted time: this one, eternal, that one, timely; this one without

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a body, in the heart of the Father; that one with a body without violating the virginity of the mother; this one without sex, that one without a man’s embrace.”55 Given the controversy of the Filioque clause, from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages, theologians, preachers, monks, and clergy reiterate this dual nature in a plethora of ways with a varying degree of urgency. In late Anglo-Saxon England, the abbot Ælfric recapitulates this Augustinian and Pauline heritage, again in terms of Christ’s two births: one birth, from God, is without beginning and end; the second, from Mary, marks Christ’s birth into time. Ælfric elaborates this in his sermon on Creation: “That child is twice-born: he is born from the Father in heaven, without any mother, and then when he became man, he was born of the pure maiden Mary, without any earthly father.”56 As Hilary of Poitiers explains in his commentary on Matthew, this double birth means that the eternal is enfolded into the temporal: “the idea of his eternal generation is included in his bodily generation.”57 This understanding of the Trinity through “double birth” is not limited to Christ, but extends to figure, albeit in a different ontological way, in man’s hosting of the Trinity. In his homily on Saint Paul, drawn in part from Augustinian sources, but possibly also from Origen’s Commentary on Matthew, Ælfric transposes this double heritage in an explicitly Pauline formulation: “We are born twice in this life: the first birth from a father and mother is fleshly, and the other birth is spiritual [ gastlic], when we are reborn at holy baptism, in which all of our sins will be forgiven through the gift of the Holy Ghost. The third birth is at the general resurrection, at which our bodies will be reborn into incorruptible bodies.”58 Human beings thus anticipate this third birth (or generation) in which the outer person metamorphoses into its promise of eternity, incorruptible and perfected. For some mystics of the later Middle Ages, the idea of a third birth will be more clearly associated with God’s birth in the soul. Johannes Tauler’s Christmas sermons celebrate three births: the first is the begetting of the Son by the father, the second, the maternal fruitfulness of the chaste Virgin, and the third “that God is truly but spiritually born every day and at every hour in a good soul, as a result of grace and love.”59 This third birth, which clearly draws on 2 Cor 4:16, is associated with the turn of perception inward to the inner senses, and a rebirth in eternal time of the inner person or soul. Thus, Augustine’s eschatological articulation of the end of time becomes articulated by later writers as inner regeneration and renewal, beyond time, yet hosted in time. For Bernard of Clairvaux, birth is associated with the famous “spiritual marriage” between the soul and Christ, exemplified in the Song of Songs. In Sermon 85 on the Song of Songs, the ushering of the eternal into time is a form of birth, the birth of the soul:

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But notice that in spiritual marriage there are two kinds of birth, and thus two kinds of offspring, though not opposite. For spiritual persons, like holy mothers, may bring souls to birth by preaching, or may give birth to spiritual insights by meditation. In this latter kind of birth the soul leaves even its bodily senses and is separated from them, so that in her awareness of the Word she is not aware of herself. Th is happens when the mind is enraptured by the unutterable sweetness of the Word, so that it withdraws, or rather is transported, and escapes from itself to enjoy the Word. The soul is affected in one way when it is made fruitful by the Word, in another when it enjoys the Word: in the one it is considering the needs of its neighbor; in the other it is allured by the sweetness of the Word. A mother is happy in her child; a bride is even happier in her bridegroom’s embrace. The children are dear, they are the pledge of his love, but his kisses give her greater pleasure. It is good to save many souls, but there is far more pleasure in going aside to be with the Word. But when does this happen and for how long? It is sweet intercourse, but lasts a short time and is experienced rarely! This is what I spoke of before, when I said that the final reason for the soul to seek the Word was to enjoy him in bliss. ( On the Song of Songs IV , 85.13.209–210) 6 0

While Bernard clearly favors the inner person’s communion with the beloved, he nevertheless posits an equally important birth that transpires in time, from mouth to ear or eye as a form of community, allowing the outer to become a vessel for the Word. As Bynum has highlighted, the twelfth-century’s emphasis on the “inner” (and the corresponding use of maternal imagery among Cistercians), is not meant to denote independence, self-determination, and uniqueness; rather, it is meant to highlight “the inner core of human nature” potentially shared by all.61 In addition, this emphasis on the inner is not at the exclusion of the outer; rather, “if the religious writing, the religious practice, and the religious orders of the twelfth century are characterized by a new concern for the ‘inner man,’ it is because of a new concern for groups, for types, and for the ‘outer man.’”62 The renewal of the inner will affect the outer, and will shape the way human beings live, individually and collectively. Although beguines like Hadewijch are not associated with any particular order and dismiss the desire for “outer” rules, beguines nevertheless demonstrate an interest in the outer that gives way to a much less rigidly defined group. The doubleness of inner and outer human beings finds its source, as I have said, in Pauline texts. In Romans 7:22, Ephesians 3:16, and 2 Corinthians 4:16, Paul makes a distinction between the outer person (o exo anthropos) and the inner person (o eso anthropos). The outer person is a temporary vessel, bound to the time of

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temporal change and decay. The inner person is that vessel for human beings which, if cultivated, may renew itself and the outer person in the measure of the divine and grant human beings eternal life. When coupled with the mind’s direction, the human being is renewed, for “the more [the mind] reaches out toward what is eternal, the more it is formed thereby to the image of God” (Trinity 12.10 [328]).63 Paul is constantly negotiating between these two spheres, and in doing so attempts to show in a linguistic and temporal medium the superiority of the inner as a measure for human perfection. The inner will only effectively be superior inasmuch as it guides the exterior and transforms it. It may do so by means of language’s ability to mediate, as a temporal host of an atemporal promise. Paul’s own language depends on this quality of language in order to communicate a divine and, as he calls it, a prophetic message. So too will the mystics. What I am highlighting here is that the medium of language has a special status: as part of the body’s time it is able to work diachronically in narrative. Language works through and in time, it produces and attests to human meaning, yet as part of a representational and symbolic medium, it is also able to show how the synchronic elements promise a glimpse of the eternal. In its exteriority and temporality it partakes in the historical time of humanity, yet in reflecting the outer human being’s truth of the mind’s representation it is also able to promise something beyond it. Language partakes in the temporal-spatial power that the body ultimately strives for and hosts. When mystics seek to become like Christ, the Word made flesh, they too are striving for a likeness that is close to the Word.

L ANGUAGE In order to understand an Augustinian materiality associated with human beings, and in order to grasp the figural significance and the subsequent traditions that rely upon his conceptualization of the Trinity, one has to take into account the body’s multifaceted constitution and its having been made and potential to be remade in the image of God by way of a linguistic interplay with the Word itself. Rather than function as an end in itself, the body hosts another end within. It is poised between a materiality that permits legibility and a meaning that it promises to embody in another register. While the outer body cannot be equated with the immemorial substance of the imago or with the trinities within the soul, it is the window, the first reflection of those trinities within. Bodily sight and the awareness of this sight enable the mind to grasp how the imago and the body are eventually interrelated. Material and mental elements combine to form trinities

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that attest to the workings of the divine. The body hosts the figure of the imago within, like a temporal archive, waiting to be deciphered by the spiritually oriented mind through reading. If one fails to read the body with a spiritual orientation (that is, spiritually, figuratively, or allegorically), one only sees matter and not the reflection of the Trinity that it serves. In our readings of women’s mystical texts, we often overlook this essential factor, a factor which actually legitimizes their embodied experience as a sign of the divine. The mystic’s will is oriented toward God, and her inner and outer persons are means to host the imago Dei. This is why inasmuch as women’s mystical texts are steeped in an Augustinian tradition, they are engaged in a poetics of embodiment which asks that the body be read according to these different temporal and material referents. True to Augustine’s idea of language and mental representation operating as a bridge between man’s given state and his promised one, divine words operate in a way that unites all space and time. His theorizing of divine language helps us understand the temporal and spatial difference between divine and human language, the latter geographically bound since languages originate in time and space. The divine Word operates as a word without a language, without belonging to any space and time of the world, while operating in the space and time of both eternal and finite realms. Augustine makes this clear: If anyone then can understand how a word can be, not only before it is spoken aloud but even before the images of its sounds are turned over in thought—this is the word that belongs to no language, that is to none of what are called the languages of the nations, of which ours is Latin; if anyone, I say, can understand this, he can already see through this mirror and in this enigma some likeness of that Word of which it is said, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (Jn 1:1). ( Trinity 15.19 [409]) 6 4

Part of the task of On the Trinity is to understand in and through language, and thus through time and space, the enigma of the Word of words. For Augustine, the thought of “a word that belongs to no language” is the thought of a pure potentiality, without predication, without any phenomenal appearing, even “before it is spoken aloud.” It is the promise or enigma of a word that would meet the understanding without difference, like God’s Word made flesh. For Augustine, this unity is not human beings’ but God’s—only God is his Word—but the idea of a word without a language permits one to think of this strange unity, belonging to no language, and preceding the idea of a language. For Augustine, language operates in a temporal milieu with an eternal counterpart, like the relation between

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earthly and heavenly cities: the earthly city, bound to time and space, takes its cue from the heavenly one; the earthly city takes its promised form and function from the truer one.65 The inner and outer persons have a similar relation to one another, as does the word: just as the inner person can be traced through the materiality of outer person, when the word passes from the mind to utterance, it assumes a materiality in which it clothes itself which is manifest to the senses.66 Augustine differentiates between inner and outer words: The word which makes a sound outside is the sign of the word which lights up inside . . . Our word becomes a bodily sound by assuming that in which it is manifested to the senses of men, just as the Word of God became flesh by assuming that in which it too could be manifested to the senses of men. And just as our word becomes sound without being changed into sound, so the Word of God became flesh, but it is unthinkable that it should have been changed into flesh. It is by assuming [assumendo] it, not by being consumed into it, that both our word becomes sound and that Word became flesh. ( Trinity 15.20 [409–410]) 67

The word assumes the materiality of bodily sound, but this materiality hosts something other than itself, since the word only assumes this materiality but does not turn into it.68 The word assumes or takes on a property that is discernible by the senses while maintaining a difference. Likewise, he argues, Christ does not lose his divinity in becoming flesh: he takes on the flesh, but is not reducible to it. So too for the inner and outer bodies: the materiality of the outer body is the vessel, the earthen house, to quote Paul, while the inner finds its true measure in God. Reading the outer body and its claim to a likeness to the divine requires a consideration of this signifying difference, this outer garment, when looking for a “true” measure. Any reading of the letter must also take into account the atemporal Word that promises to manifest itself through the senses.69 What I have attempted to show here is how, according to an Augustinian theology, embodiment is necessarily shaped by how the divine Word becomes manifest to human senses. In order to conceive of the incorporeal word, one must take into account mediation by the materiality of language and the continuum of time. Any consideration of “the body” in mysticism should, therefore, take into account how the promised body is mediated by language, the way in which the body claims to unite with or become like Christ (the Word made flesh), how the two bodies bridge temporal and atemporal elements, and the ways in which the outer body signifies the closeness of the divine as part of its inner likeness.

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Additionally, since our means of accessing the mystics’ bodies is through narratives of mystical experience—that is, since language is the medium through which we are given any and all accounts of embodied mystical experience—then there is no “body” that can be absolutely distinct from language. The body presents itself as part of a linguistic medium that requires reading and interpretation— both on our part, and on the part of the medieval mystic or hagiographer. The body which we, contemporary readers, read and interpret is also read and interpreted as signifying a trace of the divine. The mystic is constantly reading and attempting to understand her body according to a Christological orientation that hears the Word reverberate throughout, sensing the body’s proximity to its divine likeness. The mystic seeks salvation and proximity to the divine by means of the inner and outer persons. As with Paul and Augustine, these two aspects of the human being offer the means to understand Christ’s humanity, the relation of Christ’s life to the message of Scripture, and how the meaning of Scripture can be fulfi lled in the promise of conformity to Christ. Christ’s body and life are read according to embodied and spiritual meanings, as is Scripture. Interpretive practices associated with the spiritual senses of scripture are thus intricately connected to how the mystic reads her body, her life, and their relation to Christ and the imago. The outer human being offers a means for discerning and enacting the inner spiritual component; the inner is, ultimately, where the meaning of Christ’s life is accomplished, conforming the outer to its likeness. As Henri de Lubac noted of the tropological meaning of the history and mystery of Christ, the historical past becomes relived every day as a spiritual truth within. Meaning must be incorporated so that “everything is consummated in the inner man. . . . Everything is done to conduct us to ‘the inner parts,’ to make us observe the Law ‘according to the inner man.’ The soul is ‘the temple of God, in which the divine mysteries are celebrated.’” 70 When we try to understand what the mystic’s body means, how it hosts the mystery of the divine, we must take into account the hermeneutic practices that inform exegetic practices. Even though all meaning finds its telos in the inner person, the outer person is or should be conforming to the inner in life before the promised “face-to-face” encounter. As revitalized forms of spiritual devotion develop in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, especially among the Cistercians, Victorines, and Carthusians, the turn inward through reading and meditation, lectio and meditatio, becomes associated with the renewal of the inner person. As religious communities of the Middle Ages knew well, in order to find the body’s truer form, in order to find what of the inner person resides and is reflected in the outer, a practice of discernment, that is, of reading and contemplating, is needed. Th is practice becomes ar-

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ticulated in the progression from lectio to meditatio, oratio, operatio, and finally contemplatio; or (per Hugh) from cogitatio to meditatio and contemplatio.71 Reading always includes a form of reflection, yet the ability to read the body is only one part of finding truth in embodiment. Patterning the body after the mind’s insight is also of the essence, so to speak.

THE GARMENT OF CHRIST: WORDS, WORK , AND THE PATTERNING OF THE B ODY Becoming like Christ in actions and in spirit is not as obviously dominant a theme in Augustine as it is in the later Middle Ages, but, as I have demonstrated, the principle of finding one’s likeness in God presupposes a Christic emphasis, given the interrelation of the three components of the Trinity. For Augustine, in order to “arrive at the likeness of the Word of God, however unlike it we may be in many ways,” one must turn to the likeness of Christ by means of “that word of man through whose likeness of a sort the Word of God may somehow or other be seen in an enigma” (Trinity 15.20 [410]).72 Beckwith has paid significant attention to the role of Christ in the Christian emphasis on the incarnation in the later Middle Ages, noting that “an incarnational aesthetic and practice was implicit in the very earliest stages of Christianity and Christian theology,” and “Christ then, as simultaneous flesh and spirit, God and man, image and exemplar, sign and signified, is the oxymoronic means by which a theologia cordis is licensed and propagated.” 73 Incarnation is not solely characterized by an emphasis on the flesh; rather, as a theological concept, reading practice, and liturgical sign, it is part and parcel of the long development of a hermeneutic practice that allows the body to be read and used as an instrument for spiritual devotion. While Christ’s body is both sign and signified, the living human body is never the signified in itself; rather, it is the means for the invisible, that is, the promise of the Trinity, to become legible and enacted in life. In seeking out the trinities within and in understanding and loving them, the body becomes closer to living the likeness of the divine, governed as it is by its spiritual master. The body is not only a means of discerning the spiritual, but is also a means of enacting—and embodying—the spiritual. The outer person is, as Paul emphasizes, meant to conform to the inner and to find eternal life through an identification with Christ, in his crucifi xion and resurrection. The outer body is emphasized in Paul’s language, in “crucifying” the flesh and transforming the outer person into its inner likeness, making the life of Christ manifest through the mortal flesh (2 Cor 4:10–12).74 While the outer person is an initial means to

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find the figure of the divine within, the outer also becomes the means for the inner to enact and demonstrate the soul’s likeness to Christ. What is read and interpreted in the outer by the mind, as we saw in Augustine, is given an afterlife through the outer body. In Pauline terms, as we saw in the introduction, the outer person is crucified and endures death along with Christ in order to find eternal life in Christ and walk in the rhythm of the spirit. The outer person’s afterlife is the new life conformed to the inner person. The outer attempts to reflect the workings of the divine in the soul and does so by becoming like the Word. The flesh is transformed into a likeness of the Word through imitatio, that is, through becoming like Christ mainly by means of the exercise of the will. The same principle is at work in Bernard of Clairvaux, although in a different tenor. In his Sermon 83 on the Song of Songs, Bernard makes clear the rapprochement between (female) soul and (male) Word, emphasizing their union in a language that combines Augustinian and Pauline theology with an exegesis on the Song of Songs: So the soul returns and is converted to the Word to be reformed by him and conformed to him. In what way? In charity—for he says, “Be imitators of God, like dear children, and walk in love, as Christ also has loved you.” Such conformity weds the soul to the Word, for one who is like the Word by nature shows himself like him too in the exercise of his will, loving as she is loved. When she [the soul] loves perfectly, the soul is wedded to the Word. What is lovelier than this conformity? What is more desirable than charity, by whose operation, O soul, not content with a human master, you approach the Word with confidence, cling to him with constancy, speak to him as to a familiar friend, and refer to him in every matter with an intellectual grasp proportionate to the boldness of your desire? Truly this is a spiritual contract, a holy marriage. It is more than a contract, it is an embrace: an embrace where identity of will makes of two one spirit.75 (On the Song of Songs IV, 83.2–3.182)

In this passage, all of the Augustinian elements we have been highlighting are present yet framed differently. Augustine’s claim that one needs to love the Trinity becomes the principal tenor for Bernard: love is the stage on which the lover (soul) and beloved (Christ) can unite through aligned wills. What Augustine theorizes, Bernard stages as an anthropomorphized exegetical experience that will transform the soul and enable imitation of Christ, in life. The Christological focus of much medieval mysticism, such as that of Hadewijch, will likewise use love as the means for enacting the individual’s incarnation

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of the divine. For Augustine, as for Bernard, William of Saint Th ierry, Hugh of Saint Victor, Hadewijch, and many medieval exegetes whose texts and commentaries set the terms for subsequent forms of devotion, love itself becomes a measure and medium for the immeasurable, it becomes a means for turning speculative theological modalities into effective practices. Th rough an effective articulation of the work of love, flesh can be scripted according to its spiritual antecedent, so as to enable its transformation. William of Saint Thierry states it explicitly: “Love alone fully understands divine things; therefore the love of the flesh must be led along and transformed into the love of the spirit so that it may quickly comprehend things like to itself.”76 What begins with discerning and comprehending the patterning of the divine in human trinities ends with a transformation by means of bringing the pattern to life. As Bernard McGinn reminds us, the interest in patterning and order in the twelfth century is part and parcel of a movement in which theological (or theoretical) aspirations are mapped onto practical and material possibilities: “The theme of the ordering of love (or better, the ‘reordering’ in our present fallen state of the love that should have been ours) took on a heightened importance in the twelfth century. . . . To set charity in order was both a theoretical task and a practical task, involving knowing both what needed to be done and how to do it. Thus, the ordering of charity depended on grasping the proper relation between love and knowledge.”77 Cognitive and performative factors work together to discern and become like the Word. The mental or spiritual must be applied to finite ends: in patterning oneself on Christ, in turning to the resemblance of Christ in the father, in attuning oneself to the resemblance of the Trinity in man, and in resembling Christ by imitatio. This patterning is found through reading or discerning as I have just outlined, yet is also found in the exegesis and application of mystical experience. A pattern is applied to embodied forms of devotion (especially liturgical), to the constitution of a pious life, and even to the crafting of a text that will resemble and reflect a divine truth. The form of the text and the form of life are intimately interconnected, and necessarily so. Part immanence, part transcendence, the text is poised between both ends of the spectrum of life and mind. Following the Pauline sense of words being accompanied by works, reading a text, a body, or a life serves contemplation of divine truth as much as it serves to identify a pattern for actions and keeps in sight the (unreachable) measure of perfection. In his text On Contemplation and Its Forms, Hugh of Saint Victor will demonstrate how purity in contemplation in mystical ascent must be directed to life “in action [actu], in affection [aff ectu], and in understanding [intellectu],” 78 and in his Didascalicon he outlines the five stages of ascent: “The fi rst, study, gives

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understanding; the second, meditation, provides counsel; the third, prayer, makes petition; the fourth, performance, goes seeking; the fi ft h, contemplation, finds.”79 For Hugh, as for many Victorines and other Augustinian canons who emphasize the effect on the larger community, reading and interpretation take part in salvation history as the reader is able to live and effect change among others. Franklin T. Harkins writes, “Taking his cue from Augustine, [Hugh] maintains that the scriptural narrative is not merely to be read, memorized, and meditated on. Rather, the historia that recounts God’s loving works of creation and restoration exhorts the reader to become a participant in this ongoing narrative of salvation history by living a life that imitates the divine love.”80 As Ivan Illich has noted, historia first passes through the inner: “Reading is for [Hugh] equivalent to the re-creation of the texture of historia in the ark of the reader’s heart.”81 The Carthusian Guigo II likewise describes the progress from lectio to contemplatio as an ascent on Jacob’s ladder: Reading comes first, and is, as it were, the foundation; it provides the subject matter we must use for meditation. Meditation considers more carefully what is to be sought after; it digs, as it were, for treasure which it finds and reveals, but since it is not in meditation’s power to seize upon the treasure, it directs us to prayer. Prayer lifts itself up to God with all its strength, and begs for the treasure it longs for, which is the sweetness of contemplation. Contemplation when it comes rewards the labors of the other three; it inebriates the thirsting soul with the dew of heavenly sweetness.82 (The Ladder of Monks and T welve Meditations, 82)

What we witness in mystical texts is also a desired ascent—toward union—that interlinks the bodily engagement involved in contemplation, reading, meditation, and prayer and understands them as necessarily interconnected. Since vision, like meditation for Guigo, cannot “seize” its object, it can only aspire to become like it in embodied terms. Although mystics like Marguerite d’Oingt and Hadewijch are some of the most explicit in making the connection between vision, interpretation, and the body, the emphasis on interpretation serving life is common to the spirituality of the period. Bernard of Clairvaux asks of the readers of the Song of Songs: “Meditate on these things, turn them over in your minds. Refresh those hearts of yours with perfumes such as these. . . . But all that has been said about the [perfumes] you must retain in your memory and reveal in your way of life.”83 In a temporal twist, the memory of the eternal truth revealed through reading seeks illustration and illumination in and through temporal life. As Jeremy Worthen emphasizes in

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Hugh of Saint Victor’s De vanitate, in the work of restoration of humanity, the opera restaurationis, “Soul has to understand, with Reason’s help, that escape from the temporal world comes only, paradoxically, through redemption of the world in time.”84 Liturgical time is one of the most exemplary forms of this transposition of the eternal into the temporal through cyclical juxtapositions of divine and human orders. Liturgical time promises the means for salvation and eventual deliverance from time, by way of the body and its transformation, and, of course, in the Mass through Christ’s transubstantiation in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Whether as communal or solitary activity, the hours and feasts of the liturgy allow for this grafting of the divine onto the order of human perception and experience. Again, for Augustine, the attempt to resemble the word itself or Christ in actions points to the divine Word as the ultimate referent and pattern, since “we cannot have a work which is not preceded by a word, just as the Word of God could be, even without creation coming into existence, but there could not be any creation except through that Word through which all things were made” (Trinity 15.20 [411]).85 The divine Word is both end and beginning—what all creation comes from and what, if renewed through it, it will ultimately join. As both word and body, Christ occupies this dual destination in the most explicit sense. In his article on rhyme and typology in Adam of Saint Victor, Eugene Cunnar argues for the ontological and theological relevance of poetic patterning, adding that “if God creates Being through language, then it is only through language that man can bring Being into being.”86 Wanting a body to return to its wordlike form, the monk and mystic will attempt to transform the body into divine script (through its interpellation by a text, through the participation in the daily hours or the Mass, through works, or through song). When reading the corporeal nature of women’s spirituality and the identification with Christ, we must therefore be careful not to associate the “abundance” of the flesh too quickly with the nature of women, nor with exclusively feminine forms of devotion. While women may be exemplifying their faith through their bodies in a more visible fashion than male counterparts, as Bynum has emphasized, the notion of making the invisible visible through embodied actions itself is part of a hermeneutic that extends to both sexes. From late antiquity to the later Middle Ages, both women and men are asked to read their own embodied forms of practice according to textual (and exegetical) criteria. What men and women read in their bodies is tied to the power and practice of interpretation, even when women claim to receive visions directly from God. At the moment, therefore, that women seem to be making a reference to their corporeality, we should, rather than assuming it is the flesh, read it as a means for exegetical activity rather than as an

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overt identification with the flesh, taking care to discern the homo interior or exterior that may be the ultimate referent. That women mystics often privilege embodiment as a means for exegetical practice, is, as I have stressed in my introduction, not a “natural” phenomena arising from their nature as women, but is conditioned by historical and sociological factors that delineate the means for literary and theological experience. This Augustinian framework I have highlighted ties together the nature of Christ and of human actions through acts of discerning, reading, and reflecting. While reading, broadly conceived, permits a form of understanding, loving (and thus conforming to, if not becoming) the pattern revealed through the mind provides the form for salvation and eternal life. Understanding the form of salvation is not enough: the form must become activated and lived, it must become part of an individual’s life, in actions, in affect, and in his or her soul. Bernard of Clairvaux makes this explicit: “Why store oil in jars and never apply it to your limbs? Or what use to ponder over your books on the name of the holy Savior if you exclude his love from your lives? You have the oil: pour it out and experience its threefold power.”87 The “oil” is extracted through exegesis and is a mixture of divine truth and human understanding, which is then applied to human life. The important concept here, however, is not just intellectual understanding, but a blend of understanding with love, as we have seen before, when Augustine’s mind had to couple love with the body in order to perceive its object truly. In language that will resonate with Hadewijch and many other mystics in the early and later Middle Ages, love becomes the ultimate vehicle for Trinitarian salvation in Augustine’s theology. Love—as dilectio, caritas, and ultimately amor—provides the means for transformation by reading, seeing, living truly, to becoming the image of the Trinity. For Augustine, love allows for the soul to be shaped by the Word, it allows the soul and body to host a truth they cannot possess. Merely acting without love cancels out the good in an action; acting with love allows for divinity to work in the soul, and to be an effective agent in actions. The subject, properly speaking, is divinity itself. If the pattern succeeds in producing and reproducing divine truth, the body becomes as close to the Word as it humanly can. In book 8 of On the Trinity, Augustine closes the link between life and its truth through the love of form. In his exegesis of the Johannine “love thy neighbor,” he notes that one must love not with human vision, but with the “inner vision” so as to perceive “God who is charity” (8.12 [254]).88 What one loves is therefore not the outer, but the inner that is discernible in the outer. Following this, in his reading of Paul 2 Cor 6:2–10, he notes that what allows us to move from the act of reading to love entails a form of recognition of a lived truth, for what “fires us with love [dilectio] for Paul when we read this” is “that we believe that he him-

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self lived like that” and observe it “within ourselves, or rather above ourselves in truth itself ” (8.13 [254]).89 Reading, recognizing, and loving allow for the persistence of a divine truth that one will ultimately love in itself. This truth “above ourselves” is what Augustine calls form ( forma), which we perceive as the eternal, for: “Unless above all we loved this form which we perceive always enduring, never changing, we would not love him merely because we hold on faith that his life when he lived in the flesh was harmoniously adjusted to this form” (8.13 [254]).90 Thus love of form and its immutable truth is a supplement to faith, in that it allows us first to ardently love “the form of faith with which we believe that someone lived” and then to hope for it in life. In this way, Augustine moves from an understanding of love as dilectio and caritas, to love as the all-inclusive amor. Using a Platonic logic and terminology that nevertheless depends upon, rather than transcends or discards, the contingency of material life and an imperfect human perspective, Augustine asks us to pass from what we read to its content in the world through love of the good. Although Platonism provides a means for perceiving divine truths (as is emphasized in his earlier works), what is most important to the later Augustine is the effectuation of these truths through the heart and love. At the end of book 8, Augustine’s meditation on form in love and its relation to reading and life takes on a complete Trinitarian articulation in its way of positioning love, lover, and beloved: What then, after all that, is this love [dilectio] or charity [caritas] which the divine scriptures praise and proclaim so much, but love of the good [amor boni]? Now love [amor] means something loving and something being loved with love. There you are with three, the lover, what is being loved, and love. And what is love but a kind of life coupling or trying to couple together two things, namely lover and what is being loved? This is true even of the most external and fleshy kinds of love. But in order to quaff something purer and more limpid, let us trample on the flesh and rise to the spirit. What does spirit love in a friend but spirit? So here again there are three, lover and what is being loved, and love.91 ( Trinity 8.14 [255])

The trinity of love, lover, and beloved thus fi nds its ultimate articulation in the unity of the three kinds of love (pleasure, charity, and love of the good) in one amor. What I would like to stress here is that while Augustine may borrow from Platonic and Neoplatonic sources, the realm of a transcendent “ideal form” is

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nevertheless only promised and transient. While this ideal might model the height of the mind or soul, Augustine’s ultimate emphasis is on how this ideal merges with real experience and love. As we will see with Hadewijch, the Augustinian patterning of love, lover, and beloved will constantly insinuate itself in bridal or love mysticism of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, yet the body and soul will be complicated by key interactions of inner and outer, divine and human, temporal and atemporal spheres. The body needs the soul, the soul the body in order for one to articulate itself in the language of the other. The voice of the “Bride,” or lover, of the Song of Songs who endures love and seeks to unite with the beloved thus is not as much the voice of a “self” as it is the projected voice of the soul, adopted and scripted into the mystic’s text. Ideally, the text will guide the soul and transform the person in its process. William of Saint Thierry frames the sense of the work accordingly: after he outlines its historical meaning, he then adds, “The Spiritual sense is this. When the soul has been converted to God and is to be espoused to the Word of God, at first she is taught to understand the riches of prevenient grace and allowed to ‘taste and see how sweet the Lord is’; but afterwards she is sent back into the house of her conscience to be instructed, purified in the obedience of charity, perfectly cleansed of vices, richly adorned with virtues, that she may be found worthy of access to the spiritual grace of godliness and affection for virtues which is the bridechamber of the Bridegroom.”92 The bride is thus the soul “converted to God” and “espoused to the Word”—which, once returned to her conscience, is “instructed” so that she may become worthy. This inner conscience, the domain of the inner person, is the place for contemplation, purification, and transformation. The “taste” William refers to is both the fruit of understanding and the way in which any future “taste” of the Eucharist should be read and interpreted. The taste in practice echoes the taste in spiritual understanding; however, inversely, the Eucharist itself can provide the occasion for a reflection on its spiritual sense. D. H. Green and others have shown that affective literacy can be just as “literate” without the written, using the visual or the imagined as an occasion for meditation on scripture.93 As Ann Astell notes in her reading of Bernard and Gertrude of Helfta, “Whereas Bernard read and chewed the scriptures as if they were the Eucharist, however, Gertrude ‘read’ the Eucharist as if it were a text, as her reception of the sacrament occasioned vision after vision.”94 We will see in the next chapter that visions provide one of the most elaborate exegetical conduits for women, allowing a different figurative relation between time, body, and language than the exegetical commentaries of their male counterparts. Throughout this chapter I have emphasized the way in which embodiment is theologically intertwined with linguistic and cognitive properties for Augustine

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and, subsequently, with the development of medieval mysticism. When thinking of embodiment we must keep in mind the potential paradigms and functions associated with inner and outer persons, bodies, and senses that require the mediation of mind and language. Temporally and materially, the inner person is what hosts the promise of unity with its divine matrix; nevertheless, the outer person is a medium through which the inner may work. In order for unity (of inner and outer persons, of persons with God) to be effective, the body must be read in order to be properly perceived, scripted in order to be accommodated to its higher spiritual end, and loved in order to properly reflect the imago encrypted within. Reading the body and reading the embodied language of women mystics will thus require just as complex and subtle an exegetical tool as a text does. As contemporary readers, we should remember that the body is presented to us as a part of a text, and is mediated by a framework that highlights its spiritual value, even if only as a material to be negated and transformed. Reading the body, reading it as something other than its most immediate referent so as to cultivate spiritual (and thus inner) perfection is part of the mystical ascent from the outer to the inner senses, and is part of the mystic’s or hagiographer’s contemplative goal. Inversely, reading the invisible according to the visible, the spiritual through the body is, to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin, one translator’s task. As Bernard of Clairvaux reminds his readers, We indeed continue to live after the body’s death, but only by means of the body do we gain those merits that lead to a life of blessedness. Saint Paul sensed this, saying: “The invisible things of God are understood through the things he has made.” All creatures that he has made, creatures that possess a body and are therefore visible, can be understood by our minds only through the body’s instrumentality. Therefore our souls have need of a body. Without it we cannot attain to that form of knowledge by which alone we are elevated toward the contemplation of truths essential to happiness.95 (On the Song of Songs I, 5.1.25)

As readers, we too must consider the spiritual in the material, the outer according to the inner, accounting for the body’s desired likeness as word, and take into account the dual nature of a flesh modeled after its ultimate referent: Christ. The movement from outer to inner and back to outer is a product of significant reflection in Augustine and influences later elaborations of how logos and body work together in human beings, through one another, while never in a completely unified fashion. In the Middle Ages, with the ever-increasing emphasis on reading and interpretation, the movements inward (to the inner body or soul) and outward

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(from the soul to the outer body) become increasingly shaped by scripted forms in order to further emphasize (and, at times, control) the mediated nature of exegesis and exacting form of religious life. As male-authored texts of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries show an increasing emphasis on the tactile nature of the inner body and the inner senses, women’s emphases on embodied forms of devotion appeal to the categories applied to textual interpretation and the spiritual sense of reading, especially in the eyes of their biographers. When women display an overarching identification with Christ, they are identifying with both body and word. If we read both natures in Christ’s body, the desired materiality of the body of the mystic who reads herself in Christ’s likeness becomes complicated by the text or Word it imitates. As I have suggested, what is equally deserving of our attention in women’s mystical texts—other than the nature of the feminine and its relation to bodily forms of devotion—is the way that this embodied practice parallels and further defines developed reading practices, offering other means of understanding the word and its relation to life. The trend, which has gained significant momentum over the years, of reading women’s mystical texts theologically has won these works a long-deserved recognition of their conceptual complexity; my linking of embodiment in mysticism to their Pauline and Augustinian precedents elaborates this movement to validate them as theologically complex, yet it goes a step further in showing how this theology is actively present in their work at the level of what I call an “embodied poetics,” drawing on Pauline and Augustinian paradigms. Rather than isolating women’s devotional practices as feminine phenomena, reading them in conjunction with (men’s) exegetical practices allows us to understand their participation in and responses to various forms of textual communities. Understanding the difference between the innovative and the accepted, the radical and the conventional is yet another intricate task when facing women’s texts, yet reading them in relation to, and not in isolation from, other textual traditions aids us in discerning a measure of their singularity as literary and devotional forms. While this isolated use of gender may not be as critically useful a category for an understanding of the hermeneutic complexity in women’s textual production and forms of devotion—as it may paradoxically limit our understanding of the similarities of men’s and women’s mysticism—the question of gender may, in a second moment, help us perceive a profound difference in terms of style and poetics. When gender is applied blindly across the board, in a first moment, to group together religious writers based on the sex of the persons, it may succumb to essentialist fallacies and theologically naïve traps that overlook the ways in which

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women’s writings participate in the same religious and intellectual traditions as do their male counterparts. This said, once we take gender off the table, so to speak, as a means for a firstorder differentiation and initially eliminate, for example, the (artificially) gendered categories of “intellectual versus affective,” “abstract versus embodied” that, when given little thought, only serve to further ghettoize women’s writings, we can then proceed to evaluate how, once greater theological and philosophical similarities between men and women’s devotional literatures and practices are established, women’s writings can be said to differ in other ways. To establish, for example, that lived textuality—what Bernard calls applying the “oil” of learning to the limbs—is, as I have been arguing, a critical element for both genders grants a spectrum of comparison for how oil spreads between text and body. The question of gender and its relation to embodiment may reappear in a different form once it is eliminated at the most superficial level: if reintroduced as a means to differentiate techniques—of reading, styles of writing, presenting and working through exegesis—what gender may represent (in relation to textual practices) can prove instrumental in reasserting theological, philosophical, and literary depth and allowing for greater differentiation, especially when one is looking within similar historical and theological contexts. The “intellectual” and the “abstract”— categories most often ascribed to male writings—may, for example, be equally discernible in theological presuppositions of women’s writings, yet in a different linguistic fashion, in the form of an embodied poetics. To return to the question of embodiment after having seemingly dismissed it involves a return to the literary and theological contexts that define the terms. We can then attempt to measure how embodiment relates to gendered practices, nuancing the expression of the theological.

THE MYSTIC’S T WO B ODIES THE TEMPORAL AND MATERIAL POETICS OF VISIONARY TEXTS

And he said, “Return into your material and let your works blossom forth.” —Hadewijch of Br abant, Vision 8

ENVISIONING B ODIES While not as overtly philosophical as Augustine, nor as explicit as Paul, women’s visionary and mystical texts nevertheless demonstrate a complex temporal interweaving between inner and outer persons and the inner and outer senses that complicates any equation of embodiment with immediacy, mere corporeality, and unmediated experience. Focusing on Hadewijch of Brabant’s Visions, while comparing them with other women’s visionary texts, this chapter traces the temporal and embodied workings of inner and outer persons in visions to show how these are linked to forms of textuality in their participation in the interpretation and application of scripture. While the point has rightly been made that the visionary activity of medieval women circumvents the question of interpretation of scripture in claiming that visions were received directly from the divine and were therefore not part of a conscious exegetical process (keeping the woman free from charges of preaching), I contend that, despite this claim—while not contradicting it—inner and outer persons participate in processes that are directly involved in understanding (thus interpreting) and applying the wisdom of scripture, even if scripture is not directly cited.1 Although the inner person who participates in the vision may not be

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attributed to a conscious “self ” or to individual agency in the way that we—and medieval clerics—conceive them, and is instead dependent on divine grace, the inner is that part of the visionary that is ascribed to the imago Dei and associated with the promised time of the divine.2 As I have shown in the previous chapter, the inner person is an aspect of the human being that is not entirely ascribed to the “self ” since it reflects the image of God. The visionary thus avoids the question of exegesis in claiming to merely transcribe the vision: her inner person receives a divine message that will, at some later date, be transformed into a legible medium.3 This message will not spell out its spiritual truth in the same manner as sermons or commentaries, but nevertheless, once communicated in language, it shows what scripture means to the visionary and to the community to which she belongs. In looking at Hadewijch’s visions, I will show how her representations of inner and outer persons and inner and outer senses perform in temporal and mnemonic ways that derive from Paul and Augustine yet adopt functions closely aligned with the exegetes and commentators on scripture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries who are also greatly influenced by Origen and his association of the spiritual senses with reading and interpretation.4 In women’s visions, the inner senses, I contend, perceive and read divine truths and navigate the vision like a living text, but in the atemporal moment of divinity. The lesson of the vision, however, does not end there; it must be applied to life—that is, it must be lived and performed by the outer person, and hence translated into the language of lived embodiments. By comparing the subtle gestures to inner and outer persons in Hadewijch’s Visions with other visionaries such as Hildegard (who is number twenty-eight in Hadewijch’s List of the Perfect, referred to as she who “saw all the visions” [List, 285]), Marguerite d’Oingt, and to a lesser extent, Julian of Norwich, it becomes clearer as to how inner and outer persons operate temporally and textually in women’s visions in embodied ways.5 The inner person receives divine grace in the form of a vision that instructs the mystic in several registers. For one, the vision shows in an audiovisual medium how scripture is applied to particulars (like virtue, the Church, the Eucharist, or the role of reason), issues significant to the mystic’s or visionary’s life. Like a movement from the allegorical to the tropological sense, the visions perform a sense of scripture that Jeremy Worthen describes, for Hugh of Saint Victor’s Didascalicon, as one “that speaks of virtue rather than knowledge, the point where the text tells us not just how things are but how we should be; where it makes concrete demands on us, changes us, re-forms us.”6 The vision’s portrayal of the inner will therefore also model what the outer person should imitate: the perfected living mirror of the divine. Even though visions—

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like Hadewijch’s Vision 7 of unity with Christ—may invoke a sensate language that explicitly refers to the registers of inner and outer to confuse the distinctions between the two, it does so with a pedagogical purpose and in a theological framework that defers the sense of immediacy invoked.7 The vision will perform how the outer should conform to the inner according to the measure of the divine, affecting the whole human person, in body and soul. The outer person as it figures in the vision demonstrates how the visionary experience will eventually relate to what one would call “real time,” that is, to the body as it is lived and experienced, in the past, present, and future. I refer to other mystical and visionary texts of the Middle Ages to demonstrate the pervasive influence of Paul and Augustine on women’s visionary practices (although this influence is not the negative one that is so often cited) and the consequences this has for our reading and understanding of embodiment in mystical texts. The language and use of the senses, embodiment, and inner and outer persons is by no means uniform among mystics or visionaries, nor is it, as we have seen, uniform within the works of Paul and Augustine themselves. To address the complex idiom of embodied and sensate language for each author or mystic is an enormous task toward which this book can only gesture. Nevertheless, to first understand the theological and hermeneutic underpinnings of embodiment in women’s visionary and mystical texts on a broader scale—what this chapter aims to do—permits us a better grasp both of the stakes of such a task on an individual level and of how bodily and interpretive practices relate to one another. It also gives us the opportunity to think through the relation of gender to mysticism, an association that has long been celebrated, but often in oversimplified or essentialist ways. When women’s visions seem to promote gendered identifications in reading their own bodily experiences, they recast the body in a larger theological framework—one intimately connected with reading—that impacts the meaning of embodiment itself. Visions are recognized as the most popular genre for women’s textual composition in the Middle Ages and play a significant part in illuminating the relation of women’s spirituality to textuality, especially after the year 1200. In the early evaluation of this tradition, women’s visions were associated with “oral” as opposed to textual traditions, given their reported reception as auditory and visual events.8 The scholarship of the past twenty years, however, has dramatically revised the ways in which literacy, theology, and spirituality are conceived in relation to women’s spirituality, producing wider and nonoppositional criteria for evaluation: Nicholas Watson’s work on vernacular theology, Mark Amsler’s on affective literacy, Newman’s claim for an “imaginative theology,” and even the notion of “textual communities” as conceived by Brian Stock have all claimed women’s

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interaction with, not isolation from, religious, political, and literary textual traditions.9 Our conceptual models are being dramatically revised in ways that take into account the effect of gender on medieval practices. Hollywood’s and McGinn’s work on the theological significance of women’s mystical texts has weakened the supposition that women’s spirituality is any less theologically complex and original than men’s, giving us further reason to reevaluate how the “theological” is expressed. Susan Boynton’s emphasis on liturgical knowing and the experience of “performative exegesis” broadens the way we conceive of exegesis in relation to liturgical practices—practices essential for understanding women’s access to scriptural texts and that merit further exploration. This chapter explores visionary and mystical texts and how they are involved in hermeneutic traditions and practices that extend to both genders, yet manifest an embodied poetics that characterizes women’s mystical and visionary writings. Once we understand the broader theological investment that links the body to textuality, we can turn back to women’s texts to reconsider the idiom of embodiment deployed by each mystical text, how and why the language of embodiment connects to her Christic mission in nuanced theological ways, and ultimately, the ramifications this has on what we think of as “the body.” For Hadewijch, because visions represent, as I will show, a first step in her spirituality—and not the final step—they allow us to better grasp how embodiment as it is represented functions in the larger perspective of her theological views, often representing the promise of union of the outer person and the inner person, or outer senses and inner senses, precisely where it seems most tantalizingly immediate.

ENVISIONING HADEWIJCH’S EMB ODIMENTS In the works of Hadewijch, the registers of inner and outer are expressed in several ways, even referring directly to the Pauline “earthly man” (ertschen man) of 1 Corinthians 15:47, once in Letter 22, referring to the fruition one can have of God without elevation (l. 69), and twice in her third Mengeldicht (ll. 98, 103), referring to how a person may “wear the earthly man as a garment” in the hopes of human unity with the divine.10 At several points in her work Hadewijch names the inner senses (inneghen sinnen) as such, but more often she refers to the two registers in adjectival or adverbial form (van binnen and van buten).11 Although Hadewijch is less interested in mapping out the anthropology associated with the inner and outer or in theorizing the relation of one to the other, she does, nevertheless, make use of these designations in ways that reveal theological and hermeneutic orientations. Her visions constantly refer to the inner orientation of her person and the

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focus on being taken up in the spirit. Vision 1 paradigmatically begins: “I felt such an attraction of my spirit inwardly [van binnen van minen gheeste]” (CW, 263); and Vision 3, “After, one Easter Sunday, I had gone to God; and he embraced me in my interior senses [Ende Hi ontfinc mi van binnen mine sinne]” (CW, 272); Vision 4, “Then during the Epistle my senses were drawn inwards [Doe worden mi binnen der epistolen mine sinne binnen ghetrect] with a great tempestuous clamor” (CW, 273).12 Hadewijch’s referencing the domains of inner and outer is aligned with the hermeneutic nature of these designations, common to her theological milieu. Her more obvious invocation of the senses (of taste, touch, sight, smell, and hearing) is widespread in her works and seems to appeal to the immediate, but again, the theological context has to be taken into account for a proper measure of what “immediacy” means in relation to embodiment and the divine.13 Letter 22, which comments on various verses of 1 Corinthians, makes explicit Hadewijch’s Augustinian orientation. Hadewijch names Augustine when referring to the human limitations of knowing and speaking of God and demonstrates a fidelity to her source as well as an embellishment characteristic of the spiritual currents of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.14 She begins with sound Augustinian premises, echoing Augustine’s limits of the outer senses: “‘He who knows little can say little’: so says wise Augustine. This is my case, God knows. I believe and hope greatly in God, but my knowledge of him is small. I can guess only a little of the riddle of God; for men cannot grasp him with human senses [menschen sinnen]” (CW, 94).15 She then continues in a manner that will resound with the Victorine and Cistercian schools, themselves echoing Origen: “But one who was touched in his soul by God could show something of him for those who understood this [touch] with their soul. Enlightened reason interprets a little of God to the inner senses [den inneghen sinnen], whereby they can know that God in his wondrousness is an alarming and fearfully sweet Nature to behold and that he is all things to all, and wholly in all” (CW, 94).16 In this passage, Hadewijch highlights the inner way of approaching God, by means of the inner senses and the rational soul. She emphasizes what she calls the touch ( gherinen) of God in the soul and the roles of understanding, reason, and beholding (contemplation) in a form of comprehension that is primarily given by grace.17 If one understands this “touch” with the soul, she contends, what is given by the divine may be interpreted by reason for the inner senses. The inner senses then contemplate this “little” bit of God and put it to use by subsuming knowing to a way of loving God.18 In her last vision, Vision 14, Hadewijch clarifies the synesthetic nature of taste and refers to a person “tast[ing] Man and God in one knowledge [eenre const], what no man could do unless he were as God, and wholly such as he was who is our Love” (CW, 305).19 In this brief but spectacular phrase, Hadewijch shows us

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the paradox and secret of taste’s immediacy: taste harbors a quasi-tautological nature in that it confirms one’s hidden likeness to and immersion in the divine, even when taste lacks a concrete material object in the time of life. As one’s inner person becomes more and more substantial and transforms one’s outer person, one may “taste” the divine. All of these processes reflect an ordering of the inner based on the model of a Trinitarian mirroring. In the passage just cited from Letter 22, Hadewijch echoes, in the language of the inner, a Trinitarian ordering made explicit in 1 Corinthians 15:27–28: “For he hath put all things under his feet. But when he saith, all things are put under him, it is manifest that he is excepted, which did put all things under him. And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all.” Just as each part of the Trinity is subjected to the whole, so too does the inner require the subjection of reason and understanding to Love itself. In order for the soul to understand the “touch” of the divine, it must order itself as a divine mirror and become what it contemplates. The content of Hadewijch’s visions will represent these teachings in other figurative ways. In Vision 9, for example, the relation between reason and love is illuminated, with reason assuming the personified form of a queen inspiring the fear of God in Hadewijch’s soul (“to behold God’s alarming and fearfully sweet nature” as described in Letter 22 [CW, 94]).20 In Vision 9, Queen Reason initially puts her feet on Hadewijch’s neck, subduing her in bodily fashion. Then, once the “I” of Hadewijch’s vision shows that her soul is properly ordered, she overcomes Queen Reason through love. Their relationship reverses, and Queen Reason is subject to Hadewijch as she reflects on what she learns in the vision with wisdom and love. The dramatic reenactment of inner ordering in the vision anticipates the contemplative work Hadewijch must do in life. The vision is a “touch” of the divine; it is an act of grace that provides for “a little of God” to be made manifest and interpreted. Hadewijch’s emphasis on understanding, interpreting, and beholding makes it clear that her mysticism, while affective, understands itself as performing tasks that are by no means the product of the “immediate.” While the vision does not provide a concrete manner of “knowing” that conforms to the human senses, it does enable an understanding of the divine. Hadewijch places a high value on her visions, especially their importance for perfecting her person and guiding her community.21 As Veerle Fraeters and Paul Mommaers have shown, the Visions operate pedagogically in ordered fashion, moving in sequence from a less learned state to a more perfected state, suggesting that they were read as one unit, guiding the visionary and reader toward increasing perfection.22 Like Paul and Augustine’s promised face-to-face encounter with

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the divine, Hadewijch’s visions promise unity in various temporal and material registers, showing the heights of perfection to which humans may aspire. As instruments for reading and teaching, her visions illustrate how scripture is read and applied to life, emphasizing the final form of spirituality—like Richard of Saint Victor’s fourth degree of love—in which she descends from the loft y likeness of the soul with the divine (in the third degree) to conform to the humility of Christ, finding her own conformity to God in his humanity.23 Representations of embodiments associated with inner and outer in her visions will likewise reflect unity and perfection, but in less obvious ways. Hadewijch’s Vision 8—which, with Vision 7, constitutes one vision in the manuscript—reenacts the wisdom gained from Romans 8:37–39, in which all divisions are united in God through love. The vision begins with Hadewijch’s much-touted unity with Christ and the Eucharist, then proceeds to show how all realms find their unity in God through love through five different ways of loving, one of which is reserved for Hadewijch alone. The vision ends with a command to Hadewijch, highlighted at the beginning of this chapter, by a figure described as a champion (kimpe): “Return into your material [materie] and let your works blossom forth” (CW, 284).24 This command, as insignificant as it may seem, will serve to illuminate how domains associated with the body and soul shift between temporal registers associated with the human and the divine. To begin, the meaning seems easy enough to follow. Columba Hart translates it: “Return again into your material being and let your works blossom forth.” Or one could simply say, “Return to your material and let your works blossom forth.” Vision 6 ends similarly on the note of “return” when Hadewijch says that she returned, “woeful, to myself ” (CW, 280).25 The motion described is familiar to mystics as well as to visionaries in general: visions start by signaling a movement from the human body toward the soul. As with the writings of many visionaries, a number of Hadewijch’s visions begin with an account of physical suffering, only for her to then be “taken up” in the spirit. The materie, in the context of the quotation cited above, is associated with Hadewijch’s human materiality, the materiality of the temporal human body or flesh. This embodiment is what I associate with what I am calling the “outer body,” the Pauline exo anthropos (what she calls the “earthly man,” ertschen man) or the Augustinian exterior homo, especially when Hadewijch is performing works. Hadewijch’s designation of materie is unusual. One would expect the term lichame to be used to refer to the body per se, but Hadewijch, as I will show, reserves that term to talk about the glorified body as it conforms to Christ. Hadewijch employs the term materie to designate the materiality of her “earthly” person, which will also be associated with the materie of Minne, inasmuch as it manifests

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the ways in which human beings conform to Christ through love. The werke (works) of “let your works blossom forth” are her active (and virtuous) deeds as a Beguine, acts that will enable the conformity of her outer person (and thus her material body) with the promised spiritual body. Works reorient the outer person and its embodiment, subsuming it to the guidance of the soul. These “works” could even symbolically include the composing of her visions, letters, and songs, as they are all pedagogical tools designed to instruct and perfect individuals in their humanity. The reference to a “return” to Hadewijch’s materie and, implicitly, to the time in which human beings dwell implies that Hadewijch was absent from her materie in the seeing of her visions yet present to what she calls her lichame, which, in an almost counterintuitive fashion, she associates with her soul, or inner embodiment. Generally speaking, in Middle Dutch the word lichame does not have the same association with interiority as do Paul’s and Augustine’s notions of the inner person; it is usually translated by the Latin corpus, indicating the corporeality of humanity, but can also refer to the dead body in its ideal form, that is, especially in relation to the body of saints whose bodies have conformed to the soul and divine will. Christ’s body, for example, is commonly referred to as his lichame in Middle Dutch. While the term lichame is often used synonymously in Middle Dutch for “body” it is reserved in Hadewijch to denote the inner perfected body to which her outer materie must conform. The lichame refers to a spiritual body in which divine will has perfected itself, that is, when the outer fully person fully conforms to the inner person. In a perfected state, inner and outer persons become one lichame, reflecting the divine as seen in her List of the Perfect, a point I will develop later. The lichame of Hadewijch’s visions thus reflects the promised imago Dei in that it refers to her future perfected body, which will unite body and soul, transforming the material body into a spiritual one. As it figures in the vision, Hadewijch’s lichame represents the corporeal element of the inner person, the embodiment of her soul. Hadewijch’s lichame is pictured in the celebrated Vision 7 in a seemingly erotic union with Christ, performing the union promised to all who conform themselves to his likeness, when they “are one without difference” (CW, 281).26 Despite the obvious commitment of Hadewijch’s visions to the soul and its reflection of the divine, their beginnings and endings are often marked by the outer body: physical pain, trembling, affective states, or mere awareness of a departure or return to her self, often in the middle of the liturgy. What then are we to make of the presence of the outer material body in the visionary text? What purpose might it serve, if any? The formal transition in her visions from this external narrative frame (the sign of the outer) to the vision itself

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(the domain of the inner) and back again will, I will demonstrate, provide a model for dwelling with other human beings, like those in her community of beguines, as well as a model for how the human is inhabited by the divine. As with Paul and Augustine, the outer is a vessel for the inner, a means for inhabiting the world as one inhabits a text (visionary or scriptural). This is not to say that all medieval religious women were reading Augustinian and Pauline texts, hoping to put them to work in their contemplative or active lives.27 On the contrary, medieval mystics did not need to read Paul or Augustine, as they were cited and incorporated into the traditions that oriented exegesis, monastic life, and medieval spirituality in general.

BRIDGING B ODIES: THE PROMISE OF THE TEXT The temporal transitions between outer and inner bodies help us understand how visions are associated with the modeling of community. Temporally, Hadewijch’s visions move from a historical or liturgical time shared by a community—Hadewijch’s Vision 9 begins, “It was at Matins on the feast In nativitate beatae Mariae, and after the third lesson” (CW, 285)28—the time in which her materie dwells, to a divine atemporal moment available to the lichame, that aspect of the human being that renews itself according to the imago Dei and is promised a measure of eternal life. Whether explicitly or not, a vision then returns to the time of the outer body, implied if nothing else by the narrativization of the vision itself. Any account of embodiment in Hadewijch (and, by extension, visionaries in general) must contend with how these two embodiments and times relate. What is seemingly absent from the vision—the outer body, or materie—plays a significant role in the textual reconstruction of the vision, for the vision frames the material of humanity in the light of the inner person, which we saw was so critical to Augustine, in order to receive and understand divine forms and spiritual truths. Although for Hadewijch, the outer materiality is marginalized— engaged only at the beginning and the end of the vision—removed from the divine vision’s focus on the soul and access to divine truths, her materie figures significantly in the vision and in its afterlife. Just as Hadewijch returns to her materie, so too do the spiritual truths glimpsed in the vision reach the outer person once the vision is put into language. In the vision, multiple registers associated with reading occur in one narrative: spiritual truths are beheld, contemplated, interpreted, and read in order to eventually provide a prescription for Hadewijch’s performance of werke (works). As privileged as the lichame and soul are for Hadewijch in the visions, it is through the outer person and its transformation by

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means of Christic works that Hadewijch may perfect the inner body and soul, ultimately conforming her materie into a spiritual body. As we have already seen, inner and outer persons and their associated embodiments harbor different temporalities. The inner person, connected as it is to the soul, promises to find renewal in the eternal; the outer, connected to the medium of the temporal, is a means to host the living Christ in life. While the mystic text itself, as yet another corpus, promises a representational unity of these times, this unity is only ever possible in the form of a promise. Even though visions seem to claim immediacy, experience, and corporeality, as I have argued in the previous chapter, these categories are habitually misunderstood, since the play of temporal and linguistic juxtapositions requires that they be read in a mediated fashion, that is, in relation to different temporalities and to the visions’ figurative and representational properties. The mystic text pivots between internal and external time, internal and external sensation, represented and actualized bodies, and in doing so sets the stage for a temporal and material poetics that patterns how materiality should be perceived, read, and experienced. Mystical writing—or more appropriately what one would call, in reference to medieval practices of textual invention, the composition of textual space—functions as a bridging mechanism, bringing together inner and outer time within the mystic text, guiding and transforming the sense of the letter and of the body. Mystical writing enables the reader to meld her two persons and her corporealities to the example of the text. The text, like the two bodies in relation to one another, hosts the promise of unity with its divine source in order to guide and authorize the true meaning of embodiment. In other words, the text promises to join language, bodies, and spirit to the measure of the divine. The materiality of the text and the body only promise to find unity and wholeness in a future tense, inaccessible at present—accessible only in a time yet to come, made palpable by the promise in the text. In the visions of women as temporally, geographically, linguistically, and textually distinct from one another as Hadewijch of Brabant, Gertrude of Helfta, Julian of Norwich, Marguerite d’Oingt, Ida of Louvain, Angela of Foligno, Hildegard von Bingen, and Saint Theresa of Avila, how the feminine body relates to the divine message it receives is habitually highlighted in relation to an accompanying textual event, yet the body’s temporal complexity in relation to the vision is seldom addressed by scholars. As a kind of annunciatory host, surprised and startled by the message it bears, the material body often assumes an intimate yet incommensurate quality in the context of the vision, given the vision’s divine source. Poised in chronological time, yet pointing to an event that exceeds its historical moment, the outer body allows human time to relate to its divine underpinnings

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(according to an Augustinian logic) and incorporate the sense of the divine into a temporalized hermeneutic. This process of allowing the inner to be translated into terms applicable to the outer is part of a process of reading and interpretation that ensues with the event of a vision and continues beyond the event itself. Like a fi xed outer margin that frames a more aestheticized content, the outer material body of the visionary or mystic is often placed in bookend (or book-cover) fashion at beginning or endings of visions—as seen in Hadewijch’s Vision 7 and in Julian’s Showings—or in descriptive letters and commentaries on the visionary process itself like those of Hildegard von Bingen. The framing of a vision with the suffering material body is a feature shared with Hildegard, of whose visions, as we have seen, Hadewijch claimed to be aware. The framing of Hildegard’s visions lets us see how inner and outer persons relate reciprocally to one another, even from the perspective of male hagiographers. In her Vita, compiled by the monks Gottfried of Saint Disiboden and Theoderic of Echternach although supposedly reported by Hildegard herself, the visionary Hildegard constantly relates the state of her body to the receiving and recounting of her visions.29 She states, “Some time later I saw an extraordinary mystical vision, at which all my inward parts trembled,” or, earlier on in the Vita, she reports: “Then in this same vision I was constrained by the great pressure of my pains to reveal openly what I had seen and heard.”30 Even more explicitly in her Scivias, her delay is linked to her lack of trust in human language: But I though I saw and heard these things, I refused to write for a long time through doubt and bad opinion and the diversity of human words, not with stubbornness but in the exercise of humility, until laid low by the scourge of God, I fell upon a bed of sickness; then, compelled at last by many illnesses. . . . I set my hand to the writing. . . . And again I heard a voice from Heaven saying to me, “Cry out therefore, and write thus!”31 (Scivias, 60)

As Bruce Holsinger has emphasized, the content of her visions is likened to a divine touch (tacta) whereby Hildegard becomes the instrument through which the composition is articulated.32 The incommensurability of Hildegard’s outer body to the divine is a source of temporal and ontological paradox (and of physical pain) with respect to the eternal message it delivers. While the message received is itself an atemporal divine truth, it must become temporalized when put into language and transmitted in time, despite any qualms about the inadequacy of language and of one’s humanity.

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Likewise, while the message is “in” her, it is not “of ” her, displacing the sense of the subject of the vision and the agency at work. Hildegard instrumentalizes the receiving of her visions and describes her activity in understandably elusive terms that problematize outer perception itself: “She lives and does not live, she perceives the things formed of dust and does not perceive them, and utters God’s miracles not of herself but being touched by them, even as a string touched by a lutanist emits a sound not of itself but by his touch.”33 For Hildegard, the outer material body becomes thematized as part of the apparatus of vision itself, but is not the heart of its subject matter. In the composition of the vision—that is, in its narrative framing—the outer body is taken as a sign and finds a value in its signifying capacity, able to be read and understood in relation to the message it delivers. Often stimulated by visual or aural signs (like Julian’s focus on the cross), the visionary text effectuates a turn inward from external to internal senses, moving from a phrase or object perceived (or an external sickness, like Julian’s) to its figural and spiritual meaning.34 What we traditionally see encountered by men and some monastic women through the acts of meditation, commentary, ruminatio, or lectio, we see Hadewijch and other visionaries confront in less rigidly defined visual figurations of the mind that frequently work through the meaning and means of an embodied response.35 Hadewijch’s visions should therefore not be read as an ideal encounter with the divine that excludes an embodied counterpoint in life, but as an exegetic and pedagogic tool that indicates a means for the vision’s spiritual properties to become embodied in language and in works. The consequences of this lived exegesis are also material, in that the body is no longer just a body but is also a signifying text—attempting to conform itself to Christ, that is, the Word. Just as the Pauline texts insist on the conformity of the outer person to the inner person, so too do the visions attempt to demonstrate how to reform both inner and outer persons in the image of the divine. Hadewijch reports on a vision in Letter 28: “I saw God was God, and man was man, and then it did not astonish me that God was God, and that man was man. Then I saw God was Man, and I saw that man was Godlike [ godlec]. Then it did not astonish me that man was blissful with God” (CW, 113).36 The narrative of the visionary moment is itself one means of becoming embodied, that is, of providing analogues for scriptural and liturgical texts. The vision proceeds according to an imaginative spatialization of meaning and figures, as though textual meaning were being encountered spatially and bodily, yet in an atemporal register.37 In Vision 1, Hadewijch notes, “When I had received Our Lord, he then received me to him, so that he withdrew my senses from [alle mine sine buten] every remembrance of foreign things to enable me to have fruition [ ghebrukene] in him in oneness [enecheden] with him. Then I was led as if

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into a meadow, an expanse that was called the space of perfect virtue” (CW, 263).38 Hadewijch’s imaginative image of virtue is connected to a narrative encounter, with its representation as meadow and forest.39 However allegorical, the forest is connected to the reality of the inner person as it understands and interprets the link between virtue and piety. In Vision 7, as she is told by a great eagle to prepare herself for oneness, she responds in terms that perform the outer gestures of humility, “I fell on my knees and my heart beat fearfully, to worship the Beloved with oneness” (CW, 281).40 Hadewijch’s vision of unity is represented as an encounter with meaning that fuses bodily and spiritual registers through an affective understanding. The images encountered provide a medium for reflecting the inner person’s experience of scripture and model how she should externally conform to its divine origins. As Fraeters notes, Hadewijch’s collection of visions “is in fact an alternative form of experiential scriptural exegesis.” 41 As with Bernard’s liber experientiae, the mystic treats the vision as an experience that makes manifest scriptural truths. Far from being disembodied, the vision stages a moment of textual exegesis that is inextricable from its translation into embodied forms, eventually written into the material of life. As Jennifer Summit has demonstrated for medieval women, reading and textual production are closely intertwined, making devotional reading “an active process that enlisted the reader as the co-creator of meaning.” 42 Visions transpose an encounter with textuality into imaginative terms, fusing text, image, and oral delivery into sight and sound. Hildegard sketches out her visions’ relation to textuality, writing, “The brightness that I see is not placed, yet it is far, far more lucent than a cloud that envelops the sun. I cannot contemplate the height or length or width in it; and I call it ‘the shadow of the living brightness.’ And as sun, moon, and stars appear in water, so scriptures, sermons, virtues, and some works of men take form for me and are reflected radiant in this brightness” (Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, 168, 252).43 For Hildegard, writings or sermons are envisioned as quasi-animate forms that appear in a different space for her to read and transmit in oral and textual form. Despite their ephemeral nature, they attest to a lived form of textuality. The mystic’s inner and outer persons become effective hermeneutic means for encountering, meditating on, understanding, and living scripture. The activity of vision, “which is that very understanding, which is the soul,” as William of Saint Th ierry notes, may already be a form of interpretive comprehension. Scripture is transposed or reflected into interpreted forms that are seen and heard, hence reading becomes transposed into a listening and figural seeing.44 As D. H. Green has shown, “Even if [women readers were] uneducated and unable to read [a text] in the literal sense,” this kind of visual or aural reading

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entailed a form of devotional literacy, for “in devotional and mystical literature, especially popular with women, Christ’s crucified body is seen as a book to be read by those who have acquired the grammar and syntax not of school-based literacy but of this type of meditation.”45 Unlike many in their communities, visionaries and mystics like Hildegard and Hadewijch are literate in that they are able to read written works even if they do not have the scholastic training of men. Hadewijch’s works incorporate variations of reading practices common both to medieval women and to male commentators, preachers, theologians, poets, and philosophers. Wybren Scheepsma has underscored the literary orientation of women in Hadewijch’s milieu, especially in their role as readers, noting that “writing was [most often] for educated men, in other words, the clergy. But women were then, as now, the greatest consumers of literature, for reading was seen as a feminine occupation par excellence.” 46 Understanding the blend in Hadewijch’s visionary texts of forms of reading and how they produce writing—in the text as well as in life, through the body— allows us a more thorough evaluation of the literary qualities in women’s visionary and mystical works, however differently from each other they may speak. Following Hollywood’s argument in relation to Hadewijch’s work and mysticism as a whole, as readers, we should look at how the text invokes similar content to that of their male counterparts but by different means. While a visionary may be denied the ability to interpret scripture and teach, the divine that speaks through her by means of grace is able to teach both the visionary herself and her community. In the vision, the divine teaches the visionary or mystic and does so through scriptural commentary and figures of embodied learning. The body and letter are involved in a poetic work that negotiates the prohibition against scriptural interpretation in the guise of scriptural application.47 Scripture is applied to the understanding of the inner and outer persons and is a force for refiguring one in the promise of the other.

M ARGUERITE D’OINGT ’S CARTHUSIAN PROMISE: EMB ODIED EXEGESIS In a graphic rendering of reading that vividly enacts this transformation of words and textuality to inner and outer bodies, the Carthusian prioress Marguerite d’Oingt recounts a vision (the Speculum) that constantly intertwines life, text, body, mind, and textual script, demonstrating how one bears upon the other.48 As Stephanie Paulsell has noted, paying close attention to Marguerite’s Carthusian inheritance, in this vision, Marguerite follows Guigo I, for whom “listening is a

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form of reading,” and she transcribes her vision accordingly.49 Engaging in what Paulsell cleverly calls scriptio divina, Marguerite conjoins reading, experience, writing, and contemplation in a way that celebrates the activity of writing as part of her ascent.50 Using a third-person voice, and writing in her vernacular Franco-Provençal, she envisions the outside and inside of a book in relation to the temporal and eternal nature of the body of Christ. She reads and contemplates black, white, red, and gold letters on the outside of the book, which symbolically point to various aspects of the historical life of Christ. Once she has studied these letters and their significance, she reads “the book of her conscience” (“el livro de sa concienci”) and compares this with the “book” she has just read of Christ, discerning by comparison the “falsity and lies” (“fouceta et de menconges”) that adorn her book.51 She then uses the example of the good book to try to “correct” her faults, and thus “amend[s] her life, based on the example of this book” (“illi ot bien emenda sa via, a l’essimplario de cel livro”).52 Once she has done so, after “a long time” of meditation (“illi se estudiavet grant teins”), the divine book finally opens in a vision, and she is allowed to contemplate the pure and glorious body of Christ in the two pages that open up to her like a mirror.53 The body of Christ she is then allowed to see is the redeemed body and is “so transparent that one could clearly see the soul inside of it” (“si trapercans que l’on veoyt tot clarament l’arma per dedenz”), thereby becoming a model for the promised body that one hopes to mirror and see face-to-face “when our souls leave our bodies” (“quant les armes nos partirent del cors”).54 Marguerite’s clearly delineated vision of inner and outer persons and their embodiments corresponds with her reading of the outer suffering of Christ in his temporal life and the (inner) eternity of his glorified body, which has now become what Paul calls a spiritual body (in 1 Cor 15:44). The first allows her to “see” and “read” her own external faults, and the second allows her to mirror the purity and desired perfection of her soul, in the hopes that she too can imitate the promised body of Christ. In this sense, the vision enacts a desired correlation between the Word, the means whereby its graphic rendering and meaning are perceived and read, and the significance for inner and outer bodies. The vision finds its mimetic property—its capacity for true representation—in understanding and portraying the relation of bodily and written forms to spiritual sense. Her outer body is one of the means through which she enacts a kind of reform: she literally re-forms it to Christ’s life and example as glimpsed in the vision (through her mind), and shapes her temporal existence to reflect the inner virtues that Christ embodies, as though she were engaged with the tropological sense of scripture. Reading and meditating on her own vision engenders a bridge between inner and outer bodies; it

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renders them coherent, in touch with one another. The vision anticipates the unity of inner and outer bodies in and through divinity itself. As she meditates on the spiritual meaning of what she sees over time, this allows her inner person to become increasingly substantial (in the symbolic and literal sense) and adapted to its desired role, enabling her to live the way she reads. Visionaries such as Marguerite and Hadewijch are involved in a kind of visual or affective meditatio, what Barbara Newman describes as an “imaginative theology,” yet the “imaginative” content of a vision is anchored in very concrete, textspecific forms of connecting word, meaning, and spirit to the mirroring quality of the mind.55 This connection is then reflected onto inner and outer persons. Many visionaries are not shown the first sense of reading, the literal sense; rather, they are engaged with the highest senses of scripture, what male religious call the allegorical and tropological senses. The more closely the outer body conforms to a linguistic referent, the more united and perfect it becomes. The inner body becomes more substantial as it approximates the living substance of consciousness. The link between lectio– meditatio–oratio–operatio and contemplatio seen in the Victorines, Cistercians, and Carthusians is elucidated in Marguerite’s case in terms of how inner and outer relate to one another. The fourth term, operatio (work, performance), is the ultimate sign of her perfection. Although terms for reading are not systematically employed, the activities involved in the vision (of beholding, reflecting, contemplating) are nevertheless imitated and applied to the imagined reception of a text. For Marguerite—as for many mystics, including Hadewijch—reading and being ideally become one, hence the outer person and the corresponding embodiment, often portrayed in women’s visionary texts as synonymous with carnality, desire, and immediacy, are actually part of a larger script that defers the sense of the outer person to the inner person who animates it. Marguerite may be the mystic who thematizes textuality more than others, yet she exemplifies a process that underlies visions whether or not reference is made to a book, since all visions illustrate some relation to textuality, especially scripture and the texts visions are intended to produce. As Marguerite makes evident, the meaning of the text is also associated with the development of the inner body, and with the faculties associated with that development, such as the will. In one letter—in which Marguerite recounts contemplating the word “vehement” (vehemens) after hearing it and then sensing its being written on her heart—she envisions a tree with five branches, with Latin words inscribed on the leaves and one branch for each of the inner senses (visu, auditu, gustu, odoratu, tactu).56 Once the senses honor their spiritual author, inverting and pointing to the sky rather than to the temporal ground, they transform from dried and downward bent to “all

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green and full of leaves,” thus reflecting the true life and source of true meaning.57 The inner senses, represented as they are in Latin terms, reflect a fusion of exegetical sensitivity and spiritual growth (and not uniquely a tie to carnality). In her vision, Marguerite reads the Latin terms, and as she reads and contemplates their meaning, she witnesses the representation of the inner senses flourish.58 Contemplation thus generates the living substance of the inner senses, when the soul finds and is nourished on its true source. Visionaries then are readers of a different sort in that they envision and encounter spiritual meaning in the inner senses and transcribe it or reflect it onto the outer person in the hope of a promised unity. While the outer person remains at the cusp of the vision, like the cover of Marguerite’s book, the inner person and inner senses are at work within the vision, perceiving and receiving divine messages and forms as if written directly into the soul itself. Even in the case of a later mystic like Julian, the words she receives are, she says, formed by God’s writing directly on her soul: “Then [God], without voys and opening of lippes, formed in my soule these wordes.”59 What is formed in the soul passes into textual form by way of exteriorization. Critical to the visionary process, the outer body is both host and hostage to a message that issues from a divine source and that must pass into language, often through bodily pressure and pains. The visions thus seem to always in some way be contingent on embodiment (such as through a sensation of touch, pain, pleasure, a turning toward the inner senses, or an experience of the humanity of Christ in the imitatio Christi), which they register as both a corporeal and a linguistic event.60 One means of bridging these two bodies is through memory, both cognitive and embodied.

UNLIVED EXPERIENCE: MEMORY AND THE SOM ATIC ARCHIVE The corporeal and linguistic registers are, as I have argued, linked to inner and outer persons and promise to come together in the mystical and visionary text through a complex interweaving of moments. While the inner person may seem the more immediately tied to the linguistic, the lessons learned about the soul must be applied and lived, shaping the outer person into a likeness of the Word. The various moments culminate in an embodied and temporal fugue, each person and time overlapping the other, in the other, and articulating itself through the other, through the mind’s reflection and through the composition of the text. As I have stressed, the Augustinian and Pauline conception of two different kinds of time is expressed in mystical texts: the form of time linked to the outer

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person and the human faculties of perception is chronological, or historical, time; the other form of time (or lack thereof) is an atemporal, or eternal, moment, a time outside of time, the time of God, which is not subject to change or to mediation and remains identical with itself, inaccessible to humans directly. This latter time is, however, the source from which divine truths issue and are received by the inner senses. While divinity, as Augustine points out, is conceivable as a word that precedes language, humans are, of course, bound to the temporal and to language, unceasingly perfecting their relation to language and embodiment in order to become closer to the Word itself. Human existence is necessarily mediated by time, and thus it can only aspire to the promise of eternal salvation or union via memory and the hope of an afterlife. While the inner senses might perceive and register a divine truth, it is memory that is called upon to put the vision into language, mediating between the sense of an atemporal moment and its exteriorized transmission into language. Memory—both somatic and mental—is the key to the mystic text’s taking shape. While mysticism, like Christianity, is a religion of remembrance and is clearly involved in various positive mnemonic processes (detailed by Mary Carruthers) the innermost memory that the mystics call upon differs in kind from substantive memories and is closest to Augustine’s memory of the divine, which involves a memory of an unlived experience.61 In the Confessions, most notably, Augustine searches for the divine in life and in the stores of memory, and finds an experience of God’s absence in his life (there but unnoticed, unrecognized, and only known retroactively in the life of his soul), yet immemorially present and sought after through memory and confession. Augustine’s text hovers between these two poles, seeking and affirming divinity through his faith and attestation and rewriting memories that are time-based (anchored in biography) with a memory that is above and beyond time and experience itself. This latter kind of memory-without-content, linked to the imago Dei, the image of God within, has no positivistic content from which it can know itself as true; it can only anchor itself in times and experiences that are known and posit divinity as a ubiquitous absent presence, unable to be placed in any one location but potentially immanent in all.62 This memory is not Augustine’s proper, but rather the memory of God in him (in the objective genitive), which he attempts to cultivate through love and understanding. Like a postmemory—that is, a memory that is not directly gained from experience, but is issued from a time that precedes the individual—this memory is issued from the Trinity itself and from previous generations of commentaries on scripture.63 Augustine’s memory of divinity is unlived, as it is not an object of and for experience, not attested to in any positivistic way, but rather is rendered present only through language, through his

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confession in the form of a promised likeness of its truer source. A memory without content that promises a truer form of itself in a future face-to-face encounter: this is a temporal peculiarity both of mystical texts and of Augustine’s writings. Because of this fundamental difference between the memory of God and the human desire to find him, a similar rhythm of searching for God haunts Hadewijch. The desire to find God is affirmed in faith, but in human life the desire for the divine falls short of its object. Confession can never ultimately find its object; rather, the search for the object becomes the only tangible attestation of its existence. The inadequacy of confession to recapture the divine (even if this is the only way to “remember” it) finds a parallel in Hadewijch in her feelings about the inadequacy of loving Minne enough and the relentless nature of the pursuit. Language too furthers the dissimilarity, as it does in Augustine’s regio dissimilitudinis (region of unlikeness). In Letter 28, “a soul” paradoxically explains, “And since I feel with God in God, that nothing separates me more from him than having to speak, for this reason I keep silence” (CW, 113).64 While Hadewijch’s unlived experience is linked to an elusive event, her contact with or proximity to the divine nevertheless occurs within the framework of a specific date. Beginning at a precise moment in time, the mystic’s soul is taken out of herself and enveloped in a moment outside of chronological time.65 “I was taken up in the spirit on the feast of Saint John the Evangelist in the Christmas Octave” (CW, 287), says Hadewijch at the opening of Vision 10.66 As a kind of temporal parenthesis or enclave, bounded by a “departure” and “return” to the outer body, this instance is never recounted in the present tense or in the first person as it happens, nor is it attributable to the power of the mystic herself. The atemporal enclave functions as a memory of unity, eclipsed by consciousness, yet recalled through a Trinitarian focus in the soul that will haunt the mystic in life. Like Augustine’s confession, the experience of the divine is unlived, but the memory of the divine as it manifests itself in the vision will become the means for a patterning to reflect the imago in life. Memory and imitatio are thus bound together, allowing for the mystic’s pursuit of a face-to-face encounter to prefigure (in the Auerbachian sense) the imitatio required in life. In a manner that will influence Hadewijch, William of Saint Thierry links memory to a spiritual form of affective piety, that is, to a continued effort at purification in order to become like the Trinitarian image through love. “Seeking the face of God,” he writes, requires a form of piety and affective memory: “This piety is the continual remembrance of God, an unceasing effort of the mind to know him, an unwearied concern of the affections to love him, so that, I will not say every day, but every hour finds the servant of God occupied in the labor of ascesis and the effort to make progress, or in the sweetness of experience and the joy of

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fruition.”67 Continued remembrance is an hourly event—a temporal habit that Hadewijch will elaborate on even further in her constant references to “hours” (ure)—but it is a remembrance of what one already is in potential but is not yet fully in life, hence the unlived nature of that memory, even when it transpires in a vision.68 While Hadewijch can affectively and spiritually feel and anticipate the content of spiritual truths and experience “sweetness” (a substantive truth), she does not fully possess or identify with what the vision reflects. Even when the outer person is pushed to conform to the inner person, to become like the imago Dei, the perfection it seeks is always futural. If, however, the outer person approximates perfection, this may make for a saint, or a perfect life (to be recounted by a hagiographer), but not the body of divinity itself. The divine is reflected through the work or body of the saint or martyr, but is not identical to the saint or martyr. Their humanity remains intact while divinity works through them.69 The mystic lives the promise of unity, the unity as promise; she archives a unity that once exceeded her and that she seeks once more to become. The memory that is called upon to resuscitate and bind together these times will be a unifying feature in assembling the different components of the text.

ONCE: TIME, B ODY, AND EVENT The mystic’s body and soul archive a “once” that can be dated, that is, they archive an instance that fissures historical time and provides a glimpse of the seemingly truer kind of temporality that underlies creaturely life. The pains that push Hildegard to write and the “new pains,” or memories of bliss that Hadewijch knows after her visions, are signs of this somatic archive. When Hadewijch initiates her Vision 12—“On an Epiphany, during Mass, I was taken outside myself in the spirit” (CW, 293)—this instance, which is embedded in historical time, works according to a liturgical or datable calendar and can be situated within a historical period or cycle.70 At the same time, it directs us to an interruption of its domain in favor of the spirit, what Hadewijch and other mystics can only access via the inner person, made more tangible through the work of the divine office.71 Hadewijch refers to this time in which the spirit is taken up in the divine the “nameless” or “unnamed” (onghemende) hours, hours that are distinct from “named” liturgical hours. In her Lied 5, she will refer to a person’s “tasting” the nameless hours when Minne touches her, presumably when she is experiencing rapture or the ecstasy of union in the time of the vision.72 In calling them “unnamed,” she may be alluding to how these “hours” mark a limit of speech in which it attempts to approximate—but falls short of—the divine.73

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While human knowledge and language cannot directly access this temporality, those who have been “cast into the abyss of Minne’s strong nature, or those who are fitted to be cast into it” can achieve some form of inner understanding (which will play an important role in the production of works and a text). Hadewijch nevertheless specifies that such people are merely structurally fitted to Minne, for “these last rather believe in Minne than understand her” (CW, 93).74 The liturgy enacts a reorganization of the human experience of time through cyclical forms of spiritual recall and trains the body to voice the words of the spirit and to host the divine language that passes through it. In so doing, it prompts Hadewijch to leave her materie for the performative enactment of scriptural exegesis hosted in her lichame, in the voice and time of divinity (and Minne).75 The structural work of the liturgy, its reconfiguration of time and of the orientation of the body, parallels and foreshadows the hours of Minne and its work in the soul, deepening the devotee’s performative and cognitive proximity to the divine. The named ure (hours) of the liturgy cast human time in the form of the divine through a complex network of visual and textual figuration.76 The visions likewise perform a kind of figurative and ruminative work through images and text, and do so through twelve kinds of ure, as her twentieth letter makes clear. Unlike the liturgy’s anticipated and regular times, the visions often occur violently or unexpectedly to the mystic or visionary and happen to the seer in a way that supersedes will or any preparedness.77 The “once” that marks the vision, the “on x day” or “on y feast,” the instance that inscribes, fissures, or punctuates historical time—this is the trace of the incision of a different temporality. This incision is a cut that marks the wounding of the text (and the body), there where it is open to a poetic force that exceeds its date.78 The composing of the text seeks to bind together into unified form the incision of the atemporal and the fabric of the everyday. In this sense, the form of the text itself promises unity there where experience can only anticipate or elliptically recollect. In the register of historical time, this unlived experience continues to haunt the mystic, often in the somatic form of bodily pain, and assumes a structure similar to that of the unassimilated memory of a traumatic event. The body’s pain or even the body’s memory of passing away into blissful indistinction carries within it the force of recall of what the soul could not sustain, that is, the affective and spiritual “overflow” of divine essence, what Hadewijch calls the “abyss,” at the moment of the vision itself. For Hadewijch, Hildegard, and Julian, among others, the writing of the visions is delayed. Infusing the young soul, the visions take on a force that the mystic will continue to draw upon to orient her spiritual growth. As happened in Augustine’s estranging initial encounters with scripture—although in a manner no way as

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(guiltily) disdainful—the mystic will not fully understand the vision as it will transcend her spiritually as well as physically. Like a traumatic event, the force of Minne and of vision overwhelms; in a letter Hadewijch recalls, “Since I was ten years old I have been so overwhelmed by intense love that I should have died, during the first two years when I began this” (CW, 69).79 Like the wounding nature of traumatic experience, the visitation of the divine is silenced for lengths of time and is not fully understood when it happens.80 For the mystic, the vision’s accrual of meaning gestates over time along with spiritual growth and understanding yet is never completely understood in time, as this would imply a total identification with its source. Christ reassures Beatrice of Ornacieux after gifting her a vision, “I will give you understanding of all things at another time.”81 Marguerite d’Oingt, the writer of Beatrice’s vision, adds, “To our knowledge, she never wanted to reveal of this vision anything . . . but the fact that she could neither describe nor understand it.”82 While Hadewijch may often assert in her visions that she “saw and understood,” the precise content of this understanding remains elusive, conditional on her immersion in Minne and her soul’s understanding. It is almost intuitive even when put into writing, for it is God, not the mystic, who is the source of its content. In Vision 11, Hadewijch makes distinctions about inner and outer knowledge received in her vision. When seeing “an Infant being born in the souls who love in secret,” she “saw the forms [voermen] of many different souls, according to what each one’s life had been. . . . I received knowledge of the inside [van binnen] from some, and of the outer [van buten] from a great deal; and some became known from within [van binnen] of which I had known nothing of the outer [van buten]” (CW, 289).83 She then justifies the ability to know something purely inwardly: “All that men see with the spirit [ geeste] when engulfed in Minne is [fully] understood by men, is tasted by men, is seen by men, and heard by men” (CW, 289).84 Whatever degree of understanding is permitted to the soul according to perfect measure with the divine is nevertheless delayed for the mystic in life; the event is only partially experienced and comprehended once put into language.85 It is as though historical time had to catch up with the envelope of an atemporal experience, which is not delivered at the moment it occurs, but is postdated to the time it is hosted in language and then, later on, to the time of the affective register in the body. What is archived is thus a seed of a memory that waits to accrue meaning in time and eventually achieve legibility—both for the mystic and for her community. The ability to read the vision yet again becomes of central importance for the mystic and for those who read her. This temporal syncopation of event, meaning, legibility, and time has a similar structure (although not identical in kind) to what Freud calls “belatedness,” and

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Laplanche calls “afterwardsness.” For Laplanche, as well as for Freud, belatedness (Nachträglichkeit) is an occurrence in which something is deposited in an individual (a message, a memory, an event) in a secondary form of consciousness that will be reactivated later on in primary consciousness and eventually be deciphered and transformed.86 Belatedness inverts temporal horizons, in that something of the past retroactively comes alive in the present; belatedness causes consciousness to go back into the trove of memory and decipher a message from a past that has a “future” inscribed within it. The message waits mutely—or is de-translated, as Laplanche calls it, since its meaning is rendered purely enigmatic, other, impenetrable—then is retranslated into the present, given the new ability to finally read and understand its message. The implanted past thus carries within it a futurity that can only be known and read retroactively. The latency of implantation, as Laplanche understands it, is similar to that of trauma, for the temporal lag is inherent to the event and not a perversion of it.87 Unlike the decipherability of the traumatic event, however, the legibility of the vision nevertheless always carries within itself a limit, in that its message is only ever fully revealed in an even further time to come. For the mystic, the incision of the eternal into the fabric of the everyday transpires as a disruptive occurrence that can only be absorbed and given a belated meaning that is experienced retroactively, as if for the first time. Traumatic in structure, the event cannot be fully experienced except through its becoming linguistic: that is, through its becoming readable, interpretable, and understood as a sign (even if the mystic or visionary is unable to fully grasp the sense, she must be able to read it and know that it harbors divine meaning). While first a hostage to spiritual messages, taken out of her outer person unexpectedly, the visionary is eventually able to render the message subject to herself, enough to allow her to host and deliver it as a text. What was once manifest as a temporal and spiritual event, or as an envisioned encounter with textuality, is transcribed or translated into a poetic interplay with textuality. The temporal delay involved in the transmission of the vision into words involves the mystic’s wait for spiritual maturity, namely the ability to discern between love, reason, and will, and order them properly in relation to the spirit and body. In other words, in transmitting the vision to language, the mystic performs an ordering that the theologian describes. The mystic is able to organize the content of the vision as she orders her soul, allowing divinity to become the leading thread along which all aligns itself. The writing performs a sign of spiritual readiness to become the instrument through which divine work is performed.

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FUTURES The visionary text is intertwined, as I have shown, with inner and outer persons, each articulated in various embodied and linguistic ways. For Julian these bodies are what she calls the substance and the sensualite. The first is the essential core of the soul, which partakes in a time outside of time, the time released from, while interrupting, history. The second, the sensualite, corresponds to Augustine’s outer person and is linked to the human way of dwelling in space and time. Although Hadewijch makes less rigorous distinctions, in her work the body is divided into the inner body, the lichame (like the Old English lichama or lichoma), and the outer materiality, the materie (as in the materiality of the flesh), or what she refers to as the earthly man, following 1  Corinthians 15:47.88 Faithful to Augustine’s terminology, Hildegard for her part articulates this as an inner and outer bodies, with an emphasis on the inner and outer senses. The person writing—that is, the outer person associated with the time of the outer body—responds to and is responsible for bringing the inner body, the body represented (the inner body that experiences the mystical union) into the realm of language in the writing of the text. This does not mean that the inner person is “present” in the text in some magical way, but that the text represents it truthfully. The text represents a relation of the inner person to the outer according to its own linguistic (and temporalized) form. The reader may then use inner and outer senses to learn and align herself with what is represented in the text. The inner person guides the sense of the text, through the spiritual connection to God and the soul; the outer person provides an analogical means of understanding and furnishes visible and tangible signs of what works through it, hoping to become transformed by that work. As a product that involves both persons, the visionary text is poised between inner and outer persons, inner and outer senses, providing an exemplary contact between the two according to a divine measure. It demonstrates the ideal senses of embodiment, those lived and those promised, in relation to the imago Dei. The visionary narrative pivots between the two persons and their embodiments, translating one into the language of the other, showing how the body should and often does conform to the soul, and how the soul (or inner person) is promised unity with the body. As a form of pedagogical patterning of sacred experience, the text traces the discrete growth and anatomy of the soul. This patterning provides a means for the unity of the two persons and their respective embodiments through reading, interpretation, and understanding. In this sense, the text performs a unity or a desired afterlife of the inner and outer bodies, finding its perfect pattern in its divine

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source. As the vision materializes and is ushered into language, it becomes a sign of the becoming-substantial of the inner person, the spiritual growth of the visionary or mystic herself. Yet this insight is not enough. The work of the divine that manifests itself in the visionary text continues with a postscriptum that must find its measure not in the time of the soul, but in the time of the body and of humanity itself. What started in the vision as the work of the divine must continue and evolve into the performance of works according to a human measure. In the next chapter, I show how the outer person may conform itself to the inner person by performing what Hadewijch calls werke. Work promises another level of unity, just as Paul’s outer body promises to walk according to the rhythm of the spirit and be transformed.

WERK E AND THE P OSTSCRIPTUM OF THE SOUL

But what we call good works are like the children of our life, in the sense in which one asks what sort of life a man lives, that is, how he conducts his temporal affairs—the life which the Greeks call bios, not zoē. —Augustine, On the Trinity

The Middle Ages may be seen as the period when the primary focus of Christian thought about Christ shifted from what he was to what he did, from the person of Christ to the work of Christ. —Yaroslav Pelikan, The Grow th of Medieval Theology

BECOMING TEXT, BECOMING SUBSTANTIAL: WERK E AND THE PROMISED B ODY OF LOVE While Barbara Newman has underscored that “visionary experience was never supposed to be an end in itself, at least not in principle: it was valued because it could lead the soul into deeper contrition, purer devotion, more perfect knowledge, and greater intimacy with God,” Hadewijch’s visions imply a more concrete outcome for visionary activity: works.1 This “postscriptum” prescribed by Hadewijch’s visions furthers our understanding of visionary activity in that it shows how concrete the aftermath of visions could be for some mystics. In addition, rather than emphasizing intimacy and the contemplation of the divine, works, for Hadewijch, embody spiritual truths in a way that paradoxically

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distances the mystic from the closeness of God glimpsed in the vision itself. The visions of Hadewijch (and Marguerite d’Oingt, as seen in the previous chapter) bring to light a seldom-addressed pedagogical aspect of visions: how inner envisioned truths can be lived and enacted, and how they are applied to the outer material body, performing what Beatrice of Nazareth, Hadewijch’s contemporary, describes in the Seven Manners of Loving as “the angelic life already here [on earth].”2 Arguing against a strict Neoplatonic interpretation of Hadewijch’s visions that would disassociate the ideal inner person/soul from its material and historical manifestation, this chapter stresses the importance for Hadewijch of werke, through which she can make “all lowness loft y and all loftiness low” (CW, 295).3 Through works, Hadewijch attempts to conform the materie to the inner body, the lichame manifest in the visions. In works, the outer person becomes an effective vessel for the imitation of the divine. While Hadewijch clearly recognizes spiritual vision as a higher form for approximating divine essence, her spirituality emphasizes the enactment in life of the vision’s lesson so that one may be truly perfected in one’s person, as an example to others. In other words, she stresses embodied humanity and values the degree to which human beings can enact Christlike perfection. Paradoxically, even though visions provide understanding, such experiences grant only a transitive understanding for Hadewijch, like the fleeting nature of Augustine’s ictu cordis.4 As Erich Auerbach stresses, for Augustine “true understanding on earth can spring only from a momentary contact (ictu), an illumination, which can be preserved for no more than a brief moment, after which one sinks back into one’s accustomed earthly state.”5 As we saw in the previous chapter, the visionary text is a record of what eludes time; it is a guide for the visionary in life, a guide for Hadewijch demonstrating that she should perform works and be virtuous. Since works are based in time and require a faith that must be lived and tested, works demand that the mystic not fall into the complacency of a self-assured “knowing.” Hence the intimacy of vision, for Hadewijch, is a “height” from which she must fall, a loftiness made low. As we will see in this chapter, as the visions progress, the way Hadewijch reads and understands the inner senses’ operation in the vision informs the nature and experience of the outer material body in life. Embodiment is, as we shall see, inextricable from reading, interpreting, and performing textuality, recasting how we conceptualize the role of the body in women’s mystical texts. In this chapter I look at Hadewijch’s visions as a whole, demonstrating that inner and outer persons, bodies, and senses function together and that her text is patterned by an embodied poetics that culminates in promised spiritual and

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bodily perfection through works.6 The Middle Dutch “werke” may mean “working” in the sense of laboring, or the working of divine grace within; it also entails “works” in the sense of a written work, invoking at one and the same time the body and the letter. It involves both Pauline senses of “words” and “deeds,” as they are signs of divinity and love working through the mystic. In the last chapter, I highlighted the association of werke with Hadewijch’s materie, or outer body, in the command, “Return again into your materie and let your works blossom forth,” in order to highlight the temporal and material ways in which visions promise unity. Since works (a frequent subject in Hadewijch’s letters and visions) are performed in the service of Minne (the personification of Love)—“He who loves works great works” (Letter 30: CW, 116)—they embody what is larger and greater than the individual yet can be enacted through her, like visions themselves.7 Works demonstrate how the outer person manifests the inner, how the outer person hosts the promise of the divine, without necessarily being identical to it. As a means to host the divine in the time of humanity, werke alters the progressive monastic sequence lectio–meditatio–oratio–operatio and contemplatio, putting work (operatio) as the ultimate term. Werke is the final result of contemplation of the visions, their postscriptum in the materiality of life, and a product of Hadewijch’s general learning that aligns itself with a Christic compassion intended to serve and teach others. Like many other women mystics, Hadewijch’s visions thus model a theology that is primarily focused on the incarnation and the need to live its truths by means of a complex alignment of outer and inner persons with embodiment. The balancing of the contemplative life (contemplatio) with an active live (actio) is a common theme in the spirituality of the twelft h and thirteenth centuries, especially among Victorines, who regard action and contemplation as unified components of spiritual life. This emphasizes a point already made by Augustine, who stresses the unity of action and contemplation in the figure of Christ himself and, as we saw in chapter 1, in the mirroring human response of love.8 Hadewijch makes explicit the connection of werke to the promise of what one should be, that is, to a form of deification in becoming Minne: “They could do great works [ grote werke] and progress rapidly if they were what they seem to be and what they ought to be, according to the just debt [ gherechte scout] of perfect faith and of veritable Minne [ gherehter minnen]” (CW, 116).9 The Trinitarian language seen in Augustine, of becoming what one “seems” and “ought” to be, is reiterated by Hadewijch in concrete ways that emphasize the present enactment of the imago Dei in life through becoming like the personified figure of Minne (Love). The language of debt (“the just debt of perfect faith”) echoes Hugh of Saint Victor’s notion that the Holy Spirit has given an arrha (earnest money) to

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each individual, which, in the language of the Song of Songs, is what Paul Rorem calls “the beginning of the groom’s gift of himself.”10 Life enacts the repayment of this indebtedness, as it is the means for an affective reciprocity in “returning” love to Minne. What we often loosely call “affective” or “embodied” is therefore part of a complex theological economy of love and requires being understood in this context. Unlike Bernard—who asserts that “after a good work one rests more securely in contemplation”—Hadewijch proposes no methodological use of works, other than the perfecting of the individual.11 Contrary to Bernard’s view, there is little “rest” for Hadewijch after works, as works are meant to test an individual’s faith, like Job, and produce even more seeking. Hadewijch is in this sense more closely aligned with the Victorines, who read “contemplation” as a transitive term and emphasize the outward signs of virtue for a communal purpose. Richard of Saint Victor’s four stages of love describe the progress: “[The mind] enters into the first [degree] through meditation; it ascends into the second through contemplation; in the third it is introduced into jubilation; and in the fourth it goes forth out of compassion.”12 “Going forth out of compassion” signals the ultimate focus of love: that it be oriented toward others on earth in Christlike fashion by means of the divinity one hosts within. The active and contemplative nature of beguine spirituality reflects this ongoing engagement with the world, which involves activities as varied as weaving, tutoring in Latin, caring for the sick, agricultural work, the copying of manuscripts, and duties relating to everyday life in beguinages.13 The emphasis I am placing here on werke (one of twelve virtues celebrated in Vision 12) does not exclude the other significant virtues portrayed in Hadewijch’s visions; rather, emphasizing the role of werke produces an understanding of the way in which inner and outer bodies are crafted to correlate with visions, text, and virtue in general.14 It also allows for an illustration of how werke make Minne substantial in a performative and spiritual sense by living as one reads, allowing for the spiritual imago to become enacted in life. The highlighting of werke in Hadewijch’s description makes clearer what kind of perfection she seeks in her visions, and what kind of work visions help her perform in relation to her mysticism as a whole.15

PUTTING VISIONS TO WORK Hadewijch’s thirteen visions are progressive (beginning in her inexperienced youth and ending with exalted spiritual triumph) and of varied length, and they culminate in what is called the Lijst der Volmaakten (the List of the Perfect), a

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catalogue of fi ft y-six human beings who have perfected themselves in body and in spirit in Minne.16 Vision 1 marks the earliest stage of Hadewijch’s spirituality. Her early desire for fruition (union) with God is, she is told, premature, since she “had not as yet sufficiently suffered for it or lived the number of years required for such exceptional worthiness” (CW, 263).17 Vision 1 warns Hadewijch to wait for the moment when, in her werke, she fully enacts divine will and sets out a program for how she might reach this promised goal. Her first vision opens in a meadow of perfect virtues, where Hadewijch reads inscriptions on leaves and seeks to understand them as they demonstrate how to progress from virtue to self-knowledge and wisdom.18 At the end of the vision, she is told to take a leaf from a tree that symbolizes “the knowledge of [God’s] will” (CW, 270), through which she can feel herself within the divine, then access and experience Minne. From the start of her series of visions, Hadewijch is involved in a hermeneutic process that links reading with understanding. Her visions “are not naïve renderings of spontaneous experience,” as Fraeters has emphasized, but reflect an “experiential hermeneutics” that attempts to model how divinity is perceived, felt, and understood.19 The initiation of love through the will is a common trope in Augustinian and Cistercian spirituality such as that of Hadewijch and William of Saint Thierry, and represents the first step in perfecting love. She demonstrates in her first vision that she has clearly refused the work of miracles—“Exterior miracles and gifts that had indeed begun to be worked in you, you refused to accept from me, as you renounced them and did not want them” (CW, 270)20—and seeks inner works that allow the soul and body to be transformed. At the end of Vision 1, the angel prophesies the active sense of werke to be carried out by Hadewijch: “With understanding you shall wisely work my will [minen wille werken]. . . . Never fail anyone up to the day I say to you, “Thy work is all fulfi lled” [Dijn werk es al voldaen]. . . . Thus work my will [Dus werke minen wille] with understanding, my most dearly beloved” (CW, 270; Vis, 52).21 The intermingling of “will,” “work,” “understanding,” and “love” in substantive and verbal senses demonstrates in language how she is expected to transform understanding into doing. From refusing outer miracles to the inner understanding and the performance of divine will through Minne, Hadewijch’s text prefigures how she will grow. She will let werke operate through her in an active sense by aligning her will with God, working his will, and by becoming what she does, or being who she already is, that is, the imago within. In conforming to the divine, Hadewijch correlates the sense of feeling the divine within to the sense of feeling oneself within the divine. The end of the first vision correlates this with the refrain from the Song of Songs, “With love you shall live and persevere and accomplish my hidden

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will by which you belong to me and I to you” (CW, 270).22 The textuality of the vision not only mediates her understanding of things divine, but prescribes her future in the most literal sense: it pre-scribes the way in which her person will perform a postscriptum (after the visionary text) of dwelling in Minne. At the opposite end of her body of writings is the List, structured as a coda, which starts with a list of twenty-nine models of perfection ranged in hierarchical order—first Mary, then John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, and Mary Magdalene.23 Hadewijch’s List offers varying descriptions, justifications, and personal comments on how each individual dwelt in Minne and how each led a virtuous life. The List then continues, citing fi ft y-six perfected individuals whom she identifies as still living, classifying them geographically, by gender, state, or form of spiritual life.24 Hadewijch refers to the List in Vision 13 and refers the twenty-eight as “full grown” (volwassen) and “godlike now” (nu godlec) in that they are fully conformed to the godhead (CW, 301).25 Surprisingly, Hadewijch lists another twenty-three as unborn, still in the cradle, or not yet of age to start spiritual life. What is significant with regard to the List is that while she is consistently theological in her reasoning, Hadewijch’s evaluation of each person places more importance on the biographical, that is, how one lives in and through Minne. She is interested in how a person hosts and becomes Minne in life by practicing “just works” ( gherechte werke) and by dwelling in what she calls the ways (weghe) of Minne (List, 284).26 Saint Gregory, for example, whom she ranks seventh, “was supremely perfect in all three [modes]” of Love (List, 279).27 Like the Cistercians and the Benedictines, who insist on the experience of the divine, Hadewijch’s most pressing concern is not what each person professed or thought but rather how the person was oriented in life to reflect and be fully engulfed in Minne, displaying a way of dwelling according to the Trinity. Hadewijch makes clearer in her letters what constitutes crowning glory for people on earth: “The greatest glory men can have on earth is in wielding truth in works of justice performed in imitation of the Son, and to practice the truth with regard to all that exists, for the glory of the noble Love that God is” (CW, 47).28 While identification with Christ is certainly emphasized by Hadewijch, Christ is not the only measure of works. Hadewijch’s stress on Minne reflects a way of acting according to a Trinitarian framework that makes manifest spiritual truths.29 As one would expect, werke does not glorify the actor: “Remain humble and unexalted by all the works you can accomplish,” she counsels in Letter 2 (CW, 52).30 Her consistent advice to not desire anything in particular—that is, not to desire any specific types of work, lest the devotee overidentify with a goal and let her “self ” be too involved—indicates that the very performance of work is not at-

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tributable to the “self ” in the conventional sense. If, as contemporary readers, we associate women’s performance of works with a Cartesian subject or ego, we risk thinking anachronistically and missing the main point of selflessness and the exercise of divine will. If we posit identification with Christ as a female attribute because of women’s “embodied nature,” for example, we miss the nonidentification that makes work possible. A mystic like Hadewijch would read and interpret her actions in other ways than as issuing from “her” will and reflecting her “self.” Although clearly not quietist, Hadewijch’s emphasis on werke does, however, imply self-annihilation.31 Readings of mystical visions that fail to take this complex of ideas into account project human agency exactly where the mystic is attempting to subvert it. A list of the most exemplary people is the logical culmination of the visions, because they are meant to forewarn, instruct, challenge, and reward Hadewijch in her spiritual journey to becoming exemplary in her materie and lichame, that is, in spiritual life. Despite the exclusion of the List by the editors of her Complete Works, if one understands the visions in terms of a progression that shows and performs divinity as it is increasingly operating through her, this List of the Perfect looks deeply consequential, a logical articulation of the visions’ progression that identifies those who have reached perfection and whom Hadewijch strives to join. Hadewijch’s interest in how one lives life and embodies the values of the Trinity by loving is clear in the List. Life is the ultimate test of faith and virtue; it is the context for becoming like the divine in one’s humanity through Minne. Like her Cistercian counterparts, who professed an “ordinatio caritatis (cf. Song 2:4), the ordering of all reality to the love that originates in God and must return to God,” Hadewijch privileges Minne and its ways of teaching human beings in their humanity, body and soul.32 As Emero Steigman has underscored for Bernard, “the flesh, then, may be other than that caro which resists spiritus (Rom 8:1).”33 The List thus provides a transition: from vision to life, from inner perfection to its manifestation in the outer body. Hadewijch’s elaboration on Augustine’s life in the List makes clearer how generally she envisions living according to Minne, and how works figure in life. Given Hadewijch’s vision of union with Augustine in Vision 11 and their intimacy illustrated therein (he is the first person with whom she experiences unity, she tells us), it may come as a surprise that he comes after saints Gregory, Hilary, and Isidore, with whom she demonstrates far less identification. Nevertheless, Augustine’s placement reflects the high estimation and manifests ways of loving that figure prominently elsewhere in Hadewijch’s work. Hadewijch’s interest in the biographical Augustine illustrates her conception of the biographical fusing

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with Love. Life is itself a work and a way of loving. Echoing her own despair, she writes, In the second year before his death, [he] once felt that the woefulness of love affected him greatly and that he was so lost in that moment on account of love that he felt lost in love and then he saw love’s greatness next to his own littleness [Ende daer sch hi der minnen grotheit bi siere cleinheit]. Then he fell into the despair [onthopenessen] caused by love. How and with what he should become like the great love; after this hell that he then tasted, then he fell into purgatory with a great self-surrender and became very proud that he would and should become entirely love. . . . Then he left all doubt behind and fell into the full storm of unfaith [viel in allen storme van ontrouwen] so that he would allow love no justice [recht]. Therein he remained at all hours until his death; even though he did not always remain in bliss, he did remain in [Minne’s] kingdom and works [hi bleef int rike ende in de werke]. And then he wielded the Trinity’s being, in justice and in Love [in gherechtecheiden ende in minnen]. ( List , 281; Vis , 152)

While entering hell and purgatory might seem like a sort of condemnation, this passage does not at all embody a negative judgment. These terms are, as we shall see, part of Hadewijch’s vocabulary for describing the ways of entering and dwelling in Minne. Her elucidation of “the ways of Minne” makes evident how a life may become the medium for works, how the human body may be perfected in the medium of time. While outer and inner persons, body and soul, operate in a less visibly harmonious way than in the visions, they paradoxically attest unity even when life is most manifestly turbulent. Hadewijch’s description of these ways suggests that—more often than not, and contrary to what one might expect—a perfect life does not always make for an angelic existence. The dissimilarity of divine and human realms results in a different manifestation of unity in life. The embodied extremes we see in women’s mystical texts therefore may paradoxically point not only to what we envision as fleshy, but to a form of the inner person in the outer, a sign of the workings of the divine in the earthen vessel itself.

THE WAYS OF MINNE: AN AFFECTIVE VIA NEGATIVA Although, as I have stressed, Hadewijch’s spirituality discourages adherence to an exterior rule, she nevertheless identifies patterns of living attributable to Minne,

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what she terms her “ways” (weghe), those of God, heaven, hell, and purgatory and of service. A “way” is not necessarily a well-defined path, nor does it possess an outward conformity to a rule, as would adherence to an order; rather, it is predominantly defined by affective features—features of the inner manifesting itself through the outer—that make spiritual life recognizable as conforming to Minne. Like negative theology’s via negativa, the via of Minne is primarily articulated in relation to absence of the divine, with one notable exception: the way of God, the way of God’s inspiriting the soul directly as witnessed in the vision, which does not transpire in human time. The other ways (especially the ways of hell and of purgatory) reflect the trials and tribulations associated with uncertainty and longing, while the way of heaven is the most at peace with this absence. The affect associated with these three ways is not an attestation of divine presence, but an attempt to affirm the promise of the divine, even in a distant, absent, futural tense. None of these temporal ways elevate the individual; rather, like work, they are meant to make “loftiness low,” to enact divinity in the world from a creaturely perspective. An examination of the ways of Minne will underscore the temporal focus of Hadewijch’s spirituality and the significance of her Jobian emphasis on the testing of faith for how we conceive of the materiality of the body. An awareness of how the ways of Minne conjoin divinity and humanity helps us better understand how inner and outer persons attempt to unite in time and how this differs from the atemporal union of visions. The motifs of the different ways of loving illustrate the human way of loving and returning to Christ, returning the “debt” the individual owes divinity, to use Hugh’s terms.34 In Letter 22 (and echoed in Vision 9), Hadewijch specifies that there are five ways of entering divinity; she elaborates on four of these (the ways of God, heaven, hell, and purgatory) at greater length. Each way reflects a human approach to the divine and reflects a theology of absolute immanence: “Since we enter within God by all these ways—through himself, through heaven, through hell, and through purgatory—God is uncircumscribed, although he is within all” (CW, 99).35 Hadewijch associates the different ways of loving God with different affective states and with means of making human time unite with divinity so that “his kingdom [will] come in us (Matt 6:9–10)” (CW, 95).36 The highest mode, the most exceptional—through God himself—is not a creaturely temporal mode, as I noted earlier. It happens in God’s eternal time and occurs when he inspirits an individual’s soul directly and “gives all that he has, and is all that he is” (CW, 97).37 She describes this first way as “beyond our being,” when God “lavishes” his eternal time on a person “to be one spirit (1 Cor 6:17) with him” (CW, 97).38 Language falls short in this mode as it does in the nameless ure in Hadewijch’s visions when the soul becomes united with divinity, performing a moment within

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the text akin to the limit of speech in negative theology. Solitary and all-consuming, it is the most elusive of modes and is most closely aligned with—if not identical to—the visionary moment. All other ways occur in human time and thus involve a greater effort to orient the inner senses and the faculties of reason, understanding, and will to the divine model. While Hadewijch is graced with the perspective of the divine in the vision when she sees how her humanity unites with God, in life she is allowed no such omniscience; rather, the regio dissimilitudinis (the realm of dissimilarity) prevails. The unity sought by means of human ways is within time and does not surpass or transcend these limits; rather, these ways show how the divine promises to be fulfi lled “in us” (Matt 6:10): “What wondrousness takes place when such great unlikeness attains evenness and becomes wholly one without elevation [daer groet onghelijc effene ende al een wert sonder verheffen]” (CW, 96, translation modified; Brieven, 172). No confirmation of unity is ever given within the experience itself for unity can be posited and tested only through an act of faith. As Scheepsma notes of the Limburg Sermons’ Seven Ways of Loving, these ways do not “culminate in a highpoint,” but show “ways in which the experience of Love can manifest itself.”39 The fact of being consumed by Minne affirms itself according to the measure and frailties of human desire (begherte), that is, according to the outer person, as it perfects and transforms itself in divinity.40 Attempts to conform to Minne—even those, or especially those, that perceive themselves as failures—therefore show us how becoming like the imago Dei is manifest by means of the outer person, that is, how human beings attest their immersion in the divine, making the divine operate through them in performing works and in loving . The human ways of loving invert what was witnessed in visions when the soul was taken up in the divine, illustrating how the divine is accomplished in the human. The divine manifests itself, as Hadewijch emphasizes in true Pauline form, “yes, with the earthly man (1 Cor 15:47),” so that human beings may have “fruition in nonelevation” (CW, 95).41 The cognitive and figural properties we saw associated with the inner in the vision are translated into performative, affective, and human modalities of loving: ways of loving enact theological “oughts” in proportions that are specific to human beings. In these ways Hadewijch shows how, like the eagle, the “inner soul [inneghe ziele]” “does not turn its eyes from God,” and how this inner focus becomes manifest according to the outer, earthly human being (CW, 102).42 Each temporal way of Minne works according to three gifts from the divine to humans in Trinitarian fashion: “The first is, that he gave us his nature; the second, that he delivered up his substance [substancie] to death; and the third, that he relaxed [neyghede] time” (CW, 97).43

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The first temporal way of Minne described in Letter 22—the way of the first person of the Trinity “according to which he gave us his nature”—is that of those who live “here as if in heaven [hier alse inden hemel ]” (CW, 97).44 Those who achieve this goal “apply themselves to Love without great woe, and in devotion, and in delight, and in abundance, for they can have all these things without great woe” (CW, 97).45 This first way of loving is, Hadewijch tells us, perfectly oriented to human time, for these people are able to enter into divinity in historical time (the time that she deems a gift to creatures) without inhibition and experience fruition in nonelevation. “They who go to God by the way of heaven consume and are fed, for he has given them his Nature, and they accept it freely. They dwell on earth in the land of peace” (CW, 99).46 “Feeding” and “consuming” the divine denote the commensurability of divine grace and its reception in the inner person. This mode, in which the inner person sustains the outer, is not one that appears often in Hadewijch’s work, but it is nevertheless implied in the List and in her letters. One can stipulate that while words and works do not elevate individuals, they are performed with virtues (peace being the highest) that constantly defer to the divine operating through them. The second temporal way of loving is that “according to which he delivered his substance to death,” that is, imitating the Son, and is by way of Hell, wherein a person is spiritually attuned to the divine yet unable to find any repose in faith, as the instruments of reason work against it. Affect attests the longing for the divine (to being fed by the divine), but the mind undercuts what affect puts forth. The mind is constantly at odds with the grace the inner person receives and therefore the person is not consumed by the divine and does not trust “what she feels” as a sign of the divine. Unlike in the way of heaven, whose beneficiaries are fed and are consumed, [these persons] are fed without consuming [ gheuoedet sonder teren], for they can neither believe nor hope [ ghelouen noch ghehopen] that they would ever be able to content Love in her substantial being [substantileken wesene]. They dwell in the land of debt [scout], and reason penetrates all their veins. . . . They cannot believe what they feel [sine connen ghelouen datsi gheuoelen]: thus God stirs them interiorly [van binnen] in a madness [woede] without hope. ( CW , 99; Brieven , 180)

Hadewijch’s Mengeldicht 16 (“rhyming letter” or “poem in couplets”) permits a way of understanding the storminess and suffering in Hadewijch’s “noble unfaith”: the seventh and highest name, “just and sublime, calls Love hell” (CW, 357).47 This mode of loving, a mode of suffering, produces extremes of despair.

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Hadewijch’s constant references to Job give her a means of relating this predicament biblically. This mode conforms to the second person of the Trinity, who delivered his body to death: “Their spirit understands the grandeur of conformity to the delivering up of the Son, but their reason cannot understand it. This is why they condemn themselves at all hours. All their words, works, and service [Al datsi spreken ende werken ende dienen] seem to them of no account, and their spirit [ ghest] cannot believe that they can attain that grandeur [dat grote]” (Letter 22: CW, 98; Brieven, 178). Only despair leads them “into all places where truth is,” as it exhausts reason to find what God is not. Hadewijch’s Letter 6 elaborates further on this limit of reason. Paraphrasing William of Saint Thierry’s On the Nature and Dignity of Love, she explains the negative limit inscribed in reason: “Reason cannot see God except in what he is not; Love rests not except in what he is” (CW, 86).48 While works may enact the divine, what affect attests to is not yet believed because of its conflict with reason. The inner works in accordance with the outer in this mode, but the mind is not yet ordered in a way that will permit full consumption by the divine. Consuming the divine means being consumed by the divine, “becoming” what one is. According to Hadewijch, Augustine starts with Hell, then, after self-surrender (which goes beyond the confines of reason), he is released, so to speak, into the next mode, purgatory.49 The third temporal way of Love, that of purgatory, for those who “follow time, which has been relaxed” (CW, 98) differs from the second in that these people experience a more profound sense of the promise of Love and so feel what is lacking. They thus suffer a perpetual teasing by Minne herself in her failure to materialize. Minne is experienced as an affirmation that lacks any material object.50 Hadewijch’s experience of time is described as relaxed, extended, inclined, or protracted (neyghede), like an Augustinian distentio, that is, a distension of the mind. In this temporal way, divine and human approximate one another, because human time is experienced as given by divinity. This temporal mode is not identical to divine time, and so is not elevated as when the divine inspirits individuals; nevertheless, the person understands creaturely time as conditioned by divinity. The time of creation, for Hadewijch, is understood and felt as a gift in which humanity approaches divinity through the inner person, yet it is a gift that promises more than it delivers. Human desire yearns in proportion to what it lacks, but it does so according to the inner person: these individuals “burn with interior desires [innegher begherten] without ceasing, because everything is inclined toward them: the mouth open, the arms outstretched, and the rich heart ready. . . . The fact that God opens himself up so wide for them invites them at all hours to sur-

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pass their faculties” (CW, 98).51 Reason no longer seems to present a problem in this mode for it is made subject to Minne. Unlike those who love in the first way and are satisfied, these “live in the land of holy anger” and “what was given them in trust is soon devoured by their deep, anxious longing” (CW, 99).52 Hadewijch calls this purgatory; she writes, “Although they burn from being so unburned by the blaze (perfect love is a fire), they burn in order to content him” (CW, 98).53 The time of creation, for Hadewijch, yearns in the measure of what it lacks; thus humanity suffers, but it does so productively, according to the gift of the Holy Spirit. What we witnessed in Vision 9 as the victorious ordering of reason under Love is here performed as a way of living and feeling; what was read and understood in the vision is now lived as an affective and desiring way of being. Even though the way of loving described is found as lacking when the mystic (or saint) evaluates herself, it nevertheless asserts a promise of unity with Minne; it is an unharmonious harmony, that is, a unity that induces the feeling of insufficiency. Finally, the last way of loving, the fi fth (counting the “timeless” way as one way), which receives the least amount of elaboration (and celebration) on Hadewijch’s part, is the path “trodden by ordinary people with simple faith, who go to God by all kinds of outward service” (CW, 98).54 The brevity of description concerning this way conveys Hadewijch’s lack of enthusiasm for those who do things outwardly but fail to really come into “his inmost secret” (CW, 98), as do those who follow the other four ways.55 It is clear that Hadewijch values the calibration of the inner with the outer and the attempt (especially if perceived as unsuccessful) to come as close to becoming like Minne as possible. In these three temporal ways of loving (and the one atemporal way of the visions) Hadewijch stresses the promised unity of outer and inner, the human desire to penetrate the mystery of the divine, and the aspiration to live accordingly. The last way she describes shows us that while she values good service, works enact divinity in a human measure and allow a person to “become” the divine, even when a person feels inadequate. Performing werke embodies Minne, as do the attempts to return to God through Love. In the three ways that actually enter into the “inmost secret,” what we saw given to Hadewijch in the vision we now see enacted as ways of loving and ordering inner and outer in time. The inner becomes exteriorized through a way of loving and transforms the outer, making it a means for expressing Minne. Our contemporary way of reading the mystic’s affective state and body therefore requires a recognition of its inner component; we need to read the embodiment proportionately in relation to how and what it enacts. If affect is merely categorized as excessive and irrational, or a sign of “feeling” without any

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theological connotation, we in turn become “illiterate”: unable to decipher the elaborate theological mechanism at work or to understand the subtle textures invoked in the mystic’s text and life. Augustine’s ways of loving in noble unfaith and in surrender described in the List are clearly shared by Hadewijch and afford us an insight into the affective component of living and performing works through Love. The way of purgatory is manifest in her Liederen (otherwise known as her “sung” poems, or poems in stanzas), and consequently the poems are perhaps the most potentially misleading for contemporary readers of Hadewijch. The language used in her songs often borrows from the Song of Songs in order to enact the ways in which Minne stretches out to promise “the perfect kiss,” the figure of unity witnessed in visions that is felt in the way of purgatory.56 While the sensuality in the songs often appears to be an expression of carnality, once again the proximity of the divine reflects the promise of proximity. It is tangible as promise, but not consumed, furtive as it is to the senses. Her songs reflect the desire for unity and the suffering consequent on experiencing the divine as memory or promise in life. Her letters verify the knowledge of this: “Alas . . . although I speak of excessive sweetness, it is in truth a thing I know nothing of, except in the wish of my heart—that suffering has become sweet to me for the sake of his love” (CW, 48).57 In themselves werke enact a different kind of performative promise of unity, in that they allow for the hosting of divine essence in actions. In her description of the fi fteenth perfect person, a convert named Sara, Hadewijch stresses that she “had seventy-four beautiful revelations and also the spirit of prophecy, and also that which surpasses all else: just works of Minne [ gherechte werke van minnen]” (List, 284).58 The ambivalence of the actual doer of the just works (is it Sara, or is it Minne?) imitates in life the issues of agency we find in visions. Werke reflect the embodiment of divine truth in action coupled with a spirit of righteousness that demonstrates a person’s complete adoption into divine will. Werke and perfection in Love also accomplish a transformation of the outer person into a spiritual body. In a telling linguistic designation, in the two references to the body in the List— one in her description of Sara, and the other in her description of Saint Paul— Hadewijch uses lichame (not as materie), that is, the perfected spiritualized and transformed body, fully given over to the divine. Of Sara she writes, “She had the Holy Spirit in her soul [ziele] and in her body [lichame]”; and of Paul, “He did not care what his body [lichame] suffered in the quickness and fruition of the Love in which he fully dwelt” (List, 158, 156; translation mine). Remarkably consistent and technical in her usage of terms, in the perfect lichame the inner and outer persons become indistinguishable, to the point of already being in life what one hopes to be in the afterlife. While Hadewijch’s lichame is only present in her vision, those

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who she lists have already perfected their bodies and souls their lives. What she sees in their bodies, that is, as having conformed completely to Minne, she is unable to see in her own because she does not yet see “face-to-face.”

PERFECTION IN MINNE The way in which werke, materie, and lichame function together in Hadewijch’s visions show us how she envisions herself embodying perfection in Minne. Hadewijch’s visions are illustrations of the promised works she is to embody in her life in order to be “fully grown” in her spirit, and this growth of the spirit paradoxically involves time.59 In Vision 4, in which she is escorted by a seraph to see two separate kingdoms (one human and one divine), which reveal themselves to be united, Hadewijch also sees her inner and outer persons represented in both kingdoms. In this vision Hadewijch’s inner and outer persons are pedagogically shown to unite through “great works” ( grote werc) she must perform in life. Like Visions 7 and 8, which insist on unity and reenact Romans 8:38–39 (“For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor might, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is Christ Jesus our Lord”), Vision 4 emphasizes overcoming divisions through Love, yet explicitly mentions the urgency of great works. Initially Hadewijch sees two kingdoms, equal in every way, one of which belongs to her as the loved one—that is, the bride—and the other to her beloved—that is, Christ, the Angel of Great Counsel.60 Hadewijch sees how divisions of time are literally overcome (in the union of living and dead, the stopping of time, and the unity of her inner and outer persons) through Christ himself. Just as in both kingdoms Hadewijch sees “saints, all holy men, living and dead, all who are in heaven, and in purgatory, and on earth, each one as he shall be perfect [ gheheellec] in all,” she also sees herself tasting just Love [ gherechter minnen], being touched by new faith [nuwer trouwen], and made perfect by and in Christ by removing any doubt (CW, 273).61 Hadewijch—or, more literally, her inner person—is “renewed” in Christ, envisioning the divine kingdom as her inner kingdom, following the Pauline understanding of the inner person as the place in which the divine kingdom is renewed and accomplished (2 Cor 4:16).62 The vision shows, however, that Hadewijch’s outer person has not yet fully matured and conformed to the inner, while “remain[ing] equal” (CW, 274). Hadewijch is in the process of “becoming who she already is,” the imago within. The Christ-figure adopts the first-person plural

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in referring to Hadewijch’s inner person, including the inner Hadewijch in a community while excluding the outer person, who, he says, is still not fully grown. This use of the first-person plural indicates the inclusion of her inner person— that is, its conformity to the imago Dei—within the larger community of Christ. This community is, as we have seen, a plural and corporate entity of which Hadewijch is always already a part, but which she must materialize in her person as a corporate body.63 In order to do so, Hadewijch must first experience love, he says, “as all darkness,” that is, without the knowledge (kinnesse) and the taste (smaken) that we have of it doubly (twevoldech) in ourselves. He ends, “This shall be her work [werc], through which tomorrow [margen] she shall bring herself to fullness [volbringhen] in us” (CW, 275).64 Not only is Hadewijch promised full growth, but she witnesses divisions of time being literally overcome—in the union of living and dead, in the stopping of time, and in the uniting of her inner and outer persons through Christ himself. Hadewijch sees herself in her outer person, that is, in her humanity, in the figure of a third person (referred to as “she” in the vision) and is told by Christ that what she sees in “our two humanities [onser twier menscheit]” are the two kingdoms “before [their humanities] attained full growth” (CW, 274).65 The seraph shows her that both kingdoms are equal and that, despite their lack of synchronicity in historical time, they promise to be and are fundamentally united in nature. In other words, what the seraph or Christ teaches her is that although her outer person might seem separate from him historically and essentially, it is in fact immanently equal. Inner and outer persons are conceived of as two humanities that eventually unite in spiritual fullness. The vision thus performs the unity she must embody and believe in in life. She must understand Christ’s true nature, perform the works that lead her to full growth, and fully embody divine will. The seraph projects a theological understanding into her real life, enabling her to see that how she lives is already part of the spiritual body of Christ, and specifies that it is through four great works that “she shall attain full growth” (CW, 274).66 I would be cautious in designating the main addressee in the vision either as the “eternal self or exemplar,” as McGinn describes her, or as her “ideal self ” or “her image in God,” following Columba Hart.67 McGinn contrasts this with the “historical self,” arguing that “Hadewijch’s exemplary self and her historical self are growing together in love to attain the fullness of their primordially given equality with the beloved.”68 While this description is in part true, the language of “ideal” and “exemplary” is too Platonist in its leaning and fails to emphasize the point of the vision, which is that it will be through werke and life that Hadewijch becomes exemplary and ideal like those who have reached perfection. Hadewijch

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is not, as Newman claims, “a good Christian Platonist,” for the point is not to dismiss the historical in favor of an ideal form, but to allow the outer person to assume the inner form that it will take on in the afterlife.69 Like the List of the Perfect, it is in her life—that is, in the unity of outer and inner—that her perfection is promised, not in isolation from it. In addition, the vision emphasizes that the inner needs historical time in order for Hadewijch to grow in her humanity. The oscillation between past and future tense in the seraph’s (that is, Christ’s) address to her highlights this. He tells her, “You have wished, dear strong heroine and lady, with your doubts, to know from me how it might come to pass, and through what works, that she should attain full growth so as to be like me, so that I should be like her and you like myself ” (Vision 4: CW, 274).70 This alternation between past doubts—what “might come to pass”—and future goal—so that “she should” grow fully and “should be” like Christ—provides a pattern that is common to mystical texts, showing us an invisible matrix of what is (Christ’s perfection) and the “ought” that the mystic aims to follow in life. The hypothesis of “being” offered by the vision projects persons and their corresponding embodiments figuratively into spiritual truths and spiritual truths back onto the outer person as it should be inhabited and guided by the inner. Nowhere is this emphasis on historical time more evident than in the latter part of Vision 4, when the seraph (Christ) outlines the four great works “by which she shall attain full growth”—in a future moment (CW, 274). Three great works are to exercise all the virtues, to be miserable and unstable while doing so (so as not to be self-satisfied), and to be visited by discouragement in the process (so as to keep questioning her and God’s intentions). Finally, “Her fourth work and the greatest in which she shall lead forth in us [Haer vierde werc ende dat alremeeste dates in ons volleiden sal ]” is to maintain Love in the privation of “our sweet nature [onser soeter naturen]” (CW, 275).71 This also entails privation of “the knowledge and the taste of [our nature] that we have twofold in ourself [dat wi in ons selven twevolech van hare habben], while she, not full-grown [onvolwassen] must do without him, whom she must love above all, and must consequently have as all darkness” (CW, 275).72 What Hadewijch lacks in her outer self is “twofold knowledge and taste,” that is, the ability to see herself fully in the divine (and the divine in her) as one self as she does in the visions; hence the drama that animates much of her poetic work, which languishes in the absence of unity with Minne. The ability to see “doubly” is what visions enable, since they are given in and through Minne and allow Hadewijch to see herself according to divine likeness, with both inner and outer eyes. As in the allegorical commentaries on divine love of Bernard or Origen, Hadewijch sees herself enact the roles of lover or bride, yet the visions allow for a

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further concretization of the literary form of allegory. As twelfth- and thirteenthcentury commentaries on the Song of Songs provide meticulous means for understanding the meanings of scripture, Hadewijch envisions passages from the Song of Songs as enacted, making them tangible to her inner person but in a stylistically different manner. Hadewijch does not theorize this relation; rather, she alludes to it, performs it, and models it, imagining the vehicle of the allegory (often the personified lover or bride) as her own soul or inner person receiving the kiss. Like other mystics, Hadewijch literalizes the vehicle of allegory in a very peculiar way, fusing the allegorical figure with the inner person, joining the literary with the speculatively embodied.73 Again, the vehicle is a promised embodiment, not yet fully actualized, even when performed in life. It is in part enacted in performative ways, but it is not yet completely realized or recognized. By contrast, historical life must recreate this knowledge of doubleness speculatively through the mind, reflection, contemplation, memory, hope, work, and other exercises that involve a complementary act of reading of life itself. The mystical and contemplative are not separate from one another, as they each form a part of the hermeneutic process leading to a performative enactment. Following William, Hadewijch stresses the “reading” of divine judgments in relation to how she has lived. Life itself is the text: “Read in that most holy countenance all your judgments and all you have done in your life” (CW, 59).74 The vision is a prescription for her past and future works and prophesies her ultimate perfection and triumph over the divisions in time with the coming together of both persons. It is through her future, past, and present werke (in her case, loving in privation, that is, in imitation of Christ) that her promised body—her promise of embodied perfection in her person—will begin to materialize. Hadewijch’s Vision 8, with which this chapter opened, is likewise about the overcoming of temporal and bodily divisions through werke. In this particular vision, Hadewijch again visualizes the five ways of love, but this time does so in spatial terms where spiritual heights are mapped onto a high mountain.75 All five ways culminate in everlasting fruition (eweleker ghebrukenessen) and also lead to the highest being (dat hoechste wesen), divinity himself, poised at the top (CW, 274).76 Hadewijch encounters a champion (kimpe) who tells her, “Behold how I am champion and vassal of this true Countenance” (CW, 282; my emphasis), and claims he is able to lead her through four of the ways of love.77 He stops short at the fi fth, as it will be shown directly by God himself: “The fi fth way which is yours, will be made known to you by the just God who sent you this way and sends it to you” (CW, 282).78 The fi fth way is not the way of timelessness (the first way, described in Letter 22, which works according to God’s eternity); rather, it is a way in time that most closely resembles the way of Hell, as it entails loving with

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affective compassion (affectien, lines 118, 122), and not only, as the champion did, with “the sharp counsel of the mind [den scerpen rade van den geeste]” (CW, 284).79 Her way is, the Christ-figure notes, the way of privation, that is, “the privation [dervene] of what men desire above all, your touching of me the untouchable [mi te gherijnne die ongherijnlec ben]: this is the short hour which wins over all long hours” and is the highest way (den overste wegh) (CW, 283).80 This way conforms to the nature of Christ, as is stated explicitly in terms of the theological notion of eternal procession. The voice of God tells her: “Th is is the way that leads to the nature of myself [mijn selves naturen], therein I came and went forth to myself [daer ic te mi selve mede ghecomen hebbe ende ghegaen]” (CW, 283).81 This Trinitarian idea of Christ’s proceeding from and returning to the father is common to Augustinian thought (initially developed in response to the heresy that claimed two separate natures) and demonstrates Hadewijch’s understanding of the essential relation of human time and history to the divine and the human role of embodiment.82 The Christ-figure affirms a connection between the highest way and a Jobian yet Christlike sense of hiddenness: “I bear to you the true witness with which [met gherechten oerconde] I am the truth [waerheit] of my Father. And my Father bears witness to me that you are the highest way [die overste wech] and have brought with you this way which I have awaited with my hidden way [minen verhoelne weghen]” (CW, 284).83 Hadewijch’s pursuit of this way is not only for her own purification but, as is the case for Christ, is intended to lead others back to divinity in the formation of a corpus mysticum that subsumes the individual body to the community. Hadewijch’s reasoning again shows us the importance of human time and underscores how she differs from a Neoplatonism that would devalue the material of human history in favor of the spirit. Although unity cannot be “seen” with the outer eye, the inner eye and mind can guide body and soul to the unity promised. Reason, understanding, contemplation, and operatio (work) allow Hadewijch to understand and live accordingly. While this is not exactly a form of Renaissance “self-fashioning,” it is a kind of “self-reading” (or reading-of-divine-in-self) that sees promised unity there where the outer eye cannot and seeks to fashion the inner and outer persons and embodiments in a divine likeness. When, after speaking with the champion-figure, Hadewijch encounters the face (aenscijn) of God, the divine oscillates between speaking in the first and second person of the Trinity, in a way similar to Hadewijch’s use of the first and second person in Vision 4. The face that she sees, however, is not a human face, but “was in appearance like a great fiery flood, wider and deeper than the sea,” out of which a voice commands her to unite with those who are already perfect in this highest way (referring to those in the List). He also tells her to do so not only for her own perfection, but because “I have sent you this

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hour with myself and you must, with me, send it forth to yours” (CW, 283).84 Hadewijch’s duty is clear: she must share her inspiration with others and lead them into community with Christ. Again, the individuality we as contemporary readers may want to attribute to her person is overshadowed by the collective and pedagogic nature of Hadewijch’s texts. Hadewijch’s mission is to guide “hers” as much as it is to lead herself to the perfection that unites inner and outer. As the God-figure tells her further on, her knowledge of the union of inner and outer is accomplished; that is, her understanding of the unity of the nature of Christ through the sacrament (which we see in the first part of the vision, Vision 7) is properly united with an understanding of the Trinity: “Now you have tasted me and received me outwardly and inwardly [van buten ende van binnen] and you have understood that the ways of union wholly begin in me” (CW, 284).85 Again, knowledge of inner and outer natures of divinity and of self serves to show how one unites with the other and does not separate the materiality (of her outer body) from its divine purpose. Her thirteenth vision makes this condition explicit. She again sees the divine Face, this time with six symbolic wings and seals, like the six-winged figure in Godfrey of Saint Victor’s “Microcosm,” and interprets it as follows: “The seals that, outside the wings, closed themselves about the Face are the veritable attributes of the mighty Godhead, in the perfection [volcomen] of which no one can himself participate unless he wishes to perform [ pleghen] God and Man [mensche]” (CW, 297).86 Becoming the Godhead means performing and reflecting divinity in life through inner and outer persons. While the seals figuratively hide the “veritable attributes” of the face and are recognized as doing so in the vision, in life, the attributes of the Godhead are hidden, invisible, and mysterious. What Hadewijch witnesses and interprets in the visions mirrors, albeit in a different and omniscient way, her own challenges and triumphs in life as well as her ability as a reader. Perfection yet again requires the dual nature of both the eternal and the temporal and the ability to read and contemplate the ways in which they are joined, following the progress and uniting role implied in her version of lectio– meditatio–contemplatio–oratio, and the final complement, werke (operatio).87 In this penultimate vision, contemplation (beholding an object with the inner eye through understanding) is poetically associated with unity through alliteration, repetition, and echoing, as seen in an address to her by a seraph: You, mother of Love, have looked upon [ ghesien] the three hidden qualities of Love which you see [sies] in the Face of Love. We see [sient] it in the service with which we serve you, in wonder; but you see [siet] it, and you will see [zien] it in clear reason and understanding as a human being. Now contemplate

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[besiet] and possess [besit] from henceforward the whole kingdom that you see that love possesses [besiedi]. . . . Thus contemplate [besiet] these. . . . In all these three you must contemplate [besittijt]. ( CW , 299; Vis , 130)

The linguistic play (common in Hadewijch’s oeuvre) between sight, contemplation (besiet), and possession (besit) lets one hear that the qualities that love possesses can be approximated and owned through contemplation, that is, a sight that understands. In Hadewijch’s final vision, in which she sees that she has finally reached this perfect state, she envisions herself given a new power by God, “the strength of his own Being, to be God with my sufferings according to his example and in union with him, as he was for me when he lived for me as Man” (CW, 302).88 Hadewijch understands that her works have been lived in God and that her will has been perfected in his, concluding, “I did as God did who delivered back all his works [sine werke] to his Father, from whom he had them; but what I have from him, I received from the transfiguration [transfiguration] and from other showings [siene] in other aspects [manieren] of his Face” (CW, 304).89 Hadewijch models herself on a theological premise that interweaves the historical with the eternal and sees the biographical as the stage for performing works that glorify the divine. The inner and outer are not higher and lesser forms; they reflect a doubleness in divinity that humans have inherited as a means of redemption. It is perhaps paradoxical that of all Hadewijch’s written works, her visions could be characterized as both the most nonlinear or nonsequential narrative— causing a great deal of (justified) confusion among her readers—and the most linear or progress-oriented record of development, if one knows how to decipher how eternal and historical aspects of her spirituality interconnect. In this sense, the visions, as documents of the undocumentable, echo this unifying interaction between inner and outer. In the references to inner and outer times, senses, embodiments, and works, the visions show how the outer may host and enact the divine within. As readers, should we fail to see this promise of the eternal in the temporal and the contingency of the eternal upon the temporal, we fail, right where Hadewijch succeeds, to read and understand.

LICHAME — M ATERIE AND THE TEXT As the visions progress, so does Hadewijch’s perfection and understanding of the change operative in her, yet the fullness of experience attested to in visions is not

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fully carried over into chronological time. These two registers represent a fundamental rift between the soul’s identification with God and the outer person’s need to work to conform and thus transform the outer person into a divine likeness. In the visions, the experience of the divine is atemporal and, in part, unlived; in life, her experiences consist primarily of suffering and privation, which she must read and interpret according to what she calls Minne’s or God’s judgments. While Hadewijch clearly comprehends the proximity of God in life, she is deprived of any assurance of proximity to the divine as she lives it; all of her suffering must be interpreted to assess its spiritual significance. As we saw in Vision 4, Hadewijch’s lived humanity, associated with her human materie, cannot “taste [the divine nature that] we have twofold in ourself ” (CW, 275), as the seraph tells her—hence the performative nature of her reading must rely purely on faith and Love. This is why, the God-figure says, she must operate in darkness. In darkness, then, does Hadewijch begin her werke; to darkness must Hadewijch return from her illuminating visions: “Therefore I must live in night by day” (CW, 228), she writes in Lied 35.90 The visions punctuate life as a true positive, and outer life shows itself as its negative imprint. Returning to Hadewijch’s coda to Vision 8, with which we began this chapter, the materie of Hadewijch becomes a negative that carries the imprint of the vision in its somatic archive. In the last lines, the champion commands her: “‘Return again into your material being [materie] and let your works [werke] blossom forth; great trials are soon destined to you. But you return as victor over all, for you have conquered all.’ Then I came back in myself as someone in new severe pain [nuwe herde sereghe], and so I shall be until the day when I am again recalled there where I then turned away” (CW, 284; Vis, 90).91 This return to materie is a return to a materiality deprived of the fullness of vision. New pains are the sign and condition of her return to her person—and her materie; they constitute her “highest way” of loving. At the end of Visions 5 and 6, the return to her materie is similarly accompanied by pains that mark the return to herself: “I came back into my pain again with many a great woe” (CW, 277), or “And with this I was brought back, in affliction, in myself ” (CW, 280).92 Like authentic witnesses, pain and suffering attest the authenticity of the isolation and privation (derven) that she is called upon to embody in life. Her pain signals what it means to unite body and soul in time. The possessive pronoun of “dine materie” (your material being) and the reflexive of “in mi selven” (in myself) signal that the return is also linked to a kind of “mineness” or “self ”—to a form of ipseity and finitude that is ontologically part of, yet experientially separate from, the visions. Pains are an existential hyphen, a trait d’union between spiritual vision and embodied humanity, between the unlived

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experience of the vision and its hieroglyphic translation into human time and materiality. Pain also marks a difference inscribed within the very materiality of Hadewijch’s person: the difference pain signals is both in and of the outer person, but not entirely in and of the person’s materie. Pain signals what the outer person needs to attain (unity with Christ) in order to experience wholeness. Embodiment is clearly necessary to Hadewijch’s experience of love and textual production, for embodiment hosts the trace of a memory that must be materialized through work both in life and in words. We would be missing quite a bit were we to take pain at face value, or as mere imitative carnality, since it signifies a spiritual truth that is both present and substantially inaccessible to the mystic herself. Given the way in which embodiment necessarily invokes complex associations of presence and absence of the divine, the presence of the suffering body in many women’s mystical writings may require an understanding of suffering’s relation to memory, reading, and the spirit required in embodying the Word. Suffering calls attention to the body, while at the same time it marks the body’s signifying capacity beyond its materiality. Like an inscription, pain (or suffering) therefore requires as much interpretation as does a text. In Letter 4, Hadewijch explicitly connects one kind of suffering to a form of consolation. She explains: suffering marks the delayed temporal and ontological unity with the “Beloved” but also enables freedom and renewed hope: When reason [redene] is obscured, the will [wille] grows weak and powerless and feels an aversion to effort [aerbeits], because reason does not enlighten [liechtet] it. Consequently, the memory [memorie] loses its high thoughts [hoghe ghedachte], and the joyous high confidence [ yoieleke hoghe toeuerlaet], and the repeated zealous intentions [menisch nauwe keren] by which its confidence taught [leert] it to endure more easily the misery of waiting for its Beloved. All this depresses the noble soul [edele ziele]; but when it reaches this state, hope in God’s goodness consoles it once more. But one must err and suffer [dolen ende doghen] before being thus freed. ( CW , 53, tr anslation modified ; Brieven , 32)

Suffering and misery are one step in a teleological process, one more experience of promise. The management of suffering by the mind is linked to the production of artful (or courtly) speech and to an ethos that governs works and words, as she indicates in Letter 8, a discussion of the positive attributes of fear:

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For indeed to suffer pain through love [ pine te doeghene doer minne] makes a person well-mannered [wel gheraect] in speech [redene], because he fears that all he says about Love will be of no account to her. . . . It clarifies his mind [sin], it instructs [leert] his heart, it purifies his conscience [conscientie], it makes his spirit [ gheest] wise, it unifies his memory [memorie], it watches over his works and words [ssi hoedet sine werke ende sine worde]. ( CW , 64–65; Brieven , 68)

Hadewijch’s notion of suffering is complex and deeply tied to the essential drive for unity. It has little to do with a glorification of the feminine or an overt identification of the feminine with the physical body; rather, it participates in an ethos that invokes a complex understanding of humanity according to a Trinitarian theology and that emphasizes the transformable (rather than a rigidly fi xed) body and senses, when embodiment is marked by its relation to the soul. For Hadewijch, suffering is applicable to humans in general—hence her general references to “a person” or “the noble soul” and her reluctance to single out gender when speaking in broad theological terms. Even when Hadewijch appeals to a feminine Minne to speak of how the Trinity finds a (nonidentical) counterpart in lived experience, she still does so in the language of the “earthly man,” invoking gender as a flexible and multivalent figure with which she may identify in multiple ways. Gendered responses, like that of the masculine conquering champion, are incorporated into her work, but are fleeting dynamic figures in the path toward unity. While Hadewijch may be like Mary or Christ, for an individual becoming both Mary and Christ, gendered identifications are assumed but not dominant positions on which any identity is based. As Sarah Coakley astutely remarks, in her analysis of Gregory of Nyssa and his Song of Songs commentary, “The persons of the Trinity are always being reconfigured and reconstrued as the soul advances to more dizzying intimacy with the divine. And in this progress the engagement of the self with deep levels of erotic as well as epistemological re-evaluation are [sic] unavoidably predictable.”93 The materialities of history and of life are refashioned according to a spirituality that seeks to remake bodies and souls in the image of the divine, freeing them from a boundedness to the literal in order to perfect their bodies and souls by means of a conversion of the literal. That a heroic, Christic, or masculine motif of suffering in love (witnessed especially in the courtly language of her poems) takes a dominant tone in parts of Hadewijch’s work shows how her embodied person lives its promise and way of loving. Where then does this leave us in relation to gender, as it is represented thematically in her work?

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In the broader scope of my argument, I have been suggesting that we should subsume the category of the body, as it is presented in Hadewijch’s text, to a twofold understanding of how embodiment is conceived of within her visions and the greater theological context of her work. Gender is clearly an important theme— and one that many have engaged with at length, especially when analyzing the complexities of gender and gender-reversal in her Songs. Because gender is associated with the lived aspect of humanity while at the same time, the potential identification of humanity with a spiritual body, with gender, or with sexual difference, is a means—a privileged one—for the expression of many promised transformations, from a literally embodied to a spiritually embodied register.94 As a figure for human experience, gender is both preserved and altered: preserved in that humanity’s experience of gender (lived or read) provides for the multivalent expression of engaged human passion and desire, yet altered in that, like the outer person itself, whatever expression invoked must be interpreted and converted toward its truer spiritual reflection, thus making it insubstantial in relation to any human essence. What gender signifies is far more important to Hadewijch than any static relation of gender to an individual. Gender is not neutralized through its plurality of figures; rather, in its association with the expressions of desire it is a powerful vehicle for understanding and living the spiritual, as is the case for many theologians, such as Bernard or William. Gender is not necessarily queered and excessive, because aggression, masochism, and despair are fundamental for a feminine expression of desire—as Karma Lochrie argues for certain women mystics.95 It is, paradoxically, because Hadewijch sees herself as partially freed from gender in the literal sense that gender can be used as a vehicle of transformation in a figurative sense. Like the body, gender is read and interpreted. It promises a degree of perfectability—that of conforming to Christ in a future moment—yet it does not embody that perfection in and of itself just yet. As the process of spiritualization advances, the determinate nature of embodiment is suspended, promising the work of transformation. Part of becoming a spiritual body entails the paradox that lived experience lacks the experience of its divine counterpart; in her way of loving, Hadewijch suffers from the absence of the divine in life. Th is lack renders any figure of lived experience necessarily incomplete—and thus spiritually productive. One sign of this in Hadewijch’s Liederen is that the object of gendered passion remains elusive and indistinctly embodied. Even though Minne is feminine in gender, meaning love, lover, and beloved—and thereby performing a Trinitarian unity in language and in the promise of its tripartite figures uniting— it is always only present as a promise. The material manifestations of Minne are

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never absolutely discernible. Desire for Minne is present but must be read with caution. If we mistake the desire for this materialization for an actual one we miss the temporal incommensurability between (1) her expression of desire in her songs, poems, and letters, bound as it is to the temporal and sensible conditions of time, and (2) that desire’s object, which haunts but eludes a firmly delimited material expression. Desire (at times articulated in the language of a knight) for Minne provides a means for aligning inner and outer persons, inner and outer senses, but only insomuch as desire coordinates lived experience with spiritual promise. While Minne operates in the medium of human desire and “touches” on inner and outer senses, it is not an object that fully conforms to human desire, as it remains ever elusive, encouraging the conformity of inner and outer persons in a futural tense. Hadewijch constantly remarks on never having actually “attained” Minne, so whenever we read of the “kiss” of Minne, or the “touch” of Minne, we must hear the double registers that complicate how these experiences are determined. Hadewijch invokes gender in respect to humanity’s ways of knowing, loving, and approaching the divine, as do many medieval commentators in their attempt to convert the literal sense of scripture to its inner spiritual sense. In this sense, Saskia Murk-Jansen is correct in suggesting that the language of gender reversal witnessed in Hadewijch’s Liederen “illustrate[s] theological points in essentially the same way that Bernard of Clairvaux does” and demonstrates “an awareness of the similarity of the position of men and women before their Creator.”96 The reversal of gender roles in her Liederen follows a well-known tradition, but at the same time her Liederen innovate this tradition from within the Middle Dutch language. That Hadewijch’s works were also read by male monastics tells us something about the translatability and transformability of gender in these contexts. That gender plays various critical functions in her work is evident, yet gender is not limited to one paradigm, nor is it dogmatically uniform in her text. If it is considered in relation to and not in isolation from the literary and theological contexts in which it is articulated, especially in relation to the roles of derven (privation), pine (pain), affectie (affection), or other modes of devotion, it becomes as multivalent as the life it represents.97 Hadewijch subsumes every form of “life” in all its complexity to Minne: the (temporally bound) forms of servitude, courtship, academic debate, seasonal change, liturgical rhythms, and gender all are at the service of expressing the diversity in Minne as known through time and historical existence. Minne promises to unite these different and often contradictory forms as it enacts the ultimate unity of all things.98 In our readings of a mystic like Hadewijch, when we overinvest the theme of gender with a subversive and oppositional nature, we risk missing the even greater

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impressive complexity that allows her to navigate textually and theologically in an original, and even subversive, understanding of the unity of human and divine nature, of which gendered language is a part.99 By no means am I attempting here to analyze thoroughly the theme of gender in Hadewijch’s work; I have bracketed this discussion within the larger theological issue of embodied human experience and the promise of unity with the divine. In order to make any stipulation about gender as it is lived, I am arguing that one must consider how experience is understood in Hadewijch’s way of loving. As I cautioned in the beginning of this chapter, in focusing on the theme of gender alone, we run the risk of overlooking the very qualities that make Hadewijch a literary and theological force of her time.

TEMP OR AL DEL AYS—EMB ODIED LIMITS I have shown how, from the standpoint of living one’s humanity in conformity with the divine, all figures of experience for Hadewijch are partial and incomplete (materially and ontologically), as they necessitate the complement of the divine and are only promised this futurally. Minne is the figure of this divine complement, and since Minne articulates or performs the proximity between human beings and the divine, it operates in a secretive and immanent fashion, frustrating the desire for concrete manifestation. I would like to conclude here with a reflection on how the lack of concreteness in Minne in life relates to a person’s transformation from a material to a spiritual body. While suffering—a key component of Hadewijch’s way of loving—seems to highlight a body’s physicality, in fact, for Hadewijch suffering aligns the body with a linguistic referent, highlighting its closeness with and promised conformity to the Word. Hadewijch make this connection explicit. In Letter 2, she connects suffering to the experience of a Jobian “hidden word”: “Suffer gladly the pain God sends you; thus you will hear his mysterious counsel, as Job says of him: You have spoken to me a hidden word ” (CW, 51).100 And in Letter 18: “And this is what they do who serve Love in liberty; they rest on that sweet, wise breast and see and hear hidden words—which are ineffable and unheard-of by men— through the sweet whisper of the Holy Spirit” (CW, 88).101 In Lied 4: “To one who gives himself with fidelity in truth / And then with truth lives fidelity, / The hidden word is spoken, / Which no alien can understand / But only he who has had a taste of it / And has experienced silence amid great noise” (CW, 137).102 Suffering secretly encodes a divine message, connected to the Holy Spirit, that she experiences as silence—or, as she describes it, having “night by day” (CW, 253). It is important to make suffering speak, to interpret suffering as a meaningful word,

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testimony to her imitation of the Word. In conceiving herself as an addressee of pain sent to her by God—and not as the generator of pain—she is able to conceive of herself as the recipient of a divine message. Like an envelope, the immediacy of the outer person is linked to its signifying capacity: her pains mean something, they constitute a message, they bespeak a hidden word. In theological terms, materie does not presume integrity or unity of its substance, but requires the complement of the divine and of language for redemption. The materie depends upon the hidden word in order for Hadewijch to envision its promised unity, for the word can suggest the promise of substance there where the outer person can only point and show itself as a sign. While Hadewijch’s materie makes manifest the gap between her temporal being and seeing divinity face-to-face, between suffering and the bliss of promised unity, her lichame demonstrates the opposite. From the perspective of her visions, Hadewijch needs to live her humanity to the fullest, in love and service to others, in order to experience the highest fruition in God. Her lichame, an embodiment associated with her soul that I have linked to the Pauline inner person, dwells in the time of the vision and receives fruition of the divine, yet she promises to be her lichame only when she no longer dwells in history. In Vision 13, Hadewijch is told that she can return to her lichame only after death. In this vision, after the hyperbolic divine Face appears, Mary, “who was the highest [overste] of the twentynine” (CW, 301), instructs Hadewijch on the temporal delay associated with her fully inhabiting her lichame.103 Returning completely to her inner person means fully dwelling in perfection and no longer inhabiting only the outer transitory vessel, the “earthly man,” Paul’s exo anthropos. Whether Hadewijch will shed her materie entirely is unclear (will she be resurrected with it, as Augustine claimed?), but what is evident is that her lichame is left in the time of the vision for her to rejoin fully after death. In this sense the lichame seems to be fi liated to a spiritual body, but nevertheless models how inner and outer persons conform to one another in a Christic model. In an extraordinarily high evaluation of Hadewijch, Mary praises her for vanquishing Minne (conquering her diversity) and making Minne one by loving her in the three ways (“these three [ways of] being,” of which her way is the highest) (CW, 301).104 Yet despite Mary’s praise and her inclusion among the twenty-nine, Hadewijch must delay unity with God. Mary tells her, See, if you wish to have ampler fruition [voertmeer ghebruken], as I have, you must leave your sweet body [dinen sueten lichame; my emphasis] here. But for the sake of those whom you have chosen to become full-grown [volwassene] with you in this, but who are not yet full-grown [volwassen], and above all for

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the sake of those whom you love most, you will yet defer it [soe wiltuut noch versten]. And in the first hour that you wish, we will call you [hale wi di]. And now after you return hither [wedercoms], the world will scarcely let you live [saldi de werelt cume laten leven]; and then, a short time after the fortieth day, you will again resume your body [dinen lichame], which you keep so nobly for Minne [dien du edeleke houts ter minnen]. ( CW , 301; Vis , 136)

The temporal delay referred to regarding rejoining her lichame (“you will yet defer [rejoining] it”) is associated with a body that is teleologically destined for a life beyond death, as in of Christ’s ascension. It is, in this sense, a spiritual body, but this does not exclude its humanity. As I mentioned earlier, Hadewijch’s visions enable a twofold sense of how her humanity conforms to Christ, despite her inability to know this in life. The lichame finds its permanent dwelling in the “secret heaven” Hadewijch is permitted to glimpse in visions, yet Hadewijch is unable yet to dwell there if she wants to experience her humanity to its fullest. In a telling sign, Hadewijch must delay her return because of her love for others. In a further Christic imitatio, Hadewijch must take on additional suffering for those she loves before she is called back to her lichame. The concern for the community is again of central importance to Hadewijch’s spirituality. A sense of longing for the abolition of time and for unity permeates Mary’s assessment and will accompany Hadewijch’s return to her materie. Like Augustine’s distentio, time marks the experience of the body and conditions the way the visions frame themselves. The future tense of “you will” that scans Mary’s speech, prophesying Hadewijch’s return to her outer person, is countered by a “now” (nu) that marks the eternal present of Mary’s speech as it resonates in Hadewijch’s inner person. The two will intersect with Hadewijch’s return to herself. The temporal and ontological limits that are proper to each person (inner and outer) are theologically necessary, yet this thought provides little consolation in life. The promise that is constantly lived as deferral and delay counters any caricature one may have of mystics engaged in a seemingly incessantly direct tête-à-tête with divinity or an immediate Bernini-esque display of union. Nothing could be further from Hadewijch’s experience. Her encounter is necessarily mediated— and not only through the form of its presentation.105 Hadewijch is host to an experience that has no anterior referential reality that she may experience in her own name, no trace other than writing and the affect of suffering and hope. This affective “truth” is what is affirmed in the vision and inherited in life. The dream vision is retained in the body’s differing and deferring, as the memory of a date that has no history, a date that will allow the outer person one day—one perpetually

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deferred day—to be inhabited by the “I” just as the inner person is inhabited by God. By contrast, Hadewijch’s vision of Christ allows us to understand this soughtafter unity as it hopes to be experienced and as it actively bridges both the historical and the spiritual senses, enacting a joining that can be echoed by interpretation and action. From the perspective of her lichame, humanity is no longer incomplete, but only lacking in the understanding that the soul can attest in visions. In Vision 7, the term lichame is understandably used by Hadewijch to designate Christ’s multiple bodies as man, human being, and sacramental offering, thereby showing the unity of all three. These three show the interrelation between the living historical body, the body that returns after death, and the symbolic body to be consumed in sacramental union. As we know from Trinitarian theology, Christ is already what he is; essence and appearance are undifferentiated in relation to his divinity. His humanity is already perfect. The narrative of Vision 7, a vision of the Eucharist—which, as I noted, is continued by Vision 8—sets up Christ’s humanity in a way that provides Hadewijch with a measure for understanding the role of the sacramental body and its relation to the historical Christ. Hadewijch’s vision performatively fuses the two into one, and, more importantly, she understands and feels unity in Christ, overcoming all differences in time. The essential unity and identity of her lichame with Christ is only felt momentarily as mystical union; nevertheless, it serves as a theological lesson in which she can understand (and feel) the relation of her own humanity and inner body to the Eucharist and the corpus mysticum. Hadewijch narrates her vision of Christ, allowing herself to witness his developing humanity and its relation to the symbolism of the Mass, uniting what in her earthly time has not been fully felt as one: Then he came from the altar, showing himself as a child [kint]. And that child was in the same likeness [ ghedane]—as he was in his first three years. And he turned toward me, in his right hand took from the ciborium his body [lichame], and in his left hand took a chalice, which seemed to come from the altar, but I do not know where it came from. With that he came in the likeness and clothing [ ghedane des cleeds] of a man [mans] as he was on the day when he gave us his body [lichame] for the first time; looking like a human being [mensche] and a man [man] sweet and beautiful, and with glorious visage [soete ende scone ende verweent ghelaet tonende], he came to me as humbly as anyone who wholly belongs to another. Then he gave himself to me in the shape [specien] of the sacrament, in its figure [ figuren], as is the custom. Then he gave me to drink from the chalice in likeness [ ghedane] and taste, as is the custom. After that he

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himself came to me, took me entirely in his arms, and pressed me to him. And all my members felt his and were fully satisfied as my heart desired [miere herten begherte] and in my humanity [miere menscheit]. So I was outwardly [van buten] satisfied and fully sated. Also then, for a short while, I had the strength to bear this. But soon, after a short hour, I lost that beautiful man [scoenen man] outwardly [van buten] in sight, in form [in siene, in vormen], and I saw him completely come to naught and so fade and all at once dissolve [al te niete warden ende also sere verdoyene werden ende al smelten in een] that I, outside myself [buten mi], could no longer know him or observe him [niet en conste bekinnen noch vernemen] or distinguish him within me [binnen mi]. In that hour it was to me as if we were one without difference [wi een waren sonder differentie]. It was thus: outwardly [van buten], in seeing [in siene], in tasting [in smakene], and in feeling [in ghevoelne] as people [men] taste in the outward [van buten] reception of the sacrament. And to see and feel outwardly [van buten], like the beloved, with the loved one, each wholly receiving the full satisfaction of seeing [van siene], hearing [van hoerne], and merging [van vervaerne] into the other. After that I remained [blevic] in a merging [vervaerne] with my beloved, so that I wholly melted away [versmalt] in him and nothing any longer remained to me of myself [ende mijns selves niet ne bleef ]. ( CW , 281; Vis , 80, 82)

As is the case with many mystics’ writings, Hadewijch’s account of the Eucharist and of union seems like an immediate experience, yet this impression is mediated by the temporal distance of the vision and by the cognitive boundaries of her inner person. Using terms familiar to theology and scriptural commentary, devotional texts and bridal mysticism, Hadewijch reads the historical, sacramental, and atemporal as unified, performing textually the theological unity she seeks to practice, fusing times and genres together. Hadewijch enjoys Christ’s body in tandem with the experience of her lichame, for Christ’s giving of his body as sacrament is coupled with a giving of the body as man who embraces her and dissolves so “that I, outside myself, could no longer know him [as distinct from myself] or observe him or distinguish him within me.” Hadewijch feels the unity of outer and inner bodies with Christ as she eventually hopes to understand, know, and feel in life the unity of both persons. While the orchestration of the “full satisfaction” of fusion harbors sexual overtones, whatever sexual imagery is present is tempered by a theologically conditioned desire that wants to fully “know thyself ” in Christ. What Hadewijch wants to know, feel, and understand is her own inner identification in Christ, the identity of her inner person with Christ’s humanity according to her human desire.

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As we saw in the visions’ references to Hadewijch’s personal growth (which started with her being not yet full grown, then becoming more perfect, and then oriented toward her community), a teleology appears in Christ’s progression from child, to man, to human being, to figure or symbol that unites the larger collective body in the Eucharist. While Hadewijch’s person represented in the vision feels him in both outer and inner fashions, in bodily and spiritual senses, first as man then as figure, what she comes to understand is the unity of both. Th is doubleness becomes explicit as Hadewijch describes the union: “It was thus: outwardly, in seeing, in tasting, and in feeling as people taste in the outward reception of the sacrament. And to see and feel outwardly like the beloved with the loved one, each wholly receiving the full satisfaction of seeing, hearing, and merging with the other” (CW, 281–282; translation mine). While the represented experience of the lichame is a metaphor for the experience of the inner body in the eternal time of the vision, it is also a figure for the experience of unity of the outward senses with the inner (which in the vision happily do not suffer privation in the vision since they are graced with that “twofold” knowledge and taste CW, 275). Hadewijch’s lichame once again promises to bridge a gap, this time between the outer senses and an inner feeling or understanding, between the limitless experience of union in which “nothing any longer remained to me of myself ” and her identity as she knows it without union, between the vision and her remaining in time (CW, 282). Even if the lichame is divinely true, it is only experienced hypothetically in the unlived moment of vision. An abyssal embodiment, a body impossible: no outer sight can ever assure that this body and that this union have ever truly taken place. The text weaves together figures with the promise of a content that may never be made manifest. From lichame to materie to a corpus signed by God: this body-in-suspense, this promise that is affirmed is the transformational body in language; it is the impossible body represented in writing, the substitute “this is my body” that will be read “in memory of me,” in memory of the me that no longer speaks for itself. Materiality, vision, embodiment, memory, language, temporality, textuality, and exegesis: all are intertwined in weblike fashion in these mystical texts. One cannot be articulated without the other, hence the complexity of any articulation of embodiment or materiality, as it moves from the outer eye to sights unseen. Reading, beholding, contemplation, meditation, understanding, and prayer are all integral parts of Hadewijch’s visionary texts and demonstrate the critical role of figuration as a means to combine letter, body, interpretation, act, and the surrounding world. Visions are not expressions of a “freer” self that counters an oppressive social “biological identity”; rather, they are the means to envision and enact literate (and Trinitarian) identities from the sermon, song, or manuscript

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page, to the affective, religious, and interactive world in which the mystic or visionary lives.106 If the world is conceived of as a book for the Middle Ages, as Ernst Curtius long ago claimed, it is not surprising that its inhabitants are its most animated letters. Visions attest the intersection of religious affect and theological learning. The trace of the vision inhabits embodiment as a secret and a longing, while it survives in the promise and enactment of the text. Visions are another site of the intersection and confirmation of religious affect and theological or literary learning. They encourage contemplation on life’s relation to its secret and invisible counterparts and command works enacting the affect felt and affirmed in the vision. As I have shown, the cognitive nature of the vision is given substance through both language and the performative nature of werke. Visions unite in more ways than one, that is: not only do they illustrate or perform a union immanent for all humans (namely that of the union with the divine), but they provide a model, a poetics of embodiment, for uniting the outer body with the inner and show how the visionary or mystic can enact perfection in the world of life to create an exemplary vita through works. It may not be by chance that visions and vitae are among the most popular genres for medieval women; they are testimony to the fact that textuality is inseparable from the multifaceted doubleness of bodies and life, and demonstrate how medieval practices of reading and interpretation extend into a performative milieu in which embodiment has its share. Our contemporary readings, which incessantly see flesh whenever corporeality is mentioned, fail to read materiality as part of a hermeneutic practice, that is, they fail to see the Word in the doubled substance of the flesh. If medieval visions are testimony to a form of reading and exegesis that finds its ultimate end both in a performative enactment of works and in the fulfi llment of meaning in the inner body, then the poetic work that inhabits the body—which allows it to become the interiorized text—may also be found in mystical language itself. The next chapter looks at the work of poetic language, the garments for the promised body in Hadewijch’s Liederen.

LIVING SONG DWELLING IN HADEWIJCH’S LIEDEREN

GARMENTS Without He adorned you with the senses, within He enlightened you with wisdom, giving the one as an outer garment, the other as inner garb. —Hugh of Saint Victor, Soliloquy on the Earnest Money of the Soul

The garments are the works. —Hadewijch of Br abant, Lied 8

But he who rather wears the earthly man as a garment Considers the debt to reason, Which is his rule of life, and teaches him the works By which he can turn from himself to Love. —Hadewijch of Br abant, Mengeldicht 3

Who hath given songs in the night? A song in the night is joy in tribulation; because though afflicted with worldly oppressions, we yet now rejoice in the hope of eternity. Paul was announcing songs in the night, saying, Rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation [Rom 12:12]. —Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job

Hadewijch’s Poems in stanzas, now known as her “Songs,” or Liederen, are some of the most celebrated in medieval mystical poetry—if not in the history of the Dutch language as it is currently conceived and taught. As we have

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seen, North American scholars are becoming increasingly aware of Hadewijch’s work in general as interest in the complexity of women’s devotional texts grows among medievalists and feminists, and as translations enable greater awareness of the work’s linguistic, theological, and conceptual sophistication. Jessica Boon has noted that among English-language scholarship, however, a certain tendency prevails: “Most authors choose to analyze Hadewijch only in the light of her poetry” and, as such, have “focused on her use of courtly love metaphors or how her work reflects typical female religious experience, especially through metaphors such as food and the body.”1 Once again, immediacy, experience, and the body become a central tenet whose presence tends to paralyze literary considerations beyond or even within these thematic trends. Hadewijch’s poetry does, of course, lend itself to the seductive appearance of the immediate (as presented in lines such as “Desire pours out and delight drinks” [Lied 40, l. 42]),2 encouraging many contemporary readers to deem eros and bodily pleasure as ubiquitous as the images of nature in her poems. While commentary on her poetry has problematically highlighted its erotic and sensual nature by tracing out an influence of the Song of Songs and the expressions of love common to troubadours and trouvères, once again the nature of both embodiment and desire (and consequently eros and sensuality) becomes complicated if one goes beyond the face value of their manifestations and considers the larger poetic framework of Hadewijch’s poetic corpus and its interrelation with literary, temporal, and theological contexts. The affective nature of the poetry is often equated with eroticism without interpreting how precisely that affect is engaged in her work and to what end. This emphasis on the “courtly” has also assumed a dominant strain in Hadewijch interpretation—despite the ever-increasing ambiguity that surrounds this term and the growing awareness of its complex fi liation to secular and religious realms.3 As early as 1994, Joris Reynaert emphasized that Hadewijch was not the only one of her time, and she probably was not the first either, to have adapted the vocabulary and the poetic form of the courtly song to a mystic content. In order to appraise her significance and her real place in literary history we must not satisfy ourselves with comparing her poems with troubadour or trouvère poetry and then deciding that she certainly “borrowed” a great deal. We should also take into account that the language of courtly mystic poetry, which she seemingly initiated, in fact already existed or was coming into existence in her cultural milieu (beguine or otherwise) and that she could make use of it quite naturally, not necessarily manifesting herself as an imitator of the worldly poets, but on the contrary stepping forward as a representative of a

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certain conception of “divine love” and as a member of the spiritual “community” which was founded on it.4

The Victorine use of the figure of the courtly in forming the canons regular (from the outside in) has been noted by Stephen Jaeger, but never overtly related to the spiritual formation of beguines.5 Newman’s clever designation la mystique courtoise has proven a helpful way of identifying hybridity or interdependence between traditions, as has her work on the complexity of the figure of Minne, yet on the whole the meaning of “courtliness,” “eros,” “desire,” “nature,” “the body,” and other terms as they relate thematically and formally to Hadewijch’s work remains a complex and unresolved matter for interpretation.6 If we assume in interpreting these themes that the songs are the self-expression of Hadewijch’s personal experience, the conditions that frame and structure this experience and the status of love itself often risk remaining unquestioned.7 In addition, in reading her songs and poetic work as testimony to the immediacy of experience (inasmuch as she is a woman, beguine or mystic), once again we tend to lose sight of how her material works insofar as it is a literary text and how the representation of experience is conditioned by the letter. Scholars’ desires to attribute authority, empowerment, and the expression of voice to experience in women’s writing may paradoxically mask the way in which that power, authority, or voice is constructed—often through collective (and not necessarily individual) means. That women’s work is often read with less attention to its formal qualities because of our assumed emphasis on “experience” reveals more about contemporary presuppositions regarding the natural, formless, egoistic (in the psychological sense of the term), or self-evident nature of experience than it does about the variety and definition of experience in women’s writing or the constructed form, function, and relation of what we think of as “experience” in respect to literary and theological traditions. When, however, Hadewijch’s visions and letters are evaluated according to a hermeneutic measure and are used to examine the poetic fashioning of her work, the material takes on greater formal complexity and pedagogic purpose. I read Hadewijch’s poetic work in relation to the larger literary and theological framework that underlies her corpus in order to demonstrate that the poetic fabric of her songs and poems is intimately related to an immanent textuality that ideally structures an individual’s life, situated as it is in the historical time of the exo anthropos, the outer person, but that hopes to synchronize the time of life with the measure of the divine. My reading begins with the claim that her songs should be framed specifically as a fulfi llment of the obligation of her highest way of loving, which we saw illustrated in her visions: that she live according to affection (affectien), but in privation (derven) in accordance with the suffering of

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Christ, performing works of virtue. The relation of poetry to lived werke is essential, in both formal and thematic ways. Like psalms, Hadewijch’s songs are framed according to the personal and lived relation to the divine, and unlike the visions, her songs find their primary content in the domain of the outer, of what dwells in historical time, working according to a human tenor, that is, the fallible way of longing for and seeking the divine. The presence of the divine or union with the divine does not dominate the content of the songs, which is rather an articulation of absence, privation, striving, and delay, as it is with Job, and becomes a planctus for the lack of experience of Minne. This framing is not uncommon in the readings of Mommaers, Frank Willaert, and Rob Faesen, who emphasize absence, longing, and separation as the dominant signs of the songs.8 The story her songs tell, however, does not stop here, at the level of theme and content. The absence of Minne and the display of extremes (which Willaert has extensively commented upon) are mediated or countered by a poetics operative within her text that provides a pattern for recognition of the figure of Christ in human weakness and failure in a manner common to psalms. The song allows for both unbinding and containment at one and the same time; it allows for that which seems outside of faith (as in what Hadewijch calls “noble unfaith”) to be constantly folded back into the hermeneutic expanse of her theological world. The mystery of the divine that we saw operative in the inner person is thus linked to the (less immediate and less visible) figural body of the divine in the song. The patterning in the songs enables the immediate, the affective, and the outer to be read according to the less obvious and reflexive mirroring of speaker and his or her relation to the song (and creation) as a whole. As form and content work together in the psalms to order forms of experience and enable recognition of the divine in the human, prompting what is voiced in the first person to be subsumed to a larger design, so too do Hadewijch’s songs provide guidance and ordering for affective imitatio. Human extremes find their measure in and through recognition of their purposefulness as they attest to the divine. In other words, while her songs bemoan the absence of union and absence of a positive experience of the divine, they simultaneously perform an alliterative and echoic summoning, recall, and inventio (in the sense of “finding”) of the divine meaning of this experience in the mediation of language. In this fashion, the poetics operative in the text becomes a performative means for enacting, remembering, and finding the significance of lived experience. One is asked to live poetically—to use a Heideggerian motif—and this “living” is in part guided and performed through the relation of life to words and speech. Actively tracing the figure of the divine in life allows the speaker of the song to

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recognize her way of living as her divinely sanctioned way of loving. Like Gregory’s Moralia in Job, the songs prompt the speaker to read and interpret her experience of absence according to a divine paradigm, that is, as a test in which one seeks to conquer weakness and in turn be conquered by the divine; like a psalm, the formal qualities of the song simultaneously incite and order the passions so that they are understood in relation to their greater promised work of salvation. Once again, the interaction between text and the life it intends to script is of central concern, and the ability to read the world and embodiment as part of the symbolic economy of spiritual life is part of the text’s pedagogic project. Th is spiritual economy is not rigid in its articulation (especially given beguines’ lack of vows): remembering and inventing the meaning of suffering is a constantly renewable and metamorphosing event—like the recitation of the 150 psalms in the liturgy— allowing the variety of human experience to accompany inner transformation as the beguine recognizes theological-aesthetic counterparts.9 The text is used, once again, to pattern and thus transform the sense of the biographical, to make the writing of the outer conform to the inner, yet it differs from what we saw in the visions. Instead of a spiritual content being scripted from the inner to the outer, the hermeneutic process works in inverse fashion: the formal qualities of the text provide a key for meaning to be worked on primarily from the outside in, so to speak. Living according to the way one reads is yet again of central importance, but this time, reading what one lives as divinely ordered is the hermeneutic at stake. Likewise, ordering speech, actions, and passion to conform to fit a spiritual end is part of the work of the songs. The poetic work (the songs and rhyming letters) thus shows how inner (the likeness to the divine) and outer (the form of lived experience) cohabit one another poetically by performing this unity of the two. It performs the relation to inner and outer thematically and formally through the art of showing how to become what one should be and to simultaneously recognize being that which one already is (the image of the divine), whether or not one has reached perfection (but provided one is actively pursuing this spiritual calling of divine love).10 The aesthetic framework of the song or poem provides a sense of containment for the most uncontainable of affective experiences (extremes of longing, despair, elation), both prompting and patterning experience, allowing a theological pattern to resound in and transform suffering, desire, and longing. A seeming immediacy in poetic language—the garment of appearance—is linked to performative and transformative ends; mystical poetry again performs an exegetical exercise that is intimately linked to embodied experience—however complex that doubleedged term proves itself to be.

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INHABITATION Minne first made me rich: She doubled my senses, And showed me all of her winnings. But why now does she disappear before me like a traitor? She doubled my senses, And now I wander in a stranger’s land. Mi maecte rike ierste die Minne Si dobbeleerde mine sinne Ende toende mi alle ghewinne Twi vlieste nu wech als een truwant Si dobbeleerde mine sinne Nu dolic inder vremder lant. —Hadewijch of Br abant, Lied 30 11

Moving from Hadewijch’s visions to her poems, the reader is immediately struck by a change in the way the divine inhabits or dwells in Hadewijch: the change in form signals an alteration in the figural presence of the divine, from the previous “richness” in love shown (toende) in her visions, to bankruptcy and debt (scout) when translated into the substance of song.12 In the visions, divinity figures as the unlived memory of a Trinitarian presence into which Hadewijch had been absorbed. While the figure of the divine is complicated in the visions by temporal and linguistic mediation, it is nevertheless an affirmation of divinity, an illumination, even if it is elusively felt in the inner body as an atemporal union. Figures of divinity (the “face” of the divine, the body of Christ), divine gifts to humankind for accessing divinity (wisdom, virtue, Queen Reason), and the individuals who personify human perfection (Mary, Augustine, the champion) are endowed with a linguistic and affective reality that gives substance to the soul’s inner life and allows the soul to orient itself toward and be guided by the inner person. This orientation of the soul toward the inner person in turn promises to animate the body in life and works.13 In the songs, however, according to the speaker, Minne seems to have fled and only remains as a hope or memory and the experience of an absence. The theme of wandering in the wilderness reappears in the poems to describe this seeming desertion and to reflect on the duplicity of Minne in a way that echoes the striving of a lover in secular courtly love poetry. Yet it also echoes the wandering of Mary Magdalene in the desert, and her searching for Christ in the empty tomb resembles that of the figure of the Bride in the Song of Songs.14

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Hadewijch places Mary Magdalene at number four on her List because “her devout love brought her to her greatness and gave her all things that gave her perfection in the three beings that are one.”15 Mary was the “apostle of the apostles,” having learned how to love Christ completely. Given the beguines’ interest in modeling themselves on the apostolic life rather than on a rule, it is understandable that this fusion of love and life, understood in the Augustinian sense, is a model for Hadewijch. Although Hadewijch has an identifiable way of loving that can be performed according to an imitatio, there is no other clear path for her to follow, hence every path necessarily entails wandering or adventure. As she advises in Letter 15 through an allegory of the pilgrim on the path to God—“You must ask about the way. He himself says this: I am the way”— Hadewijch explicitly shows us that the “way” entails inner and outer works that are intimately tied to language and to a spirit in performance: “Oh, since he is the way [wech], consider what ways he went—how he worked [wrachte], and how he burned interiorly with charity [berrende in karitaten van binnen] and exteriorly in works of the virtues [werken van doechden van buten] for strangers and for friends” (CW, 78).16 This way is intimately connected to speech, not only because living according to Christ entails living according to the Word, but also because, as is stated in the final ninth point of in this same allegory, the pedagogic or productive nature of speaking of God is critical. Quoting Saint Bernard, Hadewijch writes, “You must gladly speak of God. This is a criterion of Minne, that the name of the Beloved is found sweet. Saint Bernard speaks of this: ‘Jesus is honey in the mouth.’ To speak of the Beloved is exceedingly sweet; for it awakens Love immeasurably. And it enlivens [vliethecht] works” (CW, 79).17 As it awakens love in the inner person, making it immanent in the speaker, speech may also ignite longing and lead to the inhabitation of Minne by others in her community, to inner and outer in-spiriting, and thus to the human way of inhabiting its divine nature up to the point of perfection like those in the List. In reading Hadewijch’s poetry, discerning the correlation of this awakening and inhabitation with the desired coordination of outer with inner is essential or one risks missing the affective and effective purpose of the poetry and its relation to the shaping and means of defining her community as a whole. The constant figure of the third in the articulation of Minne (as “love,” “lover,” and “beloved,” and in the multiple voices in the songs) complements its Trinitarian model. This emphasis on the greater community shares an Augustinian (and hence Victorine) concern. For Hadewijch as for Richard of Saint Victor, the verbal and affective sharing of love with a third is significant for the larger sense of community: “Mutual fruition, properly speaking, only happens when two love a third in a concordance of dilection, in a community of love and when the affections

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of two are united in the fire of this third.”18 Without this communal purpose, the songs would seem to consist in an elaborate—albeit beautiful—exercise in selfindulgence, far from the strict self-abnegating ethos associated with loving Minne. The doubleness or duplicity of poetic language—its capacity to be other than what it appears, its seeming ability to host a secret—will script the way for becoming and recognizing “being what one already is” and sharing it with others. The poetics of the text allows Minne to haunt the body of the song in a different fashion particular to poetic language. To the degree that Hadewijch’s visions are testimony to an inhabitation by the divine marked by the doubling of her senses and her self, her songs, to the contrary, are testimony to Minne’s having fled the speaker and left her “wander[ing] in the land of strangers.”19 At least, this is what it seems to the speaker of the poem, despite the perpetual reminders that Minne appears in her very concealing of herself. Minne dwells poetically, for like poetry, as Hadewijch tells us, Minne’s concealings are her revealings: “The proximity of the nature of Minne / Deprives the soul of its rest: / The more Minne comes, the more she steals / The more she shows, the more she keeps secret” (CW, 336).20 Like nature, the speaker of the poem guides its speaker to cyclically renew her love according to the hourly renewals seen in the letters and visions, in the promise that Minne will eventually allow the speaker to come close to full fruition and experience her.21 The oxymoronic time of the vision is itself testimony to the paradoxical condition of the poetics of disclosure. If poetry is marked by an absence that it simultaneously fi lls, then Minne haunts the figurative “body” of the poem in ways that are particular to Hadewijch’s theological, communal, and affective ends. Despite—or perhaps thanks to—her poetry’s economically compact simplicity and affective resonance, the power of poetry is closer in kind to the sublime power of Minne, and despite Hadewijch’s lamentations, her poetry paradoxically expresses the proximity of Minne in attesting to her absence. Hadewijch’s Liederen address the paradoxical forms of expression of Minne and what appears as its effect on the speaker’s tormented desire. With regard to poetic form, it is as though the doubling of the senses witnessed in the visions is transformed into the double nature and duplicitous way in which Minne appears in the world and in poetic language. Th is doubleness dictates the way Minne must be read, interpreted, and interpolated as a form of judgment of oneself: reading Minne “outside” in the world guides the reading and judging of how Minne figures within. While Hadewijch is able to have a twofold perception of her divine nature in this vision, what it anticipates is her solitary way (wegh) of loving in life, according to her human side and a Christic and Marian imitatio. The songs read the vision’s

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prediction as a form of predication—a form of speaking and being. The songs are testimony to a path of darkness and privation; however, this path also attests the divine’s secret inhabitation of the world and shaping of human suffering. The songs therefore provide a guide not only for living but also for reading and revealing how one is secretly inhabited by the divine. Hadewijch’s striving thus finds a strong parallel to the figure of Job, to Gregory’s influential interpretation in his Moralia, and to the experience of a secret that inhabits both a way of life and poetic language. This mystery of the divine in language and in the body means that her songs speak hidden words to their addressee in the articulation of suffering. This is echoed in her letter: “Suffer gladly the pain God sends you; thus you will hear his mysterious counsel, as Job says of him: You have spoken to me a hidden word ” (CW, 51).22 This hearing is equated with reading according to the inner gift of reason: those “who have been chosen for such a state in union with Love” are enlightened souls who do not yet know that they can see according to the “secret light” of reason, and are able to “read the judgments in God’s countenance . . . in conformity with the truth of the laws of Minne” (CW, 87).23 One has to read as if one were Minne or God, according to an exterior referent that becomes increasingly incorporated to the point of absolute identification. In Lied 11, this interpretive gesture as applied to suffering is clear: “For all judgments passed on him must be / Read in Minne’s countenance. / And there he sees clear truth without illusion / in many sweet pains” (CW, 158).24 While not pleasurable, the success of this seeing has its fruits. Reading is translated into acting according to the truth and principles of what one has “read” in Minne’s face. In the next stanza of Lied 11, this becomes even clearer. Internalizing this act of reading enacts kenosis: He sees in clarity that he who loves Must practice [ pleghen] with full truth. When he then knows [bekint] with truthfulness, That he does too little for Minne His high mind storms with pain [ pinen], For what he fully grasps from Minne’s countenance [Is] how the lover should practice [ pleghen] Minne, And this judgment sweetens the pain [ pine] And makes him go completely out [ gheven al om al ] So that Minne may be contented. ( CW , 158; Liederen , 124) 25

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While not as methodologically explicit as those of Eckhart, Porete, or Beatrice, Hadewijch’s process for the incorporation of Minne as imitatio transpires in the form of a hermeneutic shibboleth that will include only those who can read and live according to Minne.26 The final two stanzas of this Lied demonstrate how this individual way of reading grounds community. The last two stanzas incorporate the “he” (“hi”) into a collective unity in which “he” can become one of the wise (one of “them”) once he understands love interiorly: “With love they shall cleave in oneness to love / . . . This remains completely hidden from strangers / But is open to the wise” (CW, 159).27 Hadewijch’s mysticism is part of a communal culture of reading even if the primary material read is hidden, embedded as it is in the substance of life, and if the appeal to a message “heard” is enigmatic and entirely left to each individual to discover. The teaching is a form of autodidacticism that demonstrates a skepticism toward rote learning and exterior performances that are void of inner affective and cognitive counterparts. The ability to properly understand her poems and songs hinges on this interrelation among election, secrecy, hearing, reading, acting, and understanding, even when one is “not yet full grown” and has to earnestly (and gropingly) read between the lines. If one can unite inner understanding with outer actions and deciphering, one might then, and only then, catch a glimpse Minne’s “rich teaching” (rike gheleer) (CW, 202).28

FROM PROSE TO POETICS: INHABITING AND HOSTING MYSTERY In her letters, Hadewijch offers an explicit attempt to teach how one should read her poetic work. Short sections of three of Hadewijch’s letters (Letters 17, 18, and 19) are composed in rhyming couplets (like those that comprise her Mengeldichten, her rhymed letters) but with ensuing lines of commentary that provide a means of understanding the difference in the way divine messages are articulated through poetry and prose and how they apply to living.29 The prose in her letters comments on the poetry and suggests that the verse formulations on Minne embody something that is slightly altered by its formulation in prose. It is as though poetic form, in its ability to address a “you” by means of a form that hosts the divine within, shared a secret with its subject material and were ontologically closer to the divine, performing a linguistic unity that is promised experientially in the visions and is only commented on in prose in a limited fashion. When spoken in verse, Hadewijch’s text communicates something that requires the reader to un-

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derstand it personally, from inner understanding, as though verse had to be understood in both formal and intuitive ways. Hadewijch’s Letter 17 starts with ten lines of rhyming couplets, in the manner of the didactic couplets often found in Latin pedagogic texts such as the Dicta Catonis (and the vernacular Den Duytschen Cathoen), which seek to impart moral virtue along with their teaching of language and life lessons:30 Be generous and zealous for every virtue, But do not apply yourself to any one virtue. Fail not with regard to a multitude of things, But perform no particular work. Have good will and compassion for every need, But take nothing under your protection. This I wished to say to you for a long time, For it lies heavy on my heart; May God allow you to know what I mean, Alone in the oneness of Minne’s nature.

Te alre doghet wes onstich snel; En onderwinter di niet el. En ghebrect in ghenen dinghen, En werct te ghenen sonderlinghen. Te alre noet hebbet onste ende ontfermen, Ende en nemt niet in v beschermen. Dit haddic di gherne langhe gheseghet: Want mi wel groet opt therte leghet. God doe v kennen wat ic mene, Jnder enegher Minnen naturen allene. ( CW, 82, with alter ations ; Brieven , 126)

At first glance, the poetry seems chiefly to comprise didactic imperatives: “Be generous and zealous for every virtue,” “Fail not with regard to a multitude of things,” and “Have good will and compassion for every need.” Each of these three lines is followed by a negative condition that qualifies the previous one, warning against the particularity of attaching one’s attention onto particular things. Each warning attunes the reader to the subtleties of perfection in love and to a way of belonging that does not concern anything but Minne. The use of the negative

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seems to imply a limit to any rote application of a rule as an end in itself and a reminder to constantly find mystery or alterity at the “end” of even the most commonplace of acts, hollowing out a place for the divine.31 Immediately following these ten lines of poetry, Hadewijch reflects on them and states, to the addressee of the letter: “The things were ordered me by God, which I [now] in these words order you. Therefore I desire in my turn to order you the same things, because they belong [behoren] perfectly [volmaecteleec] to the perfection of Minne, and because they belong perfectly and wholly in the divinity” (CW, 82).32 “The things” (dese dinghen) refers to the poem’s commands, which appear to be a set of instructions, like dicta of wisdom, on how to conduct oneself in spiritual life. These orders or commands are not referred to as Hadewijch’s thoughts, or as her own creation (although she does specify that she put them in verse form); rather, in its form, the content takes on an impersonal thinglike quality and embodies a form of expropriation that parallels the way in which virtues or werke should belong (behoren) to Minne. The things commanded in the poetry (to be generous, zealous, and compassionate), which Hadewijch passes on to the reader, should be done as selflessly as if one were Minne herself. Unlike her letters, which speak of the divine—but by way of an explanation from one human being to another—her poetry addresses itself to a “you” through the divine message in her which she claims to host, as though the message could speak the divine in and through itself. For Hadewijch, how one inhabits or belongs to the divine is also reflected in how the divine inhabits poetic form. The poems in Letter 17 are described by Hadewijch as though they were spoken by divinity and transmitted through Hadewijch into the body of verse, in a fashion similar to how divine messages are transmitted through inner and outer bodies as witnessed previously in the visions. Inner and outer take on different dimensions in verse, as though they were transposed into the nature of poetic language, its relation to layers of meaning, and an accompanying embodied hermeneutics. Rather than comprising a simple set of instructions (a literal level of meaning), the poem’s commands are in fact an exposition of how to embody the Trinity according to each person, according to the spiritual sense of what is written. In the narrative lines that follow them, Hadewijch provides a kind of exegesis of the formal qualities of each line and shows how each is associated with qualities of the three persons. She writes, “The beings [wesene] that I name here, these are perfectly the divine nature,” and she asserts, “to be generous and zealous is the nature of the Holy Spirit,” and “not to apply oneself to a particular work is the nature of the father,” “this pouring out and keeping back are the pure godhead and the entire nature of love” (CW, 82).33 As the first and the third persons of the Trinity are demonstrated in the first and third lines, the ensuing fi fth line (“Have good will

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and compassion for every need”) is reserved for the son, as it is “what is proper to his person.” The formal attributes of the poem emulate the figure and persons of the Trinity, but more pertinently for the addressee of the letter, they do so in relation to their appearance in human life so that they may be imitated. Hadewijch’s Liederen then are Christic in their mission, but Trinitarian in spirit. Rather than being descriptive or emotive expressions of a self, they reflect a highly crafted way of inhabiting the world like a poem. As a person increasingly adopts and interiorizes these commands as her own, so too, one assumes, is she able to interpret the significance of acting in a particular way. Spiritual growth is thus both a process of interiorized motivation for action and an accompanying hermeneutic skill applied to living. While this observation is not necessarily new in relation to monastic life, as readers we tend to overlook the reality that beguine life (and other forms of women’s spirituality) is ordered according to this radical interiorization of Trinitarian faith through the Word and to overlook the fact that unconventional forms of women’s devotion do participate in textual communities, to use Brian Stock’s term, albeit in different—that is, applied or lived—forms.34 What theologians like Hugh, Richard, or Bernard speculate on theologically and exegetically for the sake of the desire for a true experience of a text, beguines and mystics like Hadewijch translate into a poetics of inhabitation or embodiment that affects the style of the text itself.35 Embodiment becomes a form of exegesis, and, as is the case for Saint Francis, each life is given priority (in conformity with scripture) as testimony to the way in which the divine dwells in the human. For Hadewijch, as with other dissatisfied beguines in the thirteenth century who disdained the taking of vows as a less authentic spiritual practice (like those who criticized the excesses of the Church), this process of voluntary and interiorized adoption of divine will, virtuous acts, and spiritual discernment is no longer perceived as unrelated to its monastic counterparts when forms of the body’s scripting of the letter (and the logos) are given consideration as a textual practice, although in a more self-regulated and affectively engaged fashion.36 Unlike the rules or vows that a religious order requires (like those of the Cistercians of poverty, chastity, and obedience) but similar to the affective spirituality that these same orders encourage in order for individuals to successfully fulfi ll those vows (especially the Cistercian figure of the miles Christi, which the Citeaux Moralia fuses with its illustration of Job, or the Clairvaux Speculum virginum’s image of the militant virtue thrusting its sword into vice), beguine spirituality teaches the spirit that should be engaged in the material of living, as though the theological underpinnings found their most salient implications in the spirit of life.37 When Hadewijch recapitulates the three lines (1, 3, and 5) further on in the letter, she explains that the qualities highlighted articulate “the most perfect

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life one can attain on earth” (CW, 83),38 and while the verses do not specify how to act in particular circumstances, the poem itself dictates the spirit and form in which all works should be conducted, leaving it to the addressee to discern the proper application (for only God can enable this understanding).39 Not only does the poem teach its addressee about the vestiges of the Trinity in human beings, but it also becomes a didactic instrument for teaching the tools of reading a text as it applies to life. According to a true Trinitarian (and Augustinian) paradigm, all works reflect an equal participation and emulation of divine will, work, and might so that “they have an equal part in his justice, just as the three persons are in one God.” The meticulous patterning in Hadewijch is therefore clearly not a haphazard or arbitrary phenomenon, but part of a teaching ( gheleer) of Minne, that is, part of Hadewijch’s service to others. As Lied 23 makes explicit in the transference of terms from Minne to her pupil, “If we understood Minne’s glorious teaching, / And if by this teaching we grew into glory / We would win Minne / And gain all her riches.” 40 Reading and teaching, and their scripted application to life, are yet again intimately constructive of women’s devotional practice, yet perhaps it is because this “work” leaves little trace—ephemeral and self-effacing as it is by nature—that we as readers see so little evidence of its having taken place, unless a monk or hagiographer has duly noted it when it is before his eyes. Work, for Hadewijch, is divided into two categories in a way that will influence the structuring of the songs, as this division reflects the essential difference between becoming Minne and being Minne. The first category of work applies to those who are already somewhat accustomed to the apprenticeship of loving and are now totally devoted to Minne (as is the case with Hadewijch), and the second is for those who are learning to love and emulate the Trinity.41 The first Hadewijch describes as those who are already “in the fruition of Minne” and the second as those for whom “fruition grows less or passes away” (CW, 83) and who, one infers, remain in need of some incitement, recollection, or prompting. The second form of work is forbidden to Hadewijch since she has surpassed it and is thus prohibited to perform works reserved for this stage, yet the distinction between the two kinds of work and their accompanying ethos marks a progression in loving and sets the stage for the interaction of the different kinds of voices the songs will put into play.42 For Hadewijch, the form of loving that she is now commanded to follow is “to have nothing outside of Love and to live in Love so exclusively that everything outside of Love should be hated and shunned” (CW, 83). Therefore, paradoxically, she should only live in Love and thus not tend towards “inclination, virtuous acts, or perform[ing] particular works that would assist them or mercy that would protect them” but instead must “remain constantly in the fruition of Love” (CW, 84).43 Just as Minne herself “does not seek after vir-

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tues, virtuous tendencies, or particular works” and is thus indifferent to all else but her own perfection and unity, so too must Hadewijch imitate being Minne and heed the law of indifference to all but constant fruition.44 The division of works between the more and less advanced lovers of Minne is not something Hadewijch can completely explain, as it is linked to a form of inner understanding and recognition that exhausts and exceeds the instrumental quality of communication. To understand unity, one must inhabit it. Likewise with her poems: they too require inhabitation, yet given their temporal nature, this inhabitation is of a different sort than that witnessed in visions, as it requires the existential or ontological turn of living.

WEDDING PREPAR ATIONS Just as the art of poetry through fictitious fables and allegorical similitudes composes a moral or physical doctrine to exercise the human minds—for this is the proper quality of heroic poets who praise the deeds and manners of brave men—, so theology, as if it were some kind of poetry, by means of fictive imaginations, adapts Holy Scripture to the inquiry of our mind and the impressions of the exterior corporeal senses, as though from some imperfect childhood, to a perfect knowledge of intelligible things, as though into a certain adulthood of the interior man. —Eriugena, Commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy 45

The marriage of appearance and essence, practice ( pleghen) and being, is staged in the poems through the adoption of an aesthetic and an ethos that will gradually metamorphose into the speaker’s promised transformation of being. The familiar trope of taking on Christ as a garment—the work that is a life—is the model, especially in the initial stages of the apprenticeship. The shifting value of the “garment” makes this clear.46 The garment is initially associated with work (“The garments are the works,” as Lied 8 states), and one begins work by focusing on particulars: performing works, good deeds, and virtuous acts as ends that, as will become clearer, must necessarily fail as ends in order to be associated with Christ’s humanity. As noted previously, this particular kind of work is initially framed as a voice that the singer takes on, a role that the individual plays, and—as is common to the image of the “adornment” of virtue—clothing that the person must assume in the mode of imitation. As Letter 30 states, “He who wishes to clothe himself, and to be rich and to be one with the Godhead must adorn himself with all the virtues that God clothed and

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adorned himself with when he lived as Man; and one must begin this by the same humility with which he also began it” (CW, 117).47 This clearly does not entail a literal taking on the clothing of a particular order, but rather a taking on of the qualities personified in Christ. Because, as Gregory points out, Christ himself assumes the flesh, taking it on as a garment, so too then should humans regard their earthly vessel—the outer person—as a garment, a unique means (that the soul does not possess) to suffer, perfect the soul, and imitate Christ according to the passion.48 Adorning oneself with virtues, or assuming the garment (as seen in Vision 9), is one stage in a process of redemption that, as stated previously, works from the outside in and functions according to a shifting metonymy of likenesses as one becomes closer to the source, effecting inner change. Becoming Minne at first entails assuming certain virtues and behavior, and thus reciprocally Hadewijch’s songs reflect this alternating economy of growing equivalences. The garment is at one point referred to in terms of taking on the humility of Christ, and at another as the sign of the refined nature of the lover or the man (what translators have problematically called the “knight” or the “vassal”). Both share in the process of adopting a form applied to actions and speech, as though the outer form aided in producing the desired inner effect.49 While Hadewijch clearly knows the difference between hollow and meaningful actions (or empty and full speech, to use a psychoanalytic distinction), nevertheless, the act or form seems to nurture a corresponding motivation. Hadewijch begins by associating an aesthetic of fairness or beauty with an ethos, again making form the means whereby the content will conform to its Christlike end. Like thirteenth-century books of conduct, Lied 8 makes this association of exterior attractiveness with an inner state clear. Unlike the vagrant, who does not focus on the higher purpose of love while enduring hardship, the man enacting an unflinching pursuit of Love possesses the proper form (vorme) for recognition as worthy. In the third and fourth stanzas, the vagrant is contrasted with the errant but virtuous man: He takes whatever is offered him And remains unknown to love With his vagrant’s garments, Because he has neither form nor airs Whereby Love recognizes her own. Fair demeanor, and fair garments, And fair reason adorn the man50 Suffering all for love without hostility.

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This is a fair demeanor for he who can do it well. The works are thus the garments Done with new striving, and without bitterness And ready to serve the stranger’s every need More than those he himself knows. These are the colors, the adorning tokens The utmost in highest Love.

Hi nemt dat hem es naest ghehende ende blivet vore minne die ombekinde metter truantien cleet. Soe en hevet hi vorme noch ere, daer minne dat haer bi versteet. Scone ghelaet ende scone cleder ende scone redene cieren den man. Al dogen om minne ende niet te wreder, dat es scone ghelaet die dat wel can. Die werke sijn de cleder dan, met nuwen niede ende niet te ghemeder, ende den vreemden te alre noet ghereder dan ane sijns selfs bekinnen. Dat es varuwe! Die tekene cieren alremeest vore hogher minnen. ( Liederen, 106, 108) 51

The repetition of scone and its association with both speech and actions, as well as its connection to the fairness of reason and virtue, emphasize the way in which the latter can script the former to produce an inner state. Virtuous demeanor, or fin amor, is a coloring, a form, and an adornment—a quality recognizable to the exterior eye but also to the discerning (spiritual) judgment of Minne.52 Again, the inner and outer persons ideally fuse as they do in the promise of the vision, but here the cohesion of the person is on the way to becoming Minne—that is, not yet being Minne—so fusion with the garment is only one initial step, and becoming man—that is, becoming fully Christlike (or Minne-like, as we shall see)—is the goal.53 For Hadewijch, to mistake the garment—the work—for an end and as reason for praise is an error both of reading and of spiritual understanding. Only in equating the outer person with its transitional and adaptable role is the soul

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enabled. As Mommaers has pointed out, the theme of fruition ( ghebrukene), which dominates the tone of the visions, is replaced by its opposite, failure ( ghebrekene), in the songs, which “materializes as ‘to be like’ ( gheliken) the labouring and suffering Humanity.”54 When reading Hadewijch’s songs, one should thus be careful to take into account the transitive quality of these figures for humankind. If we fail to interpret her poems accordingly—for instance, by designating “courtly” as a fi xed value and measure—we likewise fail to see its function in the measure of a transformative process that seeks to diminish any celebration of itself. Hadewijch’s mysticism is therefore not so much wed to the courtly or to any particular demeanor as it is to the use of it in order to eventually overcome and dispose of it on the way to true imitatio. In Letter 30, Hadewijch explains, We wish to be exalted for our patience and honored for our good deeds, and we forget the debt of Love too soon. . . . We wish that our virtues be known; for this reason we do not have on that wedding garment.  .  .  . Our humility is in our voice, in appearances [ ghelaet], on our face [schein], and not fully motivated by God’s greatness or by our perception of our littleness. Therefore we do not carry God’s Son maternally [moederleke] or suckle him with exercises of love. ( CW , 119) 55

In this passage the outer form—the appearance of humility—is good, but clearly not enough. The marriage of appearance and essence culminates in the fusion of bride, host, and mother, when inner and outer are fused in practice. Hadewijch contrasts exterior appearance with internal motivation, suggesting that the wedding garment trumps the initial courtly ones, although again, to call her mysticism bridal mysticism would fall short in recognition of the role of living (over an isolated interest in the life of the soul).56 Hadewijch’s use of this panoply of terms reflects her theological interest in both the inner and the outer: like Bernard, the final image for the soul is that of the bride, but like Richard’s fourth degree of love, the final term for Love is not the third—the feminine soul conformed to divine light, as it is in visions—but rather the descent of the soul, and the living (and masculine) Christ, who suffers and lives; hence the fusion of feminine and masculine figures, and their respective associations with inner and outer. Gender figures as part of a complicated trope. The form of the servant—a figure for the proper form of life in Hadewijch, Julian, Gregory, Richard, and many others—is likewise the elevated sign for how to embody Christ in life.57

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In the The Four Degrees of Violent Love, Richard of Saint Victor describes the thoughts the “soul” should have in the final degree of “violent love” (violentae caritatis), and the corresponding Pauline “newness” that one finds in this rebirth of the soul. The soul passes from its feminine form to its masculine life: “Have this mind in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although he was in the form of God [in forma Dei], did not judge equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant [ formam servi], made in the likeness of a man [similitudinem hominem], and was found in the habit of man [et habitu inventus ut homo]. . . . This is the form of humility of Christ [ forma humilitatis Christi] to which every man must conform himself. . . . And so those men who are able to lay down their life for their friends reach the highest height of love and are now placed in the fourth degree of love. . . . And so in the third degree the soul is glorified into God; in the fourth she is humbled for the sake of God. In the third degree the soul is conformed to the divine brightness, in the fourth she is conformed to the humility of Christ. And although in the third degree the soul was in some way “in the form of God” [quasi in forma Dei esset], still, in the fourth degree she begins “to empty herself [semetipsum exinanire incipit], taking on the form of a servant [ formam servi] and again being found in the habit of a man [et habitu iterum invenitur ut homo].” And so in the third degree the soul is in some way put to death in God; in the fourth she is in a way reawakened into Christ. . . . And so he begins to walk in newness of life. . . . And so this type of man becomes a new creature [nova creatura]: “the old things have passed away and, behold, all things have been made new.”58

In this light—with the shifting from the “she” to the “he” and the reading of Hadewijch’s visions as the third degree of love that predicts the form of the fourth articulated in the Liederen—it is not so surprising that a masculine figure (man, knight, or vassal) in Hadewijch’s songs is used to represent an individual’s new incarnation in pursuing a life led according to imitatio and its initial travails, finding (invenire) the habit of the man, Christ.59 The newness that punctuates Hadewijch’s Liederen and is often apparent in the Naturingang (nature-beginning) corresponds to this “new life” the songs hope to elicit. In Lied 19 (Poem in stanzas 20), this newness accordingly promises new materie, the renewal of the outer in the inner, finding the inner in the outer, echoing the language of the closing of Vision 8: “Yes, most noble of all creatures / Chosen for Minne’s nature / In rich fruition and tasting of Minne / New material [materie], joy [bliscap], and blooming [bloyen] all hours / shall be awarded you by almighty [ gheweldeghe]

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Minne” (CW, 181).60 The newness is also a gift of the inner spiritual senses, the new senses, which inaugurate the Liederen themselves, enabling the reader to read, understand, and practice their content: “Mankind’s senses [sinne] are so small . . . God must give us new faculties [nuwen sin] / For noble and free love / So that we live renewed in her / That Minne bless us / And make us with her new taste.”61 Renewal and transformation in the songs are also made possible through the songs, as a form of new understanding (or taste) of one’s experience and interpretive capacity to join inner and outer according to the sense of how they should truly correspond with the divine. The songs give language to a form of inventio, that is, of finding the true habit or garment of man.62 For Hadewijch, however, in another teleological twist that follows many devotional texts of the twelft h and thirteenth centuries, the historical Mary and imitatio Mariae become the ultimate and perfect composite for masculine and feminine, that is, as host and nurturer of the living Christ, enabling and producing a virtuous and perfect life for human beings. As Rachel Fulton has argued, the historical nature of the figure of Mary—the figure of a person who has lived a perfect life—is fused with the exegetical understanding in the songs in a way that makes her “the perfected imitation of Christ,” and not a static type representing the Church, as were many twelft h-century representations.63 Lied 29 is perhaps the most dramatic statement of Mary’s lived perfection and human means of hosting the divine, demonstrating how she makes evident God’s work: The father from the beginning Had his son, Love, Concealed in his bosom, Until Mary With her deep humility, yes Mysteriously disclosed him to us.

Die Vader van aneghinne hadde sine Sone, de minne, verborghen in sinen scoet, eerne ons Maria met diepen oetmoede, ja, verholenleke ontsloet. ( Liederen , 230) 6 4

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In being contrasted with that of the prophets, then with David’s, Mary’s work is deemed most perfect—the ideal “conduit” [conduut] for the humble heart: David said that when he thought Of God it would soothe him And his spirit swooned. He was indeed called strong in work. But Maria wrought stronger works. Yes he [David] had received most, Except for Mary who conceived him wholly, As God and man and youth. There could one see in love The first clear works begin.  . . . She has laid the conduit That is open to every humble heart.

David seide, hem ghedachte van Gode, dat dede hem zachte, ende hem gebrac sijn gheest. Nochtan hetet hi van werke starc. Maer maria wracte starkere werc. Ja, hi hads wale meest sonder Maria, diene gheheel ontfinc: Gode ende man ende jonghelinc. Daer mochte men der minnen ierst clare werc bekinnen. ( Liederen , 232) 65

This enfolding of one divine host in the other (God in Mary, Mary in humankind) trickles down to the common denominator of every humble human heart, ending in an apostrophe to a “ di,” a “you,” to renounce all so that the conduit will flow without measure (“sonder mate”) into the heart, like a word flowing into an open mouth. The figure of Mary in Hadewijch is further intertwined with the means whereby an individual becomes the transitory vessel of the divine, that is, it is fused with Minne herself. Minne, the personification of love, is both the embodiment of the unity of the three persons of the Trinity as well as the human means to unite with her in historical time according to perfection in time the human

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way. At the end of Lied 45, Hadewijch’s final, the apostrophe to Minne makes the fusion of the feminine Minne with Mary clear, Oh Minne, yes you, who have never deceived: For you have shown me in my youth That which I yearned for. Because it is within your power, Be medicina Oh yes, Minne, you who reign over all, Give me for love’s sake what elevates me most; For you are the mother of all virtues, Lady and regina.

Ay minne, ja gi, die nie en loghet, want ghi mi toenet in der joghet daer ic na quele. Want ghijt vermoghet, sijt medicina. Ay ja, Minne, ghi die als sijt voghet, ghevet mi omme minnen dies mi meest hoghet, want ghi sijt moeder alre doghet, vrouwe et regina. ( CW , 257; Liederen , 320) 6 6

The “mother of all virtues” is Minne as Mary, the feminine figure par excellence who enables the most perfect incarnation of virtue or imitatio. The constant shifting of terms reflects the transitory nature of the human exo anthropos, the exterior person, as it is renewed through Christ, the real figure of the eso anthropos, the inner person. The terms for the exterior garment are as perishable or transitory as is the outer person, yet they reflect unity with the divine image they echo in life and the unity they seek to become in Love. Given the complexity of the figurative work involved, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the shifting terms of Hadewijch’s mysticism and claim her as Marian, courtly, bridal, or Christic, for she is perhaps all of them simultaneously in a purposive and teleological fashion. Our tendencies to overly identify women’s mysticism with one category or another often betrays the contemporaneity of our own interests, perhaps precisely because of the amenability of women’s mysticism to translation into so many terms, including ours. The “bricolage” de Certeau refers to in describing its amalgam of genres is applicable here, inasmuch as it is understood as purposive and not haphazardly coincidental. That women’s mysticism is

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often involved in this dilating movement in the breadth and expansion of spirituality and its articulation in the Middle Ages is beginning to be noted in the history of Christian spirituality, yet should be put in conversation with other forms of expression such as dicta, which meticulously elaborate the translation of the letter into life. Given Hadewijch’s interest in becoming Minne, the way the Trinity manifests itself in life, and the way in which it is ultimately united in the three persons and united with humans, the insistence on Minne as a final term is understandable as it is the ultimate figure of unity for all. Minne is both the means (through love) and the end (unity), the teleological (and theological) pursuit and goal. What is perhaps different about Hadewijch’s mysticism is precisely that the figure of the “all,” of Minne, of absolute unity makes its appearance at every stage, performatively imitating the immanent plenitude that is promised at every hour and secretly (and poetically) underlies all creaturely life. Although Hadewijch does not provide us with a full-fledged exposition of a theological doctrine, this may be because the lived aspect of the theological is of far greater significance to her, and thus, like many women mystics, her writing is geared toward the pivot between understanding and enacting, as though the latter could help produce the former, as a form of inventio. Hadewijch’s mysticism provides a kind of experiential and theological enticement for what otherwise seems to be a long and only promisingly fruitful path by suggesting and performing a form of poetic inhabitation, a scripting into life of the letter, which, like Job’s way of inhabitation, is constantly in need of interpretive insight. The substance or material of this life, of the outer and inner, is equally in need of our interpretive eye, as they are constantly juxtaposed, one with the other, ideally or at least figuratively in the poem, to the point of indistinction.

EXILE; OR , MY SIGHING COMETH BEFORE I E AT Therefore I must live in night by day. —Hadewijch of Br abant, Lied 35 67

Now as often as we attentively regard this same darkness of our blind estate, we stir up the mind to lamentation. For it weeps for the state of blindness, which it is under without, if it remember in humility that it is bereft of light in the interior, and when it looks to the darkness which surrounds it, it is wrung with ardent longing for the inward brightness, and rent with thought’s whole effort, and that light above, which as soon as created it relinquished, now debarred, it

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makes the object of its search. Whence it very often happens that that radiance of inward joy bursts out amidst those very tears of piety; and that the mind, which had lain torpid in a state of blindness, being fed with sighs, receives strength to gaze at the interior brightness. Whence it rightly proceeds, Ver. 24. For my sighing cometh before I eat. —Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job , book 5

In this state the soul is led into solitude by the Lord, and there is fed with the milk so that it becomes inebriated with inward sweetness —Richard of Saint Victor, On the Four Degrees of Violent Love 68

Darkness (unknowing, uncertainty, blindness) and the need for constant reinvention of meaning are at the heart of the Liederen and represent part of the cost of ontological separation in time from a promised face-to-face encounter. Although Hadewijch does not articulate a clear-cut list of the stages of love and enlightenment as methodically as Gregory, Richard, Beatrice, Marguerite Porete, or Bernard (among others), the process of growing in conformity to Minne and the discovery or inventio of Minne’s promise are nevertheless operative in Hadewijch’s work. As a form of life-writing—that is, practicing the scripting of a life to produce a desired lived end—the stages of Hadewijch’s mysticism entail a rapprochement of body and letter and effectuate this in part through the adoption of a voice that trains its speaker, partly by a pedagogic lesson in reading. Reading helps one “practice” ( pleghen) Minne and adopt her way of being in the world. The stages of Minne begin with reading separation into the world, meaning not only an ontological condition of separation or a condition of desire, but a space for the reinvention of meaning. In this process of becoming “full grown” (as referred to in the visions), one begins by separating from the illusion of abundance of Minne, experiencing her as lacking, taking on a garment of virtues (and rewriting one’s relation to worldly things), emptying oneself and “going out” to seek Minne (kenosis), pursuing in solitude a path of darkness, recognizing absence as a form of presence, and, finally, sharing that insight with a community in the corporate mission of Christ.69 With a bit of irony, those who are the newest in love, ghi jonghe (the youth), are also the most (deceptively) “infused” with Minne in a fleeting state (which they do not yet recognize as such), as youth seems to experience Minne as abundant love, and has yet to be weaned (Lied 7, l. 57) in order experience Minne as separation, as do the “old.” In Lied 27, this process is described as loss and in terms of endurance in time:

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You youth, you have lost much in losing your childlike youth Living old in love in sadness But now you may live young And freely in the wealth of love As “I [am] all Minne’s and Minne [is] all mine” That all is your virtue now The wise and the old are elevated little For they know the cost of love’s years In which men must live sparingly.

Ghi, jonghe, ghi hebt vele verloren, verliesdi uwe kintse joget. So levedi out minne in toren, daer ghi nu jonc leven moghet ende in weelden van minnen vri, alse: “Ic al minnen ende minne al mi.” Dat es nu al uwe doghet. Derre weelden den vroeden ouden luttel hoghet, want si kinnen de coste van der minne jaren, waer men sal teren ende sparen. ( CW , 204; Liederen , 218) 70

Loss is a precursor to love, time (and one’s service to love in time) is its telling medium: as Gregory puts it, sighing comes before eating, despair before consolation, and hence the trials of the passio ensue. As shown earlier, Hadewijch explicitly traces two different stages or ways of being in her letters—encompassing those who seem to be in the fruition of Minne, or at least understand what this absolute devotion entails, and those who are actively becoming Minne. Being in the fruition of Minne does not, however, imply a state of constant union, as that is reserved for a moment outside of historical time; rather, it means being at a more advanced stage of imitatio, in which Minne herself is the sole model, rather than the intermediary human figures (with the exception, perhaps, of Mary).71 The stages of love referred to in the Liederen are temporally based; any kind of union that is staged in the songs is of a different register, as will be clear later in this chapter, one inhabiting the figural body of the song or poem. The formal qualities of the Liederen reflect this multiplicity of temporal stages with a theological and

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pedagogic purposiveness in a variety of ways: in the thematic and temporal contrast of the figure of the young ( ghi yonghe) with the wise or old (derre weelden, den ouden), in the multiple voices in the songs and their responsiveness and interrelation with one another (voices of counsel, despair, collective wisdom, observation), in the psalmodic modeling of the songs, and in the constant hypothetical nature and temporal delay that frames the songs, off-setting any seeming immediacy, and requires the suffering or enduring of time itself. The next part of this chapter shows how this multiplicity functions thematically and formally in the songs to identify and produce its desired ends in a communal fashion, teaching the singers how to “go out” (in the mode of kenosis) and discover (invenire) Minne and partake in a communal “we” or a “they.” Like the visions, Hadewijch’s songs are framed in a temporal parenthesis of delay and memory and function according to a dramatic spatialization of spiritual struggle (in the ups and downs of the “dales” [dal ] of Minne, straying in the wilderness or desert, or in the simple reflection of landscapes that condition human inhabitation). The use of conditional and future tenses in the songs echoes the temporal structuring, witnessed in the visions, of a promise that is experienced as such. Also like in the visions, access to Minne is structured as a promise, but in a slightly different fashion. Rather than bearing witness to the promised unity and conformity of the inner person with the divine, the songs perform a pedagogic function in showing how, from the perspective of the outer, desire should model itself. In other words, the patterning of the songs shows how the outer might take on a proper form to produce and elicit the desire of the divine (in both senses of the term, objective and subjective genitive), and in so doing, allow the person to recognize desire in and of the divine, uniting inner and outer aspects of a person in the figure of Love. The songs operate, yet again, according to a temporal poetics that promises unity in the poem, but only in the poem, and for the speaker, as promise and delay, since Minne always “comes late” and the realm of dissimilarity prevails. The songs reflect a topographical emphasis that in-spirits familiar figures with a double nature, constantly requiring a hermeneutic that will allow one to read emotional and relational situatedness as a spiritual sign. Like the psalms, the songs are intended for initiates as well as for the “old” in love (“But both the old and the young may soothe their mind by singing of love”),72 allowing individuals to be mirrored in their spiritual teaching in prosopological fashion, yet they function particularly well for those “new” to the stages of Minne, as they are intended to aid and give delight at one and the same time, using aesthetic and musical patterning and beauty to teach, touch, and transform their speaker.73 Like the psalter, the songs perform a communal “revolution” in a human appropriation of

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divine material, and they do so in an emotional register that allows for the emotional truth (virtutem) of what is spoken to be understood, as opposed to a purely intellectual content. As Peter Jeffery explains, from the turn of the Benedictine revolution, when choral psalmody replaced solo psalmody, the function of the psalms changed along with it: “ ‘Instead of being primarily a message from God to man, it has become chiefly man’s homage to God. . . . The hearers of the word of God have been changed into those who sing his majesty.’ The psalm itself was now the prayer, providing the words by which humans addressed God, rather than the divine word to which humans listened. . . . From the monastic exegesis of imagining oneself in the psalms, the monk now felt obliged to become himself the very speaker of the psalms.”74 Although Hadewijch’s Liederen are not to be mistaken as liturgical compositions or monastic material, unlike Hildegard’s songs, their purpose and form are better understood in relation to works that are part of the ordering of spiritual life, since they are constructed in close parallel with their spiritual ends.75 From the fourth century onward, the psalms were thought of as a mirroring device, “applying them to oneself as if looking into a mirror,” providing a means for compunctio and, most importantly, for consequent revision of one’s actions.76 The recitation and singing of the psalms are the substance of the officium divinum (the divine office, the liturgy)—a critical element in Hadewijch’s visions and, by extension, her daily life—and are predominantly Christological in emphasis (as is the underlying tenor of Hadewijch’s Liederen). The psalms often illustrate a moral sense for the reader/singer to apply to his or her own personal context, allowing for a form of recognition in emotive description. The reflexive mirroring operative in various specula of women’s visions (such as Marguerite’s) and numerous pedagogic texts (like the Speculum virginum) finds its complement in the lifelike specula embodied by the psalms and their lyric counterparts, the songs: both promise to “read” their speaking subject and offer corresponding directives for living.77 While Hadewijch’s individual songs may not be mappable onto any specific psalm per se, the widespread use and adaptation of the psalms (for example in psalmic prayers or in the earlier De psalmorum usu), the glosses and the commentaries on them, and their frequent interpolation in medieval lyric provide multiple forms for the infusion of both their material and their emphasis on the natural and human world of divine creation.78 Not only are the psalms’ influence explicit (to the point of Hadewijch’s advocating an imitatio David in Lied 29), but their purpose is almost identical, as is the formal means for achieving this goal, making this instance of mystique courtoise equally definable as mystique psalmodique.79 Musical sources for Hadewijch’s possible use of contrafacture have been traced to vernacular (including devotional) Minnesang, and trouvère and troubadour lyric,

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as well as melodies from Latin hymns. If we take into consideration in Louis Peter Grijp’s compelling musicological analysis, then Hadewijch’s use of material that further appeals to the articulation of the spiritual in the language of secular form (however problematic the distinction may be) can be seen as commensurate with the Christological mission that underlies her songs.80 Th is use of material follows a long-standing tendency—established by the psalm and song traditions—to translate the exigency of spiritual calling and divine address into increasingly familiar, intimate, and available forms—forms that in turn lend themselves to a translation into acts, or ways of being. Daniel O’Sullivan argues that it would be incorrect to interpret devotional lyrics’ use of contrafacture as testimony to a “derivative, parasitical, and secondary” secular tradition (invoking Pierre Bec): “Such a conclusion misses the point entirely of many contrafacta: their composers use existing melodies not because they deem their religious compositions unworthy of a new melody, but rather . . . because doing so furthers their devotional aim.”81 Hadewijch’s insistence on actively immersing oneself within the temporal world uses a vocabulary common to twelft h- and thirteenth-century romance, lyric, and devotional texts that couple outer form with an inner spirit. Her use of these forms to accomplish the goal of werke and become fully like Minne fi nds a pivotal vocabulary (turning from outer to inner, and vice versa) in the double nature of the language of the Liederen.82 Hildegard’s musical works, written for her convent’s liturgy, provide an interesting comparison to Hadewijch’s Liederen. They share an emphasis on the lived nature of the divine word and aim at eliciting the recognition (and confession) of weakness and renewal through an appeal to Mary or to other forms of divine grace so as to allow for spiritual rebirth. While Hildegard’s musical compositions for the divine office are more traditionally monastic in context (in that they are formulated for psalmody), reflecting her own position as a Benedictine abbess, her work, like Hadewijch’s, perceives itself in terms of the aural, embodied, and poetic nature of inhabitation for her immediate community of women.83 As Margot Fassler has meticulously shown in her analysis of Hildegard’s musical compositions for the office, “singing makes an indwelling of the Logos possible, both literally and figuratively” and allows for a communal bond to be articulated in and through the body through voices in antiphonal psalmody, allowing speech acts to be shared in unison.84 The “I” who sings in the songs and antiphons is thus physically and spiritually incarnating its corporate identity through hosting and sharing divine words.85 Likewise for the Victorines: “Just as the flesh and the heart are to play in harmony within each individual during the act of singing, so too are both halves of the choir to sing together with one melody, and this is rep-

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resentative of the unity of their customs and of the common life. God will tune this communal instrument so that it will play a unified tune.”86 Hadewijch’s Liederen differ from Hildegard’s musical works in a number of ways. Hildegard’s pedagogic style, as Carolyn Muessig, has notes, evinces Benedictine and Cistercian ideas for male monastics, for Hildegard believed that the “external reflected the internal perfection of the soul.”87 For Hildegard the perfection of her nuns would be realized in their outward comportment, while for Hadewijch this outer perfection retains only a formal value for patterning and reforming the inner, as inaccessible and invisible as it may be. In ways similar to Hildegard, the “I” of Hadewijch’s songs differs from the “I” of her visions in that while the “I” of the visions understands herself to be a unique and elected recipient of a divine gift transmitted in writing, the “I” of the song must discover the sense of this election and the proper form of inhabitation in Minne. The song may be inhabited by whoever sings it, not merely the individual mystic herself. The song itself may also assume a different interpretive tone (remembrance, consolation, warning, encouragement) depending on its speaker. Interpreting the “I” of the songs as autobiographical is thus both true and false: true in that any expression of the “I” is referring to an envisioning of a lived experience that includes Hadewijch’s, yet false in that this overlooks the pedagogic role inscribed in the adoption of the “I” in the song and the ways in which, given what we know from her letters and visions, her way of living and loving is no longer that of becoming Minne (those who take on a more youthful and courtly demeanor), but that of being Minne. A limited look at diverse voices in the songs assists in discernment of the various roles scripted within them and the subtle ways in which they frame the sense of the “lived.”

LIVING, SPE AK ING, TE ACHING, AND BEING SONG The songs are often characterized by oral references spoken by a first person— hence the constant descriptions of them as personal expressions attributable to Hadewijch—but they also refer to spoken acts in the third-person singular and plural. The only relation to the written form is in reference to “reading” the judgments of Minne, which in fact is not referring to the written word, but to the reading of the inner through the outer, what is a reading of conscience in the case of Marguerite d’Oingt. The poems are often framed as speech acts: “Ic dar wel segghen openbaer” (“I dare well say openly”88; “Ic roepe ic claghe” (“I cry out, I clamour”).89 They refer to their own activity as sanc, “song,” in past and present tenses: “Dat ic van minnen

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vele songe . . . mijn sanc, mijn wenen scijnt sonder spoet” (“That I sang so often of Love . . . my song, my weeping seem without success”)90; “Altoes mach men van minnen singhen, / eest herfst, eest winter, eest lenten, eest somer, / ende jegen hare ghewout verdinghen / want en onsteet hare nieman vromer. / Mer wi, traghe, segghen . . . ” (“Always may one sing of love / Be it autumn, winter, spring, or summer, / And plead one’s case against her power / But we, slacking, say . . . ”).91 Lament, plea, and clamor constitute one performative aspect of the Liederen, yet this reflects only a part of the picture. Oral references also betray a difference in voice and status: “Ic rade,” meaning “I counsel,” is used in many instances, but is used in Lied 39 in a way that suggests that there may be subtle differences between a voice who offers counsel in the Lied and a voice representing a youth who is less experienced in love. As is often the case in Hadewijch’s final stanza, Lied 39 ends with a refrain that is a general pedagogic address in the form of advice or counsel (at times in the collective form of a “we” or a “they”). After first offering itself as an exemplum and describing in a first-person voice how “I remain at Minne’s side” (keeping faith) no matter what happens, it turns to a prescriptive voice and describes how a “fiere gheve” (valiant one) should act. The narrative then evolves from this exemplary voice, first to giving a prescription, and then to the voice of counsel: I counsel the valiant one to combat love In his time of youth That he not retreat from her But that he seize her fully Before she elides him.

Ic rade den fieren die de minne besta in sinen jonghen tide, dat hier niet en mide, he ne sie dat hise volva, eer si vore hem lide. ( Liederen , 292) 92

Even in these few lines, the song shows us how, as advice, the songs performatively participate in Hadewijch’s Christic mission to live virtuously and serve others. Voiced in the person of an initiate, it also accomplishes a kind of self-teaching or self-fashioning that is characteristic of the beguines and evident in Hadewijch’s letters.93 In this stanza, the voice of counsel (which, in Lied 43, l. 78, is associated

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with the scone werke of reason) is subtly differentiated from the youth. While it identifies itself as performing in all the ways it encourages in the firen (valiant), it occupies a position as both inside and outside its more mature subject, able to identify with others yet separated in time and in being from their precise stage of Minne. Being separated in time and growth from the “youth,” however, could also be seen as a sign of kenosis, that is, being separated from oneself and one’s willful longing to conquer love. Completely emptying out oneself, that is, annihilating the self is the ultimate form of Minne, so that a rhetorical distance from the youthful voice may be sign of transformation—to be adopted by the singer in the hope of simultaneously being and not being that voice itself. Hadewijch’s invocation of progress has a hierarchical component, as do many medieval stages of spiritual perfection, and is even referred to as an “ascent” (for example in Letter 20), but does not have the same kind of absolutism that hierarchical “stages” imply, with mastery on the final end. It is as though structure and hierarchy were an apparatus acknowledged as needed but ultimately to be discarded as one is absorbed in the object of pursuit. One can understand why rules are disdained by Hadewijch (in Letter 4, ll. 64–68), and why, stylistically, the poetics of inhabitation is a far more suitable representation of how to be and enact Minne than a set prescriptive or instructions, which assumes a visibly applicable external measure.94 This poetics asks for inner and outer to be united, through acts, understanding, and reason. Becoming a meester (“master” or “mistress”95) may make one closer to the mistress of love herself, but it does not ensure an absolute economy of likenesses: “The course of the fi rmament and of the planets, / And of the signs that stand in the firmament, / We can in part know by likenesses, / And count the measure with calculation. / But no master can presume this / That he can make love understood with the senses” (CW, 245).96 The resonance with the inner has no other judge than the divine, and the secret of divinity is ultimately kept. The host of the divine is both host and hostage to a secret she will never be able to fully access or divulge. Elsewhere in the Liederen, true counsel (rade) is associated with Minne herself, suggesting that this ability to counsel is a sign of (almost) being Minne, meaning a sign of having interiorized the ethos that will allow one to approximate her and to resemble the divine in humanity. Yet the final sign of belonging to Minne is, paradoxically, to love beyond counsel, so fully has one given one’s will and being over to Minne and been wounded (struck) by her.97 In the last stanza of the final song, Lied 45, the counsel of Minne is taken as the ultimate principle for being: “Ay, ben ic in vrome ochte in scade, / si al, minne, bi uwen rade” (“Oh, whether I am in profit or in debt, / May all be, Love, according to your counsel” [CW, 258]).98 While much counseling seems to be offered her and referred to, Minne’s counsel is

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nevertheless elusive in terms of its content. Minne herself is tied to the prosopopaic figure that constitutes the human relation to the divine in the figures of love, lover, and beloved, like Augustine’s trinity of love witnessed in the first chapter, yet Minne herself is not any one clear figure other than the promised figure of love one seeks, and the promised figure of love one imitates and hopes to become. Given the veiled and temporally inaccessible nature of this love, all counsel likewise comes silently, even secretly, like the hidden words in Job’s suffering. Even though Hadewijch’s songs are themselves a form of counsel, they nevertheless subtly deny themselves the authority to speak the final word. They do not impose order as would a rule, making their exteriority a measure for perfection; rather, they articulate an approximated yet unfinalizable series of figures of perfection for the outer person to imitate as she conforms to the inner workings of the divine. In contrast to many scholars who have wanted to seize on one particular figure (especially a gendered one) in defining the persona articulated through Hadewijch’s poetry, my interpretation has shown that the indefi nite nature of figuration and language in the poems and the progressive movement toward greater spiritual perfection prevents any one figure from having a privileged position. Hadewijch is paradoxically able to assume the many varied figures (gendered and other) that allow for fuller expression of unity with the divine. The feminization of Minne and the use of the courtly have less to do with a biological identification or a fi xed identity of her “outer” than they do with a proper ethos for pursuing the divine without and becoming the divine within. This insistence on the secrecy of counsel demonstrates a condition of language when the secret of the divine is transferred into the domain of the lived. The demarcation of inner and outer so clearly spelled out in the visions is translated into a secrecy of inhabitation and a secret that inhabits language in Hadewijch’s poetry. Th is mutual relationship between poetry and inhabitation brings to the fore another figurative body, like the promised body of the personified Minne, that inhabits the mystical text in poetic form.

POETIC UNIONS In concluding this chapter, I would like to show how, despite the resistance of her poetic work to being reduced to one dominant figure that would fully express how human beings conform to Minne, other unions transpire in tactile and immediate ways through the evanescent materiality of sound. While Minne seems constantly out of reach, temporally out of synch with human measure, unity and patterns appear within Hadewijch’s poetic works that provide performative unions for the reader. Th is performative union imitates the way the human fig-

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ures portrayed in the songs are haunted by a figure of divine unity that is both seemingly present yet nonsubstantive and fleeting. In Mengeldicht 15, rhythmic patterns and alliterations produce overlapping sounds (“ay,” “i,” “in,” “ne”) and overlapping words (Minne) that in turn create unions in the poetic corpus. These unions are impossible to touch, impossible to lay one’s fi nger on, but they acoustically touch the reader in the way Minne touches the one who experiences her.99 At the end of Mengeldicht 15, in lines 49–52, we read: O love, were I love, and with love, love you, love, O love, for love, give that love which love may know wholly as love.

Ay minne ware ic minne Ende met minnen minne v minne Ay minne om minne gheuet dat minne Die minne al minne volkinne! ( Mgdt , 71) 10 0

The poem touches the reader through overlapping sounds in the figure of overlapping movements between lover and beloved, imitating the identity of humans in the divine. The very word Minne, which signifies at one and the same time “Love” (as noun, verb), “lover,” and “beloved,” serves to recall (and project) linguistically the union promised experientially in Hadewijch’s visions. In this repetition of the word Minne , Hadewijch allows the reader to hear a union—which we know as one past (in the time of the vision) and one promised in the future—with and in God through love. As the verse starts, we see an “I” (ic) that is eclipsed by Minne by the final line. The overlapping of the ic with Minne coupled with the transition from the ic to a subjectless Minne allows for the desired transformation (to become and be Minne) to occur performatively in the poem, even though the poem thematically only hypothesizes this union in a hopeful conditional tense. A poetics is issued out of the hiatus between the represented and the promised: the promised body (of Minne, Christ, lover, or beloved) becomes incorporated into the poetic text as uniting sound. What cannot happen overtly or tangibly in the time of human life or in the time of the “I” can happen in the figural body of the song. The only host of a present unity that can be immediately manifested is that of a poetics of Minne in the figural body of the song. The song itself represents, in a figurative way, a body that promises to bridge the gap between the cognitive and

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the performative, between the anticipation of being Minne and the actual happening of this event. The songs are not homogenous nor commensurate with what they promise (the meeting of the cognitive and the performative is only possible as promise), for Hadewijch is never clearly able to fuse her body with Minne or with the desired body of God—at least not yet.

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Even if they always do so unequally and differently, poetry and literature have as a common feature that they suspend the “thetic” naivety of the transcendent reading. This also accounts for the philosophical force of these experiences, a force of provocation to think phenomenality, meaning, object, even being as such, a force which is at least potential, a philosophical dunamis—which can, however be developed only in response, in the experience of reading, because it is not hidden in the text like a substance. Poetry and literature provide or facilitate “phenomenological” access to what makes of a thesis a thesis as such. —Jacques Derrida, “This Str ange Institution Called Liter ature”

This boke is begonne by Goddes gifte and his grace, but it is not yet performed, as to my sight. —Julian of Norwich, A Revel ation of Love

This book has argued that a fuller theological understanding of the embodiments of inner and outer persons and their relation to reading, time, interpretation, and practice enables new ways of thinking about and across gender, genre, and period. At the same time, this book has highlighted a performative aspect of embodiment that is discernible in medieval women’s mystical texts, one that emphasizes the theological as a literary and enacted poetics.1 I have foregrounded women’s mystical writings, therefore, not to insist on their separateness from men’s writings in essential ways, but rather to show that many women’s mystical texts can be read as an extension of and development on theological and

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hermeneutic traditions—but in a way particular to how these traditions are transmitted to and articulated by women. In his work on the fourteenth-century anchoress Julian of Norwich, Denys Turner has pointed out that even though Julian’s works address issues familiar to the theologian, her way of developing these is unusual: “Unlike the typical monastic theologian, whose starting point and method of procedure are typically and explicitly scriptural, or the school theologian, who sets out theologically from a carefully formulated statement of a problem or quaestio, Julian’s theological reflections are elicited through a process of progressive intensification and complex elaboration of particular and personal experience.”2 Julian transposes theological methodology into complex rhetorical and poetic reflections; whereas Turner says that these stem from “experience,” however, throughout this book I have attempted to add nuance to this notion by demonstrating that the mystic’s or visionary’s experience—as it is manifest to us—is already part and parcel of embodied textuality.3 Experience already enjoins the theological as a poetics and therefore is impossible to isolate without taking into account the ways in which such lived action is responding to and incorporating religious, cultural, and literary forms and practices.4 Mystics like Julian and Hadewijch call upon what I have liberally referred to as “the literary” or “the poetic” to represent the potential of how the theological (and, consequently, the philosophical) may be encountered in life, thus necessarily invoking or presupposing the embodied means of this encounter. Likewise, the visionary or mystical text grants the reader (or listener) “phenomenological access” to theological beliefs and scriptural truths in the experience of reading (or hearing)—through means that echo how those truths were made tangible to her. Because the mystic’s text reflects how experience and theology should be joined, it represents a “truer” experience of embodiment for the reader to experience and follow. Textuality orients a person’s access to scriptural truths through cognitive and corporeal means, thereby prompting the transformation of embodied experience as such from earthly to spiritual body, promising the unity of inner and outer persons. In concluding, I will briefly sketch out how Hadewijch’s attention to the letter, textuality, reading, interpretation, the domains of inner and outer, and performing works might be further compared with other women’s mystical texts. While the articulation of these phenomena may differ for each mystic, the importance of joining the letter to inner and outer persons, reading to living, is pervasive in mystical texts in ways that help us better understand the invocation of embodiment and its ramifications in relation to the letter. Instead of searching for precise terminology amid the vocabulary of mystics, visionaries, theologians, and secular poetic traditions, if we look at how terms are employed and to what end, the in-

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ventiveness and continuity between literary and theological texts and devotional practices may fall into a clearer perspective, lessening the isolation of women’s textual practices.5 Reading across linguistic and historical horizons, I will show how, in a cursory fashion, this practice of the letter might be traced out in the works of both Julian of Norwich and the earlier male-authored Ancrene Wisse. If we see women’s writing as performing theological meaning (in ways that differ rhetorically from the theologian’s), as Amy Appleford has emphasized in relation to Julian’s “deathbed” experience,6 for example, we should also attempt to understand how and why the performance of the theological is important beyond the manuscript page, and in ways that elucidate how body and text can and must be read together. If we conceptualize Julian’s hermeneutic and practice of composition according to a Trinitarian model—as Nicholas Watson and Denys Turner (among others) have demonstrated—we can see that this Trinitarian orientation also conceives of itself as a practice of living that teaches others how to fashion embodiment like Christ, as a word made flesh.7 The theological is invoked by means of a tangible medium, which by no means lessens the theological impulse; rather, it transforms phenomenality itself into what Derrida describes as a “force” or “potential,” a potential that orients how the theological must be felt and lived, even when—or especially when—the divine is experienced in negative terms as an absence, as is the case with Hadewijch’s Liederen. I have read Hadewijch, by no means exhaustively, as a means of demonstrating that a constant attentiveness to the ubiquitous nature of scripture is called for from medieval and contemporary readers, as though Hadewijch—and, by extension, many a woman mystic—were a never-ending hermeneutic apparatus that turned other materialities, like that implicit in creaturely life, into occasions for reading. Life, affect, and vision present opportunities for reading and responding in ways that may be just as structurally complex as those presented by texts themselves. Given women’s prohibition from public preaching, the cultivation of women’s spirituality understandably required the strategic transposing and adapting of meaning elicited by the letter into other, nonhomiletic, exegetic means. Living the text thus becomes a mode of responsive exegesis, as the mystic or nun becomes an exemplum for others to follow and, at the same time, becomes adept at the transference and translation of one term into another, transposing concepts and terms into different registers (as in the registers of “inner” and “outer”), as one might transpose music from one key to another, allowing for the content to be adapted and adopted into its new medium.8 Even within Hadewijch’s work, the mystic or beguine’s relation to Minne , or Love, is transposed in different positions and perspectives based on experience and capacity, like those of the youth and the wise in her Liederen, as we saw in chapter 4.

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The mirroring of “being” and “becoming” that operates in a Trinitarian fashion throughout Hadewijch’s work highlights a textuality already embedded in the speaker and her surrounding world. The teaching of textuality and embodiment as intrinsically related is one part of a pedagogic strategy for living according to scripture in order to fully understand and perfect a human being’s way of living in Christ. What I have emphasized is not a mere matching of one’s actions to the words of scripture; rather, meaning is simultaneously articulated via the letter and in bodily terms, allowing the incarnational aspect of meaning and its textual referent to work together in inextricable fashion. What we understand under the rubric of imitatio is not just an embodied practice in the conventional sense of the term—that is, a literalization or mimicry of Christ’s person—but is ideally a textual enactment, a poetics of embodiment. What may seem like a dualism of inner and outer aspects of a human being should be read as a dynamic interaction of inner and outer persons in their necessarily conflicted attempt to become like the Word. Intentionally or not, this pedagogic strategy of becoming like the Word manifest in mystical texts also has the effect of showing how deeds and inner conduct enact a form of writing, regardless of the “unlettered” nature of the actor and regardless of whether the “life” becomes a written vita.9 Because the body is not conceived as one entity, but contingent on an amalgam of inner and outer persons (the inner being linked to the new perfected person), the text represents the union of inner and outer in Christic fashion rather than embodying it. It reflects and represents a union that only the human being, the host of the imago, can achieve in actuality postscriptum, becoming like the true Word for which the text speaks. Embodiment is thus necessary to fulfi ll the transformation promised by textuality if only to host the promise in yet another form. While the inner and outer persons and respective embodiments are conceived of in relation to an individual, the perfection of the inner represents fusion not only with Christ but with the larger communal body of the corpus mysticum and the community to which Hadewijch and others are bound. Even though visions single out individuals, as pedagogical instruments they are intended for greater communal purposes by means of which others may live according to “the way one reads,” to borrow from Bernard, that is, according to the way the mystic or visionary sees, reads, and interprets the workings of the divine. Julian of Norwich’s long text, A Revelation of Love, ends with the promise of continuing the work of the divine that transpires in her revelation, explicitly signally the transition from text to embodiment I have just highlighted.10 In my short reflection on Julian, I would like to show how the Pauline and Augustinian anthropology, as it is manifest in her work, might allow us to understand this

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phrase in a way consonant with the temporal and material poetics I have underscored in my reading of Hadewijch. Although Julian’s use of Paul and Augustine substantially differs from Hadewijch’s in terms of intonation and underlying theological emphasis (among other things), my way of reading Hadewijch might help clarify what has been carefully described by Turner as “dualist” aspects of her theology and by Aers as its unintended Manichean extreme, permitting a fuller understanding of how the soul is embodied according to Julian.11 By understanding Julian’s divisions of the human being into substance and sensualite in a Pauline fashion, and by showing how the registers of “inner” and “outer” are articulated in her works in both theological and thematic ways, I will briefly trace out my argument that doubleness need not be conceived of in oppositional terms, but rather as part of a performative tension that borrows from Pauline and Augustinian models for transformative ends and impacts the way we conceive of the mystic’s body. Generally speaking, both Julian and Hadewijch are mystics “with no real precedent,” to quote Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (referring to the former), in terms of their composing theologically and rhetorically sophisticated works in their respective vernaculars, although Julian (whose work is in Middle English) was born at least a century later, in 1343.12 What is divided in Hadewijch’s work into different genres (each of which represents a different orientation of inner to outer, spiritual to earthly persons or senses) is, one could say, enjoined in Julian’s work as a whole.13 Julian fuses the pedagogical unfolding of spiritual truths (apparent in Hadewijch’s letters), visionary experience, and a performative lyricism (like that of Hadewijch’s songs) to elaborate the simultaneity of inner and outer registers in paradoxical ways, often through thematic and rhetorical tensions. Where Hadewijch’s works separate the atemporal visions from her temporally oriented letters and Liederen, Julian combines visionary activity with the didactic means to show how they reflect an understanding of creaturely life. Where the Liederen place an emphasis on absence and longing, illustrating the human experience of Minne from the perspective of the outer and its promise of becoming united with the divine, Julian will often, if not always, connect this absence with an illustration of how longing, pain, and suffering explicitly connect to Christ and the Trinity as a whole, despite a limited human perspective that cannot perceive this directly. In other words, whereas Hadewijch will give a divine perspective of the doubled human being in her visions (explored in chapter 3), Julian will utilize this totalizing perspective throughout her works in figurative ways, allowing synecdochical figurations of the Trinity to fi ll in there where faith alone must operate. For example, as Philip Sheldrake and others have noted, in Julian’s Revelation, the

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parable of the Lord and Servant may be read as “an exposition of salvation history from God’s viewpoint,” while at the same time it presents the human means for understanding and becoming like the divine.14 Julian will often use the totalizing perspective of the divine (showing things “in his sight”) while contrasting it with what happens “as to my sight,” providing a unity of a limited human grasp along with the fuller perspective of the Creator. Julian’s figures and focal points identified for contemplation are, nevertheless, like Hadewijch’s personified figures in her songs, often transitory vehicles for a process of identification that does not intend to rest in any one particular model. Watson notes the following example: “The glorification of Mary in Chapter 25 [of her Revelation] now gives way to that of Jesus, as the contemplation of Mary is seen as no more than a stage on the way to the higher contemplation of God.”15 In addition, Julian’s writings emphasize the historical crucifi xion and the suffering of Christ on the cross, even in descriptive detail, whereas Hadewijch stresses the intangible nature of Minne, placing far less emphasis (if any) on sin and transformative identification with the crucifi xion. Each will emphasize, in different fashion, the “courtly” or “curtesy” in the relation of the divine toward human beings while drawing on bridal imagery of Song of Songs. Despite significant differences in their spirituality’s style of articulation and theological focal points, both place their ultimate emphasis on love and the lived promise of the Trinity in true Augustinian fashion. As Turner notes, this translates into an experience of suffering that is coterminous with a promise of redemption: “To live the Trinitarian life within history is to live by means of a mystery, it is to live the divine self-knowledge in the form of faith, and it is to live by means of the divine love in the form of vulnerability, suffering, and defeat.”16 Social and institutional differences are traceable in their respective works. Hadewijch’s beguine spirituality, which finds meaning in and through an active participation in her surrounding community (both the community of her beguines and the larger social community), is manifest indirectly in the use of wide-ranging vernacular and religious materials to articulate spiritual concerns. Whereas the visions of Marguerite d’Oingt, discussed in chapter 2, reflect an emphasis on the book characteristic of Carthusian spirituality, Julian’s compositions echo the enclosure and liminality significant to life as an anchoress, as many scholars have demonstrated, not only in the geographic relation of the anchorhold to a church, but in her in-between status as a spiritual recluse and adviser to those who seek out advice from her outer window.17 As Turner observes that she is “neither religious, nor secular, neither clerical nor yet an ordinary laywoman, professed but not a nun; she is canonically marginal just as the physical positioning of her cell is attached to, but remains outside, the main body of her parish church.”18

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These representations of the social and institutional aspects of their spirituality are, I emphasize, not only thematic, but part of a material poetics in which the outer person, as it inhabits its world, is transformed through conformity to the inner person into a spiritual body. The idiom of embodiment in each mystical text also reflects embodiment as it is theologically and culturally conceived. To this end, as Watson has urged, we need “a closer attention to the issues common to works thought of as mystical and works that are not” in order to show “the value of integrating mystics scholarship with the rest of literary history,” but also to demonstrate the intimate connection between embodiment and textuality.19 While separated by their respective idioms, Hadewijch’s and Julian’s spiritualities share an overt interest in how the inner serves as the truest orientation for the spiritual, instead of an outer rule providing this orientation. As an anchoress, Julian takes vows (of obedience, poverty, and stability of abode) in the presence of the local bishop, but her spirituality is not governed like nuns in a monastic setting, nor is it as open as that of beguines. Nevertheless, as for the beguines, the spirituality of the anchoress will manifest itself as an exercise that seeks to conjoin inner and outer persons, inner and outer senses, without completely devaluing the outer per se. As Bella Millett has noted, the earlier Ancrene Wisse—the male-authored guide for female solitaries, copied around 1224–1250 (contemporary with Hadewijch)—overtly emphasizes the priority of the inner in shaping the relation of the anchoress to her surroundings, using distinctions of the inner and outer senses in explicit fashion.20 Citations from patristic and other sources saturate this work, performing the seamlessness between textuality and embodiment as it should be experienced. The Ancrene Wisse explicitly maps out how inner and outer embodiments should relate to one another, in obsessive fashion, warning, for example: “The more the recluse stares outwards [ut-ward ], the less light inwards [in-ward ] she has from our Lord—and the same is true of the other senses. Qui exterior oculo negligenter utitur, iusto Dei iudicio interiori cecatur; see what Saint Gregory says: ‘Whoever guards her outward eye [utter ehnen] carelessly is blinded, through God’s just judgment, in her inner [inre]’—so that she may not see God with her spiritual sight [ gastelich sihthe], nor through that sight know him, nor through that knowledge love him above everything.”21 Despite its structuring of the rule with minute attention to the outer senses, the Ancrene Wisse emphasizes the priority of the inner, noting how it trumps all, given that the inner law reflects the law of the divine, while the outer reflects the laws of human beings: But all cannot keep to one rule, and need not and ought not to keep in one way to the outer rule [utter riwle], quantum scilicet ad observantias corporales, “that

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is, to do with bodily practices [licomliche locunges],” following the outer rule [utter riwle] which I called “handmaid” and which is a human invention— fashioned for nothing else than to serve the inner [inre]; which directs one to fasting, vigils, wearing cold and harsh clothing, and such other hardships, which the flesh [ fles] of many can bear, but many cannot. Therefore this one changes in different ways, according to each individual’s character [manere] and capacity [evene]. . . . Therefore each anchoress shall keep the outer rule [utter riwle] according to her confessor’s counsel [read ], and do whatever he asks and commands her in obedience, he who understands her character [manere] and knows her strength [strengthe]. He may change the outer rule [utter riwle] according to his wisdom, as he sees how the inner [inre] may best be kept. (“Ancrene Wisse,” 48–49; Ancrene Wisse , 62)

The Ancrene Wisse seeks to accommodate and transpose the relation of outer to inner in accordance with the anchoress’s capacity, similar to how Hadewijch advocates for different counsel and stages of Minne for those of varying levels of experience and capacity (yet with exponentially more scrutiny, given the differences of anchoritic life). As I noted in the introduction, Hadewijch’s disdain for an exterior rule stems from the perception that outer rules do not necessarily reflect the “inner beauty” that transpires in a spirit nurtured by goodwill: “With a rule of life, people encumber themselves with many things from which they could be free; and that causes reason to err. A spirit of goodwill assures greater interior beauty [in binnen scoendere] than any rule could devise” (CW, 54).22 While Hadewijch’s Liederen aim to teach, as I have argued, primarily from the outside– in through a lived temporality that aligns itself with suffering and absence, they nevertheless do so in relation to the capacities and promise of the inner conformity to Minne. This emphasis on how the inner informs the outer is manifest in the social organization of beguine and anchoritic life: both evince unease with traditional monasticism and reflect an early thirteenth-century phenomenon in which many laywomen formed spiritual communities marginal to religious orders.23 As Millett notes, given the strong evidence of a Dominican origin of the Ancrene Wisse, “the Dominicans link with an existing tradition of extra-monastic reform may help to explain why the concept of the life of perfection in Ancrene Wisse is not wholly based on monastic models, and in some cases even seems to be defined in opposition to them.”24 Affinities between anchoritic and beguine spirituality merit further study, especially given the relation of the Dominicans to early beguine spirituality and a history of contact between Norwich and the Low Countries.25 Since this association would merit a book-length study in and of itself, I

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raise this point to show that the division of inner and outer persons as outlined in Hadewijch’s writings merits productive comparison with spiritual developments in England, especially for understanding how these divisions might complicate the notion of embodiment and community in later medieval English writings.26 Whether or not anchoritic and beguine spirituality have concrete historical ties to one another, their shared emphasis on an Augustinian spirituality that recasts the outer person—thus embodiment itself—in relation to the inner person makes for a compound conception of the human being and its embodied nature. At the same time that the male-authored Ancrene Wisse sets up a tightly regulated economy related to embodiment, as Beckwith has demonstrated, its ultimate emphasis nevertheless rests on the divine inner law as reflected in each individual, thereby mediating how the outer has to be read and interpreted, even by the male confessor or meistre.27 When one attempts to conceive of embodiment, even from the perspective of the masculine author, the exterior must be put in relation with the less visible inner referent associated with the inner person. Julian emphasizes the personal nature of union with the divine, in a way that parallels Hadewijch’s insistence on the individual’s approach to Minne. Like Augustine’s De Trinitate, Julian finds the imago Dei within each individual, stressing the importance of inner discipline and the werkyng of grace and perfection in order for union with God to be known and performed. As Christopher Abbott notes, “God’s union through Christ with redeemed humanity is also—primarily— a personal union operating at the level of ‘man’s soule.’ ”28 It is only in a turning inward, toward an understanding of how God dwells in her human nature that she may be closer to knowledge of this mutual indwelling. Julian follows the inward turn of Augustine’s imperative, “By knowledge of myself I shall get the knowledge of God,” and follows in the paths of Augustine’s mapping of the imago Dei in the soul (or mind as mens). When Julian writes that “oure soule, that is made, wonneth in God in substance—of which substance, by God, we be that we be,” in Julian’s Middle English, substance means “essential nature” or “real core” and follows Augustine’s reading of substance as essence.29 What seems like a tautology in Julian will be a way of articulating the tension in humans of becoming what we already are. Julian will draw on the dynamic nature of Trinitarian mirroring I highlighted in chapter 1 (especially in her formulations of will and love) in her understanding of this “double making” of the human being. As I noted earlier, one of the recent issues raised in Julian scholarship has focused on the substantive dualism in her understanding of the “doubly-made” human soul, that is, her claim that “we be doubel of Gods making: that is to sey, substantial and sensual.”30 With the risk of oversimplifying, I will present the general outlines of Julian’s formulation of doubleness in relation to the

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Augustinian and Pauline paradigms addressed throughout this book. Like Paul and Augustine, Julian will formulate her anthropology of the soul as twofold: what she terms the substance and the sensualite, which will also relate to what she calls ghostly and bodily ways of apprehending in her visions.31 Like Paul’s eso anthropos and Augustine’s inner person, Julian’s higher substantial part of the human being will be related to the eternal and incorruptible essence of the divine, and the lower sensualite (like the exo antropos, or outer person) to the way in which human beings dwell in time, and therefore to the perishable and changeable nature of a human being, the latter being implicated in sin.32 The sensualite will, as with Paul, be the site of redemption and restoration through temporal works, by means of which the whole person promises to be transformed. For we be doubel of Gods making: that is to sey substancial and sensual. Oure substance is the hyer perty, whych we have in oure fader God almighty. And the seconde person of the trinite is oure moder in kind in oure substantial making, in whom we be grounded and roted, and he is oure moder of mercy in oure sensualite taking. And thus oure moder is to us diverse manner werking, in whom oure pertes be kepte undeperted. For in oure moder Crist we profit and encrese, and in mercy he reformeth us and restoreth, and by the vertu of his passion, his deth, and his uprising oneth us to our substance. Thus worketh oure moder in mercy to al his beloved children which be to him buxom and obedient. ( A Revel ation of Love 58.32–41 [307–308])

Like that of Paul and Augustine, Julian’s ordering is hierarchical; however, the doubleness will often be articulated rhetorically, as is the case in this passage, in terms of how substance and sensualite overlap one another, attempting to show how these two seeming parts work together theologically and figuratively as one to redeem humanity, as her parable of the Lord and Servant makes clear.33 As I demonstrated in my introduction, like Pauline texts (which Bernard McGinn has suggested are a primary scriptural source for Julian), the Revelation offers itself as a performative linguistic vehicle for understanding how this doubleness is yoked together.34 Denys Turner has also suggested that the discussions in the Revelation have “the character of ‘charisms’ in the Pauline sense of that word” in that “her reflections upon the revelations in the Long Text reveal that she sees them as teachings of an essentially prophetic charismatic character meant for the Church.”35 Thus Julian’s style and objective (of building up the Church) suggest rhetorical and theological ties to Pauline patterning in ways that I can

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only gesture toward here.36 Unlike either Paul or Augustine, however, Julian will invoke the figure of the maternal, speaking of the lower sensualite as that which takes part in our “moder Cryst” (making reference perhaps to what I outlined in chapter 1 as the theological idea of a “double birth,” the first corresponding to our image in God, and the other to our human temporal nature, which is associated with Christ’s second birth in time).37 Julian underscores the Trinitarian underpinnings of this doubleness so that we may perceive how temporal and fallible human beings share in the promise of becoming what they already are, that is, the divine imago within. Like Paul, Julian will focus on the generative nature of identification with Christ’s passion and resurrection, which will reform and restore the sensualite to its promised unity with divine substance. Christ becomes the model for the promise of perfection of the sensualite: “For oure substance is hole in ech person of the trinite, which is one God. And our sensualite is only in the seconde person, Crist Jhesu, in whom is the fader and the holy gost.”38 Julian stresses the dynamic nature of unity, which is not that of material substances fusing together, but rather a process of identifications and orientations of higher and lower parts (modeled by Julian through her parable of the Lord and the Servant). As Watson and Jenkins observe, the Trinity itself is also articulated as a dynamic shifting process: “In A Revelation the Trinity is always process more than state, and all three persons turn out to be implicated in the soul’s ‘being,’ its ‘kinde’ or substance, with the Son taking a special role of his own.”39 Again, like Augustine, Julian will use Christ as a focal point for demonstrating how human beings may understand and conform to the divine image, precisely because Christ offers an incarnational model that relates humanity to the Trinity. Yet Julian’s doubled humanity also reflects a Pauline understanding of sin as integral to the work of transformation and redemption of humanity through the figure of the crucifi xion, for “dying by Crist, we be lastingly kept,” allowing for Christ to work “in us.”40 Through the sensible God, humans may understand and become the promise of the divine in the sensualite. Unlike Hadewijch, Julian underscores the dying and crucified Christ, yet they both ultimately are interested in the resurrected and glorified body as it exemplifies the promise harbored in perfected humanity. One of Julian’s greatest theological concerns in relation to this doubleness involves sin. In chapter 37 of her Revelation, Julian foreshadows how the substance and sensualite (given greater attention in chapters 45–53) relate to the will through an exposition on sin. While Julian explicitly states in chapter 27 that sin has no substance, she identifies wills that pertain to each part of the soul in a manner that has recently become a focal point for controversy:41

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For in every soule that shalle be saved is a godly wille that never assented to sinne, nor never shalle. Right as there is a bestely wille in the lower party that may wille no good, right so there is a godly will in the higher party, which wille is so good that it may never wille eville, but ever good. And therefore we be that he loveth, and endlessly we do that he liketh. And this shewde oure good lorde in the holhed of love that we stande in, in his sight; yea, that he loveth us now as welle while that we be here as he shalle do when we be there before his blessed face. But for failing of love in our party, therfore is all oure traveyle. (A Revelation of Love 37.14–21 [237])

Watson and Jenkins gloss the first part of this: “just as there is a bestial will in the lower part of the soul that can will nothing good, even so there is a godly will in the higher part, a will so good that it can never will evil but always good.”42 It is at this point that Aers will take issue with Julian’s formulation of the will, claiming that “whatever Julian’s intentions may have been, her teaching about a will that is untouched by the sin performed by the sinner takes her toward the position Augustine held as a Manichee.”43 In this light, if this were the case one could read Julian’s illustration of two battling wills, as Turner characterizes it, as if “the two forms of inclination within different parts of human nature (one fallen, the other not) are actually distinct powers of the soul, battling one another as do uncorrupted good and corrupted evil. Such a reading of her teaching would, were it in fact true to Julian’s thought, reduce her theological anthropology to a form of interiorized Manichean dualism.”44 Turner clearly disagrees with this characterization, arguing that we do not have to “think of moral conflict as necessarily occurring between two distinct desires or forms of desire, but as ambiguity within one and the same structure of desire,” making all experience of desire self-conflicted given the incommensurability of a human orientation towards the divine.45 Yet this passage also permits another reading, one that would align itself with the Pauline and Augustinian paradigms I have highlighted throughout this book. If we note the difference in grammatical construction (“may will no good” paralleling “which wille is so good”), we may hear this construction in the following way: just as there is a bestial will (or desire) in the lower part of the soul (the sensualite), a will which may, if it chooses, distance itself from the good—(not necessarily willing “something” evil)—even to the extent that there is nothing good in what it wills, so too there is a godly (or goodly) will (or desire) in the higher part of human beings (in the substance) that, because of its inherent goodness in what it is, can only will good and never evil. As Anna Kelner has noted, the beastly will’s desiring “no good” is not to be conflated with an evil content; rather, this will

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“maintains the memory and meaning of the good even in its absence.”46 Julian’s formulation plays with parallel constructions and negation that perform, on a linguistic level, how doubleness is enacted in life. Even though substance and sensualite are parallel constructs—one reflecting the image of God, the other reflecting the promise of the divine in a temporal medium—the lower will may misalign itself in relation to the higher potential of the divine will, through which all human beings are promised salvation. Julian’s remedy for humanity shows that because “we be that he loveth,” in the higher part of the soul, harboring the potential for perfection from the perspective of the divine, we may “endlessly . . . do that he liketh” and conform human will to divine will prefigured within through doing. Being and doing are part of a two-fold process to become what you are “now,” as Julian says, that is, in the time of humanity, “as welle while that when we be there before his blessed face,” in the future promised face-to-face moment. Julian’s understanding of human and divine parts within each human being may be read in light of these temporal tensions, in which the promise of the substance can be grasped in and through the sensualite.47 According to Julian’s underlying logic of the “necessity of sin,” both the higher and the lower parts function together in promising unity and salvation (in the oneness of love), and work according to a Christic model of suffering and redemption.48 Julian seeks to close up and heal an open and potentially divided person through the theological work of her text and, even more significantly, in the performance and work of the passio, as it inclines itself toward divine grace. “Not yet performed,” the book pleads for a continuation of its work—but it asks for a continuation according to what has already begun in the book itself, by God’s gift and grace, that is, to what already performs in the work of the book, not as Julian’s work, but as God’s. Hence the book’s work must be continued, according to Julian (as to her syght), in her actions and in her performance postscriptum. Soul, language, vision, and embodied passio are all knit together, according to the Trinitarian promise of unity. Once again, embodiment and language are yoked together as means of understanding just how human beings may become like the Word-made-flesh. When Turner notes that “contemplatives like Julian saw themselves as poised on an eschatological cusp formed by the convergence of the ‘now’ of time and the ‘not yet’ of eternity,” we can apply this temporal tension to both the materiality of embodiment and the stylistic way of echoing the promise of the whole within the part.49 Only then can we see how embodiment itself is caught in these temporal and material tensions dramatized by the text. The text mediates a relay between the sculpting and scripting of the letter and the sense of the substance and sensualite, between inner and outer persons, between deeds and their formative effect on the soul (and vice versa). The reading of the text thus

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produces a writing, that is, the text informs embodiment so as to engender another visible and legible figure. Both Hadewijch’s and Julian’s writings aim to initiate, pedagogically, the assumption of a new and truer persona, and, as I have demonstrated, this adoptive process does not end with the text, nor should it ever end. The mystery of the promised face-to-face encounter with the imago is appealed to in an implicit or explicit future tense—and not only for theological reasons (in terms of the eternal promised futurity of the Pauline face-to-face mirroring). This implied futurity also alludes to the temporal and embodied space of what happens post-text and to an incorporation of the text’s prescriptive in terms of the reader’s “new” persona, reborn in the Pauline sense, living the inner as the promised new perfected person incarnate . Like the postscriptum of Julian’s “not yet performed,” the text anticipates (and hopes to predict) its earthly afterlife in the addressee’s promised body. As we have seen throughout this book, the imitatio imagined by Hadewijch, Marguerite, and Julian involves more than copying: mirroring entails a reflection on what one already is in one’s inner person and a becoming the promise of this figure in life. Th is transforms the very nature of a temporally bound being in that it must always be put in relation to the promise in becoming. Th is reflection of promise in the temporal body recasts the body in the frameworks of scripture, liturgy, and other written and performed works, individual as well as collective. Because reading and contemplating texts—like the 150 Psalms or the Song of Songs—structure experience and interaction with other people and texts, the interpretive process becomes a template for understanding how works reflect the divine and how one should read, understand, and feel works from the inside out, as individuals and as communal beings. Interpretation is therefore deeply connected to “feeling”; an affective response is a sign of the interiorized Logos and its proper comprehension. Rote actions or deeds, however good they may seem, might reflect a hollow shell with no substance; interpretation thus becomes a means to inform, reform, or even constitute this less accessible core. Experience of the world is structured as one experiences a text, hence interpretation—reading the outer according to an inner invisible meaning—becomes a means for the experience of inner and outer to come together in thought, affect, and practice. While Hadewijch does not intend the speakers of her Liederen to fuse with her text to the point of indistinction, but intends that the speakers fuse, like her text (as its postscriptum), with the represented object of desire, the text does mediate, appeal to, and reflect a desired fusion of inner and outer bodies as the speaker is increasingly able to understand and embody the figure to which she aspires. The imbrication in women’s mysticism, of the sensory with gloss and scripture, is therefore not so much a marker of women’s self-determined, independent, and

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“fleshy” form of devotion as it is a sign, generally speaking, of a technology of reading and interpretation. It is a symbol of what is implicit and operative in lectio divina that extends beyond the book.50 The fusion of gloss with the letter of scripture appeals to this mode of applied reading, demonstrating its translatability and interpretation into various forms and its ability to be embedded and read in more than just the materiality of the scroll or manuscript page. As scholars, when our categories for classification of medieval writings extend beyond the demarcation of gender, period, or genre and invite other ways of thinking through how reading and textuality are operative (in spiritual, moral, or social formation), we have in our hands the ability to further identify connections between texts and traditions that are just as historically specific and permit a better assessment of the literary qualities in women’s spirituality. While my argument does not claim to profess a uniformity among mystical texts, my way of reading has sought to show that embodiment as a category is troubled by the influence of the letter. This offers us a chance to refine our understanding of women’s mystical texts while linking them to broader phenomena associated with the body and the letter throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. This book offers a gesture, by no means exhaustive, indicative of a different methodological approach in which letter and body are interconnected in medieval texts through a shared Pauline and Augustinian heritage and through a poetic passion.

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Original-language source texts for chapter epigraphs will appear as headnotes following each chapter heading. Introduction Nancy, Corpus, 52. 1. Translation modified. Vis, 80, 82. I will often modify translations of Hadewijch’s writings, but will provide page numbers as references. 2. Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast, 263–264. 3. Bynum turned to Hadewijch’s Vision 7 as an illustration of the thirteenth-century passion for the Eucharist, asserting, “Thirteenth-century women seem to have concluded from their physicality an intense conviction of their ability to imitate Christ without role or gender inversion. To soar toward Christ as lover and bride, to sink into the stench and torment of the crucifi xion, to eat God, was for the woman only to give religious significance to what she already was” (“Women Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion in the Thirteenth Century,” 205). 4. See Beauvoir, The Second Sex. On Irigaray and mysticism, see “La Mystérique” in her Speculum of the Other Woman, 195–202, and “Divine Woman” in Sexes and Genealogies, 191–250. For Kristeva, see “Le bonheur des Béguines,” and The Feminine and the Sacred. Hollywood discusses these philosophers’ invocation of mysticism in Sensible Ecsta sy. 5. Irigaray, “La voie du féminin,” 161; Lacan, Encore, 76. 6. Beckwith, “Passionate Regulation,” 819. 7. Ibid., 818. 8. Hollywood, “Inside Out,” 79. 9. Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife, 29. 10. Ibid., 48. 11. Watson, “Desire for the Past,” 168.

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12. See McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, vol. 3 of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism. Peter Brown’s introduction to A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture notes that the insularity of what, merely ten years ago, had constituted “literature” has “broadened and deepened to include other kinds of writing, especially of the religious variety” (A Companion to Medieval English Literature, 1). Mary Mason’s early essay from 1980, “The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers,” is often overlooked in its early claim that women’s mystical texts corresponded with a new genre of autobiography. Citing Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe while contrasting them with Augustine and Rousseau, Mason invoked female mystical texts as counterexamples to what she saw as the male writers’ prototypical masculine pattern. 13. Poor, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book, 195. 14. See Newman’s work on Hadewijch, “The Beguine as Knight of Love: Hadewijch’s Stanzaic Poems,” in God and the Goddesses, 169–181. For other work on mysticism’s relation to literary traditions see also Albrecht Claassens’s work on Margery and others in The Power of a Woman’s Voice. 15. Watson, “The Middle English Mystics,” 540. 16. See, for example, Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh; Neville, “The Bodies of the Bride”; Beckwith, “A Very Material Mysticism”; Ayanna, “Renegotiating the Body of the Text”; McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich; and Lichtmann, “‘God fulfi lled my bodye.’” The invocation of the body for authorial power often centers on the appropriation and revalorization of the flesh. 17. Aers, “The Humanity of Christ,” 35. 18. Heldris of Cornwall, Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance. On medieval understandings of the gendered body see Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages and Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist. 19. Eric Jager has explored this figure extensively in The Book of the Heart. He notes, however, that “Greek and Latin authors almost never associate the heart with interior writing,” but that writing on the heart only emerged with Judeo-Christian culture (4, 5). His reading of the Pauline texts likewise emphasizes the non-Platonic aspect of Paul. See esp. 12–15. I will use the King James version of the Bible with occasional modifications. 20. Augustine, The Monastic Rules, 117. 21. Aune, “Anthropological Duality,” 221. There is much heated discussion on the relation of Paul to Neo- and Middle Platonism. See, for example, Hans Dieter Betz, “The Concept of the ‘Inner Human Being’ in the Anthropology of Paul”; Walter Burkert, “Towards Plato and Paul: The ‘Inner’ Human Being”; and Emma Wasserman, “The Death of the Soul in Romans 7.” For an analysis of Paul’s distinction between pneumatikos and psychikos and its relation to eso and exo anthropos in Philo see Richard Horsley, “Pneumatikos vs. Psychikos,” 288. 22. The mind (nous) is often equated with the individual soul, the psyche, the entity in which spirit ( pneuma) occasionally dwells. Pauline vocabulary is, to say the least, challenging to pin down. The language for the body is multifarious: the body can be identified as soma (body) or sarx (flesh), but also defined indirectly as eso and exo anthropos (inner and outer persons) or in relation to the kardia (heart) or suneidesis (conscience). While sarx is un-

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conditionally associated with the perishable mortal body, the soma is, appropriately, a site for both negative and positive associations, one that reflects the body’s dwelling in the temporal and material world and its potential transformation into a spiritual body. See also Col 3:4 for a similar formulation: “When Christ who is your life will appear [ phanerōthē] then you will also appear [ phanerōthēsesthe] with him in glory.” By contrast, a prophetic voice can speak in the name of the divine; that is, it can claim to truly host a voice other than its own, as can the medieval visionary claim to have received (and hosted) the words and vision of the divine. Paul does not negate the flesh or surpass it in favor of the spirit; rather, the presence of sin increases opportunities for grace and redemption. Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies conceives of the natural and the (mystical) political bodies of the king in relation to two bodies, one accorded to man by nature, the other by grace. Its model derives from the classical Christological distinction of the two natures in Christ. Th is is developed by Paul and the interpretation of Pauline texts in the later medieval concept of the corpus mysticum. See The King’s Two Bodies, 206. Paul’s linguistic and philosophical complexity has enjoyed a great deal of attention as a means for articulating a universal identity. Even though it would be too complicated to trace the possible relations between Paul, in the many ways he is read today, and medieval mystical texts, the insistence, for example, on the messianism of Paul, in Giorgio Agamben, and of a lived immanence highlights something that speaks to a non-Platonizing reading of Paul that resonates with contemporary political and philosophical stakes in the claim for a universal that is grounded in the singular. The texts of greatest significance for the elaboration of the inner senses in Origen are De principiis, Contra Celsum, In Leviticum homiliae, In Ezechielem homiliae, In Canticum Canticorum, Commentarius in Evangelium secundum Matthaeum, In Lucam, In Joannem. Origen, “Prologue to the Commentary on the Song of Songs,” in An Exhortation to Martyrdom, Prayer, and Selected Works, 222. Origen, “Prologue to the Commentary on the Song of Songs,” 221. Ibid., 222. Origen specifies, “Just as there is said to be a fleshly love [carnalis amor], which the poets also call Love according to which the person who loves sows in the flesh, so also there is a spiritual love [spiritalis amor] according to which the inner man [interior homo] when he loves sows in the Spirit (cf. Gal. 6:8). And to speak more plainly, if there is someone who still bears the image of the earthly according to the outer man [exteriorem hominem], he is led by an earthly desire and love. But the person who bears the image of the heavenly according to the inner man [interiorem hominem] is led by a heavenly desire and love (cf. 1 Cor 15:49)” (ibid., 223; In Canticum canticorum Prologus: Patrologia Graeca 13, col. 67B). Although this term is used liberally to speak of both Eastern and Western forms of monasticism, Bernard McGinn and others use the term “monastic mysticism” to speak of the kind of mysticism prevalent in monastic communities that articulate a culmination of monastic life in the language of mystical union. Sheldrake’s New Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality defines “monastic mysticism” as “essentially biblical and li-

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turgical in the senses that the monastics sought God in and through personal appropriation of the spiritual meaning of Scripture cultivated within the liturgical life of the monastic community” (455–456). Largier, “Inner Sense, Outer Senses,” 5. David Aune suggests that the difference between Hellenistic eschatology and JudeoChristian apocalyptic eschatology lies in the tendency for the former to emphasize the individual, while the latter places its emphasis on the community at large. In other words, the body that one will assume in the afterlife is a corporate, that is, collective body, often referred to in the plural. Aune argues against a purely Platonic reading of the inner man showing that the inner and outer are different but not opposing. See Aune, “Anthropological Duality,” 218. William of Saint Th ierry, The Nature and Dignity of Love, 70. “Affectus est qui generali quadam potentia et perpetua quadam virtute fi rma et stabili, mentem possidet, quam per gratiam obtinuit” (De natura et dignitate amoris: PL 184, col. 389A). Thomas Davis describes it as “a basic and elemental thrust or gravity of the soul that ought to be expressed in truly noble, generous, and beautiful desires” (The Nature and Dignity of Love, 111, n. 9). On “affectus” see Hollywood, “Song, Experience, and Book in Benedictine Monasticism,” 67ff. William of Saint Thierry, The Nature and Dignity of Love, 70–71. “Itaque quisquis ille est, suit dicit beatus Iohannes, secundum hoc quod natus est ex Deo, id est secundum interioris hominis rationem, in tantum non peccat, in quatum peccatum quod corpus mortis foris operatur, odit potius quam approbat ’semine spiritualis nativitatis, quo ex Deo natus est, eum interius conservante. . . . Immo statim fecundius et vivacius convalescit in spem boni fructus, et surgit” (De natura et dignitate amoris: PL 184, col. 389B–C). William of Saint Th ierry, The Nature and Dignity of Love, 72. “Sicut enim corpus habet suos quinque sensus, quibus animae coniungitur, vita mediante, sic et anima suos quinque sensus habet, quibus Deo coniungitur, mediante caritate” (De natura et dignitate amoris: PL 184, col. 390B–C). On this “instrumentality,” or mediating nature, see Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon 10 in Sermones de diversis/Occasional Sermons. William of Saint Th ierry, The Nature and Dignity of Love, 72. “Hic ostenditur quia per sensus corporis veterascimus, et huic saeculo conformamur: per sensum vero mentis renovamur in agnitionem Dei, in novitatem vitae, secundum voluntatem et beneplacitum Dei” (De natura et dignitate amoris: PL 184, col. 390C). See also his treatise on the physiology of the body and its relation to the soul, especially section 37, on the body as the instrument of the soul in De natura corporis et animae, 106. For a stunning Victorine work that details the “ordered love of the flesh” see Godfrey of Saint Victor, “Microcosm.” William of Saint Th ierry, The Nature and Dignity of Love, 80. “Affectus ergo caritatis Deo indissolubiliter inhaerens, et de vultu eius omnia iudicia sua colligens, ut agat vel disponat exterius, sicut voluntas Dei bona, et beneplacens, et perfecta, dictat ei interius; dulce habet in vultum illum semper intendere; et sicut in libro vitae, leges in eo sibi legere vivendi, et intelligere, illuminare fidem, roborare spem, suscitare caritatem” (De natura et dignitate amoris: PL 184, col. 394B–C).

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41. Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs IV, 85.12.208–209. “Ergo quam videris animam, relictis omnibus, Verbo votis omnibus adhaerere, Verbo vivere, Verbo se regere, de Verbo concipere quod pariat Verbo, quae possit dicere: mihi vivere Christus est et mori lucrum, puta coniugem Verboque maritatam” (Sermones super Cantica canticorum [Sancti Bernardi Opera 2, 315]). 42. Bynum, Docere verbo et exemplo, 45; Zinn, “Historia fundamentum est,” 135–158. 43. Manuscripts A and B were, according to Erik Kwakkel’s recent studies, both related to the Carthusian Herne Charterhouse, even though A’s origins may derive from a nonmonastic context. B was copied by the charterhouse for a bookseller in Brussels, Godevaert de Bloc, and then fell into the possession of the Rooklooster monastery. Manuscript C, the source of the standard edition compiled by Josef Van Mierlo, is from the (male) Bethlehem priory, near Louvain. Van Mierlo, who republished Hadewijch’s works in the midtwentieth century, mistook the C manuscript as the oldest, and so our current translated editions are all based on the later manuscript version. On the dating and contents of each manuscript see Kwakkel, “Ouderdom en genese van de veertiende-eeuwse Hadewijchhandschriften,” and Willaert, “Les Opera omnia d’une mystique brabançonne.” An additional late fourteenth-century manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, 920, which includes work by Ruusbroec, contains two of Hadewijch’s letters (6 and 10) and was once owned by the Rooklooster monastery. There is a sixteenth-century manuscript, Antwerp, UFSIA, Ruusbroecgenootschap, ms. Neerl. 385 II, which may have come from Carthusians in Zelem near Diest. An additional manuscript from ca. 1500 contains only her letters. Aside from several lines of poetic verse interspersed in her letters, Hadewijch’s poetic works comprise forty-five Liederen (formerly referred to as Strofische Gedichten, or “poems in stanzas”), between fi fteen and one hundred lines in length, and the sixteen Mengeldichten, or Rijmbrieven (“poems in couplets” or “rhyming letters,” since twelve of the sixteen are in epistolary form), which range from fi ft y to two hundred lines in length. The additional poems grouped with the Mengeldichten, numbered 17–29, are strophic, but as noted above are not in the earliest manuscript. They are considered to be composed by a different author, referred to as “Hadewijch II.” The main editions of her poetry are J. Van Mierlo Jr., SJ, Mengeldichten. For the Liederen, see the new edition of Veerle Fraeters and Frank Willaert, Hadewijch Liederen, which I cite here, but which differs in content from other editions because it is based on the earliest witness, the thirteenthcentury manuscript. Those other editions—E. Rombauts and N. de Paepe, Strofi sche Gedichten, and Werken van zuster Hadewijch I: Gedichten, and, more recently, Marieke van Baest’s edition and translation, Poetry of Hadewijch,—are based on a fourteenthcentury manuscript. The main translation of her poems which I refer to as songs, or Mengeldichten (except for strophic poems 17–29 of the Mengeldichten) is Columba Hart , Hadewijch: The Complete Works. A translation of Mengeldichten 17–29 is found in Mary Suydam, “Hadewijch of Antwerp and the Mengeldichten.” Hadewijch’s Letters have recently been reevaluated as poetic compositions that may have been sung; see Anikó Daróczi, Groet gheruchte van dien wondere. I will refer to Hadewijch’s songs as her Liederen throughout.

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44. Manuscript C includes, in this order: visions, the List of the Perfect, letters, songs, The Twofold Little Treatise (Twee-vormich tractaetken), Mengeldichten 1–16, and the newer strophic poems 17–29. 45. The language of charters in Brabant oscillates among French, Latin, and Brabant (what we commonly designate as Flemish), with a changing emphasis from Latin to French. The earliest Brabantine charter written in the vernacular is written in Old French and dates to ca. 1237, although surrounding provinces were using French for charters earlier. See Godfried Croenen, “Latin and the Vernaculars in the Charters of the Low Countries.” That Brabantine was used by the nobility is attested to in many documents “internal” to households, although the majority of these documents are in French, even in Dutch-speaking households. The majority of thirteenth-century vernacular charters in the Brabant region are in French, which can be explained by the reasoning that French was the language of diplomacy and the language of the courts. 46. McGinn, “The Changing Shape of Late Medieval Mysticism,” 201. 47. On the influences on Hadewijch, see Mommaers, Hadewijch: Writer, Beguine, Love Mystic, 58–83. On Richard of Saint Victor’s influence, see Reynaert, De Beeldspraak van Hadewijch, 147–149. 48. For the Dutch edition of the Letters, I cite Mommaers, De brieven van Hadewijch (=Brieven). “Daer af sprect Sente bernaert: Jhesus es honech inden mont” (Brieven, 118); “ Sente Bernaert XVIII. Daeraf wetic oec een lettel” (Vis, 158). 49. Mommaers, Hadewijch: Writer, Beguine, Love Mystic, 63ff. 50. “Obsculta, o fi li, praecepta magistri, et inclina aurem cordis tui” (Kardong, Benedict’s Rule: A Translation and Commentary, 1). 51. “Furthermore, when someone accepts the title of abbot, he should direct his disciples with a twofold teaching. That means he should demonstrate everything that is good and holy by his deeds more than by his words. He should teach gifted disciples the Lord’s commands by words, but he will have to personally model the divine precepts for those who are recalcitrant or naïve” (Kardong, Benedict’s Rule, 47–48). “Ergo, cum aliquis suscipit nomen abbatis, duplici debet doctrina suis praeesse discipulis, id est omnia bona et sancta factis amplius quam verbis ostendat, ut capacibus discipulis mandata Domini verbis proponere, duris corde vero et simplicioribus factis suis divina praecepta monstrare” (46). 52. Pranger, The Artificiality of Christianity, 7. 53. Fulton, “Mimetic Devotion,” 88. 54. Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, 269. Jaeger describes a further step in a life becoming text in Geoffrey of Clairvaux’s biography of Bernard, which he says moves from “charismatic presence to charismatic text.” He notes, “It is a peculiar feature of the exemplary life that it takes on literary forms, and tends to create new ones adequate to the individual in its wake. ‘Life experienced as literature’ is an interesting phenomenon” (276). 55. The influence of Augustine and Paul on the Western spiritual tradition is uncontested but perhaps has become so commonplace that its ubiquitous nature is not always self-evident. In some sense, one could say Augustine and Paul were the Freuds of their subsequent times, in that the concepts inherited from them became part of a shared cultural vocabulary.

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56. Drawing on Jaeger, Carolyn Muessig has also shown that the relation between inner and outer is reflected in Hildegard, who emphasizes the perfected outer, rather than the movement from inside to outside seen in Bernard. She writes, “For Hildegard, the perfection of her nuns would be realized in their outward comportment. In the world of her monastery, the Rupertsberg liturgy reflected a little bit of Paradise. Ritual and song acted out by her nuns created heaven on earth” (“Learning and Mentoring in the Twelft h Century,” 93). Lynda L. Coon even goes one step further, arguing for architecture as an essential component of the body since “the aesthetic body was mirrored in the sacred spaces constructed by monks” (Dark Age Bodies, 2). 57. Letter 4: “Met ordenen te houdene becommert men met vele dinghen diermen quite mocht sijn; ende dat doet reden dolen. Een gheest van goeden wille werct in binnen scoendere dan alle ordenen gheuiseren mochten. . . . In begherten van deuocien dolen alle die minschen diere yet in sijn soekende. Want men sal gode soeken ende el niet” (Brieven, 34, 36). 58. On the development of the term liber experientiae see Jager, The Book of the Heart, 60–64. 59. Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs I, 16, 27. The contexts of these terms are: Sermon 3: “Hodie legimus in libro experientiae,” and Sermon 5: “Cur enim inter corpora spirituales scrutetur sensus, quos in libro vitae et absque contradictione legit, et absque difficultate intelligit?” (Sermones super Cantica canticorum [Sancti Bernardi Opera 1, 3.1.14; 5.4.23]). 60. William of Saint Th ierry, Exposition on the Song of Songs, Cant 100, 81. “Et iam in amando Deum homo quidem est in opere, sed Deus est qui operator. Non enim Paulus, «sed gratia Dei» secum (1 Cor 15)” (Expositio altera super Cantica canticorum: PL 180, col. 508B). In describing Bernard of Clairvaux’s idea that God “creates our minds to participate in him,” Bernard McGinn explains that “the humility and the hope that are the beginning of our journey away from sin and back to God are not our own effort, but are already the work of the incarnate Word in us” (The Growth of Mysticism, 173). 61. The influence of Paul and Augustine on the Middle Ages has been looked at extensively, for example, in terms of theological doctrine, rhetorical practices (in figurative and typological reading), liturgical influences, and the way in which theology operates in mystical texts. Theological studies have constituted a subject of recent scholarship on women’s mystical texts. I am thinking specifically of the recent book by Denys Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian; Denise Nowakowski Baker’s earlier book Julian of Norwich’s Showings; and Hollywood’s meticulous The Soul as Virgin Wife. For a fuller elaboration of the theological studies of Julian, see The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, 24, n. 72.

1. Children of Promise, Children of the Flesh Augustine, City of God 15.2 (597): “Nos autem, fratres, secundum Isaac promissionis fi lii sumus” (DC, 48:455). Augustine, City of God 22.30 (1090): “Dies enim septimus etiam nos ipsi erimus” (DC, 48:865).

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1. McGinn addresses the long-standing issue concerning Augustine and his designation as a mystic in The Foundations of Mysticism, 228–262. 2. Margaret Miles highlighted the influence of Paul on the later Augustine, especially in the focus on temporality and its association with the body: “Th is dichotomy between the spiritual and all phases of bodily existence which informs Augustine’s anthropology is a contemporaneous development with his immersion in the theology of Saint Paul; it is a dichotomy which has as its characteristic image in the mature Augustine that of a long journey along a ‘darkening highway’” (Miles, Augustine on the Body, 34). 3. True to his understanding of the contingency of the literal on the figural, Augustine does not defi ne gender as a literal trait. In his reading of Paul and the divisions of the soul, he makes this distinction clear, arguing that Paul “wanted to use the distinction of sex between two human beings to signify something that must be looked for in every single human being” (Trinity 12.19 [332–333]). “Quamvis in diverso sexu duorum hominum aliquid tamen significare voluisse quod in uno homine quaereretur” (DT, 50:373). For Trinity, I cite book, chapter, and page number. 4. “Verum dico, mihi dico, quid non possim scio” (DT, 50A:532). 5. “Die luttel weet, hi mach luttel segghen: dat seghet die wise Augustinus” (Brieven, 168). 6. Duff y, “Anthropology,” 26. He continues, “The biblical category ‘flesh’ denotes for Augustine not mere sensual indulgence, a case of the inferior seducing the superior, but a fault within the mind itself. Spirit becomes carnal, a servant of the flesh, when immersed in the fleshy; flesh becomes spiritual when it serves the spiritual” (29). Allan Fitzgerald, citing a Pauline influence, credits Augustine with having dramatically changed, in his mature years, in his attitude toward the body; see Fitzgerald, “Body,” 106. 7. Harrison, “Spiritual Senses,” Augustine Through the Ages, 767. On the sources of Augustine’s inner senses see O’Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind, and “Sensus interior in Augustine, Le libero arbitrio 2.3.25–6.51.” 8. Stock, Augustine’s Inner Dialogue, 173. 9. In the context of the resurrection, Paula Fredriksen argues, “For both Paul and Augustine  .  .  . salvation involves the body. But I take Paul’s spiritual body as undergoing a transformation of substance, from flesh to something else. Augustine’s . . . moves from ‘fleshy’ flesh to ‘spiritual’ flesh, but corporeality remains” (“Vile Bodies: Paul and Augustine on the Resurrection of the Flesh,” 86). How one understands the transformation of the living flesh and body in Paul is connected to the identification with Christ: “For we who live are constantly delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made manifest [ phanerōthē] in our mortal flesh [sarki]” (2 Cor 4:10–12). Paul seeks to “crucify” the flesh and transform the body into its living likeness. But it is through the flesh that this transformation is accomplished. 10. Whatever position one takes on the issue of Augustine’s Neoplatonism in his earlier years, the body is central in his project of redemption. Margaret Miles concludes that despite the younger Augustine’s attraction to metaphysical dualism, the old Augustine “realized the inadequacy of resolving an experiential tension by metaphysical descriptions which destroy the unity of human being. Despite his own unconscious resistance and that of his culture to the revaluing of the body, Augustine has done a herculean task

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17. 18.

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of integrating the ‘stone which the builders rejected.’ The body became the cornerstone of his theology” (Augustine on the Body, 131). See also Williams, “Augustine vs. Plotinus,” and Fitzgerald, “Body.” “Nitamur igitur si possumus in hoc quoque exteriore indagare qualecumque vestigium trinitatis, non quia et ipse eodem modo sit imago Dei. Manifesta est quippe apostolica sententia quae interiorem hominem renovari in Dei agnitionem declarat secundum imaginem eius qui creavit eum cum et alio loco dicat: Et si exterior homo noster corrumpitur, sed interior renovatur de die in diem” (DT, 50:333). “Non enim maior essentia est Pater et Filius simul quam solus Pater aut solus Filius, sed tres simul illae substantiae sive personae, si ita dicendae sunt, aequales sunt singulis, quod animalis homo non percipit. Non enim potest cogitare nisi moles et spatial vel minuta vel grandia volitantibus in animo eius phantasmatis tamquam imaginibus corporum” (DT, 50:265). On the inner trinity and its relation to knowledge, see Gioia, The Theological Epistemology of Augustine’s De Trinitate. “Sed quia omnes iustos quibus nunc regnat ex fide viventibus mediator Dei et hominum homo Christus Jesus perducturus est ad speciem quam visionem dicit idem apostolus facie ad faciem” (DT, 50:49). Augustine continually reiterates this “face-to-face” encounter throughout On the Trinity, including “Faith unfeigned would be purifying their hearts in order that the one who is now being seen in a mirror might one day be seen face to face” (Trinity, 15.44 [429]; see also 1.16 [76], 1.28 [87], 1.31 [90], 2.28 [118], 3.9 and 3.10 [132], 5.1 [189], 6.12 [214], 9.1 [270], 12.22 [354], 14.4 [372], 14.23 [390], 14.25 [391], 15.13 and 15.14 [405], 15.15 [406], 15.20 and 15.21 [411], 15.40 [427], and 15.44 [429]). Augustine’s interest in what happens to the material body after resurrection is detailed in City of God. For more on the resurrected body see Nightingale, Once out of Nature and Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity. Lewis Ayres elaborates further on this participation in Christ, what Augustine calls the participatio verbi, or participation in the Word: “Augustine presents Christ’s work as providing both an exemplum for the ‘outer man’ and a sacramentum for the ‘inner man’ ” (Augustine and the Trinity, 168). Translation modified. “Sed dum peregrinamur a domino et per fidem ambulamus non per speciem, posteriora Christi, hoc est carnem, per ipsam fidem videre debemus. . . . Tanto enim certius diligimus quam videre desideramus faciem Christi quanto in posterioribus eius agnoscimus quantum nos prior dilexerit Christus . . . quia hoc in membris Christi speramus quae nos ipsi sumus quod perfectum esse in ipso tamquam in capite nostro fidei sanitate cognoscimus. Inde non vult nisi cum transierit videri posteriora sua ut in eius resurrectionem credatur” (DT, 50:119–120). On the theory of visions, see Newman, “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’?” Translation modified. “Ipsa enim natura vel substantia vel essentia vel quodlibet alio nomine appellandum est idipsum quod Deus est, quidquid illud est, corporaliter videri non potest. Per subiectam vero creaturam non solum fi lium vel spiritum sanctum sed etiam patrem corporali specie sive similitudine mortalibus sensibus significationem sui dare potuisse credendum est” (DT, 50:126).

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19. “Quem tamen nisi iam nunc diligamus, numquam videbimus. Sed quis diligit quod ignorat? Sciri enim aliquid et non diligi potest; . . . Et quid est Deum scire nisi eum mente conspicere firmeque percipere? Non enim corpus est, ut carneis oculis inquiratur” (DT, 50:275). The importance of loving without knowledge, that is, with an understanding that does not fully identify with or know its object, will be a common motif in affective spirituality of the twelft h and thirteenth centuries, articulated often in terms of the sense of taste, that is, tasting something of the divine while not consuming it entirely. The other sensoria related to the commentaries on the Song of Songs will also operate in this same register, allowing for limited understanding and experience of the divine, but without knowing it in the scholastic sense. 20. Augustine, Trinity, 274. “Quod si sunt aliqua corpora quae secari omnino et dividi nequeunt, tamen nisi partibus suis constarent corpora non essent. Pars ergo ad totum relative dicitur quia omnis pars alicuius totius pars est et totum omnibus partibus totum est. Sed quoniam et pars corpus est et totum, non tantum ista relative dicuntur, sed etiam substantialiter sunt” (DT, 50:299). 21. Sermon 117: Augustine, Essential Sermons, 198. “Et quamdiu versas ut videas, partes, vides” (Sermones: PL 38, col. 664). 22. “Per oculos enim corporis corpora videmus quia radios, qui per eos emicant et quidquid cernimus tangunt, refringere ac retorquere in ipsos non possumus nisi cum specula intuemur . . . oculis cernere non valemus; sed mente quaerimus, et si fieri potest etiam hoc mente comprehendimus” (DT, 50:296). 23. See William’s reworking of Augustine with regard to the inner and outer senses: “On the level of the bodily senses, the act of sensation consists in perceiving in the mind, through a certain mental image, a certain likeness to the thing perceived in accordance with the nature both of the sense which perceives, and of the thing in question. If what is perceived, pertains, for instance, to the sense of sight, it cannot be seen at all by him who sees, unless the visible element of it is first formed in the mind of him who sees, by the likeness of a certain image, through which he who perceives is transformed into the thing perceived. In this way, and to a much greater degree, the vision of God is brought about in the sense of love by which God is seen” (William of Saint Thierry, Exposition on the Song of Songs, 76–77). 24. CW, 97; Brieven, 168–190. 25. “Ut mens tamquam in speculo se noverit” (DT, 50:317). 26. “Gignitur ergo ex re visibili visio, sed non ex sola nisi adsit et videns. Quocirca ex visibili et vidente gignitur visio ita sane ut ex vidente sit sensus oculorum et aspicientis atque intuentis intentio. . . . Ideoque non possumus quidem dicere quod sensum gignat res visibilis; gignit tamen formam velut similitudinem suam quae fit in sensu cum aliquid videndo sentimus” (DT, 50:336). 27. “Quae utrumque coniungit magis, ut dixi, spiritalis agnoscitur” (DT, 50:345). 28. “Nam et animae in ipsis peccatis suis non nisi quamdam similitudinem Dei superba et praepostera et . . . servili libertate sectantur. Ita nec primis parentibus nostris persuaderi peccatum posset nisi diceretur: Eritis sicut dii. Non sane omne quod in creaturis aliquo modo simile est Deo etiam eius imago dicenda est, sed illa sola qua superior ipse solus est. Ea quippe de illo prorsus exprimitur inter quam et ipsum nulla interiecta natura est” (DT, 50:344).

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29. “Neque enim omnino inde gignitur quoniam aliquid aliud adhibetur corpori ut ex illo formetur, id est sensus videntis. Quocirca id amare alienari est” (DT, 50:344–345). 30. “Prius enim quam visio fieret iam erat voluntas quae formandum sensum cernendo corpori admovit, sed nondum erat placitum. Quomodo enim placeret quod nondum erat visum? Placitum autem quieta voluntas est” (DT, 50:345). 31. “Finem fortasse voluntatis et requiem possumus recte dicere visionem ad hoc dumtaxat unum (DT, 50:345). 32. “In hac igitur distributione cum incipimus ab specie corporis et pervenimus usque ad speciem quae fit in contuitu cogitantis, quattuor species reperiuntur quasi gradatim natae altera ex altera, secunda de prima, tetria de secunda, quarta de tertia. Ab specie quippe corporis quod cernitur exortiur ea quae fit in sensu cernentis, et ab hac ea quae fit in memoria; et ab haec ea quae fit in acie cogitantis. Quapropter voluntas quasi parentem cum prole ter copulat: primo speciem corporis cum ea quam gignit in corporis sensu, et ipsam rursus cum ea quae ex illa fit in memoria, atque istam quoque tertio cum ea quae ex illa paritur in cogitantis intuitu. Sed media copula quae secunda est, cum sit vicinior, non tam similis est primae quam tertiae. Visiones enim duae sunt, una sentientis, altera cogitantis. Ut autem posit esse visio cogitantis ideo fit in memoria de visione sentientis simile aliquid quo se ita convertat in cogitando acies animi, sicut se in cernendo convertit ad corpus acies oculorum. Propterea duas in hoc genere trinitates volui commendare, unam cum visio sentientis formatur ex corpore, aliam cum visio cogitantis formatur ex memoria” (DT, 50:353). 33. “Quaedam ergo cogitationes locutiones sunt cordis . . . et os” (DT, 50A:484). 34. In On the Trinity, Augustine notes that the mind can snatch something from what it inspects, “and deposit it in the memory as though swallowing it down into its stomach, and by recollection it will be able somehow to chew this in the cud and transfer what it has learnt into its stock of learning” (Trinity, 12.23[335]). “Tamen quod inde rapuerit etsi transiens mentis aspectus et quasi glutiens in ventre ita in memoria reposuerit, poterit recordando quodam modo ruminare et in disciplinam quod sic didicerit traicere” (DT, 50:377). In book 8 of Augustine’s Confessions, this parallel is initially developed: “We might say that the memory is a sort of stomach for the mind, and that joy or sadness are like sweet or bitter food. When this food is committed to the memory, it is as though it had passed into the stomach where it can remain but also lose its taste. Of course it is absurd to suppose that the memory is like the stomach, but there is some similarity nonetheless” (Confessions, 10.14 [220]). “Nimirum ergo memoria quasi venter est animi, laetitia vero atque tristitia quasi cibus dulcis et amarus: cum memoriae commendantur, quasi traiecta in ventrem recondi illic possunt, sapere non possunt. Ridiculum est haec illis similia putare, nec tamen sunt omni modo dissimilia” (Confessionum: CCSL 27:166). 35. “Oculum amoris” and “visio illa Dei” (DT, 50:78). 36. Augustine claims a rhetorical truth in his ability or knowledge to wed the gaze of spiritual contemplation with the truth of language. As I noted previously, in the epilogue of On the Trinity, he equates it as follows: “But you are unable to fi x your gaze there in order to observe this clearly and distinctly. You cannot do it, I know. I am telling the

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38.

39.

40.

41.

P 1. CHILDREN OF PROMISE, CHILDREN OF THE FLESH truth, I am telling it to myself, I know what I cannot do. However this same light has shown you those three things in yourself, in which you can recognize yourself as the image of that supreme trinity on which you are not yet capable of fi xing your eyes in contemplation” (On the Trinity, 15.50 [435]). “Sed ad hoc dilucide perspicueque cernendum non potes ibi aciem figere. Scio, non potes. Verum dico, mihi dico, quid non possim scio. Ipsa tibi tamen ostendit in te tria illa in quibus te summae ipsius quam fi xis oculis contemplari nondum vales imaginem trinitatis agnosceres” (DT, 50A:532). In other words, what Augustine can say, utter, or profess is not an epistemological claim, but a claim to recognizing something indirectly, but truly. “Iudicamus autem de corporalibus ex ratione dimensionum atque figurarum quam incommutabiliter manere mens novit” (DT, 50:357). Memory will then have a first level of conserving and distilling the physical world into representation, but it will also have the capacity of recalling something of which the body does not yet have the experience, as I noted in the introduction. Th is is what I call the “memory of God,” “the memory of the imago,” understood in the sense of the subjective and objective genitive, and in the sense of God’s recall to himself of the imago in the mystic as well as in the mystic’s memory of God. See my article “Time and Memory.” “Melior est tamen imaginatio corporis in animo quam illa species corporis in quantum haec in meliore natura est, id est in substantia vitali sicuti est animus, ita cum Deum novimus, quamvis meliores efficiamur quam eramus antequam nossemus maximeque cum eadem notitia etiam placita digneque amata verbum est fitque aliqua Dei similitudo illa notitia, tamen inferior est quia in inferiore natura est” (DT, 50:307). Giles Constable stresses the interest in the twelft h century of the relation between image and true likeness, posed by Gen 1:26, as it affects teachings on the imitatio Christi, adding that “Augustine . . . maintained that every image was a likeness, but every likeness was not an image, which incorporated some, though not necessarily all, features of its prototype, and he applied the term ‘imitation’ to image and likeness in On True Religion and On the Trinity, where he distinguished ‘image’ from ‘to the image,’ saying that only Christ was the image and equal of the Father and that man was made ‘to the image, that is, he is not made equal by parity but approaches it by a kind of similarity.’ Man is separated from God by unlikeness and approaches Him by likeness” (Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought, 166–167). Minne means: (1) remembrance or thought; (2) love (religious love, love of neighbor, Christian love, live of God and Christ, that is, caritas); (3) the object of one’s love, beloved or lover (that is, amor); (4) good understanding, friendly relations, peace, concord (that is, gratia); (5) love for what one does, affection, cordiality. See “Minne” entry in the Middelnederlands: Woordenboek en teksten. The term Minne is feminine in gender, which Hadewijch plays out in various ways, most notably in her poems in stanzas (known now as Liederen, or songs), inverting gender roles in this context and making herself the knight in pursuit of Love. The figure for Christ in her letters is, however, most often masculine. Newman has cleverly (and aptly) called this phenomenon of the play and pursuit of Minne la mystique courtoise, referring to the language of the fine amour in Hadewijch, Mechthild, and Marguerite, but this is only

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42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49.

50. 51. 52.

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one aspect of Hadewijch’s very complex and wide-ranging articulation of her mysticism, applicable mainly in the context of her poems. Why poetic language is “courtly” is addressed in chapters 2 and 3. See Newman, “La mystique courtoise: Th irteenth-Century Beguines and the Art of Love,” 137–167. “De forma in formam mutamur atque transimus de forma obscura in formam lucidam” (DT, 50A:480). “Conformes facti in hac parte non patris imaginis aut spiritis sancti sed tantummodo filii” (DT, 50A:456). “Sic enim nunc eandem imaginem portare possumus, nondum in visione sed in fide, nondum in re sed in spe” (DT, 50A:456). By “language,” I mean both words and images, that is, signs that construe meaning. I do not mean that there is something like a unified body that one would designate as “a language”; rather, the very signifying processes seem to be accompanied by the promise of a unity that can never be accounted for. McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, 248. My argument might partially remedy what McGinn sees as a sigh of despair from those who read On the Trinity: “In concluding this glance at how Augustine’s thought on the imago Dei as detailed in On the Trinity forms and integral part of his mysticism, it is worth noting the role that book 15 plays in the full presentation. Those who have strained their minds to follow some of the most difficult passages in all of Augustine’s writings are sometimes disappointed upon getting to book 15 and learning how little they have really learned: ‘The Trinity itself is one thing, the image of the Trinity in something else is another’” (McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, 248). While the two remain separate, the promise of joining the two is, I am arguing, the significant aspect of Augustine’s reading of how the Trinity operates in man. Dante, Paradiso, ll. 19–21: La commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, 4:5; Paradiso, 4. Lines 22–24 read, “O godly force, if you so lend yourself to me, that I might show the shadow of the blessed realm inscribed within my mind” (Dante, Paradiso, 4). “O divina virtù, se mi ti presti / tanto che l’ombra del beato regno / segnata nel mio capo io manifesti” (Dante, La commedia  secondo l’antica vulgata, 4:5). While this “ombra” (shadow, figure) of the blessed kingdom may not necessarily be the imago Dei, the emphasis is on the figure inscribed in the mind which foreshadows the future time of redemption. On the relation of performance to text, see Schaeffer, “The Dialectic of Orality and Literacy.” Augustine, Trinity 11.1 (303). “Et si exterior homo noster corrumpitur, sed interior renovatur de die in diem” (DT, 50:333). Augustine continues, “Therefore I do not have to be continually explaining about God’s acts of speaking in this present work. For unchanging Truth either speaks by itself, in a way we cannot explain, to the minds of rational creatures, or it speaks through a mutable creature, either to our spirit by spiritual images, or to our physical sense by physical voices.” “Nec sic loquitur angelis Deus, quo modo nos in vicem nobis vel Deo vel angelis vel ipsi angeli nobis sive per illos Deus nobis, sed ineffabili suo modo; nobis autem hic indicatur nostro modo. Dei quippe sublimior ante suum factum locutio ipsius sui facti

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55.

56.

57.

P 1. CHILDREN OF PROMISE, CHILDREN OF THE FLESH est inmutabilis ratio, quae non habet sonum strepentem atque transeuntem, sed vim sempiterne manentem et temporaliter operantem. Hac loquitur angelis sanctis, nobis autem aliter longe positis. Quando autem etiam nos aliquid talis locutionis interioribus auribus capimus, angelis propinquamus. Non itaque mihi adsidue reddenda ratio est in hoc opere de locutionibus Dei. Aut enim Veritas incommutabilis per se ipsam ineffabiliter loquitur rationalis creaturae mentibus, aut per mutabilem creaturam loquitur, sive spiritalibus imaginibus nostro spiritui sive corporalibus vocibus corporis sensui” (DC, 48:507). Augustine, City of God 15.2 (598); DC, 48:454–455. Augustine, City of God 15.2 (598). “Invenimus ergo in terrena civitate duas formas, unam suam praesentiam demonstratem, alteram caelesti civitati significandae sua praesentia servientem” (DC, 48:455). “Illa est de patre sine matre / ista de matre sine patre; / illa est sine aliquo tempore, / ista in acceptabili tempore / illa aeterna, / ista opportune: / illa sine corpore in sinu patris, / ista cum corpore quo non violata est virginitas matris: / illa sine ullo sexu, / ista sine ullo virili complexu” (Sermon 214: PL 38, cols. 1068–1069). Eugene Cunnar argues for the development of rhyme in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, “not merely for aesthetic considerations but in order to have the sequence structure, including improper rhyme, mirror the theological doctrine and liturgical context.” Cunnar ties the interest in rhyme to temporal theological concerns, arguing that “sequence writers slowly began to understand that the rhyming effects created by patterned figures of repetition could correspond with the unique linear nature of Christian history present in the liturgy, and through that correspondence convey the strong theme of repetition and recurrence in salvific history to the listener” (“Typological Rhyme in a Sequence by Adam of Saint Victor,” 402, 399). “Þæt cild is tua acenned. he is acenned of þam fæder on heofonum, buton ælcere meder. and eft þa ða he man gewearð. þa wæs he acenned of þam clænan mædene marian, buton ælcum eorðlicum fæder” (Ælfric, “De initio creaturae,” in Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, 1st ser., 187, ll. 241–244). In his homily on the nativity of Christ we read, “How is man born twice? Each man is born fleshily of a father and a mother. But he is not born as God’s child unless he is born of the spiritual mother of the bride of Christ. Just as he himself says ‘Except for he who has grown from of water and of the holy spirit, he may not go into God’s kingdom.’” “Hu bið se mann tuwa acenned? Ælc man bið acenned lichamlice of fæder and of meder. ac he ne bið na godes / bearn buton he beo eft acenned of þære gastlican meder of cristes bryde. swa swa he sylf cwæð; Buton gehwa beo geedcenned of wætere and of ðan halgan gaste. ne mæg he faran into godes rice” (Ælfric, “De natale Domini,” in Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, 2nd ser., 6, ll. 104–109). Hilary of Poitiers, In Matthaeum 1.2: PL 9, cols. 920–921. At col. 921A: “Nullus error esse poterit scientibus non eam solum esse Domino nostro Jesu Christo originem, quae coepit ex Maria; sed in procreatione corporea, nativitatis aeternae significantiam comprehendi.” He is also drawing from John 3:1–8 when he exclaims in a hymn, “O Christ, for us the twice-born God! / Born once, from God unborn; Born twice, when the childbearing Virgin / Brought out into the world, / Embodied and still God!” (“Bis nobis

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59. 60.

61. 62.

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genite dues, / Christe! Dum innato nasceris a Deo / vel dum corporeum et Deum / mundo te genuit virgo puerpera”) (S. Hilarii episcopi Pictaviensis Opera, 4: Hymni; CSEL 65:209). See also John Chrysostom’s second homily on Matthew, which speaks of the two-fold birth. “Tuwa we beoð on þysum life acennede: seo forme acennednys is flæsclic of fæder and of meder seo oþer acennednys is gastlic. Þonne we beoð geedcynnede on þam halgan fulluhte on þam us beoð ealle synna forgyfene þurh þæs halgan gastes gife; Seo þridde acennednys. bið on þam gemænelicum æriste, on þam beoð ure lichaman geedcynnede to unbrosniendlicum lichaman” (Ælfric, Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, 1st ser., 405, ll. 157–164). Malcolm Godden does not recognize any clear derivation, although Michael Lapidge cites a pseudoOrigen known by Ælfric in another homily; see Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library, 263. Tauler, Predigten, 13. “Sed attende in spirituali matrimonio duo esse genera pariendi, et ex hoc etiam diversas soboles, sed non adversas, cum sanctae matres aut praedicando, animas, aut meditando, intelligentias pariunt spirituales. In hoc ultimo genere interdum exceditur, et seceditur etiam a corporeis sensibus, ut sese non sentiat quae Verbum sentit. Hoc fit, cum mens ineffabili Verbi illecta dulcedine, quodammodo se sibi furatur, immo rapitur atque elabitur a seipsa, ut Verbo fruatur. Aliter sane afficitur mens fructificans Verbo, aliter fruens Verbo: illic sollicitat necessitas proximi, hic invitat suavitas Verbi. Et quidem laeta in prole mater, sed in amplexibus sponsa laetior. Cara pignora fi liorum; sed oscula plus delectant. Bonum est salvare multos; excedere autem et cum Verbo esse, multo iucundius. At quando hoc, aut quamdiu hoc? Dulce commercium; sed breve momentum, et experimentum rarum! Hoc est quod supra, post alia, memini me dixisse, quaerere utique animam Verbum, quo fruatur ad iucunditatem” (Sermones super Cantica canticorum [Sancti Bernardi Opera 2, 315–316]). Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 87. Ibid., 85. Bynum refers to the inner as the soul, the self, and the inner man. Bynum’s critical point is the emphasis on patterning and group formation in Cistercian spirituality in its evocation of inner and outer. In this particular chapter, “Did the Twelft h Century Discover the Individual?,” she counters the emphasis in the early eighties on the “discovery” of the individual and the development of individuality in the twelft h century, highlighting the way the inner is linked to an overarching concern of belonging to and defi ning groups. Giles Constable articulates a similar thought: “In the interiorization of virtue, in the stress on inner responsibility and a direct relation to God, and in the consecration of the way of life of every faithful Christian lay in the essence of what has been called the individualism of the twelft h century, which may be better described as a personalism, since it involved a sense of the importance of the inner persona rather than a view of society, in modern terms, made up of distinct units marked by self-awareness of their differences from other people” (The Reformation of the Twelfth Century, 293). “Et quoniam quantumcumque se extenderit in id quod aeternum est tanto magis inde formatur ad imaginem Dei” (DT, 50:365). “Quisquis igitur potest intellegere verbum non solum antequam sonet, verum etiam antequam sonorum eius imagines cogitatione volvantur, hoc enim est quod ad nullam

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66. 67.

68.

69.

70. 71. 72 .

73. 74.

P 1. CHILDREN OF PROMISE, CHILDREN OF THE FLESH pertinet linguam, earum scilicet quae linguae appellantur gentium quarum nostra Latina est;), quisquis, inquam, hoc intellegere potest iam potest videre per hoc speculum atque in hoc aenigmate aliquam verbi illius similitudinem de quo dictum est: In principio erat verbum, et verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat verbum” (DT, 50A:485). Augustine, City of God 18.1 (761): “God’s city lives in this world’s city, as far as its human element is concerned; but it lives there as an alien sojourner” (“De civitatum duarum, quarum Dei una, saeculi huius est altera, in qua est, quantum ad hominum genus pertinet, etiam ista peregrina” [DC, 48:592]). On the inner word see Gerard Watson, “Saint Augustine and the Inner Word.” “Proinde verbum quod foris sonat signum est verbi quod intus lucet cui magis verbi competit nomen. Ita enim verbum nostrum vox quodam modo corporis fit assumendo eam in qua manifestetur sensibus hominum sicut verbum Dei caro factum est, assumendo eam in qua et ipsum manifestaretur sensibus hominum. Et sicut verbum nostrum fit vox nec mutatur in vocem, ita Verbum Dei caro quidem factum est, sed absit ut mutaretur in carnem. Assumendo quippe illam, non in eam se consumendo, et hoc nostrum vox fit et illud caro factum est” (DT, 50A:486–487). See Elena Lombardi’s analysis on this and other passages in Augustine, in The Syntax of Desire, 60ff. In her study of Augustine’s early dialogues, Catherine Conybeare notes, “At the moment when Augustine is beginning to reflect seriously on the implications of Christ’s incarnation for his own life, he also brings into the foreground, in the person of his mother, a reminder of his own incarnation. We can expect this to produce a certain emphasis on the embodied self; but more prominently in these dialogues it brings an emphasis on the embodied nature of language” (The Irrational Augustine, 200). Conybeare, however, turns to Kristeva and semiotics, whereas I focus on the promised and contingent nature of embodiment. I do not mean to revive the adoptionist heresy and imply that, for Augustine, there are two natures that are not united in Christ’s humanity; rather, I understand Augustine as saying that the flesh is not divinized, rather it is fully human and fully divine, both at the same time. de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, 2: The Four Senses of Scripture, 139. McGinn highlights how lectio and meditatio become separate moments in the eleventh century (The Growth of Mysticism, 385). “Quapropter qui cupit ad qualemcumque similitudinem Verbi Dei quamvis per multa dissimilem pervenire. . . . Ut ad illud perveniatur hominis verbum, per cuius qualemcumque similitudinem sicut in aenigmate videatur utcumque Dei Verbum” (DT, 50A:487). Beckwith, Christ’s Body, 47, 50. As I have emphasized in the introduction, the resurrected body, for Paul, is enacted in a now-time. Paul is interested in the way in which human beings promise likeness to the resurrected Christ in the present through the transformed materiality of the body itself. Stephen Duff y articulates this in slightly different terms: “Like Paul, whose spirit/flesh distinction is a moral and not a metaphysical distinction, Augustine asserts a radical moral conflict within human beings, not a clash of opposing, independent substances” (“Anthropology,” 29, 30).

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75. “Iam vero animae reditus, conversio ejus ad Verbum, reformandae per ipsum, conformandae ipsi. In quo? In caritate. Ait enim: Estote imitatores Dei, sicut filii carissimi; et ambulate in dilectione, sicut et Christus dilexit vos [Ephes 5:1, 2]. Talis conformitas maritat animam Verbo, cum cui videlicet similis est per naturam, similem nihilominus ipsi se exhibet per voluntatem, diligens sicut dilecta est. Ergo si perfecte diligit, nupsit. Quid hac conformitate iucundius? quid optabilius caritate, qua fit ut, humano magisterio non contenta, per temet, o anima, fiducialiter accedas ad Verbum, Verbo constanter inhaereas, Verbum familiariter percuncteris, consultesque de omni re, quantum intellectu capax, tantum audax desiderio? Vere spiritualis sanctique connubii contractus est iste. Parum dixi, contractus: complexus est. Complexus plane, ubi idem velle, et nolle idem, unum facit spiritum de duobus” (Sermones super Cantica canticorum [Sancti Bernardi Opera 2, 209]). 76. William of Saint Th ierry, Exposition on the Song of Songs, 18. 77. McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism, 155. 78. Hugh of Saint Victor, De contemplatione et ejus speciebus/Contemplation et ses espèces, 47. 79. The Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor, 132. “Prima lectio intelligentiam dat, secunda meditatio consilium praestat, tertia oratio petit, quarta operatio quaerit, quinta contemplatio invenit” (Eruditio didascalia: PL 176, col. 797B). 80. Harkins, Reading and the Work of Restoration, 12. Ivan Illich argues that Hugh “teaches how sacred books ‘ought to be read by the man who seeks in them the correction of his morals and a form of living.’ With his novices Hugh has in mind their vocation, namely, what they will one day teach others by the example of their forma vivendi” (In the Vineyard of the Text, 79). 81. Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text, 45–46. 82. “Lectio enim quasi fundamentum prima occurrit, et data materialis mittit nos ad meditationem. Meditatio quid appetendum sit diligentius inquirit, et quasi effodiens thesaurum invenit et ostendit; sed cum per se obtinere non valeat, mittit nos ad orationem. Oratio se totis viribus ad Deum erigens, impetrat thesaurum desiderabilem, contemplationis suavitatem. Haec adveniens praedictorum trium laborem remunerat, dum coelestis rore dulcedinis animam sitientem inebriat” (Guigo II, Scala claustrialum, 106–108). 83. Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs I, 11.8.75–76. “Haec meditamini, in his versamini. Talibus odoramentis refovete viscera vestra. . . . Quae dicta sunt de aliis tenete memoria, probate vita” (Sancti Bernardi Opera 1, 59). 84. Worthen, “Interpreting Scripture for the Love of God,” 66. 85. “Opus autem esse non potest nisi praecedat verbum sicut Verbum Dei potuit esse nulla exsistente creatura; creatura vero nulla esse posset nisi per ipsum per quod facta sunt omnia” (DT, 50A:489). 86. Cunnar, “Typological Rhyme in a Sequence by Adam of Saint Victor,” 407. See Margot Fassler’s Gothic Song for an analysis of the Victorine sequence in the context of Victorine theology and the Augustinian canons’ way of life. 87. Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs I, 14.8.104. “Quid facit oleum in vasis, si non sentias et in membris? Quid tibi prodest pium Salvatoris nomen lectitare in libris, nec habere pietatem in moribus? Oleum est; eff unde, et senties virtutem ejus, quae triplex est” (Sermones super Cantica canticorum [Sancti Bernardi Opera 1, 81]).

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88. “Sed si eum quem videt humano visu spiritali caritate diligeret, videret Deum qui est ipsa caritas visu interiore quo videri potest” (DT, 50:288). 89. “Quid est quod accendimur in dilectione Pauli apostoli cum ista legimus nisi quod credimus eum ita vixisse? Vivendum tamen sic esse dei ministris non de aliquibus auditum credimus sed intus apud nos, vel potius supra nos in ipsa veritate conspicimus” (DT, 50:289). 90. “Et nisi hanc formam quam semper stabilem atque incommutabilem cernimus praecipue diligeremus, non ideo diligeremus illum quia eius vitam cum in carne viveret huic formae coaptatam et congruentem fuisse fide retinemus” (DT, 50:290). 91. “Quid est autem dilectio vel caritas quam tantopere scriptura divina laudat et praedicat nisi amor boni? Amor autem alicuius amantis est, et amore aliquid amatur. Ecce tria sunt, amans et quod amatur et amor. Quid est ergo amor nisi quaedam vita duo aliqua copulans vel copulari appetens, amantem scilicet et quod amatur? Et hoc etiam in extremis carnalibusque amoribus ita est. Sed ut aliquid purius et liquidius hauriamus calcata carne ascendamus ad animum. Quid amat animus in amico nisi animum? Et illic igitur tria sunt, amans et quod amatur et amor” (DT, 50:290). 92. William of Saint Th ierry, Exposition on the Song of Songs, 10. “Sensus autem spiritualis hic est. Conversa ad Deum anima, et verbo Dei maritanda, primo praevenientis gratiae divitias intelligere perdocetur, et permittitur gustare quoniam suavis est Dominus: postmodum vero in domum conscientiae suae remittitur erudienda, castificanda in obedientia caritatis, et perfecte mundanda a vitiis, et perornanda virtutibus, ut ad spiritualem gratiam pietatis admittit, et affectum virtutum, qui sponsi thalamus est, digna habeatur” (Expositio altera super Cantica canticorum: PL 180, col. 477A–B). Hadewijch will reiterate this in Letter 10; after describing the example of the bride in the Song of Songs who must preserve the good that she receives from the Bridegroom, she extends the analogy to the role of a pure conscience: “We therefore should continually increase our grace with desire and wisdom, and carefully cultivate our field, rooting out weeds and sowing virtues; and we should build the house of a pure conscience, in which we may worthily receive our Beloved” (CW, 68; Brieven, 80). 93. Green, Women Readers in the Middle Ages. See also Simons “‘Staining the Speech of Th ings Divine.’” 94. Astell, Eating Beauty, 21. 95. “Verum nos vivimus quidem post corpus; sed ad ea quibus beate vivitur, nullus nobis accessus patet, nisi per corpus. Senserat hoc qui dicebat: Invisibilia Dei, per ea quae facta sunt, intellecta conspiciuntur [Rom 1:20]. Ipsa siquidem quae facta sunt, id est corporalia et visibilia ista, nonnisi per corporis instrumentum sensa, in nostram notitiam veniunt. Habet ergo necessarium corpus spiritualis creatura quae nos sumus, sine quo nimirum nequaquam illam scientiam assequitur, quam solam accepit gradum ad ea, de quorum fit cognitione beata” (Sermones super Cantica canticorum [Sancti Bernardi Opera 1, 21–22]).

2. The Mystic’s Two Bodies Hadewijch, Vision 8: “Ende hi seide: Kere weder in dine materie ende laet bloeyen dine werke” (Vis, 90).

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1. Visions are by nature understood as eliding the control or agency of the subject who hosts the vision. Concerning the interpretation of scripture, Hollywood explains: “In the twelft h and thirteenth centuries we find the argument that if God chose to give women visions, to bestow prophecies on them, or to render himself one with them, then women might also be permitted—indeed even be called on—to speak and write of these things. As a result, women’s lived experience of Christian truth became one of the primary means through which they were empowered to speak publicly, to teach, and to write. For women, then, the experiential aspect of the mystical is necessarily distinct from its exegetical base. Rather than arguing that mystical contemplation came to them through their interpretation of scripture, many medieval women mystics claimed that they came to understand scripture through their visionary and mystical experience” (“Mysticism and Mystics,” 596). 2. On women, mysticism, and authority, see Hollywood, “‘Who Does She Th ink She Is?’” 3. Since the vision is given by divine grace, the visionary might be allowed to teach from it within her immediate community. McGinn writes: “About 1290 the Paris master Henry of Ghent, disputing the question ‘Whether a woman can be a doctor of theology?,’ distinguished between teaching ex officio (that is, by ecclesiastical approbation) and teaching ex beneficio (that is, from grace). Women were excluded from the former, but “speaking about teaching from divine favor and the fervor of charity, it is well allowed for a woman to teach just like anyone else, if she possesses sound doctrine” (The Flowering of Mysticism, 21). 4. While the Augustinian understanding of hierarchies of vision is slightly modified over the course of the Middle Ages, the general distinction between inner and outer persons and the former’s link to the mind or soul is the basis for a medieval interpretation that emphasizes the dyadic structure of inner and outer. Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram makes distinctions among the kinds visions, noting the difference between the visio intellectualis, a vision unmediated by images; the visio spiritualis, in which one sees the disembodied image of an object perceived; and the visio corporalis, which entails the direct vision of bodies. True to Augustine’s belief in an incorporeal God, the first is of highest value and involves a direct “perception” by the mind. The soul’s sense faculty in the inner person is related to the second form of vision, spiritual vision. In the twelft h and thirteenth centuries, the emphasis on spiritual vision will permit some, like the Victorines, to shift the hierarchy from a tripartite structure to a dyadic structure that merely emphasizes inner spiritual vision, as opposed to outer vision. Hadewijch, however, still seems to work with a tripartite understanding of visions, since in Vision 6, when she falls out of her spirit, she is engulfed in unity and in a higher “plane,” so to speak, “engulfed and lost, without any comprehension of other knowledge, or sight, or spiritual understanding, except to be one with him and to have fruition of this union” (CW, 279). For Hadewijch, pure intellectual unity seems to be the highest form of vision, yet paradoxically still must be enacted through her person, as a form of believing in and attesting to the divine in the way one lives. 5. “Heldegaert die al de visione sach” (Vis, 160). 6. Worthen, “Interpreting Scripture for the Love of God,” 59.

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7. McGinn raises this issue in connection with Hadewijch’s Vision 7 (“The Changing Shape of Late Medieval Mysticism,” 197). 8. See Petroff, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, 28–30. 9. Elizabeth Robertson argues for reading practices in the Ancrene Wisse that rely on negative assumptions about the flesh but which appeal to what she calls a “materialist immanence” in which women participate in an incarnational mode of thought; see Robertson, “‘Th is Living Hand.’” For more on the relation between literacy and mysticism see Bartlett, “Miraculous Literacy and Textual Communities in Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias,” and Uhlman, “The Comfort of Voice, the Solace of Script.” On “reading” a picture and literacy, see Camille, “Seeing and Reading.” 10. Letter 22: “Then anyone whom—yes with the earthly man—God elevates with himself, he shall draw most deeply within himself and have fruition of him in nonelevation. O Deus! What a marvel takes place then—when such great dissimilarity attains evenness and becomes wholly one without elevation” (CW, 95–96). “Dien dan god met hem seluen verhoghet, Ja sonder den ertschen man, dien sal hi diepst in hem trecken ende sijns ghebruken in onuerhauenheiden. Ay deus, wat wonder ghesciet dan daer, Daer groet onghelijc effene ende al een wert sonder verheffen” (Brieven, 172). Mengeldicht 3, ll. 97–108: “No one can content [God] / so long as he bears the image of the earthly man. / If we feel something, we call it the divine touch / And we lose reason, and wish to lean on this feeling, / And fancy we are one with what we love. / Thus we upset the game before we win it. / But he who rather wears the earthly man as a garment / Considers what is owed to reason, / Which is his rule of life and teaches him the works / By which he can turn from himself to Love, / And how he can keep Love / And how with Love he repays Love” (CW, 324). “Want nieman hem genoech gedoen en can / Die draghet die ymagie vanden erdschen man. / Ghevoelen wij iet, wij werden gherenen / Ende verliesen redenne ende willenre op lenen / Ende wanen een sijn met dat wij minnen. / Dus breken wij tspel eert wijt ghewinnen. / Die ane dreghet den erdschen man / Besie die scout der redennen an, / Die sine reghele es, ende die hem leert / Die werke die men ter minnen keert, / Ende hoe men minne mach behouden, / Ende waer met minne hevet minnen vergouden” (Mgdt, 23). 11. Hadewijch explicitly names the inner senses as such (die inneghe sinne) in Lied 25, l. 40 (not translated in Hart [CW, 197] but is accurately rendered in Van Baest’s translation [POH, 181]); Lied 42, l. 28 (CW, 249; POH, 274); Letter 22, ll. 17–18 (CW, 94). Although, as Reynaert notes, Hadewijch theorizes the “inner senses” as does William of Saint Th ierry (Reynaert, De Beldspraak van Hadewijch, 189), most “theories” are enacted and implicit throughout Hadewijch’s writings, making this a moot point. In Vision 8 Christ refers to the inner and outer ways Hadewijch has known divinity: “Now you have tasted me and received me outwardly and inwardly [van buten and van binnen], and you have understood that the ways of union wholly begin in me” (CW, 284; Vis, 88). 12. Vis, 32, 58, 60. 13. Citing Gordon Rudy, for example, McGinn comments how taste and touch, in Hadewijch, “imply an immediacy of contact, a reciprocity of action between lover and beloved,” and are favored modalities of her mysticism (“The Changing Shape of Late Medieval Mystics,”

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14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

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199); see Rudy, The Mystical Language of Sensation in the Later Middle Ages. As I will argue further on, taste connotes an understanding that unites inner and outer persons, and, as Andrew Louth has shown in relation to the ictu cordis of Augustine, touch is transitory futural as it provides a “foretaste of the joys of heaven” in drawing the senses inward (The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, 137). On taste, for example, Pierre Adnès warns us that “ces métaphores et d’autres semblables, seront recueillies, commentées, développées par les auteurs spirituals et mystiques. Mais l’imprécision, dont soufre parfois leur language, ne permet pas toujours de dire à première vue ce qu’ils entendent exactement par le mot goût. Un examen attentive montre cependant qu’on peut répartir sommairement les textes en deux grands groupes: ceux qui font du gout un sens spirituel, intérieur à l’âme, grâce auquel celle-ci appréhenderait et expérimenterait les réalités surnaturelles selon un mode de connaître analogue à la sensation gustative fournie par le sens physique du même nom, et ceux qui, d’une manière plus vague, parlent de goûts spirituels pour exprimer le caractère agréable, délectable de certains phénomènes d’ordre cognitivo-affectif, qui apparaissent dans l’oraison ou le cours de la vie spirituelle” (“Goût spirituel,” 627–628). On the use of inner faculties and their relation to the inner senses, see also Reynaert, De Beeldspraak van Hadewijch, 189–229. Hadewijch’s Vision 11 illustrates her love of Augustine and his function as a model for living in love. In this vision she experiences union (in the form of two eagles, one of which is her) with the saint, despite her only wanting union with God; her List of the Perfect gives him a prominent position and demonstrates that she did know something of his life, most likely through a knowledge of his Confessions. On Hadewijch’s influences see Mommaers and Dutton, Hadewijch and Willaert, “Hadewijch en Maria Magdalena.” For the List of the Perfect, see Vis, 150–262; and “List of the Perfect by Hadewijch of Antwerp,” 277–287. Letter 22 (translation modified). “Die luttel weet, hi mach luttel segghen: dat seghet die wise Augustinus. Alsoe doen ic oec, wet god; vele gheloue ich ende hope van gode. Mer mijn weten van gode es cleine: een cleyne gheraestel maghic van hem gheraden; Want men mach gode niet tonen met menschen sinnen” (Brieven, 168). Letter 22 (translation modified). “Mer die metter zielen gherenen ware van gode, hi soudere yet af moghen toenen den ghenen diet metter zielen verstonden. Verlichte redene toent den inneghen sinnen een lettel van gode, Daer si bi moghen weten dat god es ene eyselike ende ene ouervreselike suete nature ane te sine van wondere, Ende dat hi alle dinc es te allen Ende in allen gheheel” (Brieven, 168). On touch ( ghereinen), see my article, “Hadewijch d’Anvers: Le secret de la touche,” and Suydam, “The Touch of Satisfaction.” Using language borrowed from William of Saint Th ierry’s Exposition on the Song of Songs and Hugh of Saint Victor’s On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, Hadewijch will, in Vision 8, prioritize the “eye” of Love over the “eye” of reason—as Hugh will speak of three eyes of humanity (physical, intellectual, and contemplative)—and emphasizes the need to repair the two “eyes” of reason and contemplation. See Hugh of Saint Victor, De sacramentis 1.10.2: PL 176, cols. 329C–330A. As with Augustine, for these theologians, all is ultimately united by Love, by loving love itself.

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19. Vision 14; “Daer ic toe ghecoren was, dat ic mensche ende God in eenre const smaken soude, dat ni mensche doen en mochte, hi ne ware al alse God ende altemale was die onse minne es” (Vis, 148). 20. “Daer si bi moghen weten dat god es ene eyselike ende ene ouervreselike suete nature ane te siene van wondere” (Brieven, 168). 21. Willaert argues that the fourteenth-century compiler of manuscript C seems to have placed an even greater emphasis on her visions by putting them at the front of the manuscript: “À mon avis, la place de marque des Visions dans ce manuscrit visait justement à souligner le fait que ses paroles ont été inspirées et autorisées par Dieu lui-même. . . . Nous ne savons pas à quelle époque remonte l’ordre de succession dans ce manuscrit, mais il ne me paraît pas impossible qu’en donnant aux Visions une place de choix et en mettant en exergue le statut visionnaire de l’auteur, on ait voulu souligner l’orthodoxie, toujours sujette à caution au XIVe siècle, de ces textes mystiques” (“Les Opera Omnia d’une mystique brabançonne,” 343–344). 22. See Fraeters, “Gender and Genre”; Fraeters, “Visionen als literaire mystagogie”; and Mommaers, “Hadewijch: Tasting Man and God in One Knowledge.” 23. See Mommaers, The Riddle of Christian Mystical Experience on this emphasis. 24 . “Kere weder in dine materie ende laet bloeyen dine werke” (Vis, 90). According to the Middelnederlands: Woordenboek, the term kimp(e), or kemp(e) is associated with the Latinate terms meaning “fi ghter,” “warrior,” and “boxer”: “kimp, vetus kamp, certamen; kimp vetus kamper, pugil; kimpen vetus kampen, luctari, certare.” It is related to the Middle High German kempfe, and the Old High German chempio. Hadewijch’s use of this term further associates the vision with Rom 8:37–39: “Sicut scriptum est qui propter te mortificamur tota die aestimati. Sumus ut oves occisionis. Sed in his omnibus superamus propter eum qui dilexit nos. Certus sum enim quia neque mors, neque vita, neque angeli, neque principatus, neque instantia, neque futura, neque fortitudines, neque altitudo, neque profundum, neque creatura alia poterit nos separare a caritate Dei, quae est in Christo Iesu Domino nostro” (my emphasis) (“As it is written: ‘For your sake, we are put to death all day long. We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. But in all these things we overcome [conquer], through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor might, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is Christ Jesus our Lord’ ”). When we read Hadewijch’s Visions 7 and 8 as one vision, the theme of overcoming all divisions through the love of Christ more clearly ties the two together. The  kimpe could be the sensuous soul, represented in bodily form. For more on the “rätselhafte Figur des ‘kimpe,’” see Gerald Hofmann, Hadewijch. Das Buch der Visionen, 2: Kommentar, 130ff. 25. Vis, 76. See also Vision 11, when she returns “poor and miserable” to herself (CW, 290; Vis, 104). 26. “Een waren sonder differentie” (Vis, 82). 27. On beguines’ access to the written word see Simons, “‘Staining the Speech of Th ings Divine’,” and de Hemptinne, “Reading, Writing, and Devotional Practices.”

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28. “Ic was in Nativitate Beate Marie te mettenen ende na die III lessen wart mi vertoent in ene geeste een lettel wonders” (Vis, 92). 29. On the issue of authorship and Hildegard’s Vita see Newman, “Hildegard and Her Hagiographers.” 30. “Life of Hildegard,” 179, 159. “Subsequenti demum tempore mysticam et mirificam visionem vidi, ita quod omnia viscera mea concussa sunt,” and “Tunc in eadem visione magna pressura dolorum coacta sum palam manifestare que videram et audieram” (Vita Sanctae Hildegardis, cols. 116B, 103C). 31. “Sed ego, quamius haec viderem et audirem, tamen propter dubietatem et malam opinionem et propter diversitatem verborum hominum, tamdiu non in pertinacia, sed in humilitatis officio scribere recusavi, quousque in lectum aegritudinus flagello Dei depressa caderem; ita quod tandem multis infi rmitibus compulsa . . . manus ad scribendum apposui. . . . Et iterum audivi vocem de caelo mihi dicentem: ‘Clama ergo et scribe sic’” (Hildegardis Bigensis scivias, 5–6). 32. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture. My reading of the body differs, however, from Holsinger’s in that I associate the body not only with the outer flesh but with the inner body and distinguish between the two. 33. Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, 160. “Vivit et non vivit, cinerosa sentit et non sentit, ac [et] miracula Dei non per se, sed per illa tacta profert, quemadmodum chorda, per cytharedam tacta, sonum non per se, sed per tactum illius reddit” (Hildegard von Bingen, Liber vitae meritorum 6, 45:291–292). 34. Mark Amsler argues that the Ancrene Wisse likewise uses the body as a means for what he calls “affective literacy.” He reads the focus on the kiss as a means and pivot for interior experience: “While these somatic and affective experiences are located in or on the body as part of corporeal presence, they are authorized as literate technologies for the soul or heart. . . . The senses employed in reading link the body with the soul, thus inhabiting a liminal position between the inner and outer worlds.” In his astute reading of the Amiens book of hours, he concludes, “Affective reading, then, is marked as a trace on the skin, in and out of time and on/in the book. Traces of such reading always confront readers with prior acts which transmute textuality but only partially determine future readings” (“Affective Literacy,” 89, 97). 35. The progression from lectio to meditatio, oratio, operatio, and contemplatio common to Cistercians connotes a gradual evolution, yet the “progress” is often circular for the mystic herself, where the vision informs the sense of the outer and the outer perfection reforms the inner. While the vision clearly happens before the mystic understands it and is framed as an occasion for contemplatio, it is part operatio, and also part meditatio, as it performs an exegesis of what it sees. 36. Translation modified. “Ic sach gode god ende menche mensche. Ende doe en wondered mi niet, dat god god was, ended at de mensche mensche was. Doen saghic gode mensche, Ende ic sach den mensche godlec. Doen en wonderde mi niet dattie mensche verweent was met gode” (Brieven, 230). 37. Th is emphasis on space and place gives mystical texts an interesting relation to medieval romances, especially regarding the common figure of the orchard or grove of trees that

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39.

40.

41. 42.

43.

44.

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mystics like Hadewijch encounter at the beginning of their visions, and the felicitous ending in which she sees a robe adorned with perfect virtues that accompany the lover to the beloved. The final lines of her visions are testimony to her having achieved victory and surmounted the obstacles presented to her in spiritual tests, “And since you are so courageous, and since you never yield, you are deemed the most courageous, and it is right that you know me perfectly” (CW, 305) (“Ende want due coene, dus coene best, ende dus niet ne bughes, soe heeti coenste, ende soe eest recht dattu mi tevollen kins” [Vis, 148]). What the masculine figure encounters allegorically through fight and physical combat, the feminine mystic encounters allegorically through visions. The mystic is involved in spiritual combat of sorts, like the Cistercians, who are the novi milites Christi, especially as illustrated in the Citeaux Moralia in Job. “Doe ic Onsen Here ontfaen hadde, doe ontfic hi mi te heme, soe dat hi mi opnam alle mine sinne buten alle ghedinkenesse van vreemden zaken om sijns te ghebrukene in enecheden. Ende ic wart ghevoert alse in enen beemt, in een pleyn dat hiet ‘de wijtheit der volcomenre doechde’” (Vis, 32). See, for example the Middle Dutch Limburg Sermons, wherein passages of Hadewijch’s letters appear throughout. Scheepsma argues for their using the same source text. For a rich discussion of beguine communities, the manuscripts of Hadewijch (among others), and the spirituality of the Low Countries, see Scheepsma, The Limburg Sermons, 56–100. “Ende ic wart op mine knien, ende mijn herte gheberde vreseleke dat enechleke te anebedene” (Vis, 80). Frank Willaert reminds us that the posture of prayer “ties in with a belief that goes back to Augustine, according to which an appropriate posture makes the affectus of the heart flare up higher” (“Margaret’s Booklets,” 109 and n. 26). Fraeters, “Handing on Wisdom,” 161. Summit continues, “Indeed in many instances devotional reading is conceived as a form of writing: thus the late fourteenth-century English Book to a Mother constructs its female addressee, ‘thou maist lerne aftir thi samplerie [exemplar] to write a feir trewe bok,’ by which it imagines that the reader herself will become a fresh ‘book’ in which she herself can ‘write withinne and withoute’ the lessons of humility, poverty, and chastity” (“Women and Authorship,” 104). Translation modified. “Lumen igitur quod video locale non est, sed nube que solem portat multo [et multo] lucidus, nec altitudinem, nec longitudinem nec latitudinem, in eo considerare valeo, illudque umbra viventis luminis michi nominatur; atque ut sol, luna et stelle in aqua apparent, ita scripture, sermones, virtutes, et quedam opera hominum formata in illo michi resplendent” (Hildegardis Bigensis Epistolarium, CIIIr: 261). Then joined in faith, hope, and charity in the service of reason, “seeing [God],” William of Saint Th ierry writes, “this is understanding” God. The activity of vision, “which is that very understanding which is the soul,” involves the soul’s alignment with the inner person (The Mirror of Faith, 5). William even goes so far as to say that so long as faith, hope, and charity are the guiding forces of a person, “they grasp what is perfect without books” (6) (“Igitur sine tribus [fides, spes, caritas] istis anima nulla sanatur, ut posit Deum videre, hoc est intelligere” and “Ipsa autem visio intellectus ille est, qui est in anima, cum animae intelligere, hoc est Deum videre, contingerit” [Speculum fidei: PL 180, col. 366]).

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45. Green, Women Readers in the Middle Ages, 45. 46. “Mystical Networks in the Middle Ages,” 43. 47. Hollywood’s reading occurs in the context of Hadewijch’s Vision 7, that of the Eucharist. She notes, “Rather than marking a disjunction between female- and male-authored mystical texts, then, the distinction between visionary or cataphatic language and apophatic language occurs within mystical texts. Men, within medieval Christianity, had authority to interpret scripture; women did not. Thus, in naming the divine, maleauthored texts tend to use language drawn from scripture rather than from visionary experience; scriptural language becomes the language unsaid through apophasis. On the other hand, for many medieval women, who were denied authority to interpret scripture, their visions, auditions, and ecstatic experiences of the divine become the texts that both name God and are ‘unsaid’ in the process of mystical writing” (Sensible Ecstasy, 98). 48. For a comparison see Hugh of Saint Victor, De arca Noe morali, in which Christ is represented as both tree and book of life. Hugh describes three books, and the third, as Grover Zinn explains, “is found within the Trinity in the Person of the Son, the Wisdom of God. It is this Book that the faithful seek through the simulacra of the external world and through the contemplative quest set within the inner world of spiritual reality” (“Book and Word,” 151). 49. Paulsell continues, “Th is inclusive act of reading makes it possible for one to practice lectio divina not only by reading books, but by listening to books being read aloud in the chapter house and refractory and by listening to the liturgy” (“‘Scriptio Divina,’” 135–136; see also 138ff.). 50. Paulsell writes, “Marguerite develops what I am calling scriptio divina , a spiritual discipline to which writing is central, but also a many-layered understanding of the relationship of God’s creativity to her own” (“‘Scriptio Divina,’” 143). And further, “for Marguerite, the discipline of lectio divina belongs even to those who may not be able to read or who may not have ready access to written texts: one may practice the lectio by attention to those texts one has learned ‘by heart’: the book of one’s own experience, the color and rhythms of one’s own visions and the mystical body of Christ that is inscribed by those who have been gathered by it” (157). She also argues for a more circular pattern, as Marguerite can return to her own text for further meditation. Where Paulsell emphasizes Marguerite’s “creative self,” I highlight the relation to the inner body. 51. Marguerite d’Oingt, Writings, 42; Œuvres, 92. 52. Ibid., 43; Œuvres, 94. 53. Ibid., 43; Œuvres, 94. 54. Ibid., 45, 47; Œuvres, 98, 102. 55. Newman writes that “imaginative theology” is “the pursuit of serious religious and theological thought through the techniques of imaginative literature, especially vision, dialogue, and personification. . . . It focuses on how theology might be performed; it draws attention to theological method and epistemology” (God and the Goddesses, 292, 297). While I would agree with this evaluation, use of the term “imaginative” risks implying that women’s theology is a less structured complexity than that crafted by men. Rosemary

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56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62.

63.

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Drage Hale notes the interrelation between the outer and the inner: “The medieval mystics not only regard the living soul as a mirror of the body, but the body as raw material for contemplation” (“Taste and See, for God Is Sweet,” 12). Marguerite d’Oingt, Œuvres, 146. William of Saint Thierry also claims in his Speculum: “Will is the beginning of love. Love then is a vehement will” (Mirror, 18); the Latin reads, “Voluntas enim initium amoris est. Amor siquidem vehemens voluntas est” (PL 180, col. 371). Or William’s On the Nature and Dignity of Love: “Spiritui ipsi sancto, qui Patris et Filii amor est et voluntas, bono sui assensu incipit inhaerere; et vehementer incipit velle quod Deus vult, et quod volendum memoria suggerit et ratio: et vehementer volendo amor efficitur. Nihil enim aliud est amor quam vehemens in bono voluntas” (Liber de natura et dignitate amoris, PL 184, col. 383A). It would not be surprising to have a Cistercian text in a Carthusian monastery, given William’s support of solitude and his inspiration by Carthusian spirituality. Another possible tie is to Richard of Saint Victor’s De quatuor gradibus violentae caritatis—in which, in the progression of love, the mnemonic second step is characterized by vehemence: “in secundo eius vehementia” (PL 196, col. 1213D). Writings of Margaret of Oingt, 67. Hadewijch also explicitly reads in her visions, as in Vision 12, when the name of each virtue is written ( ghescriven) on the robe of the bride (CW, 294; Vis, 116). Julian, A Revelation of Love, in The Writings of Julian of Norwich, 169. For a nuanced reading of corporeality and its inextricable tie to interpretation see Watson, “The Trinitarian Hermeneutic in Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love.” See Carruthers, The Book of Memory. For a discussion of the term “nonexperience” in mysticism and religious thought as it relates to the elaborations of a limit-experience, especially in Blanchot, Bataille, and Lévinas, see Kevin Hart, “The Experience of Nonexperience.” On the difference between Augustine’s use of memory and the more traditional forms associated with the spatialization of memory elaborated by Frances Yates and Mary Carruthers, see Dave Tell, “Beyond Mnemotechnics.” Tell argues that because “God must be remembered but he cannot be placed, the memoria Dei requires a memorial practice in which the past is not preserved through placement in memory.” It is through a performative confession that this dilemma is resolved: “Confession . . . is a way of remembering that which cannot be placed in the storehouses of memory. Confession is a performative remembering in which the object of memory is not contained in the mind before it is disclosed through speech; rather, it is embodied in the speech act. . . . Confession, then, displaces memory; it surpasses the palaces of the mind for which Augustine has become famous and refigures memory within the confessive expression itself. As such, confession renders Augustine’s absurd solution tenable: it is a way of remembering that which cannot be placed in memory” (“Beyond Mnemotechnics,” 233, 234). I am referring to Marianne Hirsch’s use of the term “postmemory,” which “characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth,” and thus have no direct historical access to the memory’s referent (“Past Lives,” 559). See Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, for a sense of the inevitable failure of Augustine’s confessional venture.

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64. “Ende dat ic dies ghevoele met Gode in Gode, dat ics maer te meer en ben ondersceden, alse mi es te sprekene” (Brieven, 230). 65. One could argue that this difference itself is minimal since Augustine too is marked by the divine in that the divine is acknowledged within at the moment of conversion; however, Augustine cannot attest an instance of unity, but can only access its promise. 66. “Ic was opgenomen in den geeste in Sente Jans daghe Ewangelists in de kerstdaghe” (Vis, 96). 67. William of Saint Th ierry, The Golden Epistle, 18–19. Hadewijch will inherit William’s and other Cistercians’ more engaged or affective sense of man’s relation to the Trinity rather than that of Augustine. What for Augustine is framed in the language of self-reflection and love, William frames in terms of affective piety and charismatic love. J. M. Déchanet clarifies love in William, explaining, “Not all love for God is ‘knowledge’; but only the love described as ‘charismatic,’ the love of the unitas spiritus, the enlightened love of the nous brought into unity by the Holy Spirit” (The Golden Epistle, xxix). While one might nevertheless be able to read Augustine in a similar fashion, the terms that William and Hadewijch use push Augustine further to emphasize a promised deification of man. See especially Hadewijch, Letter 17: “But when by fruition man is united to Love, he becomes God, mighty and just. And then will, work, and might have an equal part in his justice, as the Th ree Persons are in one God” (84). For an excellent study of Hadewijch’s use of the term “fruition” ( ghebrukene) and presentation of Hadewijch’s work in general, see Mommaers and Dutton, Hadewijch: Writer, Beguine, Love Mystic. 68. Both William and Hadewijch criticize those who obey rules and put on the habit of piety without knowing or assuming the content. Hadewijch is able to take it one step further, since beguines did not initially take vows: “In keeping a rule of life, people encumber themselves with many things from which they could be free; and that causes reason to err. A spirit of good will assures greater interior beauty than any rule of life could devise” (CW, 54). 69. On textuality and the body in martyrologies see Ross, Figuring the Feminine. 70. “In enen dertiendaghe was ic binnen der messen opghenomen in den geeste ute mi selven” (Vis, 114). 71. Th rough a reading of Hadewijch’s Vision 4, Mary Suydam argues that Hadewijch’s citational use of the liturgy authenticates her vision of heavenly space; see Suydam, “Bringing Heaven Down to Earth.” 72. CW, 140 (ll. 20–21); Liederen, 90. 73. My usage oscillates between the terms Minne and “Love,” depending on context and usefulness in hearing it as “Love” or Minne. 74. Letter 20: Brieven, 160, 162. 75. Almost every one of Hadewijch’s visions is prompted by the liturgy and framed by liturgical experience. Many of them occur at Matins—that is, at the earliest part of the divine office, which starts in the morning before any light appears and ends with the rising of the sun. The liturgy prompts visions perhaps because of the close association with the reconfiguration of time and the attempt to accommodate human time to a time aligned with divinity through memory and anticipation. The versicle and response found in Matins—“Domine, labia mea aperies,” and “Et os meum annunciabit laude[m] tuam”— exemplify the scripting of body and voice.

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76. For studies on various kinds of time in Christianity, see, for example Bourgeois, Gibert, and Jourjon, L’expérience chrétienne du temps; Guitton, Le temps et l’ éternité chez Plotin et Saint Augustin; Clément, “Le temps mystique dans la poésie spirituelle du XVIIe siècle”; Boros, “Les categories de la temporalité chez Saint Augustin.” 77. Veerle Fraeters notes, “The vision reveals, in a visual mode, the hidden sense of the liturgical text the visionary was meditating upon. In the case of women with a well-stimulated memory, what is seen during the vision is fed not only by the specific liturgical text of the day, but also by other texts and images that are triggered during the visionary’s affective ruminations on the text. Consequently, the visions of well-read beguines and nuns like Hadewijch and the Helfta nuns display a high degree of intertextual dialogue between scripture and a wide array of other religious and classical texts” (Fraeters, “The Appearance of Queen Reason”). 78. I am indirectly referring to Derrida’s reading of Celan and the date in “Shibboleth,” in which he describes the date that is tied to a poem as possessing a force that exceeds its “once”: “If the poem is due its date, due to its date, owes itself to its date as its own inmost concern . . . it speaks of this date only insofar as it is freed, as it were, of its debt—and of its date, which is also something given—releasing itself from the date without disavowing it. It absolves itself of its debt so that its utterance may carry beyond a singularity which might otherwise remain undecipherable, mute and immured in its date—in the unrepeatable” (“Shibboleth,” 311). If one reads the liturgy as an intricate poem, as does Jean Leclercq, the vision is a kind of poetic improvisation or commentary (or both) and a paraliturgical form of exegesis; see Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, 236. 79. Letter 11 “Seder dat ic x. iaer out was, soe hebbic alsoe na van herteleker minnen bedwonghen gheweest, Dat ic binnen den iersten twee iaren dat ics began hadde doot gheweset” (Brieven, 84). 80. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 18. Dominick LaCapra warns of the dangers of sacralizing trauma and of trying to preserve its transcendence in LaCapra, History in Transit, 117–123. 81. The Writings of Margaret, 53. “En aut teins jut e darey entendiment en totes cetes choses” (Marguerite d’Oingt, Œuvres, 116). 82. The Writings of Margaret, 54. “Nos non trovein pas que illi voucit unques de ceta vision revelar autres choses maque . . . illi non o porret recontar ne comprendre” (Marguerite d’Oingt, Œuvres, 118). 83. Vision 11 (translation modified). “Doe verkindic een kint gheboren werdende in die verhoelne minnende geeste.  .  .  . Ic sach van alrehande geesten die voermen, yeghewelken in sijn wesen daer hi in levede . . . Some daerbi van binnen ende oec van buten een groet deel; ende some bekindicse daer van binnen die ic nemmermeer van buten en sach” (Vis, 102). 84. Translation modified. “Want al dat men siet metten geeste, die met minnen es opghenomen, dat dorekint men, dat doresmaect men, dat doresiet men, dat dorehoert men” (Vis, 104). 85. Watson notes that for Julian, “the revelatory process is still at work even as Julian sets out to record an experience that is far in her past” (“The Trinitarian Hermeneutic,” 69).

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86. See Jean Laplanche, “Notes on Afterwardsness.” Laplanche argues “that there is something that goes in the direction of the past to the future, from the other to the individual in question, that is, in the direction from the adult to the baby, which I call the implantation of the enigmatic message. Th is message is then retranslated, following a temporal direction which is, in an alternating fashion, by turns retrogressive and progressive (according to my general model of translation–detranslation–retranslation)” (“Notes on Afterwardsness,” 265). 87. Cath Caruth argues, “The experience of trauma, the fact of latency, would thus seem to consist, not in the forgetting of a reality that can hence never fully be known, but in an inherent latency within the event itself ” (Unclaimed Experience, 17). 88. See Letter 22, l. 69: CW, 95; Brieven, 172; and Mengeldicht 3, ll. 98, 103: CW, 324; Mgdt, 23.

3. Werke and the Postscriptum of the Soul Augustine, Trinity, 12.3: “Sed quia ea quae dicuntur opera bona tamquam fi lii sunt vitae nostrae secundum quam quaeritur cuius vitae sit quisque, id est quomodo agat haec temporalia, quam vitam graeci non ζωήν sed βίον vocant” (DT, 50:365–366). 1. Newman, “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’?,” 25. 2. “The Seven Manners of Holy Love,” 319. “Dit es itoe hier een ingelec leuen ende hier na volght dat ewelec leuen” (Seven manieren van minne, 28). 3. Vision 12: “Si ne brachte wel alle nederheit hoghe ende alle hoecheit neder” (Vis, 118). 4. See Andrew Louth’s discussion of this in The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, 132–133. 5. Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public, 51. 6. Hadewijch may be influenced by Gregory the Great in using werke as a way of balancing the inner and the outer, finding perfection in the growing knowledge of one’s failings. For Gregory, the inner is not necessarily superior to the outer, but rather, each is constantly balancing the other out. As Carole Straw notes, “Vices and virtues, good works and temptations keep the natural propensities of the spirit and the flesh in the right equilibrium,” making “‘weakness’ . . . the very ‘guardian’ of virtue” (Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection, 244–245). 7. “Die mint, hi werct grote werke” (Brieven, 240). See Letters 2 and 30 (CW, 49, 116) for elaborations of “great works.” The Middle Dutch dictionary defi nes werk in these terms: “Arbeid, bezigheid, het verrichten van arbeid, het werken, werking. Kil. werck, opus, operatio, actus, opificium, negotium; Plantijn: werck, werckinge, besongne, oeuvre, ouvrage, opus, opificium, operatio; dat werck spoeyen, faire exploiter besongne, opus excitare vel accelerare, operi instare; het werck staken, cesser de la besongne, sistere opus; opus intermittere, cessare; het werck volenden, achever la besongne, opus exigere, int werck zijn, estre à la besongne, esse in opere; te werck komen, venir à l’oeuvre, ad opus venire; Teuth. werck, opus; werck maken, ondernemen, annemen, intermittere, occupare;

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8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

P 3. WERKE AND THE P OSTSCRIPTUM OF THE SOUL Voc. Cop. werc, opus,” from Middelnederlands: Woordenboek en teksten. Whichever sense of werke was intended in Vision 8, the time of the writing postdates the vision itself and allies itself with the time of materie. The command to “let her works blossom forth” means that the message should be communicated to her community. Committing the vision to writing is a part of this task, as she makes clear in Vision 13. In this vision she references how she envisions her own activity and its transmission, claiming the need for editing, as “a great book would be required if one were to write everything perfectly in full truth” (“Want daer soude een groet boec toe gaen daer ment volcomelec in volre waerheit al scriven soude”) (CW, 290; Vis, 104). On this point, see Baker, “Augustine on Action, Contemplation, and Their Meeting Point in Christ.” Letter 30: Brieven, 240. Rorem, Hugh of Saint Victor, 156. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs III, 47.4.6. Bernard continues: “And the more a man is conscious he has not failed in works of charity through love of his own ease, the more he will contemplate things sublime and make bold to study them.” “Post bonum denique opus securius in contemplatione dormitur, et tanto quis fiducialius sublimia intueri et vestigare aggreditur, quanto sibi conscius est minime se, propriae amore quietis, caritatis operibus defuisse” (Sermones super Cantica canticorum [Sancti Bernardi Opera 2, 64]). Bernard certainly values what he calls “active” love, or “love in action”; nevertheless, he places a greater reciprocal emphasis on action and contemplation (as symbolized by Martha and Mary) than Hadewijch. Richard of Saint Victor, “On the Four Degrees of Violent Love,” 287. “In primo intrat meditatione, in secundo ascendit contemplatione, in tertio retroducitur in jubilatione, in quarto egreditur ex compassione” (De quatuor gradibus violentae caritatis: PL 196, col. 1217D). See also Richard’s De statu interioris hominis on the threefold promise related to the inner person: “Prima itaque olei species est promissio veniae; secunda, promissio gratiae; tertia, promissio gloriae” (PL 196, cols. 1154D–1155A). See Simons, Cities of Ladies and Scheepsma, “Introduction,” The Limburg Sermons. The virtues listed in Vision 12 are, in ascending order: faith, hope, fidelity, charity, desire, humility, discernment, works, reason, wisdom, peacefulness, and patience. For William of Saint Th ierry, the understanding of eternal things in temporal modes constitutes one form of work, and Christ’s life is understood as his supreme work: “The dignity of the work testified in the heart of the person who understands to the greatness of divine goodness, and the supreme good, understood to some degree by the sense of love, constitute a work worthy of God. . . . His [Christ’s] life was his work, and he was eternally with God” (The Mirror of Faith, 62). “Magnitudinem siquidem divinae bonitatis in corde diligentis testatur dignitas operis, et intellectum aliquatenus summum bonum in sensu amoris constituit dignum Deo opus suum. . . . Vita erat opus suum, et aeternaliter erat apud Deum” (Speculum fidei: PL 180, col. 387C). Hadewijch’s visions are numbered as fourteen, but Visions 7 and 8 are accepted as one continuous vision. For the sake of clarity, I will refer to the published numeration when referring to the visions. Although the List is not included in the current English translation of

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

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her complete works, this is not because of any question as to its inclusion with the visions in the manuscripts. “Ic en hadder niet genoech toe ghepijnt noch gheleeft int ghetal van soe hogher werdecheit” (Vis, 32). The figure of the forest is a spiritual trope in the Limburg Sermons. See Scheepsma, The Limburg Sermons, 433–439. Fraeters, “Handing on Wisdom and Knowledge,” 154. “Miraclen ende ghichten van buten die waren in di sere begonnen te werkene. Die heves du mi ontseghet ende bester af ghestaen ende en wilter niet” (Vis, 52). “Met verstannesse saltu wise minen wille werken. . . . Niemene en ghebrec nemmermeer tote dien daghe dat ic di segghe: ‘Dijn werc es al voldaen.’ . . . Dus werke minen wille met verstanesse, mine alreghenoechlecste gheminde” (Vis, 52). I have altered Hart’s translation. She translates the verbal form of werke as “fulfi ll.” “Met minnen saltu leven ende gheduren ende mijns verholens willen pleghen daer du mi mede best ende ic di” (Vis, 52). On Hadewijch’s access to a pseudo-Origen homily on Mary Magdalene see Willaert, “Hadewijch en Maria Magdalena.” The second grouping of the perfect treats those “among the still living” and is classified predominantly by locale: “In England, there are nine: five hermits, two recluses, and two virgins. In Flanders, there are five: three beguines and two nuns. . . . In Paris there is a forgotten Master [of the schools] who lives alone in a little cell. He knows more about me than I know about the good in myself ” (List, 286). The list ends with name distribution: “Among these fi ft y-six names are seven Johns, two Diederichs, three Claus, one Ghielis, one Boniface, one Godevaart, three Henrys, three Walters, one Robert, one Godschalk, two Sarahs, one Hadewijch, one Aleyda, three Emmas, five Margarets, two Agnes, one Agatha, one Beatrice, two Odas.” Following, this, she adds a disclaimer for her addressee, referencing her own unique knowledge of their lives: “I do not know what you can make of all these people as their lives are unknown to you and in what marvelous wonders they have arrived at this perfection and shall arrive at it” (287). While she speaks of fi ft y-six in this group, she actually seems to list fi ft y-seven. Vis, 136. “Fully grown,” volwassen, is a spiritual term that designates full conformity to the godhead according to all three ways of being (wesene) of divinity; it does not equate to our sense of biological development. See especially Letter 13. Vis, 158. “Sente Gregorius VII, die in allen III overvolmaect was” (Vis, 150). Translation modified. Letter 1: “Die alre meeste claerheit die men hebben mach in ertrike, Dat es ghewaricheit in ieghenwordeghen werken van gherechticheden, ‘Ende van allen wesenen waerheit te pleghene omme claerheit der edelre minnen die god es” (Brieven, 10). Similarly, Watson argues, it is Julian’s “much later identification of its deepest source as the Trinity rather than Christ alone, that renders the process of interpretation—of ‘seeing’ in a figurative as well as a visual sense—possible” (“The Trinitarian Hermeneutic” 69). Watson sees Augustinian distinctions in Julian’s understanding of visions but does not connect them in depth to their relation to the inner senses.

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30. “Ende onuerhauen bliuen van al uwen werken die ghi gheleisten moghet” (Brieven, 24). 31. See Hadewijch, Letter 22: “He who wishes to understand and know what God is in his name and his essence must belong completely to God—yes, so completely that God is all to him and he is free from himself ” (CW, 94). 32. Steigman, “Bernard of Clairvaux, William of Saint Th ierry, the Victorines,” 33. 33. Ibid., 33. 34. As McGinn has noted, the ways in which divinity proffers gifts to humans (in the soul as reason, memory, and the will; in Christ; in giving humans his nature, and in condescending in [“neyghede”] time) parallel the means by which humans may return to, understand, and unite with Christ. He also outlines the four paradoxes of the divine nature: “Just as God ‘pours forth his Unity in Persons,’ he also ‘inclines’ the persons of the Trinity toward us through four gifts that form the basis of our return to union with him. . . . If the first gift [that of eternal time] is a participation in eternity, and the second our creation in time, then the third gift is the path of recreation or redemption by which God-man delivered up his substance to death and left us himself to be consumed in the Eucharist. Finally in the fourth donation, God ‘relaxes time’; that is, he waits for us to embrace him during the course of our lives” (The Flowering of Mysticism, 212). See Hadewijch, Letter 22: CW, 97; Brieven, 176. Th is inclining in time could be read as influenced by Origen, for whom God “stoops down in kindness,” and radically distinguishes Origen’s approach to love from the Stoic and Platonic traditions; McGuckin, The Westminster Handbook to Origen, 146. 35. Letter 22: “Wantmen met al desen weghen in gode gheet, dore hem seluen, Dore den hemel, Dore de helle, Dore dat vagheuier, Daer omme es god onghesloten, al es hi binnen al” (Brieven, 182). 36. Letter 22: “Sijn rike ropen dat ons toe come” (Brieven, 170). 37. “Geeft ende al gheuet dat hi heuet, ende al es dat hi es” (Brieven, 174). 38. Brieven, 174. 39. Scheepsma, The Limburg Sermons, 182. 40. On begherte in Hadewijch see Faesen, Begeerte in het werk van Hadewijch. 41. Letter 22: “Ja sonder den ertschen man . . . ghebruken in onuerhauenheiden” (Brieven, 172). 42. Letter 22: Brieven, 190. Hadewijch may have also been influenced by Godfrey of Saint Victor, who uses the figure of the eagle for an extensive exegetical enumeration of the “wings” of love in his visionary work, “Microcosm.” This text bears a striking resemblance to Hadewijch’s writings (especially in relation to the themes—of work and inner and outer persons—I am emphasizing in this chapter) and deserves further study. 43. Brieven, 176. 44. Ibid., 178. 45. Letter 22: “Si oefenen hen in Minnen sonder groet wee ende in devocien Ende in ghenoechten ende in weelden, daer sise hebben moghen sonder groet wee” (Brieven, 178). 46. Letter 22: “Die den wch dore den hemel te gode gaen, si hebben teren ende voeden: Want hi sine nature gaf, so nemen sise vrileke. Dese wonen hier int lant des vreden” (Brieven, 180). In Hadewijch’s descriptions of her own ways of loving, this way does not seem the most common, given the passionate and fiery nature of her love, except in her visions. Yet

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to take the poems as the only form of attestation of her way of loving would be to overlook the other indirect descriptions of her “states.” Mengeldicht 16, ll. 197–198; Mgdt, 78. See chapter 4 for a fuller discussion of the Mengeldichten. “De redene en can gode niet ghesien sonder in dat hi niet en es; Minne en rust niet dan in dat hi es” (Brieven, 140). Hadewijch continues, “Reason has its secure paths, by which it proceeds. Love experiences failure, but failure advances it more than reason. Reason advances toward what God is, by means of what God is not. Love sets aside what God is not and rejoices that it fails in what God is” (CW, 86); “Minne gheuoelt ghebreken; Nochtan ghebreken vordertse meer dan redene. Reden vordert in die dinc die god es Bi dier dinc die god niet en es. Minne settet achter di dinc die god niet es Ende verblidet hare daer si ghebrect in die dinc die god es” (Brieven, 140). William’s text describes what he calls the two eyes of the soul as love and reason, stating, “Reason seems to advance through what God is not toward what God is. Love, putting aside what God is not, rejoices to lose itself in what he is” (The Nature and Dignity of Love, 78); “Ratio ergo per id quod non est, in id quod est videtur proficere: amor postponens quod non est, in eo quod est gaudet deficere” (Liber de natura et dignitate amoris, PL 184 col. 393B). In William’s Speculum, he distinguishes between reason and love, noting that while the “outer senses of the body concern themselves with bodily things, so does the inner with inward realities, that is, with rational and divine or spiritual things. But the inward sense of the soul is its understanding. Yet a greater and worthier sense and a purer understanding of the soul is love, if love is pure. . . . In those things which pertain to God, the sense of the mind is Love” (The Mirror of Faith, 70–71). Since Hadewijch did not know William in his own name, but as Bernard, this may explain why Bernard is in her list (and not William). My understanding differs from Willaert’s positing the meaning of sinne as identical with reason. He writes, “Sinnen chez Hadewijch signifie indubitablement ‘raison,’ ‘facultés intellectuelles’ ” (“Matière et sens chez Chrétien de Troyes et Hadewijch,” 430). While sinne, “the senses”—especially the inner senses, in Hadewijch’s use of the term—encompasses reason, the term also includes other spiritual senses and understanding that are developed to enrich “inner” life. See Jacques Derrida’s essay on Michel de Certeau in which he elaborates on an affi rmation, a “yes,” in mystical texts that “gives or promises that very thing [cela même], it gives it right from the promise: the incalculable itself ” (“A Number of Yes,” 238). Letter 22: Translation modified. “Si berren met Innegher begherten sonder cesseren omme dat hen alle es vore gheneighet: De mont gheboden, de arme ontploken ende dat rike herte ghereet. . . . Dat wilde ontdoen van gode maentse alle vren van binnen bouen hare gheleisten” (Brieven, 178). She continues, “What causes the soul’s wrath to increase continually is that she knows with her interior spirit what of God is lacking to her—that he has something that she does not have to the full, and that is not given her fully. This is the wrath of the soul” (CW, 99); “Die wonen int lant dies heilichs torens: Want wat hen in toeuerlate ghegheuen wert, Dats saen verteert in dien gapenden diepen nyed. Dit doet altoes wassen die tornicheit der zielen: Dat si met inneghen gheeste weet dat ouerbliuen van gode, dat hi

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55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62.

63.

P 3. WERKE AND THE P OSTSCRIPTUM OF THE SOUL yet heuet datse niet ne volheuet, noch hare niet en es uol. Dits de tornecheit der zielen” (Brieven , 182). “Want al berren si dat si vanden viere soe ongheberrent sijn (Die volcomene minne es een brant), Si barren om hem ghenoech te werdene” (Brieven, 180). “Den vijften wech gaen de ghemeyne metten slechten gheloue Die met allen vterste dienste te gode gaen” (Brieven, 180). Hadewijch’s numbering of the ways is confusing: she numbers the three temporal ways (of heaven, hell, and purgatory) as the first, second, and third way of loving (according to the three persons), even though she considers the “timeless” way also a way. When she gets to the last way, that of service, she calls it the fi ft h way, even though she has not named a “fourth.” “Want men met desen .iiij. weghe in sijn alre binneneste comen mach” (Brieven, 180). Vision 9: CW, 285; Vision 128: CW, 295; Vision 12: CW, 285, 295. Letter 1: “Ay . . . al seggic alte suete, dat es mi ouer oncont, sonder inden wensch van miere herten Dat mi doghen suete heuet gheweest om sine minne” (Brieven, 12). Translation mine. Vis, 158. CW, 120, 274, 301. I am indebted to Columba Hart’s meticulous annotation of Hadewijch’s work, especially here where she demonstrates that the title “the Angel of the Great Counsel” is given to Christ in “the Introit of the third Mass of Christmas, et vocabitur nomen eius magni consilii Angelus (Isa 9:6, Vulgate, Admirabilis consiliarius)” (CW, 380, n. 51). Th is appellation is, however, also found in book XI of Gregory’s Moralia in Job, contrasting the magni consilii angelus to those who, like those noted in Hadewijch’s Letter 6, falsely use spiritual acts for temporal gain. Jerome also refers to Christ as the Angel of Great Counsel in his commentary on Isaiah, and Gregory may likewise be following Jerome. Both Gregory’s and Jerome’s texts were well known to Cistercians of the twelft h century. Vis, 60. William sees the soul’s renewal through the senses of the mind: “The soul likewise possesses her own senses; she possesses her own sight or eye by which she sees God. For as the body has its five senses by which it is joined to the soul by the instrumentality of life, so, too, the soul has her five senses by which she is joined to God by the instrumentality of charity. . . . This demonstrates how we become old through the senses of the body and are conformed to this world, but through the senses of the mind we are renewed to the recognition of God, in newness of life, according to God’s will and pleasure” (The Nature and Dignity of Love, 72); “Habet enim anima etiam sensus suos, habet visum suum vel oculum, qui videt Deum. Sicut enim corpus habet suos quinque sensus, quibus animae conjungitur, vita mediante: sic et anima suos quinque sensus habet, quibus Deo conjungitur, mediante caritate. . . . Hic ostenditur quia per sensus corporis veterascimus, et huic saeculo conformamur: per sensum vero mentis renovamur in agnitionem Dei, in novitatem vitae, secundum voluntatem et beneplacitum Dei” (Liber de natura et dignitate amoris, PL 184 col. 390B–C). As I argued in the introduction, in his reading of inner and outer bodies in Paul, Aune argues for an emphasis on a corporate body in the afterlife. See Aune, “Anthropological Duality in the Eschatology of 2 Corinthians 4:16–5:10,” 218. In addition, part of Hadewijch’s theology involves the necessity of restoring the numbers in the heavens, due to

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70.

71. 72. 73.

74.

75. 76. 77. 78.

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Lucifer’s Fall. The Fall of Lucifer is also responsible for destroying the undivided unity of the heavens, resulting in Purgatory and Hell. Hadewijch’s topography of the ways of Minne, which include the way of Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell, is suggestive of this Fall and the ensuing work of restoration. Vision 4: Vis, 66. Vis, 64. “Daerse mede volwassen sal” (Vis, 64). See McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 215. Ibid. Newman, “La mystique courtoise,” 146. I would agree with Prudence Allen that “even though Hadewijch was influenced by Neoplatonism . . . she did not tend towards abstraction, nor did she devalue the body as do so many others who follow this particular philosophical tradition. It is in Hadewijch’s theory of virtue that this movement beyond Neoplatonism is particularly evident. Acts of virtue are dependent upon the materiality of the human condition. They need a body to be performed” (Allen, The Concept of Woman, 46). For an excellent essay that distinguishes between the Platonic, Neoplatonic, and medieval notions of the mirror and demonstrates the progressive and nonPlatonic nature of medieval visions, see Bradley, “The Speculum Image in Medieval Mystical Writers.” “Du heves, lieve, sterke, grote ende vrowe, willen weten met dinen twivele te mi, waerbi dat wesen soude ende met wat werke datse mi ghelijc volwassen soude, dat ic hare ghelijc wesen soude ende di ghelijc mi selven” (Vis, 64). Vis, 66. Vis, 66. In Hadewijch’s understanding, Minne imitates the processional nature of Christ by going out of herself and recollecting herself in her nature. Hadewijch’s immersion “into the abyss of Minne” is also part of her departure and return to herself, as it is a departure and return of Minne to herself. Letter 6: “Ende vte dien heileghen anschine leset al v vonisse ende al v pleghen van uwen leuene” (Brieven, 50). For the reading of Minne’s judgments also see: “He who wishes that Love heal his suffering. . . . He lets it appear that he shall read all judgments passed on him in love” (Lied 36; CW, 231). See Letter 14, in which the way up the mountain is characteristic of “those who still remain here below, who are following after [Christ] in perfect virtues” (CW, 78). Vis, 84. “Sich hier hoe ic ben kimpe ende rijclec ghenen ghewareghen aenscine” (Vis, 84). “Ende den vijften die dine es, die sal di oercunden de gherechte God die hem di sende ende die hem di sent” (Vis, 84). The name kimpe is not a unique designation for the man who appears in this vision. It is not a proper name as the translation would make it seem in calling him “Lord Champion,” but is Hadewijch’s general term for a person who is victorious in love. See stanza four of Lied 40: “He who wins over the powers of love, he may well be called a champion” (CW, 244); “Die dus verwint der minnen cracht / hi mach sijn kimpe wel bekint” (Liederen, 296). See chapter 2, n. 24.

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79. Vis, 90. Th is passage has been read by Hart and others as signaling her difference with Abelard, yet it may also be an echo of a distinction that Gregory the Great makes in relation to the Stoics, in favor of a balanced life. 80. Vis, 86. 81. Ibid., 86. 82 . Mary Clark offers an explanation of procession: “The relation of the Christian faith to history and to the divine Word of God made flesh is a significant departure from Neoplatonic philosophy. The Word of God entered human history, Augustine explains, to incorporate human individuals into his body. Christ will lead them back to the Father who created them, where they will be in eternal life, ‘the glory of God’” (Clark, “De Trinitate,” 95). 83. Vis, 88. 84. “Die ure hebic di ghesent met mi ende di sent voert ten dinen met mi” (Vis, 86). 85. “Nu hevestu mijns ghesmaect ende ontfaen van buten ende van binnen, ende du heves verstaen die eneghe weghe die gheheel in mi beghinnen” (Vis, 88). 86. Translation modified. Vis, 126. 87. I list oratio, “prayer,” as coming before “work” because Hadewijch’s is a temporally oriented model (often invoked in her letters) that seeks to appeal to the divine according to human desire and prefigures a way of loving. 88. “Dat was ene cracht van sijns selfs wesene, hem God te sine met minen doghene na heme ende in heme, ghelijc dat hi mi was doe hi mensche levede te mi” (Vis, 140). 89. Vis, 146. 90. “Dies moetic nachte bi dage leven” (l. 32; Liederen, 264). 91. “Ende hi seide: ‘Kere weder in dine materie ende laet bloeyen dine werke ende stucken van onghenade sijn di nakende, want du best kerende alse al verwinnende, want du al verwonnen heves.’ Doe quam ic in mi selven alse ene nuwe herde sereghe ende emmermeer wesen sal tote dien daghe dat ic daer weder in valle daer ic doe af keerde” (Vis, 90). 92. “Ende ic quam weder in mijn leet met meneghen groten wee” (Vis, 70); “Ende ic wart met dien wederbracht jammerleke in mi selven” (Vis, 76). 93. Coakley, Powers and Submissions, 129. 94. The relation between gender and sexual difference is not simple; nevertheless, it is almost as if Hadewijch depended on the power of sexual difference as ontological difference to connote the limits between Minne and her pursuers. 95. See Lochrie, “Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies,” 184. While compelling in its direction, Lochrie’s argument—that “violence, enslavement, demonic desire, torture, and even death become defining negative experiences of mystical love and sex—experiences that lead to a disassociation of speech and thought from human subjectivity”—is contradicted by Hadewijch’s understanding of the role of language in modifying thought, speech, and action in life. While Lochrie wants to see suffering as a form of “queering” desire, she does not consider, despite her interest in performativity, Hadewijch’s own understanding of the role of suffering in relation to the unity it promises or how “acts” relate to deeds. In a reading that wants to counter Bynum’s in Holy Feast and Holy Fast, Lochrie invokes Hadewijch and warns that we “must be careful not to subsume the violence

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97.

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of the sexual language in their writings to masculine uses of the language of courtly love. By reversing this convention, the women mystics sometimes contest the idealizing strategies of male abjection and the spiritualized mythos of courtly love” (185). What Lochrie wants to see as a reversal of a hetero-normative paradigm in Hadewijch seems to concretize Hadewijch and the role of gender—there where her work in fact fails any “narcissistic” reflection, to use Lochrie’s expression—making Lochrie as attached to an oppositional model of gender as the one she critiques. The language of courtly love is valued in a masculine way in her poems: not for its bliss in unity, but for the way in which masculine suffering is praised. Hadewijch moves from the language that praises the glorious knight and lover to the even more valuable servant, both of which are masculine in gender, yet their masculinity, while culturally valuable, is subsumed to the idea it serves. As we know from her visions, privation is her highest and most perfect form of loving. Murk-Jansen, “The Use of Gender and Gender-Related Imagery in Hadewijch,” 66. MurkJansen concludes that any thought about what this reveals about Hadewijch’s “womanhood is . . . necessarily speculative.” I side, however, with Hollywood’s response to this; she asks, “Yet doesn’t the fluidity of human gender before God tell us something about how Hadewijch experienced gender, at least on the level of her relationship to the divine (itself central to her life)?” (Hollywood, “Sexual Desire, Divine Desire; or, Queering the Beguines,” 411). For an evaluation of the literary qualities of gender in Hadewijch’s Mengeldicht 2, see Prudence Allen’s brief reading of the relation of debate to masculine forms of academic discourse: Allen, The Concept of Woman, 46–47. In this sense, Hadewijch shares the Neoplatonic pseudo-Dionysian ideal of oneness and unity in Minne; however, her language places far less importance on an originary oneness than it does on the paradoxical means of approximating the divine in the realm of dissimilarity. For a careful reading of gendered pronouns in Hadewijch’s Mengeldichten, see Suydam, “‘Ever in Unrest’: Translating Hadewijch of Antwerp’s Mengeldichten.” In her reading of gender in Hadewijch’s Liederen, Elizabeth Alvida Petroff concludes that, for Hadewijch, “Love reconciles all contradictions and differences, including gender, and proves that ultimately being is profoundly androgynous, capable of experiencing all extremes of existence without being torn apart by them” (Body and Soul, 201). I disagree with this conclusion, since the extremes of desire allow for the will and Minne to align themselves in her “way” of loving, marking a fundamental difference between human beings and divinity. “Die pine die v van gode beuolen es die doghet gherne al dore ende dore: soe suldi den verholenen raet van hem horen, Alsoe iob van hem seghet: Te mi es gheseghet een verborghen woert” (Brieven, 22). “Ende alsoe doen noch die ghene die in vrihede der Minnen dienen: Si rusten op die soete wise borst ende sien ende horen die heimelike worde die onuertelleec Ende onghehoert sijn den volke ouermids die soete runinghe des heilichs gheests” (Brieven, 146). Lied 4, ll. 13–18: “Die hem met trouwen in waerheit gheeft / ende met waerheiden dan trouwen levet, / dat verhoelne woert wert hem gheseghet / dat nieman vreemders en mach verstaen, / dan diet van smake ghevoelt al hevet / ende in hoech gheruchte silentie ontfaen” (Liederen, 86).

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103. Vis, 134. The number twenty-eight is the number associated with the lunar cycle and is commonly associated with Mary, as she is the reflection of the sun. Adding the number one, the perfect number, makes for twenty-nine. 104. Translation mine. “Dese III wesene” (Vis, 136). 105. McGinn, “The Changing Shape of Late Medieval Mysticism,” 214. McGinn meditates on what constitutes the specificity of women’s mystical texts and highlights the emphasis in the 1990s on “extravagant bodily manifestations.” He also cautions that any conclusion needs to begin “not from a fi xed ideological perspective but from textual analysis which recognizes the complexity of the relationship between experience and representation” and should problematize the notion of “experience” (216–217). 106. I disagree with Ulrike Wiethaus’s claim that women’s “sense of self and of Christ as physical stressed continuity between their social and biological experience, on the one hand, and the experience of encounter with God, on the other,” and that “physical nonecstatic reality was symbolically aligned with a repressive secular reality” (“Gender and the Body in Medieval Spirituality,” 36, 51), which then makes visions the place where a gendered identity is recreated.

4. Living Song Hugh of Saint Victor, Soliloquy on the Earnest Money of the Soul, 24: “Sensibus foris decoravit, intus sapientia illustravit. Sensus dans quasi exteriorem, sapientiam quasi interiorem habitum” (PL 176, col. 961). Hadewijch, Lied 8: “Die werke sijn die cleder dan” (Liederen, 108). Hadewijch, Mengeldicht 3, ll. 103–106: “Die ane dreghet den erdschen man / Besie die scout der redennen an, / Die sine reghele es, ende die hem leert / Die werke die men ter minnen keert” (Mgdt, 111). 1. Jessica Boon, “Trinitarian Love Mysticism,” 488, n. 19. Boon’s article offers an astute and, to my eyes, correct assessment (and remedy) of the problem that “most scholars mistakenly consider Hadewijch’s poetry and visions to be direct, unedited descriptions of a mystical experience, putting aside her Letters as ‘less immediate.’ In fact, all reports of contact with the divine are mediated, not direct, descriptions since the very language that a person picks up to use in a descriptive passage is fi ltered by his or her conceptual knowledge of the world, including the conceptual limits imposed by his or her religious tradition” (“Trinitarian Love Mysticism,” 489, n. 21). 2. CW, 244; POH, 269. “Begherte scept, geneuchte drinket” (Liederen, 296). 3. For a reading of the formal ways in which Hadewijch’s work uses “courtly” forms, see, for example, Guest, Some Aspects of Hadewijch’s Poetic Form in the “Strofische Gedichten” and Newman, “The Beguine as Knight of Love,” in God and the Goddesses, 169–181. The meaning of the designation “courtly” as a vernacular term, however, is increasingly unclear. Maurice Keen reminds us that “Knighthood was a Christian calling” (Chivalry, 76), and the distinction between secular and vernacular forms is not fully understood. With regard to how “courtly” and “spiritual” have become increasingly difficult to separate, see, among

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others, Daniel O’Sullivan’s book, Marian Devotion in Thirteenth-Century French Lyric, which has put the term “courtly” into question as an easily definable and classifiable category. Reynaert, “Hadewijch: Mystic Poetry and Courtly Love,” 221. See Jaeger, The Envy of Angels. Newman, “The Beguine as Knight of Love,” 169–181. For a reading of desire (as begherte) in Hadewijch see Faesen, Begeerte in het werk van Hadewijch. Dutch-language scholarship, versed as it is in a wide theological and literary framework, has tended to be more inclusive of her work as a whole. Reynaert signaled the difficulty in directly associating eros with the courtly, noting, “Even if the erotic current in medieval mysticism cannot be traced back to Bernard of Clairvaux himself, it does already manifest itself in twelft hcentury spirituality” (“Hadewijch: Mystic Poetry and Courtly Love,” 215). One exception is Willaert’s De Poetica Hadewijch Strophische Gedichten, in which he argues for an ethos at work in the poems. Willaert’s early study—one of the first on Hadewijch—emphasizes poetic tropes and language, although it tends to overlook the theological underpinnings of the concepts invoked. Marieke von Baest has also highlighted the presence of Job in Hadewijch’s poems (see POH ), yet the significance of this influence (aside from its thematic presence) has not been explored, especially in relation to Gregory’s Moralia. The text of the Moralia was one of the most popular in the Middle Ages, and therefore it survives in numerous manuscripts. The Moralia was read by all monastics, including the Cistercians, but in that regard they were simply following the example of the Benedictines. For a brilliant exposition of the Citeaux Moralia in Job, see Rudolph, Violence and Daily Life. Th is is not to say that suffering becomes aestheticized, although it is given meaning through a tie to its relation to imitatio, which does have an aesthetic counterpart. The psalms themselves could have been known by Hadewijch in a variety of forms, not only in the Latin translation of Jerome (for the office) and earlier Latin forms (for the Mass), but also by interpretive antiphons and commentaries. Th is variance in form of the psalms implies that the content is widely known to religious communities and individuals who participate in the office and prayer and thus are able to understand the “rff,” so to speak, that a new contextualization might make of its material. Simons’s work on liturgical, paraliturgical, and nonliturgical song in beguinages is particularly interesting in this regard; he notes: “The court beguinages of the Southern Low Countries . . . mostly formed quasi-independent parishes in which clergy and beguines were able to create a liturgy of their own, obviously within the norms imposed by the secular cursus of the local diocese” (“Beguines, Liturgy, and Music,” 19). Simons also traces an early (fourteenth-century) practice of nonliturgical singing—a type that evinced a dangerously close relation to secular song—to beguine communities. Letter 30 makes it clear that redemption is based on an economy of debt, but that this is also based on an economy of debt (scout) and demand (manen) between the three figures of the Trinity. Hadewijch’s use of the language of gift, debt, and demand within the Trinity is profoundly influenced by Richard of Saint Victor’s Trinity. Richard also emphasizes the necessity of three people to share the love in the Trinity; this will be a model

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for human relationships in Hadewijch’s articulation of Minne as threefold. While Gordon Rudy sees Minne as “a demanding and capricious feudal lady,” part of this “demand” is actually a debt transformed into an ethic that is “responsive,” to use Richard’s language; see Rudy, The Mystical Language of Sensation, 79. For an exposition of Richard’s theory of the Trinity, see Clark, “The Trinity in Latin Christianity,” 286–292. Translation mine. Lied 30, ll. 43–48: Liederen, 240. Hart translates this passage as: “In the beginning Love enriched me. / She added to my sensible joy / And showed me all the winnings. / Why does she now run away like a vagabond? / She added to my sensible joy, / But now I wander in a strange land” (CW, 214). Hart’s translation loses the exactitude of the Middle Dutch’s “doubling” (dobbeleerde) of the senses (not “joy”), which I interpret in a literal sense as a reference to the doubling of the senses seen in the visions. For a translation that agrees with mine see van Baest, Poetry of Hadewijch, 213. While some may interpret dobbeleerde as an act of enriching or intensifying sinne, reading sinne as “understanding, the mind,” . . . this equally valid gloss does not disqualify the technical means—that is, the medium of the senses—whereby this “intensification” occurs in Hadewijch. Th is transition into debt is made conceptually clear in Letter 30. Because man did not “answer the demand of the Unity, he fell,” and thus by the demand of the Trinity Christ was born, died, and rose. So, Hadewijch writes, “it is also with us. When payment of the debt we owe is demanded of us by the Trinity, grace is given to us to live worthily according to the noble Trinity, as is fitting. But if, because our will is estranged [vremden], we thwart this and fall back from this unity into our own self-complacency, we no longer grow and no longer make progress in that perfection which was thus demanded of us from the beginning by the Unity and the Trinity. But if man’s noble reason [edel redene] would recognize its just debt [werdeghe scout] and follow Love’s leading into her land— that is, follow Love according to her due—then he would be capable of attaining that great object and being enriched in God with divine riches” (CW, 117; Brieven, 242–244). Hadewijch’s understanding may be influenced by Richard of Saint Victor. The plurality of figures of the divine and of human properties for accessing or allying oneself with the imago in the visions is sharply contrasted with the songs, in which only one figure of the divine, Minne, remains. Since the songs are set in historical time, it is understandable that Minne becomes a figure for the Trinitarian nature of the divine and for the human way of experiencing and aligning oneself with the divine in the world, that is, through service to love, humility, and adopting the will of the divine. The legend of Mary Magdalene’s wandering in the desert was well known in the Middle Ages. After the crucifi xion, it was said, she fled to the south of France near Marseilles and wandered there during the last thirty years of her life. Perhaps more influential is Gregory’s Sermon 25 on John 20:11–18, which uses Mary’s searching for the absent Christ as a paradigm for the searching Bride of the Song of Songs. As Grover A. Zinn Jr. notes, in an exegetical turn in the sermon, “the Bride now defi nes the Magdalene’s love: ardent, searching everywhere, presently unsatisfied, soon to be fulfi lled in a marvelous manner of divine presence” (“Texts Within Texts,” 210). Zinn’s article presents rich material for consideration in relation to Hadewijch’s work. Hadewijch’s poetry is exegetical in its use of the Song of Songs in the tradition of Gregory and Hugh.

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15. Vis, 150 (translation mine). 16. Brieven, 112. 17. Translations modified. “Ghi selt gherne om goe spreken. Dat es een teken van Minnen, dat lieues name suete es. Daer af sprect Sente bernaert: Jhesus es honech inden mont. Het es ouer sere, Ende het vliethecht de werke” (Brieven, 118). 18. “Condilectio autem iure dicitur, ubi a duobus tertius concorditer diligitur, socialiter amatur et duorum affectus tertii amoris incendio in unum conflatur” (Richard of Saint Victor, La Trinité, 208–210). See book 3 of The Trinity. 19. The “doubling” of the senses is a reference to the domains of inner and outer described in chapter 2 and to the awakening of the “inner” senses (of sight, taste, hearing, touch) to Minne, through reason. Richard of Saint Victor offers an interesting explanation of reason’s relation to the spiritual senses in his Benjamin Minor: “Every rational spirit is given two powers by the Father of lights from whom comes every good and perfect gift . The one is reason, the other the affections; the reason for truth, the affection for virtue. . . . They are the two wives of a rational being which produces numerous offspring and are the heirs of the heavenly kingdom. Of reason springs right counsel, of affection holy desires. Of the first spiritual senses, of the second ordered affections. The latter produces all the virtues, the former all truth” (Benjamin Minor, 80). “Omni spiritui rationali gemina quaedam vis data est ab illo Patre luminum, a quo est omne datum optimum, et omne donum perfectum. Una est ratio, altera est affectio; ratio qua discernamus, affectio qua diligamus; ratio ad veritatem, affectio ad virtutem. . . . Hae sunt spiritus rationalis geminae uxores, ex quibus oritur generosa proles, et regni coelestis heredes. Ex ratione oriuntur consilia recta, ex affectione desideria sancta. Ex illa spirituales sensus, ex ista ordinati affectus. Ex ista denique omnis virtus, ex illa vero veritas omnis” (Les douze patriarches , ou, Beniamin minor, 96). 20. Mengeldicht 10, ll. 47–50: “Die naheit vander minnen natueren / Die beneemt der sielen hare ghedueren: / So si meer comt, so si meer steelt; / So si meer toent, so si meer heelt” (Mgdt, 45). 21. The fi liation between absence of direct contact and the lack of certainty of Minne’s “presence” is testament to the importance of the senses for Hadewijch in her formulations of Minne. The investment in the vision is significant, for it provides an atemporal pivot around which her poetry and letters fi nd their “absent” center. Th is absent center is the promised union and perfection in love, that is, the promise of becoming Minne herself. 22. Letter 2: “Die pine die v van god beuolen es die doghet gherne al dore ende dore: soe suldi den verholenen raet van hem horen, Alsoe iob van hem seghet: Te mi es gheseghet een verborghen woert” (Brieven, 22). 23. Letter 18: “Ende die te dusghedanen wesene sijn vercoren inder Minnen enecheit Ende noch daer toe niet volwassen en sijn, si hebben de ghewelt in hare moghentheit vander ewicheit, Mer si es hen onbekint ende oec anderen. Aldus secrete verlicht de redene. Dit sien der zielen verlicht de ziele in alre waerheit vanden wille gods: Want die sine vonisse leset uten anschine gods, hi werct in alre redenen na die waerheit dier seden der Minnen” (Brieven, 142). Unlike the case of Hadewijch’s visions, the only predominant reference to

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25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

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reading in the songs is with regard to reading Minne’s judgments, that is, reading where one stands in relation to Love. There are two other mentions: in Lied 40, a reference is made to reading (leest) of Minne’s might, “Anyone who wins over Minne’s power / He may well be known as a champion / For one reads of Love’s might / That she wins over all thing” (“Die dus verwint der Minnen cracht / Hi mach wel sijn kimpe wel bekint / Want men leest vander minnen macht / Dat si al andere dinc verwint” [Lied 40, l. 27: CW, 244; Liederen, 296; POH, 266]). Th is “reading” may allude to popular romance, with which Hadewijch was clearly familiar. In Lied 29, another mention of reading is made in l. 88, regarding Mary and what others have “read” of her: “Because she wanted nothing more and nothing else had, she had everything of which everyone has read” (“Want si el ne woude noch hare el ne was, / soe hadse al daer elc af las” [Liederen, 234]). The majority of references in the songs are to spoken or sung words. Translation modified. Lied 11, ll. 37–40: “Want sine vonnessen moeten al sijn / ghelesen in minnen anscine, / ende daer siet hi, claer ware, sonder scijn, / in meneghe suete pine” (Liederen, 124). (Poem 12 in POH, 104). Note that CW and Liederen are not aligned in their numbering here, as a result of the use of an earlier manuscript (A) for the edition of the latter. In CW, this is Poem 12; in Liederen it is Lied 11. Lied 11, ll. 41–50: “Hi siet in claerheiden dat die mint, / met volre waerheit pleghen moet. / Alse hi met waerheiden dan bekint / dat hi der minnen te lettel doet, / verstoermt met pinen sijn hoghen moet. / Want in minnen anscine neemt hi al, / hoe minne der minnen pleghen sal, / ende doet hem gheven al om al / omme der minnen ghenoech te sine” (Liederen, 124). Th is practice of introspection, carried out in the face of Minne, parallels the explicit identification of psalmody prayers as practiced in the sight of God. Susan Boynton writes, “Psalmody prayers often explicitly identified singing the psalms as the sinner’s offering to God, a performance carried out in the sight (in conspectu) of God. The use of the word conspectus in reference to psalm singing recalls the conclusion of chapter 19 of the Benedictine rule: ‘Therefore let us consider how to behave in the sight (in conspectu) of God and his angels, and let us stand to sing the psalms in a way that our minds are in harmony with our voices’” (“Prayer as Liturgical Performance in Eleventh- and Twelft hCentury Monastic Psalters,” 906). Beguine liturgy is extremely diverse, and the study of it is gaining momentum—see the 2009 book Mannaerts, ed., Beghinae in cantu instructae: Musical Patrimony from Flemish Beguinages (Middle Ages–Late Eighteenth Century), and especially Simons’s contribution, “Beguines, Liturgy, and Music.” POH, 105. Lied 11, ll. 53, 59–60: “Si selen met minnen ane minne een cleven, / . . . Dit blivet den vreemden al ontwinket, / ende openbaer den vroeden” (Liederen, 124). This rhetorical distance between the speaker and a collective unity that has no understanding of the speaker’s actions and frame of mind is made clear in the opening stanza of Lied 22, which contrasts the speaker, who “must practice what I am,” and the “people” (lieden), who remain outside of the kind of knowing professed by the speaker (CW, 186; POH, 158; Liederen, 184). Lied 27, l. 7: Liederen, 216. The “subtitle” that Columba Hart imposed on Letter 17, “Living in the Rhythm of the Trinity,” further underscores the point I am making regarding life and poetic form. Anikó Daróczi’s study (Groet gheruchte van dien wonedere) of inner rhyme in Hadewijch’s

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30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

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letters does not, I think, undermine my point here, but complicates the distinction between kinds of verse. Letter 17 is one of the few letters (if not the only one) that fuses poetry, visions, and letter into one didactic and spiritual ensemble. The tradition of the Dicta, or Disticha Catonis, or Dionysii Catonis Disticha de moribus ad filium (an ensemble of didactic Latin couplets known as the Distichs of Cato in the form of advice from father to son) dates from the fourth or third centuries. It was widely popular throughout the early and later Middle Ages for its usage in learning Latin (in tandem with moral virtues) but was also translated into vernaculars. The Middle Dutch translation, Den Duytschen Cathoen, is not a strict literal translation but often a free adaptation with a prologue that is not included in the Latin. For more on Middle Dutch texts in rhyme see Kienhorst, Lering en stichting op klein format. I am alluding to Jean Laplanche’s use of the term “hollowed-out transference” for this kind of repetitive awakening of an enigma encrypted into “life.” Laplanche argues for a recovering of an enigma at the base, so to speak, of human experience, from a “fi lled-in transference” to “hollowed-out” transference. He writes, “The problem of the addressee, of the anonymous addressees, is an essential part of any description of the poetic situation. The addressee is essentially enigmatic, even if he sometime takes on individual traits. . . . What can be isolated here as characteristic of the cultural is an address to an other who is out of reach, to others ‘scattered in the future’ ” (Essays on Otherness, 224, 234). Translation altered. Brieven, 126. The “rhymed letters” (which have no determinate addressee) are similar to a form of prayer. They circumnavigate the author in the hopes of reaching the addressee by way of God, “I pray God who is the Master of all virtues, / That he make you conformed to Love” (CW, 325), and “I pray God that he may direct your understanding / In his veritable Love” (CW, 329). They also hover on the form of a command, “I command your senses to God” (CW, 331). The more impersonal, aphoristic, quasi-universal tone and form of the poems make them far less didactic and liturgical then the letters. They seem to embody the principles and divine truths that Hadewijch seeks to impart pedagogically in the prose of her letters. “Die wesene die ic daer noeme, die sijn volcomeleke hare nature: Want gheonstech ende snel, dat es de nature vanden heileghen gheest. . . . Ende niet sonderlinghe te onderwindene, dat es die nature vanden vader. . . . Die vte gheuen ende dit op houden: dit es pure godheit ende gheheele nature van Minnen” (Brieven, 126, 128). The significance of the “lived” for beguines is highlighted in economic detail by Penelope Galloway, “‘Life, Learning, and Wisdom’: The Forms and Functions of Beguine Education.” As Jean Leclercq has long noted, and which by now may seem self-evident, the purpose of monastic life is to live a text, not only to read and know it; see The Love of Learning and the Desire for God. Claire Waters’s insightful work Angels and Earthly Creatures makes strides in reconsidering the relation between preaching and women. In Lied 31, Hadewijch elliptically suggests that song (sanc) can performatively capture the simultaneous experience of

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38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

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consolation (troest) and cruelty (meslone) tasted in Love in a way that exceeds any sermon: “Consolation and cruelty in one / That is the essence of Minne’s taste / Wise Solomon, were he alive, / Could not unravel such high matters / We are not apprised of it in any sermon / The song surpasses every tune” (Lied 31, ll. 25–30: CW, 217; POH, 216). “Troest ende meslone in enen persoen: / dats wesen van der minnen smake./ Al levede die wise Salemoen, / hi liete te ontbendene soe hoge sake. / Wi ne werdens berecht in gheen sermoen: / die sanc verhoghet allen toen” (Liederen, 244). Again, see Rudolph, Violence and Daily Life for a demonstration of how the figure of the knight is used as a figure for combating even the most mundane or quotidian of domestic enemies in monastic life. Hadewijch’s use of the figure of the knight has a long-standing precedent in its association with religious quest. The image of the Bride of Christ going to war is part of how the Speculum envisions the continued work of the virgin upon entering the monastery—see 9.22–23, cited in Listen, Daughter, 165. “Die drie andere waert die ic segghe die enicheit ende minne volcomen maken” (Brieven, 128). The Liederen may have been memorized, offering themselves as “riddling formulations of what has already been expressed in prose, like the rhyming hexameters of the Summa Musicae” (Page, Summa Musicae, 15). Translation altered with reference to CW, 188; POH, 164. Lied 23, ll. 14–17: “Verstonde wij der minnen ghehere gheleer / ende worden wij metten ghelere gheheer, / wi souden minne verwerven / ende in al hare rijcheit erven” (Liederen, 190). All of the references to Minne’s gheleer make note of her richness, or “rich teaching” (rike gheleer). Hadewijch also describes her own circumstances in this letter (Letter 17): “What was forbidden me (as I told you it was forbidden) was to have on earth any undueness of love; that is, to stand in awe of nothing outside of Love, and to live in love so exclusively that every thing outside of Love should be utterly hated and shunned” (CW, 83). “Dat verbot dat ic v gheseghet hebbe dat mi verboden was, dat was ongherechticheit van Minnen te hebbene op ertrike Ende niet te spaerne dat buten Minnen es, Ende soe na der Minnen te pleghene, dat alle dat dat buten Minnen es si ghehaet” (Brieven, 130). The prohibition was made known to her in a vision described in Letter 17, which is used as a pedagogical tool to emphasize the complex relation between embodiment, exegesis, and language: “These were prohibited to me on Ascension Day, four years ago, by God the Father himself, at the moment when his Son came upon the altar. At this coming, I was kissed by him; and by this token I was shown what follows. Having been made one with him, I came before his father. There the father took the Son to himself with me and took me to himself with the Son [Daer nam hi hem ouer mi ende mi ouer hem]. And in this oneness [enicheit] into which I was taken and where I was enlightened [veclaert], I understood this essence and knew it more clearly than—by human speech, reason, or sight [dan men met sprekene ocht met redenen ocht met siene]—one can know anything that is knowable on earth. Th is seems wonderful indeed. But although I say it seems wonderful, I know indeed it does not astonish you. For earth cannot understand heavenly wisdom [Want hemelsche redene en mach ertrike niet verstaen]. Words enough and Dutch enough can be found for all things on earth, but I do not know any Dutch or any

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44.

45.

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words that answer my purpose. Although I can express everything insofar as this is possible for a human being, no Dutch can be found for all I have said to you, since none exists to express these things, so far as I know” (CW, 84; Brieven, 132). As seen before, her vision of a kiss is not an exclusively erotic experience, but becomes a means for understanding her symmetrical relation to Christ and their unity in the divine. I thank Susan Boynton for noting that this seems likely to be a reference to the kiss of the peace at Mass since she describes the Eucharist laid on the altar table on Ascension Sunday. In the Middle Ages, communicants kissed a liturgical object called a “pax” in preparation for taking communion. The object itself could depict a crucifi xion, which explain the idea that she received a kiss from Christ (from the pax), and then was made one with him (took communion). The Ancrene Wisse will also prescribe, “After the kiss of peace when the priest consecrates the host, forget all the world, be whole out of your body [al ut of bodi], embrace in shining love your lover who has alighted into the bower of your heart from heaven, and hold him as tight as you can until he has granted all that you ever ask (Gen 32:24–26). This prayer of the great cross is of great power” (Anchoritic Spirituality, 59–60; Ancrene Wisse, 82–83). Translation modified. “Noch doghet, Noch sonderlinghen werc vore en doe, hem met te verdraghene, Noch ontfermicheit hen met te bescermene, Mer slach ouerslach in ghebrukenessen van minnen” (Brieven, 130). See Colledge’s translation: “I was to have no regard for anything but Love, and so to give myself to the service of Love that everything which is foreign to Love might be hated and avoided by me, that I in my delight in Love should no longer feel any inclination towards good, no longer do any particular work for Love, no longer feel compassion for Love or long to protect it, but always, unceasingly, to live in the delight of Love” (“Selected Letters,” 76). Mary is also the perfect figure for all but the perfection of the will in the divine in that unlike prophets, Mary practices the divine; see Lied 29. The prophets, she says, “saw visions / and in beautiful parables spoke of what God would do. / But to my sense / Clear and free love / Remained unpracticed [ongheploen] by them. For their customs were like those of other men, / Now here, now there, now on, now off. / But Mary said nothing / But be it done to me as God wills” (ll. 61–70; CW, 210; POH, 206; Liederen, 232). One then can assume that Hadewijch too sees her visions as less significant than her actions. Quoted and translated in Willemien Otten, “Between Damnation and Restoration: The Dynamics of Human Nature in Eriugena’s Periphyseon and Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus,” 344. “Quemadmodum ars poetica per fictas fabulas allegoricasque similitudines moralem doctrinam seu physicam componit ad humanorum animorum exercitationem—hoc enim proprium est heroicarum poetarum, qui virorum fortium facta et mores figurate laudant—ista theologica, veluti quaedam poetria, sanctam scripturam fictis imaginationibus ad consultum nostri animi et reductionem a corporalibus sensibus exterioribus, veluti ex quadam imperfecta pueritia, in rerum intelligibilium perfectam cognitionem, tanquam in quamdam interioris hominis grandevitatem conformat” (Eriugena, Expositiones in Ierarchiam coelestem: CCCM 31, 23–24). Susan Boynton reminds me that in the Benedictine rule, assuming the garment is a critical moment in the novitiate, which suggests that Hadewijch could be using this metaphorically for her own novices in Minne. The poetic figure of the garment might also

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48. 49.

50.

51. 52.

53.

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allude to the convention of the integumentum, a popular literary process in the twelft h century in which a text is conceived of as illustrating a hidden, deeper (often spiritual) truth that is “wrapped” in the outer rhetorical garments of language. See Bernard of Chartres (Bernard Silvester): “An integumentum is a type of demonstration that covers the understanding of truth under a fabled narrative; thus, it is also called a covering” (“Integumentum vero est genus demonstrationis sub fabulosa narratione veritatis involens intellectum, unde et involcrum dicitur”) (cited in Edouard Jeauneau, “L’usage de la notion d’integumentum à travers les gloses de Guillaume de Conches,” 130). “Die hem cleden wilt ende rike sijn ende een metter godheit, hi sal hem seleuen cieren met allen doechden, Ja daer god hem seluen met cleedde ende cierde, doen hi mensche leuede, Ende dies salmen beghinnen ane die selue oetmoedicheit daer hijs ane began” (Brieven, 244). The Speculum virginum shares in the overall directive and tone of the poems in respect to their spiritual education of women: clothing oneself in virtues. See Gregory, Homiliae in Hiezechihelem prophetam, 142:215, 2.1.9: “Quid enim vestimentum eius est, nisi corpus quod assumpsit ex Virgine?” The Middle Dutch term pleghen, which means “practice, way of being, mode of acting, mode of appearing, or custom,” is the term used to designate this way of acting as a person and in reference to Minne. See Lied 5, l. 7: “What one must practice towards Love” (POH, 65; CW, 139); “Wat men ter minnen pleghen sal” (Liederen, 90). The reference to “the man” is not necessarily a reference to a knight or a vassal, as Hart or van Baest respectively translate it, although the qualities condoned do correspond with a courtly ethos. But in ignoring the value of shifting correspondences and taking the courtly as the fi nal term, we miss the sophisticated figural and theological stakes. In Vision 7, the vision of union with Christ, Christ appears “in the likeness and clothing of a man” (“ghedane des cleeds ende des mans”), phrasing that is clearly echoing this desired state. The eagerness to translate certain terms in the language of courtliness is often a greater reflection on our desire for the courtly than it is a clearcut identification. Translation mine. Leid 8, ll. 26–40: CW, 149–150; POH, 85, 87. The later Der leken spieghel (The Layman’s Mirror), composed ca. 1330 by the Brabantine poet Jan van Boendale, draws from the Disticha and also encourages its lay audience in manners, as well as in how to write like a cleric, one of the “learned,” or “ lewed.” Like Hadewijch’s letter, its opening lines emphasize the pleasing nature of ghelaet (airs, demeanor, countenance): “Die mensche sal dat verstaet / Altoes hebben scoen ghelaet / Scoene zeden ende miniere” (“Men should always take care / To always have a fair demeanor, / Fair manners and graces”). I have altered the translation of Ben Parsons in “The Virtuous Life in Jan van Boendale’s Der Leken Spieghel,” published online by the Bartholomeus Society for Medieval Studies (2008): http://hbo-kennisbank.uvt.nl/cgi/ fontys/show.cgi?fid=3617. Boendale emphasizes fidelity, the five forms of love, and the four estates in his third book and also makes a connection between writing well, living well, and living a virtuous life. Parallels between Hadewijch’s work and Middle Dutch didactic forms for the laity have yet to be pursued. Serving vremden, that is, “strangers” (what translators call “aliens”), is one of the identifying points of compassion and empathy, a first step in love. I have translated vremden as

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56.

57.

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strangers, since the term “alien” often implies a negative or hostile connotation, which is not always the case in Hadewijch’s work, even though they are not yet neighbors (see Lied 28, l. 39: CW, 206; Liederen, 224). Th is capacity to be concerned for others corresponds to Gregory’s valuing of humility and care of the neighbor as the first steps in Christic imitation and is emphasized by the Victorines. Mommaers, The Riddle of Christian Mystical Experience, 187. “Wi willen sijn verdreghen van onsen langhen tide Ende gheeret van goeden werken, Ende vergheten der Minnen scout te vroech. . . . Wi willen dat onse doghet bekint si; Daer omme en hebben wiere dat brulocht cleet niet af. . . . Onse oetmoedicheit es in de stemme Ende int ghelaet Ende inden schijn, Ende niet te vollen omme gods groetheit Ochte omme dat wi onse cleynheit bekinnen. Daer om en draghen wi den gods sone niet moederleke, Noch en soghene niet met oefeninghen van Minnen” (Brieven, 250). The wedding garment becomes the ultimate in figures, as is clear in Lied 27, but not according to the criterion of Bernard—that of the soul—but rather of Hugh—that is, as lived—in the figure of Mary. Unlike humanity, Christ has dual natures of divine and human, thus is both creator and work created, master and servant. The figure of the servant will also appear in a manuscript that is important in the formation of women’s spirituality, the Speculum virginum. The sender of the Dusseldorf manuscript signs as “Peregrinus, Christi pauperum servus” (Listen, Daughter, 51). “On the Four Degrees of Violent Love,” 293–294, translation modified. I have altered the translation to reflect the feminine gender of the soul (anima). “Hoc sentite in vobis, quod et in Christo Jesu. Qui cum in forma Dei esset, non rapinam arbitratus est esse aequalem Deo; sed semetipsum exinanivit formam servi accipiens, in similitudinem hominum factus, et habitu inventus ut homo. . . . Haec est forma humilitatis Christi, ad quam conformare se debet quisquis supernum consummatae caritatis gradum attingere volet. . . . Ad summum itaque caritatis culmen profecerunt, et jam in quarto caritatis gradu positi sunt, qui pro amicis animam suam ponere. . . . In tertio itaque gradu anima in Deum glorificatur, in quarto propter Deum humiliatur. In tertio gradu conformatur divinae claritati, in quarto vero conformatur Christianae humilitati. Et cum in tertio gradu quodammodo, quasi in forma Dei esset, nihilominus tamen in quarto gradu semetipsum exinanire incipit, formam servi accipiens, et habitu iterum invenitur ut homo. In tertio itaque gradu quodammodo mortificatur in Deum, in quarto quasi resuscitatur in Christum. . . . Incipit ergo in novitate vitae ambulare qui eiusmodi est, quia de reliquo sibi vivere Christus est, et mori lucrum . . . sit igitur nova creatura, qui eiusmodi est; vetera transierunt, et ecce nova facta sunt omnia” (De quatuor gradibus violentae caritatis, PL 196, cols. 1222C– 1223A). I am indebted to chapters 3 and 4 of Paul Mommaers’s insightful The Riddle of Christian Mystical Experience for his elucidation of this emphasis on the humanity of Christ in both Richard and Hadewijch. For a closer translation of the Latin, see Clare Kirchberger’s in Richard of Saint Victor, Selected Writings on Contemplation, 230–231. Lied 21 demonstrates that the feminine figure of the vrowe, the “lady,” for the speaker in her historical person is a position that mistakenly assumes scone ghelaet (fair airs) as though it would enable mastery: “I deceived myself in being the lady of the court when I first chose

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64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69.

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her, I fully gave in singing her praises, but could not hold out. . . . Now her rewards appear to me like that of the scorpion, that shows fair airs, and then strikes cruelly. Alas, what does such showing mean?” (CW, 184–185). The pedagogical nature of the subsequent stanzas shows us precisely what this showing means, as it counters the initial lack of understanding (seen in line 38, “I cannot understand her wild wonder”) with the wisdom shown by a “we” in the final stanza. Unlike the mistaken vrowe, the we wisely concludes, “So may we well say, ‘Oh my, how dare we cling to our repose’ ” (CW, 186). In a performative countering of this error, the stanzas that follow actively demonstrate that taking fair airs as an end is selfcomplacent. The following stanzas demonstrate how one should act: take the road of errantry, be led by Minne, and experience her as out of reach (onghehende) and unmasterable. This entails “going out” to find her, a kind of “emptying out,” kenosis; the next step is understanding this kenosis as a form of freedom and redemption. Translation modified. Lied 19, ll. 37–42: POH, 148; Liederen, 170. Translation mine. Lied 1, ll. 85–101: CW, 129–130; POH, 46; Liederen, 70. The theme of “newness” is a constant in her work and corresponds to the ure, the hours of love and this renewal of outer in the inner, the earthly in the spiritual. Fulton, “Mimetic Devotion, Marian Exegesis, and the Historical Sense of the Song of Songs,” 107. Fulton is arguing for this dominant motif in William of Newburgh’s twelft h-century Explanatio sacri epithalamii in matrem sponsi, but her overall argument for the interest in the interpretation of the Song of Songs according to Mary’s lived experience as the human and historical mother of Jesus is one that is applicable to Hadewijch. Hadewijch is far less interested in the martyrological aspect of Mary than is William, although Julian’s desired witnessing of the crucifi xion echoes this. Translation mine. Lied 29, ll. 41–46: CW, 209; POH, 204. Translation mine. Lied 29, ll. 71–80: CW, 210; POH, 206. Translation modified. POH, 289. Lied 35, l. 32: “Dies moetic nachte bi dage leven” (Liederen, 264). “Of the Four Degrees of Passionate Charity,” 224; translation modified. “Hoc itaque statu anima a Domino in solitudinem ducitur, ibique lactatur ut interna dulcedine inebritur” (De quatuor gradibus violentae caritatis, PL 196, col. 1217D).” Hadewijch describes emptying out as “taking away freedom from myself ” and as “nothing remains to me of myself ” (Lied 24, ll. 45, 48: CW, 194; Liederen, 200), but also in Lied 8 (= Poem in stanzas 9) as the movement of going out to conquer love so that one be conquered and “brought to nought in love” (CW, 151): “Ende dan in minnen te nieute werden mochte” (l. 77; Liederen, 110). In Lied 13 (= Poem in stanzas 14), it is described as “living in a new death” (CW, 163): “leven in nuwer doet,” (l. 24; Liederen, 132). Translation modified. Lied 27, ll. 42–51: POW, 193. In a compelling analysis of ghebruken (fruition) and ghebreken (failure) and its relation to Hadewijch’s sense of unity, Paul Mommaers has emphasized Hadewijch’s transition from what she sees as a more childish way of thinking of unity as ghebruken to the wiser form of unity as ghebreken; he comments on a passage: “It is as if she were saying: ‘As long as I was “childish,” I identified the real being-one with the pleasurable ghebruken or jubileren. Now, having “grown up,” I realize that this real being-one, which I keep calling ghebruken, for it is the only “fruition”

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71. 72. 73.

74. 75.

76. 77.

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I finally value, lies hidden in a compound experience as the “truth” of both “rejoicing” with the Divinity and “failing” with the Humanity’” (The Riddle of Christian Mystical Experience, 188). The speaker in the poems is constantly reminding us that she has never tasted the fruit of Minne, and does not know of what she speaks. Lied 18, ll. 87–88 (=Poem in stanzas 19). I have modified POH, 145; see CW, 179. “Maer dien ouden ende dien jonghen / coelt sanc van minnen haern moet” (Liederen, 166). As Brian Daley, SJ, argues, quoting Athanasius, “What is distinctive about the Psalter in relation to other books is its more personal element, which allows the reader to identify the message with his or her inmost feelings: ‘It contains within itself the movements of each soul, their changes and adjustments, written out and thoroughly portrayed, so that if someone should wish to grasp himself from it, as from an image, and to understand on that basis how to shape himself, it is written there.’ The point of portraying the whole range of human spiritual ‘movements’ or emotions, Athanasius goes on to explain, is not simply poetic imitation—Aristotle’s mimesis—but therapy. The person who recognizes his own inner state in the psalms ‘can possess from this, once again, the image contained in the words, so that he does not simply hear them and move on, but learns what one must say and do to heal one’s disordered feelings.’ The psalms, in other words, do not simply command us to repent of our sins, to bear suffering patiently, or to praise God for his gifts,’ they actually give us the words by which we can come to say and do those things for ourselves” (“Finding the Right Key,” 200). Jeffery, “Monastic Reading and the Emerging Roman Chant Repertory,” 77. In Lied 23, Hadewijch makes reference to those who are called to the heileghe kerke (the holy church), stating that, with high hopes of love, they too are called to begin the works of love, “die minne met minnen werken” (ll. 78, 73; translation mine; CW, 191; Liederen, 194) and to persist in the storms of love. Jeffery, “Monastic Reading and Roman Chant,” 59. Various early manuscripts of the Speculum virginum, including the Clairvaux manuscript, are accompanied at their ending by the Epithalamium, a bridal song, which, as Catherine Jeffreys has pointed out, “responds” to the written word in musical form. Jeffreys also reads the Epithalamium as a new form of psalmody. Citing Anselm of Haverberg’s reference to “a new way of psalmody” (novum psallendi . . . modum), she suggests that “his phrase . . . implies that psalms were recited and responded to in a new way that existed outside established norms as part of a set of ‘new’ and ‘unusual’ monastic practices” (in “ ‘Listen, Daughters of Light’: The Epithalamium and Musical Innovation in Twelft h-Century Germany,” 138]). Morgan Powell also emphasizes the mirroring property of the Speculum: “Picture and Scripture are part of one hermeneutic experience— even one hermeneutic moment. . . . In both the virgin is to seek herself, a fact the author insists on by stating the seemingly obvious: Nothing can be called a mirror unless it reflects the image of its beholder.” He also frames the Speculum as “another method of monastic reading” in its possibly being read by a monk to the listener, who “‘reads,’ in the fully transformational monastic sense, through him” (“The Speculum virginum and the Audio-Visual Poetics of Women’s Religious Instruction,” in Listen, Daughter, 123, 115).

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78. See Boynton’s “Prayer as Liturgical Performance in Eleventh- and Twelft h- Century Monastic Psalters,” for rich examples of the variety of the use of the psalms in devotional and liturgical contexts. Both Boynton and Fulton, whom she cites, stress the interrelation between prayer and practice through the psalms. See Fulton, “Praying with Anselm at Admont.” 79. The pervasive significance of the psalms in medieval spirituality is incontestable but widely unexamined in relation to women’s mystical texts (with the exception of related texts by musicologists and scholars of medieval liturgy). The innumerable uses of the psalms—their modification and paraphrase in liturgical form, the extensive exegesis in twelft h- and thirteenth-century spirituality, the emotive appeal that provides a guide for reading, and the multiplicity of their functions—are echoed in Hadewijch’s Liederen. For a discussion of the extensive nature of different kinds of exegesis of the psalms, see Colish, “Psalterium Scholasticorum”; Kuczynski, Prophetic Song ; van Deusen, The Place of the Psalms in the Intellectual Culture of the Middle Ages. 80. Grijp, “De zingende Hadewijch,” 72–92, 340–343; “Hadewijch dicht mystieke liederen voor haar vriendinn. Brabantse begijnen tussen Atrechtse trouvères en een Maaslandse” (23–30); also see his hypothetical reconstructions of the melodies in Liederen, 348–428. His analysis of Lied 45, for example, demonstrates how this work was modeled on the Latin sequence Mariae praeconio, keeping some of the Latin. 81. O’Sullivan, Marian Devotion in Thirteenth-Century French Lyric, 7. O’Sullivan concludes his chapter “Women’s Devotional Song” with the argument that “at the centre of women’s devotional song lies a desire less for reward than for deliverance” from suffering (73). While Hadewijch seems to focus less on the kind of pain and suffering that O’Sullivan finds in women’s Marian lyrics, the promise of deliverance does play a significant part in how one hermeneutically understands the role of temporal strife. 82. As Will Hasty has pointed out, the early association in German songs of hoher muot (high spirits) with Minne is characteristic of the love lyric (Minnesang) in the stories of ladies and of knights, but in a way that emphasizes the failure and hopelessness of the quest for love and, especially in the case of Werbelieder, most often assume a tone of lament. “In some verses the singers seem to suggest that their love service, even if there seems to be no serious possibility that it will ever earn love’s reward, nevertheless has a value all its own. Monks are (or at least should be) made purer by their ascetic suffering; figures such as Erec, Iwein, and Parzifal in the courtly romances improve themselves in the ascetic rigors of their adventures. Similarly, the singer who remains loyal to his beloved, whose perfection simultaneously qualifies her and makes her eternally remote, can be improved in love-service and the sacrifice it has involved” (“Minnesang–The Medieval German Love Lyrics,” 146). This would support Hadewijch’s use of Minnesang in relation to ghebreken, failure, and identification with the humanity of Christ. Hasty also notes the parallel with Marian poetry. 83. For more on the embodied nature of Hildegard’s work, see Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture. 84 . Fassler, “Hildegard and the Dawn Song of Lauds,” 222. An in-depth comparison of Hadewijch’s and Hildegard’s musical work is not possible here, but the parallels pro-

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85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94.

95. 96.

97.

98. 99.

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vide for a better understanding of how Hadewijch’s work may be conceived. See also Boklund-Lagopoulou, “Yate of Heven: Conceptions of the Female Body in the Religious Lyrics.” Hildegard’s Ordo virtutum, a lyric and musical dramatization of the travails of a soul who falls into sin and struggles with virtue to redeem herself, shares the tone of Hadewijch’s Liederen. Fassler, Gothic Song, 317. Muessig, “Learning and Mentoring in the Twelft h Century,” 92. Lied 34, l. 23: CW, 224; POH, 231; Liederen, 258. Lied 18 (=Poem in stanzas 19), l. 92: CW, 179; POH, 145; Liederen, 166. Lied 18 (=Poem in stanzas 19), ll. 85, 91: CW, 179; POH, 145; Liederen, 166. Lied 8 (=Poem in stanzas 9), ll. 1–5: CW, 149; POH, 85; Liederen, 106. I have altered Van Baest’s translation. Translation mine. Lied 39, ll. 91–95: CW, 243; POH, 265. Lied 35, ll. 49–50 make the association of counsel with the divine directive for the human explicit: “Minne, you were there at counsel, / Where God called me to be a human being” (“Minne, ghi waert daer te rade / daer mi God mensche wesen hiet”) (CW, 228; POH, 239; Liederen, 266). But also seems to be suggesting in Lied 23, stanza 11 that the cleric’s scholarly mastery of divine subjects prevents them from seeing how performing works of love would make all even stronger. In an even more explicit statement of the “better” rule, Hadewijch’s Mengeldict 3, which I have discussed at length, looks to the role of reason for a rule: “But he who rather wears the earthly man as a garment / Considers the debt to reason, / Which is his rule of life and teaches him the works / By which he can turn from himself to Love” (ll. 103–108: CW, 324; Mgdt, 23). See Lied 13, l. 64; Lied 22, l. 38; Lied 32, ll. 24, 25; Lied 40, l. 61. Lied 40, ll. 57–62: POH, 268. “Die loep des troens ende der planeten / ende der tekene die metten trone gaen, / mach men iet met ghelike weten / ende met mate van ghetale bevaen. / Maer gheen meester en mach hem dies vermeten / dat hi minne met sinne mach doen verstaen” (Liederen, 298). In Lied 24, l. 74, reference is also made to false counsel, “falschen rade” (CW, 195; POH, 177; Liederen, 202), given by strangers to the experience of Minne. References to Minne’s rade appear more than fi fteen times in the Liederen, as opposed to a mere four times in reference to the first person. Lied 45, ll. 33–34: POH, 291; Liederen, 322. When writing about the poet Catherine Pozzi in the final chapter of The Mystic Fable, Michel de Certeau suggests that this nonsignifying capacity of phonetic repetitions points to a memoryless memory addressed to and coming from the body itself. He writes, “The sounds, resembling fragments of refrain, form an uncanny memory, prior to meaning. One would be hard put to say what it is the memory of: it recalls something that is not a past; it awakens what the body does not know about itself ” (The Mystic Fable, 297). This section, entitled “Overture to a Poetics of the Body,” in which he focuses on Hadewijch, marks an end to the first volume and an “opening” not just to a “poetics” of the body, but

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also to the second promised (and still unpublished) volume of The Mystic Fable. On the philosophical dimensions of de Certeau’s work, and of mystical affirmation, see Derrida, “A Number of Yes.” 100. Translation mine. CW, 352.

Conclusion 1. For a further demonstration of how “inner” and “outer” extend to earlier periods, see my “Questions of Dwelling in Anglo-Saxon Poetry and Medieval Mysticism,” which compares Hadewijch II, Porete, and Anglo-Saxon poetry. 2. Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian, x–xi. 3. Turner may have a more encompassing sense of “experience” in mind; however, as I noted in my introduction and as Sara Poor and others have emphasized, the association of women with “experience” is problematic and merits further development. 4. See, for example, Vincent Gillespie, “Pastiche, Ventriloquism, and Parody in Julian of Norwich,” on Julian’s stylistic originality. He argues, “If visionary experience is written down in the popular registers and codes of theology and devotional writing, it runs the risk of losing its specificity and uniqueness” (196). 5. In his analysis of hermeneutic complexity in Julian, which shares a common purpose with my argument, Watson acknowledges the Augustinian heritage in her distinction between corporeal and spiritual senses but, searching for the identical terms of “bodily” and “ghostly” in other mystics, states, “I know of no other women visionaries who use this Augustinian terminology, and no other visionary material which combines ‘bodily’ and ‘ghostly sight’ with any of the almost polyphonic complexity of Julian’s revelation” (“The Trinitarian Hermeneutic,” 66–67). I am suggesting that the complexity witnessed in Julian’s revelations and the shift ing terms used to navigate the telling of the revelations (which he highlights) are in fact either implicit or explicit in women’s mystical and visionary texts and combine the language of apprehension, interpretation, understanding, and exegesis to show that reading is always incorporated in these processes. 6. Appleford, “‘The Comene Course of Prayers.’” 7. An extensive amount of work has been done by scholars on Julian and the Trinity, and I highlight a few here: Watson, “The Trinitarian Hermeneutic”; Barratt, “No Such Sitting: Julian Tropes the Trinity”; Jantzen, Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian; and Sheldrake, “Trinity and Anthropology.” 8. Turner also finds musical analogies helpful for understanding Julian’s method, noting that she “transform[s] the tiniest melodic features of each shewing into major thematic developments” ( Julian of Norwich, Theologian, xi). 9. A vast survey of all women mystics is beyond the scope of this book—if not all books. Rather than single out women’s mystical texts from other texts because they conform to what we as twenty-first-century readers call “mystical” texts—a category, as Michel de Certeau notes, that dates from the seventeenth century—I stress that we should investigate other qualities of mystical texts (formal, thematic, didactic, liturgical) that allow

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10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

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them to be more clearly understood in relation to spiritual practices and literary techniques of the Middle Ages. There are two primary texts ascribed to Julian: the “short” text, A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman, and the longer and presumably later text, A Revelation of Love. On the manuscripts see Jenkins and Watkins, “Introduction,” in The Writings of Julian of Norwich; extracts of A Revelation of Love in this chapter are taken from this volume. Aers, Salvation and Sin, 164. The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, 3. As for Hadewijch, we have little biographical information about Julian aside from information derived from the manuscript, except that one of the manuscripts of the short text was dated 1413 and emended with a scribal note: “a deuoute Woman and her Name is Iulyan that is recluse atte Norwyche and sitt on lyfe.” The remaining information comes from several wills bequeathing donations to “Julian, anchorite.” Th is is nevertheless significantly more information than is available on Hadewijch. Sheldrake, “Trinity and Anthropology,” 117. The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, 206. Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian, 23. The theme of enclosure has been treated at length in relation to Julian. See, for example, McAvoy, The Rhetoric of the Anchorhold: Place, Space, and Body Within the Discourses of Enclosure ; Miles, “Space and Enclosure in Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Love.” Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian, 13. Watson, “The Middle English Mystics,” 540. Millett, “Ancrene Wisse and the Life of Perfection,” 62. “Ancrene Wisse,” 92 (translation modified); Ancrene Wisse, 132. For more on the inner and outer see Jocelyn Price, “Inner and Outer: Conceptualizing the Body in Ancrene Wisse and Aelred’s De institutione inclusarum.” Letter 4: “Met ordenen te houdene becom mert men met vele dinghen diermen quite mocht sijn; ende dat doet reden dolen. Een gheest van goeden wille werct in binnen scoendere dan alle ordenen gheuiseren mochten” (Brieven, 34, 36). See Millett, “Ancrene Wisse and the Life of Perfection” for a discussion of the historical factors surrounding the increase in female lay-anchoritism. Ibid.,59. A Victorine canon (Jacques de Vitry) and Victorine-turned-Dominican (Thomas de Cantimpré) were responsible for the first vita of the beguine Marie d’Oignies. Millett emphasizes the similarities between the Ancrene Wisse and works of James of Vitry, an Augustinian canon who supported the beguines of Liège and who was an “enthusiastic advocate” of the mendicant orders (Millet, “Ancrene Wisse and the Life of Perfection,” 71). On the Dominican origins of the Ancrene Wisse, see Millett, “The Origins of Ancrene Wisse.” For an earlier argument on an Augustinian origin see Dobson, The Origins of Ancrene Wisse. On Julian’s relation to spirituality abroad see Dutton, Julian of Norwich, 73–75; Ward, “Julian the Solitary,” 26; and Voaden’s edited volume Prophets Abroad, which, however, does not consider Hadewijch.

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26. While doubting the claim made by Jusserand in 1984 that the three anchoresses for whom the Ancrene Wisse was originally written were beguines, Wolfgang Riehle underscores that an admiration for the beguine spirituality of the Low Countries is manifest in several instances: the vita of Marie d’Oignies was translated in English, “and as early as the thirteenth century Robert Grosseteste praises the Beguine way of life as the highest stage of Christian perfection.” He adds that “in one manuscript the French source for the tract The Abbey of the Holy Ghost specifically refers to a ‘beguinage.’ The English translator did not take this term over directly but replaced it with the neutral term ‘religione’” (Riehle, The Middle English Mystics, 20). 27. Beckwith, “Passionate Regulation.” 28. Abbott, Julian of Norwich, 107. 29. Julian, A Revelation of Love 54.11–12 (297). 30. Ibid., 58.32–33 (307). 31. For more on the relation between the Augustinian hierarchies of the soul and their articulation in Julian, see Watson, “The Trinitarian Hermeneutic.” 32. “Man is changeabil in this life, and by frailte and uncunning falleth into sinne. He is unmighty and unwise of himselfe, and also his will is overlaide in this time. He is in tempest and in sorow and woe. And the cause is blindhede, for he seeth not God” (A Revelation of Love 47 [265]). Watson and Jenkins gloss: “changeabil: The main characteristic of the “sensualite” according to 45:3.” 33. In his meticulous analysis of Julian’s Trinitarian hermeneutic, Watson highlights her flexibility in the language she uses for apprehending the vision, noting that “she seems determined to use the language of revelation in as wide a variety of ways as possible, almost as though she is deliberately working against the restrictions of her own circumscribing hermeneutic structure” (“The Trinitarian Hermeneutic,” 67). 34. Turner notes, “As Bernard McGinn has suggested to me—and as readers can tell for themselves once alerted—her chief scriptural source must be the Pauline letters” ( Julian of Norwich, Theologian, 220, n. 2). 35. Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian, 72–73. 36. Annie Sutherland shows how, for example, “the syntactical structure ‘by . . . in’ and ‘in . . . by’ used in articulating our relationship with Christ” parallels Rom 11:36 (“For of him, and by him, and in him are all things”) but that Julian may have “in mind the wording of the Canon of the Mass, recorded thus in the Sarum Missal” (“Julian of Norwich and the Liturgy,” 91). 37. Extensive work has been done on Julian and the figure of the maternal. See, for example, McInerney, “‘In the Meydens Womb,’” and McNamer, “The Exploratory Image.” 38. Julian, A Revelation of Love 58.52–53 (309). 39. Denys Turner will note that “for all the affi rmative richness of her theological vocabulary, hers is a linguistic strategy every bit as apophatic as that of the Cloud author or Meister Eckhart” ( Julian of Norwich, Theologian, 24). 40. Julian, A Revelation of Love 57.8–9 (289). 41. Julian is explicit with regard to her anti-Manichean tendencies in chapter 27, stating, “But I saw not sinne. For I believe it hath no maner of substance, ne no part of being, ne

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42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

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it might not be knowen but by the paine that it is cause of. And this paine, it is something, as to my sighte, for a time. For it pugeth and maketh us to know ourselfe and aske mercy. For the passion of oure lorde is comfort to us agenst alle this, and so is his blessed wille” (A Revelation of Love 27.22–26 [210–211]). Watson and Jenkins, The Writings of Julian of Norwich, 236. They note that the term “bestely” may be a synonym for “impure” and that “godly” may also be a variant of “goodly.” Aers, Salvation and Sin, 164. Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian, 183. Ibid., 184. Kelner, “Conceiving a Form of imitatio Mariae in A Revelation of Divine Love,” 6. I am indebted to this wonderful senior thesis, which made Julian’s rhetorical use of “nought” much clearer to me. Julian seems far less conflicted than Paul, in that she never articulates the two parts of the soul as being “at war” with one another the way Paul suggests, using the language of law. While Julian allows the option of willing what is “not good,” she nevertheless focuses on how redemption is possible through love. Joan Nuth argues that the incarnation functions as a way to complete union with God: “In the human being, the same soul, whose substance is eternally united to God, becomes relegated to corporeal nature, but the unit .  .  . is a fragile one, incomplete, [and] partial. . . . The Incarnation, God’s work of mercy in time, completes human nature by bringing sensuality into complete union with the soul’s substance” (Wisdom’s Daughter, 45). Turner, Julian of Norwich , Theologian, 147. While this does not mean that all mystics operate according to the scheme proposed here, the fact of our receiving any “reading” of embodiment through texts must be accounted for, whether it be the monk or the scribe who mediates the perception of the body or life.

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BIBLIOGR APHY

Primary Texts Ælfric. Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies. 1st ser. Ed. Peter Clemoes. Early English Text Society series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. ——. Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies. 2nd ser. Ed. Peter Clemoes. Early English Text Society series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Ancrene Wisse. Ed. Robert Hasenfratz. Middle English Texts series. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000. Ancrene Wisse. Trans. Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson. In Anchoritic Spirituality: Ancrene Wisse and Associated Works, 41–207. New York: Paulist Press, 1991. Augustine. City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. New York: Penguin, 2003. ——. De civitate Dei. Ed. Bernard Dombart and Alphonse Kalb. CCSL 47, 48. Turnhout: Brepols, 1955. ——. Confessions. Trans. R. S. Pine-Coffi n. New York: Penguin, 1961. ——. Confessionum. Ed. Luc Verheijen. CCSL 27. Turnhout: Brepols, 1990. ——. Essential Sermons. Ed. Daniel Doyle. Trans. Edmund Hill. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2007. ——. The Monastic Rules. Ed. Boniface Ramsey. Trans. Gerald Bonner and Sister Agatha Mary. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2004. ——. Sermones. Ed. Jacques-Paul Migne. PL 38. Turnhout: Brepols, 1987. ——. De Trinitate. Ed. W. J. Mountain and F. Glorie. CCSL 50, 50A. Turnhout: Brepols, 1968. ——. On the Trinity. Trans. Edmund Hill, OP. Brooklyn: New City Press, 1991. Beatrice of Nazareth. Seven manieren van minne. Ed. Léonce Reypens and Jozef van Mierlo. Leuven: Vlaamsche Boekenhalle, 1926. ——. “The Seven Manners of Holy Love.” In The Life of Beatrice of Nazareth, trans. Roger De Ganck, 289–331. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991.

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Saint Benedict. Benedict’s Rule: A Translation and Commentary. Trans. Terence G. Kardong, OSB. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1996. Bernard of Clairvaux. Sancti Bernardi Opera, 1–2. Ed. Jean Leclerq, Charles H. Talbot, and Henri Marie Rochais. Rome: Éditions cisterciennes, 1957. ——. Sermones de diversis/Occasional Sermons. Trans. Hugh McCaffery and Conrad Greenia. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2008. ——. On the Song of Song s I. Trans. Irene M. Edmonds. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1980. ——. On the Song of Songs III. Trans. Kilian Walsh, OCSO, and Irene M. Edmonds. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1979. ——. On the Song of Songs IV. Trans. Irene M. Edmonds. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1980. Dante Alighieri. La commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, 4: Paradiso. Ed. G. Petrocchi. Milan: Mondadori, 1967. ——. Paradiso. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Bantam, 2004. Eriugena. Expositiones in ierarchiam coelestem. Ed. J. Barbet. CCCM 31. Turnhout: Brepols, 1975. Godfrey of Saint Victor. “Microcosm.” In On Love: A Selection of Works of Hugh, Adam, Achard, Richard, and Godfrey of Saint Victor, ed. Hugh Feiss, OSB, 301–341. Victorine Texts in Translation 2. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2012. Gregory. Homiliae in Hiezechihelem prophetam. Ed. Marcus Adriaen. CCSL 142. Turnhout: Brepols, 1971. Gregory the Great. Moralia in Job. Trans. John Henry Parker and John Rivington. 3 vols. London: Oxford University Press, 1844. ——. Moralia in Job, Libri XXIII–XXXV. Ed. Marcus Adriaen. CCSL 143B. Turnhout: Brepols, 1985. Guigo II. The Ladder of Monks and Twelve Meditations. Trans. Edmund Colledge, OSA, and James Walsh, SJ. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1981. ——. Scala claustrialum. In Lettre sur la vie contemplative et Douze meditations. Ed. Edmund Colledge, OSA, and James Walsh, SJ. Sources chrétiennes 163. Paris: Cerf, 1970. Hadewijch of Brabant. De brieven van Hadewijch. Ed. Paul Mommaers. Averbode, Belgium: Altiora, 1990. ——. Complete Works. Trans. Mother Columba Hart, OSB. New York: Paulist Press, 1980. ——. Hadewijch Liederen. Ed. and trans. Veerle Fraeters and Frank Willaert. Gröningen: Historische Uitgeverij, 2009. ——. “List of the Perfect by Hadewijch of Brabant.” Trans. Helen Rolfson. Vox Benedictina 5 (1998): 277–297. ——. Mengeldichten. Ed. Jozef Van Mierlo, SJ. Antwerp: Standaard, 1952. ——. Poetry of Hadewijch. Trans. Marieke van Baest. Leuven: Peeters, 1998. ——. “Selected Letters (1–20).” Trans. Edmund Colledge, PP. In Medi a eval Netherlands Religious Literature, 32–87. New York: House and Maxwell, 1965. ——. Strofische Gedichten. Ed. and trans. E. Rombauts and N. de Paepe. Zwolle: Tjeenk Willink, 1961.

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P INDEX

Abbott, Christopher, 165 action, deeds, works, 10, 20–22; Augustine and, 36, 39, 51–56, 91; beguines and, 25, 92, 162; Bernard of Clairvaux and, 56, 92; Christ’s life as, 202n15; and contemplation, 91; as garments, 137–39; Gregory the Great and, 201n6; Hadewijch’s Liederen and, 135–39; Hadewijch’s two categories of work, 136–39; and imago Dei, 91; and meditation, 19; and monastic spirituality, 20–21, 78, 91, 92; and outer conforming to the inner, 39, 43; Paul and, 25; as rote 56, 170; and psalms, 150; and singing, 150–51; and textuality, 61, 160; and women’s spirituality, 55–56, 92; see also imitatio Christi; performance; werke Ælfric, 45, 186n56 Aers, David, 7, 161, 168 affect: as affectie, 107, 114, 125; affective imitatio, 126; affective life, 17; affective literacy, 7–8, 121, 195n34; affective memory, 81; affective nature of poetry, 124; affective spirituality, 92, 121, 182n19; affective truth, 117; and community, 129; contemporary readings of mystics’ affective states, 101–2; and Hadewijch’s

Liederen, 124, 126; interpretation and 75, 170; and ways of loving, 97, 99, 101, 107 affectus, 18, 176n36, 196n40 Agamben, Giorgio, 11, 175n27 agency: and annihilation of self, 95; and the body, 5; of the divine, 5, 14–15, 24, 175n24; and inner senses, 17; and mysticism, 24; and prophecy, 14–15, 175n24; and visionary activity, 102, 191n1; and werke, 95 allegory, 48, 64, 78, 196n37; Hadewijch and, 75, 105–6, 129; Origen and, 16 Allen, Prudence, 207n69 Amsler, Mark, 65, 195n34 anchoritic spirituality, 163–65; see also Ancrene Wisse; Julian of Norwich Ancrene Wisse, 3–4, 159, 163–65, 192n9, 195n34, 217n42, 225n25, 226n26 Appleford, Amy, 159 Astell, Ann, 57, 58 Auerbach, Erich, 81, 90 Augustine, 27–61, 181n14; and action/deeds, 36, 39, 51–56, 91; and the body, 29–44; Christ and, 31–32, 49, 91; The City of God, 27, 43; Confessions, 27, 28, 80–81, 183n34; and double destination of human beings, 44–45; and flesh, 180n6; and

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Augustine (continued ) God’s speech, 43–44; Hadewijch’s List of the Perfect and, 95–96; Hadewijch’s visions and, 95, 193n14; and human limitations, 27–28, 33, 90; influence on Hadewijch, 20, 21, 28, 67; Julian of Norwich and, 160–61, 165; and language, 28, 31–33, 38, 40, 42, 47–50; and memory, 35, 37–38, 80–81, 183n34, 198n62; and the mind, 15–16, 30, 33–39, 42, 183n34; and Neoplatonism, 57, 180n10, 208n82; On the Trinity, 27–28, 30–32, 34, 36, 38–40, 48, 56, 181n14, 183n34, 184n36, 185n47; overview of works, 27–28; Paul and, 29–30, 31, 180n2; regio dissimilitudinis, 98; relation between image and likeness, 184n39; and relation of humans to the divine, 28–29, 31–32; and the senses, 29–30, 33–38; and “sight of thought,” 36–38, 183n36; and the soul, 29, 35, 56; and temporality, 24, 34, 39–40; and unity with the divine, 29–34, 36, 38–40, 181n14; and visionary activity, 40, 65, 191n4; and will, 35–36; see also body, Augustinian conception of; faith; imago Dei; inner and outer persons/bodies, Augustinian conception of; love; mens; Trinity, Augustinian conception of Aune, David, 11, 176n35, 206n63 Ayres, Lewis, 181n15 Beatrice of Nazareth, 4, 90, 132 Beatrice of Ornacieux, 84 Beckwith, Sarah, 3–4, 51, 165 beguines, 22, 25, 46, 125, 226n26; and anchorites, 164–65; and Augustinian canon James of Vitry, 225n25; contrast to monastic orders, 135; emphasis on an active life, 25, 92, 135, 162; Hadewijch and, 21–22, 26, 127, 129, 135, 162; lack of vows, 21–22, 135; and self-teaching, 152; and song, 211n9 Benedictines, 20–21, 214 n26, 217n46 Benjamin, Walter, 59

INDE X Bernard of Clairvaux: and action/deeds, 56, 92; and the body, 59; and cultivation of virtue, 21; and contemplation, 92; and Hadewijch’s List of the Perfect, 20, 205n48; and imitatio Christi, 52; influence on Hadewijch, 20; instrumentality of the body, 17, 18; liber experientiae, 23, 75; and love, 39, 52, 129, 202n11; and the mind, 179n60; On the Song of Songs, 46, 59; and the soul, 19, 45–46, 52, 59; and the Word, 52 birth: double birth of Christ, 44–45, 167; double birth of humans, 45–46, 186n56 body, 1–26; and affective literacy, 7–8, 195n34; Ancrene Wisse and, 195n34; Bernard of Clairvaux and, 59; body as text, 7, 8, 23, 50, 51, 59; of Christ, 31–32, 49, 51, 70, 76, 118; distinction from soul, 2–3; and the feminine, 2, 8–9; in Hellenistic tradition, 8, 10–11, 18–19; as host, 12–15, 28, 29, 40, 45, 47, 48, 50, 56, 72, 79, 83, 85, 90, 102, 109, 111, 150; and imitatio Christi, 2; interrelation of body and language, 10, 42–43; Julian of Norwich and, 161; in literature, 9; modern views of, 9, 16; Pauline conceptualization of, 180n9, 188n74; and performance, 9; and resurrection, 45; scholarship on, 2–5; signifying capacity of, 5, 42, 51, 74, 111; spiritual body, 8, 10, 29, 70, 72, 77, 102, 104, 113, 115–17, 158, 163, 174n22; and suffering, 83, 110, 111; as twofold entity, 2, 5, 7, 10; and the Word, 7, 10; see also action, body, Augustinian conception of; deeds, works; inner and outer persons/bodies, Augustinian conception of; inner and outer persons/ bodies, Hadewijch’s conception of; inner and outer persons/bodies, Pauline conception of; performance; werke body, Augustinian conception of, 29–44, 180n6, 180n10; and alienation, 36; body as human and divine, 188n69; body as image, 38; language and the interrelation

INDE X of imago and body, 47–48; limited nature of bodily perception, 33–34; and promise of transformation, 29, 31, 39–40, 45; and the “thinking gaze,” 34; and unity with the divine, 29–34, 38–40; see also inner and outer persons/bodies, Augustinian conception of; Trinity, Augustinian conception of Boendale, Jan van, 218n52 Boon, Jessica, 124, 210n1 Boynton, Susan, 66, 214n26, 217n46 bridal/marriage imagery, 16–17, 41, 46, 58, 103, 105–6, 140, 173n3, 198n58, 212n14, 216n37, 219n56; Bernard of Clairvaux and, 45–46, 52; Hadewijch and, 105–6, 137–45; Julian of Norwich and, 162; marriage of appearance and essence, 137–45; and Song of Songs, 58, 128, 162, 190n92; in women’s mystical texts, 41 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 2–3, 19, 46, 55, 173n3, 187n62 Carthusians, 25, 50, 54, 76–79, 198n56 Carruthers, Mary, 80, 198n62 Caruth, Cathy, 201n87 Celan, Paul, 200n78 champion (kimpe), figure of, 69, 106, 112, 128, 194n24, 207n78 charity, 18–19, 52, 53, 56, 196n44, 206n62 Christina the Astonishing, 5 Christology: as focus of medieval mysticism, 52–53; Hadewijch and, 52–53; Paul and, 13 Church, the, 31–32, 64, 135, 142, 166–67 Cistercians, 50, 78, 187n62, 195n35; contrast to beguines, 135; Hadewijch and, 20, 21, 25, 26, 67, 95, 199n67; see also Bernard of Clairvaux; William of Saint Th ierry Clark, Mary, 208n82 Coakley, Sarah, 112 community: and afterlife, 176n35, 206n63; and beguine spirituality, 162; ecclesia or corpus mysticum, 13–14, 17, 160, 175n26;

P 247 Hadewijch and, 26, 71, 104, 117, 129–30, 132; Hugh of Saint Victor and, 54; and inner body, 17; the inner and group formation, 187n62; Paul and, 13–14, 175n26; and pedagogical function of visions, 68–69, 76, 191n3; and singing, 150–51 Constable, Giles, 184n39, 187n62 contemplation, 191n1; Augustine and, 33, 43, 91, 183–84n36; Bernard of Clairvaux and, 59, 92, 202n11; Hadewijch and, 67, 91, 92, 107–9, 120, 121, 193n18; Hugh of Saint Victor and, 53–54; Julian of Norwich and, 162; Marguerite d’Oingt and, 77–79; meditation on the Word leading to action, 19; and prayer, 17; and reading or embodied life , 21, 23, 106; and stages of mystical ascent, 51, 53–54, 78, 108, 195n35; Victorines and, 53–54, 92; William of Saint Th ierry and, 58 Conybeare, Catherine, 188n68 Coon, Lynda L., 179n56 courtly, the, 111, 112, 124–25, 138, 140, 149, 154, 162, 184–85n41, 209n95, 210–11n3, 211n6, 218n50 crucifi xion: Christ’s body as book, 76; Julian of Norwich and, 162, 167, 169; and outer person, 12, 52; and Paul, 14 Cunnar, Eugene, 55, 186n55 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 121 Daley, Brian, 221n73 Dante, 41–42, 185n49 Daróczi, Anikó, 214n29 death, 31, 32, 52, 100, 103, 118; Augustine and, 96; Bernard of Clairvaux and, 59; body, soul, and, 10, 13, 29; Hadewijch and, 116–17, 204n34; Julian of Norwich and, 159, 167; living death, 13; Minne and, 99, 100, 103, 220n69; mystical love and, 208n95, Paul and, 12–13,180n9, 194n24; Richard of St. Victor and, 141 debt, language of, 91–92, 97, 128, 211n10, 212n12; see also Hugh of St. Victor

248

P

de Certeau, Michel, 144, 223n99 Déchanet, J. M., 199n67 de Lubac, Henri, 50 Derrida, Jacques, 157–58, 159, 200n78, 205n50, 224n99 desire, 1, 3, 21, 54, 59, 77, 81, 102, 113, 125, 127, 170; as begherte (human desire), 22, 98, 100, 101, 107, 114, 119, 124, 130, 134, 146, 148, 190n92, 202n14, 208n87; and Bernard of Clairvaux, 19, 52; desired materiality of body, 60; as futural, 41; heavenly desire, 16–17; and Julian, 168; and lack of particularity, 94; and Origen, 16, 175n32; and Richard of St. Victor, 213n19 Descartes, René, 95 Distichs of Cato, 133, 145, 218n52 divine, encounters with: and body of Christ, 32; “face-to-face” encounter, 12, 13, 31–32, 77, 81, 107–8, 146, 170, 181n14; implied futurity of encounter, 31–32, 146, 170; “tasting” the divine, 68, 108, 110, 182n19; “touch” of the divine, 67–68, 74, 114; in visions, 31, 69–70, 77, 103–5, 107–8, 116–19; see also divine, unity with divine, human perception of: Augustine and, 27–28, 31, 33–34, 56, 90, 191n4; and understanding, 90; and hierarchy of vision, 191n4; limited nature of perception, 33–34; and love, 56; and the Word, 49 divine, relation of human beings to: as dissymmetrical, 13; and double destination of human beings, 44–45; gifts to humans, 17, 128, 204n34; and grace, 2, 14, 18, 24, 28, 40, 45, 58, 64, 67, 68, 91, 99, 150, 165, 169, 212n12; and God’s speech, 43–44; humans grasped by the divine, 13, 18; and limitations of human, 13, 27–28, 33–34, 67, 216n42; as memory, 24, 79–82, 184n37, 198n62; as relation of hospitality, 28–29; and third birth (resurrection), 45; see also body as host; imago Dei; Jesus; Trinity, the; visions

INDE X divine, unity with: Augustine and, 29–34, 36, 38–40, 181n14; Bernard of Clairvaux and, 39, 45–46, 52; as future event, 41, 115–21; Hadewijch’s visions and, 25, 65, 69, 72, 75, 107; inner person as host of unity, 12, 28–29, 40–41, 48, 59, 72; Julian of Norwich and, 165, 167, 169; and love; and the mind, 33–34; performative union in the Liederen, 154–56; and (re)birth, 45–46, 186n56; and redemption, 165; and sensual language, 1–3, 25, 41, 70, 78, 124–25; separation from the divine, in the Liederen, 126–32, 146; and suffering/ pain, 110–12; and textuality, 160; and unlived experience, 24, 79–82, 110; and women’s spirituality, 8, 23–24; see also action, deeds, works; divine, encounters with; temporality; love and Minne; werke divine truths: and (a)temporality, 80; Augustine and, 28, 38, 40, 56–57, 185n52; and language, 28, 40; and love, 56–57; Paul and, 15; and Platonism, 57; and suffering, 111; and visionary activity, 64; and werke, 102 Dominicans, 164 Duff y, Stephen, 180n6, 188n74 Eckhart, Meister, 132 Elizabeth of Spalbeek, 5 embodiment: embodied poetics, 34, 60, 61, 66, 90; and exegesis, 8, 50, 55–56, 66, 76–79, 135; and experience as a sign of the divine, 48; and lessons of visions, 64; mystical writing and, 71–76; and textuality, 25, 160, 169–70; and theological methodology of women’s mystical texts, 158; tied to literary form, 5–9, 25, 158; as a transformational process, 5; see also body; inner and outer persons/ bodies erotic imagery, 1–3, 25, 70, 78, 124–25

INDE X Eucharist, 55, 58, 118–20, 173n3 exegesis: and embodiment, 8, 50, 55–56, 76–79, 135; Hadewijch’s letters and, 134; Hadewijch’s Liederen and, 127, 135; and liturgical practices, 66; and prohibition against women, 76, 191nn1,3, 197n47; scriptural exegesis, 8, 23, 197n47; and Song of Songs, 52; and visionary activity, 58, 64, 75–79; see also reading and interpretation experience: book of experience, 23, 75; Hadewijch’s Liederen and, 126; Marguerite d’Oingt and, 77–79; nonexperience, 198n61; unlived experience, 24, 79–83, 110; and women’s mystical texts, 1–3, 6, 7, 22, 25, 63, 67, 72, 78, 124–25; and women’s spirituality, 23, 158; see also Bernard of Clairvaux faith: Augustine and, 28, 31; Christ’s back and “walking by faith,” 31–32; Hadewijch’s Liederen and, 126; Julian of Norwich and, 161; life as ultimate test of, 95; and love, 57; Paul and, 13, 31–32; William of Saint Th ierry and, 196n44 Fassler, Margot, 150–51 Fraeters, Veerle, 68, 75, 93, 177n43, 200n77 Fredriksen, Paula, 180n9 Freud, Sigmund, 84–85 fruition ( ghebrukene), 74, 106, 140, 199n67 Fulton, Rachel, 21, 142, 220n60 garments/clothing metaphor, 123–27, 217n46, 219n56; Augustine and, 11, 51; Hadewijch and, 11, 66, 127, 137–45; as integumentum, 218n46; Paul and, 11, 13 gender: Augustine and, 180n3; the gendered body , 2, 8–9, 72; Hadewijch and, 112–14, 208n94, 209n96; and literacy, 76, 192n9; and love, 209n98; male-authored writings on women, 4–5; and Minne, 112, 140, 142, 144, 184n41; Paul and, 180n3;

P 249 and prohibition against women preaching, 76, 191nn1, 3, 197n47; rapprochement of (female) soul and (male) Word, 52, 140–41; and reading, 76; and scholarship on women’s spirituality, 4–5; and sexual difference, 113, 208n94; the soul as feminine, 141; the soul as masculine, 2, 141; and women’s mystical texts, 9, 26, 60–61 Gertrude of Helfta, 58, 72 God, see imago Dei; Jesus; Trinity, the Godden, Malcolm, 187n58 Godfrey of Saint Victor, 108, 176n39, 204n42 Gottfried of Saint Disiboden, 73 Grijp, Louis Peter, 150 Green, D. H., 58, 75 Gregory the Great, 127, 138, 140, 147, 201n6, 206n60, 211n8; Moralia in Job, 127, 131, 135, 196n38, 206n60, 211n8 Grosseteste, Robert, 226n26 Guigo I, 76 Guigo II, 54 Hadewijch II (pseudo-Hadewijch), 20, 177n43 Hadewijch of Brabant, 19–24, 90, 158, 164, 199n68; Augustinian influences, 20, 21, 28, 67, 95, 193n14; as beguine, 21–22, 26, 70, 135, 162; Bernard of Clairvaux and, 20, 129; Christological emphasis, 52, 135, 149, 152; Cistercian influences, 20, 21, 25, 26, 67, 95, 199n67; and community, 26, 71, 104, 117, 129–30, 132; comparison to other mystics’ writings, 26, 158–71; and conscience, 190n92; and contemplation, 67, 91, 92, 107–9, 120, 121, 193n18; disdain for exterior rule, 21–22, 153, 164; diversity of genres, 25, 161; first poet of Dutch language, 19; and gender, 112–14, 208n94, 209n96; Gregory the Great and, 201n6; Hildegard von Bingen and, 73; and imago Dei, 70; and imitatio Christi, 20, 141; and inner and outer knowledge, 84; and inner and outer senses, 64, 66–68, 192n9; lack of biographical information, 19; and

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Hadewijch of Brabant (continued ) literacy, 76; and love, 53, 68, 69, 129–30, 193n18, 204–5n46, 209n98, 216n41, 217n43; materie and lichame, 69–71, 83, 86, 90, 91, 102–3, 109–11, 116–20; and memory, 81–83, 111; musical works, 150–51; native language, 20; and Neoplatonism, 18, 90, 107, 207n69, 209n98; overview of works and manuscripts, 19–20, 25, 177n43, 194n21, 214n24; Pauline influence, 21, 66, 69, 86, 89, 98, 112, 116, 123, 192n10; and psalms, 126, 211n9; and reason, 68, 100–1, 107, 111, 131, 205n48; refusal of miracles, 93; scholarship on, 2–3, 210n1; sense of her own limitations, 28, 67, 216n42; and the senses, 213n21; and the soul, 22, 67, 70, 128; spirituality of, 20–22, 26, 66, 90, 117, 145; and suffering/privation (derven), 26, 69, 73, 83, 99–100, 107, 110–12, 115, 125–32, 208n95; and taste, 67–68, 82, 192–93n13; and temporal delays in unity with the divine, 41, 115–21; and textuality, 160, 170; theological and cultural context, 20–21, 91, 93, 95, 125; and touch, 67, 192–93n13; transition from childishness to wisdom, 220n70; and the Trinity, 20, 35, 68, 134–36, 160, 199n67; and unlived experience, 81–83, 110; Victorine influences, 20, 21, 26, 67; and virtue, 207n69; and the will, 111; William of Saint Th ierry and, 100, 199n67; see also inner and outer persons/bodies, Hadewijch’s conception of; letters of Hadewijch; Liederen of Hadewijch; List of the Perfect ; Minne; visions of Hadewijch; werke hagiography, 4–5, 22–23, 50, 82 Hale, Rosemary Drage, 197–98n55 Harkins, Franklin T., 54 Hart, Columba, 69, 104, 206n60, 214n29 Hasty, Will, 222n82

INDE X heaven (afterlife, eternal life): Augustine and, 29, 39–40, 56; Bernard of Clairvaux and, 59; and community, 176n35, 206n63; and Hadewijch’s ways of loving, 97; and memory, 80; Paul and, 12, 15, 47, 52; promise of immortal body, 39–40, 105, 116; see also divine, unity with Hegel, G. W. F., 34 Heldris of Cornwall, 9 hell: Augustine and, 96; and ways of Minne, 97, 99, 106 Hellenistic philosophy, 10–11, 176n35; see also  eoplatonism; Platonism Henry of Ghent, 191n3 Hilary of Poitiers, 45 Hildegard von Bingen, 13, 14, 16, 25, 26, 72, 223n85; and agency of the divine, 14; delay in writing visions, 83, 84; and Hadewijch’s List of the Perfect, 64; and inner and outer persons/bodies, 74, 86, 179n56; and literacy, 76; Scivias, 73; and visions, 73–74; visions as a form of textuality, 75; Vita, 73 Hirsch, Mirianne, 198n63 Hollywood, Amy, 4–5, 66, 76, 191n1, 197n47, 209n96 Holsinger, Bruce, 73 Hugh of Saint Victor, 53–55, 64; and book of life, 197n48; Didascalicon, 53, 64; and language of debt (arrha), 91–92; and medieval education, 21; On Contemplation and Its Forms, 53–54; and relation between reading and living, 19, 53–55, 189n80 Illich, Ivan, 54, 189n80 Ida of Louvain, 72 “imaginative theology” (Newman’s term), 78, 197n55 imago Dei, 10, 59, 160; Augustine and, 28–30, 34, 35, 38, 47–48, 185n47; enacting the imago, 10; Hadewijch’s visions and, 70, 103–4; Julian of Norwich and, 165; language and the interrelation of imago and body, 47–48; and lichame

INDE X (Hadewijch’s term), 70; and memory of the divine, 80, 81, 184n37; and promise of face-to-face encounter, 170; relation between image and likeness, 184 n39; and relation between reading and living, 19; trace of the divine in inner and outer persons, 30, 32; and visionary activity, 64, 86; William of Saint Th ierry and, 17–18; and women’s spirituality, 23; and works/ actions, 91, 92; see also divine, encounters with; werke imago Trinitatis, 38, 185n47 imitatio Christi, 51–56, 130, 141, 170; Augustine and, 51; Bernard of Clairvaux and, 52; body associated with, 2; and Christ’s dying, 13; Hadewijch and, 20; and Hadewijch’s Liederen, 26; and humility, 13, 90, 94–95, 97, 105, 139; and memory, 81; Paul and, 13; taking on Christ as a garment, 137–39; and textuality, 160; and women’s spirituality, 173n3; see also werke imitatio David, 149 imitatio Mariae, 130, 142, 144 immediacy, and women’s mystical texts, 1–3, 6, 7, 25, 63, 67, 72, 78, 124–25, 127 incarnation, 51, 188n68, 227n48 inner and outer persons/bodies, 2, 7, 8, 10; and active life, 10, 25; and anchoritic spirituality, 163–65; and beguine spirituality, 22, 165; Bernard of Clairvaux and, 45–46; and community, 17; Dante and, 41–42; and development of “the individual,” 187n62; Gregory the Great and, 201n6; and hierarchy of vision, 191n4; Hildegard von Bingen and, 73–74, 86, 179n56; inner as host of unity, 59; Julian of Norwich and, 86, 161, 163, 165–66; Marguerite d’Oingt and, 77; and medieval education, 21; and Neoplatonism, 8, 18–19, 90, 107; Origen and, 15–17, 175nn28, 32; outer as a text, 5, 42, 51, 74, 111; outer body as instrument, 17, 176n39; outer conforming to the

P 251 inner, 39, 43, 51–52, 64–65, 70, 72, 82; outer conforming to the Word, 79; and reading, 22, 151; and reflection of the divine, 10; and shedding the outer person, 41–42; and spiritual transformation, 7, 8, 10, 11; and textuality, 74, 160; and unlived experience, 24; and visionary activity, 63–64, 78–79, 86; William of Saint Th ierry and, 17–18; see also action, deeds, works; werke inner and outer persons/bodies, Augustinian conception of, 15, 29–30, 32, 34–47, 181n15; corpus and caro, 29; inner and outer senses, 29–30, 33–38; interior and exterior homo, 29; and language, 40; and promise of transformation, 29, 31; and reading, 39–40; and “sight of thought,” 36–38; and trace of the divine, 30, 32; and trinities, 35–42; and the Trinity, 29–30; and unity with the divine, 29–30, 38–40; and visions, 40; and the Word, 49; see also body, Augustinian conception of inner and outer persons/bodies, Hadewijch’s conception of, 113, 116–17; and desire for Minne, 114; inner and outer senses, 64, 66–68, 105, 107, 142, 192n9, 205n49, 213n21; and Liederen, 126–29, 137–45; and List of the Perfect, 102–3; and marriage of appearance and essence, 137–45; materie and lichame, 69–71, 83, 86, 90, 91, 102–3, 109–11, 116, 120; outer as vessel for imitatio, 90; outer as vessel for the inner, 71; and perfection in Minne, 103–9; and transformation, 66, 104, 106, 139–40; and suffering, 110–12; and “tasting” the divine, 67–68; and temporal delays in unity, 116–21; and visions, 25, 63–75, 103–9; and ways of loving, 97–101; and werke, 92, 104; see also werke inner and outer persons/bodies, Pauline conception of, 11–15, 46–47, 174 n22,

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inner and outer persons/bodies (continued ) 206n63; Augustine and, 29–30; and clothing, 11; and conformity with the inner, 51–52, and crucifi xion, 12–13, 180n9; dynamic tension of, 11; exo anthropos and eso anthropos, 11, 29–30, 46, 166, 174n22; and heaven, 12; Julian of Norwich and, 166; and law, 12; nondualistic nature, 11, 18–19, 207n63; and nous, 11, 12, 14, 174n22; and renewal, 11, 29–30, 47; and temporality, 11, 13–15; soma and sarx, 12, 174n22; spirit/flesh distinction as moral, 188n74 inner and outer senses: and Ancrene Wisse, 165; Augustine and, 29–30, 33–38; and Benedictine rule, 20–21; “doubling” of the senses, 105, 128, 130, 212n11, 213n19; Hadewijch and, 64, 66–68, 105, 107, 142, 192n9, 205n49, 213n21; inner ear hearing God’s speech, 44; Julian of Norwich and, 165; Largier and, 17; and love, 56; Origen and, 16–17, 175n28; and prayer and contemplation, 17; “thinking gaze,” 34, 36–37; and the Trinity, 30; and visionary activity, 64; William of Saint Th ierry and, 18, 35, 182n23, 205n48, 206n62; see also divine, human perception of integumentum, 218n46 Irigaray, Luce, 3 Jaeger, Stephen, 21, 125 Jager, Eric, 11, 174n19 James of Vitry, 225n25 Jeffery, Peter, 149 Jeffreys, Catherine, 221n77 Jenkins, Jacqueline, 167, 168 Jerome, 206n60 Jesus: agency of, 14; Augustinian understanding of “Christ’s back,” 31–32; Augustinian understanding of Christ’s divinity, 49; body of, 31–32, 49, 51, 70, 76, 118; Christ’s life as work, 202n15; double birth of, 44–45, 167; dual nature of, 219n57; and Eucharist, 118–20;

INDE X Hadewijch’s expressions of unity with, 1–3, 69, 70; humanity of, 10, 50, 118, 137; and incarnation, 51; inner and outer persons/bodies as potential manifestations of, 7; and lichame, 70, 118; taking on Christ as a garment, 11, 12, 137–39; visionary images of, 32, 40, 69, 77, 84, 103–5, 107, 118–19, 217n42; as the Word made flesh, 7, 10, 55; see also crucifi xion; imitatio Christi; Trinity, the Job, 97, 100, 115, 126, 131, 211n8 Julian of Norwich, 13, 26, 64, 73, 79, 140, 158, 160–70, 203n29, 224 nn5, 8, 226nn33, 39, 227n41; biographical information, 225n13; and Christ’s passion and resurrection, 162, 167; pedagogical function of visions, 161; A Revelation of Love, 73, 160–62, 166, 169; and sin, 162, 167–69; and the soul, 86, 161, 165–69, 227n47; substance and sensualite, 86, 161, 165–68; and temporality and embodiment, 72; vows of, 163; writing of visions delayed, 83–84, 200n85 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 15, 175n26 Keen, Maurice, 210n3 Kelner, Anna, 168 kenosis, 146, 148, 153 kimpe , see champion (kimpe), figure of kiss, 102, 106, 114, 195n34, 216–17n42, 217n42 knight, image in Hadewijch’s Liederen, 138, 141, 184n41, 216n37, 218n50 Kwakkel, Erik, 177n43 LaCapra, Dominick, 200n80 language: Augustine and, 28, 31–33, 38, 40, 42, 47–50; Hildegard von Bingen and, 73; and inhabiting or hosting mystery, 130–37; interrelation of body and, 10, 25, 40, 42–44, 47–50; Julian of Norwich and, 169; Paul and, 12, 14, 47;

INDE X sensual language of mystical texts, 1–3, 6, 7, 22, 25, 40–41, 63, 67, 72, 78, 124–25; and truth, 28, 40; and the Word, 47–49 Lapidge, Michael, 187n58 Laplanche, Jean, 85, 201n86, 215n31 Largier, Niklaus, 17 Leclercq, Jean, 215n35 lectio–meditatio–oratio–operatio and contemplatio (or other order) progression, 51, 53–54, 74, 78, 108, 195n35 letters of Hadewijch, 19; commentary on poetry in, 132–34; and inhabiting and hosting mystery, 132–34; and marriage of appearance and essence, 137–38; and the Trinity, 20 letters of Hadewijch, list of: Letter 1, 94, 102; Letter 2, 94, 115, 131, 201n7; Letter 4, 22, 111, 153, 199n68; Letter 6, 100, 106; Letter 8, 111–12; Letter 10, 190n92; Letter 15, 20, 129; Letter 17, 132–37, 199n67, 214n29, 215n30, 216nn41, 42; Letter 18, 115, 131, 132; Letter 19, 132; Letter 20, 83, 153; Letter 22, 28, 35, 66, 67, 68, 86, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 106, 192n9, 204nn31, 42, 46; Letter 28, 74, 81; Letter 30, 91, 137–38, 140, 211–12n10, 212n12 lichame, 69–71, 83, 109–10, 116–20; and Hadewijch’s List of the Perfect, 102–3 Liederen of Hadewijch, 19–20, 123–56, 177n43; aesthetic framework of, 127; and being or becoming Minne, 135–39, 146–47; and community, 129–30, 132; and contrafacture, 149–50; contrast to Hadewijch’s musical works, 150–51; contrast to visions, 126, 127, 128, 140; diverse voices in, 151–54; emphasis on absence, 126–32, 140, 146; and figures of the young and old, 146–48, 152–53; garments/clothing metaphor, 11, 123–27; and gender reversal, 113–14; and imitatio Christi, 26; inhabiting and hosting mystery, 130–37, 154; intended singers, 148; and marriage of appearance and

P 253 essence, 137–45; misleading approaches to, 140; and newness, 141–42; operating from the outside in, 25, 127, 164; pedagogical function of, 127, 132–36, 148–49, 152–54, 220n59; and performative unions, 154–56; poetic form, 128, 130, 135; and psalms, 25–26, 126, 148–50; and purgatory, 102; purpose of, 148–49; and reading and interpretation, 130–34, 213–14n23; relation to letters, 132–34; scholarship on, 126, 154; and temporality, 147–49, 164; themes and content of, 126, 128–32, 137–45; and the Trinity, 134–36; and works/actions, 135–39 Liederen of Hadewijch, list of: Lied 1, 142; Lied 4, 115; Lied 5, 82, 218n49; Lied 7, 146; Lied 8 (= Poem 9), 3, 137–39, 152, 220n69; Lied 11 (= CW Poem 12), 131–32; Lied 13 (= CW Poem 14), 220n69, 223n95; Lied 18 (= CW Poem 19), 148, 151, 152; Lied 19 (= CW Poem 20), 141–42; Lied 21, 219n59; Lied 22, 223n95; Lied 23, 136, 221n75, 223n93; Lied 24, 223n97; Lied 27, 132, 146–47, 219n56; Lied 28, 219n53; Lied 29, 142–43, 149, 214n23, 217n44; Lied 30, 128, 130, 212n11; Lied 31, 215–16n36; Lied 32, 223n95; Lied 34, 151; Lied 35, 110, 145, 223n93; Lied 39, 152; Lied 40, 124, 153, 207n78, 223n95; 214n23; Lied 43, 152; Lied 45, 144, 153, 222n80 life, see action, deeds, works; experience; rule of life; temporality; werke List of the Perfect (Hadewijch of Brabant), 25, 92–96, 202n16; Augustine in, 95–96; Bernard of Clairvaux in, 20, 205n48; Hildegard von Bingen in, 64; Mary in, 94, 116; Mary Magdalene in, 129; names listed, 94, 203n24; Paul in, 102; Sara (convert) in, 102 liturgy: and exegesis, 66; Hadewijch’s visions and, 81, 82, 83, 199n75; liturgical song, 149, 211n9; liturgical time, 55, 83; and

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liturgy (continued ) psalms, 25–26, 149, 211n9; and women’s spirituality, 8–9, 23 Lochrie, Karma, 208–9n95 Louth, Andrew, 193n13 love, 52–53, 181n15; amor, 56, 57, 184n40; Augustine and, 33, 35, 38–39, 56, 57, 96, 102; becoming and being Minne, 136–39, 146–47, 153; and beguine spirituality, 129; Bernard of Clairvaux and, 39, 52, 129, 202n11; caritas, 17, 56, 57, 184n40; dilectio, 17, 56, 57; and faith, 57; and gender, 209n98; gratia, 184n40; Hadewijch and, 53, 68, 69, 129–30, 193n18, 209n98, 216n41, 217n43; Hadewijch’s five ways of loving, 69, 106–7, 110, 204–5n46, 206n54; Hadewijch’s Liederen and, 129–32, 136–45; and inner vision, 56; Julian of Norwich and, 162; love lyric (Minnesang), 149–50, 222n82; love of form, 56–57; loving love itself, 33, 193n18; loving what one cannot know, 33, 182n19; Origen and, 17; pleasure, charity, and love of the good, 57; relation between reason and love, 68, 100, 101, 107, 205n48; Richard of Saint Victor’s four stages of violent love (or passionate charity), 69, 92, 140–41; and suffering, 112; and trinities in human beings, 35; trinity of love, lover, and beloved, 38–39, 57–58, 129, 155; and the will, 93; William of Saint Th ierry and, 18, 53, 198n56, 199n67; see also bridal/marriage imagery; Minne Lyotard, Jean-François, 198n63 Marguerite d’Oingt, 26, 54, 64, 72, 84, 151, 149, 162; content of visions, 77–79; and embodied exegesis, 76–79; and inner and outer persons/bodies, 77, 78; and reading, 77, and scriptio divina/lectio divina, 197n50 Marie d’Oignies, 225n25, 226n26 Martha, 202n11

INDE X Mary, 128, 202n11, 214n23, 217n44, 220n60; Hadewijch’s Liederen and, 142–43; Hadewijch’s List of the Perfect and, 94, 116; Hadewijch’s visions of, 116–17; Julian of Norwich and, 162 Mary Magdalene, 94, 128–29, 212n14 Mason, Mary, 174n12 materiality, and sound, 49, 74, 154–55; see also embodiment; temporality; women’s mystical texts materie and lichame, 69–71, 83, 86, 90, 91, 102–3, 109–11, 116–20 McGinn, Bernard, 40, 53, 66, 104, 175n33, 179n60, 192n13, 204n34, 210n105 meditation, and stages of mystical ascent, 51, 53–54, 78, 108, 195n35 memory: Augustine and, 35, 37–38, 183n34, 198n62; and confession, 198n62; Hadewijch and, 81–82, 111, 126, 216n39; memory of the divine, 24, 79–82, 184n37, 198n62; memoryless memory, 223n99; “postmemory,” 198n63; and sight of thought, 37–38; temporal complexity of, 64, 80; and trinities associated with human beings, 35; and unlived experience, 79–82; William of Saint Th ierry and, 81–82 Mengeldichten, 66, 99, 130, 132, 155, 177n43, 192n10, 209n99, 215n32, 223n94 mens, as mind, 15, 30, 37, 165; and etymology of Minne, 39 Middle Dutch language, 1, 20, 215n30, 216–17n42, 218n52; and Brabant, 178n45 Miles, Margaret, 180nn2, 10 Millett, Bella, 163, 164, 225n25 mind: Augustine and, 15–16, 30, 33–39, 42, 183n34; Bernard of Clairvaux and, 179n60; Origen and, 15–16; Paul and, 174n22; William of Saint Th ierry and, 182n23; see also inner and outer senses; memory; mens, reason; soul; understanding Minne (personification of love), 207n73; and absence, 126–30; being and becoming,

INDE X 136–39, 146–47, 153; and community, 129–30; and counsel (rade), 152–53, 223nn93, 97; defi nition, 39, 184 n40; as feminine term, 113, 154, 184 n41; Hadewijch’s letters and, 133–34; and inhabiting and hosting mystery, 130–31; Mary and, 143–44; and materie, 69–70; perfection in, 103–9; and performative union, 155; praise for vanquishing, 116; and the senses, 213n21; stages of, 146–48; and temporality, 81–82, 103; and the Trinity, 129–30, 143, 145, 212n13; and understanding, 84; ways of loving, 96–103, 106–7, 110, 125, 206n54; and works/actions, 93–109, 136–39; see also love Mommaers, Paul, 20, 68, 126, 140, 220n70 monasticism: and abbots, 21; spirituality, 195n35; and action and contemplation, 91; living a text, 20–21, 55, 215n35; and mysticism, 175n33; and relation between reading and living, 19, 21, 215n35 Muessig, Carolyn, 179n56 Murk-Jansen, Saskia, 114, 209n96 music, 149–51; see also Liederen of Hadewijch mystery, inhabiting and hosting, 85, 109, 130–37 negative theology, 41, 96–98, 197n47 Neoplatonism, 8, 18–19, 20, 57, 90, 107, 180n10, 207n69, 208n82, 209n98 Newman, Barbara, 6, 78, 89, 105, 125, 184n41, 197n55 Nuth, Joan, 227n48 orality, 43, 75, 132, 134, 149, 151–52, 185n50, 214n23; oral nature of visions, 65; and word, 48, 115, 131 Origen, 7, 15–16, 45, 64, 67, 175n28, 175n32, 204n34; Commentary on the Song of Songs, 16, 105; inner and outer persons/ bodies/senses, 15–17; and love, 17; Paul

P 255 and, 16–17; and soul, 15–17; and temporality, 16, 204n34 O’Sullivan, Daniel, 150, 222n81 pattern/patterning, 53, 55, 56, 96, 105, 127, 136, 151, 174n12: and the body, 51; bringing to life, 53; 127 and Christ, 53; circular pattern in Marguerite, 197n50; and group formation, 187n62; and Julian, 166; and Hadewijch’s Liederen, 126, 127, 148, 154; and love, 58; and order, 53; and poetics, 55, 72, 90, 126, 186n55; and union, 41, 86, 154; and vision, 81, 86 Paul, 9–15; and action/deeds, 25; Augustine and, 29–32, 180n2, 181n14; and the body, 180n9, 188n74; Christological emphasis, 13; Colossians, 30, 175n23; and community, 13–14, 175n26; 1 Corinthians, 13, 14, 16–17, 30, 31, 66, 67, 68, 77, 86, 97, 98, 175n32, 181n14; 2 Corinthians, 11, 12, 30, 31, 47, 51, 56, 103; crucifi xion of, 14; and double destination of human beings, 44; Ephesians, 16, 47; and “face-to-face” encounter with the divine, 12, 13; Galatians, 11, 14; and gender, 180n3; Hadewijch and, 66; Hadewijch’s List of the Perfect and, 102; Julian of Norwich and, 160–61; and language, 12, 14, 47; and Neoplatonism, 18; Origen and, 16–17; and prophetic voice, 14–15, 47; and resurrection 31, 51, 180n9, 199n74; Romans, 11, 12, 15, 18, 47, 59, 69, 95, 103, 226n36; and the soul, 12, 174n22; and spiritual law, 11–12; and temporality, 11, 13–15, 24, 46–47; William of Saint Th ierry and, 18; and women’s visionary practices, 65; see also divine, encounters with; inner and outer persons/bodies, Pauline conception of Paulsell, Stephanie, 76–77, 197nn49, 50 perfection, 25, 53, 59, 78, 82, 90–92, 94, 102–9, 113, 127–29, 137, 153, 160, 203; Ancrene Wisse and, 164; Gregory the Great and, 201n6; Hildegard and, 151;

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perfection (continued ) Julian of Norwich and, 165, 167, 169; Marguerite d’Oingt and, 77; and Minne, 103, 129, 133–34, 143, 213n21; and Minnesang, 222n82; and Mary 128, 142, 143, 217n44; and operatio, 78; Paul and, 47, 167; reflection in songs, 127, 154; and Trinity, 136–37, 212n12; visions and, 68–69, 92, 95, 104, 109, 116, 121, 195n35 performance, 9; acting out divinity, 5, 17, 20–21, 51, 93, 108; and the body, 5; Hadewijch’s Liederen and, 126, 154–56; Julian of Norwich and, 166, 169; memory and confession, 198n62; and mystical ascent, 54; Paul and, 13–14; and psalms, 214n26; and visions, 64, 86; women’s writing, 159; see also action, deeds, works; imitatio Christi; Liederen of Hadewijch; werke; women’s mystical texts Petroff, Elizabeth Alvida, 209n99 Philip of Clairvaux, 5 Plato, 10 Platonism, 57, 104–5, 207n63 Poems in Stanzas (Hadewijch of Brabant), see Liederen of Hadewijch Poor, Sara, 6 Porete, Marguerite, 8, 41, 132 Powell, Morgan, 221n77 Pranger, M. B., 21 prayer: and body, 196n40; and inner senses, 17; and mystical ascent, 51, 53–54, 78, 108, 195n35, 208n87; and relation between reading and living, 21; see also liturgy prophecy, 14–15, 47, 175n24 psalms, 25–26, 126, 148–50, 211n9, 214n26, 221n73, 222n79 pseudo-Dionysius, 20, 41, 209n98 purgatory, and ways of Minne, 97, 100–1 reading and interpretation, 50, 51; and affect, 170; and affective literacy, 7–8, 195n34; Augustine and, 32–33, 50; and book of life (liber vitae), 18–19; and Carthusians, 25, 76–79; and gender, 113–14; Hadewijch

INDE X and, 126; Hugh of Saint Victor and, 19, 53–55, 189n80; and illumination of the heart, 10; and inner senses, 17; and love, 56; and monastic rule, 21; and mystical ascent, 54; Origen and, 16–17; reading the body, 8, 23, 50, 51, 59; reading a life, 10, 106; reading Minne, 130–32, 214n23; reading the outer, 8, 10, 39, 170–71, 151; and relation to body, 25, 47–51; and relation to living, 19, 21, 189n80; “self-reading,” 107; and suffering, 111; and temporality, 22; and visions, 32, 63, 74, 75–76, 84, 107; women reading, 75–76, 196n42; see also textuality; women’s mystical texts reason: Hadewijch and, 67, 68, 100–1, 107, 111, 131, 193n18, 205n48; Hugh of Saint Victor and, 193n18; Richard of Saint Victor and, 213n19; and the spiritual senses, 213n19; and trinities associated with human beings, 35; and ways of loving, 100–1; William of Saint Thierry and, 100, 196n44, 205n48; see also mind; reading and interpretation; understanding redemption: Augustine and, 180n10; Hadewijch and, 211n10; Julian of Norwich and, 167, 169; Paul and, 14, 15, 175n25 resurrection, 32, 42, 45, 51, 167, 180n9, 181n14,188n74 Reynaert, Joris, 124–25, 192n11, 211n6 rhyme, 99, 155, 186n55, 214n29, 215n32 Richard of Saint Victor, 69, 92, 129, 140–41, 202n12, 211n10, 213n19 Riehle, Wolfgang, 226n26 Robertson, D. W., 24 Robertson, Elizabeth, 192n9 Rorem, Paul, 92 Rufinus, 17 rule of life, 4, 46, 163; and Ancrene Wisse, 163–64; and becoming scripture, 20–21; and beguine spirituality, 22, 46; Benedictine rule, 214n26; Hadewijch’s disdain for exterior rule, 21–22, 153, 164, 199n68; and reason, 223n94; and ways of

INDE X loving, 96–103; William of Saint Th ierry and, 199n68 saints and martyrs, 82; see also List of the Perfect salvation: Augustine and, 27, 32, 56, 180n9; Julian of Norwich and, 162, 169; Paul and, 180n9 sarx, 12, 29, 174n22 Scheepsma, Wybren, 76, 98, 196n39 scripture: becoming scripture, 17, 20–21; Christ and, 50; prohibition against interpretation by women, 76, 159, 191nn1, 3, 197n47; and relation between reading and living, 21, 69; and visionary activity, 63, 64, 69, 76; see also action, deeds, works; performance; reading and interpretation senses, see inner and outer senses; taste; touch servant, figure of, 140, 141, 162, 166, 167, 180n6, 209n95, 219n57 Sheldrake, Philip, 161 sight, see divine, human perception of; inner and outer senses Simons, Walter, 211n9, 214n26 sin: Augustine and, 35; Julian of Norwich and, 162, 167–69; Paul and, 12, 167, 175n25; William of Saint Th ierry and, 18 singing, 150–51; see also Liederen of Hadewijch soma, 12, 29, 174n22; somatic archive 82, 110 Song of Songs, 19, 39, 45–46, 212n14, 220n60; Bernard of Clairvaux and, 52, 54; Hadewijch and, 93–94, 102, 106, 124, 190n92, 212n14; Origen and, 16 Songs (Hadewijch of Brabant), see Liederen of Hadewijch soul: Augustine and, 15, 29, 35, 56; Bernard of Clairvaux and, 19, 45–46, 52, 59; blurred distinction between body and soul, 2–3; and charity, 18–19; and divine gifts, 128, 204 n34; and Hellenistic tradition, 10–11; Hadewijch and, 22, 67, 70, 128;

P 257 and hierarchy of visions, 191n4; inner beauty of, 22, 164, 199n68; and inner senses, 17; Julian of Norwich and, 86, 161, 165–69, 227n47; and lichame, 70; love and reason as two eyes of, 205n48; Marguerite d’Oingt and, 77; masculinity associated with, 2; and Neoplatonism, 8, 18–19, 90, 107; Origen and, 15–17; Paul and, 12, 174 n22; rapprochement of (female) soul and (male) Word, 52–53, 140–41; and reading and interpreting scripture, 16; Richard of Saint Victor and, 140–41; touch of God in, 67; William of Saint Th ierry and, 18, 58, 196n44, 205n48, 206n62; and the Word, 19; see also mind Speculum virginum, 135, 149, 218n47, 219n57, 221n77 Steigman, Emero, 95 Stock, Brian, 65, 135 Stoics, 204n34, 208n79 Suydam, Mary, 177n43, 199n71, 209n99 suffering, 211n9; Hadewijch and, 26, 69, 73, 83, 99–100, 110–12, 115, 125–26, 208n95; Hadewijch’s Liederen and, 127–32; Hildegard von Bingen and, 73; and imitatio Christi, 13; Julian of Norwich and, 161, 162, 169; as message, 116; and ways of loving, 99–100 Summit, Jennifer, 75, 196n42 taste, 82, 182n19, 192–93n13; Hadewijch and, 40, 67–68, 104, 105, 108, 110, 120, 142; William of Saint Th ierry and, 58 teaching: and Hadewijch’s Liederen, 127, 132–36, 148–49, 152–54, 220n59; and mistress or master of love, 153; and prohibition against women, 191nn1, 3; and visions, 68–69, 74, 76, 86–87, 90, 160, 161; see also werke Tell, Dave, 198n62 temporality: Augustine and, 24, 34, 39–40, 44–45; and delay, 64, 84–85, 200n85,

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temporality (continued ) 201n86; and double birth of Christ, 44–45; and double destination of human beings, 44–45; as gift to humans, 204n34; Hadewijch’s Liederen and, 147–49, 164; Hadewijch’s visions and, 71–72, 81–85, 107; Hadewijch’s ways of loving and, 97–101; historical time and atemporal moment, 22, 24, 31, 33–34, 44–45, 55, 71–73, 77, 79–80, 82–84; Julian of Norwich and, 169–70; liturgical time, 55, 83; and memory, 79–82; Nachträglichkeit (belatedness), 84–85; Origen and, 16, 204n34; Paul and, 11, 13–15, 24, 46–47; and reading and women’s mystical texts, 22, 23; and somatic archive, 82–85, 110; and spiritual vision, 34; and stages of Minne, 147–48; and transformation, 2, 13–15, 24, 29, 31–32, 39–41, 45, 105, 115–21, 170; and unlived experience, 24, 79–82; and writing, 71–76 textuality: and action/deeds, 61, 160; and the body, 22–23, 59; and bridging function, 15, 27—28, 31, 71–76, 118, 155; Hadewijch and, 160, 170; Hadewijch’s Liederen and, 125, 127; Hadewijch’s visions and, 94; Hildegard von Bingen and, 75; and imitatio Christi, 160; inner person linked to the Word, 7, 160; Julian of Norwich and, 169–70; Marguerite d’Oingt and, 76–79; mediated nature of, 5; and women’s mystical texts, 6–9; see also language Theoderic of Echternach, 73 Theophilus of Antioch, 24 touch, 34, 42, 68, 78, 155, 192–93n13, 213n19; and Hadewijch (as gherinen), 67, 82, 103, 114, 192n10, 193n17; Hildegard von Bingen and, 74; and visionary activity, 35, 67, 68, 73, 74 trauma, and visions, 84–85, 201n87 Trinity, the, 10; and divinity and humanity of Christ, 118; and double

INDE X birth, 45; Hadewijch and, 3, 20, 35, 68, 94, 98–100, 107, 108, 112, 134–36, 143, 160, 199n67, 211n10, 212n12; Julian of Norwich and, 159, 161, 162, 167, 169; and language of debt, 211n10, 212n12; and Minne, 129–30, 143, 145, 212n13; and werke, 94 Trinity, Augustinian conception of, 24, 28–47, 107; Bernard of Clairvaux and, 52; imago Trinitatis, 38, 185n47; and inner and outer persons, 32; trinities identified as memory, understanding, love, 33–45 truth, see divine truths Turner, Denys, 159, 161, 162, 166, 168, 169, 226n39 understanding: and action/deeds, 20, 21, 56, 93, 132, 145; combined with love, 56; delay in understanding visions, 16, 84–85; fleeting nature, 90; and human trinities, 35; inner and outer knowledge, 84–85; and Hadewijch’s Liederen, 142; love and reason as two eyes of the soul, 205n48; loving what one cannot know, 33, 182n19; spiritual/inner understanding, 16, 17, 18, 58, 83, 133, 139; and stages of mystical ascent, 53–54; and touch of God, 67–68; and visionary activity, 75, 90, 93, 108, 120; see also mind; reading and interpretation; reason; will van Boendale, Jan, 218n52 Van Mierlo, Josef, 177n43 vernacular, 19, 20, 77, 149, 161–62, 178n45, 210n3, 215n30; and theology 6, 65 Victorines, 50, 78, 191n4; and balance of action and contemplation, 91, 92; and beguines, 225n25; and education, 19, 125; emphasis on community, 54, 92, 129, 219n53; Hadewijch and, 20, 21, 26, 67; and singing, 150–51, 189n86; and spiritual ascent 51, 53–54; see also Godfrey of Saint

INDE X Victor; Hugh of Saint Victor; Richard of Saint Victor Victorinus, Marius, 24 virtue: Hadewijch and, 92, 93, 105, 137–38, 202n14, 207n69; life as ultimate test of, 95; Mary and, 144; and medieval education, 21; Richard of Saint Victor and, 213n19; and visionary activity, 64, 75 visions, 63–87; and agency of the divine, 14, 175n24; and agency of the visionary, 102, 191n1; Augustine and, 40, 191n4; as bridging mechanism, 71–76; and community, 71, 104, 117; delay in understanding/writing, 64, 83–85, 200n85, 201n86; and exegesis, 58, 64, 74, 76–79, 191nn1, 3; experience of, 69–70, 73, 82–84, 110, 158; as event, 82, 85; as “face-to-face” encounters with the divine, 31; hierarchy of, 191n4; and humans grasped by the divine, 13; images of Christ in, 32; and “imaginative theology,” 78; and inner and outer persons/bodies, 63–64, 78–79, 86; and inner senses, 16; lessons applied to life, 64; and mediated nature of textuality, 5, 32; and memory, 79–82; operating from inside out, 25; pedagogical function of, 68–69, 74, 76, 86–87, 90, 160, 161; and prohibition against women preaching, 191nn1, 3, 197n47; and temporality, 65, 71–76; and trauma, 84–85, 201n87; and unlived experience, 79–83, 110; visionaries’ knowledge of scripture and other texts, 200n77; William of Saint Th ierry and, 75, 196n44; see also Hildegard von Bingen; Julian of Norwich; Marguerite d’Oingt; visions of Hadewijch; women’s mystical texts; werke visions of Hadewijch, 19, 63, 89, 109, 116, 194 n21, 197n47; beginnings and endings of, 69–70, 110, 195–96n37; and being grasped “by” the divine, 13; commands given in, 69, 71, 89, 91, 104, 105, 107–8; and community, 71, 104, 117; content of,

P 259 67–69, 74–75, 81, 84, 93, 106–9; contrast to Liederen, 126, 127, 128, 140; delay in writing of, 83–84; experience of, 69–70, 82–84, 110; as experiential exegesis, 75; image of Augustine in, 95, 193n14; image of Christ in, 69, 70, 103–5, 107, 118–19; image of Mary in, 116–17; and inner and outer persons/ bodies, 25, 63–75; and liturgy, 81, 82, 149, 199n75; and materie and lichame, 69–70, 83, 109–11, 116–20; and memory, 81–83; progression of, 92–96; purpose of, 95, 120–21; and reading/ contemplation, 76–78, 84, 109; and somatic archive, 82–85; and temporality, 81–85; and textuality, 75, 94; tripartite understanding of, 191n4; and unlived experience, 81–83, 110; virtues listed in, 202n14; and ways of loving, 96–103; see also werke visions of Hadewijch, list of: Vision 1, 67, 74–75, 93–94; Vision 3, 67; Vision 4, 67, 103–5, 107, 110, 199n71; Vision 5, 110; Vision 6, 69, 110, 191n4; Vision 7, Vision 8, Vision 9, 68, 97, 101, 102, 138; Vision 10, 81; Vision 11, 84, 95, 193n14; Vision 12, 82, 90, 92, 102, 198n58, 202n14; Vision 13, 94, 108–9, 116–17, 202n7; Vision 14, 67–68, 109, 196n37 —— Vision 7, 1–3, 24–25, 65, 69–70, 73, 75, 103, 108, 118–20, 194n24, 197n47; and Eucharist, 69, 118–120, 173n3; and immediacy, 1–2, 25, 40; and promised unity with the divine, 25; text of, 1; and union with Christ, 69, 70; Visions 7 and 8 as one vision, 69, 202n16 —— Vision 8, 103, 106–8, 110, 141, 192n11, 193n18, 202n7; commands given in, 107–8; figure of the champion (kimpe), 69–70, 106, 194n24; and five ways of loving, 69, 106–7; Visions 7 and 8 as one vision, 69, 202n16 von Baest, Marieke, 211n8 vows, see rule of life

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Watson, Nicholas, 5, 6, 65, 159, 162, 163, 167, 168, 200n85, 203n29, 224n5, 226n33 werke, 21, 25, 70, 89–109; as command in visions, 69, 71, 91, 104, 105, 107–8; defi nitions, 91, 201n7; didactic purpose of, 90, 92; and garments, 137–40; Hadewijch’s Liederen and, 135–39; two categories of, 136–39; and humility/ selflessness, 90, 94–95, 97, 105, 139; and joining of appearance and essence, 137–45; and List of the Perfect, 94–96; and Minne (personification of love), 93–109, 136–39; and poetry, 126; and progression of visions, 92–96; theological context, 91; and the Trinity, 94; see also Minne Wiethaus, Ulrike, 210n106 will: Augustine and, 35–36; Hadewijch and, 93, 111, 212n12; and imitatio Christi, 52; Julian of Norwich and, 167–69; and love, 93; and trinities, 35; William of Saint Th ierry and, 198n56; see also werke Willaert, Frank, 126, 194n21, 196n40, 205n49, 211n7 William of Saint Th ierry, 17–18, 58, 190n92; and agency of the divine, 24; Exposition on the Song of Songs, 190n92; Hadewijch and, 100, 199n67; and love, 18, 53, 198n56, 199n67; and memory, 81–82; and the mind, 182n23; The Nature and Dignity of Love, 17–18, 100, 198n56, 205n48, 206n62; and Neoplatonism, 18; and reason, 100, 196n44, 205n48; and rule of life, 199n68; and the senses, 18, 35, 182n23, 205n48, 206n62; and the soul, 58, 196n44, 206n62; Speculum fi dei, 198n56, 205n48; and visionary activity, 75, 196n44; and works/actions, 202n15 women’s mystical texts, 63–87, 158–71; approaches to, 6, 22, 60, 72, 121, 124–25; as bridging mechanism, 71–76; embodied experience as a sign of the divine, 48; embodiment and exegesis, 8, 50, 55–56,

INDE X 60, 66, 76–79, 135; experience, and corporeality in, 1–3, 6, 7, 22, 25, 40–41, 63, 67, 72, 78, 124–25; and “face-to-face” encounter, 13; and gender, 26, 60–61; and incarnation, 52; and interrelation of body and language, 25, 43, 48, 50; and literary form, 5–9, 25, 158; and love, 52–53; marginalization of, 6, 7, 8, 61; and Neoplatonism, 8; and orality, 65, 75; popularity in the Middle Ages, 65, 121; relation to literature, 6, 7, 60, 124–25, 174n12, 195–96n37; scholarship on, 2–6, 65–66, 124–25, 210nn1, 105, 211nn6, 7; see also Hadewijch of Brabant; Hildegard von Bingen; Julian of Norwich; Marguerite d’Oingt; temporality; textuality; visions women’s spirituality: anchoritic spirituality, 163–65; and Christ’s body, 76; and devotional reading, 75–76, 196n42; and imitatio Christi, 173n3; and knowledge of scripture, 200n77; and literacy, 75–76, 192n9; and the liturgy, 8–9, 23; material body, 10, 55–56, 159; and memory, 24; and physicality, 2–3, 55–56; and prohibition against preaching, 76, 159, 191nn1, 3, 197n47; and scriptural exegesis, 8, 23; and textuality, 65; see also beguine spirituality; exegesis; Hadewijch of Brabant; Hildegard von Bingen; Julian of Norwich; Marguerite d’Oingt; visions; women’s mystical texts Word, the, 208n82; Augustine and, 47–49, 208n82; Bernard of Clairvaux and, 52; Christ identified with, 7, 10, 55; humans becoming like the Word-made-flesh, 52, 79, 169; and inner person, 7, 10, 41, 160; Marguerite d’Oingt and, 77; and singing, 150; soul’s identification with, 19; see also imitatio Christi works, see actions, deeds, works; werke Worthen, Jeremy, 54, 64 Zinn, Grover, 19, 197n48, 212n14