Saints, Scholars and Politicians: Gender as a Analytical Tool in Medieval Studies 2503516548, 9782503516547

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Medieval Church Studies 15

Saints, Scholars, and Politicians Gender as a Tool in M edieval Studies

E dited by

BREPO LS

Mathilde van Dijk and Renée Nip

Saints, Scholars, and Politicians G ender as a T ool in M edieval Studies Over the past eighteen years, gender has become a major analytical tool in medieval studies. The purpose of this volume is to evaluate its use and to search for ways in which to improve and enhance its value. The authors address the question of how gender relates to other tools of medieval research. Several articles criticize the way in which an exclusive focus on gender tends to obscure the impact of other factors, for instance class, politics, economy, or the genre in which a source is written. Other articles address ‘wrong’ ways of using gender, for instance monolithic or anachronistic views of what constitutes differences between men and women. The intention is that this selection of case studies further establishes and enhances the indispensability of gender as an analytical tool within medieval studies. The volume has been produced in recognition of the work of the Groningen medievalist, Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, on the occasion of her sixty-fifth birthday. She is the person primarily responsible for introducing to the Netherlands gender as a legitimate and useful tool in medieval studies. The contributors are medievalists from a range of countries and different backgrounds. They were selected in order to test Dr Mulder-Bakker's ideas on methodology and interdisciplinarity through a series of case-studies.

Medieval Church Studies is a series of monographs and, sometimes, collections devoted to the history of the Western Church from, approximately, the Carolingian reform to the Council of Trent. It builds on Brepols’ longstanding interest in editions of texts and primary sources, and presents studies that are founded on a traditional close analysis of primary sources but which confront current research issues and adopt contemporary methodological approaches.

Cover im i M antelm adonna, Ravensburg, ca. 1480 fro m the B erlin Skulpturengàk Staatliche M useen Preussischer K ulturbesitz, Inv. 421. Reproduced w ith perm isi ISBN 2 - 5 0 3 - 5 1 6 5 4 - 8

9782503516547

9 782503 516547

Sa in t s , S c h o l a r s ,

and

P o l it ic ia n s

Gender as a Tool in Medieval Studies

MEDIEVAL CHURCH STUDIES 15

Sa i n t s , S c h o l a r s ,

and

P o l it i c ia n s

Gender as a Tool in Medieval Studies Festschrift in Honour o f Anneke Mulder-Bakker on the Occasion o f her Sixty-Fifth Birthday

E dited b y

Mathilde van Dijk and Renée Nip

BREPOLS

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

© 2005, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part o f this publication m ay be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission o f the publisher. D/2005/0095/87 ISBN: 2-503-51654-8 Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper

Contents

List of Contributors Introduction

vii 1

MATHILDE VAN DIJK

The Virgin as Social Icon: Perspectives from Late Antiquity

9

KATE COOPER

lleven ons heren Jhesu Christi: Female Readers and Dutch Devotional Literature in the Fifteenth Century

25

GEERT WARNAR

Johannes Hertenstain’s Translation (1425) of Grimlaicus’s Rule for the Anchoresses at Steinertobel near St Gallen

43

GABRIELA SIGNORI

Ignorantia est mater omnium malorum: The Validation of Knowledge and the Office of Preaching in Late Medieval Female Franciscan Communities

65

BERT ROEST

Women’s Formal and Informal Traditions of Biblical Knowledge in Anglo-Norman England

85

JOCELYN WOGAN-BROWNE

Gender and the Archive: The Preservation of Charters in Early Medieval Communities of Religious Women KATRINETTE BODARWÉ

111

Henry Mande: The Making of a Male Visionary in Devotio Modema

133

MATHILDE VAN DIJK

The Meanings of Hair in the Anglo-Norman World: Masculinity, Reform, and National Identity

153

PAULINE STAFFORD

Visions and Schism Politics in the Twelfth Century: Hildegard of Bingen, John of Salisbury, and Elisabeth of Schönau

173

RENATE BLUMENFELD-KOSINSKI

Conflicting Roles: Jacqueline of Bavaria (d. 1436), Countess and Wife

189

RENÉE NIP

The Metamorphosis of Women? Autobiography from Margery Kempe to Martha Moulsworth

209

HELEN WILCOX

Gender and Religious Autobiography between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation: Typologies and Examples

227

GABRIELLA ZARRI

Selected Bibliography of Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker

241

Index of Historical Figures and Writers

249

Index of Modem Authors Cited

255

Contributors

Katrinette Bodarwé studied history and mathematics at the University of Bonn, where she also received a PhD in medieval history. She wrote a dissertation on education in female monastic communities. She is an assistant at the University of Gottingen. She publishes on female monastic life. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski received her PhD in romance languages and literatures at Princeton University. Amongst other topics, she published on medieval saints and religious women in the Later Middle Ages and on the history of Caesarean birth. Currently she is interested in the literature surrounding the Great Schism of the Western Church (1378-1417). Kate Cooper is senior lecturer in early Christianity and Director of the Centre for Late Antiquity at the University of Manchester. She has dedicated her career to the study of gender and family in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Her book, The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity, was published in 1996 by Harvard University Press. Mathilde van Dijk studied history at the University of Groningen. She teaches the history of Christianity and gender studies at the same institution. Next to medieval gender studies, her fields are medieval saints, mysticism, and the history of religious men and women in the Middle Ages. Presently, she is working on a monograph about visions of humanity in the Devotio Moderna. Renée Nip is lecturer in medieval history at the University of Groningen. She has published on the hagiography and historiography of the Low Countries, and Flanders in particular. She is co-ordinator of the Dutch part of the Flemish-Dutch databank Narrative Sources from the Medieval Low Countries (www.narrative-sources.be).

viii

Contributors

Bert Roest studied intellectual history and medieval studies in Groningen and Toronto. Over the years he held several temporary positions in Florence, Notre Dame (Indiana), and St Bonaventure (New York). His publications include Reading the Book o f History (Groningen: Regenboog, 1996) and Franciscan Literature o f Religious Instruction before the Council o f Trent (Leiden: Brill, 2004). Gabriela Signori studied history, romance languages, and philosophy at Basel, Geneva, Lausanne, and Paris. She received a PhD at Bielefeld and is professor of late medieval history and auxiliary sciences in Münster. She specializes in saints and hagiography, religious life, political culture, gender studies, and social history. Pauline Stafford is professor of medieval history at the University of Liverpool. She has a first degree and doctorate from Oxford and worked for many years at the University of Huddersfield. Her major work has been on early medieval women, especially queens. She is currently engaged in a study of gender in chronicles in early England, with special reference to conquest and nation. Geert Waxnar is affiliated to Pallas, the research institute for historical, art historical, and literary studies of Leiden University, where he is leading a five-year research project entitled Men of Letters, Medieval Dutch Literature and Learning. His publi­ cations include Ruusbroec: Literatuur en mystiek in de veertiende eeuw (Amster­ dam: Atheneum-Polak & Van Gennep, 2003). Helen Wilcox is professor of english literature at the University of Groningen. Her research focuses on early modem women’s writing, drama, devotional poetry, and autobiographical works. Women and Literature in Britain 1500-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and a forthcoming edited collection entitled Transforming Holiness are perhaps her most relevant publications to mention here. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne is professor in the English Department and Center for Medi­ eval Studies at Fordham University, NY. She did degrees at the universities of Melbourne, Oxford, and Liverpool, UK and has taught in Australia, England, Europe, and America. She published editions, translations, studies, research tools, and essay collections principally on women’s literary culture in medieval England. Gabriella Zarri is professor of early modem history at Florence. She worked on the lives of medieval and early modem women. Her publications include Le sante vive: cultura e religiosità femminile nelle prima éta moderna (partially translated into English in Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. by D. Bomstein and R. Rusconi), and Recinti: Donne, clausura e matrimonio nelle prima éta moderna (2000).

Introduction MATHILDE VAN DIJK

his Festschrift is in honour of the Groningen medievalist Anneke B. MulderBakker on the occasion of her sixty-fifth birthday. Although this marks the end of her professional career, it is emphatically not the end of her scholarly life. This is why this volume does not contain a colourful array of articles by friends and colleagues assessing results and looking back. Instead, in accordance with Anneke’s wishes, it is a future-oriented collection of essays which focus on the con­ tinuing development of gender as an indispensable tool in medieval studies. This is well in line with Anneke’s professional interests. Amongst other things, the volume is a test of her ideas on methodology and interdisciplinarity — the contributors are medievalists from several countries and different backgrounds. Without a doubt, the rise of gender studies is among the most important develop­ ments in medieval studies in the past thirty years. Since the publication of Joan Wallach Scott’s famous article ‘Gender: A Useful Category in Historical Analysis’, medievalists have been quick to implement it as a versatile instrument with which to measure the past.1 Many medievalists have come to acknowledge the perceived dif­ ferences between men and women as primary constituents of social and cultural relationships, alongside the traditional trinity of class, ethnicity, and race. Another American historian, Caroline Walker Bynum, was among the first to explore gen­ der’s potential. Thanks to her efforts, and those of others, the study of the social and cultural significance of the differences between men and women became central to medieval studies. This is most obvious in the fact that it has become more and more common to take gender into account, even if it is not the main object of a certain

T

1

J. W. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category o f Historical Analysis’, American Historical

Review , 91.4 (1986), 1053-75.

2

MATHILDE VAN DIJK

research project.2 Increasingly, gender is seen as an indispensable instrument in the medievalist’s toolbox. The purpose of this volume is to look at the use of gender as a category in distinct fields of medieval studies, such as political, social, literary, intellectual, and religious history. At present, these are the areas in which gender is most used. The volume’s main objectives are to show how the use of gender as an analytical tool focuses the medievalist’s perception of the past and to enhance the value of gender for our understanding of the Middle Ages. Therefore, this volume presents a series of case studies in which the authors assess the ways that gender can and must be used in explaining the significance of certain historical phenomena, whether historical figures, events, or texts. The authors attempt to fine-tune gender as a tool, criticizing how it has been used in the past. Before introducing the separate articles, I shall first give an outline of the rise of gender in medieval studies, then attempt an explanation of its success, and finally discuss its future in medieval studies. We have to acknowledge that the advance of gender studies is most obvious in the Anglo-Saxon world, particularly in the United States.3 It is only recently that conti­ nental medievalists have begun to appreciate its importance.4 In Dutch academia, for instance, Anneke Mulder-Bakker was the first to realize the value of researching women and then of gender for medieval studies.5 She joined forces with women’s studies, which at the time was focused mainly on modem times, and put gender studies on the Dutch medievalist map. There is an obvious parallel here with the histories of medieval anchorites and anchoresses, who have been her prime interest throughout her scholarly life.6 Like many of them, she had a prophetic vision. Only recently has her approach been established as a school in her native country, not only 2 K. F. Morrison, Understanding Conversion (Charlottesville: University Press o f Virginia, 1992), pp. 50-51. 3 P. J. Geary, ‘Visions o f Medieval Studies in North America’, in The Past and Future o f Medieval Studies, ed. by J. van Engen (Notre Dame: University o f Notre Dame Press, 1994), pp. 45-57 (p. 54), asserts that women’s history and gender studies are the fields in which American medievalists excel and which they put on the international medievalist’s map. It is significant that gender is a major subject in the survey in which Geary’s article appeared. 4 It is significant that gender is a relatively minor subject in a similar survey by the German medievalist H. W. Goetz, Moderne Mediävistik: Stand und Perspektiven der Mittlealterforschung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999). 5 Outside academia, the Haarlem archivist Florence Koom was a lone voice in favour o f women’s history and, later, gender studies. However, in view o f her position outside a uni­ versity, she was not as well placed to create a following. See for instance F. W. J. Koom, Begijnhoven in Holland en Zeeland gedurende de Middeleeuwen (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1981); Koom, ‘Hollandse nuchterheid? D e houding van de Moderne Devoten tegenover vrouwenmystiek en -ascese’, Ons geestelijk erf, 66 (1992), 97-114. 6 A. B. Mulder-Bakker, Lives o f the Anchoresses: The Rise o f the Urban Recluse in Medie­ val Europe, The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University o f Pennsylvania Press, 2005).

Introduction

3

by way of cross-pollination with the United States, but also by Dutch medievalists following in her footsteps. As we will presently see, her progression from the history of mentalities to gender history is indicative of the route that medieval studies followed from the time she started her career in the 1960s. The question of why gender studies was so successful in the United States and other Anglo-Saxon countries, and why its path is still far more rocky in continental Europe, has been a source of some speculation. It has been suggested that relatively high numbers of female medievalists may have been a factor. Judith Bennett points for instance to the tradition of feminist historiography of the Middle Ages in the United States, which has been present since the end of the nineteenth century.7 However, such historiography was not exclusive to the United States. I assert that the question should be asked the other way around. The challenge is not so much why gender is successful in certain areas, but why it is not in others. In fact, as I shall presently show, gender is eminently suited to the new medievalism as it has devel­ oped since the 1960s. If any explanation is needed it would be why all medievalists of the 1980s did not instantly embrace it. The roots of gender studies lie in women’s studies of the 1970s. It is significant that medieval historians did not really latch on to this movement until the devel­ opment of gender as an analytical category, despite the fact that there had been a tradition of feminist medieval historiography from the nineteenth century onwards. Like that of the 1970s, this historiography was given direction by the women’s movement. Medievalists focused primarily on the powerful abbesses and queens of the early Middle Ages. In the era of suffragettes, these figures proved that women were as capable as men when it came to government.8 The relative absence of medievalists may have been caused by the fact that medieval women were not as forgotten as their sisters in other eras were. This was the case with history on the one hand, and with philosophy, theology, language, and literature on the other, but in different ways. Throughout Europe, women were the first to write in the vernacular. This is why they had always been a prime subject for research into medieval language and literature right from the start, at the end of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, these female authors were challenging subjects for scholars whose favoured subject was religion, and who, in the era of nationalism, were looking for authentic philosophical or theological voices. In the Low Countries, for instance, the Antwerp Jesuits of the Ruusbroecgenootschap looked for

7 J. M. Bennett, ‘Our Colleagues, Ourselves’, in Past and Future, ed. by Van Engen, pp. 245-58 (p. 248). 8 L. Eckenstein, Women under Monasticism: Chapters on Saint-lore and Convent Life between A.D. 500 and A.D. 1500 (New York, 1896; repr. N ew York: Russell and Russel, 1968); J. W. A. Naber, Vrouwenleven in Reformatietijd bezegeld door den marteldood van Wendelmoet Claesdochter (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1927); M. R. Beard, Woman as Force in History: A Study in Traditions and Relations (New York: Collier Books, 1976).

4

MATHILDE VAN DUK

expressions of piety in the vernacular.9 With such a research objective, the works of female authors were indispensable. Coinciding with the rise of women’s studies from about 1970, medieval authors attracted new interest from a different per­ spective. Under the influence of French philosophers like Luce Irigaray, they were regarded as the last women to express themselves as women. Thus they were regarded as the pillars of the écriture feminine, the tradition of female subjectivity long since repressed.10 Therefore, they are relevant to those who are interested in women’s voices in literature, religion, and philosophy. The understanding of authors like Hadewych or Angela of Foligno as the last female subjects has been much criti­ cized by medievalists, but that is of no importance here. The fact is that such assessments encouraged the study of medieval women from a gender perspective.11 As far as historians were concerned, medieval women had been centre stage since the rise of the history of mentalities in the 1960s. The influential French historian Georges Duby (1919-94) at first focused on marriage. He felt that shifts in the ways that the relationships of men and women were constructed were a major indication of cultural change. In connection with this, he also became interested in the views of women and their social roles.12 The same was true for other leading figures in the history of mentalities, like Jacques Le Goff (b. 1924).13 Their impact ensured that the study of medieval women was not just the exotic hobby of a few feminists, but daily fare for all historians of mentalities. Perhaps as a result most medieval historians did not feel challenged to join women’s studies. Another problem was that in the 1970s, women’s studies primarily because aimed at documenting ‘ordinary’ women.14 This was not easy for medieval

9 This was the Ruusbroecgenootschap’s avowed purpose. See Ons geestelijk erf, 1 - (1927-). 10 L. Irigaray, Speculum de l ’autre femme (Paris: Les éditions du Minuit, 1974), pp. 2 3 8 52; Irigaray, ‘De w eg van het vrouwelijke’, in Hooglied: D e beeldwereld van religieuze vrouwen in de Nederlanden vanaf de dertiende eeuw, ed. by P. Vandenbroeck (Bmssels: Vereniging voor tentoonstellingen van het Paleis voor Schone Künsten, 1994), pp. 155-66. 11 For instance A. M. Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands o f History (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 2002), and A. Passender, ‘Het lijdend lichaam en de vrije ziel: Middeleeuwse mystica’s op zoek naar God’, Lover: Literatuuroverzicht over feminisme, cultuur en wetenschap, 23 (1996), 15-20, 22. 12 See for instance G. Duby, Le chevalier, la femme et le prêtre: Le mariage dans la France féodale (Paris: Hachette, 1981); Duby, Dames du x if siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1995); Storia delle donne, ed. by G. Duby and M. Perrot (Rome: Laterza, 1990). 13 See for instance J. Le Goff, Les intellectuels au Moyen Age (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957), pp. 43-47. 14 The Dutch gender historian Grever provides a survey o f the development o f women’s history in M. Grever, ‘Het verborgen continent: Een historiografische verkenning van vrouwengeschiedenis in Nederland’, Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis, 12 (1986), 221-68 (p. 221, pp. 227-38); Grever, ‘Het haperende geheugen van de historica: Overpeinzingen bij

Introduction

5

studies because there are few sources about the lower orders of society and even fewer address women. Commitment to the research of mentalities involved a different view of the Middle Ages. Until the 1960s, this era had been studied first and foremost as a formative period for our civilization. Historians focused primarily on the roots of present-day institutions. In view of the theory of constantly changing mentalities, they then became aware of the mental distance that separates us from the Middle Ages. They argued that medieval culture was as different from ours as, say, the tribal cultures of the Amazon. Like an Amazonian tribe, medieval people were bound to have different perceptions of themselves and the world in which they lived: in short, of just about everything. It is a small step to assert the same for their views of the differences between the sexes. Furthermore, as the history of mentalities evolved into cultural history, it became more and more interdisciplinary. This meant that scholars from different disciplines studied the problems of the medieval period from different perspectives. This had been a special feature of women’s studies from the first, and continued to be so after the transformation into gender studies. Because of this, gender studies and medieval studies are very well suited. It has already been asserted that Anneke Mulder-Bakker’s scholarly career passed through a similar development. From the start, she was involved in the Interdisci­ plinaire Werkgroep Mediaevistiek, which began as an informal study group of medievalists and was institutionalized later as the Department of Medieval Studies at the University of Groningen. Following in the footsteps of the French medieval historians of mentalities, she focused on different protagonists and sources than traditional medievalists. In the late 1980s, she was one of the founders of another interdisciplinary study group, the Hagiografisch Werkgezelschap Nederland (the Dutch hagiographie society). Thus, she was among the first historians in the Nether­ lands to become aware of the value of hagiographie texts as sources for historical research. During her stay in the United States (1987-88), she became acquainted with American medieval research, which was firmly embedded in linguistic and philosophical theory. Sanctity and devotion, power and authority, the transmission of knowledge, the private and the public spheres, all these were and still are among the main themes of interest to her. Increasingly, she focused on the history of women. Her move to gender studies was a logical conclusion. Alongside her commitment to interdisciplinarity, she also strives for international­ ization. As organizer and participator in several congresses and workshops, by edit­ ing and contributing to collections of essays, she has tried to reconcile the primarily source-orientated method of West European medievalists with the more theoretical American approach.15 Because of her interest in interdisciplinarity and in the de geschiedenis van een vakgebied’, Lover: Literatuuroverzicht over feminisme, cultuur en

wetenschap, 22 (1995), 16-21. 15 For her publications, see the bibliography included in this volume.

6

MATHILDE VAN DIJK

reconcilement of European and American approaches, methodology was and is a primary interest in her work. She is very critical of traditional medievalist interpre­ tations of sources because of the unconscious anachronisms these involve. For instance, she asserts that nineteenth-century images of the reliability or unreliability of sources still dominate many areas of medieval studies. She challenges the view that administrative sources are per se more reliable than narrative ones. Furthermore, she warns against the distorted image provided by the familiar series of text editions. For example, in the Acta Sanctorum, the Lives of male saints outnumber those of female. It is a matter of debate whether this reflected medieval reality since contem­ porary research on local saints discovered a sizeable number of hitherto unknown holy women. Thus, the selection that the editors of such series made may obscure historical fact. Finally, she highlights how many medievalists were unaware of how a reformatorian, counter-reformatorian, or contemporary point of view determined their view of the sources. The essays in this volume discuss similar problems. As is often the case, Anneke’s interest in women and gender is rooted in her personal life and professional career. She has experienced the unequal position of men and women at first hand. It took a long time and a real fight before women were recognized as breadwinners, entitled to build up a pension. And then there were the lack of provisions for women to combine scholarly careers with having children. In her professional career she has experienced the consequences of the male-dominated world of Dutch universities. After the democratization of the 1960s, once again the road to power is via old boys’ networks and excludes women. Still, the course of life, including motherhood, handicaps a woman’s scholarly career in a way that cannot easily be compensated. As one of the founders of a faculty network for women, the Letteren Vrouwen Netwerk, Anneke helped to improve the position of women at the University of Groningen and to increase their career chances. The following essays assert the indispensability of gender for the construction of the past and deal with varied fields and subjects. The first three essays focus on the connections between a text and the female reader. Cooper, Wamar, and Signori all warn against facile ways of automatically equating the tenor of the text with the ways in which it functioned in a certain gendered milieu. Kate Cooper details the connections between the way in which the holy virgin is presented in a text and the way in which such texts were read, particularly by women. In modem scholarship, virgins have been seen as proponents of autonomy and agency and as a means to empower or disempower women. In a late antique context, the virgin appears to surmount all social barriers as she rebels against the wishes of her parents by insist­ ing on an unmarried life. Cooper provides a more balanced view. She argues that later Lives of virgins stress their roles as promoters of social coherence. The virgin martyr Eugenia is a good example. Even if, at first, she seems to step out of the familial fold, in the end she becomes reconciled to her parents. Geert Wamar is an advocate of gendered research on the audience of religious texts. He is studying the transmission of Tleven ons heren Jhesu Christi, a Middle Dutch translation of the Vita Christi. The surviving copies were all from religious communities of women

Introduction

7

touched by Devotio Moderna. The translator probably created it with a female audience in mind. Wamar resists the temptation to equate such a text automatically with Christ-centred piety in female milieus, as though the thoughts of the male trans­ lator were as a matter of course similar to his audience’s. Instead, he addresses the question of how such a text was intended and read. Gabriela Signori deals with the transmission of medieval texts. She takes her point of departure in the ninth-century rule for anchorites by Grimlaicus. Originally, the author intended his rule for male anchorites. In the fifteenth century, it was translated for a female audience. Surpris­ ingly, the text was transmitted virtually unchanged, even if some prescriptions do not appear to be very fitting for an audience of women. Signori studies the ways in which such texts were read, as compared to texts created explicitly for women. The next two articles provide a refreshing view of women’s access to learning. Bert Roest challenges the notion that the history of Franciscan women is about discouragement of intellectual pursuits and public activities like preaching. He discusses several examples of women from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who acted as spiritual leaders, either in their writings or even by preaching, apparently with their superiors’ consent and with much support from lay people. Furthermore, it appears to be a misconception that such a role could only be engaged in when a sister relied on ecstatic experiences. For instance, Caterina Vigri insisted on using the supposedly male powers of reasoning in reaching for the knowledge of God rather than on affective spirituality. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne attacks the notion that nothing much happened as far as literary activity was concerned in the British Isles between the Anglo-Saxon abbesses and Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. The picture is entirely different when francophone British nunneries are taken into account. Both French and English scholars have, for nationalist reasons, ignored the ongoing tradition of female writing after the conquest. Nuns like Clemence of Barking composed extensive literary works, in which they advocated learning and speaking for women and provided extensive theological discussions, apparently with the acknowledgement of their superiors. Katrinette Bodarwé argues for a critical assessment of the availability of sources with respect to female religious communities. She focuses on charters. Generally, fewer have been preserved from female houses. Bodarwé challenges the traditional reasons given for this in modem scholarship by asserting the opposite. Furthermore, she attempts to initiate a new evaluation of these circumstances. I criticize the way that sources have been read without taking into account how the authors perceived the differences between men and women. I challenge the way that religious practices have been labelled as either male or female by medieval scholarship. I argue first for a comparison of male and female religious people, and for an in-depth investigation of the roots of their pious practices. Working from the case of a male visionary in Devotio Moderna, and comparing him to female adher­ ents of the same movement, I aim to show how supposedly female practices could be entirely male, depending on the context.

8

MATHILDE VAN DIJK

Pauline Stafford also discusses the gender of males as compared to each other and to females. With her, we move into the area of political history. She looks at mascu­ linities and moral stature in the Anglo-Norman world before and after the conquest. Clearly, masculinity was a powerful feature of evolving identities: of reforming clergy against the warrior elite, and ethnically for the victorious Normans against the defeated English. Several problems of Anglo-Norman gender identity are discussed. For instance, were clergymen true males? Were the Normans manlier than the English? She particularly focuses on the symbolic meaning of male haircuts. Heads long­ haired or shorn were important and flexible indicators of masculinity or effeminacy. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski compares the actions of male and female commenta­ tors on two papal schisms, one in the twelfth century and a better-known one in the fourteenth. She focuses on three authors from the schism of 1159 — John of Salisbury, Hildegard of Bingen, and Elisabeth of Schönau — and compares their works to those of visionaries from the Great Schism. It is striking that both male and female authors used letters rather than their visionary work to address the schism. Furthermore, all the authors were definitely upper class. This is different to the later situation. Unlike the female visionaries from the Great Schism, Hildegard and Elisa­ beth did not have to use their revelations to exert authority. Furthermore, contrary to several later visionaries, they were cloistered nuns descending from high aristocracy. Renée Nip also approaches a subject in political history: the sad fate of Jacqueline (Jacoba) of Bavaria, Countess of Holland, Zeeland, and Hainault. Usually, since the nineteenth century, medievalists of women and gender focused on female rulers who were successful despite their sex. Nip demonstrates how the ambition to govern could be effectively thwarted by the problems that a female ruler like Jacoba automatically encountered. Finally, the essays by Helen Wilcox and Gabriella Zarri return to women, texts, and social roles. They focus on women’s self-representation in autobiographies. From a comparison of the fifteenth-century autobiography of Margery Kempe with similar texts from the seventeenth century, Helen Wilcox shows how gender can function as a flexible instrument with which to measure cultural change, for instance in terms of perceptions of the self. Gabriella Zarri studies religious autobiographies by women from the fifteenth until the eighteenth centuries. She criticizes the way that premodem autobiographies have been ignored in autobiographical studies. The same is true of gender. Furthermore, she addresses the problem that many of these female authors wrote ‘for obedience’, in response to an order from a spiritual advisor or even an inquisitor. How far did the autobiographical genre still offer opportunities for female self-expression or female guidance of others? How far was self-representation either enhanced or toned down in view of the growing fear of women meddling in religious writing? Hopefully, this selection of case studies will both establish and enhance the indispensability of gender in medieval studies. Groningen, 11-23-04

The Virgin as Social Icon: Perspectives from Late Antiquity KATE COOPER

When Gregory last dreamt o f his sister, it was as if he held in his hands a precious relic, which flashed into his eyes, like a mirror catching the full light o f the sun. This was an omen to him. He knew that he would carry Macrina with him to the grave. Her body was the untarnished mirror o f a soul that had caught, at last, the blinding light o f the katharotéas, the radiant purity, o f God.1

urs is a generation that has come as close as any to apprehending the early Christian vision of virginity as an icon not only of purity, but also of eternity. The idea of virginity as reversing the ancient equation between marriage and death has been vivid in the minds of modem readers since 1972, when Ton H. C. Van Eijk of Warmond published an article with the provocative and mem­ orable title, ‘Marriage and Virginity, Death and Immortality’.2 Virgins, according to Van Eijk, were able to make time stand still. The early Church had understood them as avatars of realized eschatology, of the kingdom of heaven as something not to be looked for in the distant future, but rather as a dimension of eternity already present among the faithful. Van Eijk’s vision of the iconic role of virginity made sense to a generation of scholars keenly interested in institutions and their failings. The early Church as an institution was beset by a crisis of maturity, and by an ever-increasing fear that the kingdom’s arrival on earth would never again seem as close as it had in the earliest years. As the Christian generations succeeded one another with ever-increasing

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1 Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 300. 2 Ton H. J. Van Eijk, ‘Marriage and Virginity, Death and Immortality’, in Epektasis: Mélanges offerts au cardinal J. Daniélou, ed. by J. Fontaine and C. Kannengiesser (Paris: Beauchesne, 1972), pp. 209-35.

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material prosperity and political commitment to the world around them, the coming of the kingdom, it seemed, would be postponed ever further out of reach. A liminal figure between the here-and-now and the kingdom of heaven, the virgin stood as a point of focus for the most urgent fears and hopes of the early Church. What has changed since Van Eijk’s day is not so much the significance of his thesis — which remains as valid today as it was thirty years ago — as the social con­ text for our interest in it. The past generation of English-speaking scholars has seen a social revolution in its attitude to early Christianity in general, and to the figure of the virgin in particular. The study of the early Christian writers known across cen­ turies as the ‘Fathers of the Church’ is no longer the province exclusively of patristic theologians. It is now pursued by a more diverse public of social and cultural his­ torians of late antiquity, a shift that has taken place at roughly the same time as, and not independently from, a dramatic rise in contributions by women and by male his­ torians of gender. Van Eijk could perhaps not have foreseen that within a decade, the question of early Christian virginity would no longer be a matter of high theology, but rather of social history and historical genealogy.3 His work found an audience newly fascinated by sexuality and anti-sexuality, and by the problem of women’s contribution to and recognition by the early Church. Most significantly, the views and perceptions of ancient women themselves, to the degree that they can be under­ stood, were to become central to scholarly interest in the phenomenon of virginity. It is easy to see the magnetism of virginity for late twentieth-century historians. Virginity stood at the centre of an ancient sexual revolution not unlike the twentieth century’s in its socially ramifying influence. Like the bones of Macrina, the late fourth century has served as a mirror reflecting a generation’s most pressing social concerns. The present essay will attempt to chart, at least glancingly, the main out­ lines of this transformation of the study of early Christian virginity and to illustrate the point that ancient writers themselves — be they male or female — reflected on, and at least sometimes attempted to address, the meaning to at least some female readers of the iconic figure of the virgin. To begin with, a broad definition of virginity as an ancient social phenomenon may not be out of place. Virginity, parthenia in Greek, virginitas in Latin, refers in the classical period to the state of being unmarried, a state whose emblematic subject is the unmarried girl. In classical terms, sexual inexperience is not directly implied, although under Christian influence virgo or parthenos in late antiquity comes to mean a person, paradigmatically but not necessarily a woman, whose body not only does not engage in, but also has never engaged in, sexual relations.4 The early Christian virgin could represent unmixed loyalty — heir to the daughterly virtues of 3 Significant in this respect have been responses to Michel Foucault’s History o f Sexuality, including Brown’s Body and Society cited above, and Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (London: Routledge, 1995). 4 See Kate Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Wonanhood in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), ch. 4, ‘An Angel In the House’.

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an Antigone, or the goddess Hestia/Vesta, attendant of the hearth — while also standing as a symbol of inviolate physical wholeness. To put it baldly, early Chris­ tian virginity seems to have been a case of Graeco-Roman notions of the sanctity of the hearth meeting Jewish notions of the ritual purity of priesthood and temple, con­ verging on the person of the marriageable girl. Asceticism, by contrast, classically means something like ‘athletic training’, refer­ ring to any practice of self-discipline, but emblematically practices of bodily self­ mortification, including fasting, sexual abstinence, and sleep deprivation. Continence {continentia, enkrateia) is the state of abstaining from sexual relations, but it is a state which can be attained by non-virgins and even by married couples by prior arrangement. A virgin is continent, but continence does not imply virginity. Chastity, however, was an altogether different concept. In the classical period, chastity was by no means to be equated to virginity, or even continence. Chastity {castitas, sophrosyne) was originally the virtue of fecundity, not abstinence. Its ava­ tar was the materfamilias, chaste in that she enjoyed sexual relations with none other than her husband — a fertile purity leading to numerous offspring. Classically, a virgin was chaste to the degree that she cultivated her person toward honourable marriage. By the early fifth century, the ascetic party within Christianity was to establish a second, secondary meaning of chastity, as a virtue best cultivated by the unmarried, but this meaning never entirely overtook the classical sense of chastity as honourable fecundity.5 Indeed the second definition took its power from the speaker or writer’s awareness of the older, more venerable meaning. If marriage equalled death — an equation as old as Sappho — then honourable offspring conferred immortality. Viewed in this light, the new meaning of chastity as sexual abstinence could be seen to divert some of the sacred power of the bride and mother onto the figure of the daughter — and onto the members of a new ascetic elite. In the three decades since Van Eijk wrote, the scholarly problem of the idealized woman in general, and of the virgin in particular, has in some sense come frill circle. From an early feminist emphasis on women’s agency, to the historian’s aprioriation of Lévi-Strauss’s idea of women as ‘good to think with’,6 to the post-modem em­ phasis on rhetorical strategies through which texts revise the trace of real historical women into something which often bears only an oblique relation to them,7 two core 5 A somewhat tendentious early fifth-century attempt to equate chastity with continence is preserved in Pseudo Pelagius, De castitate (PL Supplement 1, 1464-1505; an English translation is given in B. R. Rees, The Letters o f Pelagius and his Followers (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1991). 6 Janet Nelson, ‘Women and the Word in the Earlier Middle A ges’, in Women in the Church, ed. by W. J. Shiels and D. Wood, Studies in Church History, 27 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 53-78. 7 Kate Cooper, ‘Insinuations o f Womanly Influence: An Aspect o f the Christianization o f the Roman Aristocracy’, Journal o f Roman Studies, 82 (1992), 150-64. Elizabeth A. Clark, ‘Holy Women, Holy Words: Early Christian Women, Social History, and the “Linguistic Turn’” , Journal o f Early Christian Studies, 6.3 (1998), 413-30.

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problems emerge from the scholarly approaches to early Christian virginity during this period. The first highlights agency and autonomy: did virgins themselves derive sig­ nificant benefit from the virginal ideal, or were they pawns to the bishops who acted as their sponsors? The second, related question highlights the relation between the divine feminine and human empowerment: did divine or ideal human figures of the feminine have an empowering effect on early Christian women, understood as a broad social category? In each of these instances, what emerges most clearly from scholarly studies over the period in question is the difficulty of making generalizations.8

‘M ale ’ a n d ‘F em ale ’ M eanings f o r the Virgin Like any ideal, the figure of the virgin served a variety of purposes. How men used the ideal in late antiquity has certainly been easier to trace than how it was used by women, given the dominance of male-authored texts in our evidentiary basis. But we will see below that the scholars who have attempted to trace the meanings of the virgin for women on the one hand and for men on the other have been engaged in parallel and even complementary inquiries. Work by scholars identifying themselves with women’s history and gender his­ tory can be loosely divided according to the two above-mentioned headings of agency and empowerment. Agency may be considered first. In the 1970s and 1980s the figure of the virgin was envisioned as a manifestation of early Christian women’s struggle for autonomy. In a seminal 1974 article, ‘Misogynism and Virginal Femi­ nism in the Fathers of the Church’,9 Rosemary Radford Ruether argued that in the early Church misogynistic male writers and autonomy-seeking female Christians had achieved what amounted to a historic compromise: if women would support a rhetorical economy that emphasized their sexuality as the ‘Devil’s Gateway’ (in a famous phrase coined by Tertullian10), they could escape the negative stigma of sexuality, and earn a surprising degree of autonomy, by registering themselves publicly as asexual, as virgins or widows of the Church. Ruether’s article suggested terms for addressing the question of why a widely read text from the early Christian tradition would condone the rupture of a teen-aged heroine with the duties and obedience of the family, given that key texts of the New 8 Rebecca Flemming, "Quae corpore quaestum facit: The Sexual Economy o f Female Pros­ titution in the Roman Empire’, Journal o f Roman Studies, 89 (1999), 38-61. 9 Rosemary Radford Ruether, ‘Misogynism and Virginal Feminism in the Fathers o f the Church’, in Religion and Sexism: Images o f Woman in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. by Rosemary Radford Ruether (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), pp. 150-83. 10 Tertullian, On the Dress o f Women 1, 1, 1-2; see also the article by Elizabeth Clark, ‘D evil’s Gateway and Bride o f Christ: Women in the Early Christian World’, in her Ascetic Piety and Women’s Faith: Essays in Late Ancient Christianity (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1986), pp. 23-60.

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Testament stress the importance of women’s obedience. It also outlined terms for understanding the way in which the cult of virginity could both sustain and limit women’s autonomy, a point brought home by Elizabeth Clark’s 1981 article on ascetic renunciation and feminine advancement as a paradox which late ancient women could use to their own ends, a point to which we will return.11123 Two important books in the early 1980s, Stevan Davies’s The Revolt o f the Widows12 and Dennis MacDonald’s The Legend and the Apostle,13 brought the Ruether hypothesis to bear on the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, a group of second-century texts which place a strong emphasis on the alacrity of early Christian virgins in aban­ doning family ties to follow the Apostles. Along with others,14 Davies and MacDonald argued that the Apocryphal Acts could serve as evidence for early Christian women’s way of reading the virginal heroines of the Apocryphal Acts, such as Theda, the consort of Paul, with Davies arguing that the stories were written, and MacDonald arguing that they were compiled in oral form, by early Christian women themselves in an attempt to provide a legitimizing history for their own spiritual authority. This picture became more complicated in the 1990s. The Apocryphal Acts as a literary genre drifted in the eyes of scholars perceptibly upwards in social terms, to the point where they were accorded rhetorical stance and authorial strategy — and, viewed through that lens, the viewpoint of the authors began to seem increasingly male.15 Similarly, the literary genre on which they draw, the ancient romance (known in some circles as the ancient novel), was no longer regarded as the province of women and the modestly educated, but had begun to exact recognition as a genre with serious literary pretensions in the terms of its day.16 11 Elizabeth A. Clark, ‘Ascetic Renunciation and Feminine Advancement: A Paradox o f Late Ancient Christianity’, Anglical Theological Review, 63 (1981), 240-57, repr. in her Ascetic Piety, pp. 175-208; see also Elizabeth A. Clark, ‘Authority and Humility: A Conflict o f Values in Fourth-Century Female Monasticism’, Byzantinische Forschungen, 9 (1985), 1733, repr. in her Ascetic Piety, pp. 209-28. 12 Stevan L. Davies, The Revolt o f the Widows: The Social World o f the Apocryphal Acts (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980). 13 Dennis Ronald MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle fo r Paul in Story and Canon (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983). 14 Ross S. Kraemer, ‘The Conversion o f Women to Ascetic Forms o f Christianity’, Signs: Journal o f Women in Culture and Society, 6 (1980), 298-307. Virginia Burrus, Chastity as Autonomy: Women in the Stories o f Apocryphal Acts (Lewiston, N Y : Edwin M ellen Press, 1987). 15 Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride, ch. 3, ‘The Bride that Is N o Bride’; Simon Goldhill, Foucault’s Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History o f Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 16 Brigitte Egger, ‘Women and Marriage in the Greek Novels: The Boundaries o f Ro­ mance’, in The Search fo r the Ancient Novel, ed. by James Tatum (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 260-80; Susan A. Stephens, ‘Who Read the Ancient N ovels?’, in

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This opens the possibility that the literary parallelisms and inversions between the pagan heroines and those of the Apocryphal Acts are intentional and rhetorically motivated. Just as the heroines of the pagan novel defy all persons and institutions who stand between them and reunion with their heroes, so too the heroines of the Apocryphal Acts defy all persons and institutions who stand between them and the Apostles whom they wish to follow. I have argued elsewhere that the heroine of the Apocryphal Acts, in her attentiveness to the Apostle and his message, is a literary device designed to mobilize the reader’s sympathy, and to invite him or her to engage in a similar single-mindedness in pursuing the Christian message. In the hands of a reasonably sophisticated author, the reader’s interest in and identification with a nubile heroine might be intended less to foster the authority of women than to encourage the reader to think of him- or herself as passive in obedience, yet fierce in loyalty, to apostolic authority,17 though this reading does not preclude the possibility that women might have used the stories in oral form to a very different end, along lines such as those proposed by MacDonald. A similar binary of male versus female appropriation of the figure of the virgin emerges when we look at the women of the late fourth century made immortal by writers like Jerome and Ambrose and studied in the late twentieth century by schol­ ars who may be seen as following one of two paths, one opened by Peter Brown and the other by Elizabeth Clark. For Brown, and for others such as David Brakke and Neil McLynn, the virgins appear as emblems of the boundedness of the Church, their purity and spiritual power sustaining the authority of the bishop.18 Clark, on the other hand, has sought to assess the power ascetic renunciation might have conferred on the women themselves, and writers such as Susanna Elm, David Hunter, and Hagith Sivan have sought, while developing their own independent approaches, to clarity the social and theological context which governed women’s participation in the ascetic movement, as well as how gestures of renunciation would be received.19 ibid., pp. 405-18; Berber Wesseling, ‘The Audience o f the Ancient N ovels’, Groningen Colloquia on the Novel, 1 (1988), 67-79; David Konstan, Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Graham Anderson, Eros Sophistes: Ancient Novelists at Play, American Classical Studies, 9 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982). 17 Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride, ch. 3, ‘The Bride that Is No Bride’. 18 David Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics o f Asceticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); N eil B. McLynn, Ambrose o f Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1994). 19 Susanna Elm, Virgins o f God: The Making o f Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clar­ endon Press, 1996); David Hunter, ‘Resistance to the Virginal Ideal in Late Fourth Century Rome’, Theological Studies, 48 (1987), 45-64; Anne Ewing Hickey, Women o f the Roman Aristocracy as Christian Monastics (Ann Arbor: U.M.I. Research Press, 1987); Hagith Sivan, ‘On Hymens and Holiness in Late Antiquity: Opposition to Aristocratic Female Asceticism at Rome’, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum, 36 (1993), 81-93; Jane Simpson, ‘Women and

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That these questions of agency and the search for autonomy are difficult to an­ swer should come as no surprise, given the limitations of our source material alluded to above. But their difficulty lies also in our uncertainty surrounding the broader question of how early Christian readers apprehended the paradigms of sanctity pro­ posed to them by early Christian literature. This brings us to the second concept, which has played a historiographically central role, that of empowerment. Implicitly or explicitly, late twentieth-century historians and theologians have tended, when assessing which early Christian theological positions benefited women, to be influenced by projection theories of religious authority. This is a view that lay behind Elaine Pagels’s 1979 study, The Gnostic Gospels,20 which argued that the early Christian Gnostic heresies fostered women’s participation more successfully than orthodoxy, not only because of their healthy disrespect for episcopal authority, but through their use of divine-feminine archetypes, particularly but not exclusively the figure of Sophia, divine wisdom. Theologians such as Carol Christ were simultaneously working along similar lines. Christ argued that the essential business of feminist theology was the dis­ covery or recovery of archetypes of the divine feminine, which women might use to discover authority and meaning in their own person and experience.21 This view, in turn, was built on a constellation of notions, crucial not only to feminism, but to the wider political left, that language — and more particularly naming — is crucial to the individual’s ability to attain empowerment. This issue of the centrality of lan­ guage is one to which we will return: its usefulness, if anything, may now seem greater than it did a generation ago. But on the other hand, the central equation linking the divine feminine and earthly empowerment for women came quickly to Asceticism in the Fourth Century: A Question o f Interpretation’, Journal ofReligious History, 15 (1988), 38-60; Gillian Cloke, ‘This Female Man o f G od’: Women and Spiritual Power in the Patristic Age, a d 350-450 (London: Routledge, 1995); Jo Ann McNamara, A New Song: Celi­ bate Women in the First Three Christian Centuries (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1983). 20 On the problem o f women’s use o f Gnostic texts, see Suzanne Heine, Women and Early Christianity: Are the Feminists Right?, trans, by John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1987), and Michael A. Williams, ‘Variety in Gnostic Perspectives on Gender’, in Images o f the Feminine in Gnosticism, ed. by Karen L. King (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), pp. 2-2 2 . See also Elaine Pagels, ‘What Became o f God the Mother?’, in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, ed. by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979; repr. 1992), pp. 107-19. 21 Carol P. Christ, ‘Why Women Need the Goddess’, in Womanspirit Rising, ed. by Christ and Plaskow, pp. 273-87; see also Dawne McCance, ‘Understandings o f “the Goddess” in Contemporary Feminist Scholarship’, in Goddesses in Religions and Modern Debate, ed. by Larry W. Hurtado (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990), pp. 165-78. Helene P. Foley, ‘A Question o f Origins: Goddess Cults Greek and M odem’, in Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader, ed. by Elisabeth A. Castelli (New York: Paigrave, 2001), pp. 216-36, gives a valuable overview o f how the early Goddess theologies interacted with the emerging scholarship on ancient goddess cults.

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seem less than axiomatic. Already in 1975, Mary Daly argued in her The Church and the Second Sex22 that far from being an unequivocal boon to women, the projection of a female icon of religious authority could also serve a negative function, as a compensatory license for misogyny against real historical women. Complementing the interpretive problem of gender, projection, and archetype has been current feminist work on representation, gaze, and spectacle, which has slowly but surely come to bear on how ancient historians understand the early Christian virgin. Theories of the gaze in early post-modern feminist film criticism, particularly Laura Mulvey’s 1975 article, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’,23 where female characters were seen not as points of identification for the female viewer but rather as ‘erotic object for the characters in the story and erotic object for the specta­ tor’,24 opened up a way of talking about the rhetoric of gender which was compatible with psycho-historical approaches. John Anson, for example, to whom we will return below, looked to the virgin as a figure projected in terms of the needs and desires of a male monastic audience, with projection understood in a specifically psychoana­ lytic light.25 Subsequent work by Tina Pippin, Margaret MacDonald, Virginia Bumis, and the present author has taken up rhetorical criticism instead of the psy­ choanalytic approach, investigating the social repercussions of the early Christian woman as the object of the male gaze.26 But the post-modern emphasis on textual strategies opens the way for a recogni­ tion of the independence of the reader. Reader-response criticism alerts us to the possibility that early Christian readers read in a way that was independent from — 22 Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1968). 23 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16.3 (1975) 6-1 8 , re­ printed in Feminisms: An Anthology o f Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. by Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Hemdl, 2nd edn (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), pp. 438-48. 24 Jill Nelmes, ‘Women and Film’, in An Introduction to Film Studies, ed. by Jill Nelmes, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 267-305 (p. 277); Nelmes reminds us that Mulvey herself went on to critique her own earlier, highly influential article in a 1981 piece, ‘After­ thoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Framework, 6 (1981), 15-17. 25 John Anson, ‘The Female Transvestite in Early Monasticism: The Origin and Develop­ ment o f a M otif, Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 5 (1974), 1-32. 26 Tina Pippin, Death and Desire: The Rhetoric o f Gender in the Apocalypse o f John (Louis­ ville: Westminster and John Knox, 1992); Virginia Burrus, ‘Reading Agnes: The Rhetoric o f Gender in Ambrose and Prudentius’, Journal o f Early Christian Studies, 3 (1995), 25-46; Mar­ garet Y. MacDonald, Early Christian Women and Pagan Opinion: The Power o f the Hysterical Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Kate Cooper, ‘The Voice o f the Victim: Gender, Representation, and Early Christian Martyrdom’, Bulletin o f the John Rylands University Library, 80.3 (1998), 147-57, and Cooper, ‘Matthidia’s Wish: Division, Reunion, and the Early Christian Family in the pseudo-Clementine Recognitions', in Narrativity in Biblical and Related Texts, ed. by G. J. Brooke and J.-D. Kaestli (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), pp. 243-64.

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and sometimes even opposed to — the ‘reading’ which emerges most strikingly from the text itself. Critics as diverse as the deconstructionist Jonathan Culler, whose essay ‘On Reading as a Woman’27 was designed to undermine the idea of the reader straight-jacketed to a response ‘required’ by a text, or Janice Radway, whose fieldwork-based study of readers of contemporary low-budget romance novels28 traced the strategies by which female readers exert control over the textual worlds which they encounter, have uncovered the relative independence of the reader in a way that may well be applicable to antiquity. This is more or less what Tertullian suggested when he stated that the Acts o f Paul and Theda had been written by a male presbyter who wished to give glory to the Apostle Paul, but that a group of female readers had put the text to an entirely unexpected use as a legitimation for their own practice of female priesthood.29 This opens up the possibility that the same text could be alternately hegemonic or empowering for different readers — or even for the same reader — depending on the reader’s approach to the text. This complexity of meaning coincides with an increasing ambivalence on the part of feminist scholars and gender historians regarding the historical appropriateness of the conception of individualism implicit in the notion of autonomy, or the concep­ tion of gender solidarity implicit in the notion of an icon benefiting women as a group. As the relatively straightforward identity politics of feminist scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s gave way to the polymorphous sensibilities of the multicultural 1990s, the notion of a woman breaking ‘free’ of family structures in order to assert her ‘own’ identity began to seem problematic for discussing a Roman Empire whose canons of human identity were inextricably tied to the group and not the individual. In addition, there was the problem of class. It is virtually certain, because of the elite nature of writing in the Roman period, that the early Christian women about whom historical information is preserved, even the very early ones, would have stood close to the top of the class pyramid — and that no generalization about ‘women’ based on this evidence will hold uniformly for the women of unrepresented groups. It is unlikely that Roman women of whatever class would have shown great interest in a shared status as women per se, preoccupied as they were with clan and class as units of social allegiance. In the next section, we will look at a little-studied anonymous hagiographical romance from the fifth or sixth century, the Passion o f Eugenia, which offers an ancient perspective on the problem of an early Christian woman’s loyalties, and on how a young woman of good family might be expected to react to the figure of the

27 Jonathan Culler, ‘Readers and Reading’, chapter 1 in his On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), section 2: ‘Reading as a Woman’, pp. 43-64. 28 Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University o f North Carolina Press, 1984). 29 Tertullian, On Baptism 17 (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, 1.291).

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virgin when she encountered her in early Christian literature.30 It is an interesting text in part because it is comparatively little studied. It represents a vast quantity of material on women in late antiquity and the early medieval period which is still not in the com­ mon domain, much of it still untranslated or not yet in print. Complacently aristo­ cratic in its outlook, and highly stylized in its execution, the Passio offers what is by no means an unmediated vision of the experience of late Roman Christian women, but it may tell us at the very least something about their reading habits, and about how one writer thought at least some of them might wish to imagine themselves.

The Passion o f Eugenia The Passion o f Eugenia tells the story of the martyrdom of Eugenia, the daughter of Philip, a Roman prefect in Egypt. Troubled about whether to accept a marriage pro­ posal about which her father has told her, the girl reads the second-century Christian romance The Acts o f Paul and Thecla and decides, in imitation of Thecla, to cut her hair, refuse the marriage, and take to the road with her eunuch attendants, Protus and Hyacinthus, disguised as one of their brothers. The three enter a monastery, where Eugenia is swiftly elected abbot. After some time, a rich matron comes to her, to be cured of quartan fever. Eugenia — now Eugenios---- cures her, whereupon the woman, Melantia, falls in love with the girl. When Eugenios/Eugenia refuses her advances, Melantia brings her to Alexandria, accusing her of seduction. The prefect before whom the accused is brought is of course none other than Eugenia’s father, who arranges for games at which the wicked abbot and his companions will be exe­ cuted. When she is led before the prefect, Eugenia bares her breast and reveals herself as his daughter, thus obviating the charge. All of Eugenia’s family are baptized, while Philip is made Bishop of Alexandria. When the emperor hears of the defection of his prefect, Philip is persecuted and eventually martyred. Eugenia sees to his burial and returns to Rome, where she herself is martyred, along with Basilla, a granddaughter of the emperor whom she has converted to Christianity and to conti­ nence, and whose abandoned fiancé charges them as Christians before the emperor. After death, Eugenia appears to her mother Claudia, whom she promises a swift reunion in death, and indeed Claudia dies during the Eucharist the following Sunday and is buried alongside her daughter. With its recapitulation of the main tropes of the literature of virginity — the aban­ donment of the fiancé, the near-martyrdom, the disguise of the virgin as a beardless youth or eunuch, the Egyptian desert — along with a diversity of pseudo-historical 30 I use here the Latin version o f the Passio Eugeniae (BHL 2667) collected by the fifteenth-century scholar Bonino Mombritius in voi. n o f his Sanctuarium seu Vitae sanc­ torum, in the early twentieth-century Solemnes edition (Paris: Fotemoing, 1910). N ot all versions o f the Passio, which is also attested in Greek, are identical in their treatment o f the episode o f reading described below.

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references, such as a curiously tangential account of the persecution of Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, the Passion o f Eugenia was clearly designed to be a didactic text. It is this magpie quality which makes it so useful as an introduction to the problems raised by the literature on which it draws. We saw above that Eugenia sees herself as an imitator of Thecla, the paradigmatic heroine of the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. Thecla was believed by the secondcentury and later churches to have abandoned her fiancé after hearing the preaching of the Apostle Paul as he travelled through Iconium, and to have followed him with her hair cropped close, disguised as a male companion, only to be discovered by the erstwhile fiancé, who has her brought before the Roman authorities on the charge of being Christian. Thecla was a controversial figure in the early Church, because at the end of the tale, the Apostle exhorts her to ‘Go and preach the word of God’,31 thus obviating his own injunction, in I Corinthians 11. 2-16, that women should not teach, but should remain silent in the churches. It was this episode that seems to have led a secondcentury order of women priests to call on Thecla as a legitimizing precedent for their own activity at the sacred altar. A later version of the Passion o f Eugenia, in fact, suppresses the explicit reference to Eugenia’s having read the Acts o f Paul and Thecla, presumably on account of the fluctuating esteem in which the text was held.32 But clear historical evidence attests that from the fourth century at the latest, historical women were being advised to study the example of Thecla, and to model their own spiritual lives accordingly.33 The scene in which Eugenia’s father alerts her to her potential role in a marriage alliance, asking whether she would undertake the marriage willingly, is intentionally reminiscent of the famous episode in the Acts o f Paul and Thecla where the young Thecla refuses to marry her fiancé Thamyris, refusing for three days to move from an open window through which she can hear the preaching of the Apostle Paul in the house of a Christian neighbour across the street,34 but this time, it is the virgin Thecla, not the preacher Paul, who effects the conversion. Initially, the Passion o f Eugenia's version is framed in terms which highlight the relationship between pagan and Christian romance. When her father asked her if she would consent to become the wife of the son of the consul Aquilinus, she replied, ‘A 31 Acts o f Paul and Thecla, 41, in Acta Apostolorum Apocrypha, ed. by Richard Adelbert Lipsius and Maximilian Bonnet, vol. I (Leipzig: Mendelssohn, 1891), pp. 235-72 (p. 267). 32 Hannah Jones, ‘The Passio o f Eugenia and the Passio o f Agnes’ (unpublished master’s dissertation, University o f Manchester, 1998), p. 45. The relationship between the two ver­ sions is discussed in ibid., pp. 28-29, following Hippolyte Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain: Les Saints de Novembre et de Décembre, Subsidia Hagiographica, 23 (Brussels, Société des Bollandistes, 1936), pp. 175-78. 33 Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride, pp. 112-15. 34 Acts o f Paul and Thecla, 7, ed. by Lipsius and Bonnet, pp. 240-41.

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husband ought to be chosen for his character more than his birth; indeed, he should be accepted by us because of his behaviour, not his public honours.’35 So far, the text follows the formula of the romance that leads to marriage. The heroine is beautiful and well educated, and she responds to her father’s proposal with a philosophical flourish that would have pleased Plutarch, the great (pagan) theorist of philosophical marriage. What happens next, however, alerts us to the fact that the Passion o f Eugenia is meant to be read in the context of the romance of virginity: Then, while she struggled with these and other entreaties, with a chaste heart, the letters o f the Apostle Paul and the history o f the virgin Thecla fell into her hands. Reading them secretly she wept every day, and although she lived under the most pagan o f parents, in her heart she began to be a Christian.36

Seeking a pretext for dissociating herself from her family, with its central role in the civic rituals of paganism (her father, it will be remembered, is a prefect), Eugenia requests permission from her parents to retire to the family’s country villa with her eunuch attendants, Protus and Hyacinthus. The text is very specific about the role that the example of Thecla plays in her conversion: ‘Reading in her litter during the journey, she turned the experiences of the virgin Thecla over in her heart.’37 Worth examining here is how the Passion o f Eugenia mediates the issue of the female reader’s relation to the virginal exemplum. The writer is fully aware that young women could be expected to choose their reading material without parental consent, and implies, as well, that they could be expected to do what Jonathan Culler has called ‘reading as a woman’ — that is to say, that they would pay special attention to the aspects of the text which stressed female experience and would consider how that experience measured against their own. It is important to notice, however, that the writer proposes imitation as the normative reaction of a female reader to the exemplum proposed by the text — a reaction that the text presumably proposes, by extension, to the reader of the Passion o f Eugenia itself. The second main episode of the Passio, in which Eugenia disguises herself as the brother of Protus and Hyacinthus and enters a monastery in the Egyptian desert, raises a second and equally important aspect of the problem. This is the variety of purposes to which the text might be used, since the author’s motive in writing might be related only obliquely to the status and experience of real historical women. In the 1974 article mentioned above, John Anson attempted to account for the persistent theme in early Byzantine literature of the female saint who, following Thecla, cut her hair and dressed as a man — a genre of which the Passion o f Eugenia is one of the

35 Passion o f Eugenia, ed. by Mombritius, Sanctuarium, II, 391, lines 38-41. [The text is not divided by internal section numbers.] 36 Passion o f Eugenia, ed. by Mombritius, Sanctuarium, n, 391, lines 41-44. 37 Passion o f Eugenia, ed. by Mombritius, Sanctuarium, n, 391, lines 46-47.

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most striking examples.38 Most of these texts — the vitae of Pelagia and Euphro­ syne, for example — include an episode in which the transvestite saint enters a monastery.39 In many cases, her/his biological sex is not discovered until after death, when the body is prepared for burial. Anson took the monastic setting of these texts, which clearly form the model for at least part of this section of the Passion o f Eugenia, as what a biblical scholar would call the Sitz im Leben of these stories: that is to say, the real-life context which occasioned their being produced in the first place. His central argument was that the texts were the product of early Byzantine monks, an attempt to exorcise the spectre of sexuality within the monastery, or the ever-present possibility of the eruption of sexual desire — by an exploration of what would happen if the avatar of sexual possibility, a girl of marriageable age, were to be present in the monastery. Anson’s article drew explicitly on a Kleinian notion of projection: the projection, in this case, of male sexual desire onto a female, who nonetheless resolves the sexual anxiety by showing a ‘masculine’ reserve well in excess of that of her male brothers, neutralizing the strong currents of repressed sexuality which lead to her invention. In the case of Eugenia, we have a text whose resolution lies outside the monas­ tery, in the martyrdom of Eugenia once she has been restored to her feminine identity. This does not mean that Anson’s hypothesis was incorrect in the case of the earlier texts, which the Passion o f Eugenia takes as a model; there are other reasons to imagine that this is a reworking of those narrative traditions to an alternate end. Indeed, the Passion o f Eugenia shows evidence of a very different Sitz im Leben, the competition between virgins and married women for the palm of moral superiority. The episode in which Eugenios/Eugenia rebuffs the sexual advances of Melantia illustrates this point. Melantia, a wealthy matrona, comes to the monastery in order to be cured of the quartan fever and falls in love with the abbot who cures her. This is a stock scene of the Lives o f the Desert Fathers, in which a holy father is falsely accused of seduction by a woman and must show exemplary forbearance until the truth of his innocence can be revealed. Here, however, Eugenia takes the matter into her own hands. When she is brought to the arena in chains, in order to face questioning and condemnation to the beasts, she casts off her tunic and reveals her virginal, female body. The prefect, whom it may be remembered was also her father, converts to Christianity, while a pillar of flames descends on the house of the false accuser Melantia, killing the matrona herself and all her household. Eugenia, too, will die an even more gruesome death, but not before she has enlightened the populations of Alexandria and Rome with the Christian message.

38 Anson ‘Female Transvestite’; Evelyne Patlagean, ‘L’histoire de la femme déguisée en moine et l’évolution de la sainteté féminine à Byzance’, Studi Medievali, 3rd series, 17 (1976), 597-623. 39 Holy Women o f the Syrian Orient, ed. and trans, by Sebastian Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1987).

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The episode also shows other signs of consciousness of the issue of female agency. At the point when Melantia wishes to seduce the girl-abbot, she parades her own autonomy and agency as a woman of rank and wealth, while offering him the hope of himself stepping in to head her powerful household. At one level, Melantia as a powerful and independent woman is framed as a temptress: at another level, she re­ veals a certain irony in the notion of sexuality as a source of power: ‘Be the master of my properties and indeed you may become my master,’40 she proposes, at precisely the moment when she wishes to overcome the holy abbot by her sexual attractions. One can imagine that such a scene, parading the stratagems of a desirable and lasci­ vious woman before a so-called abbot who is certain to be impervious to her charm, would have held at least as much interest for a male readership as for a female read­ ership. But the virgins of the Church were equally warned against the temptations of consorting with matronae. St Jerome’s Letter 22 to the virgin Eustochium, written in Latin in the early 380s, exhorts the young virgin both to imitate Thecla, as we might now have come to expect, and also, quite specifically, to avoid the company of married women, even Christian married women. ‘Learn of me a holy arrogance,’ argues Jerome,41 his immortal phrase indicating the gap in sanctity that at least some ecclesiastical writers were beginning to perceive between the simple Christian laity and those who had been set apart by a vow of continence or, better yet, virginity. If the text is able to resolve this tension, it is in Eugenia’s relationship not with Melantia, but with an even more powerful matrona, the girl’s own mother. The concord between the daughter and her parents in this text is a far cry from the tense relationship of the mother and daughter in the Acts o f Paul and Thecla. We should also notice one or two things about Eugenia’s relationship with her father. In accordance with Roman law, the father solicits the girl’s consent to the marriage alliance in which he hopes she will play a central role. She does not have to run away to the desert in order to escape the marriage. It is certainly possible that in some cases the bride’s consent required by law would have been coerced, but our author clearly sees the father’s respect for the daughter’s wishes in the matter as a starting point. Secondly, the daughter here seems to be possessed of at least a passing philosophical education — mentioned elsewhere is the fact that her eunuch servant-companions, Protus and Hyacinthus, had also been her school-mates — and our author seems to see it as perfectly normal that she should call her father to account in a case where his dynastic plans seem to be veering from these shared philosophical values. Finally, when Eugenia decides to withdraw from the world, she has no difficulty obtaining permission from her parents to make an extended journey to the family villa, accompanied only by her personal attendants. In other words, our fifth- or sixth-century author’s view of third-century paganism includes the assumption that aristocratic girls of marriageable age were possessed of 40 Passion o f Eugenia, ed. by Mombritius, Sanctuarium, n, 394, lines 28-29. 41 Jerome, Letter 22, to Eustochium, 16, in Patrologia Latina, 2 2,403.

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far greater opportunities to exert what we might call agency than the model of asce­ ticism as a strategy for women’s autonomy would necessarily lead one to expect. (The pagan novels of the second and third centuries more or less confirm this view.) The possible historical contexts for the Passion o f Eugenia’s, comparatively benign view of paternal authority need not concern us here.42 But we should be aware that to a Roman eye it would not have been autonomy, but rather an idealized notion of familial concord, which Eugenia is envisioned as enjoying. Her seeming indepen­ dence should in fact be read as an indication that the romance of virginity has been subsumed into the values of Roman filiality. The text closes with an invocation of the bonds of love and loyalty that the virgin is perceived as able to sustain beyond death. We have already seen that Eugenia appears in a vision to her mother Claudia as the mother weeps at the daughter’s grave, consoling her, ‘Rejoice, my mother Claudia, since Christ has admitted me to the exultation of the saints’, and informing her mother of the time and place at which the two will be reunited in death. In a similar vein, the virgin martyr Agnes, one of the pre-eminent saints of the Roman Church, appears, according to the Passion o f Agnes, after her death to both of her parents to assure them of her safety, and even exultation, in the heavenly realm,43 while the hagiographical romances of the early medieval period are füll of stories of virgin martyrs who after death arrange for divine intervention to ensure that their bodies are not removed from the care of the communities of women with whom they had lived while on earth.44 The virgin’s association with the virtues of devotion and loyalty may explain why it is often a virgin who plays the role of welcoming the souls of the faithful into the heavenly kingdom. Jerome’s Letter 22 to Eustochium, cited above, encourages the earthly virgin Eustochium to meditate on her arrival in heaven, when the heavenly virgin Thecla will be present to welcome her with open arms. But it is not only for virgins that Thecla performs this role: she appears prominently in the commendatio animae, the early medieval prayer for the souls of the dead.

D eath a n d the M aiden In concluding, we have come full circle, to the ancient equation between virginity and escape from the fetters of death. The virgin is a figure intimately linked with the problem of death and immortality. While at the level of high theology she appears as

42 Richard Sailer, ‘Corporal Punishment, Authority, and Obedience in the Roman House­ hold’, in Marriage, Divorce, and Children in Ancient Rome, ed. by Beryl Rawson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 144-65. 43 Passion o f Agnes, 14 (BHL 156), in Acta Sanctorum, January II (Brussels: Alphonsus Creuse, 1863), pp. 351-54. 44 Passion ofFebronia 41, in Holy Women, ed. by Brock and Harvey, p. 175.

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an eschatological sign, her social meaning was as a figure of concentrated social solidarity, whose relationship to her family of origin was characterized by unmixed loyalty and peculiar intensity, emblematizing the community’s attempt to bridge the abyss of human frailty. What is clear is that in her vulnerability she both exemplifies and compensates for the fragility of the human community, mitigating human impermanence by a mar­ riage to the community beyond time. The effect of the ideal virgin on historical women is still open to debate. Read as an icon, the figure of the virgin frustrates the idea of the primacy and autonomy of the individual, which has been cherished by the post-Enlightenment West. It may be that the generic type of ‘the early Christian woman’ has served late twentieth-century scholarship as an icon of a different sort: disarmingly familiar, and yet elusive. But as the evidence for a not insignificant population of late Roman women continues to accrue, we may perhaps begin to talk in contextually accurate terms about how some of the Christians among them as­ sumed the mantle of the virgin’s authority, and about differences in the way specific women were able to mobilize her fluid, potent, and unstable spiritual patrimony. Similarly, we will be able to talk about other women who found themselves uneasy about their place in the virgin’s charmed circle. It is to be hoped that our powers of imagination will prove worthy of the ever more complex and copious evidence for these differences and tensions.

Tleven ons heren Jhesu Christi: Female Readers and Dutch Devotional Literature in the Fifteenth Century* GEERT WARNAR

Introduction ecent studies of the gender aspects of medieval readership tend to focus on the participation of women in the processes of transmission and reception of literature in a manuscript culture. New issues include the impact of female scribes, female literacy, readership and ownership, and book commissions. Both codicological aspects and textual analysis contribute to a new understanding of female attitudes towards literature in general and texts written for women in par­ ticular.*1 In a volume that evaluates gender as an analytical tool in medieval studies, I

R

I would like to thank Prof. Dr Jos Biemans (University Library Amsterdam) and Dr Sabrina Corbellini (Free University Amsterdam) for their help and advice. 1 See the following publications: C. A. Grisé, ‘Women’s Devotional Reading in LateMedieval England and the Gendered Reader’, Medium Aevum, 71 (2003), 209-25, and the literature she discusses in her introduction; Th. de Hemptinne, ‘Reading, Writing, and Devo­ tional Practices: Lay and Religious Women and the Written Word in the Low Countries (13501550)’, in The Voice o f Silence: Women ’s Literacy in a Men ’s Church, ed. by Th. de Hemptinne and M. E. Góngora (Tumhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 111-26; and W. Simons: “‘Staining the Speech o f Things Divine”: The Uses o f Literacy in Medieval Beguine Communities’, in ibid., pp. 85-110. From a codicological perspective is M. C. Erler, Women, Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); as a case study also Erler, “‘This Living Hand”: Thirteenth-Century Female Literacy, Materialist Immanence, and the Reader o f the Ancrene Wisse’, Speculum, 78 (2003), 1-36; and last but not least Anneke Mulder-Bakker’s introduction to the volume Seeing and Knowing: Women and Learning in Medieval Europe 1200-1550, ed. by A. B. Mulder-Bakker (Tumhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 1-20.

GEERTWARNAR

26

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