Women's Lives: Self-Representation, Reception and Appropriation in the Middle Ages (Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages) 9781786838339, 9781786838346, 1786838338

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Series Editors Preface
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
I. Elizabeth Petroff and Mysticism
1: Women and Mysticism in the Medieval World
2. Male Confessors and Female Penitents: Possibilities for Dialogue
II. Self-Representation
3: The Empowerment of Teresa de Cartagena through Her Patroness
4: Hildegardian Remixes: Hildegard von Bingen and the Appropriation of Auctoritas
5: Language and Trance Theatre
III. Reception
6: Smuggled Balsam and the Inscription of Memory: Hugeberc von Hildesheim and the Pilgrimage of Saint Willibald
7: Gender, Genre and Collaboration in the Life of Ida of Nivelles
8: History Meets Literary Imagination: The Making of a Twelfth-Century Woman Warrior
9: A Woman Mystic in Pre-Islamic North Africa: Al-Kāhina in the Futūḥ Miṣr
IV. Appropriation
10: When Romance and Hagiography Meet: Inventing Saintly Women in The South English Legendary
11: Selfless Acts of Salvation as Self-Glorification: Saving the Prostitute in Hrotsviths Plays
12: Liturgy and the Performance of the Mystical Self
Index
Back Cover

Citation preview

RELIGION AND CULTURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Women’s Lives

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Series Editors Denis Renevey (Université de Lausanne) Diane Watt (University of Surrey) Editorial Board Miri Rubin (Queen Mary University of London) Jean-­Claude Schmitt (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris) Fiona Somerset (Duke University) Christiania Whitehead (University of Warwick)

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RELIGION AND CULTURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Women’s Lives Self-Representation, Reception and Appropriation in the Middle Ages Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Petroff

edited by

NAHIR I. OTAÑO GRACIA AND DANIEL ARMENTI

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS 2022

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© The Contributors, 2022 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff, CF10 3NS. www.uwp.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-78683-833-9 eISBN 978-1-78683-834-6

The right of the Contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Typeset by Marie Doherty Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Melksham, United Kingdom

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Contents

Series Editors’ Preface vii List of Illustrations viii Notes on Contributors ix Acknowledgements xii Introduction Nahir I. Otaño Gracia and Daniel Armenti I 1 2

ELIZABETH PETROFF AND MYSTICISM Women and Mysticism in the Medieval World Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff Male Confessors and Female Penitents: Possibilities for Dialogue Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff

II SELF-REPRESENTATION 3 The Empowerment of Teresa de Cartagena through Her Patroness Juana de Mendoza Borja de Cossío 4 Hildegardian Remixes: Hildegard von Bingen and the Appropriation of Auctoritas Andrés Amitai Wilson 5 Language and Trance Theatre Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida III RECEPTION 6 Smuggled Balsam and the Inscription of Memory: Hugeberc von Hildesheim and the Pilgrimage of Saint Willibald Susan Signe Morrison 7 Gender, Genre and Collaboration in the Life of Ida of Nivelles Barbara Zimbalist 8 History Meets Literary Imagination: The Making of a Twelfth-Century Woman Warrior Lan Dong 9 A Woman Mystic in Pre-Islamic North Africa: Al Kāhina in the Futūḥ Miṣr Denise K. Filios

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13 34

57 79 102

141 157 173 188

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IV APPROPRIATION 10 When Romance and Hagiography Meet: Inventing Saintly Women in The South English Legendary Meriem Pagès 11 Selfless Acts of Salvation as Self-Glorification: Saving the Prostitute in Hrotsvith’s Plays Madalina Meirosu 12 Liturgy and the Performance of the Mystical Self Claire Taylor Jones Index

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Series Editors’ Preface

Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages aims to explore the interface between medieval religion and culture, with as broad an understanding of those terms as possible. It puts to the forefront studies which engage with works that significantly contributed to the shaping of medieval culture. However, it also gives attention to studies dealing with works that reflect and highlight aspects of medieval culture that have been neglected in the past by scholars of the medieval disciplines. For example, devotional works and the practice they infer illuminate our understanding of the medieval subject and its culture in remarkable ways, while studies of the material space designed and inhabited by medieval subjects yield new evidence on the period and the people who shaped it and lived in it. In the larger field of religion and culture, we also want to explore further the roles played by women as authors, readers and owners of books, thereby defining them more precisely as actors in the cultural field. The series as a whole investigates the European Middle Ages, from c.500 to c.1500. Our aim is to explore medieval religion and culture with the tools belonging to such disciplines as, among others, art history, philosophy, theology, history, musicology, the history of medicine and literature. In particular, we would like to promote interdisciplinary studies, as we believe strongly that our modern understanding of the term applies fascinatingly well to a cultural period marked by a less tight confinement and categorization of its disciplines than the modern period. However, our only criterion is academic excellence, with the belief that the use of a large diversity of critical tools and theoretical approaches enables a deeper understanding of medieval culture. We want the series to reflect this diversity, as we believe that, as a collection of outstanding contributions, it offers a more subtle representation of a period that is marked by paradoxes and contradictions and which necessarily reflects diversity and difference, however difficult it may sometimes have proved for medieval culture to accept these notions.

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List of Illustrations

1

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Wu Youru’s (fl. nineteenth century) drawing that portrays the battle scene in which Lady Liang beats the drum on a ship. From Wu Youru, Wu Youru Huabao (Shanghai: Biyuan huishe, c.1909), no. pag.

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Notes on Contributors

Daniel Armenti is a Visiting Lecturer in Italian at the College of the Holy Cross. His research focuses on the reception of classical literature during the Middle Ages and on how literary representations of sexual and gendered violence contributed to the institutionalisation of rape culture in the Middle Ages. His current project explores the expression of traumatic experience and the challenges that arise in writing and voicing traumatic events. Borja de Cossío is a Professor of Practice at Tulane University. He received a BA in English Philology and an MA in Comparative Literature from the Universidad de Oviedo, and another MA and a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with a specialisation in Medieval and Golden Age Literature. His main areas of expertise include early modern visionaries before Saint Teresa, the adaptation of the Spanish Baroque in early seventeenth-century English poetry, and the digital humanities. Among his publications is a digital edition of El libro de la oración de Sor María de Santo Domingo for the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, and he has also published three different digital editions for Catálogo de Santas Vivas at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid: eighteenth-century hagiographies on Sor María de Santo Domingo and her sister María de la Asunción, and forty-three lives of women taken from Crónica de la Santa Provincia de Granada (1683). He is currently working on another edition of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz written by her confessor, Diego de Calleja in 1693. He has also published work on Teresa de Cartagena, Sor María de Santo Domingo and Richard Crashaw. Before coming to Tulane, he taught at UMass Amherst and Colorado College. Lan Dong is Interim Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Louise Hartman Schewe and Karl Schewe Professor in Liberal Arts and Sciences (2017–20) at the University of Illinois Springfield. She teaches Asian American literature, world literature, comics and graphic narratives, and children’s and young adult literature. She has published six books as either author or editor and has published numerous journal articles, book chapters and reference essays on Asian American literature, comics and graphic narratives, and children’s and young adult literature. Denise K. Filios is an Associate Professor in the in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Performing Women in the Middle Ages: Sex, Gender, and the Iberian Lyric. Her teaching and research interests include medieval Spanish literature, women in literature and performance, and North African–Spanish cultural contacts from 711 to the present. Her current book project

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Notes on Contributors

examines stories about the conquest of Iberia in early Islamic and Hispano-Latin historiography. Claire Taylor Jones is Associate Professor of German at the University of Notre Dame. Her publications include the monograph Ruling the Spirit: Women, Liturgy, and Dominican Reform in Late Medieval Germany (Penn Press, 2018) and the book-length translation Women’s History in the Age of Reformation: Johannes Meyer’s Chronicle of the Dominican Observance (PIMS, 2019). Madalina Meirosu specialises in comparative approaches to nineteenth-century political and social thought in German literature. She also has expertise in contemporary migration literature, the Medical Humanities, and Women and Gender Studies. Her current research project explores the political undertones of nineteenth-century literature featuring artificial humanoids. Susan Signe Morrison, Texas State University System Regents’ Professor and University Distinguished Professor of English at Texas State University, specialises in comparative medieval literature, gender and cultural studies, and ecocriticism. She has written on topics ranging from women pilgrims in the Middle Ages and Geoffrey Chaucer’s use of excrement to waste as material and metaphoric agent in our world; her award-winning book, A Medieval Woman’s Companion: Women’s Lives in the European Middle Ages, has been translated into German. Creative works express her commitment to making women’s lives – all too often neglected historically – present to the reader as vibrant agents of change. Her novel, Grendel’s Mother: The Saga of the Wyrd-Wife, tells the tale of the Old English epic poem Beowulf from the perspective of the female characters. Nahir I. Otaño Gracia is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Mexico, and a member at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton. Her theoretical frameworks include critical identity studies, translation theory and practice, and the global North Atlantic – extending the North Atlantic to include the Iberian Peninsula and Africa. She has published several articles on literatures written in Middle English, Old Castilian, Old Catalan, Old Irish and Old Norse-Icelandic, and they have appeared in journals such as Comitatus, Enarratio, Literature Compass and English Language Notes. Her current projects include a monograph entitled The Other Faces of Arthur: Medieval Arthurian Texts from the Global North Atlantic. Meriem Pagès is Professor in the English Department at Keene State College, where she teaches a range of courses on medieval literature. She is the author of From Martyr to Murderer: Representations of the Assassins in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Europe (Syracuse University Press, 2014). She has also edited The Middle Ages on Television: Critical Essays with Karolyn Kinane (McFarland, 2015) and, with Robert G. Sullivan, Imagining the Self, Constructing the Past: Selected Proceedings from the 36th Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2016) and Art and Violence in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2020). Her essay ‘Navigating Gender in the Mediterranean: Exploring Hybrid Identities in Aucassin

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Notes on Contributors

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et Nicolete’ appeared in the volume Gender in the Premodern Mediterranean (ACMRS Press, 2019). She currently serves as the Director of the Medieval and Renaissance Forum and the Coordinator of the Center for Creative Inquiry at Keene State College. Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida is a Full Professor at the Universidad Complutense, Madrid. She has worked for several years at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Madrid, 1996–2004) and at the University of Manchester (UK, 2001–3). Her research encompasses different periods, although she favours especially the fifteenth, sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. In recent years, she has published widely on Spanish visionary women, including editions of María de Santo Domingo’s Revelaciones (with María Luengo Balbás; PMHRS, 2014) and her Libro de la Oración (with María Victoria Curto Hernández; Iberoamericana, 2019), and the monographs La representación de las místicas: Sor María de Santo Domingo en su contexto europeo (Real Sociedad Menéndez Pelayo, 2012) and La comida visionaria: Formas de alimentación en el discurso carismático femenino del siglo xvi (CCCP, 2015). She is currently directing a research project on this subject: Catalogue of Living Saints (1400–1550): Towards a Complete Corpus of a Female Hagiographic Model, funded by the Spanish Government. Andrés Amitai Wilson currently serves on the English faculty at the Roxbury Latin School in Boston, where he teaches English, music, and yoga. He has published poetry, short stories and articles on a variety of medieval and modernist topics. He is also a busy session and touring guitarist with many recordings and performance credits, in genres from hip-hop to jazz and everything in between. Andrés holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and has also earned degrees from Columbia University and the Berklee College of Music. When not making music, reading or writing, he can usually be found running around in the woods with his three children or recklessly riding his bicycle in circles. Barbara Zimbalist is Associate Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Texas-El Paso. She has been a Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Assistant Professor at Harvard Divinity School, and her first book, Translating Christ in the Middle Ages: Gender, Authorship, and the Visionary Text, is forthcoming from the University of Notre Dame Press.

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Acknowledgements

The process of putting together this volume was lengthy and daunting, and we owe a great deal of thanks to everyone who helped us along the way. First and foremost is our professor and mentor, Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, for whom this volume was initially conceived. As with many of the contributors to this volume, who were also guided through their studies by Elizabeth before her retirement in 2014, we are grateful for the care and attention she gave to us, her students, over the years. In us she instilled more than an awareness of the diversity of voices present in medieval literature, but of the need for continual investigation of those voices. It is our honour to present a volume celebrating her academic work. We would also like to thank all of our contributors, whose wonderful essays make this volume a valuable addition to scholarship on the writing of medieval women mystics; without their continued enthusiasm – not to mention patience – this volume could not have been completed. Many others are owed thanks for the final version of this volume: Sarah Lewis, the Head of Commissioning at the University of Wales Press has been indispensable in her support of this project, as well as her help in putting the volume together. Likewise, we would like to extend our thanks to the Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Department, and especially to the Program in Comparative Literature, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, for their financial contributions against the costs of this volume, not to mention their academic support for us during our studies. In particular we would like to thank Leslie Hiller, the Business Manager for the Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Department, who single-handedly resolved financial issues for us when we would have been hopelessly lost. Each of us has individuals we would like to thank for their support and advice along the way. Daniel would like to thank Simona Wright and Roberta Ricci for their practical advice in navigating the process of managing an edited volume. Likewise, thanks to Marisol Barbón, Jessica Barr, Michael Papio and Teresa Ramsby – you were all very patient with me as I balanced the work of this volume against that of my dissertation. I could not ask for better mentors. Finally, thanks to Elif, always, for her support and love. Nahir would like to thank the medievalist communities at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, the University of New Mexico, the University of Pennsylvania and the Medievalists of Color group for their encouragement and support. Special thanks must go to Geraldine Heng, Seeta Chaganti, Rita Copeland, Kevin Brownlee and Suzanne Akbari for their generous support. Nahir would also like to thank her husband and children – Matt, Violet, and Enora – ustedes son mi luz y mi camino y yo los amo con todo mi corazón. Elizabeth Petroff’s contributions to this volume were first published in her book, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (Oxford University Press, 1994),

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and they appear with permission from Oxford University Press. We would like to finish as we began, by thanking Elizabeth Petroff: thank you for your generosity, and we hope we have made you proud. Nahir I. Otaño Gracia Daniel Armenti 2021

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Introduction NAHIR I. OTAÑO GRACIA AND DANIEL ARMENTI

I

t cannot have been more than a few weeks after Elizabeth Petroff’s retirement in 2014 that we discussed the idea of putting together a volume of scholarship in honour of her career. At that point in our own studies, both of us were at pivotal moments in our academic careers – Daniel had just passed his exams to become a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Massachusetts and Nahir was about to begin a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania – and we wanted to curate a collection of essays that represented the impact that Elizabeth’s presence had in our lives and in our work as well as on the field of medieval studies. Our first step was to organise two panels at the Fiftieth International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo in 2015, ‘New Theoretical Approaches to Medieval Women Writers’ and ‘Writing Medieval Women Mystics’, from which we were able to draw a core of contributors. From there we sought out the other excellent contributions that would complement the goals of this volume. As our mentor and advisor, Elizabeth Petroff was always ready with thoughtful, honest advice to help us navigate academia, everyday life and, of course, medieval literature and culture. She was adamant that we find our voices as academics, but also to know how, when and where to use them. She felt that to survive, she often had to hide her voice: as a woman in academia, she frequently encountered gender bias and dismissal of her work. She once told Nahir, in a conversation about raciolinguistic bias, that she had to learn to think and write like a man if she wanted academia to take her seriously. Petroff was sorry to hear that decades later Nahir was being asked to do the same, because of racial and gender bias. Petroff did not want us to have to hide ourselves to survive. Today, we want to honour her voice and honour the many ways she helped our own voices grow as academics. The essays in this volume aim to celebrate her legacy by bringing together the work of accomplished scholars, many her colleagues, former students and admirers, to underscore the ways in which the lives and voices of women permeated medieval literature and culture. These essays are directly related to the work of Elizabeth Petroff as an influential scholar of medieval women mystics, whose research helped recover texts written by medieval women that often reflect a marginalised experience and opened medieval scholarship to new generations. The present volume focuses on texts written by or about women and includes essays that centre around women, mostly mystics, from Asia, North Africa and Europe; they are a testament to the openness of Professor Petroff’s scholarship and the type of work that she inspires.

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Petroff’s scholarly corpus belongs to a movement that rescued the voices of women writers. Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (1986), edited by Petroff, translates many primary sources into English, giving access to a body of medieval literature written by women who were certain that they were chosen, by God or by some other Power, and that their voices were meant to be used to speak. The volume continues to be an invaluable text from which to teach medieval women writers to this day. Petroff’s theoretical framework for editing Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, the defiant act of proving the heteronormative, patriarchal model of scholarship insufficient and lacking, has become more important than ever before, at a time when the urgency of recognising and listening to women’s voices has been brought to the forefront of political discourse. Some of the most influential work in the field of Medieval Studies functions in this way, recovering the historical realities of the Middle Ages by dismantling the patriarchal, colonial systems that have shaped our understanding of the Middle Ages as a ‘pre-racial, pre-political era in which Europe was homogeneously Caucasian and an unproblematized Christianity reigned supreme’.1 Petroff’s recovery work of the Middle Ages, which demonstrates that the male-dominated medieval canon was curated to benefit white men, provides a methodology for scholarship of this sort. For both of us, Petroff’s tenacity in uncovering a different past from the one ‘sold’ in Medieval Studies has been key for our own research, respectively on the role of literature in the construction of rape culture, and on how Arthuriana from the Global North Atlantic demonstrates ideologies of exclusion against Muslims and Africans, as well as in our past collaborative work.2 Petroff’s desire to bring voice to marginalised women was a first step to help us focus on bringing to the fore the voices of other marginalised communities. Despite the fact that Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature has given us a theoretical framework that is necessary to uncover our Medieval past – a framework that has helped redefine the field of Medieval Studies – it is her monograph, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (1994), that most influenced this present volume. Her insights that there is a ‘radical difference between the way male biographers view saintly women and women’s view of themselves’, and that female-authored medieval mystical texts ‘are radically noncanonical’, as well as her insights into women’s embodiment, mysticism and agency, have acted as a foundation for the collected essays that we present here.3 In fact, her approach, which was radical at the moment of her writing, shows that critical identity studies have always been key to understanding the Middle Ages. Petroff suggests that Mystical texts by women will not fit into a traditional Western notion of literature, because they derive from a different relationship to language. I see these texts as a window onto a lost world of experience of thousands of women from late antiquity until just before the Renaissance, an experience that is recuperable by us only if we radically challenge prevailing ideas of what constitutes literature and what is the nature of reality.4 Petroff’s argument questions heteronormative ideologies about the Middle Ages by disrupting the meaning of the concepts ‘Western literature’, ‘language’ and ‘reality’ itself. In this way, she helps to deconstruct the Middle Ages and the ideology that white, patriarchal, colonial research is the only way to understand the Middle Ages instead of being

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Introduction

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a biased representation of the Middle Ages. It seems to us that medieval scholarship has finally caught up to Elizabeth Petroff. The introduction of theoretical outlets such as post-colonial theory, Mediterranean studies, global medieval studies, and more recently critical race studies, disability studies and queer studies, has challenged previous academic ideologies on the Middle Ages and has changed the course of medieval studies for the better. Petroff’s work has helped this shift. From research on disability studies, breastfeeding and wet-nursing, and the queer Middle Ages, Petroff is quoted, often alongside Caroline Walker Bynum, on the importance of embodiment in the Middle Ages.5 Tison Pugh, for example, quoting Petroff, writes: ‘As Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff demonstrates, bodies and gender are inextricably connected to visionary writing: “Bodies – the visionary’s own body and the body of Christ – are very important in women’s visionary writings [. . .] [I]n using the language of the body the medieval writer may be able to say unsayable or unthinkable things.”’6 Petroff’s work has also been instrumental in the study of women and religion. From works on Hindu and Christian theologies of emotion to the interconnections between sexuality and mysticism, Petroff’s work on illuminating the embodied aspects of the spirituality of Christian women continues to be influential and to move medieval research forward.7 Petroff’s framework, which has helped to redefine the medieval canon, has had real-world implications for her students, many of whom are featured as authors in this volume. In fact, this wide-ranging study of women, the inclusion of non-‘Western’ medieval subjects, and the opening up of our conceptions of what the term ‘medieval’ encompasses are a testament to Petroff’s passion to help women and minority individuals to study medieval literature and culture. In a field in which less than one per cent of scholars are people of colour, and in which scholars tend to cloister within national languages, religious studies and around gender lines, this volume breaks with these traditional aspects of the field. In the public essay ‘Lost in Our Field: Racism and the International Congress on Medieval Studies’, Nahir Otaño Gracia talks about the racism she has encountered at the ICMS congress and how she was able to overcome that first shock. She writes: I remember recounting my experience to one of my professors and wondering out loud if I was meant to be a medievalist. It seemed to me that the attendees at ICMS were not convinced that I should. My professor gave me the best answer for me at that moment. ‘Fuck them and do what you want, you don’t owe them anything.’8 That professor, the one that had the right words at the right time, was Elizabeth Petroff. In other words, Petroff was the type of mentor that lived by her own ideologies, allowing us, her students, to challenge prevailing ideas on the Middle Ages, creating a new generation of medievalists that, we hope and fervently believe, will continue to recuperate medieval experiences and challenge normative notions about the Middle Ages. This is what set Petroff apart in her commitment to scholarship and her commitment to teaching. This volume honours Petroff’s legacy by focusing on themes of mysticism and spirituality as they connect historically and literarily to women’s experiences, highlighting the often marginalised experience that is integral to an understanding of medieval spirituality in general. These themes were integral to her research and teaching agenda, and

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we hope to continue and expand the work she helped open in medieval studies. Our first section, ‘Petroff and Mysticism’, returns to two of Petroff’s ground-breaking essays, originally published as chapters in Body and Soul. ‘Women and Mysticism in the Medieval World’ serves as an introduction to mysticism and women mystics, centring on several concepts for the study of female mysticism; ‘Male Confessors and Female Penitents: Possibilities for Dialogue’ explores the relationship between women mystics and their confessors. Petroff emphasises themes that reverberate throughout this volume: how the mystical experience allowed female subjects to contend with the many restrictions placed upon them; the embodiment of that experience in the female life cycle, in many cases transcending social class and geography; and the access to freedom granted to women mystics that allowed them to discover their individual voices. These themes continue to reverberate today, in part, because they are about celebrating and self-affirming the experiences of women. Petroff’s work does not only show how heteronormative patriarchy confined women to specific roles or created violence against women; she also recuperates the voices of women and highlights how they still thrived despite oppression. Petroff’s first essay provides language to analyse and study an experience that is understood to be ‘beyond language’ even as women mystics used language to write down their experiences. Petroff grounds medieval women mystics within the context of mysticism, the Middle Ages and their place in their societies, identifying that many medieval women’s mysticism was primarily visual and affective; that is, the mystic saw and felt truth, saw God or Christ or the saints, and was flooded with love for what she saw. So powerful was this love that she felt compelled to share it with others, and so effective was the transformation created in her by her mystical experiences that she discovered and invented new ways to communicate her insights. Beyond this broad outline of women mystics and mysticism, Petroff introduces eight important women mystics – Christina of Markyate, Hildegard of Bingen, Hadewijch of Antwerp, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, Angela of Foligno, Catherine of Siena and Julian of Norwich – that ‘left autobiographical and didactic writings’ that ‘were bilingual and bicultural’, and whose ‘lives and life-styles . . . illustrate the various possibilities open to women with spiritual vocations . . . and the variety of paths to the divine that may be termed mystical and visionary’. Finally, ‘Women and Mysticism’ points out that the European High Middle Ages was not just steeped in faith, ‘but it was also an age of crisis. In such a context, mysticism was not a retreat from the negative aspects of reality but a creative marshalling of energy in order to transform reality and the perception of it.’ It is this creative energy to transform reality and the perception of reality that this edited collection honours through this publication. In Petroff’s second essay, ‘Male Confessors and Female Penitents: Possibilities for Dialogue’, she emphasises the extraordinary power of the female voice through the audacity of her three subjects – Christina of Markyate, Marie d’Oignies and Margery Kempe – in their drive to express their experiences to their confessors. Petroff highlights that by analysing the relationship between penitent and confessor, we can see ‘that visionary authority indeed provided women with a voice and the content for teaching’. Petroff concludes that these relationships underline the compelling nature of women’s voices and their deliberate rejection of the stereotypes of womanhood that bound medieval women.

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Introduction

5

These deliberate rejections of stereotypical roles for medieval women were ultimately what allowed growth for women and the men around them. ‘Male Confessors and Female Penitents’ continues to provide scholars with frameworks to describe the relationships of power between male confessors and women mystics, a relationship that is analysed further in the essays by Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida and Barbara Zimbalist. Petroff’s reading of the relationship between Christina of Markyate and the Norman abbot Geoffrey of St Albans, for instance, exemplifies the ways in which Petroff’s work continues to be necessary, but it also reveals the limitations of her work and the necessity to recognise and pursue new areas of inquiry that arise in medieval studies. Petroff analyses Christina’s and Geoffrey’s relationship through a feminist perspective: she explains that Christina comes from a prominent early English family that was able to maintain their position after the Norman conquest, and she points out that Geoffrey came from a different world, the world of the overlords of England. He was Norman and, according to one reader of the Christina manuscript, acted just like a Norman (‘more Normanorum’ says the marginal note), meaning he behaved arrogantly and thought himself superior. Although Petroff is aware of the manifold power imbalances of this relationship, she is not able to successfully account for the fact that Christina is a member of the newly subjugated English community, and the abbot is part of the new French-speaking ruling class.9 Emerging scholarship on the topic of structural bias and power imbalances, such as that of Tarren Andrews, shows the ways that the Normans used settler-colonial ideologies to acquire land and remain in power.10 We believe that revisiting the relationship between Christina and Geoffrey through an intersectional perspective that considers the myriad forms of power imbalance will garner new important research. Petroff’s interdisciplinary work has already helped produce important research in medieval queer, religious and feminist studies, and we welcome the opportunity for our readers to use Petroff as an inspiration to produce exciting new work, in part by revisiting Christina and Geoffrey’s relationship, but also through the essays published in this volume. Beyond Petroff’s essays, we have collected the contributions to this volume into three further sections: ‘Self-Representation’, ‘Reception’ and ‘Appropriation’. These three areas reflect the chasm between women writers and the male-centric approach favoured in the Middle Ages and its reverberations in our present society. The areas also present a more thorough look at the lives of medieval women and account for our relationship with them as scholars and readers. Additionally, these three areas allow us to showcase the ways in which Petroff’s research had a profound effect across multiple disciplines. ‘Self-Representation’ gives emphasis to women writers, considering the ways in which their texts both expose and hinder them. In other words, the research in this section focuses on women writers and their relationship with their own writing. This section begins with two studies that consider women mystics not as unique cases within a medieval literary canon but as fundamentally integral to their respective literary traditions: ‘The Empowerment of Teresa de Cartagena’ by Borja de Cossío and ‘Hildergardian Remixes: Hildegard von Bingen and the Appropriation of Auctoritas’ by Andrés Amitai Wilson. De Cossío analyses shifts within the works of Teresa de Cartagena, a formative

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Spanish woman writer from the fifteenth century and understudied to this day. De Cossío astutely demonstrates the changes in language, tone and topic between her Arboleda de los enfermos (The Grove of the Infirm) and Admiraçion operum Dey (Wonder at the Works of God), which turn Teresa’s voice from that of a woman who is ‘resigned’ to accept her deafness as mandate from God, to the strong voice of a woman who is able to legitimise her position as a writer in a fifteenth-century Spanish context. Wilson, by contrast, discusses one of the best-known women writers of the Middle Ages, Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179), and highlights her use of auctoritas to insert herself into the canon. Wilson pays close attention to her use of music to appropriate and modify common prophetic and biblical tropes, which she utilised deftly to construct authority for herself and learned medieval women in general. We close the section with Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida and her analysis of female performance and mysticism. Her essay, ‘Language and Trance Theatre’, is a translation and adaptation of a section from her book on Sor Maria de Santo Domingo (2012),11 in which she discusses the relationship among European female mystics with the men, women and the communities that surrounded them, as well as the literary performances that accompanied their writing. This essay bridges the gap between this section and the next by exploring how European women writers legitimised and protected themselves through their performances and how their communities tended to appropriate their voices, demonstrating the complicated patterns of writing, authority and performance that surrounded women mystics and their texts. The next section, ‘Reception’, centres on how medieval women have been represented through time, demonstrating the importance of women within a historical context. Exploring how medieval historical women are represented continues the important work of exposing the role of women in history, which tends to be devalued in our current male-centric, patriarchal status quo. Moreover, this section focuses on the relationship of women mystics, both as authors and characters, to their readers. It demonstrates the function these historical women played in their respective societies. ‘Reception’, begins with Susan Signe Morrison’s ‘Smuggled Balsam and the Inscription of Memory: Hugeberc von Hildesheim and the Pilgrimage of Saint Willibald’. Her essay analyses Hugeberc of Hildesheim’s retelling of Willibald’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land (eighth century) in which a holy woman uses her own authority to grant authority to a male subject. Morrison demonstrates that the retelling of Willibald’s pilgrimage manipulates gender expectations in the act of reading, turning that act into a pilgrimage unto itself. The section continues with ‘Gender, Genre and Collaboration in the Life of Ida of Nivelles’ by Barbara Zimbalist. Her essay demonstrates the collaborative aspects of the Life of Ida by focusing on the female, visionary, vernacular and oral aspects of the text instead of prioritising the male, clerical, Latinate and textual aspects. By decentring the male perspective, she shows that the text is a product of the relationship between Ida, her hagiographer and the community members that witnessed and reported her visions before and after her death. While Morrison studies the reception of the text by the reader, who is immersed in the experience of pilgrimage, Zimbalist explores the reception of Ida’s work within her own community and the ways that Ida’s life and reception helped to form her Vita. Lan Dong and Denise K. Filios move the section towards the reception of female historical figures within a larger geographic frame. Both works centre on historical military

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women, Liang Hongyu and Al-Kāhina, and the ways their lives became legends in China and North Africa respectively. ‘History Meets Legend: The Making of a Twelfth-Century Woman Warrior’ by Lan Dong demonstrates how writings about Liang Hongyu transform her into a symbol of loyalty, wisdom and courage by highlighting two particular aspects of her mystification: the presentation and reception of her body as an object of reverence and the overwhelming emphasis on her virtues which outshone her transgression of participating in combat, a male dominated space. ‘A Woman Mystic in Pre-Islamic North Africa: Al Kāhina in the Futūḥ Miṣr’ by Denise K. Filios studies the mysticism of this Berber Queen, military hero and icon of Amazigh identity as depicted in Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s Futūḥ Miṣr [The Conquest of Egypt]. Al-Kāhina’s mystical experiences are corroborated by Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s citations of her speech which allow the readers to reconstruct the complex social, political and religious needs served by her historical persona. Finally, ‘Appropriation’ explores how women’s lives tend to be usurped within medieval literature written by both men and women, and what these acts of appropriation reveal about women in the Middle Ages. This final section also broadens the term ‘appropriation’ to include the appropriation of medieval women in general, not just women writers, through current theories and themes, in order to understand medieval women better from our modern perspective and as scholars/teachers of medieval women writers. The section begins with Meriem Pagès’s ‘When Romance and Hagiography Meet: Inventing Saintly Women in The South English Legendary’, which explores the addition of Saint Thomas à Becket’s saintly mother in the thirteenth-century South English Legendary. Romance influences the hagiography by the inclusion of a well-known stock motif, that of the Saracen princess who betrays faith and kin for her Christian lover. Pagès’s analysis raises the question of why England’s most ‘English’ saint needed a foreign, converted mother to help him fulfil his divine mission, as well as the consequences of this relationship on the construction of English identity in the late Middle Ages. ‘Selfless Acts of Salvation as Self-Glorification: Saving the Prostitute in Hrotsvith’s Plays’ by Madalina Meirosu analyses Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim’s plays and anonymous medieval accounts of the lives of Thais (Paphnutius) and Mary (Abraham), pointing out that these stories of female redemption focus on the virgin saviour rather than on the penitent, promiscuous sinner. The motif of the redemption of the prostitute becomes a vehicle for gaining glory by converting prostitutes. While Pagès demonstrates the appropriation of romance in hagiography, Meirosu critiques the appropriation of the body of prostitutes in order to glorify virginity. We close the book with ‘Liturgy and the Performance of the Mystical Self’ by Claire Taylor Jones. Jones’s insightful essay moves the study of medieval women writers in new directions by questioning the supposition that the women who have been worthy of study are those that are exceptions to the medieval patriarchal tradition because they construct female agency through resistance to a patriarchal order. Jones’s analysis of the monastic practice of liturgy, for example, answers why a medieval woman might have chosen the rigid life of monastic practice, not merely as flight or retreat from the maledominated world, but in active pursuit of a certain form of subjectivity. She reassesses medieval women’s agency as a performative, bodily textuality that is linked to the daily practice of the liturgy. Jones leads her reader to understand the process of appropriation of women mystics in our modern world and shows that modern scholars tend to focus

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on women that overtly reject patriarchy, a type of appropriation that elides the ways that ‘everyday’ women might have also rejected patriarchy. *** We offer these essays in honour of Elizabeth Avilda Petroff, a great scholar, teacher and friend. We regard the research presented in this volume as an extension of her legacy and impact on the field of medieval mystical writing and the relevance of women’s voices from the Middle Ages. We are proud to be a part of that legacy, and it is with excitement that we join our voices with hers to present these new studies on those subjects.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

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Geraldine Heng, ‘Who Speaks for Us? Race, Medievalists, and the Middle Ages’, Medievalists of Color (3 April 2018), www.medievalistsofcolor.com. For examples of research that is doing this recovery work see: Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); two works by Shyama Rajendran, ‘E(race)ing the Future: Imagined Medieval Reproductive Possibilities and the Monstrosity of Power’, in Richard H. Godden and Asa Simon Mittman (eds), Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 127–43, and ‘Undoing “the vernacular”: Dismantling structures of raciolinguistic supremacy’, Literature Compass: Critical Race and the Middle Ages, special issue edited by Dorothy Kim, 16/9–10 (2019), doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12545; and in general, the articles in that special issue of Literature Compass, along with those of English Language Notes: Indigenous Futures & Medieval Pasts, special issue edited by Tarren Andrews and Tiffany Beechy, 58/2 (2020). See Daniel Armenti, ‘Moralizing the rape of Philomela in late medieval commentary’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2020); Nahir I. Otaño Gracia, ‘Towards a Decentered Global North Atlantic: Blackness in Saga af Tristram ok Ísodd’, Literature Compass: Critical Race and the Middle Ages, special issue edited by Dorothy Kim, 16/9–10 (2019), doi. org/10.1111/lic3.12545; Otaño Gracia, ‘The Past and Future Margins of Catalonia: Language Politics and Catalan Imperial Ambitions in Guillem de Torroella’s La Faula’, in Ann E. Zimo, Tiffany D. Vann Sprecher, Kay Reyerson and Debra Blumenthal (eds), Rethinking Medieval Margins and Marginality (New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 70–90; and Otaño Gracia, ‘Borders and the Global North Atlantic: Chaucer, Pilgrimage, and Crusade’, English Language Notes: Indigenous Futures & Medieval Pasts, special issue edited by Tarren Andrews and Tiffany Beechy, 58/2 (2020), 261–75, doi 10.1215/00138282-8557893; and Nahir I. Otaño Gracia and Daniel Armenti, ‘Constructing Prejudice in the Middle Ages and the Repercussions of Racism Today’, Medieval Feminist Forum Subsidia on Microaggressions, Harassment, and Abuse – Medieval and Modern (2017), 176–201. Elizabeth A. Petroff, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. ix. Petroff, Body and Soul, p. ix. In disability studies, see Tory V. Pearman, Women and Disability in Medieval Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); regarding breast-feeding and nursing, see Lia Moran and Jacob Gilad, ‘From Folklore to Scientific Evidence: Breast-Feeding and Wet-Nursing in Islam and the Case of Non-Puerperal Lactation’, International Journal of Biomedical Science: IJBS, 3/4 (2007), 251–7; in queer studies, see Tison Pugh, Chaucer’s (Anti-)Eroticisms and the Queer Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014). See also Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) and Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991).

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8

9

10

11

9

Petroff, Body and Soul, p. 204, cited in Pugh, Chaucer’s (Anti-)Eroticisms, p. 172 n. 9. See Michelle Voss Roberts, Tastes of the Divine: Hindu and Christian Theologies of Emotion (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); and Michelle M. Sauer, ‘Cross-Dressing Souls: Same-Sex Desire and the Mystic Tradition in A Talkyng of the Loue of God’, in Susannah Mary Chewning (ed.), Intersections of Sexuality and the Divine in Medieval Culture: The Word Made Flesh (New York: Routledge, 2017). Nahir I. Otaño Gracia, ‘Lost in Our Field: Racism and the International Congress on Medieval Studies’, Medievalists of Color (24 July 2018), www.medievalistsofcolor.com. In a similar fashion, Petroff describes Christina as Anglo-Saxon, a term that has come into deep scrutiny because of its racist history. See Adam Miyashiro, ‘Our Deeper Past: Race, Settler Colonialism, and Medieval Heritage Politics’, Literature Compass: Critical Race and the Middle Ages, special issue edited by Dorothy Kim, 16/9–10 (2019), doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12545. Tarren Andrews, ‘Colonial Entanglements: The Domesday Book, the Dawes Act, and Indigenous Temporal Sovereignty’, in Jane Hawkes, Megan Henvey and Amanda Doviak (eds), Transmissions and Translations in Medieval Literary and Material Culture (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida, La representación de las místicas: Sor María de Santo Domingo en su contexto europeo (Santander: Real Sociedad Menéndez Pelayo, 2012).

Works Cited Andrews, Tarren, ‘Colonial Entanglements: The Domesday Book, the Dawes Act, and Indigenous Temporal Sovereignty’, in Jane Hawkes, Megan Henvey and Amanda Doviak (eds), Transmissions and Translations in Medieval Literary and Material Culture (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). Andrews, Tarren and Tiffany Beechy (eds), English Language Notes: Indigenous Futures & Medieval Pasts, special issue 58/2 (2020). Armenti, Daniel, ‘Moralizing the rape of Philomela in late medieval commentary’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2020). Bynum, Caroline Walker, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991). Bynum, Caroline Walker, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Heng, Geraldine, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Heng, Geraldine, ‘Who Speaks for Us? Race, Medievalists, and the Middle Ages’, Medievalists of Color (3 April 2018), www.medievalistsofcolor.com. Kim, Dorothy (ed.), Literature Compass: Critical Race and the Middle Ages, special issue 16/9–10 (2019), doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12545. Miyashiro, Adam, ‘Our Deeper Past: Race, Settler Colonialism, and Medieval Heritage Politics’, Literature Compass: Critical Race and the Middle Ages, special issue edited by Dorothy Kim, 16/9–10 (2019), doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12545. Moran, Lia and Jacob Gilad, ‘From Folklore to Scientific Evidence: Breast-Feeding and Wet-Nursing in Islam and the Case of Non-Puerperal Lactation’, International Journal of Biomedical Science: IJBS, 3/4 (2007), 251–7. Otaño Gracia, Nahir I., ‘Borders and the Global North Atlantic: Chaucer, Pilgrimage, and Crusade’, English Language Notes: Indigenous Futures & Medieval Pasts,

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special issue edited by Tarren Andrews and Tiffany Beechy, 58/2 (2020), 261–75, doi 10.1215/00138282-8557893. Otaño Gracia, Nahir I., ‘Lost in Our Field: Racism and the International Congress on Medieval Studies’, Medievalists of Color (24 July 2018), www.medievalistsofcolor. com. Otaño Gracia, Nahir I., ‘The Past and Future Margins of Catalonia: Language Politics and Catalan Imperial Ambitions in Guillem de Torroella’s La Faula’, in Ann E. Zimo, Tiffany D. Vann Sprecher, Kay Reyerson and Debra Blumenthal (eds), Rethinking Medieval Margins and Marginality (New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 70–90. Otaño Gracia, Nahir I., ‘Towards a Decentered Global North Atlantic: Blackness in Saga af Tristram ok Ísodd’, Literature Compass: Critical Race and the Middle Ages, special issue edited by Dorothy Kim, 16/9–10 (2019), doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12545. Otaño Gracia, Nahir I. and Daniel Armenti, ‘Constructing Prejudice in the Middle Ages and the Repercussions of Racism Today’, Medieval Feminist Forum Subsidia on Microaggressions, Harassment, and Abuse – Medieval and Modern (2017), 176–201. Pearman, Tory V., Women and Disability in Medieval Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Petroff, Elizabeth A., Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Petroff, Elizabeth A., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Pugh, Tison, Chaucer’s (Anti-)Eroticisms and the Queer Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014). Rajendran, Shyama, ‘E(race)ing the Future: Imagined Medieval Reproductive Possibilities and the Monstrosity of Power’, in Richard H. Godden and Asa Simon Mittman (eds), Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 127–43. Rajendran, Shyama, ‘Undoing “the vernacular”: Dismantling structures of raciolinguistic supremacy’, Literature Compass: Critical Race and the Middle Ages, special issue edited by Dorothy Kim, 16/9–10 (2019), doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12545. Roberts, Michelle Voss, Tastes of the Divine: Hindu and Christian Theologies of Emotion (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). Sanmartín Bastida, Rebeca, La representación de las místicas: Sor María de Santo Domingo en su contexto europeo (Santander: Real Sociedad Menéndez Pelayo, 2012). Sauer, Michelle M., ‘Cross-Dressing Souls: Same-Sex Desire and the Mystic Tradition in A Talkyng of the Loue of God’, in Susannah Mary Chewning (ed.), Intersections of Sexuality and the Divine in Medieval Culture: The Word Made Flesh (New York: Routledge, 2017).

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I Elizabeth Petroff and Mysticism

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1 Women and Mysticism in the Medieval World* ELIZABETH ALVILDA PETROFF

I

f one is not already a mystic, one can best understand mysticism by reading mystical texts, for mysticism is an experience, not an idea. This is especially true for medieval women mystics, whose works explore the manifold dimensions of this experience, as far as is possible in words. A few passages from the writings of women mystics can illustrate this. At last in the time that followed I saw a mystic and wondrous vision, such that all my womb was convulsed and my body’s sensory powers were extinguished, because my knowledge was transmuted into another mode, as if I no longer knew myself. And from God’s inspiration as it were drops of gentle rain splashed into the knowledge of my soul.1 Hildegard of Bingen When the poor soul comes to court, she is wise and courtly, and so she looks upon her God with joy . . . She is silent, intensely longing that He should praise her. Then with great desire He shows her His divine heart: it is like reddish gold, burning in a large charcoal fire. Then he places her in His ardent heart so that the Noble Prince and the little servant girl embrace and are united, as water and wine. Then she is brought to nought and abandons herself, as if she had no strength left, while He is sick with love for her, as He has always been, for (in this desire) there can be neither growth or lessening. Thus she speaks: ‘Lord, you are my consolation, my desire, my flowing fountain, my sun, and I am your mirror.’ Such is the journey to court of the loving soul, who cannot be without God.2 Mechthild of Magdeburg In the same experience of vision I understood the writings of the prophets, the Gospels, the works of other holy men, and those of certain philosophers, without any human instruction, and I expounded certain things based on these, though I scarcely had literary understanding, inasmuch as a woman who was not learned had been my teacher. But I also brought forth songs with their melody, in praise of God and the saints, without being taught by anyone, and I sang them too, even thought I had never learnt either musical notation or any kind of singing.3 Hildegard of Bingen

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O immeasurably tender love! Who would not be set afire with such love? What heart could keep from breaking? You, deep well of charity, it seems you are so madly in love with your creatures that you could not live without us! You are our God, and have no need of us. Your greatness is no greater for our well-being, nor are you harmed by any harm that comes to us, for you are supreme eternal Goodness. What could move you to such mercy? Neither duty nor any need you have of us . . . but only love! . . . My heart is breaking and yet cannot break for the hungry longing it has conceived for you!4 St Catherine of Siena Mysticism is the direct experience of the real, an unmediated experience of God. Mystical literature is an oxymoronic proposition, for how can we put into words what is beyond language, and how can we understand the language in which mystical experiences were often expressed? Susan Clark, in introducing Mechthild of Magdeburg’s The Flowing Light of the Divinity, observes that ‘the individual mystic’s world is, paradoxically, circumscribed and infinite in its possibilities, and access to it comes about only through the verbal medium that endures, a medium that is fundamentally at odds with the transcendent, non-verbal nature of the mystic’s revelation’.5 The women writers of mystical literature often saw themselves at an additional disadvantage – not only was mystical experience difficult to communicate, but as women they lacked the authority, and the authoritative language, to communicate spiritual truths. ‘They wrote’, says Fiona Bowie, ‘out of an inner urge to communicate a personal event of great importance.’6 This event was a mystical vision, ‘through which the mystic came to see herself as someone in direct relationship with God’.7 The authority to write came directly from God: The claim that they were compelled to write by God, and not through any presumption on their part, recurs frequently in women’s writing. Lacking the authority of formal theological education, clerical orders or male gender, the only justification for writing was that of being an instrument of the Creator.8 In her study of mysticism, written more than half a century ago, Evelyn Underhill anticipated current interest in the nature of the mystical experience; in The Mystics of the Church she recalls that the word mysticism comes from Greek religion, where ‘the mystae were those initiates of the “mysteries” who were believed to have received the vision of the god, and with it a new and higher life.’9 This calling to a revealed higher life is what motivates mystics on their path, for mysticism is not just one event but a succession of insights and revelations about God that gradually transforms the recipient. This developing mystical path is typically described as having three stages – purgative, illuminative and unitive – that at times blend into one another and overlap. Mysticism has also been called ‘the science of the love of God’ and ‘the life which aims at union with God’;10 these definitions underscore the double nature of mysticism as knowing and as doing. The mystic knows God first-hand, and also knows herself in that same light of illumination; this double consciousness of self and God later becomes the content of her teaching. What Underhill says of one mystic is true for all: ‘He pointed to a rigorous self-knowledge as an important part of purification; meaning by this knowledge not only of our sins, but of our possibilities.’11

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Christianity has no monopoly of mysticism. Sufis, Tantrikas, Mongolian or Native American shamans – all are far more familiar with the mystical side of the experience of Hildegard of Bingen or Catherine of Siena than I am as I write this. Mira Bai and Mahādēvi in medieval India, like the women of medieval Europe, shattered the stereotypes of good feminine behaviour to sing their love of God, because of their mystical experiences.12 Mystics may be found in every religious tradition, sometimes as central participants but often on the periphery of accepted practice, for it is they who are found mapping out new experiences of the divine. There is no identifiable mystical type, although scholars at times have tried to identify one; mystics may be women or men, they may be educated or uneducated, they may come from wealthy or deprived backgrounds. Mystical experiences may be primarily visual or auditory, or they may be so abstract as to elude any verbal formulation; the mystical path towards enlightenment may be based either on developing love or on the growth of the intellect; its focus may be what theologians term Christocentric or theocentric. Since mysticism is a natural human capacity, mystical experiences can occur spontaneously, unexpectedly, at any time and any place; many religions endorse ascetic practices and modes of prayer that encourage the development of mystical experience in some people, although all religions seem to agree that mysticism is a special gift not under the control of the recipient. There also seem to be historical periods during which mysticism becomes uncharacteristically prevalent and authoritative, and during which mystics are more needed by their communities. Valerie Lagorio agrees with Underhill that mysticism not only seems to intensify in certain periods, but is in itself a richly creative activity: ‘The great periods of mystical activity tend to correspond with the great periods of artistic, material, and intellectual civilization . . . It is always as if [the mystic] were humanity’s finest flower; the product at which each great creative period of the race had aimed.’13 One such richly creative period was the High Middle Ages in Europe (1100–1450), a time of great art and great social change, as the feudal system gave way to capitalism, cities and a new middle class. We think of the Middle Ages as the age of faith, and so it was, but it was also an age of crisis. In such a context, mysticism was not a retreat from the negative aspects of reality but a creative marshalling of energy in order to transform reality and the perception of it. Scholars sought to define the nature and variety of the mystical experience. Richard of St Victor, a mystic from Scotland who became prior of the Chapter of St Victor, a school just outside Paris that was famous as a theological and a spiritual centre,14 distinguished four kinds of vision: two physical types and two spiritual.15 His first kind of seeing is normal physical sight, containing no hidden significance; the second kind, still a bodily seeing, contains ‘a force of hidden meaning’. Richard says it was in this mode that Moses ‘saw’ the burning bush. The two modes of spiritual vision are more important for the story of mysticism: Of the two modes of spiritual vision, one is that of the eyes of the heart, when the human spirit, illuminated by the Holy Ghost, is led through the likenesses of visible things, and through images presented as figures and signs, to the knowledge of invisible ones. This is what Dionysius had called symbolic vision. The second, which Dionysius had called anagogic vision, occurs when the human spirit, through inner aspiration, is raised to the contemplation of the celestial without the mediation of any visible figures.16

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Mystics were the teachers of this age; they were the inspired leaders who synthesised Christian tradition and proposed new models for the Christian community. We know some of the male mystics – St Bernard of Clairvaux, St Francis of Assisi, St Thomas Aquinas in his final years, Meister Eckhart – but we are less familiar with female mystics, although they were actually more numerous in this period. Women mystics, such as Hildegard of Bingen, Clare of Assisi, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Angela of Foligno, Julian of Norwich, to name a few of the more famous ones, drew on their personal experience of the divine to provide spiritual guidance for others. Such women became highly respected leaders of the faithful; their role as prophets and healers was the one exception to women’s presumed inferiority in medieval society. Although any generalisation about female mysticism is bound to leave out someone important, we can say that medieval women’s mysticism was primarily visual and affective; that is, the mystic saw and felt truth, saw God or Christ or the saints, and was flooded with love for what she saw. So powerful was this love that she felt compelled to share it with others, and so effective was the transformation created in her by her mystical experiences that she discovered and invented new ways to communicate her insights. We should not think of medieval women mystics only or primarily as hermits withdrawn into a private world of prayer and meditation, although most of them passed some part of their lives as hermits or recluses. They were very active women who had completed a lengthy apprenticeship in the spiritual life and were capable of being spiritually responsible for large numbers of people. No one knows exactly why medieval European mysticism was largely female, in contrast to mystical revivals in other periods, but we can speculate on some of the factors involved. The only approved form of religious life available to women was contemplative and enclosed, partly because medieval society believed that women had to be protected from the violence of others and from their own sexuality, and partly because women were thought to be ‘naturally’ passive, meditative and receptive.17 Men with religious vocations and leadership ability had a number of choices – they could be active or contemplative, priests, friars, monks or hermits. But according to longestablished custom in the medieval Church, women who felt themselves called to the religious life were severely restricted in the public sacramental life of the Church: they were forbidden to administer the sacraments, to hear confessions, or to grant absolution, and they were not allowed to preach. They could (if they had the price of a dowry) join convents, where they were expected to live a contemplative life of prayer, fasting and vigils. They were not supposed to have commerce with the secular world once they entered a convent; their role was to pray for the salvation of their own souls and for the souls of the Christian community. Nevertheless, women did emerge as leaders in medieval society, and it is useful to speculate on how mysticism, spiritual practices and leadership came together in some women’s lives. Some aspects of convent life probably encouraged the development of mystical and leadership abilities. Until the fourteenth century, a religious community was the only place a woman could find the opportunity to read and write, along with a library of books and other scholars to talk to; it was also the only place a woman had any privacy, where she could be expected to be alone with her thoughts.18 The vow of celibacy exempted women from pregnancy and childbearing, and accorded them much longer lives than were common for married women. Convents also provided opportunities for leadership and teaching, whether in keeping accounts, tending the

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sick or instructing children. But if convent life was the only approved mode of life, it was not the only lifestyle chosen by women. Many women mystics preferred, and managed to live in, more fluid structures for their spirituality; they were beguines or tertiaries or recluses in cities. Nevertheless, they shared with their convent-enclosed sisters’ celibacy, common spiritual practices, access to books and ideas, and opportunities for leadership. During the Middle Ages, for the first time in European history, women outnumbered men.19 This meant that not all women could expect either to marry or to become nuns. Women developed very creative responses to this situation, which allowed them to develop new lifestyles more in accordance with their needs, and, beginning in the twelfth century, some came together to form new religious communities. These women – called beguines in northern Europe,20 Franciscan or Dominican tertiaries in southern Europe21 – lived together in supporting themselves by manual labour and devoting their lives to serving others and growing spiritually. Many famous medieval mystical writers, among them Hadewijch of Antwerp, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Angela of Foligno and Catherine of Siena, belonged to these informal communities. Finally, we can see that the spiritual practices recommended to medieval women (and possibly invented by them) encouraged the kind of growth and mental concentration that often led to visions and mystical experiences. By the thirteenth century, these practices were quite similar for all ranks of women, whether rich or poor, married or unmarried. They were shared by the laity, but not usually by the men in religious communities, who had a more intellectual education. In addition to the seven canonical hours of daily prayer (the rule in convents), women (and men) were expected to perform two sorts of penitential acts: acts of contrition, such as self-flagellation, fasting and vigils; and acts of mercy toward others, such as tending the sick and assisting the poor. Understanding the meaning of these spiritual practices has been the focus of two recent studies on medieval women.22 We know that women’s practice of asceticism and self-denial was more austere than men’s and, in some cases, perhaps self-destructive. Mantric or repetitive prayer, consisting of countless recitations of the Hail Mary and the Our Father, was practised daily, even by the totally illiterate. The kind of meditation taught to women was visual and creative, not intellectual or abstract: the devout woman was to imagine herself as an observer and a participant in the life of Mary and of Christ. Most of the visual imagery for these mental pilgrimages was available to everyone in the pictorial cycles in parish churches and in convents. The conditions of women’s lives led to visions, and visions gave an individual woman a voice, a belief in herself as chosen to speak. They also gave her the experience of inner transformation, which she felt compelled to communicate to others. Perhaps the only voice women heard that told them to do something was God’s voice in visions. But God’s voice was the only one that was really necessary, for the divine permission and guidance, anything was possible. As Julian of Norwich said in her Showings, God forbid that you should say or assume that I am a teacher . . . for I am a woman, ignorant, weak and frail. But know very well that what I am saying I have received by the revelation of him who is the sovereign teacher . . . [B]ecause I am a woman, ought I therefore to believe that I should not tell you of the goodness of God, when I saw at that same time that it is his will that it be known?23

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The lives of the great women mystics are highly individualised, although some common themes emerge in their writings. Here I would like to introduce eight women from four different geographical areas and three different time periods. All these holy women – Hildegard of Bingen and Mechthild of Magdeburg (Germany), Marguerite Porete of Brabant and Hadewijch of Antwerp (the Netherlands), Angela of Foligno and Catherine of Siena (Italy), and Christina of Markyate and Julian of Norwich (England) – were mystics, and all left autobiographical and didactic writings. The lives and lifestyles of these eight women illustrate the various possibilities open to women with spiritual vocations; their styles of mysticism are illustrative as well of the variety of paths to the divine that may be termed mystical and visionary. Two of the women – Hildegard and Christina – became leaders in Benedictine houses after having spent a number of years enclosed as recluses; one, Julian of Norwich, became a recluse in response to her visions, which she continued to study and write down in solitude.24 Two were tertiaries in the mendicant orders: Catherine of Siena was a Dominican tertiary, and Angela of Foligno was Franciscan. Both lived in the world and had public preaching careers. Three of the eight women belonged to that fluid classification known as beguines – women who were committed to a spiritual life, but did not live enclosed lives and did not take permanent vows.25 One of these three – Marguerite Porete – was burned at the stake as a heretic. Only three of the eight women were well educated, which at this time meant knowing Latin and having access to a sizeable library of spiritual classics. Yet seven of the eight were writers, and some were the earliest and best writers of the vernacular languages in their own countries. All were bilingual and bicultural. I begin with two women – Christina of Markyate and St Hildegard of Bingen – who were born just as the First Crusade was launched, at the beginning of a period of great change and cultural contact.

Christina of Markyate Christina of Markyate (1096/8–c.1160) was born into an influential Anglo-Saxon family in Norman England. Two documents connected with her provide many clues to her spiritual life – her biography and her prayer book. Her anonymous biography, The Life of Christina of Markyate,26 is incomplete and breaks off around 1142, when Christina is in her forties and has become a professed nun in the Benedictine community of St Albans. Her life story is an adventurous one, told with great energy and with a novelist’s sense of suspense. Her biography begins with her childhood and the awakening of her desire for a spiritual life. The reader is soon introduced to her influential parents and their rage when she tries to refuse the marriage they have arranged for her. We see the Anglo-Saxon social world that Christina wishes to repudiate, when, like Wealtheow in Beowulf, she is commanded to carry the mead cup to all the guests at a feast. But this story is told from a female viewpoint, and whereas Wealtheow’s private thoughts are not recorded, Christina’s are. The narrator tells us that in this instance Christina’s mother has pushed her into offering mead in the hope that Christina will get drunk and that her betrothed, Burthred, will be able to seduce her and thus consecrate the marriage. The holy girl, knowing that her future depends on her ability to stay sober and clear-headed, only pretends to drink and to participate in the merriment. She fights off the advances of Burthred

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(this is just one instance out of many attempts), as well as those of a corrupt churchman, takes her case against marrying to court, wins, and then sees the decision reversed as a result of her parents’ well-placed bribes. Helped by the Virgin Mary in visions, she is able to think out an escape, and she runs away to live as a hermit, first with a famous female recluse and then with a local holy man. Her determination is tested by the need to live and to perform her spiritual practices secretly, locked into a kind of closet during the day in the hermit Roger’s dwelling, until Burthred publicly releases her from their betrothal and she can safely appear in public. Her biographer recognises that her visionary life and her psychic intuitions help her to grow spiritually and to defend herself against the many threats to her integrity, and he gives the reader full accounts of these experiences. We do not know who the writer was, but it is clear that he knew Christina (or Theodora, as she was called before her profession) well, and that in composing this Life he often transcribed her first-person accounts of her adventures and visions. Christina’s visions were primarily personal, intended to provide guidance to her individually without commenting on a larger community. But her visions often foretold future events, and this fact seems to have conferred personal power on her. Other visions concerned local matters, such as how the abbot of St Albans should behave.27 The contents of the St Albans Psalter (which is believed to be Christina’s prayer book, although her name is nowhere inscribed in it) tell us much about her daily life and spiritual exercises.28 The calendar at the beginning gives the death dates of many of Christina’s family members and makes a special reference to the death of Roger, the hermit with whom she lived for so many years and whose cell she inherited. The calendar is followed by thirty-nine scenes of the life of Christ, devotional images for meditation and contemplation. The next major section is the text, in French, of the Chançon d’Alexis, a story clearly related to her own life experience, since it depicts a ‘Bridegroom who leaves his bride on his wedding night to wander the world’:29 The St Albans psalter can be seen to be in every part a book ‘made’ for Christina, it reflected her own experience, and provided for her a means of reflecting on it. It is worth emphasizing what rich material it gave her: the great corpus of the psalms enriched with drawings to stimulate meditation, pictures of Christ’s life which combined features of Anglo-Saxon and Byzantine iconography in a new form, a newly translated poem from the Byzantine world, and the Emmaus series, taking up the pilgrim theme dear to Christina, besides having other meaning in her world.30 Although we have no mystical texts written by Christina herself, we have precious evidence in the psalter of a spiritual programme that helped shape the powerful and fascinating woman we read of in her Life.

Hildegard of Bingen The seer Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) was Christina’s contemporary. Unlike Christina, who evidently dictated her experiences to someone within the same community and who probably never expected her biography to be circulated, Hildegard

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composed her works for the world outside the walls of her convent. Emilie Zum Brunn and Georgette Epiney-Burgard say of her: ‘Hildegard offers us the finest example of what a woman could achieve in the twelfth century, as regards active life, as well as spiritual and artistic life. She is outstanding for the quality of her natural gifts, her prophetic charisma, and her dynamic reforming attitude.’31 Hildegard’s writings – letters, visions, prophecies, song sequences, a morality play, even a handbook on medicine – fill an entire volume of the Patrologia Latina.32 Her religious life began at the age of seven or eight, when she joined her aunt Jutta, who was a recluse; their retreat was later opened and turned into a convent, where Hildegard made her profession as a nun aged fourteen. Although she was unable to write German and was unsure of the correctness of her Latin, her dictated writings exhibit wide learning. Although she claimed that all her knowledge came from a mystical source, it is obvious that she was familiar with the Scriptures, natural science, classical Latin literature and neo-Platonic philosophy. She was taken seriously as a prophet by everyone – from St Bernard of Clairvaux and the pope down to the humblest labourers. Hildegard’s selfidentification as prophet was the key to having a public voice, for as a woman lacking in systematic education in Latin, she had an individual voice, as Sabina Flanagan points out in her biography of Hildegard: To the people of the Middle Ages, as to the ancients, prophecy implied the revelation of divine secrets concerning the past, the present and the future. Hildegard’s belief that she possessed such privileged knowledge would not have been enough to insure her success [sic], if her superiors had not seen it the same way . . . There were both biblical and early Christian precedents for the role of the female prophet. Moreover, a woman could be a prophet without upsetting the perceived natural order, since no particular attributes of her own were required, except, possibly, humility. Indeed, there was some suggestion that God might specifically choose the weak and despised to confound the strong. Thus to be a female prophet was to confirm women’s authority, rather than to deny it.33 Throughout her period of prolific writing, Hildegard was a forceful administrator of her convent. She began the Scivias, her first visionary and autobiographical work, when she was forty-two, but she had been having visions since she was five. Although she struggled with illness throughout her life, she insists that she saw her visions in spiritual and psychological wholeness, when she was fully conscious and aware of her surroundings. She distinguished between two grades of spiritual vision: her ecstatic awareness of ‘the Living Light’ in which she could see nothing, and a ‘more diffused radiance which she calls the Shade of the Living Light, and within which her great allegorical visions were seen’.34 Although she is perhaps more famous now for her visionary trilogy, she was also a writer of lyrical and dramatic poetry. Peter Dronke believes that ‘these songs contain some of the most unusual, subtle, and exciting poetry of the twelfth century.’35 Of Hildegard’s theology, Barbara Newman believes that ‘[w]e may boldly claim Hildegard as the first Christian thinker to deal seriously and positively with the feminine as such, not merely with the challenges posed by and for women in a male-dominated world.’36 Around four traditional female figures – Eve, Mary, Ecclesia and Sapientia or Caritas – ‘Hildegard developed a richly nuanced theology of the feminine that belongs wholly to the realm of the symbolic.’37 Using these four female figures allowed Hildegard

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‘to see the feminine as a species of incapacity and frailty, yet also as a numinous and salvific dimension of the divine nature’.38 Hildegard’s mission, as Newman sees it, was the mission of all the female mystics studied here: ‘to unlock the mysteries of Scripture, to proclaim the way of salvation, to admonish priests and prelates, to instruct the people of God’.39

Two Beguine Mystics: Hadewijch of Antwerp and Mechthild of Magdeburg The thirteenth century produced a number of visionary women writers, but I focus on just two here: Hadewijch of Antwerp and Mechthild of Magdeburg. Both were beguines; both wrote not in Latin, as had Hildegard, but in their vernacular language; and both contributed to a new style of spirituality that came to be known as Rheno-Flemish mysticism. Dom Porion, in his introduction to his French translation of Hadewijch’s ‘Letters to a Young Beguine’ and Beatrijs’s Seven Degrees of Love,40 finds the most telling characteristic of the beguine mystics to be the inner orientation, the impetus which urges the soul to overpass herself in order to be lost in the simplicity of the Divine Being. This is what distinguishes those among our holy women whose picture is most clearly drawn by documents and testimonies. Marie d’Oignies, Lutgard de Tongres, Yvette d’Huy, as well as Beatrice and Hadewijch, plunge into their gaze into the Divine Essence, showing that It is visible to the inner eye if it manages to recover its original nakedness. It is on account of this testimony that their names must be preserved and their voices transmitted: bold women who remind us why we were born.41 There is also a theological difference between the beguine mystics and the mystics, like Hildegard, who preceded them. According to Zum Brunn and Epiney-Burgard, in Hildegard’s writings ‘the soul, at the summit of the vision, becomes similar to God’, while for the beguines ‘the soul is annihilated to become “what God is”’:42 Their mysticism of abandonment is expressed, in fact, in an ontological dilemma: the creature must shed his particular, created, separated being, in order to find once again his true, ‘uncreated’, ‘non-separated’ being in God. Thus it is that the ‘non-willing’, which consists of willing nothing apart from God Himself, leads to a real annihilation of the soul considered in her particular and egoistic being. But she loses herself thus only to find herself at an incomparably higher stage or ‘being’, having become, as Hadewijch says ‘God with God’, or, as Meister Eckhart will say, ‘God in God’.43 Hadewijch of Antwerp Hadewijch of Antwerp was a Flemish beguine who lived in the second quarter of the thirteenth century. Although she and her writings were known in the fourteenth century, she achieved no particular fame in her own lifetime as far as we know. What little is known of her is the result of inference. Her familiarity with the vocabulary of chivalry and courtly love suggest that she was from the higher classes and that she probably attended good convent schools. She knew about higher education, the universities and the curriculum of the seven liberal arts, for she used the metaphors of the curriculum

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and the school masters in her ‘school of love’ poems. We know almost nothing of her external life, but we have three books by her: a collection of poems, ‘Poems in Stanzas’ and ‘Poems in Couplets’,44 in Mother Columba Hart’s translation; a set of letters, known as ‘Letters to a Young Beguine’, on the spiritual life, and a book of Visions. Hart believes that Hadewijch either founded or joined a beguine group and became its mistress, supervising the spiritual development of a number of young beguines who she believed were specially called to mysticism, when she ran into opposition.45 Her authority was called into question by members of her group and by outsiders, and her closest companions were sent away from her: ‘The general opinion of scholars at present seems to be that Hadewijch actually was evicted from her beguine community and exiled; that she was made the talk of the town because of her doctrine that one must live Love.’46 According to Hart, we do not know where she went or how she died, but, considering how often she urged her sisters to care for the sick, it may be conjectured that she joined a leprosarium or a hospital for the poor, where she would have been able to serve others and to sleep and pray in the chapel that was always attached to such institutions. She wrote in Dutch and is thought to have lived and participated in the rich culture of Antwerp. A brilliant poet herself, she obviously knew the latest poetry in Latin, Old French and Provençal, as well as in Dutch. Each of her three works exhibits its own particular way of viewing her experience of love, which for her is a female being: Minne, or Lady Love. As a mystic she believed that the soul, created by God in his own image, longs to be one with divine love again, ‘to become God with God’, as she puts it.47 As I point out in Chapter 10 of Body and Soul, in her Strophische Gedichten, she never apologises for herself as a woman, and she never underrates her education and her intelligence;48 the formulae of modesty employed by most female mystics are not for her. Reason and intelligence are important to her – ‘to her friends she recommends attention to their intellectual progress as a source of spiritual progress. They must seek information, pose questions, and study!’49 In the end, however, reason cannot go far enough: ‘In Vision VIII she is led by a guide who is a scholastic theologian; he cannot accompany her to the summit of union because he has put intellect before love.’50 Love and reason go hand in hand: the latter teaches the former which, in turn, enlightens reason. But reason can touch God only in what He is not (that is, reason sees by means of images, arguments, and symbols, all of which can express His Being only in an imperfect manner). Love, on the other hand, touches the very Being of God, insofar as it abandons itself to Him, plunging into the abyss hidden from each creature, where fruition is reached.51 Mechthild of Magdeburg Mechthild of Magdeburg (c.1212–82?),52 the most famous of the German beguines, author of the The Flowing Light of the Divinity,53 decided at twenty-two to devote her life to God, and went to Magdeburg, where she knew no one, to become a beguine. In 1270 she came to the convent of Helfta, perhaps advised to make such a retreat because of her outspoken criticism of corruption in the Church. Her autobiographical Flowing Light comprises seven books, written at different stages of her life and utilising all the poetic and narrative resources of her time – lyric poetry, dialogue, courtly allegory, even

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homely folk wisdom. (Her work was collected by a Dominican friar, Henry of Halle; we do not know to what extent she was involved in the ordering and arranging of each chapter.) The Benedictine convent at Helfta was a centre of learned feminine spirituality under the direction of the abbess Gertrude of Hackeborn, and when the aged Mechthild of Magdeburg arrived there, two other famous mystics were already in residence: Mechthild of Hackeborn and St Gertrude the Great. The first page of The Flowing Light announces the danger to which Mechthild is exposed because she is a mystic: ‘I have been put on my guard about this book, and certain people have warned me that, unless I have it buried, it will be burnt . . . Yet’, she continues, ‘I in my weakness have written it, because I dared not hide the gift that is in it.’ She discovers, along with Hadewijch, a new subjective mode, according to Peter Dronke: Hadewijch’s and Mechthild’s poetry is a poetry of meditation; it is their inner colloquy with divine Love . . . Love (die Minne) is a womanly figure, divinely beautiful and seductive; she is both relentless tyrant and sweet enchantress. Under her spell, these women know and recreate in themselves all the heights and all the abysses, the raptures and the torments of the beloved in the Song of Songs.54 Hadewijch and Mechthild are profoundly different in the poetic ‘I’ they present, however. Mechthild, who dictated her skilful poems, seems much more vulnerable, sure of herself only when she feels that God is speaking through her, but when inspired she can be fiercely critical of her supposed superiors. She has many voices, as does Lady Minne, and we should not presume to see Mechthild’s historical figure in just one of them. Hadewijch, too, has many voices, personae distinguished from one another by their experience of Minne, some male and a few female, and her visionary experience must include all these personae. Mysticism involves the total self, and in these two women of great poetic gifts, the mystic vision takes shape in sophisticated poems of love. Hadewijch utilised the complex stanzaic forms of troubadour poetry to explore her unique vision of the soul’s path to God. (The poetic forms she used are discussed in Chapter 10.) Mechthild, perhaps because she composed orally, utilised many poetic forms: Mechthild’s poetry . . . consists of numerous lyrical interludes, in rhyming free verse, in her book of meditations. Sometimes they are long, passionate dialogues of the soul with Minne, with God, or with the senses; or again they can be as short as two lines, spoken by the divine Minne: ‘I come to my loved one / Like dew upon the flowers.’55

Marguerite Porete Marguerite Porete, a French beguine from Hainault, shared the beguine culture that had inspired Hadewijch and Mechthild fifty years earlier, and, like them, she writes of the return of the soul to its true nature, becoming God in God. The only source for our knowledge of her, apart from the records of her trials, is her book The Mirror of Simple Souls, which she wrote in French. Identification of the Marguerite who was burned at the

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stake in 1310 with the writer of The Mirror of Simple Souls was only made in 1946, by Romana Guarnieri, and an edition was published in 1965. Like Mechthild, Marguerite was very critical of the lapses of the Church and its leaders. Sometime between 1296 and 1306, she wrote her book, which was condemned as heretical. Since she refused to give any testimony during the year and a half she spent in prison in Paris, the Dominican Inquisitor extracted a list of articles from her book and submitted them, out of context, to the theological regents of the University of Paris. They declared the articles heretical, and Marguerite was swiftly judged a ‘relapsed’ heretic (she had been arrested several times before) and, in 1310, executed in the Place de Grève in Paris. While she was being pursued by the Inquisition, Marguerite sent her book to three noted scholars, all of whom approved of it. The book, despite being condemned, circulated widely, and by the latter half of the fourteenth century had been translated into Latin, Italian and Middle English. Far from ceasing with Marguerite’s death, the persecutions by the Inquisition continued and may be said to bear witness to the success of the Mirror in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It overcame linguistic barriers as did no other contemporary mystical writing in the vernacular. Proof of this fact is furnished by the six versions which have been preserved, in Old French, Old Italian, Middle English and in Latin… At present they are accessible in about fifteen manuscripts, while others have been reported to exist in various places but have then mysteriously disappeared.56 Marguerite’s crime was that she insisted on speaking publicly and teaching her ideas publicly, and that she did so in her own voice and those of others like her. She may have been heretical in her views – although even experts in theology cannot agree about this – but the very evolved spirituality she presents seems no more or less dangerous than the spiritual teachings of Hadwijch and Mechthild. She was, however, much more visible than they, for she refused to hide behind God’s voice or to submit to the hierarchical Church. As a poet, she is exquisitely expressive. Formally, her long and beautiful book is a dialogue between Love and Reason, and concerns the conduct of a Soul. The dialogue is often interrupted by various allegorical figures with a commentary in verse and exempla. There is still no complete translation into English; we have to be content for now with brief sections that have been published in various anthologies. Lerner has written of the politics of her role, and Dronke has written of her poetry.57 Here is a passage in illustration: LOVE: This soul swims in a sea of Joy, that is to say, in the sea of delights which issues and flows from the Divinity; and so she feels no joy, for she herself is joy, and she swims and floats in joy without feeling any joy, for she dwells in Joy and Joy dwells in her; she is joy herself by the force of joy that has transformed her into Itself. There is now a common will, the will of the lover and that of the beloved; they are like fire and flame, for Love has transformed this soul into Herself. SOUL: Ah, most sweet, pure, and divine Love, what a suave transformation it is to be transformed into what I love more than myself. And I am so transformed that I have

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lost my name in order to love, I who can love so little; it is into Love that I have been transformed; for I love nothing but Love.58

Angela of Foligno A rather different mystic was the Franciscan Blessed Angela of Foligno,59 Marguerite’s older contemporary, who was born in 1248 and who died in 1309, the year before Marguerite’s death. Foligno, only a few miles from Assisi, was a centre of Franciscan spirituality, and it was not unusual for pious married women living there to become tertiaries. Angela confessed that she had joined the Third Order for the prestige it would give her, for she wanted the reputation of being a virtuous married woman. But when her mother, her husband and all her children died suddenly, her attachment to St Francis and his order became more profound. She underwent a powerful experience in 1285, and in 1291, when she was forty-three, she had a vision of God’s love for her as she was walking on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St Francis in Assisi. Since she was illiterate, she dictated her experiences to Brother A (probably her uncle and confessor, Fra Arnaldo, a Franciscan priest); the book, Liber de vere fidelium experientia (The Book of the Experience of the Truly Faithful), was read immediately and was widely copied and circulated. The first of the three treatises that compose Angela’s book details her inner life from the time she becomes a tertiary. Angela identifies nineteen steps in her penitential period. At the eleventh, she desires to commit herself fully to poverty, although she has doubts that she will be able to withstand the temptations that will come to her if she is compelled to beg for sustenance. It is only when she has decided on full renunciation of property that she begins to experience the joys, as well as the difficulties, of the spiritual life. Profoundly aware of her own limitations, she is comforted by a deep and unceasing awareness of the goodness of God. The second part of Angela’s book tells of her visions during the next seven stages of her illumination, including the one best known to students of mysticism – her wooing by the Holy Spirit as she was on a pilgrimage to Assisi. The third part of the book, dictated to various unidentified scribes and known as the ‘treatise on evangelical doctrine’, is composed of letters and discourses based on additional visions and addressed to her spiritual sons and daughters. Believing that the beginning and the end of true wisdom is to know God and ourselves, Angela traces in moving language and images the pace of her movement towards God and his towards her. She uses anecdotes from her own experiences to show how she came to resolve conflicts and doubts, and she manages to avoid both false humility and inflated self-satisfaction.60 Her mysticism is violent, gestural, performative: she does not sing of her love; she acts it out publicly. Angela of Foligno, revered by Franciscan advisers in her lifetime, became the object of a cult. However extravagant her emotional utterances, Angela did not lay claim to any new belief, any idea that challenged the prevailing world-picture of theologians of her time. Her innovations were startling; yet they were confined, we might say, to the form in which she experienced and retold accepted spiritual realities; she did not impinge upon their content. Thus one can begin to understand why her memorial, her book, was unfailingly treasured, whilst the far greater book of her contemporary, Marguerite Porete, led to Marguerite’s being atrociously put to death.61

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St Catherine of Siena Caterina Benincasa, the future St Catherine of Siena, was born in 1347, the year before the Black Death began its sweep over all Europe. By the time she was a year old, the population of Siena was one-fifth what it had been before the plague. Her mission was to see God in the horror and disorientation and loss of faith in the aftermath of the disaster. Like Angela of Foligno, Catherine was a woman of great strength and personal magnetism who attracted many followers. She discovered her visionary path when she was still a child; her first recorded vision occurred as she was walking along a lonely road just outside the city wall with one of her brothers. Sometime after this event and before she was fifteen, she had a vision of a mystical marriage with Christ in which she vowed her virginity to him. Her visions led to the performance of ascetic practices that indicate her tremendous strength of well. In spite of the limitations of her sex and her class – her father was a dyer; her mother, a washerwoman – she did not allow herself to be deterred from her goals. She resisted her family’s pressure to marry, and when as a punishment she was reduced to a kind of servitude in her parents’ home, she transformed the situation by visualizing family members as the holy apostles and her parents as the divine family. At about seventeen, she was stricken with smallpox, and she used this opportunity to force her mother to arrange an interview with the Dominican Sisters of the Third Order, called the Mantellate. Although the Dominicans were unwilling to admit any woman who was not a mature widow – they were not cloistered and could not protect a virgin – Catherine was so disfigured by smallpox and so sober in speech that she became the first virgin tertiary in the Dominican order. Her new status as a tertiary was very congenial to her, because she wanted to live outside a detailed fixed Rule. During her years of silence in her parents’ home, she had learned to build an internal cell that she could enter in order to meditate; the value of such an imagined retreat was one of the teachings she passed on to her followers. Catherine had only a little more than ten years – from 1367 to 1380 – of active ministry. She joined the Dominican tertiaries in 1363 or 1364 and lived in isolation in her parents’ home until 1367, when she was twenty. On the last day of Carnival in that year, she experienced her mystical marriage to Christ, and this event marked the beginning of a more public ministry. From then until 1370, she gradually widened her circle of contacts and worked to help the sick and the needy. In 1370 she suffered a mystical death during which she received a command to go abroad into the world to save souls. It is precisely in 1370, when Pope Urban V leaves Rome for Avignon, that Catherine’s life changes radically. Catherine has a vision: Jesus, the beloved that by now she knew intimately, because he had been appearing to her and speaking with her for years now, this time opens her breast, draws out her heart, and substitutes his own. This is the sign of a complete mystical transformation: now Catherine possesses the heart and spirit of Jesus, while he has that of Catherine.62 She was only twenty-three years old, yet, impelled by her vision, the unlearned young woman took on the greatest problems of her country: a papacy under foreign domination, continual war between the pope and the city-states of the northern Italy, all taken within

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the context of the Hundred Years War between France and England, and a corrupt and distrusted Church that failed to help or heal its members. Claudio Leonardi stresses Catherine’s role as prophet from 1370 to 1380, and demonstrates that she envisioned a three-stage plan with which to re-establish a moral and peaceable Christendom: the return of the papacy to Italy, where she believed it once again could be a spiritual institution for all of Christendom, rather than a political agency under the control of the political agenda of France; the establishment of peace among the warring factions in Italy and in Europe; and the undertaking of a Crusade to bring Christianity to the Islamic world.63 Leonardi insists that she did not conceive of this Crusade in the bloody model of the earlier attempts to gain control of the Holy Land. Instead, she was following in the tradition of St Francis, ‘who sought out the Sultan without arms, seeking with words alone to bring him to belief in Christ’.64 She besieged Pope Gregory XI with letters, begging him to have the courage and faith to return to Rome. By 1374, she had attracted enough attention to be called to Florence to be examined on her beliefs and activities by the General Chapter of her order. On 1 April 1375, she had a vision in which she received the stigmata and prophesied the Great Schism, which took place four years later. In 1376 she undertook to try to make peace between Florence and Pope Gregory XI, and finally convinced the pope to return to Rome from Avignon; two years later, after peace was established by Gregory’s successor, Pope Urban, she turned to composing the Dialogue, her major visionary work. At the end of 1378, she was again living in Rome, serving as Urban’s trusted adviser. During these last years of her life, she offered herself as an expiatory victim for the sins of the Church. Shortly before her death, she had a vision of the weight of the ship of the Church descending on her shoulders and her physical suffering increased. She died in Rome on 3 April 1380, at thirty-three years of age.

Julian of Norwich Julian of Norwich (1343–after 1416) was a recluse attached to the church of St Julian in Norwich. In 1373, at the age of thirty, she experienced a series of visions, or ‘sowings’, on the Passion of Christ. These visions became the basis for meditation over the rest of her life and may have determined her choice of the anchoress’s life. Although she makes the usual apologies for her lack of formal education – usual, especially among women – her work indicates that she was quite well read. Her book of revelations exists in two different redactions. The short text must have been written soon after her experience. Each vision is described in careful sensual detail and is followed by brief comments concerning its spiritual meaning. We learn from reading the long text that certain visions or narrative scenes were not included in the first text because Julian had not yet understood them. It was only in 1388 that she finally reached an understanding of some of her early experiences, an understanding that developed further as she wrote them down in 1393. In her commentaries on the meaning of each vision, she reveals much about her own questions about Christianity and about the process by which she worked through to an understanding of theological questions. She ‘reads’ each vision as a kind of allegorical drama in which every detail of the imagery and the dialogue is significant – the colour of clothing, the movements and gestures of the characters, the

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similes that occur to her as she reviews her experiences. Her powers of observation are acute, and she draws on a wide variety of experience to illustrate her perceptions – for instance, her teachings on the Motherhood of Christ. If we look over the life histories and writings of these women as a group, we can see more clearly how their mystical experiences enabled them to overcome the restrictions facing them. We have already noted how respected visionary experience was in the medieval world. To have the reputation of a mystic was useful for both men and women who wanted to be spiritual leaders, and such a reputation granted essential status especially to women, who, because of their gender, had no other way to achieve this status. Second, the conditions of female monastic life and the training of women in meditation encouraged the emergence of visionary experience. Visions themselves initiated further learning and growth, granting the visionary both greater wisdom in dealing with others and greater ability to help those in need. Skill in meditation improved the ability to envision conflict situations creatively and to find solution to them. Mystical women seem to have become more valuable to their communities as they grew older and gained wisdom and experience. Female mysticism is connected to the female life cycle. Although medieval women mystics came from different class backgrounds in different parts of Europe and experienced their spiritual awakenings at different ages, many of them (e.g. Hildegard, Angela, Umiltà of Faenza and, later, St Teresa of Avila) did not become great teachers until they reached middle age. Although, of course, there were great mystics, such as St Catherine of Siena, whose ministries were relatively brief and who died young, the more common pattern for medieval women mystics called for a peak in activity fairly late in life. As children they were marked by precocious piety, and their rebellion often took the form of asceticism. From adolescence through their thirties, they often lived withdrawn or secluded lives. If they were married, they were silently absorbed in family responsibilities and childbearing; if they were in convents, they withdrew in prayer as much as possible. All this changed, however, around their fortieth year. As older women, they could be visible as active leaders and effectively offer spiritual advice to others. The meditation techniques they practised and their innate gifts gradually led them to visions, and during this growth process they learned about where they were needed. Empowered by the divine voices of their visions, they were able to bring about change. Finally, women’s mysticism is connected to freedom. Most of the women mentioned in this discussion were extra-regular in some way. Although convent life offered a structure in which piety might develop into mysticism, that structure could often seem too rigid. The freer approach of the beguines, with the possibility for alternating times in community and times of reclusion, seems to be much more congenial for discovering an individual voice as a writer. But to be outside convents was dangerous because of the Church’s mistrust of women’s leadership; Mechthild had to flee to the convent of Helfta in her old age, and Marguerite Porete was burned at the stake. The succeeding chapters in this volume explore the problems that women faced in their spiritual paths, showing both women’s successes and their failures. In all the works by medieval women studied here, we see what is missing in the literature of the rest of the medieval world – a female subject, living autonomously in a world she defines, speaking a language she invents and controls.

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Notes *

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This essay and the following one appeared originally as the first and eighth chapters of Elizabeth Petroff’s monograph Body and Soul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Some editorial decisions have been made to account for the inclusion of these essays in the present volume, and the reader should be aware that the sources referenced in these essays, while standard at the time of composition, may no longer hold such prominent positions as authorities on the subjects of this scholarship; all references to ‘recent’ scholarship are relative to the year of these chapters’ original publication. Nevertheless, we include Petroff’s essays here as a testament to her influence on research into medieval women mystics, with which all of the essays contained in this volume are concerned. Readers should explore these essays, which we believe are the most recent inheritors of this research, and which will no doubt influence the future of our field. Quoted in Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua to Marguerite Porete (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 62. Quoted in Emilie Zum Brunn and Georgette Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics in Medieval Europe (New York: Paragon, 1989), p. 57. Quoted in Dronke, Women Writers, p. 145. Quoted in Valerie Lagorio, ‘The Medieval Continental Women Mystics: An Introduction’, in Paul Szarmach (ed.), An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), p. 191. Susan Clark, ‘Introduction’, in Susan Clark (ed.), Mechthild von Magdeburg: Flowing Light of the Divinity, trans. Christiane Mesch Galvani (New York: Garland, 1991), pp. i–xxvii. Fiona Bowie (ed.), Beguine Spirituality: Mystical Writings of Mechthild of Magdeburg, Beatrijs of Nazareth, and Hadewijch of Brabant, trans. Oliver Davies (New York: Crossroad Books, 1989), p. 41. Bowie, Beguine Spirituality, p. 41. Bowie, Beguine Spirituality, p. 41. Evelyn Underhill, The Mystics of the Church (London: James Clark, 1925), p. 10. Underhill, Mystics, p. 20. Underhill, Mystics, p. 82. For the poems of Mahādēvi, a twelfth-century Indian mystic, see A. K. Ramanujan (ed. and trans.), Speaking of Siva (Baltimore: Penguin, 1973), pp. 111–42. For selection from the work of other Indian women poets, see Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone (eds), A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now (New York: Schocken, 1981), pp. 64–79. Lagorio, ‘Medieval Continental Women Mystics’, p. 161. On the school of St Victor and teachers associated with it, see Jean Leclercq, François Vandenbroucke and Louis Bouyer, The Spirituality of the Middle Ages (New York: Seabury Press, 1982), pp. 229–42. St Victor was founded in 1108 by William of Champeaux, as he retired from teaching at Notre Dame in Paris; in 1113, William adopted the Augustinian Rule and resumed his teaching. Hugh of St Victor entered the community ‘about 1115 or 1118, taught there from 1125, and about 1133 succeeded William of Champeaux as Master of the school. He remained in that office until his death in 1140 or 1141’ (pp. 229–30). Richard became ‘Prior in 1162 and died in 1173’ (p. 235). For connections between the Victorine school, William of St. Thierry, and the beguines, see Zum Brunn and Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics, pp. xvii–xxxiv, 74, 98, 107. Here I am relying on Dronke, Women Writers, p. 146. Dronke, Women Writers, pp. 146–7. For the history of enclosure, see Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, ‘Strict Active Enclosure and Its Effects on the Female Monastic Experience (ca. 500–1000)’, in John A. Nichols and Lillian Thomas Shank (eds), Medieval Religious Women, vol. 1: Distant Echoes (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984), pp. 51–86. See Lina Eckenstein, Women under Monasticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896). This remains the best and most readable history of women in the monastic tradition. This was probably the result of the Crusades, but the issue is debated by historians.

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The standard works on the beguines are Ernest W. McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953; New York: Octagon, 1969); Herberd Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter, 2nd edn (Hildesheim: Olms, 1961); Dayton Phillips, The Beguines in Medieval Strasbourg: A Study of the Social Aspect of Beguine Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1941); and Simone Roisin, L’Hagiographie cistercienne dans le diocèse de Liège au xiiie siècle (Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’université, 1947), and ‘L’efflorescence cistercienne et le courant féminin de piété au xiiie siècle’, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 39 (1945): 458–86. Benjamin de Troeyer, ‘Béguines et Tertiaires en Belgique et aux Pays-Bas aux XII–XIVe siècles’, in Mariano d’Alatri (ed.), I Frati Penitenti di S. Francesco nella Società del Due e Trecento: atti del 20 Convegno di studi francescani, Roma, 12–14 ottobre 1976 (Rome: Istituto Storico dei Cappuccini, 1977), pp. 133–8; Pierre Peanò, ‘Les Béguines du Languedoc ou la crise du T.O.F. dans la France méridionale (XIIIe–XIVe s.)’, in Mariano d’Alatri (ed.), I Frati Penitenti di S. Francesco nella Società del Due e Trecento: atti del 20 Convegno di studi francescani, Roma, 12–14 ottobre 1976 (Rome: Istituto Storico dei Cappuccini, 1977), pp. 139–58. Rudolph Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Julian of Norwich, Julian of Norwich: Showings, trans. and ed. Eric Colledge and James Walsh (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), p. 135. Recent scholarship suggests that she may not have been enclosed when she received her first visions, since she speaks of her mother standing next to her as she believes she is dying. McDonnell, Beguines and Beghards; R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: Penguin, 1970), pp. 318–31. C. H. Talbot (ed. and trans.), The Life of Christina of Markyate [De S. Theodora Virgine, Quae et dicitur Christina] (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959). See also Christopher J. Holdsworth, ‘Christina of Markyate’, in Derek Baker (ed.), Medieval Women (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), pp. 185–204. To delve further into these visions and into Christina’s relationship with her spiritual friend Geoffrey, the Norman abbot of St Alban’s, see Chapters 2 and 8 of Petroff, Body and Soul. I am following Holdsworth’s description of the psalter. For illustrations, see Otto Pächt, C. R. Dodwell and Francis Wormald (eds), The St. Alban’s Psalter (London: Warburg Institute, 1960). Holdsworth, ‘Christina of Markyate’, p. 191. Holdsworth, ‘Christina of Markyate’, p. 193. Zum Brunn and Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics, p. 3. Hildegard of Bingen, Opera Omnia, in Jacques-Paul Migne (ed.), Patrologiae cursus completus, series latina, vol. 197 (Paris, 1882). Sabina Flanagan, Hildegard of Bingen: A Visionary Life (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 14-15. Underhill, Mystics of the Church, p. 76. Peter Dronke, Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages: New Departures in Poetry, 1000–1150 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 151. More study of Hildegard’s song sequences is found in Flanagan, Hildegard of Bingen, pp. 106–40, and in Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), and Saint Hildegard of Bingen Symphonia (A Critical Edition of the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum [Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations]) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Newman, Sister of Wisdom, p. xvii. Newman, Sister of Wisdom, p. xviii. Newman, Sister of Wisdom, p. 36. Newman, Sister of Wisdom, p. 4. Beatrijs of Nazareth (1200–68) was a contemporary Netherlands mystic. Educated in beguine and convent schools, she became the prioress of the Cistercian convent of Nazareth in 1236. Her life and work are discussed in Chapter 3 of Petroff, Body and Soul. Quoted in Zum Brunn and Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics, p. xix.

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Zum Brunn and Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics, p. xxiv. Zum Brunn and Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics, p. xxiv. These are the Mengeldichten attributed to Hadewijch II or Pseudo-Hadewijch, a later poet (Zum Brunn and Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics, pp. 129–31). Hadewijch of Antwerp, Hadewijch: The Complete Works, trans. Mother Columba Hart (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), p. 4 Hadewijch of Antwerp, Hadewijch, p. 4. See the sections on Hadewijch in Zum Brunn and Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics, pp. 97–139, and in Bowie, Beguine Spirituality, pp. 96–125. For example, see Petroff, Body and Soul, pp. 190–1. Zum Brunn and Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics, p. 98. Zum Brunn and Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics, p. 98. Zum Brunn and Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics, p. 107. Her dates are problematical. Zum Brunn and Epiney-Burgard say she was born between 1207 and 1210, went to Magdeburg about 1230, and began writing about 1250 (Zum Brunn and Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics, p.  39); Clark says, ‘Born in the late first or early second decade of the thirteenth century, Mechthild began to compose her mystical revelations in 1250’ (‘Introduction’, p. xii). The most recent translation is Galvani, Mechthild von Magdeburg (see Clark, ‘Introduction’). The other English translation, only a partial one and often inaccurate as well, is Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Revelations of Mechthild of Magdeburg, or The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Lucy Menzies (London: Longmans Green, 1953). Another complete translation, under the general direction of Gertrud Jaron Lewis, will be published by Cistercian Publications within the next few years. [Editors’ note: we were unable to find further information about this publication.] Peter Dronke, The Medieval Lyric (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 81. Dronke, The Medieval Lyric, p. 81. Zum Brunn and Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics, p. 147. Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); Dronke, Women Writers, pp. 202–28. Quoted in Zum Brunn and Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics, p. 154. Editors’ note: since the publication of Body and Soul in 1994, Angela of Foligno was declared a saint by the Catholic Church in 2013. In Chapter 11 of Body and Soul, I examine Angela’s use of the language of the body. Dronke, Women Writers, p. 217. ‘[P]roprio nel 1370, quando Urbano V lascia Roma per Avignone, che la vita di Caterina muta radicalmente. Caterina ha una visione: Gesù, l’amato che ormai ben conosceva, perché da anni le appariva e le parlava, questa volta le apre il petto, ne estrae il cuore e lo sostituisce con il suo. È il segno della piena transformazione [sic] mistica: Caterina ha il cuore e lo spirito di Gesù, Gesù ha quello di Caterina’ (Claudio Leonardi, ‘Caterina la mistica’, in Ferruccio Bertini (ed.), Medioevo al Femminile (Rome: Laterza, 1989), p. 178). Leonardi, ‘Caterina la mistica’, pp. 171–95. Leonardi, ‘Caterina la mistica’, p. 187.

Works Cited Barnstone, Aliki and Willis Barnstone (eds), A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now (New York: Schocken, 1981). Bell, Rudolph, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Bowie, Fiona (ed.), Beguine Spirituality: Mystical Writings of Mechthild of Magdeburg, Beatrijs of Nazareth, and Hadewijch of Brabant, trans. Oliver Davies (New York: Crossroad Books, 1989).

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Bynum, Caroline Walker, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Clark, Susan (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in Susan Clark (ed.) and Christiane Mesch Galvani (trans.), Mechthild von Magdeburg: Flowing Light of the Divinity (New York: Garland, 1991). de Troeyer, Benjamin, ‘Béguines et Tertiaires en Belgique et aux Pays-Bas aux XII–XIVe siècles’, in Mariano d’Alatri (ed.), I Frati Penitenti di S. Francesco nella Società del Due e Trecento: atti del 20 Convegno di studi francescani, Roma, 12–14 ottobre 1976 (Rome: Istituto Storico dei Cappuccini, 1977), pp. 133–8. Dronke, Peter, Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages: New Departures in Poetry, 1000–1150 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). Dronke, Peter, The Medieval Lyric (New York: Harper & Row, 1969). Dronke, Peter, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua to Marguerite Porete (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Eckenstein, Lina, Women under Monasticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896). Flanagan, Sabina, Hildegard of Bingen: A Visionary Life (London: Routledge, 1989). Grundmann, Herberd, Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter, 2nd edn (Hildesheim: Olms, 1961). Hadewijch of Antwerp, Hadewijch: The Complete Works, trans. Mother Columba Hart (New York: Paulist Press, 1980). Hildegard of Bingen, Opera Omnia, in Jacques-Paul Migne (ed.), Patrologiae cursus completes, series latina, vol. 197 (Paris, 1882). Holdsworth, Christopher J., ‘Christina of Markyate’, in Derek Baker (ed.), Medieval Women (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), pp. 185–204. Julian of Norwich, Julian of Norwich: Showings, trans. and ed. Eric Colledge and James Walsh (New York: Paulist Press, 1978). Lagorio, Valerie, ‘The Medieval Continental Women Mystics: An Introduction’, in Paul Szarmach (ed.), An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), pp. 161–93. Leclercq, Jean, François Vandenbroucke and Louis Bouyer, The Spirituality of the Middle Ages (New York: Seabury Press, 1982). Leonardi, Claudio, ‘Caterina la mistica’, in Ferruccio Bertini (ed.), Medioevo al Femminile (Rome: Laterza, 1989), pp. 171–95. Lerner, Robert E., The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). McDonnell, Ernest W., The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953; New York: Octagon, 1969). Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Revelations of Mechthild of Magdeburg, or The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Lucy Menzies (London: Longmans Green, 1953). Newman, Barbara, Saint Hildegard of Bingen Symphonia (A Critical Edition of the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum [Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations]) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Newman, Barbara, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

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Pächt, Otto, C. R. Dodwell and Francis Wormald (eds), The St. Alban’s Psalter (London: Warburg Institute, 1960). Peanò, Pierre, ‘Les Béguines du Languedoc ou la crise du T.O.F. dans la France méridionale (XIIIe–XIVe s.)’, in Mariano d’Alatri (ed.), I Frati Penitenti di S. Francesco nella Società del Due e Trecento: atti del 20 Convegno di studi francescani, Roma, 12–14 ottobre 1976 (Rome: Istituto Storico dei Cappuccini, 1977), pp. 138–59. Petroff, Elizabeth A., Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Phillips, Dayton, The Beguines in Medieval Strasbourg: A Study of the Social Aspect of Beguine Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1941). Ramanujan, A. K. (ed. and trans.), Speaking of Siva (Baltimore: Penguin, 1973). Roisin, Simone, ‘L’efflorescence cistercienne et le courant féminin de piété au xiiie siècle’, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 39 (1945), 458–86. Roisin, Simone, L’Hagiographie cistercienne dans le diocèse de Liège au xiiie siècle (Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’université, 1947). Schulenburg, Jane Tibbetts, ‘Strict Active Enclosure and Its Effects on the Female Monastic Experience (ca. 500–1000)’, in John A. Nichols and Lillian Thomas Shank (eds), Medieval Religious Women, vol. 1: Distant Echoes (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984), pp. 51–86. Southern, R. W., Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: Penguin, 1970). Talbot, C. H. (ed. and trans.), The Life of Christina of Markyate [De S. Theodora Virgine, Quae et dicitur Christina] (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959). Underhill, Evelyn, The Mystics of the Church (London: James Clark, 1925). Zum Brunn, Emilie, and Georgette Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics in Medieval Europe (New York: Paragon, 1989).

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2 Male Confessors and Female Penitents: Possibilities for Dialogue ELIZABETH ALVILDA PETROFF

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tudents of medieval women mystics have long recognised that in the absence of approved leadership roles for women in medieval society, mystical or visionary experience gave women an authority they would not have possessed otherwise. Studies of famous women mystics and prophets, such as Hildegard of Bingen, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marie d’Oignies, have demonstrated what this authority meant in social terms. What has not been explored as fully is how this authority manifested itself in interpersonal relationships, particularly in regard to men who were in a position of authority vis-à-vis these women. What I would like to examine in this chapter is the nature of the dialogue between confessors and penitents – what male ecclesiastics learned from the women who were under their spiritual direction. What was it in certain relationships with certain women that turned a clearly hierarchical and power-laden situation into one of equality? Of superiority in some areas? What did men learn from women that they needed? I can make a few generalisations here, and then explore the stories of three male-female relationships in more detail. First of all, the women seem to present men with a compelling image of living faith. Second, the men are attracted by the women’s gift of prophecy; they want to know more about themselves and about the future. Third, the women are intercessors with God; the men go to them when something terrible is happening or when someone is dying, to request their prayers and their communication with God. Fourth, medieval holy women demonstrate a new kind of teaching in action, apparently spontaneous, compassionate, and non-hierarchical. Finally, women have refreshing new viewpoints; they can react and respond to situations directly (or so it seems to male observers) without recourse to precedents, and thus they can be transgressive in ways a male ecclesiastic cannot be. On the basis of existing texts, it is more difficult to ascertain what the women get from the men. Official approval and acceptance were certainly primary for many women. Lay penitents were in a vulnerable position in regard to the Church hierarchy, for they were not nuns and they weren’t quite laywomen. A loyal and understanding confessor could provide protection for a woman who was living a holy life outside a convent or the regular structure, and the confessor–penitent bond was a connection with the

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institutional Church that defined the women as good women, even if their status was ambiguous. And, of course, the confessor was the door to the reception of the sacrament of the Eucharist. As Caroline Bynum has pointed out, women – no matter how radical their ideas of God might have appeared in other respects – supported the traditional role of the priesthood when it came to their access to the sacraments.1 It is likely that the women also received theological instruction, guidance in meditation practices and advice in cases of conscience. A confessor who was knowledgeable about mystical experience could provide guidance and reassurance in times of doubt. But the hagiographies written by men that I am about to cite, interestingly enough, do not speak about that. Only Margery Kempe’s Book tells us of both the woman’s and the man’s view of the teaching that went on in their relationship.

Christina of Markyate Christina was an Anglo-Saxon recluse, later a prioress, in Anglo-Saxon England, whose Vita was probably written for the nuns of her convent.2 However, not all the biography has survived, and the part we have covers the period from her childhood to the 1140s. She was still alive in 1155 and may have lived until 1166. She is believed to have been born between 1096 and 1098, the same time as Hildegard of Bingen. Christopher Holdsworth summarises what is known about her; our two main sources of information about her are her Life and the St Albans Psalter, which was made for her.3 We know very little about the author of The Life of Christina of Markyate, except that he was a monk in the nearby monastery of St Albans, and that he was writing in the monastery itself. The editor and translator, C. H. Talbot, observes: Whoever the writer was, he was very close indeed to Christina. The whole tone of the story is autobiographical rather than historical . . . There is in the narrative a frankness, a vigour of expression, and an economy of words that must reflect direct contact with Christina herself.4 Although he never says that he was her confessor,5 he knows things about her that only a confessor would be likely to know, for [h]e apparently had enough authority to question her about her visions and her gift of foreseeing future events, for besides showing intimate knowledge of her spiritual difficulties, he knew exactly what signs gave her a premonition of some impending supernatural grace. All this is described with such naturalness as could arise only from long familiarity, a familiarity which is emphasized by his reference on one occasion to his having taken a meal with her.6 The anonymous biographer never reveals himself, and Talbot has established that the version we have7 is an edited copy of an original, more detailed, Vita he wrote that no longer exists. If there was a story about the relationship between Christina and this biographer, it is not to be found here. But there is another story – Christina’s relationship with the Norman abbot of St Albans, Geoffrey:

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One of his most prolific sources of information must have been Abbot Geoffrey himself, for in his account of the relationship between the abbot and the recluse, he seems to know Geoffrey’s side of the story with uncanny precision, what he said and did, his perplexity over the sources of Christina’s spiritual knowledge, and his reactions to her teaching.8 Geoffrey died in 1147; I think it is likely that he in fact left a written account of his relationship with Christina. At one point in the text, Christina’s sister Margaret and Geoffrey’s sister Lettice agree that the events in Christina’s and Geoffrey’s relationship deserve to be recorded, as St Gregory had done. The story of Christina and Geoffrey must be seen in the context of the time in England. Christina came from an influential Anglo-Saxon family that had retained its position after the Norman Conquest, and the world she lived in was composed almost entirely of persons of Anglo-Saxon descent. As Holdsworth argues, until Christina met Geoffrey, all the people close to her had Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Scandinavian names: ‘The canon who strengthened her resolve as a girl was called Sueno; the first person she fled to was Aelfwen, a recluse; another hermit Eadwin helped her to escape.’9 All were members of the ‘submerged majority’ who ‘were ministering to the people who were not at home with the Anglo-Norman culture and who may well have found it hard to make themselves understood by their new French-speaking lords’.10 The hermit who trained Christina in meditation must have spoken to her in Anglo-Saxon, for the one phrase in that language in the Latin Vita is Roger’s name for her: ‘myn sunendaege dohter’ (my Sunday’s daughter). As a hermit, Christina was a representative of an older, native English religious culture. During her lifetime, the aftermath of the First Crusade, the age of conflict between pope and emperor, there was popular mistrust of the established Church and a new interest in an apostolic Christianity based more closely on Christ’s life as depicted in the Gospels: For not only was England in the twelfth century a conquered country where those who might have exercised the functions of lordship were often absent from the village communities who needed them, but it shared with the whole of western Christendom a sense of unease about the old centers of power in the church. Both parish clergy, the bishops, and the old cultic centres guided over by monastic bodies under attack from those who sought new standards of behavior, even though their novelty was often disguised as a return to old, apostolic practice or to the life of the desert fathers.11 In this context, it is no accident that Christina was the name the girl Theodora chose as her name in religion, after her father told her in anger, ‘Si enim Christum vis habere: Christum nuda sequere’ (‘If you wish to have Christ, follow Christ naked’).12 Not much later, this became the cry of the Franciscan movement: ‘naked, to follow the naked Christ’. Geoffrey came from a different world, the world of the overlords of England. He was a Norman and, according to one reader of the Christina manuscript, acted just like a Norman (‘more Normanorum’ (‘in the custom of the Normans’), says the marginal note), meaning he behaved arrogantly and thought himself superior.

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He was a man of affairs, a former schoolmaster of Dunstable, who had offered himself as a monk to St. Albans in compensation for the loss of some valuable copes which he had borrowed from the abbey for a play and which had been accidentally burnt whilst they were in his keeping. From the hints dropped by the biographer in the Life one gets the impression that he was a worldly man, rather proud of his success as an administrator and inclined to pay little heed to the opinions and advice of others.13 When Geoffrey and Christina came to know each other, Christina lived at Markyate, in a tiny congregation of female hermits that had grown up around her hermitage. Geoffrey was abbot of the male community of St Albans, a few miles down the road. Everyone seems to have known of the close relationship that developed between these two: The biographer is at pains to emphasize the close spiritual relationship that bound these two people together, the gossip to which it gave rise, and the great advantages which both of them drew from it. Christina always called the abbot ‘her beloved’, whilst he on his side referred to her as his puella. Her affection for him was such that she was continually preoccupied with his welfare and spent more time praying for him than she did for herself, and it was mainly by his persuasion that she agreed to make her profession at St. Albans.14 Christina and Geoffrey met in inauspicious or, rather, confrontational circumstances. He was not known to her personally, but she probably had heard of his arrogance and obstinacy. She had become known in the area as a prophet and a miracle worker, and was venerated by many, but she still had enemies in the Church, dating back to her initial refusal to marry.15 She felt that she needed a protector, someone who could help her to found a women’s house affiliated with St Albans, for, after resolving many doubts, she had recently decided to become a nun. Her biographer sees their meeting as the beginning of an exchange: ‘[I]t was through this man that God had decided to provide for her needs and it was through His virgin that He decided to bring about this man’s full conversion. And this was how it began.’16 Abbot Geoffrey was about to make a big mistake; he risked offending his community because he had in mind ‘a project which he knew could not be accomplished without the annoyance of his chapter and offence against God’. Alvared, a monk who had been converted by Christina and who must have died not long before, appeared in a vision to Christina and explained that Geoffrey had decided on a dangerous course of action, ‘for if he carries it out he will offend God’. He authorised her to intercede in this delicate matter: ‘I beg of you not to let him do it. This is the injunction I bring you from God.’17 This put Christina in the awkward position of having to send an unwelcome message to someone who was her superior and whose help she could use. But being more afraid of offending God than of offending a mere man, she sent a messenger to the abbot to report her vision. Geoffrey did not take it well: He grew angry, considering the message as a piece of nonsense, and sent the man back to the virgin with the advice not to put her trust in dreams. [This is where the marginal note says ‘just like a Norman’.] Nevertheless he was astonished that the virgin should be aware of something that was only in his own mind.18

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Although Geoffrey ignored his message, Christina did not forget hers, and she doubled her efforts, praying with fasting and vigils for Geoffrey to be diverted from his course. That night, Geoffrey was attacked by ‘black and terrifying figures’ and then confronted by ‘the aforesaid Alvared, his eyes and countenance blazing in anger’. There was a stand-off, and ‘[a]t first neither spoke to the other’. When Geoffrey finally asked what he was to do, Alvared replied that Geoffrey knew very well what he was supposed to do, for he had already received a message about it. Geoffrey was very frightened at this and pleaded: ‘Holy Alvared, have pity on me: I will not continue on my evil bent and from now on will obey her messages promptly.’ The next morning, his physical bruises convinced him that the night’s events had really happened, so he called together his confidants and promised to put an end to the project. He also went to speak with Christina in person. He seems to have known what he needed to say: ‘acknowledging his debt to her and thanking her for his deliverance, [h]e promised to avoid everything unlawful, to fulfill her commands, and to help her convent in the future: all he asked was her intercession with God.’19 This first meeting became the pattern for their future meetings: ‘Ever after the man often visited the servant of Christ, heard her admonitions, accepted her advice, consulted her in doubts, avoided evil, bore her reproaches.’20 Even if he had to accept her criticisms, the abbot gained something valuable from these meetings, for, as Christina’s biographer continues: if he went discomfited, he returned comforted; if weary of the vicissitudes of the world, he returned refreshed. He withdrew under the shadow of Him whom lovers find, and when he grew cold in divine love, he was glad to realize that, after speaking with her, he grew fervent.21 Christina, seeing how much progress he was making, ‘cherished him with great affection and loved him with a wonderful but pure love’.22 Again, the biographer points to the element of fair exchange in their relationship: Their affection was mutual, but different according to their standards of holiness. He supported her in worldly matters: she commended him to God more earnestly in her prayers . . . Nor did she make a secret of reproving him harshly in his presence, when she knew that in his absence he had sinned, thinking that the wounds of a friend are better than the flattery of an enemy.23 A loving and thoughtful dialogue was established; each partner was authoritative in one type of matter. Geoffrey’s role as abbot made Christina’s life simpler and safer, and Christina’s role as prophet and confidante strengthened Geoffrey and made his life simpler and safer too. Her prayers saved his life when he thought he was dying – she saw him in a vision and knew how badly he wanted her to be there with him. But there is one important area in which the parity confirmed by their dialogues was not shared: Christina’s gift of prophecy. She always seemed to know what he was up to and often used her sister Margaret as a witness of her foreknowledge concerning him. He could never figure out how she always knew when he was coming to visit her. He tried to test her by telling no one of his planned visit to her, but she knew and told the other sisters to be ready for him.

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He took a long time getting there but finally arrived, saying triumphantly, ‘This time I know my sudden coming took you by surprise.’ As usual, she had the last word; she called Margaret and asked her to repeat what she had already told them.24 This need to test her is probably indicative of his dependence on her insights; since he relied on her in all his decisions, he felt compelled to understand more fully the source of her information.25 Their relationship was mediated by visions and dreams; she was aware of his visions when they happened and was able to be present in them at times. She also had visions of what he was doing in his life as a priest and saw God’s response to his activities. An example of the mutuality of this visionary life is shown in two episodes. The first was a response to Geoffrey’s desire to know how he could ask her how she obtained her knowledge of him. In spite of their closeness, he felt he could not ask her directly what he wanted to know. I quote the passage in its entirety, for it is very revealing of his attitude toward her: [H]e saw himself holding a flowering herb in his hands, the juice of which was very efficacious for driving away maladies. If he squeezed it strongly, little juice came out, but if gently and quietly he would get what he wanted. Next morning he hastened to accompany a religious man, Evisandus, on a visit to the hermitage which he loved. And in discussing the dream as they went, the herb was interpreted as Christina, the flower as the honour of her virginity; he said she should be approached not on impulse, but gently and kindly. This we often experienced later on. He told everything to Christina. For at a very early hour, after having heard the divine Office, she came out of the church and walked in a little enclosure nearby filled with flowers, and plucked the first flower, camilla [sic] which she found. And taking it reverently in her hands, she went towards the abbot as he approached and as if about to greet him said: ‘This is the flower, is it not, which you saw in your vision during the night?’ And she showed him the plant. For she had been told this by a voice which came to her from above . . . In this manner God in his mercy solved the problems of the inquirer and made the loved maiden more lovable to the abbot.26 Perhaps the abbot was not very good in interpersonal relations. The vision tells him in no uncertain terms that gentleness will work when force will not, something he probably needed to learn. The metaphor of the flower is very telling, for the flower he picks, and the one she holds out to him, is a herbal remedy that must be handled carefully if its healing properties are to be effective. After this episode, more trust must have been apparent in their relationship, for Geoffrey was able to ask for her intercession with God in some very delicate matters. Three times he was asked by King Stephen to journey to Rome to consult with the pope about matters concerning Stephen. Each of these missions was personally dangerous, for Stephen was notoriously hostile to the papacy and, thanks to the advice of some evil churchmen, was often equally hostile to the leaders of the English Church, among them Abbot Geoffrey. Each time Christina was very worried for him when he reported that he had been chosen for the mission, and two of the three times Geoffrey himself was very reluctant to obey but was afraid to refuse because of the king’s power. Each time Christina prayed for divine counsel, and each time she was given a vision of Geoffrey’s divine protection. In all three episodes, the symmetry of their experiences is stressed.

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The first time Geoffrey was requested to make this journey, he asked Christina to make him some undergarments for greater comfort while travelling. As she thought about Geoffrey, she heard a voice coming to her from above: ‘Behold the wall.’ And she saw a wall, in which her beloved friend was, as it were, cemented alive. ‘As long’ (it continued) ‘as he is firmly fixed in it, the protection of God will never desert him. But the garments you have prepared for his comfort give as quickly as possible to the poor, because Christ will obtain for him more gracious comfort on his journey.’27 The woven garments were the price of Geoffrey’s protection; he did not have to go to Rome, but she had to give the garments away: ‘So in giving away the garments, she fulfilled the command, whilst He, in keeping back her beloved, confirmed the promise. And she counted it little loss to dispose of the woven stuff so long as he, whom true charity has woven, was prevented from embarking on so onerous a task.’28 Earthly dialogue has been ratified by a celestial colloquy with Christina, in which God and the holy woman exchange valuable objects. The second time, she saw Geoffrey standing happily in a kind of transparent enclosure with no doors or windows. A voice told her, ‘This enclosure which you see has but one doorkeeper, God: and that man cannot come out except by divine intervention.’29 She told Geoffrey, ‘On this account . . . I am confident that you are kept within that enclosure and prevented from setting out on your journey.’ Encouraged by this, Geoffrey hastened to Oxford to argue before the king’s court, while she went to the Eternal King to pray about the same journey. At the king’s court and with the earthly king discussions were held about the abbot’s departure. With God and the celestial King she discussed how the same man might be prevented from departing. She who knew how to love to supreme advantage gained the day.30 Geoffrey’s mission was again cancelled. By coordinating their interviews with their respective kings, both parties obtained what they sought; the symmetry of their colloquies underlines their spiritual communion or dialogue. The third time, Geoffrey’s mission was even more dangerous, and this time Christina’s vision was even more personal: She was rapt in ecstasy and saw herself in the presence of her saviour; and she saw him, whom she loved above all others, encircled with her arms and held closely to her breast. And whilst she feared that, since a man is stronger than a woman, he would free himself from her grasp, she saw Jesus, the helper of the saved, closing her hands with His own loving hand, not by intertwining her fingers with His but by joining them one over the other: so that by joining her hands no less than by the power of her arms she should feel greater strength in holding her friend back.31 This time Christina, not Geoffrey, is the subject of the vision. She holds Geoffrey in her arms, but, as if in response to her fear that he might be strong enough to break out of her grasp, Jesus himself shows her how to strengthen her grip by joining her hands. She has received divine reassurance not only that she ought to hold Geoffrey back, but

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that she is capable of so doing. She has found her centre, in the presence of Christ, and now can rest within it. She continues to be the teacher in the relationship – the very last paragraph of the Vita speaks of her being mindful of Geoffrey day and night and constantly praying for him, and the final clause is ‘sensibly reproving him when his actions were not quite right’.32

Marie d’Oignies Marie d’Oignies, the first known beguine, is probably the best-known example of a lay penitent who has a deep bond with her confessor, Jacques de Vitry.33 But rather than looking at their relationship as described by de Vitry in the Life of B. Marie d’Oignies, I would like to look at their relationship as described by a third person, Thomas de Cantimpré, who wrote after Marie was dead but while Jacques de Vitry was still alive. Thomas wrote the Supplement to the Life of Marie d’Oignies about 1230, just about the time that he left his position as an Augustinian canon of Cantimpré to join the Dominican order. His work is addressed to Prior Giles of Oignies (Marie’s brotherin-law) and to Cardinal Jacques de Vitry, whom Thomas adored as a young man but of whom he had become very critical. As Hugh Feiss says in his introduction to his translation of the Supplement, Thomas ‘portrays a close interaction between professed religious, holy women and laity; he manifests a lofty regard for the religious gifts of women.’34 As well as being experienced and well read in the spiritual life, Thomas has the writerly gifts of the novelist; he is superb at finding the telling details in an anecdote and at recreating the ambience in which an encounter took place. He also has a gift for reproducing speech patterns; whether or not his characters actually said what he attributes to them, we are convinced by the individual voices we hear. In the Supplement, Thomas’s avowed intention is to cite events in the life of Marie relating to Jacques de Vitry that were not included in de Vitry’s Life of Marie. His covert hope is to use this text to recall his beloved master to Liège – a feat he knows even Marie had not been able to accomplish. As Thomas describes their relationship, both Marie and Jacques knew they were destined for each other. When studying in Paris, Jacques learned of her reputation and ‘abandoned his theological studies in which he was immoderately interested and came to Oignies where she had recently gone’.35 Marie went out to meet him upon his arrival and ‘followed in his footsteps, kissing on bended knee the places where he stepped’.36 Urged by a companion to stop this embarrassing behaviour, Marie said she could not: ‘No, no, I can’t. I am forcefully impelled by the spirit who now reveals to me interiorly that God has chosen him from among mortals to exalt him gloriously so that through him the salvation of souls will be miraculously achieved.’37 Marie ‘compelled this venerable man to preach to the people’, and her encouragement (that is, her ‘prayers and merits’) was so successful that ‘he reached in a short time such a pre-eminence in preaching that scarcely any mortal equalled him in expounding the Scriptures and destroying sins.’38 He defended the cause of the holy women in Liège so enthusiastically and effectively that soon news of them extended all over Europe, but Marie knew that his activities would not end there. She foresaw what others were reluctant to admit, that God would ‘raise this man up to an episcopal see in the holy land across the sea’ and that de Vitry would be pulled away from his responsibilities in Liège.

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As Thomas saw it, she was aware that once she was dead, de Vitry would be seduced by higher positions in the Church. Ironically, de Vitry’s famous biography of her, which details the whole movement of feminine piety in the Liège area and his effectiveness as a preacher under her guidance, would be the basis for his rise in the Church. Jacques says that while he was the master in ordinary matters, in matters of the spirit Marie was master. Marie not only had the gift of prophecy, but was a teacher herself, as Thomas shows in an anecdote about a rich businessman whom she had called to a new life. Although this anecdote is not related to Jacques de Vitry, it furthers our knowledge of their relationship by showing us Marie in action. In this situation, as in the Jacques–Marie relationship, both parties recognised each other immediately – she knew he ‘was going to be a vessel of election’, and he, on seeing her face, ‘experienced completely unclouded self-knowledge and felt the spirit of God miraculously at work in him’.39 She gave him teaching on purgatory, emphasising the necessity for purgation and terrifying him by her vivid description of the intensity of the purgatorial flames. At the end of that conversation, she sent him into a nearby church to pray, where he promptly had a vision in which the pyx, in three stages, moved toward him from the altar. After seeing this, ‘[h]is gazing eyes were suddenly covered by his eyelids and he was rapt to interior contemplation.’ His consciousness began to return, and he ran to his ‘mother’, ‘emitting flames of divine fire’ and saying, ‘I will love God without discretion.’ To this she counselled: ‘No, friend, certainly not.’ The handmaid of Christ continued, ‘. . . when the pyx approached you for the third time, like a white dove, He went out of the pyx, encircled you with a gentle, warming flame and thus, through your soul, made his way towards me. So pay no less attention to what I saw: for our Lord Jesus, holding a white cross in His hand, gave testimony on your behalf. Because you had wished with a perfect will to suffer for His truth, you were made His martyr. He promised you that after your death you will pass to the heavenly realm with little or no additional suffering in purgatory.’40 Her teaching on purgatory, and his fear of punishment, brought the merchant to a new and deeper relationship with Christ, one that was mediated by her knowledge. For she not only had precipitated his visionary experience, but had seen it and participated in it, recognising in it a promise that he had already undergone the flames of purgatory and had found them to be the flames of love. Marie’s expertise was not limited to spiritual direction and healing. She was also capable of physically healing this unnamed man and those he loved. He fell ill on a business journey and crawled back to her, barely alive. He asked for some of her hair, confident that it would ‘cure him of his sickness’. She pulled out ‘a bunch of hair’ as easily as if it were a leaf, handed it to him, and left. When he rubbed himself with the hair, he was cured, and he immediately returned to saying the Hail Mary with many genuflections, a practice he had abandoned during his illness. Marie visited him again, saying that she had left him alone so that he could do his spiritual practice. Although he was certainly grateful for the miracle she had performed on his behalf, what evidently seemed perfectly natural to her was understandably disturbing to him. Thomas observes that ‘[h]e was frightened not only by the speedy cure of his illness, but also that she could know immediately when it happened and what he had done in the meantime.’ When he returned

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home to his wife and child, he saw that his little boy had received a terrible head wound. Confident of another miracle, he told his wife to wash the boy’s head. When she did so, she saw the gaping wound and could not continue. The father pushed ‘all the relics of the already tested hair of the holy woman of God into the open wound’.41 While he prayed, the wound closed, leaving only a narrow scar. If we put this portrait of Marie in action next to the figure of Jacques de Vitry, we can see that Thomas has created a portrait of a very powerful woman, a prophet, a teacher and a healer, in a relationship with a very powerful ecclesiastic, a cardinal. Their personal power and authority make them equal – but she has the ability to prophesy and to heal, particular strengths that Jacques has learned to rely on. She was never deceived in her discernment of spirits, says Thomas, a gift any priest would devoutly wish to have. So powerful was she in this area of spiritual knowledge that she (after her death, and through the mediation of Jacques de Vitry) healed the temptation to blasphemy of Bishop Hugolino, a close friend of St Clare of Assisi. Hugolino had confessed to Jacques that a spirit of blasphemy troubles my soul and submerges it with waves of temptations. Almost every day I am driven to desperation . . . It does not allow me to be refreshed and rested by food, drink, or sleep . . . I am as fearful as I can be that I will be unable to carry such a burden and will be completely dislodged from the holy faith.42 Jacques tried to comfort him as best he could and, when this was not enough, gave him his Life of Marie to read and the relic of her finger to wear (a proven relic, for it had saved his life earlier). The bishop found hope in the biography and rest in the relic, for when he was attacked by temptation again, ‘he grasped the finger of the handmaid of Christ in his devout hands’ and prayed for her help. He was instantly ‘illumined with the heavenly light of interior grace’.43 Thus Marie and Jacques together saved for the Church the future Pope Gregory IX. Another bishop was also saved by the intercession of Marie, this time without the aid of Jacques de Vitry. Thomas does not reveal his name in the Supplement, but in his Bonum Universale he is identified as ‘Conrad, a former canon of St Lambert of Liège who became abbot of Villiers and finally a cardinal’.44 He had great veneration for her during her life and returned from Italy to pray at her tomb: ‘Suddenly he was rapt in spirit and saw the venerable Marie, risen from her place of rest, praying with extended hand and bended knees opposite the holy altar, interceding to the Lord on his behalf. The manner of his exceptional vision gave the bishop great joy.’45 According to Thomas, Marie’s relationship with Jacques was not one of uncritical admiration, either in life or after her death. She rescued Jacques from drowning once, but not without using the opportunity to rebuke him. Shipwreck seemed imminent, and everyone on the ship was invoking a favourite saint; Jacques invoked Marie. He seemed to swoon and saw her speaking to him: ‘Behold I, your protector, am here because you called me. I really did love you in life and since my life ended, I have been ceaselessly praying for your salvation.’ She promised him that he would not die then and conducted him in spirit to a church in Oignies, where she showed him five altars, the fifth of which he was supposed to consecrate to the Trinity. She concluded with a prophecy and a comment on his character:

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If you wish, before this altar Christ will give you the peace you have sought . . . But you are a man with a will of your own, and you have never wanted to accede to my counsels and the counsels of those who loved you spiritually. You have always walked according to your own judgements, rather than the judgements of others.46 Jacques promptly asked to be released from the episcopate and returned to Oignies. He told no one of his experience until the church of Oignies was completed and the five altars were in place, just as Marie had shown them to him. When he asked Prior Giles to whom the fifth altar was to be dedicated, Giles told him that during a recent illness, he had made a vow to consecrate it to the Trinity. Evidently Marie did not trust Jacques alone with the task, but when ‘the bishop heard this in great wonderment, he was filled with inestimable joy. He was frightened and wondrously venerated the outcome of divine revelation manifest in all things.’47 When Pope Honorius III died, Bishop Hugolino was named pope, and Jacques wanted to go to Rome to see him. The prior and the brothers were afraid (quite rightly, as it turned out) that the pope would keep Jacques with him ‘by entangling him in some dignity’. As she had done before at crucial junctures in his life, Marie appeared to him; he dreamed that he was anointing her as if she were ill: [S]he looked at him with a stem face, as though indignant, and said, ‘Since your book of rites does not contain my kind of anointing, you certainly can’t anoint me. But anoint our prior and the brothers since, like me, they gravely weakened by your departure’ . . . However, he was not turned back from his plan, but made all the arrangements to begin his journey. Jacques was not the only one who turned to Marie for aid over this matter. Prior Giles also turned to Marie in prayer, to ask her to block Jacques’s journey. In a vision, she said to him: ‘You needn’t doubt that I am just as opposed as you are to the bishop’s journey. Hence, I will not accompany him as he goes; rather, three women will accompany him. He won’t escape their hands. So let him do what he wants; you can’t turn him from his purpose now.’ Thomas, good storyteller that he is, does not end the episode here. Prior Giles was awakened from this vision by Jacques de Vitry’s voice and told de Vitry what Marie had just told him: The bishop was not impressed by these words. He laughingly rejoined to the prior, ‘Lady Marie said the same thing to me. I am not moved by such things . . . I will return faster than you expect. Don’t be upset, dearest brother. Truthfully, love, it would be hard for me, and even harder for him, if I didn’t visit and see such a good friend in such circumstances. Besides, I don’t believe it; indeed I certainly presume that, contrary to your fears, the pope will not detain me with him if I am unwilling.’48 Of course, Marie knew him better than he knew himself. He did not return to Liège from Rome, and Thomas used the remainder of the Supplement (five pages out of thirtysix) to plead with de Vitry to return to Liège, where he was more needed. He concludes with a statement of his own motivation:

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With what charity I love you, with what sincere love I embrace you, He knows who knows all things. When I was not yet fifteen years old and you were not a bishop, I heard you preaching in Lorraine. I loved you with such veneration that I was happy just at the sound of your name . . . So, holy father, forgive me, especially since I have only recalled to your mind things you saw revealed long ago. I wish that if . . . my love is able to obtain your return, which is the goal of its desire, I will not be charged a big penalty for my foolishness, even though I have presumed to provoke you, a venerable cardinal . . . with rather rude, if loving, words.49 For Thomas to make his plea to Jacques de Vitry, he has brought Marie back from the other world to support his goals. So vivid is his portrayal of her that the reader forgets that Marie had been dead for seventeen years when the Supplement was written. Yet with this conclusion, it is clear that the female discourse of Marie has become embedded as narrative in a male discourse and, in fact, has been exploited to serve the needs of that discourse. What is at stake is Thomas’s criticism of his one-time mentor, Jacques, and Marie’s comprehension and criticism of that same Jacques is not as important in itself as it is as part of a male ideology of leadership. By its existence as a text, the Supplement testifies to the incompleteness of de Vitry’s work in Liège; Jacques could not finish the Life of Marie any better than he could fulfil his task of spiritual leadership there. Of course, Marie may be having the last laugh on both of them, since she knew that Jacques would not be returning to Liège and probably had the prescience to know that Thomas’s criticism of him would not count any more than hers did.

Margery Kempe The Book of Margery Kempe gives us another point of view on the confessor–penitent relationship.50 Margery Kempe was the daughter of the five-time mayor of Lynn. She was married at twenty to John Kempe, with whom she had fourteen children, only one of whom seems to have lived to adulthood. In order to tell her story, she invented the first autobiography in English, just as in her life she invented a new religious role, a blend of personal asceticism, public apostolate and pilgrimage.51 Her first mystical experience took place when she was twenty, when Christ, quite unexpectedly, appeared to her and healed her of severe postpartum depression.52 More mystical experiences followed, and, as she spoke to various confessors seeking understanding and support for her visions and her lifestyle, someone suggested that she dictate her life story. She did not do so at the time, but twenty years later, when she was in her sixties, she sought out an amanuensis who could help her. Three kinds of confessor–penitent dialogues are evident in her book. She solicits one kind of dialogue as she confesses her life and narrates her visions and ‘felynges’ to her spiritual advisers. Ecclesiastics solicit another kind of dialogue when, believing in her gift of prophecy, they want to know about themselves, their own spiritual states and the fates of others.53 A third kind of dialogue ensues when she is attacked for her behaviour and defends herself to male ecclesiastics. All these kinds of dialogue refer to a fourth and higher type, her dialogues with God and the Virgin Mary. All these successful verbal constructions are counterpointed by an insistent and inarticulate voice – the sound of Margery’s weeping. For accompanying Margery’s forays

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into ever more successful dialogue is an increasingly loud and uncontrollable weeping. For most readers of Margery, and certainly for her contemporaries, this weeping characterised her and made her visible (audible). As Dhira Mahoney reminds us, The Book of Margery Kempe recounts many dramatic incidents when its author’s recollections of Christ’s Passion result in uncontrollable weeping and loud cries, sometimes accompanied by bodily convulsions. These tears and cries exasperate Margery’s contemporaries, to the point that they seek to ban her from attendance at public sermons and even from communion.54 Mahoney argues that Margery, in seeking a new kind of religious life for herself, needed ‘to find physical markers that would perform the same function as enclosure, that would announce her separation from society, her holiness, and her link with God’.55 Like the dialogues with those around her, the tears ‘are signs of the visionary experiences that she alone is privileged to witness’.56 Until she can write her book, her tears are her voice, ‘in a world which would deny that voice’.57 In this sense, ‘Margery’s tears are a sign of her power, her link with the Other.’58 In the real world, tears accomplish the same thing that her dialogues do in the world of her book – they prove that she is a participant in the divine world. The intensity of her cries may be related in part to the depth of her need to prove her link with divinity, in the face of public scorn and disbelief. As a married woman belonging to no religious order but having a strong sense of personal vocation, she was very dependent on her various confessors for validation, both of the truth of her visions and of the appropriateness of her life choices. She begins the book with her bout of insanity when she was twenty, caused, she asserts, by her confessor’s maladroit handling of her confession: When this creature was twenty years of age, or somewhat more, she was married to a worshipful burgess [of Lynn] and was with child within a short time, as nature would have it. And after she had conceived, she was troubled with severe attacks of sickness until the child was born. And then, what with the labour-pains she had in childbirth and the sickness that had gone before, she despaired of her life, believing she might not live. Then she sent for her confessor, for she had a thing on her conscience which she had never revealed before that time in all her life . . . And when she came to the point of saying that thing which she had so long concealed, her confessor was a little too hasty and began sharply to reprove her before she had fully said what she meant, and so she would say no more in spite of anything he might do. And soon after, because of the dread she had of damnation on the one hand, and his sharp reproving of her on the other, this creature went out of her mind.59 This opening page establishes without a doubt that this is a woman’s book, concerned with women’s experiences and women’s spiritual needs. Margery’s need for reassurance from a confessor is probably typical of what most medieval women sought. She refers to herself in the third person as ‘this creature’. This device may be a result of the necessity of dictating her story to a male writer who may very well see her this way. It may be a sign of her modesty and insecurity; it may be intended to suggest symmetry between the voice of ‘this creature’ and the creator who also speaks at length, or it may be a way of identifying her experiences with those of all women, who as women are less mind and more body, more ‘creature’, than their male contemporaries.

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One episode among many shows the interconnection of her spiritual dialogues and her earthly ones. In Chapter 12, God tells her that she is pregnant again;60 she is troubled by worries about caring for the child, and she feels ‘unworthy’ to hear God speak to her when she is still having sex with her husband. God reassures her: ‘I love you, daughter, as much as any maiden in the world.’61 He encourages his mother to verify this, and she too assures Margery, ‘Daughter, I am your Mother, your lady and your mistress, to teach you in every way how you shall please God best.’ The only person to whom she can tell this is her spiritual director: [The Virgin] taught this creature and informed her so marvelously that she was embarrassed to tell it to anybody, the matter was so high and holy, except to the anchorite who was her principal confessor, for he was most knowledgeable in such things. And he charged this creature – by virtue of obedience – to tell him whatever she felt, and so she did.62 Her marriage and her sexual experience trouble her, because they seem to contradict what she has heard of holy women.63 She cannot believe that she can be holy and loved by God if she is married: ‘Because I am no virgin, lack of virginity is now great sorrow to me. I think I wish I had been killed as soon as I was taken from the font, so that I would never have displeased you.’64 God comforts her in her despair and convinces her that her married state is not an impediment: I have told you before that you are a singular lover of God, and therefore you shall have a singular love in heaven, a singular reward and a singular honour. And because you are a maiden in your soul, I shall take you by the one hand in heaven, and my mother by the other, and so you shall dance in heaven with other holy maidens and virgins, for I may call you my dearly bought and my own beloved darling.65 Unlike Marie and Christina, Margery often has trouble interpreting these feelings: ‘She sometimes had such great trouble with such feelings when they did not ring true to her understanding, that her confessor feared that she would fall into despair at them.’66 The chapter on her colloquies with God and her confessor is immediately followed by a chapter devoted to dialogues solicited by those who were to exploit or learn by her gift of prophecy. Foremost among them is the priest who wrote down her book; he refuses to write for her unless she tells him about the future: [I]n order to test this creature’s feelings, [he] asked her questions many different times about things that were to come – things of which the outcome was unsure and uncertain to anybody at that time – asking her, although she was loath and unwilling to do such things, to pray to God and discover when our Lord would visit her with devotion, what the outcome would be, and then truly, without any pretending, tell him how she felt, or else he would not have gladly written the book.67 She gives him the information, but in circumstances that reveal his own lack of insight. A young man came to him, claiming to be a priest who had got into trouble in his home parish (he had fatally wounded several persons in the course of defending himself) and asking for his aid. The priest told the young man’s story to some well-to-do friends in

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Lynn, hoping that they would give him money for the young man. Margery overheard the conversation and had an immediate intuition that charity would be wasted on the young man and should better be given to others in Lynn who were more needy. She warned the priest: ‘Don’t you get involved with him, for he will deceive you in the end.’68 But the priest gave in to the young man’s importunities and lent him money. The young man never returned to repay it. The priest was almost taken in a second time, this time by an old man who wanted to sell him a breviary, ‘a good little book’, but this time the priest went to Margery and asked her advice. She told him not to trust the seller, and when the priest questioned him about where he got the book, the old man was evasive and went away without making the sale.69 Other examples Margery provides indicate that she could be a reassuring confessor herself and relieve the doubts of others. A vicar came to her, ‘asking her to pray for him and discover whether he would please God more by leaving his cure of souls and his benefice, or by keeping it, because he thought he was of no use among his parishioners’.70 Margery kept his situation in mind when she was praying, and Christ provided useful advice she could pass on to the questioner: Tell the vicar to keep his cure and his benefice, and be diligent in preaching and teaching to them in person, and sometimes to procure others to teach them my laws and my commandments, so that there is no fault on his part, and if they don’t do any better, his reward shall be none the less for it.71 Thus encouraged, the vicar kept his cure, and the advice to enlist the help of others in areas where he may have felt inadequate was no doubt useful. Another priest, who had protected Margery in Rome, accompanied her back to England but was fearful of being killed by certain enemies. She was able to return his assistance to her by assuring him that he would travel safely ‘by the grace of God’. Both parties gained from this exchange, ‘[a]nd he was much comforted by her words, for he greatly trusted in her feelings, and along their route he treated her as warmly as if he had been her own son, born of her body’.72 Margery knew when to use her gift of prophecy and when it would be dangerous to do so, and she was quite able to protect herself. She had narrowly escaped being tried as a Lollard in several towns when she came to Lincoln and was approached by the men of a powerful lord in the region, who ‘swore a great many oaths, saying, “We’ve been given to understand that you can tell us whether we shall be saved or damned”’. She met their challenge by asserting: Yes, truly I can, for as long as you swear such horrible oaths, and break God’s commandment as knowingly as you do, and will not leave your sin, I dare well say you shall be damned. And if you will be contrite, and shriven of your Sin, willingly do penance and leave sin while you may, with a will to turn back to it no more, I dare well say you shall be saved.73 Like Marie d’Oignies and Christina of Markyate, Margery was a teacher and a corrector of ecclesiastics, even when she was in great danger herself. She was brought to trial before the archbishop of York on charges of heresy. Although she was so afraid that ‘her flesh trembled and quaked amazingly, so that she was glad to put her hands under

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her clothes so that it should not be noticed,’74 she held her own and gave back as good as she got. When the archbishop asked her why she cried so loudly, she said, ‘Sir, you shall wish some day that you had wept as sorely as I.’ He examined her in the articles of faith and found nothing to criticise in her ready responses. Not knowing what to do next, for his clerics were very opposed to her, he said, ‘I am told very bad things about you. I hear it said that you are a very wicked woman.’ Not to be deterred by this, she rejoined, ‘Sir, I also hear it said that you are a wicked man. And if you are as wicked as people say, you will never get to heaven, unless you amend while you are here.’ By this time, the archbishop wanted only to get her out of his district, so he asked her to swear that she would not ‘teach people or call them to account in my diocese’.75 Her eloquent refusal is a defence of women’s rights to be moral teachers: ‘No, sir, I will not swear,’ she said, ‘for I shall speak of God and rebuke those who swear great oaths wherever I go, until such time that the Pope and Holy Church have ordained that nobody shall be so bold as to speak of God, for God Almighty does not forbid, sir, that we should speak of him. And also the Gospel mentions that, when the woman had heard our Lord preach, she came before him and said in a loud voice, “Blessed be the womb that bore you, and the teats that gave you suck.” Then our Lord replied to her, “In truth, so are they blessed who hear the word of God and keep it.” And therefore, sir, I think that the Gospel gives me leave to speak of God.’76 In her defence, she invokes the female body as sanctified by Christ’s words and parallels this with a woman’s voice blessing the body that bore Christ. This new public discourse enables her to sanctify that female body with which she began her book. All writers of autobiography discover themselves anew when they write their lives, and certainly this is true for Margery. Perhaps her actual statements in court were not as pithy as they are when she dictates them; she has had thirty years to think about what she said. But she cannot have strayed too far from the record, for in her audience were people who still remembered stories about her. For her, the empowerment that came from visions allowed her the luxury of a dialogue with herself, as she orally composed her own story.

Conclusion In reviewing these three accounts of confessor–penitent relationships, we have seen that visionary authority indeed provided women with a voice and the content for teaching. The three texts are driven by three different purposes. The Life of Christina of Markyate, although it presents a great deal of autobiographical material, focuses on the dialogues between Christina and the men who would supervise her, most importantly on the exchanges between Christina and Geoffrey, dilectus and puella. The Supplement to the Life of Marie d’Oignies completes and corrects the earlier Life of Marie d’Oignies by foregrounding dialogues between Marie and her first biographer that were not included in the first biography, exploiting Marie’s assumption of authority in her relationship with Jacques de Vitry for the ends of a rival biographer. The Book of Margery Kempe uses examples of dialogue, themselves made possible by Margery’s divine colloquies, to demonstrate the acquisition of a voice subsequent to the acquisition of visionary authority.

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One of the elements common to all three discourses is the audacity of the female voice. This audacity is all the more improbable because of the irregular status of all three women. Each had chosen to live out an isolated and self-defined religious role, a dangerous project for any woman; in these three lives, that unique role was the consequence of a deliberate rejection, on the one hand, of marriage and therefore of the social world and, on the other, of typical convent life in an enclosed community. Those were the choices the medieval world offered women, and those were the choices that these women could not and did not make.77 By shattering the stereotypes of the good nun and the good wife, these women gave birth to themselves, and furthered that growth, and the growth of the men around them, by engaging in dialogue with them.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

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Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 183–5. For more about Christina’s life, see Chapters 1 and 2 of Elizabeth Petroff’s Body and Soul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Christopher J. Holdsworth, ‘Christina of Markyate’, in Derek Baker (ed.), Medieval Women (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), pp. 185–204. C. H. Talbot (ed. and trans.), The Life of Christina of Markyate [De S. Theodora Virgine, Quae et dicitur Christina] (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 6. Talbot notes that ‘it may be that although he was a monk of St. Albans, he was attached to Markyate in some official capacity, such as chaplain or confessor’ (Talbot, Life of Christina, p. 7). Talbot, Life of Christina, p. 7 The British Museum Manuscript that contains the Life of Christina is Cotton Tiberius E.I., vol. 2. Talbot, Life of Christina, p. 8. Holdsworth, ‘Christina of Markyate’, pp. 202–3. Holdsworth, ‘Christina of Markyate’, p.  203. Christina could read French, for the Life of St Alexis in her psalter is the French Chançon d’Alexis. For a fine analysis of this story, and its appropriateness to Christina, see Brigitte Cazelles, The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagiographic Romances of the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), pp. 21–7. In fact, an examination of the St Albans Psalter reveals that Christina read French and Latin as well as Anglo-Saxon. Holdsworth, ‘Christina of Markyate’, p. 204. Talbot, Life of Christina, p. 72. The English translation is our own [editors]. Talbot, Life of Christina, p. 28. Talbot, Life of Christina, p. 9. For the story of this period of Christina’s life, see C. H. Talbot (trans.), ‘Of S. Theodora, a Virgin, Who Is Called Christina’, in Elizabeth A. Petroff (ed.), Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 144–50; and Chapter 1 of Petroff, Body and Soul. Talbot, Life of Christina, p. 135. Talbot, Life of Christina, p. 135. Talbot, Life of Christina, p. 137. Talbot, Life of Christina, p. 139. Talbot, Life of Christina, p. 139. Talbot, Life of Christina, p. 139. Talbot, Life of Christina, p. 139. Talbot, Life of Christina, pp. 139–41. Talbot, Life of Christina, pp. 143–5. For another point of view on this episode, see Chapter 3 in Petroff, Body and Soul.

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35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51

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55 56 57

58

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Talbot, Life of Christina, p. 153. Talbot, Life of Christina, p. 161. Talbot, Life of Christina, p. 163. Talbot, Life of Christina, p. 165. Talbot, Life of Christina, p. 165. Talbot, Life of Christina, p. 169. Talbot, Life of Christina, p. 193. For more about Marie’s life, see Chapter 3 in Petroff, Body and Soul. Thomas de Cantimpré, Supplement to the Life of Marie d’Oignies, ed. and trans. Hugh Feiss (Toronto: Peregrina Press, 1989), p. vii. Thomas de Cantimpré, Supplement, p. 5. Thomas de Cantimpré, Supplement, p. 6. Thomas de Cantimpré, Supplement, p. 6. Thomas de Cantimpré, Supplement, p. 5. Thomas de Cantimpré, Supplement, p. 7. Thomas de Cantimpré, Supplement, pp. 8–9. Thomas de Cantimpré, Supplement, p. 11. Thomas de Cantimpré, Supplement, p. 22. Thomas de Cantimpré, Supplement, p. 24. Thomas de Cantimpré, Supplement, p. 49. Thomas de Cantimpré, Supplement, p. 26. Thomas de Cantimpré, Supplement, p. 28. Thomas de Cantimpré, Supplement, p. 29. Thomas de Cantimpré, Supplement, p. 31. Thomas de Cantimpré, Supplement, p. 36. The original Middle English text was published in Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Leech and Hope Emily Allen (London: Oxford University Press, 1940). The translation used in this essay is by B. A. Windeatt, The Book of Margery Kempe (New York: Penguin, 1985). Elizabeth A. Petroff, ‘Women Writers of the Late Fourteenth Century – Seeking Models: Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Doña Leonor López de Córdoba, and Christine de Pizan’, in Elizabeth A. Petroff (ed.), Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 301. Maureen Fries, ‘Margery Kempe’, in Paul Szarmach (ed.), An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), pp. 217–35. According to Fries, Margery suffered ‘a painful and lengthy postpartum depression (apparently at its unipolar manic phase) following upon a first childbirth’ (p. 219). ‘. . . God gave her great gifts, especially prophecy: she advised a vicar to keep his cure, knew the condition of dead and live souls and who should live and who die, correctly foretold that two men trusted by the priest who wrote her book were con men (this is obviously a future reference) and predicted a Benedictine Chapel’s failure to receive the right to baptize and purify. No wonder she could see the host “flicker” like a dove, especially with Christ’s assurance that St. Bridget “saw me never in this wise”’ (Fries, ‘Margery Kempe’, p. 221). Fries’s essay gives a useful summary of Margery’s book. Dhira Mahoney, ‘Margery Kempe’s Tears and the Power over Language’ (Paper presented at the twenty-fifth International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, 10 May 1990). Mahoney, ‘Margery Kempe’s Tears’, p. 3. Mahoney, ‘Margery Kempe’s Tears’, p. 4. Elizabeth A. Petroff, ‘Introduction: The Visionary Tradition in Women’s Writings: Dialogue and Autobiography’, in Elizabeth A. Petroff (ed.), Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 39. Mahoney, ‘Margery Kempe’s Tears’, p. 7.

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64 65

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Margery Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, p. 42. Margery Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, p. 84. Margery Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, p. 85. Margery Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, p. 86. For her time, she was very right to be concerned. Fries summarises the patristic attitude towards women: ‘Margery was a married woman when her mystic experience began, and this state of life was not only inferior to virginity but also to widowhood (no wonder she had so much trouble with widows); her state of life precluded the claims she made to direct revelation from God’ (Mahoney, ‘Margery Kempe’, p. 229). Furthermore, she was not enclosed, and she journeyed constantly – the antithesis of monastic stability. Margery Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, p. 86. Margery Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, p. 88. Janel M. Mueller holds that after the experiences detailed in this section of Margery’s book (which includes a lengthy and reassuring interview with Julian of Norwich), Margery ‘attains a level of confidence that never recedes, despite intermittent doubts and challenges’ (‘Autobiography of a New “Creatur”’, in Domna C. Stanton and Jeanine F. Plottel (eds), The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 57–69). What Mueller focuses on in this period is not so much the dialogues as the tears which Margery experiences. Yet she adds, ‘One major aspect in which female spirituality, selfhood, and authorship come together is in the formation of blocks or sequences of narrative that address the question of giving credence to Margery, to what she says and does’ (p. 59). Margery Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, p. 90. This is not the only time she mentions her doubts and confusion about her ‘feelings’. Just before her trip to the Holy Land, she had doubts about Christ’s revelations to her concerning the damned and the saved; as punishment for this doubt, she was tormented by lecherous thoughts about men’s members, particularly those belonging to men of religion. This went on for twelve days, until Margery declared that she believed what Christ had revealed to her (Fries, ‘Margery Kempe’, p. 224). Margery Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, p. 90. Margery Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, p. 92. Margery Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, pp. 93–4. Margery Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, p. 88. Margery Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, p. 89. Margery Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, p. 138. Margery Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, p. 174. Margery Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, p. 162. Margery Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, p. 164. Margery Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, p. 164. Christina of Markyate did end up turning her hermit community into a convent, but she did this after she had gained a reputation as a holy woman, and she did it on her own terms. In any case, her Life is not interested in her as a nun.

Works Cited Bynum, Caroline Walker, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Cazelles, Brigitte, The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagiographic Romances of the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). Fries, Maureen, ‘Margery Kempe’, in Paul Szarmach (ed.), An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), pp. 217–35.

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Holdsworth, Christopher J., ‘Christina of Markyate’, in Derek Baker (ed.), Medieval Women (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), pp. 185–204. Mahoney, Dhira, ‘Margery Kempe’s Tears and the Power over Language’ (Paper presented at the twenty-fifth International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, 10 May 1990). Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Leech and Hope Emily Allen (London: Oxford University Press, 1940). Mueller, Janel M., ‘Autobiography of a New “Creatur”’, in Domna C. Stanton and Jeanine F. Plottel (eds), The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 57–69. Petroff, Elizabeth A., Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Petroff, Elizabeth A., ‘Introduction: The Visionary Tradition in Women’s Writings: Dialogue and Autobiography’, in Elizabeth Petroff (ed.), Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 3–59. Petroff, Elizabeth A., ‘Women Writers of the Late Fourteenth Century – Seeking Models: Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Doña Leonor López de Córdoba, and Christine de Pizan’, in Elizabeth Petroff (ed.), Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 299–307. Talbot, C. H. (ed. and trans.), The Life of Christina of Markyate [De S. Theodora Virgine, Quae et dicitur Christina] (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959). Talbot, C. H. (trans.), ‘Of S. Theodora, a Virgin, Who Is Called Christina’, in Elizabeth A. Petroff (ed.), Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Thomas de Cantimpré, Supplement to the Life of Marie d’Oignies, ed. and trans. Hugh Feiss (Toronto: Peregrina Press, 1989). Windeatt, B. A. (trans.), The Book of Margery Kempe (New York: Penguin, 1985).

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II Self-Representation

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3 The Empowerment of Teresa de Cartagena through Her Patroness Juana de Mendoza BORJA DE COSSÍO*

Introduction Teresa de Cartagena was a Cistercian nun who is renowned for having been the first woman in Spain to defend the case of women as writers. The essay I am contributing to this book deals with the empowerment of Teresa de Cartagena as observed in her second work, Admiraçión operum Dey (Wonder at the Works of God), through the alliance that she established with her patroness Juana de Mendoza in order to authorise her status as a female writer. Teresa was born to one of the most influential families in Castile at the time, the de Cartagena family. She became notorious after the Inquisition doubted the authorship of her first work, Arboleda de los enfermos (Grove of the Infirm), in which she reflected upon the effects of her deafness in her social and religious experience. Thus, after the accusations of literary fraud, she decided to compose her second work Admiraçión operum Dey to fight her male detractors and empower her case as a female writer. One of the mechanisms that Teresa used to authorise her writing was the relationship that she had with her patroness, Juana de Mendoza, who was a noblewoman belonging to another powerful family in Castile, the Mendoza family and was married to Gómez Manrique, a famous chansonnier poet at the time and appointed mayor of the town of Toledo by the king. Furthermore, Juana also became a political force in the court of Queen Isabella at the end of the fifteenth century. Therefore, Teresa might have used the power and influence of her patroness, as her dedicatee, to defend herself against the aforementioned accusations with the ultimate goal of empowering her writing in her second work. As Teresa empowered her writing, she made the case that women should have access to letters and become writers. Thus, as mentioned above, the main aim of this essay is to analyse the authorisation of Teresa de Cartagena in her second work through her relationship with her patroness, Juana de Mendoza. In order to observe this empowerment, I will frame the alliance between the two women in the conceptualisation of female community, which has been popular within the scholarship devoted to the study of early modern women in the last fifteen years.1 Teresa would form a strong bond (or alliance) with Juana de Mendoza, which would be crucial in her second treatise to fight

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accusations of literary fraud and effect a final reconciliation with her community. Juana de Mendoza’s social status and influence were solid tools to defend Teresa’s act of writing. Both being intellectual, educated and noblewomen, they created an intellectual alliance in order for Teresa to achieve her purpose.

Biographical Information on Teresa de Cartagena Little is known about Teresa de Cartagena, but the biographical information that has survived to this day reveals that she was born in Castile around 1425.2 There is uncertainty about her city of birth, but she spent her childhood in Burgos, where her family, the Santa María de Cartagena family, was an influential religious force in that town during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Her grandfather, Pablo de Santa María de Cartagena, became bishop of Burgos in 1412, after his conversion to Christianity in 1390. Pablo de Santa María had been the rabbi of the same town under the name of Selomoh ha-Levi. Teresa de Cartagena’s father, Pedro de Cartagena, was the third son of Pablo de Santa María and had a successful career at the court of John II, where he became a knight to the Crown. Due to the intellectual background of her family, Teresa de Cartagena was educated, and it is believed that she studied at the University of Salamanca for a short period of time but did not receive a degree from this institution. After her studies in Salamanca, Teresa joined the Franciscan Monasterio de Santa Clara in Burgos, where her incipient deafness started to manifest itself in the 1450s, possibly between 1453 and 1459. Teresa stayed in that convent until she had to abandon it owing to disagreements with other nuns who allegedly isolated Teresa because of her bodily infirmity. Afterwards, Teresa went to the famous Cistercian convent of Las Huelgas in Burgos, where she resided until her death and composed her two main works Arboleda de los enfermos and Admiraçión operum Dey.3 The exact date of her death is still unknown, but it was during the last two decades of the fifteenth century. Her situation as a writer was mainly marked by the fact that she suffered attacks from the Inquisition after the publication of Arboleda de los enfermos, in which Teresa described the effects of her deafness. As the work develops, she reflects upon her hearing disability and accepts it in order for her to profess a more contemplative life experience. Shortly after her first work came to light, the Inquisition accused Teresa of plagiarism, stating that a woman could not have had the gift of writing such an exceptional work. To paraphrase Joseph Hutton, Arboleda de los enfermos was not in itself great prose, but it was representative of the Castilian narrative genre produced in the fifteenth century.4 Ironically, this statement contrasts with the aforementioned attacks on her authorship from the Inquisition, which acknowledged the great quality of her work. Consequently, Teresa de Cartagena replied to the objections of the Inquisition with her second work, Admiraçión operum Dey, which is considered to be the first proto-feminist treatise in the history of Spanish literature. According to Amy Katz Kaminsky, Teresa’s second work can be framed in a proto-feminist movement occurring in Europe throughout the fifteenth century with writers such as Christine de Pizan. Kaminsky emphasises that Teresa was the only woman in Spain to contribute to this debate:

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Teresa de Cartagena, a nun, became the first Spanish woman to write a defense of women’s writing [Admiraçión operum Dey]. She was the only woman (in Spain) to participate in the so-called feminist debate that took place throughout the 1400s and she embroiled herself in it to defend her own right to authorship.5 Hence Teresa’s works gain voice not only within the standards of Spanish literature, but also as part of women’s literary production that had arisen in Europe before her time, and to which she contributed with her second treatise. María Milagros Rivera Garretas also revisits this proto-feminist idea comparing the works of Christine de Pizan, Perpetua and Teresa de Cartagena.6 In acknowledging Teresa’s work as the first proto-feminist treatise in the history of Spanish literature, we need to consider that, after the attacks from the Inquisition, Teresa created a work, in which she defends her case as a writer, basing her argument on three main images: (1) Judith, (2) the metaphor of the bark/pith in a tree and (3) the blind man on the road to Jericho, as will be discussed below. In order to authorise every image, she introduces direct references to Juana de Mendoza, who helps her empower each strategy. However, being a devout nun, she reiterates that only God can bestow this literary gift on women as he has likewise done with men. In sum, Teresa authorises her writing with these images, but also relies on the power and position of her patroness to empower herself.

Literature Review The bulk of scholarship on Teresa de Cartagena’s work has grown considerably since the start of the new millennium. Previously, only Joseph Hutton, Alain Deyermond, María Milagros Rivera Garretas and Ronald Surtz had conducted extensive research on the figure of Teresa de Cartagena. Joseph Hutton’s foundational work on Teresa was included in the introduction to his critical edition of the two works by Teresa de Cartagena. He provides biographical information about the nun and her family as well as establishing the reasons why the Inquisition accused Teresa of plagiarism, drawing parallels between the Arboleda and El libro de las consolaciones de la vida humana (The Book of the Consolations of Human Life) written by Pope Benedict XIII (Don Pedro de Luna). More recently, Milagros Rivera Garretas and Victoria Rivera Cordero, among others, have contributed to the feminist debate surrounding Teresa de Cartagena, and Yonsoo Kim has become one of the most prolific experts on Teresa de Cartagena’s spiritual life, having conducted interesting research on the bodily pain that Teresa suffered as expressed in her writings. In particular, Rivera Garretas has published two articles that are important for the development of this essay: one on Juana de Mendoza’s biographical information, which provides information on the origins of her friendship with Teresa de Cartagena,7 and another on the wills of Juana de Mendoza and her husband, giving evidence of Juana’s influence in the court of Queen Isabella.8 In tracing the evolution of interpretation of Teresa de Cartagena’s life and works in more detail, there have been four main topics to which scholars of Teresa de Cartagena have devoted their research: her situation as a woman writer and her authorship (and consequently her revolutionary proto-feminist views); her converso heritage;9 her hearing disability;10 her suffering11 and possible mysticism.12 Likewise, there are critics who

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examine her triple marginalisation as a woman, a deaf person and a conversa.13 For this essay, it is pertinent to observe the history of the scholarship regarding the attacks on authorship and the consequent response from Teresa to authorise her writing, since one of the mechanisms that she implements to achieve her goal is to use the power and influence of her patroness Juana de Mendoza. Joseph Hutton (in 1968) is the first to analyse Teresa de Cartagena’s work and her act of writing, stating that ‘los tratados de Teresa de Cartagena no pertenecen a la más alta categoría de la creación literaria . . . pero fue Teresa la primera mujer en la historia de la Península Ibérica que escribiera en defensa del derecho de la mujer a ser literata’ (‘Teresa de Cartagena’s treatises do not possess the highest literary quality . . . but Teresa was the first woman in the history of the Iberian Peninsula to defend the right of women to become women of letters’).14 Luis Miguel Vicente García (1989) compares the case of Teresa de Cartagena and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in light of the defence of the woman as an intellectual being. This comparison is revisited by María del Mar Cortés Timoner (2004) in her article on both women writers. Dayle Seidenspinner-Nuñez (1993) comments on the gendered hermeneutics of Teresa de Cartagena highlighting the subversive tone of her poetics. Yadira F. Calvo (1994) writes an article in which she compares the case of Teresa de Cartagena, María de Zayas and Sor Juana in their defences of women writing, stating that these three women writers composed their works under a proto-feminist discourse. Ronald Surtz’s famous article (1995), ‘The New Judith: Teresa de Cartagena’, included in his book Writing Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain, is an excellent example of the type of scholarship devoted to how Teresa managed to empower her case as a writer.15 In his article, he discusses the creation and recreation of certain images (the bark/pith in a tree, the Old Testament Judith and the blind man on the road to Jericho), which served Teresa to build her authorship defence. However, Surtz problematises the limits of Teresa’s feminism, as her act of writing is an isolated case among women at the time, as Teresa herself also acknowledges. In relation to this topic, John K. Moore revisits the topic of the bark/pith metaphor in a more recent article from 2003. As aforementioned, Amy Katz Kaminsky (1996) frames Teresa de Cartagena’s treatise as a late contribution within the proto-feminist debate occurring in Europe at the beginning of the fifteenth century, while María Angeles Ochoa de Eribe Urdinguio (1999) reconsiders the topic of the weak woman (deaf) who empowers herself in order to secure a place in the canon of Spanish literature. Rivera Garretas (1993) compares the works of Perpetua, Christine de Pizan and Teresa de Cartagena, and she has continuously approached the works of Teresa in terms of the aforementioned four points of discussion. Elizabeth Teresa Howe (1996) composed an article on Teresa and her ‘entendimiento’ (understanding) in which she defends that Teresa was able to write because Juana sponsored this writing. More recently, in the first years of the new millennium, several important articles on these topics have been composed: Miriam Majuelo Apiñaiz (2004) discusses the role of authorship and authority in Teresa de Cartagena and her contemporary peasant visionary María de Ajofrín. María Milagros Rivera Garretas (2006) also contributes to this notion of the educated woman in her article about the use of symbols in the history of women writers. Joseph T. Snow (2007) discusses the many voices through whom Teresa is speaking and highlights the presence of Juana de Mendoza as one of them. Raquel Trillia also

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reflects upon Teresa’s empowerment arguing that her withdrawal from public life led her to be the agent of her own salvation. Gregorio Rodríguez Rivas (2009) enlarges this vision of giving voice to Teresa de Cartagena in his article devoted to the rebel voice of Teresa de Cartagena rooted in a gloomy background. One of the last contributions to this empowerment comes from the pen of Victoria Rivera-Cordero (2011), who entitles her article ‘Writing as Resistance’ in which she analyses the self and survival of Teresa de Cartagena and Doña Leonor López de Córdoba. Nieves Baranda (2011) analyses the appropriation of male discourse in Teresa de Cartagena and two other medieval writers, which can also lead them to empower their writing. More recently, María del Mar Cortés Timoner (2016) commented on Teresa de Cartagena’s mysticism, a topic that she also considered in her 2004 book on Teresa de Cartagena. In her work she argues to what point Teresa de Cartagena can be considered a mystic writer, stating that even though she does not have a union with God, she is filled with God’s love through her experience. In 2017, Cortés Timoner also published an essay comparing the strategies of spiritual authorisation of Teresa de Cartagena and Teresa de Ávila. Likewise, for the constant recurrences of Juana de Mendoza, the aforementioned works acknowledge that the female Mendoza is the dedicatee of both Teresa’s works, and Surtz (1995) and Rivera Garretas in two different articles (2007) delve into this friendship. Surtz reflects upon the reasons why Teresa decided to dedicate her works to Juana, while Rivera Garretas provides information about Juana’s family lineage, influence in the court of Queen Isabella I – stating that she acquired a considerable amount of power within the court – and the possible origins of her friendship with Teresa de Cartagena. Due to this political power, Teresa may have chosen Juana as her dedicatee, and consequently Juana became a means of authorising her writing.

Conceptualisation of Female Community Having traced a historical evolution of the interpretation of Teresa de Cartagena’s work, I will mention how the friendship between Teresa and Juana could be framed in the conceptualisation of female community. Considering this, it will be easier to understand more profoundly the alliance and emotional bond that Teresa made with Juana de Mendoza. Teresa uses this bond with her patroness consequently to empower her writing. As Nieves Romero-Díaz has recently said in her article on María de Ágreda’s letters, the concept of community has expanded and might be used as synonymous to ‘alliance (also referred to as community, network, contact, sisterhood, or friendship)’.16 All these terms could be used alternatively to understand how women made connections at the time to navigate a possible isolation that men could impose on them and, eventually, reconcile with their community while navigating this world and using their contacts. Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington problematise the concept of community highlighting the different meanings it has adopted through time and history: ‘Community – that difficult word, according to Raymond Williams – has suffered more than most from a problem intrinsic to historical analysis: namely the tensions between its past and current meanings.’17 Acknowledging the problematic nature of the word, the bulk of scholarship devoted to medieval and early modern women has added to and transformed

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this definition of community in recent years, but has always recognised the collective identity that these women shared. For Susan Broomhall and Stephanie Tarbin, community is closely linked to the search of identity highlighting different aspects of the life in community for women: ‘social, marital, and sexual status; religious and political affiliations; age and occupation’.18 They also introduce the dichotomy between division and conflict, which ‘may be central to the creation of a sense of community, uniting people in debate about its defining values rather than agreement about core ideals’.19 This is crucial for my understanding of community, since conflicts may provoke isolation; women united and made connections to fight against that isolation and reconcile with their community and ultimately redefine it. Melissa Harkrider also emphasises the idea of isolation and connectivity in her book about women and reform in early modern England. For her, community and physical space work closely together in this dichotomy: ‘religious activism within less studied arenas: in their households, parish, churches, and local communities’.20 Harkrider also introduces the role of patronage for these women in their pursuit of navigating through their communities: ‘Different kinship and patronage relationships often shaped men and women’s exposure to the world.’21 For Harkrider these patronage relationships are crucial for humans to expose themselves to the world and to deal with the situations that they have to confront. Two other works on female community are devoted to letter writing at the time as means of creating a set of networks: Julie Campbell and Anne Larsen articulate their study analysing letter writing through space and time, making connections at different levels – literary, identity, linguistic and social.22 Jane Couchman and Anne Crabb contribute to the definition of community, saying that letters might be written to different types of people, such as family and friends, or larger social communities, either acquaintances or people the writers do not know.23 Thus, when writing and receiving these letters, women interacted also with other members of their community to establish networks that would result in bonds and alliances in order to navigate the dichotomy of isolation and connectivity, and finally overcome their difficulties. In light of this, the last work that I would like to mention is the study of Stephanie Kirk about women, community and identity in colonial Mexico. Her definition of community shares several aspects with the aforementioned studies: ‘women formed bonds, alliances, friendships and micro- and macro-communities of different kinds that stood in opposition to the controlled community of the Church authorities attempted to impose from outside.’24 Kirk examines the double discourse of community: she focuses on discursive strategies that the Church implemented to control the community and also on the acts that women used to fight against this imposition and endeavour to redefine it.25 Therefore, my understanding of female community is built upon the belief that these women formed alliances, bonds and social networks that helped them to fight against an isolation generally provoked by a male detractor. Their final intention was to make effective their connectivity with other members of their community using their set of networks in search of both a final reconciliation with their community and to redefine their identity within it. Therefore, it is crucial to observe the social connections that they attempted to establish and how these women interacted with the different members of their respective communities. To a greater or lesser extent, this relationship that Teresa established with Juana de Mendoza and the consequent empowerment through her image could contribute to the aforementioned proto-feminist debate. While creating this

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network with an influential social figure, Teresa attempted to authorise her writing and fight against those male detractors who imposed that isolation on her. As she authorised her writing and found her case as a woman of letters, she was already immersed in this proto-feminist debate.

The Mendoza and the de Cartagena Families: A Century of Friendship In order to observe the kind of alliance that Teresa formed with Juana de Mendoza, the background of the patroness needs to be observed, since her social status, and probably her consequent influence due to the power of her family and husband, could help to understand Teresa’s choice of Juana to empower her writing. Furthermore, it is pertinent to explain the relationship between the Cartagena and Mendoza families at the end of the Middle Ages with the intention of comprehending more profoundly the influence of both families in the Castilian politics of the time. Lastly, Juana de Mendoza was also the wife of Gómez Manrique, one of the most important poets at the time and nephew of the Marquis of Santillana, the most canonical chansonnier poet in Spanish literature. Therefore, the choice of Juana de Mendoza as one of the mechanisms to authorise Teresa’s act of writing was not, in my opinion, either naive or arbitrary. I postulate that Teresa wielded the power of her patroness, forming a strong bond with her in order to find her place as a women writer and reconcile with other members of her community, who had previously attacked her. Juana de Mendoza was one of the means that Teresa used to navigate the dichotomy of isolation/connectivity due to the influence of her family and the friendship between them. In order to delve into the lineage of Juana de Mendoza, it is important to emphasise that she belonged to one of the most prominent families at the end of the Middle Ages in Castile.26 Helen Nader, in her book about the Mendoza family (1350–1550), dates the blooming and later decline of this family between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. The first main referent of this family was Ferrán López de Ayala (1305–85). The Mendoza family were originally from Alava (in the present-day Basque Country) and started to have influence in Castile during the times of Alfonso XI (1312–50), when they moved from Alava to Castile to enjoy this new political power. Not only did this family begin to obtain political power, but they also contributed to the intellectual history of Castile at the time: That the Mendoza developed an important intellectual tradition is not an entirely new idea in Hispanic studies. For more than a century, the coincidence [that] Castile’s greatest poets and historians in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – including Garcilaso de la Vega, Gómez and Jorge Manrique, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, and the marquis of Santillana – were all members of the extended family descended from Pedro López de Ayala’s father has intrigued scholars.27 It is precisely one Manrique that had a direct relationship with Juana de Mendoza since, as stated above, she married Gómez Manrique, and this marked the beginning of a family and political alliance between the Mendoza and the Manrique families. It is clear that the power of the Mendoza family was very influential, and thus the alliance that Teresa decided to form with Juana was in accord with the intention to authorise her writing.

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In reality, the relationship between the Cartagena and the Mendoza families had started a century before Juana acted as Teresa’s patroness with the publication of the Admiraçión. The grandfather of Teresa, Pablo de Santa María, bishop of Burgos, had established diplomatic relationships with the Mendozas. Pablo de Santa María had been the rabbi of Burgos but decided to embrace Christianity in 1390 after hearing Vicente Ferrer preach.28 This family alliance became closer after 1390 during the times of Alfonso de Cartagena (Teresa’s uncle) as bishop of Burgos. Alfonso de Cartagena maintained a good relationship with different members of the Mendoza and Manrique families, as Nader states: ‘Fernán Pérez de Guzmán was a nephew of Ayala . . . he maintained correspondence with his friend, Don Alfonso de Cartagena’,29 and ‘As early as 1440, Santillana, Velasco, and don Alfonso de Cartagena discussed ways of eliminating don Alvaro’s influence at court; but no action resulted from these conversations.’30 In this case, Nader is referring to Don Álvaro de Luna, Duke of Trujillo (1388–1453), who had the favour of Juan II of Castile. This political friendship between the two families lasted several decades: the Admiraçión was composed in 1457 (one year after of the composition of the Arboleda and the consequent attacks that Teresa suffered). Therefore, the long relationship of networks and alliances between the two families was well established when Teresa dedicated her second work to the figure of Juana. Focusing on the particular friendship of Teresa and Juana, all scholarship acknowledges that Juana de Mendoza was Teresa de Cartagena’s patroness and dedicatee of her works. However, María Milagros Rivera Garretas explores this relationship in more detail, arguing that ‘Juana de Mendoza y Teresa de Cartagena pudieron conocerse en Burgos, ciudad de la que Gómez Manrique está testimoniado como su Corregidor’ (‘Juana de Mendoza and Teresa de Cartagena might have met in Burgos, city in which Gómez Manrique served as mayor appointed by the King’; my translation).31 Garretas remarks that, since Teresa studied in Salamanca and received a humanist education, the origins of her friendship with Juana were more plausible.32 With this intellectual background, it is not strange that Teresa decided to dedicate her works to Juana de Mendoza. In another study, Rivera Garretas summarises Juana’s background and her role at court, saying: La dedicación al servicio de Isabel I le llevó a Juana a vivir en la corte itinerante de la reina desde 1480 – cuando tenía unos 55 años – hasta su muerte – rondando los setenta – en 1493 . . . En la corte de Isabel I, Juana de Mendoza cuidó mucho de los asuntos de su marido y de acrecentar su propia fortuna . . . Juana de Mendoza acompañó mucho a la reina en la Guerra de Granada (1482–92), ocupándose de la intendencia de los hospitales reales y de la dotación de las iglesias fundadas en las poblaciones conquistadas . . . El resto del dinero del que dispuso Juana de Mendoza procedería de sus rentas y de las libranzas que le pagaba la reina.33 (Her service to Isabella I led Juana to live in the itinerant court of the Queen from 1480 – when she was about fifty-five – until her death – when she was about seventy – in 1493 . . . At the court of Isabella I, Juana de Mendoza took care of her husband’s endeavours and of increasing her own fortune . . . Juana de Mendoza accompanied the Queen during long periods of time in the War of Granada (1482–92), managing the administration of the royal hospitals and the endowment of the churches founded in the conquered towns . . . The rest of the money that Juana de Mendoza had would come from her rents and from the paments that the Queen made to her). (my translation)

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As we can observe, Juana de Mendoza served at the court of Isabella, the Catholic Queen, reaching the title of ‘camarera mayor’ (head chamberlain) and assisted the Queen in many of her endeavours, the most important one in the final years of the Reconquest in Granada, accompanying Isabella as well as managing administration and properties. Having possessed such power in the court in Castile, Juana de Mendoza increased her fortune and acquired land in different parts of the kingdom.34 It is clear that she enjoyed the favour of the Queen and was a prominent figure in the noble and social life of the court of Isabella. Thus, Teresa’s choice of Juana to dedicate her work was aimed at creating a solid apparatus of networks to empower her writing. Teresa de Cartagena established an alliance with her patroness based on the grounds of both a noble and intellectual background, which would be the perfect mechanisms to fight against accusations of literary fraud. Ronald Surtz summarises the aspirations and motivations that Teresa had in regard to the composition of her second work and her willingness to utilise her patroness, Juana de Mendoza: Both the Arboleda and the Admiraçión are addressed to a female dedicatee, who is explicitly identified in the case of the Admiraçión as the noblewoman Juana de Mendoza, the wife of the poet and important political figure Gómez Manrique. In the dedication of the Admiraçión to Juana de Mendoza, Teresa expresses the hope that God will inspire her to compose the subsequent treatise and claims her patroness asked her to write the work. Teresa thereby not only shields her work with the authority of her dedicatee’s aristocratic social status, but also implies that her self-defence was not written of her own free will but rather out of obedience to her patroness.35 Surtz’s assertions function as a channel to build our discourse within the conceptualisation of female community following a thread of networks and alliances based on the influence of the Mendoza family and the manner Teresa is willing to use that influence. Elizabeth Howe also contributes to this idea, stating that ‘both author and patroness enjoy identity as educated women. One is able to write a defence of women’s learning and the other sponsors the effort.’36 Not only is Juana de Mendoza the recipient of the work, but she is also the main promoter of Teresa’s work, since Teresa wrote it following her patroness’s advice and will. Therefore, from the very beginning of the Arboleda, there is a visible alliance between these two educated and noble women, which will be the stand-out point of the empowerment of Teresa de Cartagena in the attainment of the Admiraçión. The appearance of Juana de Mendoza in the Arboleda is reduced to its introduction, and the noblewoman serves the Castilian nun as emotional support in order for Teresa to endure her deafness and loneliness, whereas in the Admiración, the references to Juana are more powerful and aim at legitimating the authorship of Teresa. The identity of Doña Juana is revealed in the Admiraçión, but the scholarly works dedicated to Teresa de Cartagena agree that the references to a ‘virtuous lady’ in the Arboleda is the same woman to whom Teresa alludes in her second work. To sum up, the choice of Juana de Mendoza is not arbitrary, since this noblewoman belonged to one of the most influential families in Spain at the time and also enjoyed a privileged position in the court of Queen Isabella. The friendship that the two women built was based upon this long tradition of favours between the families and it is reflected in Teresa’s writing with emotional addresses to her patroness.

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Teresa and Juana in the Admiraçión operum Dey Having explained the power and influence of Juana due to her family, her connections with Queen Isabella and her marriage, I will examine the references to Doña Juana in the Admiraçión. It is interesting to highlight what Nieves Baranda proposes in the composition of the Admiraçión to understand more profoundly the choice of Juana de Mendoza: The fact that she locates herself within the tradition of the querelle des femmes, and that her Admiraçión is an apología, forces Cartagena to question herself, to justify her position as a woman in a gendered world, and to defend her transgressive intellectual activity in a way that had not come to the fore in the Arboleda.37 Teresa de Cartagena constantly addresses her patroness in her work, and to a certain extent, she tries to get approval from her patroness to keep writing. Likewise, all the references to the ‘virtuous lady’ are either placed at the beginning of a paragraph or at the beginning of a sentence in which Teresa would like to express something important: Teresa’s earliest voice is a representation of her own and is epistolary in nature, addressed to a silent recipient/reader in each of her treatises. This reader, an unidentified ‘virtuosa señora’ [virtuous lady] in the Arboleda, becomes a kindred, and perhaps the same, ‘virtuosa señora’ in the Admiraçión, where she is unambiguously identified as Juana de Mendoza, wife of Gómez Manrique, to whom Teresa assigns a wide range of endearing epithets.38 Therefore, given the nature of this friendship, all these direct addresses are characterised by an emotional tone from Teresa towards Juana. Affective relationships among women are very important to their survival within the community at the time. Alison Weber analyses the reciprocal and sensitive relationship between Saint Teresa and her sisters, patrons and confessors, which could be felt in the language presented by both sides. This emotional tone was mainly interchanged with her favourite sisters, María de San José and Ana de San Bartolomé, and her dearest confessor, Father Jerónimo Gracián. In her study, Weber examines the tone, the composition, and the kind of language in the letters penned by the three nuns to argue the emotional relationships that could arise in the convent.39 The context where this could happen is described as ‘in the monasteries . . . relationships of affection only with the divine family . . . but nuns loosened their ties with home communities, and formed new ones with each other’.40 Teresa shows a series of epithets for her patroness characterised by an emotional tone and respect, such as ‘virtuous lady’. With her patroness, she could feel at ease, and subsequently she is able to use this familiar tone and show both esteem to Juana de Mendoza and belligerence towards her detractors. Teresa probably felt emotional comfort from her friendship with Juana as well in regard to her situation as a deaf woman, and how she ended her days in the convent. According to Mariló Vigil, there were many different types of women who ended up living in the convent in early modern Spain.41 Vigil describes the convent as ‘aparcamientos de mujeres . . . grupos heterogéneos de mujeres que iban a parar allí por diferentes motivos’ (‘parking lots for women . . . heterogeneous groups of women who ended up in the convent for different reasons’; my translation).42 One of the reasons Teresa

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de Cartagena joined the convent was probably the effects of her incipient deafness. Her family might not have been willing to take care of an ill woman, and the decision to send her to the convent could have been the easiest way not to take care of Teresa but have her protected by the walls of a convent. Consequently, they could save Teresa de Cartagena on the social scale since she would not be able to get married. Once in the convent, she felt secluded by other nuns, who allegedly bullied her because of her deafness. Later on, she was also isolated by the attacks from the Inquisition on the authorship of a work in which she reflected upon her deafness. Therefore, her isolation was double: on the one hand, she had to fight the effects of her bodily infirmity, and on the other, she had to confront the attacks from the Inquisition and her peers. Therefore, the Castilian nun found counsel, from a marginal position in society, in the figure of her patroness, Juana de Mendoza, who became her ally and network to defy her opponents and finally defeat them. The relationship with this aristocratic female figure helped Teresa both to endure the effects of her deafness and to build her empowerment. Thus, Teresa de Cartagena created a powerful use of language, which would enable her to show both determination and sensitivity at the same time. On the other hand, patrons at the time had a strong influence in the publication of works. Harry Sieber, in his study of patrons and sponsors in the court of Philip III emphasises four characteristics that Cervantes uses when he offers the first part of Don Quixote to the Duque of Béjar: ‘En la relación entre cliente y mecenas refleja el discurso de patronazgo – “honor”, “favor”, “protección”, “servicio”’ (‘A patronage discourse is reflected in the relationship between client and patron – “honour”, “favour”, “protection” and “service”’; my translation).43 Teresa would follow these four characteristics after dedicating her work to her patroness: as she sought Juana’s protection and favour, she honoured her and paid service to her. Furthermore, Nieves Baranda analyses female patronage in early modern Spain saying: ‘because the pursuit of power, wealth, clientele, or patronage is what usually motivated book dedications, the literary tastes or interests of the recipients were subordinates to other factors, making it difficult to assess the intellectual link between book and reader.’44 She also establishes a hierarchy of dedications: ‘God, then to the Virgin Mary, and the saints. They were then dedicated according to social rank: kings and princes, members of the aristocracy and the upper echelons of state or church, lay corporations, and finally social circles closest to the author.’45 Teresa, then, fulfils most of the aspects in the definition that Baranda proposes. She dedicates her work first and foremost to God, then she uses the biblical Judith as her mythical figure and finally she employs the power of Juana de Mendoza as a member of the aristocracy, but, at the same time, Juana is a social personality close to her. It is not strange that the identity of Juana is disclosed at the very beginning of the Admiraçión, at a moment when Teresa needs an important person to defend her situation as a woman writer. In Arboleda, there is the constant reference to a ‘virtuous lady’, but her identity is not revealed. It is not until the beginning of the Admiraçión that we know, as readers, that the dedicatee of both works is Juana de Mendoza. Teresa provides the social status of her patroness to make her empowerment stronger and more visible; from here on, the reader gathers that Juana de Mendoza will be extremely important in the development of the treatise. However, it is not Teresa who unveils the name of the noblewoman but the transcriber of the work, Pero López del Trigo, in his introductory explanation:

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Aquí comiença vn breue tractado el qual co[n]uinientemente se puede llamar Admiraçión operum Dey. Compúsole Teresa de Cartajena, religiosa de la horden de [. . .] a petiçión e ruego de la Señora Juana de Mendoça, muger del Señor Gomes Manrique. (Here begins a brief treatise which can be fittingly called Wonder at the Works of God. Teresa de Cartagena, a nun of the order of [. . .] composed it at the petition and request of Señora Juana de Mendoça, wife of Señor Gómes Manrique.)46 The treatise starts after this explanatory note. Gradually Teresa’s voice starts to gain power establishing her discourse, from the very beginning of the work, on her relationship with her patroness: Acuérdome, virtuosa señora, que me ofresçí a escreuir a vuestra discreçión. Si he tanto tardado de lo encomendar a la obra, no vos devéys maravillar, ca mucho encojida la voluntat quando la dispusyçión de la persona no conçierta con ella, antes avn la ynpide e contrasta. Sy consyderardes, virtuosa señora, las enfermedades e corporales pasyones que de continuo he por familiares, bin conosçerá vuestra discreçión que mucho son estoruadoras de los mouim[i]entos de la voluntat e no menos turbadoras del entendimiento, el qual fatigado e turbado con aquello que la memoria e natural sentimiento de presente le ofresçen, asy costreñido de propia neçesydad, recoje en sy mesmo la deliberaçión de la voluntad con todos ynteriores mouim[i]entos.47 (I remember, virtuous lady, that I offered to write at your discretion. If I have delayed so long in committing this to paper, you should not marvel, for one’s will is very inhibited when one’s physical disposition not only does not co-operate but even impedes and contradicts it. If you consider, virtuous lady, the illnesses and physical sufferings that I have continually for companions, you will readily acknowledge that they are real obstacles to the intentions of my will and my understanding, which, fatigued and disturbed at present with memories and emotions and constrained by its own need, draws unto itself the deliberations and inner desires of my will.)48 It is important to observe that Teresa de Cartagena addresses her dedicatee with a significant epithet: ‘virtuous lady’. This epithet demonstrates the kind of affection that Teresa de Cartagena professed towards the Castilian noblewoman. As the treatise develops, Teresa will always refer to Juana de Mendoza with this emotional expression. Furthermore, it is indicative that Teresa mentions the name of her patroness twice in a brief span of time. This demonstrates that Teresa uses it whenever she wants to solidify her arguments against the accusations of plagiarism. As Elizabeth Teresa Howe anticipates: ‘Sor Teresa assures that Doña Juana’s good judgement will enable her to follow the author’s reasoning.’49 In this case, Teresa refers to Juana with a double intention: on the one hand, she is introducing her work; thus, she has to authorise it with an important person (following Sieber’s characteristic of honour and favour which will result in the protection of her patroness); on the other hand, she presents her main motivations to write her work. Therefore, the Castilian nun clarifies her main reason to write: a personal request from Juana de Mendoza. She also reflects upon the delay in her writing process, due to her bodily infirmities. In any case, with the use of this epithet, Teresa makes allusion to a well-established social figure, as well as providing high affectionate

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rates to their alliance with the inclusion of sensitive adjectives to qualify the noblewoman. Furthermore, Juana is so present in the work that ‘both of Teresa’s narratives are endowed with a textual narratee and it is through this figure that we become substitute silent readers, reading, as it were, over Juana de Mendoza’s shoulder’.50 According to Snow, with this epistolary addressee the reader realises that Teresa is writing directly to her patroness and readers are made aware of that. As the work progresses, Teresa de Cartagena addresses her patroness in order to introduce each important point in her treatise, since Juana’s image will make the image stronger in the rhetorical effect in Teresa’s discourse. Surtz indicates the importance of this placement several times with the phrase ‘punctuating her argument once again with a direct address to her patroness’,51 thus attempting to make the image stronger with this direct address. Besides, while addressing Juana, Teresa avoids direct confrontation with those who attacked the Arboleda. Doña Juana’s petition opened a space for a dialogue between women, not isolated from the dialogue of masculine culture, but rather intertwined with questions of particular interest to women, created by that culture.52 According to Surtz, and as observed in the treatise, there are three images that Teresa uses to empower her writing: Judith, the bark/pith dichotomy in the tree, and the blind man on the road to Jericho. She will allude to Juana before introducing the story of Judith, the woman in the Old Testament, who saved her people from Holofernes after cutting his head off. Likewise, she will implement the same strategy before presenting us with the ‘corteza/meollo’ (bark/pith) metaphor arguing the gender distinctions in regard to each sex’s tasks in life. The main reason to compose this work becomes apparent when Teresa introduces the dichotomy between the bark and the pith in saying: Asy que, tornando al propósyto, creo yo, muy virtuosa señora, que la causa porque los varones se maravillan que muger aya hecho tractado es por no ser acostunbrado en el estado fimíneo, mas solamente en el varonil.53 (Thus returning to my purpose, I think most virtuous lady, that the reason that men marvel that a woman has written a treatise is because this is not customary in the female condition but only in the male.)54 Teresa starts to voice her writings supported by the power of a now ‘muy virtuosa señora’(‘most virtuous lady’). Teresa disputes that women were denied the gift of writing because it had traditionally been a predominantly male activity. Only God can bestow on women the capability of writing as he granted it to men, and thus ‘the differences between the sexes are divinely ordained in such a way that each one complements the other.’55 Right after this explanation, Teresa will focus on the bark/pith recreated image first in order to show the intellectual relationship with her patroness, while implementing a strategy to authorise her writing: E sy queredes bien mirar las plantas e árboles, veréis como las cortezas de fuera son muy rezias e fuertes e sofridoras de las[ten]pestades que los tienmpos hacen, aguas e yelos e calores e fríos. Están asy enxeridas he hechas por tal son que no paresçen

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sino un gastón firme e rezio para conservar e ayudar el meollo qu’está en[cerc]ado de dentro. E asy por tal horden e manera anda lo vno a lo ál, que la fortaleza e rezidumbre de las cortezas guardan e conservan el meollo, sufriendo exteriormente las tenpestades ya dichas. El meollo asy como es flaco e delicado, estando incluso, obra ynterioramente, da virtud e vigor a las cortezas e asy lo vno con lo ál se conserva e ayuda e nos da cada año la diversidá o conposidad de las frutas que vedes.56 (And if you observe well the plants and trees, you will see how their outer bark or cortex is very robust and strong and resistant to the weather, to tempest and water and ice, and heat and cold. They are made in such a way that their firm and resilient barks protect the inner core or medulla enclosed within. And thus in this order the one works for the other, for the strength and hardness of the bark protects and preserves the medulla by resisting on the outside the inclemencies of the weather. The medulla, encased because it is weak and delicate, works inwardly and gives power and vigour to the bark; and thus, the one preserves and helps the other and gives us each year the diversity and abundance of fruits that we see.)57 All these second person singular pronouns ‘you’ (and in Spanish the morphology of the verbs with the same person) are directed to Juana. Thus, Teresa justifies her right of authorship through introducing her patroness to this metaphor of the bark/pith as if Juana were listening to her writing. Likewise, it feels as if Teresa were speaking directly to Juana, returning to Snow’s idea of an epistolary dedicatee. Her discourse is quite straightforward, men are stronger and tougher than women and that is why they cover women in public affairs (men as the bark, and the medulla signifies women). What is revolutionary about Teresa’s statement is that she truly believes that the softer part of the tree is what brings sensitivity to the act of writing. Thus, according to Teresa’s discourse, women are more gifted for the arts and letters than men, but only God can prove the veracity of her assertion.58 In sum, Teresa reinforces her argument on the dichotomy of the arboreal image, endeavouring to present her patroness with this distinction. The noblewoman, belonging to a higher social status, will make Teresa’s recreation of the image stronger and more accessible to an audience who might not be willing to listen to a deaf woman. Backing up her statements with a noblewoman could reinforce Teresa’s words and facilitate her connectivity. The last reference that will be examined in this relationship is the moment when Teresa de Cartagena introduces and compares herself to the case of the Old Testament fighter, Judith. With this self-comparison, Teresa endeavours to empower her writing as well. At the same time, Juana is present in the text to witness and approve this comparison. Once again, Teresa introduces this topic with the direct epithet, ‘virtuous lady’: Dezidme, virtuosa señora, ¿quál varón de tan fuerte e valiente persona ni tan esforçado de coraçón se pudiera hallar en el tiempo pasado, ni creo que en este que nuestro llamamos, que osará llevar armas contra tan grande e fuerte príncipe como fué Olinfernes, cuyo exérçito cobría toda la haz e término de la tierra, e no ovo pavor de lo fazer vna muger? E bien sé que a esto dirán varones que fué por especial gracia e yndustria que Dios quiso dar a la prudente Iudit. E yo así lo digo, pero segund seto, bien paresçe que la yndustria y graçia soberana exçeden a las fuerças naturales e varoniles, pues quello que grant exérçito de onbres armadas no pudieron hacer, e fízolo la yndestria e graçia de una sola muger.59

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(Tell me, virtuous lady, what man could be found in past times or present of such strong valiant character or fearless heart that he would dare to bear arms against such a great and strong general as Holofernes, whose army covered the surface and extent of the land, and yet a woman had no fear of doing this? And I know well that men will respond that this was a special grace and skill that God conferred on the prudent Judith, and I agree. Yet according to this, it is apparent that supreme skill and grace transcend natural male forces, since what a great army of armed men could not accomplish was achieved by the ingenuity and grace of a lone woman.)60 This is the penultimate time in the treatise that Teresa addresses her patroness with a direct reference.61 However, with the use of ‘your’ and the inflection of the verbs in Spanish, it feels that Juana de Mendoza will be present until the end of the work. On this occasion, Teresa uses the figure of the noblewoman again in order to introduce an important topic in her writing: Judith. Judith killed Holofernes, the general of her people’s enemy, cutting off his head with her sword.62 Teresa, first of all, addresses her patroness, and secondly introduces the story of Judith, making reference to Holofernes’ greatness in war with the intention of magnifying the achievement that Judith was able to fulfil. Combining here the intellectual knowledge of Teresa de Cartagena of the Bible with her patroness, also educated, we witness the intellectual alliance between the three women to form a sufficiently strong bond in order to fight against Teresa’s accusations on authorship. The three of them together possess the power to defeat all the false accusations discharged against Teresa. While comparing her case to Judith, Teresa de Cartagena takes as an example of the story of the Old Testament fighter in order to create her own model for other women who could face the same slanders in the future. Always supported by the on-going presence of her patroness, Teresa achieved her mission, since after the publication of the Admiraçión no other accusation of plagiarism manifested (or at least, there is not written evidence). Both Teresa and Judith developed historically male activities embodied by masculine features in order to have their presences and voices heard by their enemies: Both Judith and Teresa were empowered to wield typically masculine – and even phallic – instruments. What can be said of Judith’s usurping of the phallic sword and Teresa’s usurping of the phallic pen? When Teresa is discussing the privileges which God endowed the masculine gender, she singles out the fact that he made man strong, brave, and daring, while woman is weak, cowardly, and timorous.63 Hence, both women, while appropriating masculine tools in exclusive male tasks, are empowering themselves against the pre-established order. They might have to adapt to male characteristics in order to be visible, but what is important in the survival of women’s voices is that they were actually heard, and they defeated all the accusations and hostile comments coming from the other gender. As Teresa herself states, those are not purely male tasks, but God has to decide to grant these flares to women too. As aforementioned, Juana de Mendoza also served at court and helped Queen Isabella in the war in Granada in what could be considered a male task at the time as well: handling money and properties. The three women take up traditionally male crafts, but they accommodate them to their needs.

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Conclusion Teresa, though a deaf-mute woman, ends up acquiring a strong voice of authority, which she herself may not have been capable of hearing, but this voice has become eternal in the history of Spanish literature as the first woman to defend the right of women to write and have access to the arts and humanities. Many a time during the Middle Ages and the early modern era, women had to fight against this type of accusation, and the only mechanism they had within their community to attempt to defend themselves and save their case was to make alliances and sets of networks that could help them overcome their isolation from male detractors. Sometimes women achieved their goal, as in the case of Teresa, but many failed to survive their accusations. Their main goal was to navigate through the dichotomy of isolation and connectivity. First of all, they had to face their isolation, generally provoked by a male detractor, and then, they had to navigate within their community with these alliances to conduct their connectivity and reconcile with their community. Normally, these connections were powerful men and women who helped them secure their place in their communities, as was the case of Teresa with Juana de Mendoza. In order to reconcile with her community, one of the tools that Teresa wielded was her blind faith in her patroness, Juana de Mendoza, within her community, showing her honour and favour, and Juana would respond with her protection coming from her social status, given the origins of her family, her suitable marriage and the power that she acquired within the court of Queen Isabella. Teresa de Cartagena, based on both women’s historical family friendship, created a strong bond with Juana de Mendoza, which helped her to reconcile with her community and redefine her identity within it, asserting that she was truly a woman writer. In this way, Teresa made an excellent connection, network or alliance as one of the main mechanisms to authorise her writing.

Notes * My first academic encounter with Elizabeth Petroff occurred when I decided to take her graduate seminar, Medieval Women Writers, as a first-year master’s degree student in Spring 2011 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. As the years went by, Elizabeth and I worked together on two different projects: the reception of the Spanish Baroque in England through the poetic production of Richard Crashaw and the study of the life and works of fifteenth-century Castilian nun Teresa de  Cartagena. My final paper for that graduate seminar was focused on Teresa de Cartagena’s first work Arboleda de los enfermos/The Grove of the Infirm in which I completed a translation of that treatise into English. Teresa de Cartagena was the vehicle for Elizabeth and me to start working together, opening a professional relationship of adviser and advisee which ended after her retirement in 2014. 1 Critics such as Stephanie Tarbin, Susan Broomhall, Alison Weber and Stephanie Kirk have contributed to this conceptualisation of female community in which all of them agree that the role of early modern women within their community (religious or secular) is key in the creation and definition of their identity. 2 All the biographical information is taken directly from Joseph Hutton’s introduction and notes in Teresa de Cartagena, Arboleda de los enfermos. Admiraçión operum Dey, ed. Joseph Lewis Hutton (Madrid: Anejos del Boletín de la Real Academia Española, 1967); The Writings of Teresa de Cartagena: Translated with Introduction, Notes, and Interpretive Essay, trans. Dayle

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Seidenspinner-Núñez (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998); and Helen Nader, The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance 1350–1550 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1979). Teresa de Cartagena’s works have survived to our day in one codex copied by Pero López del Trigo. The original is preserved at the Real Biblioteca del Escorial in the h-III-24 manuscript consisting of seventy-six folios. Teresa de Cartagena, Arboleda, p. 8. Amy Katz Kaminsky, Water Lilies (Flores de Agua): An Anthology of Spanish Women Writers from the Fifteenth through the Nineteenth Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 37. María Milagros Rivera Garretas, ‘Vías de búsqueda de existencia femenina libre: Perpetua, Christine de Pizan y Teresa de Cartagena’, Duoda: Revista d’estudis feministes, 5 (1993), 51–71. María Milagros Rivera Garretas, ‘Una vida en relación: Juana de Mendoza con Gómez Manrique, Isabel la Católica y Teresa e Cartagena’, in Blanca Garí (ed.), Vidas de mujeres del Renacimiento (Barcelona: Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2007). María Milagros Rivera Garretas, ‘Los testamentos de Juana de Mendoza. Camarera Mayor de Isabel la Católica y de su marido el poeta Gómez Manrique, corregidor de Toledo’, Anuario de Estudios Medievales, 37/1 (2007), 139–80. For her converso background, see James Hussar, ‘The Jewish Roots of Teresa de Cartagena’s Arboleda de los enfermos’, Coronica: A Journal of Medieval Spanish Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies, 35/1 (2006), 151–69. Much has been discussed about Teresa de Cartagena’s deafness. We could highlight Alan Deyermond’s analysis based on the idea of the ailment convent, ‘“El convento de dolençias”: The Works of Teresa de Cartagena’, Journal of Hispanic Philology, 1 (1976), 19–29; Encarnación Juárez’s psychological approach to this deafness, ‘The Autobiography of the Aching Body in Teresa de Cartagena’s Arboleda de los enfermos’, in Sharon Snyder (ed.), Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (New York: The Modern Association of America, 2002), pp. 131–43; Brenda Jo Brueggemann’s ‘Deaf, She Wrote: Mapping Deaf Women’s Autobiography’, PMLA, 120/2 (2005), 577–83; and Victoria Rivera-Cordero’s article on space and embodied deafness in Teresa’s first treatise is a great contribution to scholarship on her bodily infirmity, ‘Spatializing Illness: Embodied Deafness in Teresa de Cartagena’s Arboleda de los enfermos’, Coronica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures and Cultures, 37/2 (2009), 61–77. The main expert on this topic in recent years has been Yonsoo Kim, who has written, in the last ten years, a series of articles dealing with pain and suffering, passion and consolation, ‘La discapacidad física como medio intelectual y espiritual femenino: Teresa de Cartagena en la “Arboleda de los enfermos”’, Medievalia, 38 (2006), 22–32; and ‘La crisis transformativa y el perfeccionamiento espiritual; Teresa de Cartagena’, Ambitos: revista de ciencias sociales y humanidades, 21 (2009), 11–19. Her book published in 2008 on the bodily suffering of Teresa de Cartagena is the main contribution to this topic in the bulk of scholarship; see Yonsoo Kim, El saber femenino y el sufrimiento corporal de la temprana edad moderna: Arboleda de los enfermos y Admiraçión operum Dey de Teresa de Cartagena (Cordoba: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Córdoba, 2008). In support of her mysticism, see María del Mar Cortés Timoner, Teresa de Cartagena, primera escritora mística en lengua castellana (Malaga: Universidad de Málaga, 2004). An eloquent summary to her triple marginalisation is compiled in Cesar Maldonado’s article, ‘Teresa de Cartagena: mujer, sorda, conversa. Letras femeninas en el siglo XV’, Yarchay, 49 (2009), 45–68. Teresa de Cartagena, Arboleda, p. 8; my translation. In this book Ronald Surtz analyses the case of other four religious women (writers or transcribed) whose literary production occurred before the time of Saint Teresa of Avila: Constanza de Castilla, Juana de la Cruz, María de Ajofrín, and Sor María de Santo Domingo: Ronald E. Surtz, Writing Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain. The Mothers of Saint Teresa of Avila (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).

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Nieves Romero Díaz, ‘On Female Political Alliances: Sor María de Ágreda’s Communities of Letters’, Hispanic Review, 86/1 (Winter 2018), 91. Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington, Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric. Politics, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2001), p. 12. Stephanie Tarbin and Susan Broomhall, Women Identities and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), p. 1. Tarbin and Broomhall, Women Identities and Comunities, p. 4. Melissa Harkrider, Women, Reform and Community in Early Modern England: Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, and Lincolnshire’s Godly Aristocracy, 1519–1580 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008), p. 5 Harkrider, Women, Reform and Community, p. 5. Julie Campbell and Anne Larsen, Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009). Jane Couchman and Anne Crabb, Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400–1700: Form and Persuasion (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), p. 3. Stephanie Kirk, Convent Life in Colonial Mexico: A Tale of Two Communities (Miami: University of Florida Press, 2007), p. 13. Kirk, Convent Life, p. 12. There is a reference to another woman called Juana de Mendoza, daughter of Pedro González Mendoza and great-grandmother of Ferdinand of Aragon. However, this woman cannot be the woman to whom Teresa refers in her works, since Teresa was only six years old when this Juana died in 1431. Helen Nader, The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance 1350–1550 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1979), p. 4. Teresa de Cartagena, Arboleda de los enfermos, p. 3 Nader, The Mendoza Family, p. 25. Nader, The Mendoza Family, p. 48. María Milagros Rivera Garretas, ‘Una vida en relación: Juana de Mendoza con Gómez Manrique, Isabel la Católica y Teresa de Cartagena’, in Blanca Garí (ed.), Vidas de mujeres del Renacimiento (Barcelona: Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2007), p. 126. Rivera Garretas, ‘Una vida en relación’, p. 125 María Milagros Rivera Garretas, ‘Los testamentos de Juana de Mendoza. Camarera Mayor de Isabel la Católica y de su marido el poeta Gómez Manrique, corregidor de Toledo’, Anuario de Estudios Medievales, 37/1 (2007), p. 145. The object of study in Rivera Garreta’s article is to analyse the wills of Juana de Mendoza and her husband, Gómez Manrique. In her study, Rivera details all the possessions that they both acquired in life, and focus more profoundly on the will of Gómez Manrique since, as she states, there is not a known copy of Juana’s will, so she centres on understanding Juana’s wealth while she was the Head Chamberlain to the Queen. Ronald Surtz, Writing Women, p. 22. Elizabeth Teresa Howe, ‘Sor Teresa de Cartagena and Entendimiento’, Romanische Forschungen, 108/1–2 (1996), p. 140. Nieves Baranda, ‘Through Women’s Eyes: The Appropriation of Male Discourse by Three Medieval Women Authors’, in Xon de Ros and Geraldine Hazbun (eds), A Companion to Spanish Women Studies (London: Boydell & Brewer, 2011), p. 91. Joseph T. Snow, ‘Speaking through Many Voices: Polyphony in the Writings of Teresa de Cartagena’, in Ivy A. Corfis and Ray Harris Northall (eds), Medieval Iberia (London: Boydell & Brewer, 2007), pp. 17-18. Alison Weber, ‘“Dear Daughter”: Reform and Persuasion in St Teresa’s Letters to Her Prioresses’, in Jane Couchman and Anne Crabb (eds), Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1470–1700 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), p. 248.

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Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau, Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in their Own Words, trans. Amanda Powell (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010), p. 5. Vigil mentions three different kinds of women living in the convent together with the nuns: ‘niñas, doncellas, and huéspedes’ (‘girls, damsels, and guests’). All the women had to coexist in the convent and emotional bonds arose among them with the ultimate intention of supporting each other within the geographical space of the convent, as well as in regard to the interaction of the convent with other members coming from outside. See Mariló Vigil, La vida de las mujeres en los siglos XVI y XVII (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1986). Mariló Vigil, La vida de las mujeres en los siglos XVI y XVII, p. 208. The designation of the convent as ‘aparcamientos de mujeres’ (parking lots for women) may appear misogynistic, but Mariló Vigil, coining this term, endeavours to explain the situation of religious women at the time: if they could not get married or their families were not willing to take care of them, they were sent to the convent. In the convent, the social status of the nun was equivalent of that of the married woman (La vida, p. 212). Harry Sieber, ‘Clientelismo y mecenazgo: Hacia una historia cultural literaria de la corte de Felipe III’, Actas del IV Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Internacional Siglo de Oro (AISO), 1 (1998), 95; my translation. Nieves Baranda, ‘Women’s Reading Habits: Book Dedications to Female Patrons in Early Modern Spain’, in Anne Cruz and Rosilie Hernández (eds), Women’s Literacy in Early Modern Spain and the New World (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), p. 20. Baranda, ‘Women’s Reading Habits’, p. 21. Teresa de Cartagena, Arboleda, p.  111; English translation from Teresa de  Cartagena, The Writings, p. 86. Teresa de Cartagena, Arboleda, p. 111. Teresa de Cartagena, Writings, p. 86. Howe, ‘Sor Teresa’, p. 140. Snow, ‘Speaking through many voices’, p. 18 Surtz, Writing Women, p. 32. Katz, Water Lilies, p. 34–5. Teresa de Cartagena, Arboleda, p. 115. Teresa de Cartagena, Writings, p. 89. Surtz, Writing Women, p. 25. Teresa de Cartagena, Arboleda, p. 117. Teresa de Cartagena, Writings, p. 91. This particular testimony is what Surtz problematises as the boundaries of Teresa de Cartagena’s proto-feminism: ‘the image appears to appropriate and reinforce a series of traditional stereotypes regarding gender roles’ (Writing Women, p. 27). Teresa de Cartagena, Arboleda, p. 119. Teresa de Cartagena, Writings, p. 93. The last direct address to Juana de Mendoza comes at the end of the story of Judith just before Teresa starts to argue about the gender differences between men and women, which are reinforced by the last comparison of the nun with an external element: the blind man in the road to Jericho, in which Teresa compares this man’s blindness to her deafness in order to empower and justify her act of writing as well. The Book of Judith may have been written in the second century bce, originally in either Greek or Hebrew: the oldest version could be a translation from Hebrew or directly composed in Greek, as part of the Septuagint. This Book tells the story of Judith during the war between Israel and Babylonia, and contains several historical anachronisms. Judith is a widow and daughter of Merari. She is described as a beautiful person, highly patriotic and religious. Her combative spirit leads the Israelites to defeat their enemy. Judith, angry and disappointed with the army of her people, learns that Holofernes is in love with her and takes the initiative to cross the walls of her town accompanied by her loyal maid. After meeting Holofernes, she misleads him, promising him to disclose information about the Israelites, gets him drunk, grasps her

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sword and finally cuts off his head. Judith returns to her town with Holofernes’ head, which symbolises the victory of her people. See Natalio Fernández Marcos, María Victoria Spottorno and José Manuel Cañas, Traducción de la Biblia griega Septuaginta (Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme, 2008), p. 11. Ronald Surtz, ‘Image Patterns in Teresa de Cartagena’s Arboleda de los enfermos’, in Gilbert Paolini (ed.), La Chispa ’87: Selected Proceedings (New Orleans: Tulane University, 1995), p. 302.

Works Cited Arenal, Electa and Stacey Schlau, Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in their Own Words, trans. Amanda Powell (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010). Baranda, Nieves, ‘Through Women’s Eyes: The Appropriation of Male Discourse by Three Medieval Women Authors’, in Xon de Ros and Geraldine Hazbun (eds), A Companion to Spanish Women Studies (London: Boydell & Brewer, 2011), pp. 81–95. Baranda, Nieves, ‘Women’s Reading Habits: Book Dedications to Female Patrons in Early Modern Spain’, in Anne Cruz and Rosilie Hernández (eds), Women’s Literacy in Early Modern Spain and the New World (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 19–39. Brueggemann, Brenda Jo, ‘Deaf, She Wrote: Mapping Deaf Women’s Autobiography’, PMLA, 120/2 (2005), 577–83. Calvo, Yadira F., ‘Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Teresa de Cartagena, María de Zayas y la defensa de las mujeres letradas’, Revista de Artes y Letras de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 18/1 (2006), 247–50. Campbell, Julie and Anne Larsen, Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009). Cortés Timoner, María del Mar, ‘Estrategias de autorización en el discurso spiritual de Teresa de Cartagena y Teresa de Jesús’, Cahiers d’ Études des Cultures Ibériques et Latino-américaines, 3 (2017), 9–26. Cortés Timoner, María del Mar, ‘“Fue levado mi entendimiento”: Teresa de Cartagena y la escritura mística en femenino’, Scripta: Revista Internacional de Literatura i Cultura Medieval i Moderna, 8 (2016), 148–63. Cortés Timoner, María del Mar, Teresa de Cartagena, primera escritora mística en lengua castellana (Malaga: Universidad de Málaga, 2004). Couchman, Jane and Anne Crabb, Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400–1700: Form and Persuasion (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005). Deyermond, Alan, ‘“El convento de dolençias”: The Works of Teresa de Cartagena’, Journal of Hispanic Philology, 1 (1976), 19–29. Fernández Marcos, Natalio, María Victoria Spottorno and José Manuel Cañas, Traducción de la Biblia griega Septuaginta (Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme, 2008). Garí, Blanca, ‘Las amargas lágrimas de Margery Kempe’, Duoda: Revista d’Estudis Feministes, 20 (2001), 54–5 Harkrider, Melissa, Women, Reform and Community in Early Modern England. Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, and Lincolnshire’s Godly Aristocracy, 1519–1580, Studies in Modern British Religious History (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008). Howe, Elizabeth Teresa, ‘Sor Teresa de Cartagena and Entendimiento’, Romanische Forschungen, 108/1–2 (1996), 133–45.

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Hussar, James, ‘The Jewish Roots of Teresa de Cartagena’s Arboleda de los enfermos’, Coronica: A Journal of Medieval Spanish Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies, 35/1 (2006), 151–69. Juárez, Encarnación, ‘The Autobiography of the Aching Body in Teresa de Cartagena’s Arboleda de los enfermos’, in Sharon Snyder (ed.), Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (New York: The Modern Association of America, 2002), pp. 131–43. Katz Kaminsky, Amy, Water Lilies (Flores de Agua). An Anthology of Spanish Women Writers from the Fifteenth through the Nineteenth Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Kim, Yonsoo, ‘La discapacidad física como medio intelectual y espiritual femenino: Teresa de Cartagena en la “Arboleda de los enfermos”’, Medievalia, 38 (2006), 22–32. Kim, Yonsoo, El saber femenino y el sufrimiento corporal de la temprana edad moderna: “Arboleda de los enfermos” y “Admiraçión operum Dey” de Teresa de Cartagena (Cordoba: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Córdoba, 2008). Kim, Yonsoo, ‘La crisis transformativa y el perfeccionamiento espiritual: Teresa de Cartagena’, Ambitos: revista de estudios de ciencias sociales y humanidades, 21 (2009), 11–19. Kirk, Stephanie, Convent Life in Colonial Mexico: A Tale of Two Communities (Miami: University of Florida Press, 2007). Majuelo Apiñaiz, Miriam, ‘La autoridad en María de Ajofrín y Teresa de Cartagena, ¿un desafío?’, Arenal: Revista de historia de mujeres, 11/2 (2004), 131–44. Maldonado, César, ‘Teresa de Cartagena: mujer, sorda, conversa. Letras femeninas en el siglo XV’, Yarchay, 49 (2009), 45–68. Moore Jr., John K., ‘Conventional Botany or Unorthodox Organics? On the Meollo/ Corteza Metaphor in “Admiraçión operum Dey” of Teresa de Cartagena’, Romance Notes, 44/1 (2003), 3–12. Nader, Helen, The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance 1350–1550 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1979). Ochoa de Eribe Urdinguio, María Angeles, ‘El yo polémico de Teresa de Cartagena en la “Admiración de las obras de Dios”: Las argucias del débil por entrar en el canon’. Letras de Deusto, 29/84 (1999), 179–88. Petroff, Elizabeth A., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Rivera-Cordero, Victoria, ‘Spatializing Illness: Embodied Deafness in Teresa de Cartagena’s Arboleda de los enfermos’, Coronica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures and Cultures, 37/2 (2009), 61–77. Rivera-Cordero, Victoria, ‘Writing as Resistance: Self and Survival in Leonor López de Córdoba and Teresa de Cartagena’, in Jeff Rider and Jamie Friedman (eds), The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 179–201. Rivera Garretas, María Milagros, ‘Los testamentos de Juana de Mendoza. Camarera Mayor de Isabel la Católica y de su marido el poeta Gómez Manrique, corregidor de Toledo’, Anuario de Estudios Medievales, 37/1 (2007), 139–80. Rivera Garretas, María Milagros, ‘Una vida en relación: Juana de Mendoza con Gómez Manrique, Isabel la Católica y Teresa e Cartagena’, in Blanca Garí (ed.), Vidas de

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mujeres del Renacimiento (Barcelona: Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2007), pp. 103–30. Rivera Garretas, María Milagros, ‘Vías de búsqueda de existencia femenina libre: Perpetua, Christine de Pizan y Teresa de Cartagena’, Duoda: Revista d’estudis feministes, 5 (1993), 51–71. Romero Díaz, Nieves, ‘On Female Political Alliances: Sor María de Ágreda’s Communities of Letters’, Hispanic Review, 86/1 (Winter 2018), 91–111. Shepard, Alexandra and Phil Withington, Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric. Politics, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). Sieber, Harry, ‘Clientelismo y mecenazgo: Hacia una historia cultural literaria de la corte de Felipe III’, Actas del IV Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Internacional Siglo de Oro (AISO), 1 (1998), 95–113. Snow, Joseph T., ‘Speaking through Many Voices: Polyphony in the Writings of Teresa de  Cartagena’, in Ivy A. Corfis and Ray Harris-Northall (eds), Medieval Iberia (London: Boydell & Brewer, 2007), pp. 16–29. Surtz, Ronald E., ‘Image Patterns in Teresa de Cartagena’s Arboleda de los enfermos’, in Gilbert Paolini (ed.), La Chispa ’87: Selected Proceedings (New Orleans: Tulane University, 1987), pp. 297–304. Surtz, Ronald E., Writing Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain: The Mothers of Saint Teresa of Avila (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). Tarbin, Stephanie and Susan Broomhall, Women Identities and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008). Teresa de Cartagena, Arboleda de los enfermos. Admiraçión operum Dey, ed. Joseph Lewis Hutton (Madrid: Anejos del Boletín de la Real Academia Española, 1967). Teresa de Cartagena, The Writings of Teresa de Cartagena: Translated with Introduction, Notes, and Interpretive Essay, trans. Dayle Seidenspinner-Núñez (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998). Trillia, Raquel, ‘Teresa de Cartagena: Agent of Her Own Salvation’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 32/1 (2009), 51–70. Vigil, Mariló, La vida de las mujeres en los siglos XVI y XVII (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1986). Weber, Alison, ‘“Dear Daughter”: Reform and Persuasion in St Teresa’s Letters to Her Prioresses’, in Jane Couchman and Anne Crabb (eds), Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1470–1700 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 241–62.

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4 Hildegardian Remixes: Hildegard von Bingen and the Appropriation of Auctoritas ANDRÉS AMITAI WILSON

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he vast oeuvre of Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) encompasses philosophy, poetry and music.1 Hildegard’s literary output remains well known to medievalists,2 but her works are frequently viewed as sui generis – illustrative of some vague notion of ‘female-visionary literature’ rather than viewed as the unique product of the medieval tradition of auctoritas.3 I do not seek to diminish the uniqueness of Hildegard’s female voice or her stunning originality as a medieval polymath; rather, I believe that a more restrictive view of Hildegard’s works reveals the richly subversive ways in which these creations widen the boundaries and connotations of ‘authority’, rather than disregarding those borders.4 In employing such an approach to Hildegard’s work, we might better come to see what Elizabeth Petroff, who spent her impressive academic career helping her students to appreciate the beauty and nuance of medieval visionary literature, has called ‘the controlled brilliance of Hildegard’s work’.5 Hildegard’s experience was unique because of her dual role as auctor and magistra.6 She engaged many archetypes of the feminine in order to inspire the Rupertsberg community of which she was in charge, but she also framed the visionary narratives of the Scivias exegetically;7 these visions contribute both sacred texts and commentaries in the medieval commentary tradition.8 Likewise, Hildegard’s musical output engages key tropes from authoritative biblical texts in order to adapt them to her nuanced interpretations of notions such as virginity, motherhood and viriditas, a concept most likely derived from Gregory but whose instantiation is uniquely hers.9 Across her works, in particular her Scivias and her musical output, Hildegard constructed a mythos in which the two figures of Eve and Mary become significant indicators of downfall and salvation. She employs the latter of these two figures, Mary, as a rectification for Eve’s disobedience and the subsequent expulsion of humanity from paradise. Hildegard’s poetic exceptionality lies in her uncanny ability to work within and recraft with great subtlety medieval notions of auctoritas.10 The ‘Sibyl of the Rhine’s’ works employ long-established tropes from prophetic and exegetical literature in order to assert an authority from which, as a woman, she had otherwise been socially barred. Paradoxically her credibility as a prophetess and the auctoritas that she is able to claim are derived by her use of traditional tropes teamed with the disingenuous assertion that

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she is indocta, ‘an unlearned woman’;11 however, as creative exegetical works ostensibly composed by a woman, the mildly antinomian elements of Hildegard’s visions and their explanations exploit the gender misconceptions of Church patriarchy, levying what social psychologists call a ‘stereotype tax’.12 Consequently, Hildegard’s Scivias and musical output walk a fine but visible line between a prophetic voice that allows her to be heard in the first place, and the exegetical tradition that stood as a stylistic indicator that her works were, nevertheless, orthodox.13 Hildegard’s marginality as a woman prophet and leader juxtaposed with her adaptation of auctoritas are what define her unique visions and musical reworking of traditional tropes and Christian archetypes.

Auctoritas As Hildegard’s writing presents a nuanced reworking of tropes within a traditional understanding of auctoritas, I recapitulate that concept here to better present the ways in which Hildegard defers to and adapts it. Implicit in the definition of a medieval auctor is the circularity between ‘authorship’ and ‘authority’, for Auctoritas exists as a hinge, connecting authors that one must read as part of medieval liberal-arts education with the texts considered to be ‘authoritative’.14 Alastair J. Minnis explains: ‘The book of an auctor was a book worth reading; a book worth reading had to be the work of an auctor’;15 God is the sole auctor who uses things to signify, while human auctores can only do so using words. Only in the thirteenth century with the ascendancy of Scholasticism and a heightened focus on the literal did the character, personhood or specifics of authorship really matter from an exegetical point of view because, ultimately, the meaning of a text and its implicit import were viewed as having been derived by the Holy Spirit. I believe it is this latter aspect of auctoritas that Hildegard was able to seize upon and wield to her advantage.16 Even if Hildegard wrote polyphonic pieces of music, her depiction of experience is much more disingenuous and politically motivated than many other female mystics. In Claire Taylor Jones’s contribution to this volume, ‘Liturgy and the Performance of the Mystical Self’, she stresses the interpersonal dimension to polyphonic singing that results in a sort of kenosis or undoing of the self.17 Intrinsic to the experience of creating music with others is the potential for an interpersonally spiritual experience. Nevertheless, whether or not we accept that Hildegard empirically experienced ‘visions’, instrumentally we can see the ways in which as a writer she employed visionary experience to politically validate her narratives by imbricating them in the authoritative tropes of prophetic and biblical texts. Hildegard frames her visions similarly to biblical commentaries and explicates spiritual precepts in a genre that represents a compromise between first-person prophetic writings and homily. I follow Barbara Newman’s persuasive contention that prophetic appropriation is salient in Hildegard’s Scivias – the vast collection of personal visionary testimonies teamed with theological exegesis that is generally Hildegard’s most widely known work.18 Hildegard’s contention that her visions were given by the Holy Spirit, the use of common tropes from prophetic literature in these visions and the conceit that Hildegard attempts to explicate those visions with the divine authority of the figure who reveals them to her renders Hildegard’s testimonies acceptable as vera doctrina.19 As ‘a

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tender and fragile rib imbued with a mystical breath’,20 Hildegard is paradoxically able to claim authority that a man in a similar situation might not, but a man would not need to do so for simply presenting a public commentary on Scripture.21 The role of prophetess that Hildegard asserts both frames her creative work and prompts her correspondence with twelfth-century male luminaries like Bernard of Clairvaux.22 Elizabeth Petroff has demonstrated that ‘Visions were a socially sanctioned activity that freed a woman from conventional roles by identifying her as a genuine religious figure.’23 As a woman in a patriarchal and misogynist society, the role of prophetess allowed Hildegard a certain power within the authoritative realm of men that was in many ways an extension of the power that she wielded within the enclosed realm that she shared exclusively with women – the sisters whom she governed as magistra.

Inner Visions I recapitulate some of the major historical coordinates of Hildegard’s biography here in order more adequately to contextualise her work. Born into an aristocratic family, Hildegard enjoyed direct access to the highest officers of the ecclesiastical order. Hildegard’s parents offered her as an oblate – a minor offered by his or her parents to become a monk or nun, according to the Benedictine Rule – at eight years old and she was enclosed under the tutelage of the anchoress, Countess Jutta of Sponheim (1091–1136).24 Upon Jutta’s death, Hildegard was unanimously elected to the position of community magistra; although taught to read at an early age, Hildegard was granted permission at the age of forty-three and learned to write properly in Latin;25 at this second stage of literacy Hildegard began to compose music as well by using neumes26 and writing in a personalised yet exegetical mode;27 following a vision that she had, in 1150 Hildegard moved her sisters to Rupertsberg near Bingen, and it was after this move, with the help of her magister at Disibodenberg and later her amanuensis, Wolmar,28 that Hildegard systematically began to compile the lyrics she had already been composing since the 1140s. Hildegard spoke of three major visions that influenced the course and direction of her life. The first occurred around 1141 ce and ostensibly occasioned the material for the Scivias, while the other two came in 1163 and 1167, respectively, and led to the Liber divinorum operum. Although Hildegard consistently refers to herself as indocta29 or ‘unlearned’, her vast erudition in the Christian canon is apparent in her dictated works, and she somehow gained an understanding of the monastic exegetical process and ultimately wrote and preached to the order of nuns of which she was magistra. The consistent conceit of Hildegard’s lack of knowledge suggests her compulsion to present her unlearned exegetical conclusions because they have been divinely relayed, not attained by erudition. Hildegard returns to this humility trope in her correspondence with Bernard of Clairvaux, saying that she received a vision despite being ‘wretched and more than wretched for being a woman’ (misera et plus quam misera in nomine femineo).30 Hildegard begins the Scivias in keeping with the prophetic tradition31 and tropes established by the major Hebrew prophets and continued in the Book of Revelation (1:13). As biblical exempla, prophets were important sources of auctoritas that served as examples for Hildegard’s social role as magistra.32 Hildegard introduces her reader to the context

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of her visions, noting her age at the time and the assertion of ‘I saw’ (vidi) that defines prophecy: ‘And behold! In the forty-third year of my earthly course, as I was gazing with great fear and trembling attention at a heavenly vision, I saw a great splendour in which resounded a voice from Heaven’ (Scivias I, p. 59). Through dating, Hildegard tethers her prophetic moment to Christian history and mythology: ‘It happened that, in the eleven hundred and forty-first year of the Incarnation of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, when I was forty-two years and seven months old, Heaven was opened and a fiery light of exceeding brilliance came and permeated my whole brain.’33 Hildegard downplays any personal details extraneous to the visions in which she is most often called homo. As an author, Hildegard sought some degree of androgyny, amplifying her ‘feminine ignorance’ when that serves her visions, but exaggerating the universality of her prophetic project by becoming ‘male enough’ to be a prophet in the tradition of Ezekiel and Jeremiah. This of course corresponds with Jerome’s statement about women’s spirituality being contingent on the visionary’s ability to ‘become like a man’, as addressed in Petroff’s work;34 by casting herself as an androgynous prophetess Hildegard signals maleness as a conceit in order that the ecclesiastical authorities take her more seriously, but she thus outwits the patriarchy of the Church by winning at its very game of auctoritas. In addition to suggesting a sort of maleness, Hildegard plays down her erudition. The voice of heaven states, since you are timid in speaking [sed quia timida es ad loquendum], and simple in expounding, and untaught [indocta] in writing, speak and write these things not by a human mouth, and not by the understanding of human invention, and not by the requirements of human composition, but as you see and hear them on high in the heavenly places in the wonders of God.35 The visions of Book II, Vision 1, are particularly illustrative of Hildegard’s humility trope. The most emphasised aspects of these visions are in fact her condition as a woman and her ‘unlearnedness’.36 The voice tells Hildegard, ‘Therefore, O diffident mind, who are taught inwardly [quae interius es docta] by mystical inspiration, though because of Eve’s transgression you are trodden on by the masculine sex, speak of that fiery work this sure vision has shown you.’37 Hildegard’s prophecy surpasses those of learned men not despite her lack of learning but precisely because of it. Because of her deficient education she is privy to divine secrets by means of interior vision; however, in a witty double-entendre, ‘interius’ evokes the womb, the unique anatomical domain of women. Hildegard’s conceit is that she must present her exegetical conclusions as unlearned because they have been divinely relayed and not attained by erudition. The indocta Hildegard is told to ‘Explain these things in such a way that the hearer, receiving words of his instructor, may expound them in those words, according to that will, vision and instruction’, and Hildegard thus becomes both unlettered prophetess sharing her vision as well as exegete inspired with the proper interpretation by means of the Holy Spirit. As a result of her revelation, Hildegard instantaneously comes to know the meaning of the exposition of the Scriptures, namely the Psalter, the Gospel and the other catholic volumes of both the Old and New Testaments, though [Hildegard] did not have the interpretation of the words of their texts or the division of the syllables or the knowledge of cases or tenses.38

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Despite purported deficiency in Latin, Hildegard understands how to read and interpret Scripture through visionary intuition,39 an infallible epistemological position that trumps the erudite males who can only assess the veracity of her experience through its similarity to a long-established tropology. What Hildegard suggests here is that she learns, through vision, ‘the deep profundity of scriptural exposition’.40 In other words, the consequence of Hildegard’s vision is insight into the nature of divine will as it manifests itself through Scriptures, whose interpretation her narrative suggests that she is worthy of contributing. Hildegard is enjoined scribe (‘write!’), and the necessary testament of her vision is the Scivias. Like the purportedly illiterate prophet Muhammed of the Koran, Hildegard relates essential prophetic messages that she has gleaned by no other means than vision. Although Hildegard expresses a truth purportedly gleaned from visions that contain prophetic tropological elements, she also feminises those elements, perhaps in an effort to engage her sisters at Rupertsberg. Mariological semiotics and the accompanying celebration of virginity as a transcendent state of being figure prominently in Hildegard; however, Hildegard’s Marian perspective on Mary subtly catapults the mother of Jesus more fully into Christianity’s monotheistic pantheon. One of the more striking ways in which she reworks traditional theological notions is her presentation of Mary as the Second Eve.41 According to medieval Christian doctrine, Adam’s ‘Original Sin’ needed to be rectified by Christ, the ‘Second Adam’, whose duality as wholly human and wholly divine would allow him to vanquish sin completely. In Book I, Vision 3, near the close of the vision, Hildegard surreptitiously introduces a Marian aspect of ontological atonement into the conversation in a way that seems quietly revolutionary: The first man sought more than he should have sought, and was deceived by [the Devil] and went to perdition. But the Devil did not foresee the redemption of Man, when the Son of Man slew death and broke Hell asunder. The Devil at first conquered Man through the woman [diabolus enim in initio per mulierem devicit hominem]; but God at last crushed the Devil through the woman who bore the Son of God, who wondrously brought the works of the Devil to naught [sed Deus in fine temporum per mulierem contrivit diabolum, quae Filium Dei genuit]; as my beloved John testifies, saying: ‘For this reason the Son of God appeared, that He Might destroy the works of the Devil’ [1 John 3:8].42 Hildegard does not overemphasise her point, but the subtle shift in her claim is that the literal debt of Original Sin was not only paid by Christ as ‘Second Adam’, but also to some degree paid by the Virgin Mary as ‘Second Eve’. This contention is so understated that it would easily escape the radar of theologians who approached Hildegard as an unlearned female visionary and only secondarily as an exegete actively engaged in theologising; thus, Hildegard, in her prophetic work, exploits the stereotype tax that will be levied against her, anticipating how she will be perceived and offering her unique interpretations around those expectations on the part of her examiners. Hildegard returns to this point later in the Scivias, drawing the reader’s attention to the Jesus-as-flower iconography: When humility was extolled in the assumption of this Flower (Christ), where scorn overwhelmed pride, which the first woman lent her ear to, thirsting for more than what she ought to: the second woman surrendered herself to the service of the Lord,

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she realized how small she was in her humility and proclaimed her God; . . . the first woman rejected [this Flower] when wanting to listen to the serpent’s counsel, so that all mankind fell with her, dispossessed of the joy afforded by the heavenly clarity and would still be in darkness if the blossom of this branch had not lifted it, with Her science and Her piety, to the sanctity of salvation.43 Here again Mary becomes ‘Second Eve’ whose actions supplant those of her errant mythic predecessor, Eve. Just as Christ atones for the sin of Adam, in Hildegard’s mythic ontological schematic Mary rectifies the Original Sin engendered by Eve. I conclude this portion of my essay focusing on the Scivias with an investigation of a few other key tropes from the Christian tradition that Hildegard subtly (and originally) emends. Hypostasising of the Church as the ‘Bride of Christ’ and the reading of the Song of Songs as an extended allegory of this relationship is doctrinal by the twelfth century, but Hildegard focuses directly on the maternal aspects of the trope and the Church’s allegorisation as a feminine ‘Bride’. This first vision of the second book concludes with the divine voice explicating visions for her and concluding with a startling vision of the ‘New Bride of the Lamb’ (nova sponsa ejusdem agni) who praesentata est in diversis ornamentis quibus ornanda est in omni genere virtutum fortissimi certaminis totius fidelis populi; qui contra callidum serpentem pugnatori su[n]t. Sed qui vigilantibus oculis videt, et attentis auribus audit, hic mysticis verbis meis quae de me vivente emanant, osculum praebeat amplexionis. (was set up with many ornaments, for she had to be ornamented with every kind of virtue for the mighty struggle of all the faithful people, who are to fight against the crafty serpent. But let the one who sees with watchful eyes and hears with attentive ears welcome with a kiss My mystical words, which proceed from Me Who am life.)44 Hildegard recycles the ‘mystical kiss’ as well as a number of tropes that she would have known from the Scripture of the daily offices and the accepted allegorical reading of Song of Songs in order to prove that her point is orthodox. Scivias describes the Sacrament as a ‘royal kiss’ between the Church and God (Vision 6).45 Hildegard furthers this interpretation through a direct quotation of the Song of Songs 8:5, a trope that recurs in the Hebrew and Latin translations of the poem in various forms: ‘Quae est ista quae ascendit per desertum deliciis affluens: et innixa super dilectum suum?’ (‘Who is this that cometh up from the desert, flowing with delights, leaning upon her beloved?’)46 Hildegard explicates this passage as pertaining to the Church in distinction to the pagans who surround it, and as such the Church is a multicoloured but beautiful woman arising from the wilderness. In contrast, Hildegard horrifically allegorises the Synagogue as not having eyes in Vision 5, which is dedicated to that allegory; however an analogy is drawn because it was the Synagogue that gave birth to the mother of the incarnation of God – that is, Mary. According to this analogy, if Mary rectifies Eve, then female monastics who stem from Mary rectify the blind female Synagogue. Hildegard reworks and further feminises the conventional medieval hypostasising of Synagogue and Ecclesia as twins with the theological distinction that Synagogue is blind, and thus ‘blind’ to the revelation of the Messiah: ‘Therefore you see the image of a woman, pale from her head to her navel; she is the Synagogue, which is the mother of the Incarnation

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of the Son of God.’47 It is the maternal element of these traditional allegories upon which Hildegard seizes and makes her own. In Hildegard’s semiotic paradigm, the hypostasised Bride of Christ is also mater. In Book II, Vision 3, Hildegard explicates a verse from her vision that reads, ‘Her womb is pierced like a net with many openings with a huge multitude of people running in and out’ as meaning ‘she displays her maternal kindness.’48 Hildegard’s Church is both ‘always pregnant’ yet virginal. The Sibyl explains, ‘He chose the Church as his Bride, to be a mother to the believing peoples, to restore salvation and by spiritual regeneration send them without stain to the celestial realms.’49 Like Hildegard’s monastic cohort, her ideal Church is virginal and it is by dint of this distinction that it can play a faultless maternal role in fostering salvation. Hildegard’s allegory is built on a Marian archetype, virginal yet pregnant with the spirit of God. On the one hand, none of these arguments is transgressive; on the other, Hildegard chooses to focus on the corporeal aspects of the virginity trope to make her ideas more relevant to the sisters to whom that message is most intended.

Music of Whose Spheres? Turning briefly to Hildegard’s musical output to conclude this study, it should be reiterated that Hildegard was partly indebted to Bernard of Clairvaux as well as to her teacher and scribe, Wolbero, with whom it might be said she had a symbiotic teaching relationship,50 since Wolbero began as Hildegard’s teacher but ultimately served as her amanuensis and student. Whereas Hildegard was tasked with rendering the mundanity of the weekly offices relevant for her sisters as well as forging a political place of her own in Europe through prophecy, Bernard’s reworking of the Song of Songs by means of homily reinvented the poem for all of medieval Christendom. But both Wolbero and Bernard authored commentaries on the Song of Songs. As Barbara Newman has summarised, in Wolbero’s commentary on the cycle of biblical of poems it is the musical component of the Song that rings through,51 and it is that commentary that calls into question whether the medieval understanding of the Song of Songs was as both poem and song, upon which Hildegard might have seized for its musical value. In addition to these thematic feedback mechanisms, Hildegard’s musical output’s deference to auctoritas manifests formally through her reworking of a medieval musical device called centonisation. With help from the extensive work of Barbara Newman, I plan to draw the reader’s attention to a few instances in her lyrics and music in which she consciously reworks commentarial tropes – particularly from the Song of Songs – through this Gregorian technique. In Music in the Middle Ages, Gustave Reese defines centonisation: The word cento originally denoted a patchwork quilt or dress; the name applied to a literary composition made up of fragments taken here and there from works of an author or different authors and pieced together in the form of a literary mosaic . . . The Gregorian artist often selected a few significant bits from the verses of a psalm and produced a short, concise text that corresponded better to his [or in our case, ‘her’] special purpose than any of these bits with its original text. The Gregorian melodists followed the example of the liturgical writers.52

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In Hildegard’s employment of the device, a sort of displacement occurs in which old signs are revised and consequently replaced by new signifiers.53 In this case, centonisation is the conceptual parallel of the phenomenological intersubjectivity of choral singing that Jones addresses in her essay, building upon the theories of Merleau-Ponty. Centonisation appropriates material and reconstructs it in a new formation that is nevertheless imbricated with the old. As was the case with the Scivias, the singularity of Hildegard’s aesthetic sensibilities derives from her unique reworking of familiar tropologies from the common semantic reservoir.54 Though the literal referentiality of Hildegard’s invocation of canonical works like the Song of Songs might rightfully be challenged, her intent in those invocations explicitly draws upon the popular expositions of Bernard of Clairvaux.55 Hildegard knowingly employed such a reading of the Song of Songs and the Psalms in her own musical and poetic crafting of new songs, songs that contain poetry that Peter Dronke has called, ‘some of the most unusual, subtle, and exciting poetry of the twelfth century’.56 The scant scholarship on Hildegard’s musical/ poetic opus has made short shrift of the interplay between music and text in her vast oeuvre, and a thorough investigation of the musical choices in these antiphons and their relationship to authority leaves much to be desired. As noted in the Ordo of Sosson, Hildegard begins to compose music in the 1140s – contemporaneously to her composition of the Scivias – and her musical works are composed to suit particular occasions.57 Hildegard systematically begins to compile these pieces from 1151–7.58 Other works are accreted to the song cycles after her death.59 In addition to the Benedictine sisters of her community, there is evidence that Hildegard shared her compositions with the Cistercian monks of Brabant who had posed thirtyeight theological questions to her.60 Like the theological notions that she advances in the Scivias, Hildegard’s music and lyrics were guardedly inventive and steeped in the conventions of a well-established aesthetic. Reese notes in explicating the medieval musical aesthetic that composers like Hildegard were interested not so much in composing new melodies as in adapting old and traditional phrases to new liturgical purposes . . . The ecclesiastical composers [of whom Hildegard was one] were careful to observe the melodic style required in the setting of a particular text for a particular place in the liturgy.61 Her compositions represent reworkings assembled within a malleable yet traditional liturgical framework. This last comment is not intended to denigrate the quality of her work in any way, but it is meant to illustrate that meeting Hildegard’s extensive and original output with modern notions of the artist as a solitary genius who defies convention is anachronistic in the medieval context and perhaps incorrect in the modern context as well. Hildegard’s work is always in dialogue with traditional genres as well as musical and poetic conventions; but it is the way in which she adapts these that her genius is revealed. Furthermore, in keeping with the traditional framework that she adapts to her own usage, the bulk of Hildegard’s musical output surrounded the Divine Offices, consisting of seven liturgical ‘hours’ and Matins, as outlined in the Regula Benedicti VIII–XIX.62 The particular portion of the divine offices to which her seventy musical pieces would have been composed centred around the psalmody – the daily recitation and weekly

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repetition of the Book of Psalms. The Regula Benedicti dictates that all 150 Psalms should be chanted on a weekly basis (XIX. 23), allowing some flexibility in the way that these recitations are conducted, just as long as they follow the distribution guidelines outlined in the aforementioned chapters, and that the entirety of the Book of Psalms is communally recited by the week’s end.63 Benedict also dictates that certain Psalms be recited with antiphons (cum antiphonis) sung either before, after or surrounding their place in the various Offices.64 Though the Regula outlines the point during services at which the antiphons are sung and which Psalms they accompany, it does not offer any systematic explanation of how antiphons are composed or how they should sound.65 Composers of Gregorian chant began to cultivate certain practices in response to this absence. One such practice that arose was the ‘Law of Accent’. Reese explains: ‘Gregorian melody is built on the grammatical accents of the liturgical text. Melodic peaks generally coincide with the tonic accents of the words. The accented syllable of each word is normally higher (i.e. musically) than the one that precedes it.’66 Because the texts of Gregorian chant are liturgical and therefore sacrosanct, prosody dictates melody – or at least it should; however, in Hildegard’s music, it generally does not. Though the Law of Accent was fundamental to the composition of Gregorian chant and therefore to subsequent music built on similar principles, Reese explains that the Law of Accent could sometimes, ‘yield to superior aesthetic laws based on the exigencies of musical phrasing, style, tonality, rhythm, and the particular form to which the melody belongs’.67 If the Law of Accent applied to the prosody of a particular word, on a macro level, there was a word within each phrase that would also be accented, and this was most often found at the peak of a musical phrase and referred to as the ‘phraseological accent’.68 The phraseological accent was more often than not dictated by the most substantively important word of a phrase. Notably out of the seventy pieces that we have which are attributed to Hildegard, forty-three of those are antiphons. Whereas the Mass was sung in church by trained singers, antiphonal psalmody was sung by monks, and there were two types. The first variety of antiphons undergirded the Divine Offices while the second, sometimes called ‘votive antiphons’, were more freely interpolated into the framework of the service. Hildegard wrote plainchant or simple melodies to accompany snippets of liturgy, but she did this within the framework of antiphonal composition. Her melodies are surprisingly monophonic and richly melismatic.69 Though Hildegard’s use of melisma was in no way unique for the time, its particular expression within her work was.70 To stretch a single syllable of a verse through countless notes suggests the primacy of the medium of music within the hybrid art form of liturgical song, as the integrity of semantic meaning is disrupted – if not eroded – by the elasticity of sound; nevertheless, the employment of a virtuosic and performative ‘exercise in sound’, if you will, is in many ways akin to the spiritual vocalizing of text required in lectio divina. The notion that concerns the opposition of music and text points to the generally dualistic relationship between body and soul that carried a theological import for Hildegard,71 but in a different way from Augustine’s confused attempt in Book X of the Confessions to disentangle the spiritually salutary text from the meaningless inveigling of song.72 For Hildegard, when included in a liturgical setting, word comes to stand for the body, while music reflects the spirit; thus Hildegard inverts the arrangement of the long-standing trope and consequently suggests that the ultimate goal of her own musical production is divine synthesis of both modes

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of expression: ‘For the harmony of heaven proclaims the divinity of God’s Son, and the word makes known his humanity.’73 Singing richly melismatic melodies in harmony would render the internal experience of shifting tonalities interpersonal by making those tones also chords. In this regard, Hildegard’s aesthetic exemplifies the governmental, interpersonal experience of group singing of which Jones writes in her study.74 More than half of the musical pieces compiled as the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum – often hyperliterally translated as the ‘Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations’ – are composed of antiphons; nevertheless, even the subtle changes that Hildegard renders to traditional text are notable for the many ways she introduces novel theological implications to the threadbare tropes. The medieval sense of symphonia differed considerably from our own.75 ‘Symphony’ was more or less synonymous with ‘harmony’ as in, for example, Hildegard’s use of the term in ‘celestis symphonia’ from Ave generosa (XVII) where it means something like ‘celestial harmonies’. The redundancy of the title that Hildegard later gives to her collection of liturgical songs imparts a superlative value in a periphrastic turn reminiscent of the title of the Song of Songs as the ‘finest of Songs’. In many places in the text Hildegard reconceives the ontology of music itself as ancillary to the act of salvation by frequently conflating the images of Christ’s ‘blood’ with ‘music’. Whether it is the intersubjective role of music as wielding a governmental pull on human behaviours, regulating them and inculcating virtue, or if this is a more impressionistic view that Hildegard held about music is unclear, but if the Song of Songs is the ultimate piece and her collection is a compilation of celestial harmonies, perhaps for Hildegard music itself is the ultimate ‘note’ in the symphony of the divine plan. Indeed, Hildegard seems to view music as a cosmic or essential medium of communication and writes in both the Scivias and Causa et curae that Adam knew the language of the angels, that is, music, and even though the original perfection of communication was lost: Hearing earthly music enables humans to recall their former state and functions as a moral force that assists them in their ongoing moral quest. But a man’s soul also has harmony in itself and is like a symphony. As a result, many times when a person hears a symphony, he sends forth a lamentation since he remembers that he was sent out of his fatherland into exile.76 The primary tropes that appear in Hildegard’s music that I want to look at in what remains of this piece are those that Hildegard reworks in her presentation of Mary by again juxtaposing Marian theology with some of Hildegard’s own idées fixes as well as tropes from the Bible and, more particularly, the Song of Songs. We have seen the way in which an exaggerated and adapted Marian image permeates the Scivias but also plays out in an interesting way in Hildegard’s songs and poetry. Though the lyrics of Hildegard’s antiphons touch upon a variety of themes that surround the Divine Offices and the rhythms of the monastic calendar, as previously discussed, Hildegard evinces a number of idiosyncratic lyric fixations. Viriditas (literally ‘greenness’ or ‘verdancy’) is a Latin term that Hildegard reworks to mean something like ‘spiritual purity’ or ‘spiritual vitality’.77 It comes to be associated with the Virgin Mary and the transcendent perfection of her virginity. Furthermore, just as light is the guiding image of Hildegard’s visions from Scivias, words like ‘claritas’, ‘lucida’ and ‘stella’

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permeate her poetry. Hildegard’s lyric conception of Mary as equal-part Jesus’ mother and God’s lover is notable throughout the Marian poems in the collection (pieces VIII– XXIII). Though the sexual components of these lyrics may seem perverse in this context, they cannot be overlooked and result from an analogy in which Mary’s virginal maternity rectifies Eve’s transgression as Jesus rectifies Adam’s Original Sin. In Ave generosa the understatedly carnal language of the immaculate conception assumes an erotic quality and its lyrics are performed by a mixed choir that ascends in fourths by a wide leap on the verse, ‘nunc omnis ecclesia in gaudio’. As with the other Mary poems, the work is framed as an apostrophe of praise directed at Mary with ambling and generally pentatonic runs. Mary’s womb ‘held joy / when every celestial harmony rang through’ (XXVII v. 5) (‘Venter enim tuus gaudium habuit / cum omnis celestis symphonia de te sonuit’). Later in the text, though this gaudium is framed in richly erotic allusions, it is the unique quality of viriditas that Mary exudes that allows for ecstasy. O splendidissima gemma (X), or ‘Antiphon for the Virgin’, is the first musical piece that Hildegard recounts as having been inspired to compose in the Scivias.78 As you may recall from my treatment of the Scivias, according to medieval Christian mythic history, God’s initial act of speech that punctuates the beginning of the world is disrupted by Eve’s infraction. The prima materia of the world was troubled by Eve; as a consequence, Mary is chosen as new matter from which the world would ultimately be reformed. Mary’s corrective role as the appropriate lover in the postlapsarian world is framed in many of the images from the Song of Songs, and the supernatural music of the piece has an elastic Phrygian melody with a wide range that evokes an ecstatic sense of angularity. Phrygian mode is the third mode of the major scale (Ionian), a minor scale that has the characteristic sound of the flat second. Notably, the Phrygian tonality abounds in the music of the Middle East and Spain. We might speculate that Hildegard was experimenting with a tonality that she recognised as ‘foreign’ or ‘other’ in this piece in order to create a sense of otherworldliness in her musical etiological myth of Mary, a reformed world through which the Second Adam of Christ descends. In Hodie aperuit (XI) the thing that opens on the day for which the text is set is the formerly ‘clausa porta’ (v. 2) (‘closed door’) of Eden and, metonymically, salvation – slammed shut in Eve’s face because of violation of God’s injunction. But this image of a clausa porta evokes both Song 4:12, ‘hortus conclusus soror mea sponsa hortus conclusus fons signatus’(‘A locked garden is my sister, my bride; a locked garden and a sealed spring’), as well as the phrase’s valence in Bernard’s thought as a metaphor for the chain of communication between Scripture and humanity. Scripture is a ‘locked garden’ that the exegete (in this case, Hildegard) must force open; however, Bernard offers some flexibility as to how this might be achieved. Hildegard’s verse accepts the traditional view that Eve’s infraction resulted in man’s being barred from eternal life and prompted Jesus’ consequent (though deferred) rectification of ontological reality, but Hildegard presents this with the novel view of Mary as the symbolic signified in the Song’s lyrics. Mary who is frequently the ‘stella maris’ (‘star of the sea’) in the broader medieval tradition also becomes, ‘a flower that gleams in the dawn’ (‘unde lucet in aurora / flos de Virgine Maria’). But beyond Mary’s own gleaming it is the rays that she gives off that depict her importance as cosmological. Mary’s role as creator and ‘builder’ – not just one who emanates the work of the divine plan – is evident in Hildegard’s own creation of the Mary mystique.

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In O clarissima mater (IX), Mary’s birthing of Jesus provides ‘the balm for the wounds that Eve had built into torments for souls’, and the initial vocative features one of the most strikingly melismatic and rubato portions of Hildegard’s entire musical corpus. The metaphors of ‘balm’ and ‘medicine’ that Hildegard employs here are in dialogue with several biblical passages, but Hildegard reworks them in a manner that reflects Bernard’s ‘Sermon on Song of Songs’. As with any good study of biblical exegesis, this requires some intertextual context. In Jeremiah 46:11 the prophet literally reproaches the ‘virgin daughter of Egypt’ – while metonymically this message is equally directed at the erring Israelites – for seeking to use medicines that do not heal (multiplicas medicamina sanitas), i.e. idolatry, in vain. While to the Israelite audience these ‘medicines’ would have meant the foreign gods, to the medieval Christian world it would have meant the attempt to overcome sin without faith in Christ. Thus Mary’s ‘balm’ to which Hildegard alludes is Christ; however, additional layers of allusion are drawn from Bernard’s Commentary. ‘Balm’ was geographically associated with both Gilead as well as the Bridegroom. In his commentary on the Song, Bernard explicates this image in a way that privileges subjectivity on the part of the exegete: Every person, therefore, is free to pursue the thoughts and experiences, however sublime and exquisite, that are his by special insight, on the meaning of the Bridegroom’s ointments. For my part, I offer for the common good what I have received from a common source. He is the fountain of life, a sealed fountain, brimming over from within the enclosed garden [a direct allusion to Song 4:12] . . . This is that true wisdom which Job says, ‘is drawn out of secret places’ divides into four streams and flows into streets . . . from these four streams as from the priceless perfumes – there is nothing to prevent us seeing them either as water or as perfume, water because they cleanse, perfume because of their scent – from these four as from priceless perfumes blended from heavenly ingredients . . . The Church was devoid of the power to run in the odor of her Solomon until he who from eternity was the Wisdom begotten of the Father, became Wisdom from the Father for her in time, and so enabled her to perceive the odor.79 Based on Bernard, Hildegard has affected a subtle but theologically radical change. Bernard gives other exegetes carte blanche to interpret the ‘balm’ in any way that he or she sees fit, based on his or her own interpretation or intimation of the passage. While the traditional reading – as well as the one that Bernard espouses – emphasises the balm or ointments as having originated in the coming of the Bridegroom, allegorically understood as Christ, Hildegard’s reworking of the verse into the antiphon underscores the agency of Mary in bringing the Christ into being. Mary is the ‘clarissima mater / sancte medicine’ (vv. 1–2) with the ‘mother’s radiance’ in prime syntactic position within the phrase. The music gives precedence to the long, open ‘ah’ sound that predominates the text, fashioning an ethereal bed of female voices. Furthermore, although Mary is not herself the ‘blessed medicine’ the antiphon is addressed to her, and Hildegard hails Mary by writing ‘you vanquished death / building life’(‘Tu destruxisti mortem, / edificando vitam’). Antiphon XII (Quia ergo femina) follows this same line of argumentation: ‘Because a woman constructed death / a bright virgin has destroyed it’ (‘Quia ergo femina mortem instruxit, / Clara virgo illam interemit’). As in the theology of the Scivias, Mary’s unique agency in redemption is underscored throughout Hildegard’s lyrics. Perhaps the

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ubiquity of melisma in her musical output, in addition to its proto-Rococo excess, might have been a sort of defence mechanism against outcries of heresy. Hildegard walks a thin line between an understanding of Mary as the foremost human example of piety versus presenting her as divine matriarch. Given Hildegard’s Marian proclivities as a theologian, it is clear that such dangerous claims would need grounding in authoritative imagery of the biblical tradition, and it seems that this conscious stylistic choice is particularly salient in the antiphon, O viridissima virga (XIX). Hildegard grounds much of her Marian imagery in text and tropes appropriated from the Song from Songs, though some of those are also archetypal and some even original. As I conclude with a close reading of the lyrics and music of this piece, I present the full text below and include Barbara Newman’s literary (and not her literal) translation afterwards: 1.

O viridissima virgo, ave, Que in ventoso flabro sciscitationis Sanctorum prodisti.

2.

Cum venit tempus Quod tu floruisti in ramis tuis, Ave, ave fuit tibi Quia calor solis in te sudavit Sicut odor balsami.

3.

Nam in te floruit pulcher flos Qui odorem dedit Omnibus aromatibus Que arida erant.

4.

Et illa apparuerunt omnia In viriditate plena.

5.

Unde celi dederunt rorem super gramen Et omnis terra leta facta est, Quoniam volucres celi Nidos in ipsa habuerunt.

6.

Deinde facta est esca hominibus Et gaudium magnum epulantium. Unde, o suavis Virgo, In te non deficit ullum gaudium.

7.

Hec omnia Eva contempsit

8.

Nunc autem laus sit Altissimo.

19. Song to the Virgin / Never was a leaf so green, / For you branched from the spirited / Blast of the quest / Of the saints. // When it came time / For your boughs to blossom / (I salute you!) / your scent was like balsam / distilled in the sun. // And your flower made all spices / Fragrant / Dry though they were: / They burst into verdure. // So the skies rained dew on the grass / And the whole earth exulted, / For

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her womb brought forth wheat, / For the birds of heaven / Made their nests in it. // Keepers of the feast, rejoice! / The banquet’s ready. And you / Sweet maid-child / Are a fount of gladness. // But Eve? / She despised every joy. / Praise nonetheless, / Praise to the Highest. Hildegard begins ‘Song to the Virgin’ with a musical stress on the viriditas (v. 1) of the virgin, and it is verdant imagery and lush harmony that marks the first stanza and several measures of the piece. Nevertheless, the floral imagery of the second stanza evokes another realm of fecundity than a non-descript region of greenness, and virginity shifts to a heightened description of feminine sexuality that remains in dialogue with viriditas. It is Mary’s ‘boughs’ that ‘blossom’ and Hildegard relates that blossoming with the simile ‘like balsam / distilled in the sun’ ‘Quia calor solis in te sudavit / Sicut odor balsami’).80 There is an understated allusion in this verse to Song 2:13 (‘The fig-tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines in blossom give forth their fragrance’ (‘ficus protulit grossos suos; vineae florentes dederunt odorem suum’), a verse in which the Bridegroom (the allegorical representative of Christ but here also God-the-Father) courts the Bride (the allegorical representative of the Church, but here also Mary). The ‘dryness’ or virginal quality – perhaps equating Mary with the many barren women of the Hebrew Bible who miraculously conceive – distinguishes Mary even from the Shulamite of the Song’s literal rendering. As Newman notes, such references might only be ‘echoes’ drawn from Hildegard’s memory, as suggested by the rephrasing of the essential text. But Hildegard’s emphasis on ‘greenness’ throughout this piece, a greenness only suggested by the Vulgate’s use of large figs and other vernal imagery, displays a unity of effect that illustrates Hildegard’s mimetic genius as well as the strategic cultivation of imagery from the Song of Songs. Although in the third stanza it is merely Mary’s ‘flower’ that is referenced and not the ‘candidum lilium’(‘burning/shining lily’) to Song 2:1: ‘Ego flos campi, et lilium convallium’ (‘I am a flower of the fields / a lily of the valley’). Lastly, the sixth stanza’s banquet and the banqueters suggest Hildegard’s knowledge of the long commentarial tradition of the Song of Songs read as an ‘epithalamium’ or wedding poem. In this case, Mary is the happiest of all, and her foil, Eve, is presented as one who ‘despised joy’. Authentic sexual joy is construed as carnal virginity and ‘spiritual’ communion with God, a source of gaudium that carnal Eve would not understand. Embodied within these two figures of Mary and Eve in Hildegard’s mythos is the representation of the literal and the allegorical, the plain text and the song.

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Her entire oeuvre and a number of related works such as the Vita Hildegardis by the monks Gottfried and Theoderich of Disibodenberg were compiled and are among the varied texts contained within 481 folios of the Wiesbaden/Riesen Codex 1175/1190. We are not sure whether this anthology had been collected before or after Hildegard’s death. Hildegard’s best-known musical work is probably the Ordo Virtutum (Order of the Virtues), an allegorical morality play set to music and composed towards the end of her life. It is often included among the seventy liturgical songs in her Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum (Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations), to be discussed in more detail later, as well as in the philosophical treatise/prophetic narrative, the Scivias. Though I will not be referring to the Ordo any further

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here, a brief summary is justified to cast more light on Hildegard’s unique theological and creative productions. The Ordo depicts the struggle of the Soul (written as a female voice) against the body, with allegorised ‘souls’ seeking escape from corporeal imprisonment. The Anima falls prey to the wiles of the Devil but ultimately repents, finding her way back to God to whom all souls offer praise to conclude the work. The Ordo might well be the first medieval morality play and might even be thought of as a proto-opera. Hildegard even enjoys a relative degree of cultic status among non-academics as a proto-feminist, proto-alchemist or musical innovator. Theologian Constance J. Mews has expressed a similar criticism of this shortcoming found in Hildegard studies, explaining, ‘They [i.e.  prevailing scholars] sometimes present her as a visionary and mystic, at odds with a ruling patriarchal establishment, paying little attention to the actual structure and content of her thought.’ Mews sees Hildegard as reworking the very notion of the Trinity through her reinterpretation of the spiritus sanctus as a living and not a static entity; see Constance J. Mews, ‘Process Thought, Hildegard of Bingen and Theological Tradition’, Concrescence: Australian Journal of Process Thought, 1 (2001), http://www.concrescence.org/ files/journals/1/articles/149/public/149-113-1-PB.pdf. Beatriz Meli has persuasively argued that Hildegard’s music interweaves an idealised and intrinsically feminine definition of virginity with traditional notions of authority in order to forge a sense of liturgical and existential meaning for the sisters over whom she stood as magistra; see Beatriz Meli, ‘Virginitas and Auctoritas: Two Threads in the Fabric of Hildegard of Bingen’s Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum’, in Thérèse de Hemptinne and María Eugenia Góngora (eds), The Voice of Silence: Women’s Literacy in the Men’s Church (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 47–55. Meli explains, ‘virginitas and auctoritas were two essential threads with which the magistra wove the fabric of her Symphonia at times when a nun did not enjoy authority by virtue of her office but had to build it on account of her exceptional achievements and experiences. This need is particularly evident at her departure from the custody of the monks of Disibodenberg in search of independence and autonomy in her new nunnery of Rupertsberg; a most unusual act at the time’ (p. 49). Furthermore, Peter Dronke has tried to illustrate Hildegard’s familiarity and use of canonical sources in her works without noting them. See Hildegardis Bingensis, Liber divinorum operum, in Albert Derolez and Peter Dronke (eds.), Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis, 92 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), pp. xvi–xvii. Elizabeth A. Petroff, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 140. Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Preface’, in Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), p. 2. All of the longer English translations from the Scivias that follow are drawn from Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop’s translation to which Bynum’s preface is affixed. Alastair Minnis explains, ‘The term auctor may profitably be regarded as an accolade bestowed upon a popular writer by those later scholars and writers who used extracts from his works as sententious statement or auctoritates, gave lectures on his works in the form of textual commentaries, or employed them as literary models’; Alastair Minnis, The Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), p. 10. Indeed, by subtly modifying and using its own conventions, Hildegard brilliantly and surreptitiously interpolates herself into the patriarchy of auctoritates, and it is only because of this traditional grasp of power from an unlikely and oppressed source that we continue to read and hear her works today. Elizabeth Petroff was in many ways an academic parallel to Hildegard: a brilliant scholar who used the language and paradigm of the often patriarchal discipline of medieval studies in order to subtly exert a change in that modern scholastic community. Speaking for myself, I would say that as her students and colleagues, we have viewed her work both as authoritative and as a prime contemporary example of academic auctoritas. I present this thesis with an obvious concession to the text’s conceit that a divine figure explicates both her visions and their broader significance. The implied autoexegesis of these visions originates from and responds to the broader medieval commentary tradition.

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Beverly Mayne Kienzle summarises: ‘Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179 ce), a Benedictine nun and superior (magistra) of women’s communities, spent her waking life immersed in the Scriptures and their exegesis: listening, singing, reading, and praying the liturgy of the divine office . . . The monastic exegetical tradition which she inherited practiced the spiritual interpretation of Scripture: allegorical and not literal’; we need not be close-minded to Hildegard’s literacy or the extension of the said literacy in polyvalent and strategically ludic realms of meaning. See Beverly Mayne Kienzle, ‘Hildegard of Bingen’s Exegesis of Jesus’ Miracles and the Twelfth-Century Study of Science’, in William John Lyons and Isabella Sandwell (eds), Delivering the Word: Preaching and Exegesis in the Western Christian Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 99–112. Although the word enjoyed some currency in the Classical Latin sources, none used it so widely as Gregory in his Moralia in Job, which contains the most references to the concept. For more on the importance of Gregory’s understanding of viriditas in Hildegard as well as speculation as to its import in her work, see Jeannette Jones, ‘A Theological Interpretation of Viriditas in Hildegard of Bingen and Gregory the Great’, The Portfolio of the Department of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at Boston University, 1 (2012), http://www.bu.edu/pdme/jeannette-jones/. Maria Isabel Flisfisch summarises: ‘As an author, [Hildegard] starts from [a] “shared narrative” to turn it with great freedom into her own Sacred History . . . assessment of the diverse events and characters is her own.’ See Maria Isabel Flisfisch, ‘The Eve–Mary Dichotomy in the Symphonia of Hildegard of Bingen’, in Thérèse de Hemptinne and Marìa Eugenia Góngora (eds), The Voice of Silence: Women’s Literacy in a Men’s Church (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 37–46. Jeroen Deploige postulates that the subversive quality of Hildegard’s works lay more particularly ‘in her sex and in her marginal prophetic position’, for ‘so far as content goes, her visions were completely acceptable for the canonical standards of her time.’ See Jeroen Deploige, ‘Priests, Prophets, and Magicians: Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu vs. Hildegard of Bingen’, in Thérèse de Hemptinne and María Eugenia Góngora (eds), The Voice of Silence: Women’s Literacy in a Men’s Church (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 3–22. The term has been most closely associated with the work of Eugene Caruso and can be thought of as a price paid by a stereotype for one’s misconceptions based on stereotyping; see ‘The Price of Prejudice’, The Economist (15 January 2009), http://www.economist.com/node/12926026. Even regarding the content of Hildegard’s prophetic messages her goal was not a transgressive reformation of either the Church or the role of women in it, but rather the more modest albeit equally challenging reform of hypocritical or insincere clergy. Jeroen Deploige alludes to these so-called ‘conservative’ tendencies in Christian female mysticism, citing cases such as the works of Hildegard or Bridget of Sweden (1303–73). Deploige explains that ‘conservative female prophets never really attacked the existing clerical hierarchy, but only criticised the clerics who neglected their pastoral duties’ (‘Priests, Prophets, and Magicians’, p. 21). Although I see Deploige’s view as somewhat reductive, establishing an axis in which female visionaries and medieval mystics more broadly are examined along a continuum of transgressive and orthodox thought might be helpful in cultivating a greater understanding and appreciation of their works. Robert K. C. Forman engages such an approach in his monograph, Meister Eckhart: Mystic as Theologian (Rockport, MA: Element, Inc., 1991), but scholars tend to avoid such perspectives in engaging medieval female authors. Minnis, The Medieval Theory of Authorship, p. 14. Minnis, The Medieval Theory of Authorship, p. 12. Minnis explains: ‘It would seem, then, that twelfth-century exegetes were interested in the auctor mainly as a source of auctoritas: the human writer of Scripture was important in proportion to the extent to which he had provided (perhaps unwittingly) part of the vast pattern of meaning supposed to lie behind the literal sense of Scripture. It was this pattern which the exegetes strove to describe, not the individual contribution of any human auctor. Discussions of authorship hurried past personal factors to discover what riches God, the source of auctoritas, had hidden in the text. The notion of the auctor as an agent engaged in literary activity was submerged; the truth of the Bible was maintained at the expense of its human contributors’ (The Medieval Theory of Authorship, p. 72).

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See Claire Taylor Jones, ‘Liturgy and the Performance of the Mystical Self’, in this volume, pp. 230–48. Newman’s notable work has indelibly influenced my own understanding of Hildegard as prophetess in the Scivias; see Barbara Newman, ‘Introduction’, in Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), pp. 9–54. Unless otherwise noted, English citations from Scivias are taken from this edition and cited accordingly. The Latin text will be quoted from Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, in Jacques P. Migne (ed.), Opera Omnia, Patrologia Latina, 197 (Cooperatorum Veritatis Societas, 2006), http://www. documentacatholicaomnia.eu/04z/z_1098-1179__Hildegardis_(Hildegard_von_Bingen)__ Scivias_sive_Visionum_ac_Revelationum_Libri_Tres__MLT.pdf.html. As is generally the case, there was of course a political element that allowed for Hildegard to achieve this as well. As Deploige notes, ‘During the second half of the eleventh century . . . a clear change occurred in the appreciation and use of visions by the ecclesiastical prelacy. While till then visions nearly always had been considered by the Church with certain suspicion – as potentially dangerous but possibly useful messages – from the eleventh century onwards they got a new function in the context of the papal politics of reform . . . Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) and his former right-hand man Peter Damiani (c.1007–72) regarded the prophetic vision, when manifested to an important adherent of reform, as an efficient means of propaganda for the investiture of controversy’ (‘Priests, Prophets, and Magicians’, 11). Scivias II, p. 149. Historically Caedmon’s vision and resulting hymn provide a historical parallel to the story of Hildegard, but the seventh-century Caedmon never attains the position or level of auctoritas of Hildegard. A man offering an overtly orthodox commentary needs the protection of prophetic claims to be deemed an authority. Likewise, Hildegard’s position as a celibate woman engendered (and ungendered) her situation. As Elizabeth Petroff writes in reference to the female visionary more broadly, ‘Celibacy altered her status, moving her upward toward a position of potential authority.’ See Elizabeth A. Petroff, ‘Introduction’, in Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 5. In fact, one might even go so far as to speculate that ecclesiastical authority would view a commentary authored by a learned woman as suspect and inauthentic, while acknowledging that an unlearned woman’s election as prophet could indeed be miraculous, assuming the teaching of this prophecy was in line with that of Church dogma. Conversely, a learned man claiming to have experienced prophetic visions might be subject to ridicule while his commentary would be accepted. Hildegard was viewed by many as a prophetess, and monastic communities and prominent Church figures of this time frequently corresponded with her regarding theological, divinatory and even horticultural questions Petroff, Medieval Women, p. 6. As an act of lifetime devotion an anchorite would voluntarily make a vow of ‘Stability of Place’ and enclose herself within a small cell – often physically attached to a church as if she were its ‘anchor’ – for the duration of her life, living a life of asceticism, contemplation and prayer. Arguments that she was unlettered, as suggested in the Scivias, are probably nothing more than a prophetic trope; as Constance Mews maintains, ‘While it is impossible to be sure of exactly what Hildegard had read, there can be little doubting that her protestations of being unlettered were a humility topos, designed to reinforce the image of a prophet which she was fashioning for herself’ (‘Process Thought’, 5). Likewise, Petroff notes that Hildegard’s ‘dictated compositions exhibit wide learning’ (Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, p. 139). The precursor in the Western standard notation, this was a system in which common melodies would be indicated by melodic direction, high to low and low to high. I may need to qualify this statement; although all exegesis contains an element of subjectivity that reflects the exegete’s personal values or interpretations of key elements, Hildegard’s personal narratives such as her autobiography or the Scivias assume the form of exegesis on a de facto basis.

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Prevailing knowledge contends that because Hildegard herself was dictated to by the ‘heavenly voice’ that dictated the Scivias and her other texts directly to her, Wolmar did not amend them in any way but for the propriety of her Latin grammar. Hildegard, Scivias I, p. 59. Hildegard of Bingen, ‘A Letter from Hildegard of Bingen to Bernard of Clairvaux (1146–47)’, Epistolae: Medieval Women’s Latin Letters, trans. Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman, epistolae.ctl.columbia.edu/letter/1188.html. See John F. A. Sawyer, Prophecy and the Prophets of the Old Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), in which Sawyer outlines and thoroughly establishes prophetic narratology conventions, and discusses the twelve biblical prophets according to this paradigm. Sawyer discusses four essential elements that define a prophetic work, all of which are present here and relevant to our discussion of Hildegard: (1) Commission, (2) Summons, (3) Past/Present, (4) Future Prediction. ‘Commission’ and ‘Summons’ are seemingly the most important to our discussion, as both outline the authenticity and the authority of the prophetic experience claimed by Hildegard. Petroff has argued that ‘Having such insights about the spiritual welfare of others marks the visionary as a spiritual authority, and the urgency of the messages she receives provides her with the strength and the confidence to act outside the stereotypes of proper female behavior’ (Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, p. 8). Hildegard, Scivias I, p. 59. Here the Latin is helpful as the language mirrors biblical prophetic language: ‘Ecce quadragesimo tertio temporalis cursus mei anno, cum caelesti visioni magno timore, tremula intentione inhaererem vidi maximum splendorem, in quo facta est vox de caelo ad me dicens.’ That this kind of historical context is essential to prophetic narratives hardly needs illustration here. For analogies in the Hebrew Bible, see especially Ezekiel 1:1–2, Jeremiah 1:2–4, among others. ‘Letter 22 to Eustochium: The Virgin’s Profession’, in Elizabeth Clark and Herbert Richardson (eds), Women and Religion: A Feminist Sourcebook of Christian Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 56–68; quoted in Petroff, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, p. 54 n. 13. Hildegard, Scivias I, p. 59. She emphatically and almost epithetically refers to herself as nec docta or indocta. Hildegard, Scivias I, p. 59. Hildegard, Scivias I, p. 59. See Beverly Mayne Kienzle, ‘Hildegard of Bingen’s Exegesis of Jesus’ Miracles and the Twelfth-Century Study of Science’, in William John Lyons and Isabella Sandwell (eds), Delivering the Word: Preaching and Exegesis in the Western Christian Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 2011). Kienzle explains, ‘The Divine Office, the Rule of Benedict, and the daily monastic activities are and were spent in some form of rumination on the Scriptures. Learning the office with its music required a basic education in Latin; the study of monastic manuscripts reveals that hymns and sequences and psalms were accompanied by glosses with theological, grammatical, and lexical content. The community listened to patristic works which were read aloud during the nocturns of Matins; public reading occurred in the refectory; devotional reading was integral to monastic discipline. Hildegard both learned and taught with this monastic method of primary schooling’ (p. 101). Hildegard, Scivias I, p. 61. See Flisfisch, ‘The Eve–Mary Dichotomy’, pp. 37–46. Flisfisch writes about the Mary–Eve paradigm quite persuasively as regards the entire Hildegardian corpus, but she pays particularly close attention to how this plays out in the Symphonia, a work that will be discussed later. Hildegard, Scivias I, Vision 3, p. 105, emphasis mine. Quoted and presumably translated by María Isabel Flisfisch, ‘The Eve–Mary Dichotomy’, p. 38; she cites its location as ‘Scivias III, [Vision] 7, [Section] 15’; however, the passage is found in Vision 8, Section 15. Hildegard, Scivias II, Vision 1, p. 156. Vision 6 of the Scivias in general seems to be that chapter which is most concerned with exegesis and has numerous references and attempts at explicating the Song of Songs.

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Song 8:5; citation of biblical texts taken from the Douay-Rheims Bible. Scivias I, Vision 6, p. 133. To this day, such statuary is pervasive in the churches of European cities. Famously such a statue is found in Strasbourg Cathedral. Hildegard, Scivias II, Vision 3, p. 171. Hildegard, Scivias II, Vision 3, p. 171. For the entirety of her correspondence, see Hildegard of Bingen, Hildegardis Bingensis, Epistolarium, ed. Lieven Van Acker and Monika Klaes-Hachmoller (CCCM, Turnhout: Brepols, 1991, 1993, 2001). For the English translations, see Hildegard of Bingen, The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, 3 vols, trans. Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, 1998, 2004). Letters to Bernard are also found on several sites on the web. See, for example, the collection of epistles at the Columbia University website, https:// epistolae.ctl.columbia.edu/woman/115.html. Barbara Newman summarises, ‘Wolbero interpreted the entire mystical love song with the aid of musical analogies. For him every preacher and exegete is a cantor who sings to claim the impassioned (like Saul) or to arouse the sluggish (like Elisha). The Song of Songs is a spiritualis harmonia in four parts, or a canticle to the Lord “modulated” in the seven tones by the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit’; Barbara Newman, ‘Introduction’, in Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia: A Critical Edition of the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum, ed. and trans. Barbara Newman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 23. I sought Wolbero’s commentary without success. The key secondary work about Wolbero’s output is a single essay by David Chamberlain, ‘Wolbero of Cologne (d. 1167): A Zenith of Musical Imagery’, Mediaeval Studies, 33 (1971), 114–26. See Gustave Reese, Music in the Middle Ages (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1944), p. 74. See Dolores Pesce, ‘Beyond Glossing: The Old Made New in Mout me fu rief / Robin m’aime / Portare’, in Dolores Pesce (ed.), Hearing the Motet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 28–51. As Barbara Newman remarks, ‘Hildegard’s lyrics, like her prose, are rich in allusions but sparing in quotations. As someone once said of Saint Bernard, she too “spoke Bible.” She was so deeply immersed in the sacred page that her language rings with echoes from the Vulgate, especially from the Psalter and the Song of Songs. Yet these are seldom more than echoes, verses recalled or paraphrased rather than quoted’ (‘Introduction’, in Symphonia, p. 35). All subsequent references to the medieval Latin of the Symphonia texts will refer to Newman’s edition. Shorter translations are my own unless otherwise indicated, while longer translations are Newman’s, unless otherwise indicated. I admittedly draw to a great extent upon Newman’s work, and it seems that since Peter Dronke’s earlier scholarly pursuits, Newman has become the Hildegard scholar and has written prolifically and astutely about every aspect and subset of Hildegard’s work. Unlike the commentaries that had preceded his, the commentaries of Bernard do play upon an understanding of the Song as a piece of music as well as a text (see Sermon 1.6–8). In this introductory sermon Bernard explains the title of the ‘Song of Songs’ as distinguishing between two types of Songs, one of a more carnal and the other of a jubilant, near-ecstatic nature, such as the ‘Song of the Sea’ (Heb. Shirat Ha-Yam) of Exodus 15, a song precipitated by the miracle of the parting of the Sea of Reeds. See Peter Dronke’s chapter, ‘Hildegard of Bingen as Poetess and Dramatist’, in Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), esp. p. 171. Barbara Newman suggests that it is only after the move to Rupertsberg in 1150 that Hildegard begins more systematically to organise the work that she had been composing according to theme. Newman contends, ‘[Hildegard] composed her songs not to fulfill a conceptual scheme but to suit particular occasions, integrating them with suitable homilies, prophecies, and dramatic exchanges’ (‘Introduction’, in Scivias, p. 9). See Hildegard of Bingen, Liber vitae meritorum, in Jean Baptiste Pitra (ed.), Analecta sacra, 8 (Rome: Typis Sacri Montis Casinensis, 1880), pp. 7–8. Newman, ‘Introduction’, in Scivias, p. 9.

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Quoted in Barbara L. Grant’s introduction to her edition of five of Hildegard’s liturgical songs; see Barbara L. Grant, ‘Five Liturgical Songs by Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179)’, Signs, 5 (1980), 557–67. Gustave Reese, Music in the Middle Ages, pp. 164–5. The Regula Benedicti or Rule of Benedict is the book of precepts compiled by the sixth-century Church Father St Benedict of Nursia (480–547 ce). It dictates a certain order under which monks who submitted themselves to the authority of an abbot in a monastic community might live. Compared to the restrictions outlined by later monastic communities, the Regula Benedicti reads much more like a moderate enumeration of guidelines that strive for a balance between individual devotion and group order, as well as a focus on the Via media or ‘Middle Road’ of devotion in lieu of fanaticism. It should be noted that we do not have an autograph of this text and the earliest reliable version is from the ninth century (Codex San Gallensis 914). For the Latin text, see Benedict, Regula, ed. Jacques P. Migne, Patrologia Latina, 66 (Cooperatorum Veritatis Societas, 2006), http://www.documentacatholicaomnia. eu/04z/z_0480-0547__Benedictus_Nursinus__Regula__MLT.pdf.html. Benedict’s stress on incorporating the Psalms – ostensibly the most musical elements of the Hebrew Bible and imbricating these musical poems throughout the liturgy and daily rhythms of monastic life is quite plausibly a musical choice that might not so easily be dismissed as such. In Music and the Middle Ages, Gustave Reese attributes the incorporation of the reading of Psalms into the Divine Offices to Augustine, quoting Augustine’s view of the Psalms as ‘a certain sound of joy without words’ (p. 64). Furthermore, he attributes the focus on David as the mythic music-maker of the Bible to the statements of John Chrysostom (345–407 ce) who wrote that for the faithful in the Church, ‘David is first, middle, and last’ (Reese, Music and the Middle Ages, p. 65). I must admit that it remains unclear to me just how Augustine thought about music. Did he confront music in the same way that he did classical Latin poetry, that is, admiring it for its beauty but perhaps wary of its ability to evoke and seduce? ‘Hiemis tempore suprascripto, in primis versu tertio dicendum: “Domine, labia mea aperies, et os meum adnuntiabit laudem tuam.” Cui subiungendus est tertius psalmus et gloria. Post hunc, psalmum nonagesimum quartum cum antiphona, aut certe decantandum. Inde sequatur ambrosianum, deinde sex psalmi cum antiphonis’ (Benedict, Regula, ‘Caput IX Quot Psalmi dicendi sunt nocturnis horis’) (‘In winter time as defined above, there is first this verse to be said three times: “O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall declare Your praise.” To it is added Psalm 3 and the “Glory be to the Father”, and after that Psalm 94 to be chanted with an antiphon’) (English translation by the Order of Saint Benedict, http://archive.osb.org/rb/text/ rbefjo2.html#9). Perhaps this has more to do with the descriptive nature of much of the Regula’s discourse. I would explain it this way: For those aspects of monastic life that are not yet codified, the Regula seeks to do so; otherwise, for those aspects of monastic life that are universal, it might simply explain an extant practice. Although this argument is speculative on my part, I do know of analogues from Jewish prescriptive legal texts in which legislation is simply a compromise between what is already done and the more ideal, prescriptive position. It seems to me that legal texts often present such a dynamic. Reese, Music in the Middle Ages, p. 166. Reese, Music in the Middle Ages, p. 167. Reese, Music in the Middle Ages, p. 167. Newman defines this as, ‘long melodic phrases sung to one syllable’; Newman, ‘Introduction’, in Symphonia, p. 26. In ‘O vos angeli’, Hildegard’s concluding melisma has more than eighty notes! In many ways, melisma illustrates Hildegard’s acknowledgement of the rupture, the disjuncture, or perhaps even the dichotomy between music and text. As Nathaniel M. Campbell explains, ‘The musical gestures that are characteristic of Hildegard’s melodies are deployed so as to add force to the words in accordance with the (rhetorical) aim of moving the listener, and thus the songs can be regarded as sonic analogues of the lectio divina and even the sermo absentium’; Nathaniel

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M. Campbell, Beverly R. Lomer and K. Christian McGuire, ‘The Symphonia and Ordo Virtutum of Hildegard von Bingen’, International Society of Hildegard von Bingen Studies (2015), http:// www.hildegard-society.org/p/music.html#Manuscripts. Newman adds, ‘For Hildegard, the duality of word and song was itself patient of theological interpretation. Unlike many patristic and Cistercian writers, she was untroubled by the sensual beauty of music and its potential for distracting worshippers from the text’ (‘Introduction’, in Symphonia, p. 27). Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin Books, 1961), pp. 238–9. Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias III, Vision 13, Section 12, as quoted by Newman in ‘Introduction’, in Symphonia, p. 27. In contradistinction to Augustine’s dualistic Manichaeism that viewed the word and melody as opposing threads, Hildegard’s construes the two as interdependent with each having a unique but complementary role to play in the Gospel. While music manifests Jesus’ divinity, it is the word that articulates his humanity. Each sounds a note that resounds in the transcendent chord. It may even be argued that Hildegard understood the inclusion of music with liturgical text as embodying the very mystery of the Trinity and the divine relationship to Mary, with the theological paradoxes Christianity’s narrative brought to their artistic conclusion through the interplay of music and writing. See for example, pp. 241–2 in this volume. Newman notes this in her introduction though it becomes quite evident when reading Hildegard’s work that her notion of harmony is distinct from our own. Hildegard of Bingen, Liber vitae meritorum, trans. Bruce W. Hozeki (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 46; quoted in Campbell, ‘The Symphonia and Ordo Virtutum of Hildegard von Bingen’. The term does have precedents in Christian theological texts. It is a hapax legomenon in Augustine’s introduction to the discussion of what differentiates eternal life from mortality in the De Civitate Dei (Book  XXII.1), but in that context it simply means something like ‘transient’ or ‘fleeting’ and carries an expressly corporeal and therefore, in the Augustinian sense, negative connotation. See Augustine, De Civitate Dei, ed. Jacques P. Migne, Patrologia Latina, 41 (Cooperatorum Veritatis Societas, 2006), http://www.documentacatholicaomnia. eu/04z/z_0354-0430__Augustinus__De_Civitate_Dei__MLT.pdf.html. See Scivias III, Vision 13, p. 525. Sermon 22:4–5. Bernard of Clairvaux, Commentary on the Song of Songs, vol. 2 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Studies, 1971), pp. 16–17; emphasis mine. Here Newman’s translation considerably shifts from the original text to meet the syntactical conventions of modern English, a non-declining or at least minimally declining language.

Works Cited Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin Books, 1961). Augustine, De Civitate Dei, ed. Jacques P. Migne, Patrologia Latina, 41 (Cooperatorum Veritatis Societas, 2006), http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/04z/z_ 0354-0430__Augustinus__De_Civitate_Dei__MLT.pdf.html. Benedict, Regula, ed. Jacques P. Migne, Patrologia Latina, 66 (Cooperatorum Veritatis Societas, 2006), http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/04z/z_0480-0547__ Benedictus_Nursinus__Regula__MLT.pdf.html. Benedict, The Rule of Benedict, ed. and trans. the Order of Saint Benedict (OSB, 1995– 2019), http://archive.osb.org/rb/index.html#English. Bernard of Clairvaux, Commentary on the Song of Songs, vol. 2 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Studies, 1971).

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Bynum, Caroline Walker, ‘Preface’, in Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), pp. 1–8 Campbell, Nathaniel M., Beverly R. Lomer and K. Christian McGuire, ‘The Symphonia and Ordo Virtutum of Hildegard von Bingen’, International Society of Hildegard von Bingen Studies (2015), http://www.hildegard-society.org/p/music.html#Manuscripts. Chamberlain, David, ‘Wolbero of Cologne (d. 1167): A Zenith of Musical Imagery’, Mediaeval Studies, 33 (1971), 114–26. Clark, Elizabeth and Herbert Richardson (eds), Women and Religion: A Feminist Sourcebook of Christian Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). Deploige, Jeroen, ‘Priests, Prophets, and Magicians: Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu vs. Hildegard of Bingen’, in Thérèse de Hemptinne and María Eugenia Góngora (eds), The Voice of Silence: Women’s Literacy in a Men’s Church (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 3–22. Dronke, Peter, Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). Flisfisch, Maria Isabel, ‘The Eve–Mary Dichotomy in the Symphonia of Hildegard of Bingen’, in Thérèse de Hemptinne and Marìa Eugenia Góngora (eds), The Voice of Silence: Women’s Literacy in a Men’s Church (Turnhout: Brepols: 2004), pp. 37–46. Forman, Robert K. C., Meister Eckhart: Mystic as Theologian (Rockport, MA: Element, Inc., 1991). Grant, Barbara L., ‘Five Liturgical Songs by Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179)’, Signs, 5 (1980), 557–67. Hildegard of Bingen, ‘A Letter from Hildegard of Bingen to Bernard of Clairvaux (1146–47)’, Epistolae: Medieval Women’s Latin Letters, trans. Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman, epistolae.ctl.columbia.edu/letter/1188.html. Hildegard of Bingen, Liber vitae meritorum, in Jean Baptiste Pitra (ed.) in Analecta sacra, vol. 8 (Rome: Typis Sacri Montis Casinensis, 1880), pp. 1–244. Hildegard of Bingen, Liber vitae meritorum, trans. Bruce W. Hozeki (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, in Jacques P. Migne (ed.), Opera Omnia, Patrologia Latina, 197 (Cooperatorum Veritatis Societas, 2006), http://www.documentacatholicaomnia. eu/04z/z_1098-1179__Hildegardis_(Hildegard_von_Bingen)__Scivias_Sive_ Visionum_Ac_Revelationum_Libri_Tres__MLT.pdf.html. Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1990). Hildegard of Bingen, The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, trans. Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, 1998, 2004). Jones, Jeannette, ‘A Theological Interpretation of Viriditas in Hildegard of Bingen and Gregory the Great’, The Portfolio of the Department of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at Boston University, 1 (2012), http://www.bu.edu/pdme/ jeannette-jones/. Kienzle, Beverly Mayne, ‘Hildegard of Bingen’s Exegesis of Jesus’ Miracles and the Twelfth-Century Study of Science’, in William John Lyons and Isabella Sandwell (eds), Delivering the Word: Preaching and Exegesis in the Western Christian Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 99–112.

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Meli, Beatriz, ‘Virginitas and Auctoritas: Two Threads in the Fabric of Hildegard of Bingen’s Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum’, in Thérèse de Hemptinne and María Eugenia Góngora (eds), The Voice of Silence: Women’s Literacy in the Men’s Church (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 47–55. Mews, Constance J. ‘Process Thought, Hildegard of Bingen and Theological Tradition’, Concrescence: Australian Journal of Process Thought, 1 (2001), http://www. concrescence.org/files/journals/1/articles/149/public/149-113-1-PB.pdf. Minnis, Alastair, The Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Newman, Barbara, ‘Introduction’, in Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), pp. 9–54. Newman, Barbara, ‘Introduction’, in Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia: A Critical Edition of the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum, ed. and trans. Barbara Newman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 1–63. Pesce, Dolores, ‘Beyond Glossing: The Old Made New in Mout me fu rief / Robin m’aime / Portare’, in Dolores Pesce (ed.), Hearing the Motet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 28–51. Petroff, Elizabeth A., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). ‘The Price of Prejudice’, The Economist (15 January 2009). Reese, Gustave, Music in the Middle Ages (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1944). Sawyer, John F. A., Prophecy and the Prophets of the Old Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

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5 Language and Trance Theatre REBECA SANMARTÍN BASTIDA* [A] withdrawal (ecstatic) brought about by the seduction of the Other, and a virtuosity (technical) in making words confess what they are unable to say. Rapture and rhetoric.1

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ow that even anger or madness are studied as cultural constructions and not as spontaneous expressions, we can also think of women mystics as constructed artefacts, with a behaviour culturally defined and not only inspired.2 The postmodern history of emotions has dealt with women mystics because it considers the body to be a medium of countless practices, techniques and discourses, which has gained interest, especially after Victor Turner,3 on account of its learned rituals. Thus, female devotion is framed within its ritual exercises because performance studies feel attracted to the physical and visual context surrounding its manifestations. De-emphasising the author as the producer of the text and considering the text a performance rather than a literary work focalises the action, space, emotion and sensory dimensions of the mystic discourse to its theological or intellectual content. Paul Zumthor set the greatest precedent, after whom several scholars have investigated both the orality itself of the Middle Ages and its textual status; from there, attention has been given to the theatricality of reading/dictation strategies, and to the so-called oral and indexical signs in written texts. Nevertheless, what is analysed is not an orality that serves popular discourse, not even as a means of transmission, but an orality that conforms to literary facts as a social practice in very concrete and material terms, from its composition and communication to its reception, preservation and memorisation, placing the text under a new optic.4 Within the realm of women mystics, the concept of performative devotion – in which orality plays a major role and is associated with other fields, such as art or music – offers a new way to understand pious practices in Europe, as has been demonstrated by several scholarly works published in recent years on the subject.5 This essay, following this perspective, deals with female mysticism as performance, by using examples of well-known European visionary and mystic women from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries and unknown Castilian mystic women (fifteenth to sixteenth centuries), by paying close attention to their lives and revelations as well as the theatrical qualities of their writing, reading, and, of course, of trance itself.

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Certeau highlights the revealing relationship between mysticism (although he refers to a postmedieval one) ‘and a new eroticism, a psychoanalytic theory, historiography itself, and the “fable” (which relates simultaneously to orality and fiction)’.6 With regards to this last term, ‘fable’, I emphasise the acted orality and replace the ‘fiction’ that Certeau describes with the term ‘imitation’, which suggests an agency that helps to restore the capacity for action of women mystics, confronting more passive visions on these women and thus offering other types of analysis. Above all, we must recognise that there are many ways to observe performativity in mystical texts. As suggested by Mary Suydam and Joanna Ziegler, we ought to reconsider the artistic side of visionary behaviour, in order to counteract the interest of some critics for what is understood as grotesque from a psychological point of view:7 By entering mystical behavior as theater, as artistry – with an audience hoping to make a leap of faith – we begin to understand the most incredible acts of public pain and self-affliction. As in theater, the audience is moved to believe, to feel the pain and suffering, and to witness the effects of love. The freakish, outlandish, bizarre acts of personal piety that accompany mysticism, if interpreted as performance, may then be seen as dramatic vessels from which pour forth the entire and glorious range of ecstatic revelation.8 The studies included in the essential (in terms of wide-ranging perspectives) edition by Ziegler and Suydam demonstrate the benefits of this analysis, leading Nanda Hopenwasser to ask whether we should admire Margery Kempe (1373–1439) by considering her a conscious artist or denounce her as a religious fraud;9 and Catherine Müller and Mary Suydam to analyse the texts of the Flemish Beguines as performative, since the authorship is displaced and their production of meaning is oriented to a present and collective audience in contrast to the literary, which centres on individual writing.10 Mary Giles, for her part, examines the Spanish visionary Sor María de Santo Domingo (c.1486–1524) as an individual who experiences a liminal state and is perceived by her public as situated outside the boundaries of the norm.11 While Giles highlights the spontaneous nature of the visions of Sor Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534) or Sor María de Ágreda (1602–65), the work of Susan Rodgers and Joanna Ziegler describes the dance in ecstatic state of Elisabeth of Spalbeek (1246–1304) as a conscious exercise which implies control, repetition, and stylisation.12 As for the analysis of the voices found in mystical texts, Laurie Finke sees a dialogism in the struggle for authority between translator and author (particularly in the English version of the book of Marguerite Porete, where there is no unique, single controlling voice),13 and Claire Sahlin shows that Birgitta of Sweden (c.1303–73) gains spiritual power by delegating her voice to others, as her sermons and exorcisms were employed by priests.14 From another parallel perspective, William Hodapp addresses mystical ecstasy as ritual, and as such he understands that this is a moment of revelation in which the encounter with the sacred brings the past to the present, with all the instabilities and ambiguities the trajectory contains, through a ritual-devotional impulse that is not only symbolic but also performative.15 In this regard, the monograph edited by Suydam and Ziegler wisely proposes to consider the components of performance (spoken discourse, frame or space in which the body moves) as constitutive of the mystic trance. Ziegler,

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Rodgers and Hodapp realise that this type of trance occupies and defines particular or domestic spaces turning them sacred through the movements of the body that, for example, revive the Passion or upbringing of Jesus. Indeed, Rosemary Hale analyses the performative dimension of the motherly activities that relate the woman mystic with Christ the child, such as cuddling, bathing, caressing or holding the baby, and how objects such as sculptures and cribs are employed for this purpose.16 Hale argues that these tactile and sensory performances have to do with the transformative nature of mystical experiences, that it does not belong only to the field of women, as evidenced by the work of Hodapp about Richard Rolle and his meditations on the Passion, but that in women mystics the body reacts in a more intense way. This brief immersion into one of the most suggestive proposals (to date) of performative studies on women mystics shows its viability and versatility, although, as discussed in this chapter, I will pay attention to other elements as well.17

On Writing, Reading, and the Mystic Word Si no estuviera la uida desta santa tantos años ha escrita y predicada por otros, y nuestro Señor en vida y en muerte no huuiere calificado, y como si dixessemos, sellado su santidad con tantas marauillas, no me atreviera a poner la mano en ella, y passara en silencio casos tan maravillosos.18 If the mystical invasion that pervaded the last centuries of the Middle Ages renews the content of the spiritual life, this fact is corroborated by the vocabulary itself. Ecstasy is described as a state of sweetness and softness where the soul tests spiritual consolations that go beyond every word, and ideas that are based on this experience are developed by Meister Eckhart (c.1260–c.1327) in his so-called ‘mystical essence’, which combines mysticism and theology.19 Although men and women use the same metaphors in their writings of this experience, listening to similar sermons and sharing a large number of sources – the Scriptures and spiritual treatises, although in the case of women the range is smaller because of the Church’s impulse to censor – female mysticism is marked by certain tendencies. Female spirituality produces writings centred on the supernatural, charismatic authority, visions, corporeal symbols, spiritual asceticism, and self-inflicted suffering. Something that was favoured because the religion of women was considered more affective – or at least it was anticipated that it would be so, which does not mean that male doctrine would not emphasise tears or sensibility – and also more erotic in its load of bridal themes that, if they were first articulated by men, were widely developed by women mystics. As with Eucharistic devotion, visions, levitations or the stigmata, there are writing traits that belong more to the world of female devotion than to male devotion.20 However, my interest in mystical writing is not centred on issues of gender but on the moment of enunciation, taking into account, of course, that many circumstances could be considered for this type of production: whether the woman is from northern Europe (where they are more contemplative) or south (more active with their charity work); whether the mystic is a tertiary nun or a Beguine; if she converted as an adult, if she is married, or living in a convent. For example, Bynum argues on numerous occasions that

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women who lived in the world before their mystical experience have a more negative view of womanhood and are more influenced by the misogynist clerical tradition than women raised in convents, as in the case of Mechthild of Magdeburg (c.1212–c.1282?) in contrast to Gertrude the Great (1256–1302).21 But I will put aside these considerations to focus on the fact that this writing conforms through many diverse modes. For example, through a you that is put into correlation with a them; or through a plural you; or an I and a you in a dialogue; or a third person to whom things happen; or an I that opens up to an intimate and private way of writing which helps confessional practices, auto-analysis and meditation.22 Nevertheless, in general in our mystical texts, there is a predominance of the form of the dialogue or report,23 and through this form a series of tactics come into play in order to establish order in the drifting mystical movements: the narration of a life; the construction of fictitious and/or normative itineraries: sketches of spiritual ascensions or biographic models of progress; the establishment of lists of rules to discern the spirits, etc.24 In the midst of this composition, biographers and confessors influence the creation of a new syntax for which female mystics are also held responsible, sometimes with an unbridled word (that participates in those screams, tears and raptures that invade the woman visionary) and other times structured as a sermon (how much learned rhetoric is there in mystic writing?).25 A word in which the presence of the community’s gaze weighs in (which certifies its validity and awards its authenticity), either that of their colleagues, usually more credulous, or that of the vigilant and cautious clergy: it is this last gaze which is more present in the extant writings by and about Sor María de Santo Domingo. But let us remember as well that we speak of an imitated and performed word, which does not entirely belong to the mystic because it responds to a previous pattern; let us remember how Judith Butler refers to the ‘not owning of one’s words’ of the performative act, which here is also a ‘yielding of ownership over what one writes’, since the holy woman delegates to a scribe – generally a man – a reflection of what lives in the paper, and this delegation implies by its allocation ‘an important set of political corollaries’.26 It is in this dispossession of the language where the speech of the mystic opens up into the difficult terrain of the community which recognises the hagiographic mark. At the same time, she who enunciates the speech acquires other possibilities: it is no longer that she is imposed by silence as a member of a marginalised population, as by the Suma y breve compilación de cómo han de vivir y conversar las religiosas de San Bernardo (A Full and Brief Compilation of How the Nuns of San Bernardo Ought to Live and Talk) by Hernando de Talavera towards the end of the fifteenth century, but that she is ordered to speak, to express herself with words and gestures that might lose the restraint and constant measure that the confessor of the Spanish Queen, Isabella I of Castile, demanded. To be able to channel that expression, the relationship between the visionary woman and the man who writes about her – generally a confessor that sometimes acts as secretary or a scribe – is crucial.27 This is a union that the historian Rosalynn Voaden has called the construction team of the mystic edifice that would demonstrate the divine presence.28 Of course if the composition of texts of certain visionary women was a collaborative affair among them, their scribes, their editors or translators, we could also describe it as a competition between voices for authority, or a dialogism without a single winner (as has been discussed by Finke, about the translation of Porete’s The Mirror of Simple

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Souls),29 creating sometimes a disconnect between the one that dictates and the one that transcribes, especially striking in the case of the Book of Margery Kempe. However, excepting the cases in which the spiritual biographies are based on the biographical notes of the saint, as is the case of Beatrijs van Nazareth (c.1200–68), or in which they are owed to the pen of her companions, such as those by those of Juliana of Liège (c.1192–1258), Juana de la Cruz, or Béatrice d’Ornacieux (c.1260–c.1303), whose life is attributed to Marguerite d’Oingt (c.1240–1310),30 generally there should be an active agreement between the woman saint and the male confessor or spiritual director in order to produce a mystic text. Thus, Christina of Markyate (c.1096–1160) most likely counted on Geoffrey to relate her misadventures;31 Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) had a secretary all her life in Volmar; the brother of Elisabeth of Schönau (1129–65) took care to edit and collect the epistolary and visionary production of his sister; Margareta Ebner maintained a long correspondence with Heinrich von Nördlingen, who encouraged her to write her Revelations;32 Angela of Foligno (1248–1309) entrusted the transcriptions and translations into Latin of her visions to her Franciscan relative, Fra Arnoldo; Raimondo da Capua recounted the life of Catherine of Siena (1347–80) because he knew her well as her spiritual director, a similar case to Juan de Corrales and María de Ajofrín (c.1455–89); and the writings of Catherine of Genova (1447–1510) were almost all provided by her confessor Cattaneo Marabotto. The allocation of facts by the confessor helped in the fifteenth century, with the devotio moderna, to insist even more ‘en la necesidad de la formación de la conciencia por un director, en el examen de conciencia, en el análisis de sí mismo’ (‘on the need for the formation of a conscience through a director, in the examination of conscience, in selfanalysis’),33 although the personal hermeneutic practices of the Other that monitors and verbalises the interior by extracting it began in the first centuries of Christianity.34 What is interesting here is that this collaboration may extend to imitation.35 Could the confessor be another sort of imitator, although indirectly, consigning women to mimicry and to the final enunciation? Or is he collecting and improving the imitation presented to him? It all depends on whether he directs the performance, if instead of being the disciple, he is the hidden master, something that in the cases of Elizabeth Barton (c.1506–34) or Lucrecia de León (1567–?) seems more or less clear.36 These are examples of the close relationship maintained between the writer and the mystic, a relationship that sometimes can bring into question the authorship of certain texts (to what extent does it belong to the saint or the writer?), although on occasion these women personally monitor the writers.37 Angela of Foligno’s work – like Margery Kempe’s – is full of references to the writing process, in which she involved herself. However, I will not enter into the problematics of the authorship of these texts because this study is not focused on style or genre. I focus rather on a model of the representation of feminine sainthood, the genre of hagiography, which influences the textual dramatisation of the woman mystic, with a male mediation in the process that cannot be measured quantitatively. Men, as censoring public and as editors, exercise direct control on the textualisation of female discourse and partake of these textual productions granting them legitimacy, especially important for the social valorisation of laywomen or illiterate women posing as divine messengers.38 But they are not the main constructors of the imitation: in this we will have to grant an active role to the women. In addition, there are some women who write their texts in their particular languages, such as Hadewijch (early thirteenth century), Beatrijs of Nazareth, Marguerite d’Oingt,

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Marguerite Porete and Julian of Norwich. We know that the male intervention in these cases was to translate the texts to Latin in order to give it canonical standing: there is the example of Henry of Halle, a Dominican who compiled the six parts of the German book of Mechthild of Magdeburg (the seventh book was translated by her Helfta sisters), who was her confessor and who encouraged her to write her text, which was translated into Latin, probably thanks to his insistence.39 In this sense, the more open and experiential style of women might have been influenced, according to Bynum, by the available texts written in the vernacular, that employ a vocabulary of feelings that is not found in texts written in a more impersonal and distant Latin;40 moreover the dictation by women such as Angela da Foligno, whom her confessor translated, would give rise to a more conversational, empathetic, and self-conscious discourse. In any case, the role of spiritual director was critical because he knew better the criteria for the discernment of spirits, criteria that any public discourse of a religious nature would have to uphold in order to be accepted. I disagree, therefore, with María Jordán Arroyo when she states that visionary women were familiar with the qualifying principles used by theologians, ‘pudiéndose apropiar de los mismos y utilizarlos para pintar un cuadro que correspondiera con el modelo de santidad diseñado por la ortodoxia’ (‘being able to appropriate them and use them to paint a picture that would correspond to the models of holiness designed by orthodoxy’).41 While it is true that many of these criteria would slide into public sermons, it is hard to believe that in the theological issues that surrounded their life and visions, illiterate women should spin ever so fine. In this sense, the implicit failure in the condemnation of a visionary or in her lack of canonisation would also have a second responsible party, the director. They would be aware of the dangers locked in the speech of women, an awareness of the feminine text as threatened demonstrated by Mechthild of Magdeburg in The Flowing Light of the Godhead, in which she states that her book could be burnt; or by Sor Juana de la Cruz, who claims that when her guardian angel asked her to write down the glorious speeches that she witnessed, she resisted in case something ill-boding would happen – she had already been dismissed from her position as abbess.42 This discernment, however, did not only limit women and their confessors, but also, along with the hagiographic conventions that were employed by the biographers in their stories, it provided them power by offering a model of behaviour and communication that facilitated the acceptance of their message.43 Voaden points out the fundamental importance of the influence of discretio spirituum on the visionary experiences of medieval women, and on the written representations of those experiences . . . the doctrine was, in effect, a discourse, developed and elaborated by ecclesiastical authorities, a discourse which provided both a vocabulary to articulate visionary experience and a set of criteria to evaluate the vision and the visionary. In addition, discretio spirituum supplied a pattern for self-fashioning which extended to behaviour, demeanour and modes of expression. Familiarity with, and skill in, the discourse was a vital factor in the textual – and physical – survival of the visionary.44 And all this happens in texts that are often introduced as inextricably linked to their production,45 when they express, at the moment they are produced, a lived experience, and when discourse transforms the subject into an intensive present. This was

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a performativity that in many of these dictated or transcribed texts could also be considered a type of coeval reading, in which the author/confessor examined, altered and developed the spoken words beginning, mainly, from the textual tradition of the hagiography, which allowed for positive sanction. Indeed, as noted by Janette Dillon,46 the relationship between woman and confessor was key to medieval female piety and the transcription of revelations since only the confessor could transform signs of eccentricity into symbols of her holiness. Without the right confessor or writer, the visionary woman could be identified as a heretic, possessed or crazy.47 In any case, this way of ensuring the approval of these women was in many cases mutual: Bishop Alfonso earned fame through the commission given to him by Birgitta of Sweden, to prepare an authorised edition of her Liber caelestis in Latin, which resulted in his being the last scribe and confessor to the saint;48 and the Order of Preachers gained status as well by supporting holy women.49 It is important to remember this relationship because the woman mystic obtained an identity through the imitative performance and it is the confessor who would first sanction (or direct) the quality of this performance, and after him would come the Church. In this sense, to gain support, the visions of these women came with explicit orders from God or his approval for the act of writing: the written word of women needed to assimilate to God’s male voice in order to be heard.50 Her personal defence resides then in ceding authority to the divine (on whom the praise and admiration falls, in the written text), and thus re-evaluating the authorship raises the value of the work.51 Sor Juana de la Cruz, at various times in the Libro de Conorte (also known as El Conhorte, The Book of Consolation), tries to persuade the reader that her female condition does not invalidate her words, because they come from God: she warns against disbelief, and worries about controlling the future reception of the text. She justifies herself by stating that the Lord does not need to perform miracles to demonstrate the divine providence of her writing, and that his will is that she speaks of things arranged as they appear ‘en este santo libro’ (‘in this holy book’).52 If there is an error, then it comes from the scribe and not the Holy Spirit that inspired the text and knows and understands the things he says ‘mejor que nadie lo puede decir ni declarar ni manifestar’(‘better than anyone can say or declare or manifest’):53 it is the Lord who plays ‘por esta flauta y órgano de voz, para sanar y remediar las ánimas’ (‘through this flute and voice organ, to heal and remedy souls’): ‘y tuvo por bien venir a hablar, en esta voz’ (‘and had to come and talk, with this voice’).54 For Sor Juana, all these precautions were still not sufficient because, although she counted on the prior acceptance of a long chain of visionary women, the renewed suspicion that had emerged by the end of the Middle Ages and the presence of false women mystics in sixteenth-century Spain meant she had to keep always on her guard. However, this self-identification as the flute of God55 has a long tradition in female Vitae that present visionary women as the mouth through which the divine speaks.56 Moreover, Sor Juana is an example of how, without being able to read or write, the words and life of a mystic can be collected by the labour of an Other, in this instance of Sor María Evangelista, a companion from the convent, who stated in the process of the canonisation of Sor Juana that although she did not know how to write, she managed it through divinely inspired knowledge (just as María de Ajofrín wrote her letters or Catherine of Siena and managed to read and write) in order to spread the words of Juana de la Cruz.57 This is an unusual example, along with the nuns of Helfta, of female

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writing of the dictated or transcribed text, for which, in the case of María Evangelista, memory plays a key role to preserve the sermons before being written.58 Women found ways to legitimate their words, especially after the prohibition by the Church of all preaching that came from them which made all of their alleged divine revelations suspicious. Safe-conduct would consist in the mandate to write coming either from Heaven, or from a spiritual director or any ecclesiastical office: as to the first, it seems that that was the case for María de Toledo (1437–1507), according to the chronicle of Pedro de Salazar, and this is why her confessor collected her words (although there are no extant versions). Regarding the latter, to use another example from the Peninsula, it is likely that Sor María de Santo Domingo dictated her Revelaciones and that her trances were transcribed in the Libro de la oración because it was the desire of Cardinal Cisneros. What we know with certainty is that the European woman mystic (and I appropriate the beautiful words of Certeau on the dealings of Saint Teresa [1515–82]) ‘has recourse to the letrados; she seeks out the purest ones . . . ; she counts on them to bring back her body wounded by love within the bounds of the field designated by scripture. Each time, her approbation is a “relief” [alivio] to her.’59 In this way, a sort of tension is produced between the speaking body of the visionary and the scriptural order of the prelate who collaborates with her, and ‘As the writing, ecstatic, is about to escape, a recapture must be anticipated. The guardians of conformity to place can excise what strays too far.’60 The confessor is in charge of the selections, as someone authorised to certify that the pupil does not abandon safe spaces without knowledge, so the task is framed by the men who examine the product, even though inside that framework ‘a feminine discourse takes place’ where women imitate each other. In this circle of women, between ‘the command to write and the appreciation of the writing, both of which are masculine, the feminine act of speaking unfolds’, from which arises a ‘subtle combination’ between male authority (ecclesial) and female speech.61 In the ars dictandi that pervades mystic texts, epistolary writing is fundamental since it shows a more direct female participation than in the spiritual biography. Catherine of Siena is a model of this expression of mysticism, which through written letters ‘furnished a technical framework of “ways of speaking” to a literature that, beginning with fifteenth-century letters of “direction”, “consolation”, or “confession”, “addressed itself” to God or to a spiritual clientele’.62 In addition, the pastoral epistolography was key in several contemplative monastic orders in which, following the traditions of St Bernard of Clairvaux or St Jerome, letters addressed to the laity were even more important than the oral activity of the sermon.63 Imitating her models, Sor María de Santo Domingo also dedicated herself to these tasks, as did María de Ajofrín, who dictated to Inés de San Nicolás a letter to Cardinal Mendoza.64 As Surtz points out, not knowing how to write was not a problem during the Middle Ages in order to compose a text because writing was associated with the practice of dictation.65 This labour of dictation resembles the work of religious non-visionaries like Sor Constanza de Castilla (c.1405–78), whose prayer manuscript – which served for private, non-regulatory, conventual reading,66 and in which she names herself six times – does not appear to have been written by her, even though she could read and write. It is likely that Constanza followed the usual custom of dictation: the regularity and calligraphic nature of the letters seem characteristic of the writing of professional scribes.67

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In her case, the movement from Latin to Castilian romance in some of the sentences show us the linguistic phenomenon of fluency or mouvance, of which we have examples in other devout texts written by European women.68 More importantly, Sor Constanza does not depend on the rewriting of her words by any other: for her, writing consists of a pure and literal dictation, and there are none of the problems of expression that are found in women mystics when, beyond epistolary correspondence, someone gathers their expressions of ineffable love to and from God. Thus, it is necessary to take into account the difficulty of putting into words the encounter with divinity. Bernard McGinn says that ‘speaking of God’s presence is at bottom another strategy for saying the unsayable’.69 Certeau guarantees that: ‘The very condition of knowledge became the problem against which mystic thought stumbled and became polarised . . . How was it possible to speak, to hear?’70 Angela of Foligno continually insists on the difficulty of turning her experiences into words, as does Catherine of Siena,71 although for the Dominican saint structuring her works as an extensive series of conversations between her and God leads to an easier transmission of her mystical wisdom.72 For Angela of Foligno, this difficulty of expression is also shared with the Virgin and other saints: Fra Arnoldo claims that the Italian woman saw more elements of the Passion of Christ ‘than any other saint’ (Angela was always aware of her exceptionality), penetrating even into the details of the salvational agony, adding that her soul had seen so much of the passion that it understood that even though the Blessed Virgin had seen more of it and mentioned more of its details than any other saint, still she herself could not – and neither could any other saint – find words to express it. Christ’s faithful one said she understood this so well that if any saint were to try to express it, she would tell him: ‘Are you the one who sustained it?’73 She is not, though, the sole visionary in that impossibility of language: the impossibility of explaining the spiritual and celestial revelations that Sor Juana de la Cruz would also remember in the book of her Vida.74 But this is about an incapacity that for God is not an obstacle: if on many occasions Angela of Foligno wanted to keep her secret, it was He who drove her to speak,75 although this impression of being driven (sometimes related to a feeling of physical discomfort)76 can also be read as a justification for her preaching vocation. And, of course, at other times it is God who imposes silence on women mystics, and not they on themselves in a fit of humility (as María de Ajofrín would do on many occasions): God first silences Sor Juana for a time to prepare her so that He can speak through her, as if replacing her, as her Vida tells us.77 Because, once again, we must remember the sensation of danger that these mystic women displayed, created by the efforts to control what was written: if Angela dictated her message in Umbrian, Fra Arnoldo read to her the translation he made into Latin to regain her conformity – although, for certain, it did not completely satisfy the saint.78 The description by Fra Arnoldo of this process is very interesting, as well as the result: the writings of Angela turn into two voices, that of the commentator, Fra Arnoldo, who explains and contextualises the circumstances of the visions, and that of Angela, who lives them directly and who also responds to the questions posed by Fra Arnoldo, as if in a dialogue that parallels those maintained by God and the mystic. That is to say, there are

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two or three interconnected performative acts: the relationship of God with the mystic, the mystic with the friar-amanuensis, and that of Fra Arnoldo with the reader. Although, this third act, by supervising the final product, is also taken care of by the Italian woman. Finally, God is the ultimate authority in the long chain of editors of the text, because He shows himself to Angela. As Arnoldo says, ‘we had written the truth without any falsehood – although her account was much more complete, and I had shortened and diminished it in my writing.’79 In this sense, it must be said that this friar scribe exposes himself as unsure80 of his work – compared to, for example, the compiler of the words of Sor María de Santo Domingo, who never seems to apologise in case the transcriptions of her words are not adequate; nevertheless, it is true that this is not a translation, as in Angela’s case, and that in Sor María’s fourth trial, difficulties were reported on the part of the witnesses about the moment of pouring her mystical speech onto paper. Be that as it may, it is divine grace that supposedly makes Angela’s words flow smoothly when Fra Arnoldo asks her questions while she is under the inspiration of God, although the confessor also transcribes the repetitions and exalted concepts of the Italian saint and at other times he simply omits ‘much that [he] was not able to write’,81 probably because of haste due to the pressure that his fellow friars applied to him (in this sense Fra Arnoldo is as misunderstood as Angela herself), and because the language cannot do more, neither his or hers, the difficulty of the mystic in finding the expression that defines lived happiness would have been experienced by any man or saint.82 In his dictation, which at the same time is also a dictation by Angela, God reminds them how much he is owed: ‘At the end of what you both are writing, be sure to add that thanks should be given to God for this writing.’83 Likewise, Lucrecia de León, who lived a few years after Sor María de Santo Domingo, carried out a constant negotiation process with her secretaries in the telling of her dreams, although in her case we can discern a certain distrust towards these scribes who decoded her symbols: when her dreams were read back to her, as they were recorded by the theologians who supported her, Lucrecia sometimes asked for additions. In the corpus of this visionary, the language, in fact, is not hers, since her vernacular and prosaic dictation was polished and systematised, and made to seem as if it were composed by a learned author.84 Women then performed a double duty: they scrutinised what happened to them inwardly and what was written of them and through them. As for the former, if their daily tasks involved the outside world (some, as we know, were involved in political affairs), the main reason for their writings was the analysis of their intimate universe: as Dronke points out, the most common feature of the texts of these women was their growing subjectivity, if we can even employ this expression for a medieval text.85 And in the scrutiny of their mental state, which was made public and taken to the exterior through psychosomatic manifestations, sometimes God spoke directly (Catherine of Siena) or the visionary related his words (Angela of Foligno). Also, in the reports of what the mystics saw, we come across a diverse way of wielding authority: in the case of Catherine of Siena, she resorts especially to St Thomas Aquinas, St Augustine or St Jerome to endorse her arguments,86 while Angela of Foligno, like other mystics, directly employs her spiritual experiences. Undoubtedly, the degree of patristic or theological support depended on the training of these women, as well as on the confessor’s or copyist’s editing of their words.

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This level of theological wisdom is reflected in images where the mystic is represented as reading, and, above all, listening, for she reproduces the voice of God.87 As Joan Ferrante states when she talks about Hildegard von Bingen, visionaries are represented as the instrument by which God addresses humanity and the Church, the mediators between the divine and the human, although, in the case of Sor María de Santo Domingo and other mystics, their partiality for certain reformers, regents or popes would bring them problems.88 An interesting fact is that the visionary adopts a position of tabula rasa on which God writes, and this position allows her to speak for Him, removing from her the responsibility for that speech, even when later their teachings are endorsed by theological arguments, as in the case of Saint Catherine. But when the woman mystic insists on her lack of knowledge, enabled or sponsored by her biographer, it underlines her total dependence on divine revelation before any other doctrinal knowledge, and this was fundamental in order to vouch for the answers that Birgitta of Sweden or Sor María gave to the questions of the Prelates. This type of writing would be monitored, and we cannot forget this for a second. Every vision had to be subjected to a subsequent and intense examination of the account. Surely because of this, the confessors or hagiographers placed more emphasis on the behaviour of the female saint than on doctrinal novelties. Comparing the successful case of Angela of Foligno with that of Marguerite Porete, Peter Dronke reflects sharply on the importance of not introducing great surprises into the visionary content, to submit as much as possible to the demands of impersonating the model: However extravagant her emotional utterances, Angela did not lay claim to any new belief, any idea that challenged the prevailing world-picture of theologians in her time. Her innovations were startling; yet they were confined, we might say, to the form in which she experienced and retold accepted spiritual realities; she did not impinge upon their content. Thus one can begin to understand why her memorial, her book, was unfailingly treasured, whilst the far greater book of her contemporary, Marguerite Porete, led to Marguerite’s being atrociously put to death.89 Therefore, the accepted hagiographic marks were not only bodily visible (stigmata and certain external behaviour as fasting, embracing),90 but they also were words and manners employed to send the message, with more relevance than the message itself, which the less novel the better. If not, it could bring problems in the long run, as happened to Sor Juana de la Cruz. With regard to their bodies, if the extravagances of Angela were considered within the imitable model, those of Sor María de Santo Domingo, for example, caused her problems for not conforming to acceptable behaviour.91 Even in the genre of ‘questions and answers’, it was important to follow some type of pre-established behaviour, a mimicry that implied receptivity and humility; after this was done, the prelates and the community of spectators could allow themselves to be instructed, because supposedly the visionaries would answer the most difficult questions on divinity with the wisest answers, acquiring the ability to humiliate their detractors.92 As for the mode of writing their messages, we must attest that just as the life of the mystic had to be filled with elements that were considered fundamental for the trajectory of the female saints (fasting, works of charity, visions), texts had to use certain rhetoric to expose an already accepted and canonised female devotion.93 Their speech was expected

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to have an affective key with a strong presence of the body, within a marked exaltation of motherhood or pain. Expressions of ecclesiastical criticism or political discourse were also common, with the help of repetition and metaphors such as those elaborated in the psalms (which were read and used by the nuns), although by the end of the Middle Ages, involvement in civil and ecclesiastical matters would be understood in somewhat negative terms, as was proved by Birgitta of Sweden, who received criticism from the French theologian Jean Gerson. This type of discourse was expected to be more spontaneous and less formal if it came directly from women and not from a male voice (that of God or the biographer). The doctrines of these women were infused, not acquired, and this can be noted in the texts, as well as the use of experience, which supplemented the supposed lack of authority.94 This perspective opens up the way for a new writing style: writing from experience, which, similar to homiletic prose, is channelled into a type of performance writing: it is the expression of the here and now that the mystic lives, in which she tries to make herself understood. This scripture of experience serves to excuse the female condition of the author and with it the alleged congenital clumsiness of which she is often accused. St Teresa de Jesús (Teresa of Ávila), who considered that her female nature limited her style and impeded her from being learned, declared her desire to avoid writing in similes and justified in this way the supposed little success of her writing, as if in a constant captatio benevolentiae: ‘Servirá de dar recreación a vuestra merced de ver tanta torpeza’(‘it will serve to give recreation to your mercy to see such awkwardness’); ‘Siempre tuve esta falta de no me saber dar a entender – como he dicho – sino a costa de muchas palabras’ (‘I always had the fault of not knowing how to make myself understood – as I have said – except at the expense of excessive words’); ‘no alcanza mi saber a darme a entender’(‘my knowledge is not enough to make myself understood’); ‘Yo sé poco de estas pasiones del alma . . . porque soy muy torpe’(‘I know little of these passions of the soul . . . because I am inept’).95 Because of this, similarly to Angela of Foligno, it is the Lord who directly (without the need of intermediaries) helps her understand the verse of a psalm, ‘según soy torpe en este caso’ (‘because I am inept in this case’);96 an awkwardness, in short, that for her is accompanied by ‘poca memoria’ (‘a poor memory’) and ‘poco ingenio y grosería’ (‘no wit and crude language’).97 Although Teresa attributes her difficulty in explaining herself to her sex and not to the mystic themes she elaborates, she ends up making an intelligent technical manoeuvre: that her union with God was already declared in ‘la mística teología’ (‘mystical theology’), so she prefers simply to tell what is happening to her by drawing from her own experience and her memories, two keys in the writing of her work.98 Along these lines, other women, such as Sor María de Santo Domingo, benefit from their image as illiterate, because their confessors justify God’s preference to speak through the humble; and it is precisely their illiteracy that grants them credibility and gives their answers about the Scriptures the category of miracle. However, the ultimate goal of presenting women as such is that, once they are dead, they can assume a final role of written authority, distancing themselves, paradoxically, from their reduction to a suffering body treated as ‘un enunciado donde se inscribe el libreto divino’ (‘a declaration in which the divine plan inscribed itself’), as Jordán Arroyo observes.99 If the visionaries use strategies such as their visions (in the form of drama, dialogue, dance, passion) to

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justify their authority100 and perhaps to transcend their gender (always a negative barrier in the process of their acceptance), the last step of their imitation, generally achieved post mortem, is to become converted into learned people, and, like the Virgin in the first vision of Sor María de Santo Domingo in her Book of Prayer, to dive into the books that they have not always been allowed to read. This does not prevent them from challenging literary and scholastic knowledge with charismatic knowledge, leaving the former in a subordinate position.101 They design in this way a new book of divine origin, that book of life to which Angela of Foligno refers in one of her exhortations to her spiritual children. A book that will not be scholastic, but neither the eschatological one from the end of the Middle Ages where the sins of the souls are remarked upon, the one that appears in two engravings of the ars moriendi wielded by angels and demons.102 It will rather be that of the God-Man’s life, through which the mystic women will reach the summits of enlightenment, a text for which it is not necessary to be literate nor to decipher the Scriptures, because with infused science they do not need more. A delicious book, since, as Sor Juana tells us, to the good person ‘le parecerá en su paladar más dulce que el panal de la miel’ (‘it will seem to his palate sweeter than the honeycomb’) for there is no accent mark or word that is not a pearl or jewel in it.103 It is, therefore, a reading that comes directly from God, since He is the teacher of doctrine, whether or not the women know how to read. This is the case of Teresa de Cartagena, who in her Admiración Operum Dey states that ‘solo me enseñó, e Él solo me leyó’ (‘He alone taught me, and He alone read to me’).104 There is no need for classical knowledge or great understanding to approach the true Word, the mystic has found another medium of easier access. God is the Teacher, the tutor who guides the mystic or the woman of inner devotion such as Sor Teresa de Cartagena. The phrase ‘He alone read to me’ suggests the idea of ​​God reading aloud to his disciple, a metaphor of the living book that grants a type of perpetuity and authority, which also appears in Marguerite Porete and later in St Teresa.105 Teresa de Jesús in particular shows us the direct access to reading Him that is enjoyed by women mystics: it is better to read Him than to know Latin. Cuando se quitaron muchos libros de romance, que no se leyesen, yo sentí mucho, porque algunos me daba recreación leerlos y yo no podía ya, por dejarlos en latín; me dijo el Señor: No tengas pena, que Yo te daré libro vivo. Yo no podía entender por qué se me había dicho esto, porque aún no tenía visiones. Después, desde a [sic] bien pocos días, lo entendí muy bien, porque he tenido tanto en qué pensar y recogerme en lo que veía presente, y ha tenido tanto amor el Señor conmigo para enseñarme de muchas maneras, que muy poca o casi ninguna necesidad he tenido de libros; Su Majestad ha sido el libro verdadero adonde he visto las verdades. ¡Bendito sea tal libro, que deja imprimido lo que se ha de leer y hacer, de manera que no se puede olvidar!106 When many books of romance were removed, so that they would not be read, I felt much, because some gave me recreation to read them and I could no longer, for those remaining were in Latin; the Lord said to me, Do not be sorry, for I will give you a living book. I could not understand why I had been told this, because I still had no visions. Later, after a few days, I understood it very well, because I had so much to think about and gathered myself in what I saw present, and the Lord has had so much

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love for me by teaching me in so many ways, that very little or almost no need have I had of books; His Majesty has been the one book where I have seen the truths. Blessed is such a book, that leaves imprinted what is to be read and done, so that it cannot be forgotten! It should be said, though, that this image of Christ as a book of life was also used as an argument against bibliophilic excess in feminine environments, where it might seem contradictory to have both a mystical experience of divine love and the desire to read books.107 Of course, it depends on which book. The mystic reader (or listener, if she was illiterate) was accepted when she read the lives of other saints, an action that preceded imitation. In the space of the convent or tertiary houses, where the Vitae were compiled, is well noted that religious or beatified women knew the writings of their sisters: at the end of the Middle Ages, hagiography was a genre of broad social projection, its reception and composition was not restricted to the clerics.108 This reading contributes to an awareness of being chosen by the grace of God, and thus, as Danielle Régnier-Bohler affirms, the woman, as the subject of enunciation and aided by these texts, would be able to feel ‘privilegiada y, en consecuencia, con derecho a hablar, a escribir’ (‘privileged and, as a consequence, with the right to speak, to write’).109 That is to say, and with this we complete the circle: a woman is compelled to read (the book of God, the Vitae etc., but not to know Latin nor to enjoy literary knowledge); only afterwards, if she is selected, does she feel the call to write and to be directed in the attempt. In the late Middle Ages, women access reading in this way, and this reading is portrayed as another activity of their visionary life, as is shown repeatedly by Fray Juan de Corrales’s presentation of María de Ajofrín with a book in her hands.110 The devotio moderna and the new affective spirituality help to emphasise the individual encounter with the Word of God, in isolation from noises as counselled by Juan de Ávila or Francisco de Osuna.111 In any case, this situation of a woman reading, in solitude or accompanied, can be a counter-example offered to silence women with too much active authority, with too much power, and who are too intrusive: to silence them and to make them sit, to instate a gesture that calms them into a passive position.112 To what extent, then, is this presentation a forward motion, even if it pairs women with other male authors? In the fifteenth century, this image becomes canonised. Flemish painting is dedicated to showing us a woman reading, like the Annunciation by Rogier van der Weyden (in the Louvre); the Annunciation and Visitation altarpiece panel by Melchior Broederlam (in Dijon); or the Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece) by Robert Campin (at the MET Cloisters): in all of them an angel communicates to the Virgin the pregnancy of Christ while she reads a book, an act that Mary is also doing in the painting of the Master of the High Rhine, this time reading a large volume in the Garden of Paradise. Others that hold a book include the Virgin and Child of the diptych of Philippe le Croy by van der Weyden (the Huntington Library); the Mary Magdalene of the same artist that is in the National Gallery, London; the Virgin of two French Books of Hours of the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries;113 or the St Barbara in a work of art by the Master of Flemalle, which we can contemplate in the Museo del Prado. This type of image is also portrayed in other schools: Catherine of Siena is shown reading in English Books of Hours from the same period. Would she be reading her work, The Dialogue? The fact

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is that although this image celebrates the visionary nature of her spirituality, it projects at the same time an image of loneliness and restriction. Authors/dreamers are frequently shown sitting, head in hand, before a book while they gaze upon the image that is projected by the imagination. Appropriately, then, Catherine is not shown writing, she is depicted like the page upon which the divine works, like the stigmata themselves, are imprinted.114 It is no longer about Birgitta of Sweden’s revelation of an open book on the pulpit, which she felt was analogous to her mission, as a preacher-mystic, but, again, we return to that tabula rasa, to that supposed female passivity that is not always as such because of the participation of the woman in the process of assembling the written book, a process through which religious women reach a degree of wisdom and respectability. All this is enclosed in the image of St Catherine reading, though actually she read poorly, in the engravings and paintings made some years after her death:115 if we observe with attention, we can arrive at the figure of the Father inspiring her with doctrine, helping her to act out the sign of his teaching, constituting Himself in the aforementioned living book, the one which did not need Latin. Also, the one which, as we shall see below, allows her to preach, like Birgitta, while she carries out her performance.

The Trance Theatre Michel de Certeau, in his accurate study of mystic fable, emphasises that in this ‘fable’ we find an eloquent relationship, ‘relative to the act of speaking and to the fact that it transforms the relationship between speakers’,116 which makes the you and the self play roles with implications: the content of the discourse then becomes the history of that relationship, where conventions are established between the speaker and the recipient. But this speech act is set in motion in an intensive present, in which everything revolves around the moment of outburst, which must be described by the self who experiences it. The illocutionary activity is manifested in speech by the privileged place given to ‘indicial’, that is pragmatic or subjective, elements of language in such a way that the language of the statement becomes the account of the conditions and modalities of its own utterance – a dramatics of allocution . . . The ‘experience’ that specifies mystic writings, moreover, has as its principal characteristics on one hand the ego, which is precisely the ‘center of the speech act’, and on the other hand the present, the ‘source of time’, the ‘presence in the world that the act of utterance alone makes possible.’117 The discourse of the mystic woman is elaborated from the here and now, from where the writing that reproduces it is also composed. The absolute protagonist of this act of speaking is an absence that becomes present, that of God, who is heard by the mystic and from whom she transmits what He preaches, what He answers and what He lets her feel, so that there are two players in the original discourse (that of God): the mystic and the copyist. Between the two they produce on paper a text in dialogue, with oral marks that refer us to a liminal state in a sacred space, each with its own peculiarity.118 Notwithstanding, I am not going to deal here with an identity style (if one can use this

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term for the Middle Ages) in each of the visionaries, but with the theatrical and performative elements that appear in these divine revelations. Since in the theatre of the mystic woman the space where one acts is a special place, because it becomes different during the trance, it loses the functional utility in order to assume the category of the sacred. This space then needs an external gaze that recognises the signs found in it and transcends them, a space where the woman builds her mystic identity and isolates herself from the exterior, where she loses control over her body and speaks in the midst of her outbursts.119 Likewise, the trance occurs in a specific time which ceases to correspond with the quotidian, even if it begins in it: as in the case of Sor María de Santo Domingo, who experiences outbursts even when she is carrying out her daily activities. During the phenomenon of the trance, the spectator believes that he finds himself in a distinct temporality in which gestures that repeat an earlier model refer to something transcendental that is reconstructed beyond economically productive time.120 In this space-time framework, the performing self of the mystic actualises what she speaks during her outburst; it is a self that is simultaneously action and locution in the visionary that represents her trance. But that self does not work if not ‘within the particular setting of proceedings conventions, and persons – in short, in expected and verifiable circumstances’:121 that is to say, within an audience’s horizon of expectations able to recognise the imitated model. This speaking self can temporarily substitute the divine self when speaking in the name of God, as in The Dialogue of Catherine of Siena. According to Certeau, this speaking self becomes ‘the representation of what is missing . . . the speaking I (or writer) takes up the illocutionary function, but in the name of the Other.’122 Precisely therein lies the fascination of the mystical discourse, in which the role of the necessary Other is systematised, while absent from the speaker.123 And this self that pronounces itself in the place of God needs an imaginary space for expression, a space where the threshold of mystical speech is installed. A space that is turned into the theatre of the interior, a place where the soul converses with or connects to God, being either a garden where a horticulturalist works (as in Sor María de Santo Domingo’s case, among others), an interior castle (as in St Teresa) or a bridge over which the souls pass (as in St Catherine): a space, in short, that allows for the order of ideas and modes.124 But the self also often gives way to her, a third person who excels through mystical places with great dramatic capacity. Marguerite d’Oingt employs the third person mixed with the word ‘creature’ to designate that which is the object and subject of the vision, but, in this case, through a shift in the her and the self that glosses the revelation to the reader, she produces a distance between the person who has the vision and sees herself in it (the third person) and the person who, from outside the vision, communicates it (the first person): thus the female voice unfolds and is made polyphony.125 These movements of proximity and distance from the self are also visible in other mystics, such as Catherine of Siena, Catherine of Genoa (who flees from the self to replace it with an us) or Julian of Norwich, who moves away from the self to behold herself when, as ‘his creature’, Christ takes her towards the interior of his inner side.126 St Teresa as well: although she employs the first person in almost all her work, she delegates the third person for when she talks about experiences in which she feels special modesty or pain.127

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Although in the early Middle Ages visions could obtain a certain theatrical nature, such as those in the Scivias of Hildegard of Bingen studied by Cirlot,128 full of chromaticism in the presentation of the adventure of the soul, the exercise of contemplation encouraged during the late Middle Ages increased the movement of the protagonist character – God or the mystic, sometimes split into an I, a you or a He/She. In texts such as the Meditations on the Life of Christ, Christians were encouraged to imagine themselves present in the scenes of the gospel, to visualise events with vivid detail and colour, to suffer and rejoice with those who had participated in them and thus to create a kind of mental drama to which they could add their own personal apostilles. The purpose was that identification with the life of Christ became a step towards the imitatio Christi. In these works, the one who meditated was invited to provide flesh to the bones of the Scriptures, within an affective piety that helped the faithful to formulate their own spiritual experience with elements of their daily life, and to use their senses, emotions and sympathies.129 With these elements, visions lent themselves to a type of ‘nocturnal theatre’ (as Jordán Arroyo calls the prophetic dreams of Lucrecia de León),130 which, by the way, unveils something that happened to some mystics: the influence of religious theatrical performances on the way they were living their ecstasies. If Angela of Foligno suffers an intense experience as a result of the representation of the Passion of Christ, we see a similar occurrence for Birgitta of Sweden. On the Iberian Peninsula, although the cofradías of Holy Week do not appear in Castile, León or Andalusia before 1520 or 1525, there were already constitutive elements of these dramatisations of the Passion in some early brotherhoods; on the other hand, the celebration of Holy Week and Easter in the streets, churches or convents maintained a theatrical vein, as demonstrated by the Passions in vernacular language that would unfold for several days during the fifteenth century.131 In the case of Lucrecia, from her repeated and vivid mentions of different religious processions (which in the second half of the sixteenth century constituted great theatre with catechistic purpose) we can infer that they made an impression in her memories and provided material for the details in her oneiric scenarios: her participation in these celebrations left a clear imprint on the quality and features of her visions.132 Perhaps this external influence in combination with their readings are the cause for the similar vocabulary and imagery shared by theatrical representations and women mystics. The doctoral dissertation of Ayn Becze demonstrates how in the English moral drama Wisdom, in which Christ (Wisdom) and Lucifer debate, the soul participates in a mystical wedding with God described in a similar way and parallel to that of the divine love of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe.133 In this sense, a visionary who introduces paratheatrical or dramatic scenes in her revelations is precisely Julian, who describes each of her visions (she first composed a short version of her book and then a longer one, as she spent the rest of her life meditating about what she contemplated when she was sick) as a kind of allegorical drama in which every detail of the imagery and of the dialogue is relevant: the colour of the clothes, the movements and gestures of the characters, the expressed emotions etc. Her powers of observation are acute when she illustrates her perceptions, as is clear from her teachings on the maternity of Christ.134 But, as Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins point out, ‘Julian presents herself mainly as a participant, not an interpreter, who at first understands her experience simply as a sequence of events.’135 It will be

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later, with meditation, that she imparts theological juice into what in the beginning are only scenes full of dynamism.136 As in these types of visions, we see the same in some representations of the Passion: in those of Sor María de Santo Domingo or Juana de la Cruz, for example, and in others that do not belong to women mystics (those of Sor Constanza de Castilla or Isabel de Villena), exchange of speech is fundamental. The woman listens, intervenes or lets others talk to one another in texts that sometimes become monologues or discourses that do not expect a response137 and that, in general, contain little action: we rather find an intersection of voices that, as in Angela’s text, can be extended to those who compose her writing. In this sense, these visions are distant from the narrative quality that was an intrinsic element in hagiographies (and here I make a distinction between the works of and on the mystics), which prioritised action over complex plot.138 In revelations, neither an intricate argument nor the action-filled episodes of many saints’ lives are provided. This dialogue with herself or with the Other is executed within a chain of imitations that usually reaches Christ himself when the woman wants to relive her experience with the Beloved. The granting of this wish brings about the possibility of the mystic woman’s connection to the Virgin, with whom her identity merges. Thus, for example, as in a succession of metamorphoses, María de Ajofrín seeks to relive the Passion of Christ through the compassion of the Virgin, feeling wounded by a sword that pierces her heart like Mary;139 and in her meditation on the Passion, Angela of Foligno imitates Christ, who in turn imagined with detail the torments that his mother would suffer.140 But, in addition to the imitatio Christi, another source of drama was the realm of preaching, with its tendency to the paratheatrical and its emphatic rhetoric based in repetition.141 It should be remembered that, according to Pedro Cátedra, María de Ajofrín or Juana de la Cruz could be called ‘monjas predicadoras’ or preaching nuns for their ability to explain the Scriptures to their sisters, the latter in very suggestive sermons to which I will return shortly.142 Within this semi-dramatic convent activity, I also have to emphasise the ‘ensamblamiento entre lectura y rito o representación’ (‘assembly between reading and ritual or representation’) which Cátedra shows in his study of the Cancionero de Astudillo, a clear example of prayer that requires performative conditions.143 Images also provide women mystics with some important types of expressions: the observation of sculptures of suffering Virgins or Magdalenes could influence the movements of the bodies of the visionaries in trance or meditation on the Passion. The contemplation of a sculpture of Christ and St Francis shook Angela of Foligno to her core. They mimic gestures that relate to liminal moments in the exposure of ecstasy in images, showing a behaviour of the corporeal that is different from that of the unassuming population and of their contemporary uses: this is an important difference to have in mind because developing mimicked gestures of outburst could in certain moments avoid misunderstanding between the body and their spectators. The public exposure of pain has a specific vocabulary for women mystics and images, which is not the one employed in daily life out of sanctity, nor that of sick bodies that cannot exercise control over their physical agony, already looked upon with less distrust in the late Middle Ages.144 The dancing body of Elisabeth of Spalbeek, which was ultimately successful, gives her a winning result: she carries out the steps of the Passion in a dance that has much of the theatrical, with that turn of her body which moves in crescendo with the agony of Christ.145 This mystic involves the audience in her dance through the drumming of

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her own feet on the ground, which keeps her in a trance and brings the public closer to her psychological state,146 in a staging of pain that reminds us that dancing is related to death.147 Her case is very different from that of Sor María de Santo Domingo, who also dances through her outbursts (or either these surprise her while dancing), as we are informed in the only process for which we are sure to have written memory. Nevertheless, in a different context, this fact can be used as a criticism against her. More applause for her mimed representation draws Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, a mystic of the second half of the sixteenth century who describes herself, likewise, through her trances marked by a performative condition, as shown by the transcription made by her companions (against her will, by the way) of her words, gestures, movements or sighs indicative of the blows she receives, in the same way as Jesus Christ, in her revival of the Passion.148 On the subject of dance, Cátedra has already noted and provided examples of how these recreations were not uncommon in female monastic environments.149 The most obvious example of this comes from Castile with Sor Juana de la Cruz, who also offers a clear example of theatrical vision in her sermons. As for the dance, in the case of Sor Juana we can see an echo of the testimonial belief that in Paradise there would be games, dances and laughter, and of those visions of Paradise from the Divine Comedy or the Roman de la Rose where the blessed and angels celebrated God in endless dances, a custom that was also endorsed by biblical references to religious dance.150 In the visions of Sor Juana, dance is part of some festive ceremonies, and in her work we are all invited to dance, including Christ: ‘No tañen bien esos tañedores, ni bailan bien esos bailadores. Salid vos, Hijo mío, que vos solo me contentáis’, God says (‘Those players do not play well, nor do those dancers dance well. Come out, my son, that you only please me),151 as well as the Virgin: ‘Hija mía muy amada, salid Vos a bailar y danzar’ (‘My beloved daughter, come out to move and dance’),152 in the suggestive sermons of the Most Holy Trinity or of the Nativity of Mary.153 Nevertheless, Sor Juana takes the celebration a step further in her detailed descriptions of the repertoire and props: as Cátedra says, this nun would transfer the profane feast, just as it was practised in her epoch, to the sacred feast.154 But she shares her choreography of celebrating heavenly angels and celestial beings (and we should not forget this when we highlight the originality of this Toledan woman) with other mystics of her time like Blessed Lucia of Narni, an important model for Sor María de Santo Domingo: this Italian woman shows us in her visions a Paradise with palaces, gardens, angels, damsels carrying cups, altars covered with tablecloths, heavenly chairs, etc. – that is to say, even more developed paraphernalia than Sor Juana.155 As for the sermons of the blessed Toledan, they could last three or four hours during which she, as explained by Cortés Timoner, ‘hablaba en voz alta y describía e interpretaba las visiones imaginaries que se le representaban en rapto’ (‘she spoke aloud and described and interpreted the imaginary visions that were presented to her in her raptures’).156 In the book of her Vida, we are told that she first rose when she heard the call of God, and then, lying as the nuns would place her on the bed, with a beautiful expression and her arms crossed, different voices flourished through her, among which was that of God himself: ‘cuando su Divina Majestad le dava el resuello de su spíritu se oýa la voz por la persona della como se oye por una zerbatana quando una persona habla a otra’ (‘when His Divine Majesty gave her the breath of his spirit, they heard the voice through her person as it is heard through a long reed when one person speaks to another’).157

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In her visions we have dialogues of celestial figures mixed with a good dose of imagination and a certain fidelity to the Castilian version of the Meditationes. Reading her dramatised accounts of the gospel, it is not surprising that Sor Juana herself becomes a theatrical character in the work of Tirso de Molina, where she converses with celestial beings as if this was an ordinary act. But from this familiarity of Sor Juana with the inhabitants of Heaven we also find important antecedents, such as Das fließende Licht der Gottheit (‘The Flowing Light of Divinity’) of Mechthild of Magdeburg, a text where not only erotic encounters with Christ appear (not found in Sor Juana), but with a theological originality that can remind us of the Spaniard in her treatment of the Trinity and in the dialogue and role she plays with regards to the Incarnation.158 From another perspective, the sermons on the Incarnation and the Nativity are related to the songs of Astudillo,159 since the Virgin also takes the word in Sor Juana’s text to explain her own experience.160 Likewise, the work of this Franciscan tertiary (later nun) is related to the contemporary meditations on the life of Christ, for in the middle of the narration of events, the characters (whether they are authoritative or the voices of the common people) employ a direct manner of expression (with exclamations) in order to arouse the feelings of the readers.161 In fact, the representations of the Birth of Christ by Sor Juana depend directly on versions from the Infançia Salvatoris, the Vida de Nuestro Señor Jesucristo (translation of the Catalan Vida de Jesucrist by Francesc Eiximenis) and the Meditationes vitae Christi, although she also develops the theology of the Redemption and Birth from the Legenda aurea of Jacobus de Voragine. These texts, according to Cátedra, serve to ‘diseñar espacios mentales no solo para la meditación, sino también para la imaginación literaria’ (‘to create mental spaces not only for meditation but also for literary imagination’) and to enrich her argument in the dramatic vision.162 As Sor María de Santo Domingo does with the evangelical figures and later, for example, Lucrecia de León in her visions, Sor Juana assumes a role of authority through her use of the voice of God or the Holy Trinity: these characters are responsible for explaining the meaning, often allegorical, of the sermon. In fact, at some point the act of making sermons is transferred to God himself,163 so in her speech Sor Juana only reproduces and imitates the divine conduct. But unlike Lucrecia de León, who repeatedly interfered in civil and political affairs,164 the Toledan tertiary did not need this performative resource in order to escape unpunished in her status as mediator between the supernatural world and the earthly one: it was rather, as has been said, to justify the attention paid to her female voice.165 In this sense, Sor Juana distances herself from other Spanish mystics in that she is not a witness or an active character in her visions. Instead, she plays a secondary role, which also helps to safeguard her against accusations of agency. She does speak of herself in her revelations (and only occasionally), as seen when she defends the divine origin of her voice, but she does not participate or play a role in her visions, as is the case of Lucrecia de León; not even in her dramatic trances does she constitute herself as a figure who is in dialogue with the disciples of Christ, as does Sor María: she simply lets others speak (or she impels them to speak). In spite of this, the authority she gains by these sermons extends to her person, for when her visions end, all of the people who attend her function receive from her the holy blessing while kneeling and bowing their heads, according to her Vida. Perhaps this is why she is forbidden to have an audience, and then, as there is no public, the sermons of a cloistered Sor Juana cease.166

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The theatrical quality of Sor Juana’s sermons can also be seen in the descriptions of the scenarios in which the action unfolds, filled with light, diners, tables, tablecloths, gold plates and cups, chairs, music and colour:167 what becomes tangible is the place of the feast and of Paradise, and not so much the terrestrial spaces in which the child-God suffered or was born, places that are found in other mystical texts. However, those spaces occupied by celestial beings who are in constant dialogue can pour into the Castilian streets and plazas, and in some cases the characters are invited or directly ordered to do their representation in those extra-conventual places: this is what happens at the end of the sermon on the celebrations of San Lorenzo or of the Assumption of Mary, where we are given instructions on how to arrange the staging.168 As a matter of fact, in the Libro de conorte, we are assured that ‘Porque este auto y otros algunos que en este santo libro están escritos y mandados, querría el soberano Dios – dijo él mismo – que se hagan en todas las ciudades y villas y lugares de cristianos’ (‘Because this play and some others, written and commanded for this holy book, the sovereign God wanted – he said it himself – that it be performed in all the cities and towns and places of Christians’).169 That is to say, there is a divine injunction that the visions/sermons of Sor Juana be represented: God becomes a conscious artifice of his theatrical quality. The labour of disseminating, that this mise-en-scéne of her visionary imagery implies, expands the first audience of her sermons, since in Sor Juana’s literary inventio (as in the devotion of Sor Constanza de Castilla) we are given a situation that we do not find in Sor María and in other women mystics such as Catherine, Angela or Birgitta: that is, that the text is in principle addressed to other women, but this reduced audience is broadened under the aforementioned mandate of God (it is also true that Sor Juana was visited by the Emperor Charles V and Cisneros, but they were not her frequent public). In this conventual, feminine circle to which these kinds of sermons were directed, the time set to eat was frequently transformed into that of performance by the dramatic quality of the collective reading at the table, as if the secular practice of making meals into a spectacle of a theatrical character could become a sacred one; indeed, the liturgical readings recommended by Hernando de Talavera for the refectory indicate something of the kind. Hence why culinary references are so important in Sor Juana. In any case, in feminine discourse, accounting for the importance of the ritual within the context of the convent, it would be advisable not to separate the ritual reading from the homiletic outbursts: a separation that makes no sense in texts such as the Libro del conorte, since, in presenting the sequence of the yearly feasts, the celestial celebration revealed to Sor Juana in her visions is joined to the liturgy of the convent. We could even postulate that the plays of the Toledan woman constitute the complement of a processional ceremony, a complement that lends to the feast a deep theological and interpretative analysis of the salvific events, and that would be an example of a theatrical practice which in convents would constitute a long-lived activity, although not always well accepted.170 Of course, in both types of texts – those addressed only to women and to a conventual sphere, and those that would expand their repertoire to account for men and secular life settings – there are shared circumstances in the performance. And here I mean that many of these texts are performative since, as Cátedra says, they have no formal framework, nor elements that give the opportunity to introduce the voice of the protagonists, who present themselves by their own voices or their actions, as in the theatre.171

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In this dramatical circle, Sor Juana converses with the Virgin, Jesus, God, the saints and especially with her guardian angel;172 Margery Kempe holds in her arms baby Jesus, and Birgitta witnesses his birth. These performances can include the whole body of the mystic, sometimes with more pathos, as in the case of Sor María, and others with a more festive style. But, in general, these bodies experience outbursts or stigmata, which will then be attested by the observing public. Also revealed in the trance is a degree of sexuality that may or may not be rejected, whether it be acted out by the mystic herself or by some of her characters, as in the dance of the Virgin before God from the Sermon on the Nativity of Our Lady by Sor Juana, where the Father plays with the breasts of Mary.173 Nevertheless, sensuality becomes more present in writings like those of Hadewijch, of which she herself is the protagonist. Finally, the mystic woman not only invites the listener/spectator/reader to live the Passion of Christ with her; she also incorporates herself into the text precisely to fulfil the function of the testimonial public. Rebecca Selman shows that in the Speculum devotorum, a meditation on the Life of Christ translated and compiled from several Latin sources at the beginning of the fifteenth century and destined for a nun at the convent of the Bridgettines of Syon, the figure of the Swedish saint was employed, together with that of the Virgin, to produce identification practices in the reader.174 The writer of this treatise, like those of so many mystical texts on the Passion, prioritises the woman reader in two specific ways: the Virgin is placed as a model whose behaviour the receiver must imitate, and Saint Birgitta is the ideal spectator and textual authority of the scenes that she describes, in which the reader is invited to partake. Additionally, in the Speculum devotorum the Virgin communicates information to Birgitta about Christ’s childhood so that she can transmit it, and thus ultimately converts both of them, herself and Birgitta, into authors with a status equivalent to that of the evangelists.175 A different proposal, but convergent with that of Birgitta, whose voice others take up, is presented by Sahlin’s analysis, to which I referred at the beginning of this essay. In the texts by priests that she studies, the path of the voice is reversed: it departs from Birgitta to reach others – it is her confessor who pronounces, for example, her exorcisms;176 while in the Speculum it departs from others (the Virgin) in order to reach the Swedish saint, who later transmits to us what she hears and sees. If I have pointed out these comings and goings and swings of voices and bodies during the trance, it is because the mystical scene ultimately transforms itself always to fit into these patterns, welcoming gestures, movements, words or dances that refer to something from beyond, involving a circle of readers and spectators who, for the drama to succeed, must get involved in their roles.

Notes * Originally published as a chapter, ‘La palabra y el teatro del trance’, in Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida, La representación de las místicas: Sor María de Santo Domingo en su contexto europeo (Santander: Real Sociedad Menéndez Pelayo, 2012), pp. 241–89. Here, the chapter has been revised by the author and translated, shortened and adapted by Nahir I. Otaño Gracia and Daniel Armenti. The editors would like to note that they have attempted to keep Sanmartín Bastida’s eloquent style as intact as possible. In some instances, quotes are also translated by Otaño Gracia and Armenti, but whenever possible, as with Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, the editors

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have used and cited the definitive published English translations of the quotations. Sanmartín’s book frames late medieval Spanish visionaries (María de Santo Domingo, Juana de la Cruz) within a European context. The following notes come from the book. Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, vol. 1, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 29. Emphasis, here and in future citations, is from Certeau himself. I am especially interested in the study of this author inasmuch as he regards mysticism not in its theological argumentation but as literature; see Carlo Ossola’s Epilogue to the Spanish edition, ‘Epílogo: Historien d’un silence: Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)’, in Michel de Certeau, La fábula mística (siglos xvi–xvii), trans. Laia Colell Aparicio (Madrid: Siruela, 2006), p. 358. On the topics of ‘anger’ and ‘madness’, see (respectively) Barbara H. Rosenwein (ed.), Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); and Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jean Khalfa and Jonathan Murphy (London: Routledge, 2006). Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1988). The functions of oral and written texts in medieval literature reveal a specific way of using (and playing with) language. For more information see Lillian von der Walde Moheno (ed.), Propuestas teórico-metodológicas para el estudio de la literatura hispánica medieval (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2003), especially section IV, ‘Textualidad, oralidad y auralidad’(‘Textuality, Orality and Aurality’), pp. 229–349, with essays by Fernando Gomez Redondo, Diane M. Wright, Gustavo Illades and Michael Gerli. See June L. Mecham, ‘Sacred vision, sacred voice: performative devotion and female piety at the convent of Wienhausen, circa 1350–1500 (Germany)’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Kansas, Lawrence, 2004), pp. 394–5. Mecham points out that ‘recent scholarship on this subject [the study of women, spirituality, and the arts] reflects the adoption of broader definitions of the arts and of female religiosity in addition to a weakening of both conceptual and disciplinary boundaries . . . Researchers are increasingly re-conceptualizing piety in terms of grouped or interrelated actions tied to the visual and material culture of medieval Christianity, thereby highlighting the importance of performance within female devotion. While issues of essentialism and agency continue to stimulate debate, researchers have uncovered considerable evidence of the influence medieval women exerted upon religious drama, music, art, literature, and theology’(p.  448). See also Denis Renevey and Cristina Whitehead, ‘Introduction’, in Denis Renevey and Cristina Whitehead (eds), Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), pp. 6–10. Certeau, Mystic Fable, p. 3. On mystics and psychoanalysis, see especially pp. 7–9. Caroline Walker Bynum, for example, notes that feminist and non-feminist studies on the physical self-punishment exercised by these women criticise this religious practice (probably poorly understood and contextualised), describing it as masochistic and pathological. See Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 75. See also Suydam and Ziegler’s introduction to Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). Suydam and Ziegler, Performance and Transformation, p. xx. Nanda Hopenwasser, ‘A Performance Artist and Her Performance Text: Margery Kempe on Tour’, in Mary A. Suydam and Joanna E. Ziegler (eds), Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality (New York: St.  Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 97–131. Catherine M. Müller, ‘How to Do Things with Mystical Language: Marguerite d’Oingt’s Performative Writing’, in Suydam and Ziegler (eds), Performance and Transformation, pp. 27–45; and Mary Suydam, ‘Beguine Textuality: Sacred Performances’, in Suydam and Ziegler (eds), Performance and Transformation, pp. 169–210. Mary E. Giles, ‘Spanish Visionary Women and the Paradox of Performance’, in Suydam and Ziegler (eds), Performance and Transformation, pp. 273–97.

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Susan Rodgers and Joanna E. Ziegler, ‘Elisabeth of Spalbeek’s Trance Dance of Faith: A Performance Theory Interpretation from Anthropological and Art Historical Perspectives’, in Suydam and Ziegler (eds), Performance and Transformation, pp. 299–355. Laurie A. Finke, ‘“More Than I Fynde Written”: Dialogue and Power in the English Translation of The Mirror of the Simple Souls’, in Suydam and Ziegler (eds), Performance and Transformation, pp. 47–67. Claire L. Sahlin, ‘Preaching and Prophesying: The Public Proclamation of Birgitta of Sweden’s Revelations’, in Suydam and Ziegler (eds), Performance and Transformation, pp. 69–96. William F. Hodapp, ‘Ritual and Performance in Richard Rolle’s Passion’, in Suydam and Ziegler (eds), Performance and Transformation, pp. 241–72. Rosemary Drage Hale, ‘Rocking the Cradle: Margaretha Ebner (Be)Holds the Divine’, in Suydam and Ziegler (eds), Performance and Transformation, pp. 211–39. See also Sanmartín Bastida, La representación, pp. 123–47 Many other theoretical works wisely employ performance theory. See, for example, Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). José de Sigüenza, Historia de la Orden de San Jerónimo, vol. 2, ed. Juan Catalina García, 2nd edn, Nueva Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 12 (Madrid: Bailly-Bailliére e Hijos, 1909), p. 357: ‘If the life of this saint had not for so many years been written and preached by others, and our Lord in her life and in death had not authorised it, and as if, we might say, sealed her holiness with so many wonders, I would not dare put my hand to it, and would pass by such wondrous moments in silence’ (Nahir I. Otaño-Gracia’s translation). José Sánchez Herrero, ‘Desde el cristianismo sabio a la religiosidad popular en la Edad Media’, Clio & Crimen, 1 (2007), 333. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 25–6. Bynum, Holy Feast, p. 27. See Victoria Cirlot and Blanca Garí, La mirada interior: Escritoras místicas y visionarias en la Edad Media (Madrid: Siruela, 2008), p. 31. As for that first person prevailing in certain mystical texts, Cirlot and Garí warn that the distance between this first person and that of the twentieth century should not be forgotten (p. 29). The ego of mysticism does not have to respond to a concrete and literal situation of a certain life, but at the same time, ‘tampoco nos parece lícito pensar vacía a esa primera persona, considerarla como una simple retórica que en absoluto tiene que ver ni con la realidad de la persona, ni con su experiencia como individuo’ (‘it does not seem licit either to think of that first person as empty, or to consider it simple rhetoric that has nothing to do with either the reality of the person or her experience as an individual’) (editors’ translation). Richard Lawes interprets the first person in terms of psychological disorder in the stories of Julian of Norwich or Margery Kempe. See Richard Lawes, ‘Psychological Disorder and the Autobiographical Impulse in Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Thomas Hoccleve’, in Denis Renevey and Cristina Whitehead (eds), Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), p. 217. See also Elizabeth Petroff, ‘Introduction: The Visionary Tradition in Women’s Writings: Dialogue and Autobiography’, in Elizabeth Petroff (ed.), Women’s Visionary Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 21–8, 46–7, on autobiography, the discovery of themselves in writing and the contrasting of the inner and outer worlds in the mystics. I do not agree with María Ángela Holguera Fanega, who states that the phenomenon of the woman who writes and who exposes ‘una gran parte de su propio yo’ (‘a large part of her own self’) is very rare during the Middle Ages: Christine de Pizan, the object of her analysis, was not an exception in this. See María Ángela Holguera Fanega, ‘Christine de Pizan: la autobiografía femenina en la Edad Media’, in José Romera, Alica Yllera, Mario García-Page and Rosa Calvet (eds), Escritura autobiográfica (Actas del II seminario internacional del Instituto de Semiótica Literaria y Teatral, Madrid, UNED, 1–3 de julio, 1992) (Madrid: Visor Libros, 1993), p. 259.

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For Petroff, ‘dialogue serves to hasten self-definition, and it provides a justification for women to write’ (Women’s Visionary Literature, p. 26). Certeau, Mystic Fable, p. 120. For more information on mystic words as compulsive, inarticulate in their exclamations and elided by sobs, see Danielle Régnier-Bohler, ‘Voces literarias, voces místicas’, in Georges Duby, Michelle Perrot and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (eds), Historia de las mujeres en Occidente, vol. 2: La Edad Media, trans. Marco Aurelio Galmarini and Cristina García Ohlrich (Madrid: Taurus, 2003), pp. 531–5. As for the work of confessors and other male supporters, María Jordán Arroyo speaks of its necessary existence to remove the ‘anonymity’ of the women who say they have prophetic gifts; see María V. Jordán Arroyo, Soñar la Historia: Riesgo, creatividad y religión en las profecías de Lucrecia de León (Madrid: Siglo XXI de España Editores), p. 187. However, it must be kept in mind that in a society where oral culture was so widespread, there would have been other means to spread the fame of visionaries or prophetesses. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 241–2. See Cristina Mazzoni, The Women in God’s Kitchen: Cooking, Eating, and Spiritual Writing (New York and London: Continuum, 2005), p. 52. Petroff points out that the marginal state of visionary beguines, tertiaries or married women made it difficult for them to find a scribe (‘Introduction’, p. 39). Rosalynn Voaden, God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries (York: York Medieval Press, 1999), pp. 3–5. See Finke, ‘More Than I Fynde Written’. Cirlot and Garí, La mirada interior, pp. 22, 169. Elizabeth A. Petroff, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 140–6. See Schmidt, ‘An Example’. Sánchez Herrero, ‘La representación’, p. 335. See Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988); and Michel Foucault, ‘About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self (1980)’, in Jeremy R. Carrette (ed.), Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 158–81. Sanmartín Bastida, La representación, pp. 115–22. Sanmartín Bastida, La representación, pp. 403–19. I am not going to discuss how much of their own voice or the mediator’s voice is in the written discourses of these mystics. For a general study on the subject, especially on the differences between texts written directly by women and those written by men, see the set of essays collected by Catherine Mooney on figures such as Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth of Schönau, Clara of Assisi, Beatrijs of Nazareth or Catherine of Siena: Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and their Interpreters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). As regards the reproduction of words or phrases actually pronounced by women, for Bynum, ‘there is reason to think that hagiographers, in revising earlier material or writing up their personal knowledge of a subject, were especially careful to preserve the sayings, or logia, of holy people exactly as they heard or read them. Therefore, the words attributed to women may be especially trustworthy evidence . . . The author of the Life of Ida of Léau, for example, preserves some of her phrases in the vernacular; the Vita prior of Lidwina de Schiedam also preserves a few vernacular words’ (Holy Feast, p. 349 n. 3). Jordán Arroyo, Soñar la Historia, pp. 149–50. Cirlot and Garí, La mirada interior, p. 27. Bynum writes that ‘a comparison of two women from much the same milieu, Mechtild of Hackeborn and Mechtild of Magdeburg, shows clearly that the one who wrote in Latin wrote more impersonally and to a much greater extent under the influence of the liturgy, whereas the vernacular poet wrote more experientially, with a greater sense both of personal vulnerability and of an immediate and special relationship to God’ (Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 196).

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Jordán Arroyo, Soñar la Historia, p. 155. See Petroff, ‘Introduction’, p. 23; and Inocente García de Andrés, ‘Introducción’, in his edition of Juana de la Cruz’s book El Conhorte: Sermones de una mujer. La Santa Juana (1481–1534) (Salamanca: Fundación Universitaria Española / Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, 1999), 2 vols., pp. 13–223. Voaden, God’s Words, p. 43. Voaden, God’s Words, p. 4. Ossola, ‘Epílogo’, p. 360. Janette Dillon, ‘Holy Women and their Confessors or Confessors and their Holy Women? Margery Kempe and Continental Tradition’, in Rosalynn Voaden (ed.), Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late-Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), pp. 139. Margery Kempe is accused of being crazy – see The Book of Margery Kempe: A New Translation; Contexts; Criticism, ed. and trans. Lyn Staley (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), pp.  46, 95; and Blanca Garí, ‘Las amargas lágrimas de  Margery Kempe’, Duoda: Revista d’Estudis Feministes, 20 (2001), 54–5, 75 – as well as María de Toledo, whose family accused her of being out of her mind; see Ángela Muñoz Fernández, Beatas y santas neocastellanas: ambivalencias de la religión y políticas correctoras del poder (s. xiv–xvii) (Madrid: Dirección General de la Mujer/Instituto de Investigaciones Feministas de la Universidad Complutense, 1994), p. 114. See Joan Isobel Friedman, ‘MS Cotton Claudius B.I.: A Middle English Edition of St Bridget of Sweden’s Liber Celestis’, in Rosalynn Voaden (ed.), Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late-Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), pp. 91–113. Alfonso Pecha de Vadaterra was also acquainted with Catherine of Siena, Catherine of Sweden (Katarina av Vadstena) and the blessed Chiara Gambacorti. For the participation of the Spanish Alfonso in the edition of the Revelations, see Denis Searby, ‘General Introduction’, in Birgitta of Sweden, The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 14–15. Dillon, ‘Holy Women and their Confessors’, pp. 119, 137. Petroff, ‘Introduction’, p. 27. When I speak of visions, I include dreams, as my use of the example of Lucrecia de León demonstrates. For a study of the representations and meaning of the divine call to write their visions, as well as the varied answers to this call in a series of mystics, see Rosalynn Voaden, ‘God’s Almighty Hand, Women Co-Writing the Book’, in Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor (eds), Women, the Book and the Godly: Selected Proceedings of the St Hilda’s Conference (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 55–65. Nieves Baranda Leturio, ‘El ser o no ser de las escritoras en la Historia. Entre la Edad Media y la Moderna’, Voz y Letra, 17/2 (2006), 12. See García de Andrés, El Conhorte, pp, 429, 1404, 1469, 1477. See also Ronald E. Surtz, La guitarra de Dios: Género, poder y autoridad en el mundo visionario de la madre Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534), trans. Belén Atienza (Madrid: Anaya & Mario Muchnik, 1990), pp. 131–67. García de Andrés, El Conhorte, p. 1469. García de Andrés, El Conhorte, p. 1423; see also pp. 543–4, 995, García de Andrés, El Conhorte, p. 1404; see also García de Andrés, ‘Introducción’, p. 173. For an analysis of this theme, see Alison More, ‘“In hortis liliorum Domini”: a study of feminine piety in medieval Flanders with particular reference to the Vitae of the mulieres sanctae’ (Ph.D. thesis, Queen’s University, Ottawa, 2000), 20–58. García de Andrés, ‘Introducción’, p. 24; see also Sigüenza, Historia de la Orden, p. 362. Giles, ‘Spanish Visionary Women’, p. 279. Certeau, The Mystic Fable, p. 191. Certeau, The Mystic Fable, p. 192. Certeau, The Mystic Fable, pp. 192–3. Certeau, The Mystic Fable, p. 121. Pedro M. Cátedra, Liturgia, poesía y teatro en la Edad Media (Madrid: Gredos, 2005), p. 123.

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Ronald E. Surtz, Writing Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain: The Mothers of Saint Theresa of Avila (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1995), p. 173 n. 26. Surtz, Writing Women, p. 5. Cátedra, Liturgia, p. 94. Constance Wilkins, ‘Introduction’, in Constanza de Castilla, Book of Devotions: Libro de devociones y oficios, ed. Constance L. Wilkins (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998), p. xv. Renevey and Whitehead, ‘Introduction’, p. 2. Bernard McGinn (ed.), The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism (New York: The Modern Library, 2006), p. xv. Certeau, The Mystic Fable, p. 161. See José Salvador y Conde, ‘Introducción general’, in Catalina de Siena, Obras: El Diálogo; Oraciones y Soliloquios, 5th reprint, trans. José Salvador y Conde (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1991), p. 34. The Dialogue is divided into ten sections, which follow a pattern of making a petition to God, then his response, and finally the act of thanking him, by the Italian saint. However, almost all mystics coincide in that their written words (to which they try to give the greatest possible precision) are a kind of translation of what they have seen and heard, but of a different nature (Petroff, ‘Introduction’, p. 27). Angela of Foligno, Complete Works, trans. Paul Lachance (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), pp. 180–1. García de Andrés, ‘Introducción’, p. 173. See for example Angela of Foligno, Complete Works, p. 187. Petroff, ‘Introduction’, pp. 42–4. Ángela Muñoz Fernández, ‘La palabra, el cuerpo y la virtud. Urdimbre de la “auctoritas” en las primeras místicas y visionarias castellanas’, in María del Mar Graña Cid (ed.), Las sabias mujeres: educación, saber y autoría (Madrid: Asociación Cultural Al-Mudayna, 1994), p. 312. See Fray Contardo Miglioranza, ‘Introducción’, in Santa Ángela de Foligno, Experiencia de Dios Amor, ed. and trans. Fray Contardo Miglioranza (Seville: Apostolado Mariano, 1991), pp. 11–12. Fra Arnoldo begins to write on a small sheet of paper, ‘somewhat carelessly and in summary fashion . . . I thought that I would only have to write very little’, but God reveals to Angela that Fra Arnoldo must obtain a thick notebook instead of a tiny sheet of paper. See Angela of Foligno, Memorial, ed. Cristina Mazzoni, trans. John Cirignano (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 36–7. It is worth noting, as Cirlot and Garí do (La mirada interior, p. 183), that the mystical story of Angela shows the first Italian use of a direct channel of personal revelation; it does not come from the pious legend (the Vita), as in the cases of Umiliana de’ Cerchi, Margherita da Cortona or Chiara da Montefalco. Nevertheless, Fra Arnoldo shows in his writing the same caution present in Beatrice of Nazareth’s life, translated into Latin from the autobiographical writings she had left in Dutch (Cirlot and Garí, La mirada interior, p. 99). Angela of Foligno, Memorial, p. 34. Angela of Foligno, Memorial, pp. 36–9. Angela of Foligno, Memorial, p. 25. Angela of Foligno, Complete Works, pp. 180–1. Angela establishes her own comparison to other saints, which reveals and confirms for us an exercise in imitation, forcing us to see that her experience equals or surpasses that of her antecedents. Angela of Foligno, Memorial, p. 71. Jordán Arroyo, Soñar la Historia, p. 14. Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 202. Catalina de Siena [Catherine of Siena], Obras: El Diálogo; Oraciones y Soliloquios, 5th reprint of the 1st edn, trans. José Salvador y Conde (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 2007), p. 202. In a note from the codex containing the Latin translation of her Orations, Catherine of Siena is presented sitting listening to God and responding to him (see Catalina de Siena, Obras, p. 441).

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Joan Ferrante, ‘Correspondent: “Blessed Is the Speech of Your Mouth”’, in Barbara Newman (ed.), Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 92. Dronke, Women Writers, p. 217. Caciola, Discerning Spirits, p. 312. For Giles, who refers here to Sor Juana and Sor María, ‘in the final analysis the fate of the visionary woman was decided not so much on the content of her performance as on the role of her body in the act of performing, as well as in the actions that shape the context for her theater’ (‘Spanish Visionary Women’, p. 291). I will come back to Giles’s analysis later. Fra Bartolomeo affirms that in no way did the words of St Catherine resemble those of a woman, but the doctrine and sentence of a great doctor (Catalina de Siena, Obras, p. 438), and the same is said of Sor María de Santo Domingo’s ecstatic words. The bull that accompanies the altars of the Italian saint, signed on 28 June 1461, also highlights this aspect, that she appeared as a teacher, without being a disciple. The doctors in sacred sciences, after receiving answers from Catherine, left ‘like lambs after having come as proud lions and threatening wolves’ (as Salvador y Conde strikingly states, ‘Introducción general’, p. 23; English translation by Nahir I. Otaño Gracia). It is necessary to remember that the triple halo or crown is attributed to St Catherine, and that she was an interlocutor of pontiffs as well as a preacher: finally, she was named Doctor of the Church on 4 October 1970. See Jordán Arroyo, Soñar la Historia, p. 156. Surtz, Writing Women, p. 6. Teresa de Jesús [Teresa of Ávila], Obras completas, ed. Tomás Álvarez (Burgos: Editorial Monte Carmelo, 2004), pp. 109, 132, 705–6; translation by Nahir I. Otaño-Gracia, here and below. Teresa de Jesús, Obras, p. 688. Teresa de Jesús, Obras, p. 870. For other self-accusations of clumsiness or inadequacy, see, for example, Teresa de Jesús, Obras, pp. 48, 52. See also María Milagros Rivera Garretas, ‘Teresa de Cartagena: escritura en relación’, in Ángela Muñoz Fernández, La escritura femenina. De leer a escribir II, Laya 19 (Madrid: Asociación Cultural Al-Mudayna, 2000), pp. 98–9. Teresa de Jesús, Obras, p. 170. Jordán Arroyo, Soñar la Historia, p. 171. See Petroff, ‘Introduction’, p. 48. Jordán Arroyo, Soñar la Historia, p. 162. Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida, El arte de morir: La puesta en escena de la muerte en un tratado del siglo xv, Medievalia Hispanica, 10 (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2006), pp. 111–18. Juana de la Cruz, El Conhorte, p. 1473;. See also Surtz, La guitarra, pp. 154–6. Teresa de Cartagena, Arboleda de los enfermos; Admiraçión Operum Dey, ed. Lewis Joseph Hutton (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1967), p. 131. See María del Mar Cortés Timoner, Teresa de Cartagena: Primera escritora mística en lengua castellana (Malaga: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Málaga, 2004), p. 122; and Surtz, Writing Women, pp. 34, 159 n. 48. María Milagros Rivera Garretas, Nombrar el mundo en femenino: Pensamiento de las mujeres y teoría feminista (Barcelona: Icaria editorial, 2003), p. 40. Teresa de Jesús, Obras, pp. 259–60. English translation by Nahir I. Otaño Gracia. Cátedra offers an example of this position through one of two letters preserved in the Cancionero de Egerton addressed to a religious woman, perhaps Franciscan: a letter that underlies the tension between lectio and meditatio (Cátedra, Liturgia, p. 124). Fernando Baños Vallejo, La hagiografía como género literario en la Edad Media: Tipología de doce ‘vidas’ individuales castellanas (Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo, Departamento de Filología Española, 1989), p. 106. Régnier-Bohler, ‘Voces literarias’, p. 493. Sigüenza, Historia, pp. 361, 376. Cortés Timoner, Teresa de Cartagena, pp. 98–102. For a parallel interpretation of silencing women through the reading act, although applied to situations from several centuries later, see Rebeca Sanmartín and M. Dolores Bastida, ‘La imagen

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de la mujer lectora en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX: La Ilustración Española y Americana y el Harper’s Weekly’, Salina, 16 (2002), 129–42. Surtz refers to these last images to contextualise the vision that Sor María has of the Virgin reading (Writing Women, p. 179 n. 33). Denise L. Despres, ‘Ecstatic Reading and Missionary Mysticism: The Orchard of Syon’, in Rosalynn Voaden (ed.), Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late-Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), p. 151. Salvador y Conde, ‘Introducción’, pp. 5, 23. Certeau, The Mystic Fable, p. 162 Certeau, The Mystic Fable, pp. 162–3. On the marks of orality and subjectivity of mystical discourse, among which stand out repetition, redundancy, proverbial and non-analytic style, empathy, lack of time sense, and the situational versus abstraction, see Petroff, who considers that oral methods of composition are more present in female religious writing than in male religious writing (‘Introduction’, pp. 28–30). Giles, ‘Spanish Visionary Women’, p. 280. See Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 8; and Erika Fischer-Lichte, Semiótica del teatro, trans. Elisa Briega Villarrubia (Madrid: Arco/Libros, 1999), pp. 19, 29. Certeau, The Mystic Fable, p. 173. Certeau, The Mystic Fable, p. 188. Ossola, ‘Epílogo’, p. 360. See, for example, Certeau, The Mystic Fable, pp. 188–9. Cirlot and Garí, La mirada interior, p. 165; Garí, ‘Las amargas lágrimas’, p. 62. See also Petroff, ‘Introduction’, pp. 23–4. Julian of Norwich, The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and a Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), p. 201. See, for example, Teresa de Jesús, Obras, pp. 157, 202–3, 670. Victoria Cirlot, Hildegard von Bingen y la tradición visionaria de Occidente (Barcelona: Herder, 2005), pp. 159–79. Voaden, God’s Words, pp. 12–13. Jordán Arroyo, Soñar la Historia, p. xi. See Raquel Torres Jiménez, ‘Notas para una reflexión sobre el cristocentrismo y la devoción medieval a la Pasión y para su estudio en el medio rural castellano’, Hispania sacra, 58/118 (2006), 450, 470; and Sánchez Herrero, ‘Desde el cristianismo’, 333. In 1588 Lucrecia has a vision in which Christ appears to her in pieces, and, after he reconstructs himself, out of his hands come lilies and palm leaves; later he will be surrounded by the people of Toledo: this vision is an example of how its content may have been affected by attendance at a Holy Week procession (see Jordán Arroyo, Soñar la Historia, pp. 119–20; see also another vision of a saint which seems to come from a procession: pp. 120–1). Unlike Jordán Arroyo (p. 169), I do not believe that this is only a Baroque influence due to the religious scene of that time being plagued by Christocentric devotions such as the flogging or imitation of Calvary: the examples of Birgitta and Angela do not corroborate the statement. Ayn Becze, ‘“my spowse most specyally”: late medieval mystical unions and the morality play Wisdom’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Calgary, Ottawa: Library and Archives Canada, 2004), pp. 28–85. Petroff, Body and Soul, p. 20. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins, ‘Introduction’, in Julian of Norwich, The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), p. 1. Petroff, ‘Introduction’, pp. 31–2. Constanza de Castilla, Book of Devotions: Libro de devociones y oficios, ed. Constance L. Wilkins (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998), p. 17; Surtz, Writing Women, p. 55.

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Thomas J. Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 5. Surtz, Writing Women, pp. 78–9. See Angela of Foligno, Complete Works, p. 180. Lewis Joseph Hutton, ‘Introducción’, in Teresa de Cartagena, Arboleda de los enfermos; Admiraçión Operum Dey (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1967), p. 31. Cátedra, Liturgia, p. 93 Cátedra, Liturgia, p. 11. Esther Cohen, ‘The Animated Pain of the Body’, The American Historical Review, 105/1 (2007), 67. Sanmartín Bastida, La representación, pp. 168, 180–1. Rodgers and Ziegler, ‘Elisabeth’, pp. 312, 330. Rodgers and Ziegler interpret the dance of Spalbeek as a kind of liminal state that indicates a transformation – the trance places her in a different space and personality: ‘Elisabeth was a woman dancing to male life, a human dancing divinity, a thirteenth-century follower of Christ becoming Christ at the time of his crucifixion. We speculate that Elisabeth left behind her normal apprehension of a percussive medium. Then, in the midst of her dance, her selfhood was probably in transition to her climactic union with her vision of Christ’ (‘Elisabeth’, p. 312). They also note that her dance is a kind of spiritual marriage to Christ (p.  318). As for the relationship between dance and death, we can recall the danse macabre from the end of the Middle Ages, and I refer to Francesc Massip and Lenke Kovács for a comprehensive study on the subject: El baile: conjuro ante la muerte. Presencia de lo macabro en la danza y la fiesta popular (Ciudad Real: CIOFF-INAEM, 2004). E. Ann Matter, ‘Theories of the Passions and the Ecstasies of Late Medieval Religious Women’, Essays in Medieval Studies, 18 (2001), 8. Cátedra, Liturgia, pp. 301–2. Surtz, La guitarra, pp. 153, 278 n. 216; Writing Women, p. 193. García de Andrés, El Conhorte, p. 837. García de Andrés, El Conhorte, p. 1151. On another occasion, the Lord leads the dance of the infant Jesus along with the infant John the Baptist and others, celebrated in a beautiful square, and with a trumpet call by angels to contemplate it. As in a popular dance and the reverse of the danse macabre, the Lord calls to the dance and John the Baptist responds, and then he plays hide and seek with the infants, to show them his power to see the occult (see Juana de la Cruz, El Conhorte, pp. 947–9). Cátedra, Liturgia, 302. Matter, ‘Theories’, 7. María del Mar Cortés Timoner, Sor Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534) (Madrid: Ediciones del Orto, 2004), p. 26. Quoted in Muñoz Fernández, ‘La palabra’, p. 309. McGinn, The Essential Writings, pp. 202–7; Juana de la Cruz, El Conhorte, pp. 237–41, 831–44. From another perspective, Mechthild of Magdeburg shows other similar proposals to those of Sor Juana, like the incorporation of the question of female authority, and the importance given to dance or to the treatment of the desire for union with God in musical terms (see Surtz, La guitarra, p. 261 n. 147; Muñoz Fernández, Beatas, p. 137). Sanmartín Bastida, La representación, p. 140. García de Andrés, El Conhorte, pp. 244, 259; see Cátedra, Liturgia, pp. 325–7. See for example Cátedra, Liturgia, pp. 578–81. Cátedra, Liturgia, pp. 85–6. Juana de la Cruz, El Conhorte, p. 834. See Jordán Arroyo, Soñar la Historia, p. 157. In the case of Lucrecia, her theatrical dreams allow her to give advice on the strategic-military policy of the kingdom, to influence the sacramental life, and to dictate the behaviour of the liturgical and religious activities of her confessors (Jordán Arroyo, Soñar la Historia, pp. 158–9).

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169 170 171

172

173

174

175 176

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See Muñoz Fernández, Beatas, pp. 136–7, 141; ‘La palabra’, p. 310. See for example García de Andrés, El Conhorte, pp. 337–8. García de Andrés, El Conhorte, pp. 1067–8, 1101–3. Surtz notes the importance of these plays in the history of Castilian theatre, and how we should frame them in the dramatic activity of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; see Ronald E. Surtz, ‘El Libro del conorte’ (1509) and the Early Castilian Theater (Barcelona: Puvill, 1982), p. 18. See also, on these plays, García de Andrés, ‘Introducción’, pp. 186–93; and Cortés Timoner, Sor Juana, pp. 43–8. García de Andrés, El Conhorte, p. 1068. See Cátedra, Liturgia, pp. 111, 121, 126, 189, 447–8. Cátedra is referring to a different genre of texts (pastoral dances), but his conception of the performative seems equally appropriate (Liturgia, p. 304). See Nieves Baranda Leturio, Cortejo a lo prohibido: Lectoras y escritoras en la España moderna (Madrid: Arco/Libros, 2005), p. 21. García de Andrés, El Conhorte, p. 1151. See Surtz, Writing Women, pp. 104–26; and following in his wake, Anne J. Cruz, ‘La sororidad de Sor Juana: espiritualidad y tratamiento de la sexualidad femeninas en España y el Nuevo Mundo’, in Lisa Vollendorf (ed.), Literatura y feminismo en España (s. xv–xxi) (Barcelona: Icaria Editorial, 2005), pp. 98–9. Rebecca Selman, ‘Spirituality and Sex Change: Horologium sapientiae and Speculum devotorum’, in Denis Renevey and Cristina Whitehead (eds), Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), pp. 63–79. Selman, ‘Spirituality’, p. 71. Sahlin, ‘Preaching’, p. 80.

Works Cited Angela of Foligno, Complete Works, trans. Paul Lachance (New York: Paulist Press, 1993). Angela of Foligno, Memorial, ed. Cristina Mazzoni, trans. John Cirignano (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2000). Baños Vallejo, Fernando, La hagiografía como género literario en la Edad Media: Tipología de doce ‘vidas’ individuales castellanas (Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo, Departamento de Filología Española, 1989). Baranda Leturio, Nieves, Cortejo a lo prohibido: Lectoras y escritoras en la España moderna (Madrid: Arco/Libros, 2005). Baranda Leturio, Nieves, ‘El ser o no ser de las escritoras en la Historia. Entre la Edad Media y la Moderna’, Voz y Letra, 17/2 (2006), 7–32. Becze, Ayn, ‘“my spowse most specyally”: late medieval mystical unions and the morality play Wisdom’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Calgary, Ottawa: Library and Archives Canada, 2004). Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). Bynum, Caroline Walker, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991). Bynum, Caroline Walker, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Caciola, Nancy, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca,: Cornell University Press, 2003).

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Catalina de Siena, Obras: El Diálogo; Oraciones y Soliloquios, trans. José Salvador y Conde, 5th reprint of the 1st edn (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 2007). Cátedra, Pedro M., Liturgia, poesía y teatro en la Edad Media (Madrid: Gredos, 2005). Certeau, Michel de, The Mystic Fable, vol.  1, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Cirlot, Victoria, Hildegard von Bingen y la tradición visionaria de Occidente (Barcelona: Herder, 2005). Cirlot, Victoria and Blanca Garí, La mirada interior: Escritoras místicas y visionarias en la Edad Media (Madrid: Siruela, 2008). Cohen, Esther, ‘The Animated Pain of the Body’, American Historical Review, 105/1 (2007), 36-68. Constanza de Castilla, Book of Devotions: Libro de devociones y oficios, ed. Constance L. Wilkins (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998). Cortés Timoner, María del Mar, Sor Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534) (Madrid: Ediciones del Orto, 2004). Cortés Timoner, María del Mar, Teresa de Cartagena: Primera escritora mística en lengua castellana (Malaga: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Málaga, 2004). Cruz, Anne J., ‘La sororidad de Sor Juana: espiritualidad y tratamiento de la sexualidad femeninas en España y el Nuevo Mundo’, in Lisa Vollendorf (ed.), Literatura y feminismo en España (s. xv–xxi) (Barcelona: Icaria Editorial, 2005), pp. 95–106. De Sigüenza, José, Historia de la Orden de San Jerónimo, vol. 2, ed. Juan Catalina García, 2nd edn, Nueva Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 12 (Madrid: Bailly-Bailliére e Hijos, 1909), pp. 357–80. Despres, Denise L., ‘Ecstatic Reading and Missionary Mysticism: The Orchard of Syon’, in Rosalynn Voaden (ed.), Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late-Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), pp. 141–60. Dillon, Janette, ‘Holy Women and their Confessors or Confessors and their Holy Women? Margery Kempe and Continental Tradition’, in Rosalynn Voaden (ed.), Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late-Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), pp. 115–40. Dronke, Peter, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Ferrante, Joan, ‘Correspondent: “Blessed Is the Speech of Your Mouth”’, in Barbara Newman (ed.), Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 91–9. Finke, Laurie A., ‘“More Than I Fynde Written”: Dialogue and Power in the English Translation of The Mirror of the Simple Souls’, in Mary A. Suydam and Joanna E. Ziegler (eds), Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 47–67. Fischer-Lichte, Erika, Semiótica del teatro, trans. Elisa Briega Villarrubia (Madrid: Arco/ Libros, 1999). Foucault, Michel, ‘About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self (1980)’, in Jeremy R. Carrette (ed.), Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 158–81.

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Foucault, Michel, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jean Khalfa and Jonathan Murphy (London: Routledge, 2006). Foucault, Michel, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). Friedman, Joan Isobel, ‘MS Cotton Claudius B.I.: A Middle English Edition of St Bridget of Sweden’s Liber Celestis’, in Rosalynn Voaden (ed.), Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late-Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), pp. 91–113. García de Andrés, Inocente, ‘Introducción’, El Conhorte: Sermones de una mujer. La Santa Juana (1481–1534) (Salamanca: Fundación Universitaria Española/Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, 1999), pp. 13–223. Garí, Blanca, ‘Las amargas lágrimas de Margery Kempe’, Duoda: Revista d’Estudis Feministes, 20 (2001), 51–79. Giles, Mary E., ‘Spanish Visionary Women and the Paradox of Performance’, in Mary A. Suydam and Joanna E. Ziegler (eds), Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality (New York: St.  Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 273–97. Hale, Rosemary Drage, ‘Rocking the Cradle: Margaretha Ebner (Be)Holds the Divine’, in Mary A. Suydam and Joanna E. Ziegler (eds), Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 211–39. Heffernan, Thomas J., Sacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Hodapp, William F., ‘Ritual and Performance in Richard Rolle’s Passion’, in Mary A. Suydam and Joanna E. Ziegler (eds), Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality (New York: St.  Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 241–72. Holguera Fanega, María Ángela, ‘Christine de Pizan: la autobiografía femenina en la Edad Media’, in José Romera, Alica Yllera, Mario García-Page and Rosa Calvet (eds), Escritura autobiográfica (Actas del II seminario internacional del Instituto de Semiótica Literaria y Teatral, Madrid, UNED, 1–3 de julio, 1992) (Madrid: Visor Libros, 1993), pp. 259–65. Hopenwasser, Nanda, ‘A Performance Artist and Her Performance Text: Margery Kempe on Tour’, in Mary A. Suydam and Joanna E. Ziegler (eds), Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 97–131. Hutton, Lewis Joseph, ‘Introducción’, in Teresa de Cartagena, Arboleda de los enfermos; Admiraçión Operum Dey (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1967), pp. 7–36. Jordán Arroyo, María V., Soñar la Historia: Riesgo, creatividad y religión en las profecías de Lucrecia de León (Madrid: Siglo XXI de España Editores, 2007). Julian of Norwich, The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). Lawes, Richard, ‘Psychological Disorder and the Autobiographical Impulse in Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Thomas Hoccleve’, in Denis Renevey and Cristina

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Whitehead (eds), Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), pp. 217–43. Kempe, Margery, The Book of Margery Kempe: A New Translation; Contexts; Criticism, ed. and trans. Lyn Staley (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001). María de Santo Domingo, Libro de la oración de Sor María de Santo Domingo, ed. José Manuel Blecua, facsímile edn (Madrid: Hauser y Menet, 1948). Massip, Francesc, and Lenke Kovács, El baile: conjuro ante la muerte. Presencia de lo macabro en la danza y la fiesta popular (Ciudad Real: CIOFF-INAEM, 2004). Matter, E. Ann, ‘Theories of the Passions and the Ecstasies of Late Medieval Religious Women’, Essays in Medieval Studies, 18 (2001), 1–16. Mazzoni, Cristina, The Women in God’s Kitchen: Cooking, Eating, and Spiritual Writing (New York and London: Continuum, 2005). McGinn, Bernard (ed.), The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism (New York: The Modern Library, 2006). Mecham, June L., ‘Sacred Vision, sacred voice: performative devotion and female piety at the convent of Wienhausen, circa 1350–1500 (Germany)’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Kansas, Lawrence, 2004). Miglioranza, Fray Contardo, ‘Introducción’, in Santa Ángela de Foligno, Experiencia de Dios Amor, ed. and trans. Fray Contardo Miglioranza (Seville: Apostolado Mariano, 1991), pp. 7–23. Mooney, Catherine M. (ed.), Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and their Interpreters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). More, Alison, ‘“In Hortis Liliorum Domini”: a study of feminine piety in medieval Flanders with particular reference to the Vitae of the mulieres sanctae” (Ph.D. thesis, Queen’s University, Ottawa, 2000). Müller, Catherine M., ‘How to Do Things with Mystical Language: Marguerite d’Oingt’s Performative Writing’, in Mary A. Suydam and Joanna E. Ziegler (eds), Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 27–45. Muñoz Fernández, Ángela, Beatas y santas neocastellanas: ambivalencias de la religión y políticas correctoras del poder (s. xiv–xvii) (Madrid: Dirección General de la Mujer/ Instituto de Investigaciones Feministas de la Universidad Complutense, 1994). Muñoz Fernández, Ángela, ‘La palabra, el cuerpo y la virtud. Urdimbre de la “auctoritas” in las primeras místicas y visionarias castellanas’, in María del Mar Graña Cid (ed.), Las sabias mujeres: educación, saber y autoría (Madrid: Asociación Cultural Al-Mudayna, 1994), pp. 295–318. Ossola, Carlo, ‘Epílogo: Historien d’un silence: Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)’, in Michel de Certeau, La fábula mística (siglos xvi–xvii), trans. Laia Colell Aparicio (Madrid: Siruela, 2006), pp. 349–78. Petroff, Elizabeth A., Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Petroff, Elizabeth A., ‘Introduction: The Visionary Tradition in Women’s Writings: Dialogue and Autobiography’, in Elizabeth A. Petroff (ed.), Women’s Visionary Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 3–59. Régnier-Bohler, Danielle, ‘Voces literarias, voces místicas’, in Georges Duby, Michelle Perrot and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (eds), Historia de las mujeres en Occidente,

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vol. 2: La Edad Media, trans. Marco Aurelio Galmarini and Cristina García Ohlrich (Madrid: Taurus, 2003), pp. 473–546. Renevey, Denis and Cristina Whitehead, ‘Introduction’, in Denis Renevey and Cristina Whitehead (eds), Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), pp. 1–17. Rivera Garretas, María Milagros, Nombrar el mundo en femenino: Pensamiento de las mujeres y teoría feminista (Barcelona: Icaria editorial, 2003). Rivera Garretas, María Milagros, ‘Teresa de Cartagena: escritura en relación’, in Ángela Muñoz Fernández, La escritura femenina. De leer a escribir II, Laya 19 (Madrid: Asociación Cultural Al-Mudayna, 2000), pp. 95–110. Rodgers, Susan and Joanna E. Ziegler, ‘Elisabeth of Spalbeek’s Trance Dance of Faith: A Performance Theory Interpretation from Anthropological and Art Historical Perspectives’, in Mary A. Suydam and Joanna E. Ziegler (eds), Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 299–355. Rosenwein, Barbara H. (ed), Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). Sahlin, Claire L., ‘Preaching and Prophesying: The Public Proclamation of Birgitta of Sweden’s Revelations’, in Mary A. Suydam and Joanna E. Ziegler (eds), Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 69–96. Salvador y Conde, José, ‘Introducción general’, in Catalina de Siena, Obras: El Diálogo; Oraciones y Soliloquios, 5th  reprint, introd. and trans. José Salvador y Conde (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1991), pp. 3–38. Sánchez Herrero, José, ‘Desde el cristianismo sabio a la religiosidad popular en la Edad Media’, Clio & Crimen, 1 (2007), 301–35. Sanmartín Bastida, Rebeca, El arte de morir: La puesta en escena de la muerte en un tratado del siglo xv, Medievalia Hispanica 10 (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2006). Sanmartín Bastida, Rebeca, La representación de las místicas: Sor María de Santo Domingo en su contexto europeo (Santander: Real Sociedad Menéndez Pelayo, 2012; 2nd edn London: SPLASH, 2017). Sanmartín, Rebeca and M. Dolores Bastida, ‘La imagen de la mujer lectora en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX: La Ilustración Española y Americana y el Harper’s Weekly’, Salina, 16 (2002), 129–42. Schmidt, Margot, ‘An Example of Spiritual Friendship: The Correspondence between Heinrich of Nördinglen and Margaret Ebner’, in Ulrike Wiethaus (ed.), Maps of Flesh and Light: The Religious Experience of Medieval Women Mystics, trans. Susan Johnson (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993), pp. 74–92. Searby, Denis, ‘General Introduction’, in Birgitta of Sweden, The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 3–27. Selman, Rebecca, ‘Spirituality and Sex Change: Horologium sapientiae and Speculum devotorum’, in Denis Renevey and Cristina Whitehead (eds), Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), pp. 63–79.

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Surtz, Ronald E., ‘El Libro del conorte’ (1509) and the Early Castilian Theater (Barcelona: Puvill, 1982). Surtz, Ronald E., La guitarra de Dios: Género, poder y autoridad en el mundo visionario de la madre Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534), trans. Belén Atienza (Madrid: Anaya & Mario Muchnik, 1990). Surtz, Ronald E., Writing Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain: The Mothers of Saint Theresa of Avila (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1995). Suydam, Mary, ‘Beguine Textuality: Sacred Performances’, in Mary A. Suydam and Joanna E. Ziegler (eds), Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 169–210. Suydam, Mary A., and Joanna E. Ziegler (eds), Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). Teresa de Cartagena, Arboleda de los enfermos; Admiraçión Operum Dey, ed. Lewis Joseph Hutton (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1967). Teresa de Jesús, Obras completas, ed. Tomás Álvarez (Burgos: Editorial Monte Carmelo, 2004). Torres Jiménez, Raquel, ‘Notas para una reflexión sobre el cristocentrismo y la devoción medieval a la Pasión y para su estudio en el medio rural castellano’, Hispania sacra, 58/118 (2006), 449–87. Turner, Victor, From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1988). Voaden, Rosalynn, ‘God’s Almighty Hand, Women Co-Writing the Book’, in Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor (eds), Women, the Book and the Godly: Selected Proceedings of the St Hilda’s Conference (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 55–65. Voaden, Rosalynn, God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries (York: York Medieval Press, 1999). von der Walde Moheno, Lillian (ed.), Propuestas teórico-metodológicas para el estudio de la literatura hispánica medieval (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2003). Watson, Nicholas and Jacqueline Jenkins, ‘Introduction’, in Julian of Norwich, The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and a Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), pp. 1–59. Wilkins, Constance, ‘Introduction’, in Constanza de Castilla, Book of Devotions: Libro de devociones y oficios, ed. Constance L. Wilkins (Exeter: University of Exeter Press,1998), pp. vii–xxii.

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6 Smuggled Balsam and the Inscription of Memory: Hugeberc von Hildesheim and the Pilgrimage of Saint Willibald SUSAN SIGNE MORRISON

E

lizabeth Alvilda Petroff has contributed to pilgrimage studies by introducing countless students and scholars to sometimes neglected texts in her Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature. Works like those by Hugeberc of Hildesheim, the Blessed Angela of Foligno and the ‘pilgrim-mystic’1 Margery Kempe contribute to the textured variety of pilgrimage narratives in context with one another along with other varied genres. Petroff’s invaluable book catalyses ‘mental pilgrimages’ parallel to those experienced by mystics undertaking ‘a more advanced form of spiritual exercise’, such as ‘devotional meditation and visualisation exercises’.2 Petroff points out that Hugeberc of Hildesheim, the focus of this essay, invented ‘a new genre, a new literary form, the first travel book by an Anglo-Saxon, in order to record a new spiritual movement, the conversion of Germans and Franks’.3 In addition to creating ‘a new approach to geographical writing’,4 Hugeberc frames Willibald’s adventures while fashioning – shaping – Willibald’s personality. His asceticism complements his curiosity about the world since, as the narrative relates, travel would have been rudimentary, even at times dangerous. Hugeberc’s work demonstrates (1) how she manipulates gender expectations in multiple references to the act of writing and (2) how memory studies can contribute to an understanding of pilgrimage literature. Memory studies can join the many other ways to ‘read’ pilgrimage – such as through the prisms of cultural anthropology, material culture, space and spatial theories, post-colonialism or gender – all of which offer exciting means to delve deep into the mass of material loosely referred to as pilgrimage literature, that body of texts consisting of theological commentaries, itineraries, interior reflections, remembered travelogues, visionary constructions of the Holy Land and poetic fantasies.

How to Read Pilgrimage Texts Ethnographical field data in anthropological scholarship tend to complicate the dominant Victor and Edith Turner paradigm that articulates deviation from normal social structure and the cohesion among groups of pilgrims in communitas. Those monitoring

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a pilgrimage site – the religious and lay people whose economic and political power might depend upon a shrine’s popularity and influence – could have radically differing agendas from each other concerning shrine space and propaganda, as well as from the pilgrims visiting the site. Scholars have come to see pilgrimage as ‘a realm of competing discourses’.5 Historical pilgrimage was fraught with tension for the pilgrim, whose journey was ambiguously sacred and secular, religious and commercial, linear and circular. The pilgrim could gain agency – or lose it – in a myriad of ways.6 For example, Margery Kempe learned new modes of affective devotion while on pilgrimage to Rome that were personally fulfilling to her, while remaining threatening and alien to her fellow English.7 Material cultural artefacts can suggest how pilgrims understood their experience. Art and architecture responded in a multifaceted way to pilgrimage, which was, in part, a visual experience. The laity was invited to participate more fully through art. Canterbury Cathedral was a ‘theatre of memory’, where pilgrims re-enacted Thomas Becket’s martyrdom and cultic history. Within the dynamic ritual of pilgrimage, pilgrims creatively perform. A pilgrimage space can respond to the needs of pilgrims and their existing practices but can also be orchestrated. In the case of Walsingham, the shrine dedicated to the veneration of the Virgin Mary, medieval art in the village and leading up to it on the pilgrimage route was designed to appeal to women pilgrims in that it extols women saints, particularly those who were mothers.8 Another aspect of ‘material culture’ is that most immaterial of pilgrimage arts: music. As Kathleen Ashley and Marilyn Deegan point out in their sumptuous volume Being a Pilgrim: Art and Ritual on the Medieval Routes to Santiago, music was ‘one of the most powerful practices of pilgrimage’.9 Spatial practices varied according to the body of the pilgrim actor in its peculiar situation – time of life, health, age, wealth, gender, attitude or experience as a pilgrim (neophyte or practised). Thus, paradigms need to be flexible in discussing pilgrimage. Itineraries provide information about how long it takes to travel between two different cities. The account by the Dominican Felix Fabri of Ulm, who travelled to the Holy Land in 1480 and 1483, helped future pilgrims on their journeys. He describes the boat voyage to Jerusalem, where just being able to defecate was a trial, and goes on to make suggestions on how best to purge one’s bowels.10 John Arderne’s surgical Treatises of Fistula in Ano, Haemorrhoids, and Clysters describes how French rogues use sleeping powders to rob pilgrims of their gold. While all of these titbits are fascinating, it is crucial for literary scholars to understand how people creatively make meaning from pilgrimage materials and experiences. The ‘production of meaning’ in such apparently ‘documentary’ texts alerts the modern reader to how medieval pilgrims understood their experience.11 Medieval pilgrims made excursions on literal and interior pilgrimages. Leigh Ann Craig’s idea of ‘consensus memory’12 suggests how a community would construct a series of miraculous events. Similarly, Suzanne Yeager argues for how individual and communal memories play into the memorializing process, along with the role of Jerusalem as an ‘object of memory’.13 As she points out, pilgrim writing functions as ‘another form of ritual performance’,14 a key insight that provocatively deepens and infuses these texts with spiritual import. In Yeager’s study, William Wey’s itinerary offers a ‘how-to’ guidebook, while the pilgrimages of Richard Torkington and that of Anonymous offer individualised accounts prior to arriving in Jerusalem. All three writers, concerned as they are to go accurately step by step around the holy sites in Jerusalem, construct an interior pilgrimage experience for the reader.

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Pilgrimage shrines can be read as places of memory according to Pierre Nora’s delineation. He distinguishes between lieux de mémoire (places of memory) and milieux de mémoire (environments of memory). A lieu de mémoire is where memory is frozen, such as a museum or monuments like the Eiffel Tower, and belongs to the world of tourism or art history. A milieu de mémoire, on the other hand, is a constantly changing and evolving environment of memory, such as family, church or village, which is part of everyday experience and is communal rather than individual.15 Pilgrimage shrines visited by the faithful in the Middle Ages and today are milieux de mémoire. Pilgrimage transforms the pilgrim actor by connecting him or her to the fabric of society and reinforcing aspects of individuality and history that a particular culture privileges. Believers can be changed by simply entering into the aura of the holy, even kissing or touching an image or relic. Memory studies contribute to how interpreters make meaning in critical ways. As Petroff’s colleague, James Young, the pre-eminent scholar of memory and the Holocaust, has argued, ‘Rather than coming to Holocaust narrative for indisputably “factual” testimony, therefore, the critical reader might now turn to the manner in which these “facts” have been understood and reconstructed in the narrative.’16 Similarly, pilgrimage narratives, particularly those purporting to retell an actual, historical pilgrimage, might be read by focusing on how a ‘fact’ – anything from a description of a relic to the meditation on an incident – has been placed into the narrative structure. A focus on memory reveals the creative activity on the part both of the pilgrim writer and pilgrim reader. Material instances of dynamic agency by both pilgrim-actor and pilgrim-writer provoke memory work in the pilgrim-reader, thus engaging her in ‘the memory work of pilgrimage’.17 Memory brings up the issue of aesthetics – how to write about pilgrimage. Creating an aesthetically evocative experience for the pilgrim-reader is not only a creative aesthetic decision, but also an ethical act – allowing the text’s audience to have a deeper spiritual response permitting more expansive opportunities for the pilgrim-reader to achieve salvation.

Gendered Images of Fertility In one pilgrimage work from the eighth century, the writer poeticises and memorialises the pilgrimage experience. The Hodoeporicon of Saint Willibald (later called the Vita Willibaldi) was written between 778 and 786 by Hugeberc (also Hugeburc or Huneberc; the name is disputed) of Hildesheim,18 an eighth-century Saxon nun. Wynnebald founded a double monastery with both monks and nuns in 752, with his brother Willibald’s support. At the time, Willibald was bishop of Eichstätt. On Wynnebald’s death, his sister Walburga became abbess, ruling this double monastery in Germany.19 A member of St Boniface’s group, Hugeberc, a Saxon, left England in or just after 761 to live under Walburga. It is commonly theorised that Hugeberc wrote down the travels of her kinsman Bishop Willibald as he told her about his adventures to and in the Holy Land between 722 and 729. Her Latin work, in addition to providing a vivid portrait of an early pilgrimage to the Holy Land, gives the history of Willibald from his childhood, his role in the Christianisation of Germany and an analysis of his character. Though she attributes her work to Willibald’s reminiscences, she does not merely record, but frames and orders

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his recollections. Petroff’s 1994 volume Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism focuses on ‘the radical difference between the way male biographers view saintly women and women’s view of themselves’.20 Her insights concerning male biographers can be usefully employed to see how Hugeberc, a female biographer of a male subject, fashions her work. As Petroff asserts, many ‘female authored texts are radically noncanonical’.21 Petroff points out that women’s writing about male figures ‘are relevant to women’s as well as men’s concerns, and his actions are meant to reflect on women’s as well as men’s actions or to provide models for both women and men’.22 Hence Petroff’s immense contribution to medieval studies by including Hugeberc in her 1986 anthology. Gender distinctions on earth are ‘man-made . . . [a] woman may escape the human limitations of her gender.’23 Yet women did acknowledge their gender rhetorically, as when Hugeberc introduces the modesty topos, deprecating her own gender. Peter Dronke’s work on Hugeberc comments mainly on the modesty topos she uses, combining humility and self-denigration with bold intention. Dronke argues that this topos was a means for her to – ultimately – assert herself. St Paul’s proclamation in the Epistles, that he was ‘not worthy to be called an apostle’, provided a model for her apparent ingenuousness and self-deprecation, since, after all, Paul was crucial to the early Church. Clearly, she plays with the topos, citing her gender as a reason for her to be self-denying. She subtly overturns that deficiency into her defiant pursuit of her text.24 Hugeberc performs being humble, only to confidently present her work to male priests and deacons, unashamed of her gender. Hugeberc’s use of the modesty topos blossoms with the vegetative images so present throughout her work. ‘I am but womanly, stained by the frailty and weakness of my sex . . . freely prompted by my own wilful impetuosity, like some ignorant child who at her heart’s discretion plucks a few small things from trees rich in foliage and fruit.’ Just as Dronke has shown this topos functioning to defiantly reinforce her authority, Hugeberc’s employment of this foliage imagery reinforces her authorial position. This theme of fertility and harvest is artfully rooted in her work. Hugeberc’s most remarkable and remarked upon passage is as follows: Being an unlearned woman, I do not undertake to examine these matters in a literary form because I underestimate the talents of your wisdom or because I do not well know that there are many of you whom our Lord God has deigned to place as bishops above me, who are more outstanding not only in being of the male sex, but also in the divinely bestowed dignity of the priesthood, and who would be able to lay out and explain these matters much better than I because of their knowledge of divine law, not to mention their cleverness at investigation. But, although I am an unworthy woman, I know that I have flowered from the same genealogical root as these men [of whom I shall write], albeit from the lowest stalks of its branches, and therefore I have felt disposed to place in the hands of readers something worthy of remembrance concerning such great and venerable men and concerning the ways in which their lives were blessed, not only in their deeds, but in the various journeys they undertook and the great miracles they performed.25 Beyond the modesty topos laid out in terms of gender, the most striking metaphor lies in the flower and harvest imagery, which she initially uses to describe her own writing.

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She asserts her authority by virtue of genealogical identity. She has flowered, just as her writing will. She proposes to ‘combin[e] and [put] into order the few facts that there are and weav[e] them into a continuous narrative’ (p. 145). Here she uses the image of weaving, a female-identified image of creation since the time of Homer’s Penelope. Hugeberc claims she would ‘be pleased to pluck, collect, and display, with however small an art, a few tokens from the lowest branches for you to keep in your memory’ (p. 144). Later in the Prologue she shifts her metaphor from that of flowering to that of ploughing: ‘All these writings, which are but black tracks ploughed by a pen in a furrowed path on the white plains of these fields [of parchment], are presented to your knowledgeable and loving care’ (p. 145). The masculine image of ploughing asserts that her writing is as virile, that is to say as worthy, as any writing by a male. Hugeberc returns to this image. ‘Far and wide through the vast province of Bavaria [Willibald] drove his plough, sowing the seed and reaping the harvest with the help of many fellow laborers’ (p. 164). This image reiterates the cultivation image in the Prologue, only there the ploughman was a ploughwoman – herself, with her writing the harvest. She comes to equate Willibald’s missionary work with her writing his life,26 sowing her seeds, her words, onto the page. The careful listener will receive spiritual fertility. Willibald retraces, and in a sense re-enacts, Christ’s life, becoming a type of Christ himself, which, as a saint, he is.27 He visits the places of Christ’s birth and baptism and even goes through a kind of Harrowing of Hell, reminiscent of the one Christ is said to have undergone in the Gospel of Nicodemus. This takes place on the visit to the inferno of Theodoric. The imagery of the ‘inferno’ is terrible, like those in depictions of hell (p. 160). Willibald’s life is laid out in conjunction with Christ’s, parallels and reflects it, but this Christ is feminised at the conclusion of the work, lending legitimacy to women and women writers. While Hugeberc applies the topos of Christ’s soldiery to Willibald who acts as a substitute Christ, she layers Willibald/Christ with multiple images and meanings at the conclusion of her work. Again, she invokes the fertility and harvest imagery: With a few fellow laborers he tilled the wide and spacious fields for the divine seed, sowing and cultivating them until harvest-time. And so like a busy bee that flits through the meadows, purple with violets, aromatic with scented herbs and through the tree branches yellow with blossom, drinking the sweet nectar but avoiding bitter poison, and returns to the hive bearing honey on its thighs and body, so the blessed man chose out the best from all that he had seen abroad with his own eyes, adopted it, and, having adopted it, submitted it to his disciples for acceptance, showing them good example by word and deed, in zeal for observance, avoidance of evil, piety, forbearance, and temperance. (pp. 163–4) This sexually laden, lushly fertile imagery reminds the medieval reader of the Song of Songs viewed as a mystical text by Christians. Just as Willibald bears honey on his body and thighs, the lover tells his beloved: ‘Your lips drop sweetness like the honeycomb, my bride, / syrup and milk are under your tongue’ (Song of Songs 4:11). The Song of Songs became an allegory read by Christian exegetes wherein the lover is identified with Christ and his beloved with the Church, each Christian soul and the Virgin,28 as well as

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the love of Christ for the consecrated nun or virgin. Feminised, Willibald buzzes with empowering fertility. Hugeberc concludes by asking a number of rhetorical questions, helping to entice the reader into further participating with the text. Some of her questions could be answered with a name other than Willibald or Christ. ‘Who was more outstanding than he in piety, more perfect in humility? Who more forbearing in patience, more strict in temperance, greater in meekness?’ (p. 164). The answer to the question of who is most humble and meek can only be the Virgin Mary, a subtle way to inscribe a feminised Willibald into her work, simultaneously reminding her audience of the virtue of women.29 Implicitly invoked in this passage, Mary reminds the reader/listener of the potential perfection of womankind.30 Hugeberc further feminises Willibald by saying that ‘Willibald and Mother Church, like a hen that cherishes her offspring beneath her wings, won over many adoptive sons to the Lord, protecting them continually with the shield of his kindliness’ (p. 164). This ‘motherhood’ of Christ and Willibald precedes by four centuries Bernard of Clairvaux’s use of Christ as mother imagery. As Caroline Walker Bynum has shown,31 such a theme as God as mother is not an invention of twelfth-century devotional writers. God in the Old Testament speaks of himself as mother. While the New Testament generally lacks such imagery, Matthew 23:37 compares Christ to a hen gathering her brood under her wing, referenced here by Hugeberc. Christ as mother is present in various early Christian works, including the writings of Clement, Origen, Irenaeus, Chrysostom, Ambrose and Augustine. Twelfth-century authors innovate the association between instruction and pastoral care with maternity and nurturing.32 Anticipating the burst of Christ-as-Mother imagery articulated four hundred years later, Hugeberc reminds her audience of the Song of Songs and feminises Willibald. By adding motherhood to the topos of Christ’s femininity and reminding her readers or listeners of holy women’s virtue, Hugeberc could be establishing a place for women. While she explicitly addresses men in her Introduction as recipients of her text, she implicitly inscribes a female audience in her work, to appeal to the nuns of her double monastery and ‘spiritually mentor’33 them. Just as the modesty topos works in a doubleedged way, so does her artistic achievement. Just as the monastery is double, so too is her intended audience. Hugeberc specifically mentions female saints whenever possible in order to further interest an implied female audience. In Sicily, Hugeberc reminds the reader/listener of Saint Agatha and the miraculous powers of her body, stopping the volcanic fire of Mount Etna (p. 151). Hugeberc mentions Saint Helena several times as when the men visit Emesa where Helena built the church in honour of Saint John the Baptist (p. 152); when they come to Calvary, Hugeberc alludes to Helena’s discovery of the cross (p. 155). The brother-pilgrims go to Galilee, ‘to the place where Gabriel first came to our Lady and said: “Hail Mary”’ (p. 153). Mary is mentioned again when Willibald visits the gate of Jerusalem where the miracle occurs concerning Mary’s body, which Jews try to take from the Apostles after her death (p. 156). He travels to the valley of Josaphat where ‘there is a church of Our Lady and in the church is her tomb (not that her body lies at rest there, but as a memorial to her)’ (p. 156), as well as to the village where ‘Saint Peter raised up the widow Dorcas to life’ (p. 157). Along with many female saints and figures, Hugeberc returns again and again to the centrality of water, token of fertility and life.34 The men beg some bread in Phygela

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and ‘went to a fountain in the middle of the city, and, sitting on the edge of it, they dipped their bread in the water and so ate’ (p. 151). They then journey to Chanaan (Cana), ‘where our Lord changed water into wine. A vast church stands there, and in the church one of the altars has on it one of the six waterpots that our Lord ordered to be filled with water and then changed into wine; from it they drank some wine’ (p. 153). They move on to Capharnaum ‘where our Lord raised to life the ruler’s daughter’ (p. 154). This precedes the passage concerning the visit to the spot where Christ was baptised. At this spot there is now a church built high up on columns of stone; beneath the church, however, the ground is dry. On the place where Christ was baptized and where they now baptize there stands a little wooden cross: a little stream of water is led off and a rope is stretched over the Jordan and tied at each end. Then on the feast of the Epiphany the sick and infirm come there and, holding onto the rope, plunge themselves in the water. Barren women also come there. Our Bishop Willibald bathed himself there in the Jordan. (p. 154) Hugeberc masterfully conflates images of water, Christ’s baptism, miraculous healing, women’s sterility and fertility and Willibald’s participation in these rites. For female audience members of her work, the parallel mention of Willibald and barren women suggests that both women and this soldier of Christ have the right to bathe where Christ did and are equivalents in God’s eyes. This passage precedes the visit to Jericho. The fountain that bubbled up there on the brow of the hill was barren and quite useless to man before the prophet Eliseus came and blessed it and made it flow. Afterward the people of the city drew it off into their fields and gardens and other places that needed it, and now wherever this fountain flows, the crops increase and promote health, all by reason of the blessing given by Eliseus the prophet. (p. 155) Water and fertility are thematic urgencies for Hugeberc who uses images of growth, harvest and fertility to analogise her writing activity. In Jerusalem, Willibald goes to Solomon’s Porch, ‘where there is a pool at which the sick used to lie waiting for the angel to move the waters, after which the first who went down into them was cured: This is where our Lord said to the paralytic: “Rise, take up your pallet, and walk”’ (pp. 155–6). A moment in Samaria conflates water and femininity: Near the town is the well where our Lord asked the Samaritan woman to give Him water to drink. Over that well there now stands a church, and there is the mount on which the Samaritans worshiped and of which the woman said to our Lord: ‘Our fathers worshiped on this mountain; and you say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.’ (p. 158) Hugeberc’s spiritual associations literally bubble up, suggesting that gender does not imply a ‘moral hierarchy’.35 Indeed, unlike Vitae where a male scribe/confessor confers authority on the female holy woman, here a female scribe/holy woman authorises the male subject. Hugeberc and Willibald collaborate, wherein her scribal activity legitimises his lived experience.36

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Memorialising Pilgrimage through Participation Pauline Head has pointed out how Hugeberc ‘writes, then, in order that this period of his life be remembered by her audience, those immediately interested in learning of and then recalling Willibald’s activities’.37 As Elisabeth van Houts writes concerning the function of women as transmitters of information, as carriers of a tradition – whether of a family or of a monastic community . . . [By] preserving the memory of the dead, the nuns preserved the past. This was by no means a passive role . . . [T]he nuns rapidly took the opportunity to shape the past as they saw it.38 Women writers actively created new memories for their audiences. Mary Carruthers explains the importance of memory for medieval culture and learning, contending that ‘medieval culture was fundamentally memorial’.39 While ‘[t]exts are the primary medium [of] public memory’,40 ‘[w]riting’, she contends, ‘was always thought to be a memory aid, not a substitute for it.’41 The book itself, an object which cues memory, contains memorial events, was perceived of as a memorial object, yet it was only one of many ways by which to memorialise the culture.42 Analogously, the spatial layout of a pilgrimage route or shrine in a cathedral was fashioned both to bring to mind the saint’s life and death and to instil in the pilgrim’s memory the experience of the pilgrimage and shrine.43 The imitatio Christi in the journey to the Holy Land was the attempt to relive Christ’s life – seeing where he lived and died – which would be better remembered once the actual ground he trod was somatically experienced.44 Images work affectively on the memory; personalising the memory makes the reader remember, just as personalising Christ’s life by replicating it helps the pilgrim to remember it.45 In other words, spatial memory is visual memory.46 Like memory, pilgrimage concerns itself with spatial order47 – of the route to the shrine and of the experience of the shrine within a church. The pilgrimage text, in turn, becomes the means to remember a pilgrimage and way for the audience to undergo, see and remember its virtual pilgrimage. Visionary literature stems out of bodily seeing as well as spiritual ‘seeing’.48 In Willibald’s story, his physical journey requires bodily detail: places, communities and experiences. Yet these ‘facts’ are made meaningful through their links to biblical and spiritual moments and people. Hugeberc follows Willibald’s pilgrimage much as many other medieval pilgrimage accounts do: weaving incidents from the Bible in with the sites he sees. A visit to a place triggers, for Hugeberc, a connection to these spiritually rich associations, thus memorialising a sacred event or being. In understanding female mystical meditation, Petroff comments: ‘The kind of meditation taught to women was visual and creative, not intellectual or abstract: the devout woman was to imagine herself as an observer and a participant in the life of Mary and of Christ.’49 Willibald’s physical journey allows Hugeberc to re-enact the pilgrimage herself. As proxy, she travels to the Holy Land, along with her reader. Sparking memories through revered moments in Scripture and holy writings, Hugeberc invites readers to meditate and, like her, participate.50 Hugeberc urges the contemplation of Christ’s life when describing how Willibald and his companions ‘came to the spot where two fountains, Jor and Dan, spring from the earth and then pour down the mountainside to form the river Jordan. There, between the two

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fountains, they passed the night and the shepherds gave us sour milk to drink’ (p. 154). This moment in the text where Hugeberc uses ‘us’ has been interpreted as implying that she is using Willibald’s own words here.51 Or as Ora Limor puts it, ‘This author thus became a partner in producing the story of a journey in which he or she had not taken part – a kind of intermediary between pilgrim and reader.’52 This conversational interruption suggesting the spoken words adheres to what Denise K. Filios has called a means for ‘exercising power’, as in the story of Al-Kāhina in the Futūḥ Miṣr (The Conquest of Egypt) by Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam.53 Barbara Zimbalist shows elsewhere in this volume how the mystic Ida of Nivelles ‘was both subject of her Vita and a collaborator in its production’.54 Like Filios, Zimbalist cues in on the power of speech where ‘the eyewitness nature’ of a narrative functions as an ‘authoritative strategy’.55 Indeed, as Limor asks, ‘[W]hose voice was heard in these compositions, the traveler’s or the writer’s?’56 Or, for that matter, that of the reader. Hugeberc makes Willibald’s pilgrimage become the pilgrimage of the audience, who partakes in both the sour milk offered by the shepherds and Hugeberc’s words. Just as the waters that baptise the parched Christians refresh them, the reader, who collaborates with Willibald’s ordeal, is refreshed by what Hugeberc has written. The pilgrimage and its locales foster a milieu de mémoire for the reader actively consuming virtual milk and inscribed words. Hugeberc asserts her authority in terms of a proxy: Willibald has authority and she heard from his lips what she relates. In fact, At the present time, if I may say so, it seemed to me surely shameful that a human voice should, in mute tenacity and with sealed lips, keep silent about those things our Lord deemed worthy to reveal, in order to make them known in our times, to his servant Willibald through the exertions of his body and vision of his eyes. (p. 144) For Hugeberc, silence would be the worst sin, one which transcends gender. Therefore, her gender, which she raises as a problem, is a red herring: ultimately gender is irrelevant in establishing who has authority to relate God’s truth. By presenting Willibald as feminised, herself as masculinised, she confuses – deliberately – gender stereotypes to assert the authority of Christian writers. Historians such as Craig argue: ‘Women’s pilgrimages were located at the nexus of conflicting ideals.’57 In Hugeberc’s text, a woman author takes pilgrimage as a metaphor for her own writing journey. A peculiar moment alludes to her writing. Willibald goes to look into the inferno of Theodoric, where he sees something come out of the volcano: ‘And that pumice stone that writers speak of he saw issuing from the crater, thrown out with flames and cast into the sea, then washed up again on the seashore by the tide, where men were collecting it and carting it away’ (p. 160). An implement crucial for writers, the pumice stone would have been used by scribes to smooth parchment and possibly absorb ink. Such a key piece of technology emerges from a hell-like region. Writing only can be created after a kind of harrowing of hell undergone by the writer, who has joined with Willibald, united in his journey. One moment that best analogises Hugeberc’s writing is the odd scene in which is described at length Bishop Willibald’s smuggling of balsam into Tyre. An elaborate description is given of his filling a calabash, a dried gourd, with balsam. He then fills a reed with mineral oil, which he puts into the gourd. In Tyre, Willibald and his companions are arrested and their belongings scrutinised. Their

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captors open the calabash and smell only mineral oil. ‘They did not find the balsam that was inside the calabash underneath the mineral oil, and so let them go’ (p. 159). This scene functions as a symbol for Hugeberc’s work: her text contains good balsam. The modesty topos, like the mineral oil, misleads, in this case the superficial reader. The citizens of Tyre, who seize Willibald and his companions and smell only mineral oil, lack the wisdom to seek out and smell the balsam. As a religious rite, pilgrimage imprints experience on the mind. Reading and walking are analogues for one another in shaping past memory into present experience.58 Reading a pilgrimage text educates, controls and affects the reader. Books themselves were ‘decorated in the same way as shrines, like reliquaries of saints, another memorial object’.59 Just as a shrine memorialises the dead saint, so too does the memory function as a shrine – to memorialise.60 Pilgrimage as narrative, then, reflects historical pilgrimage as a means to venerate and remember the dead. Pilgrims ‘write’ through walking, making the experience concrete in the memory. Pilgrimage acts out a metaphor so spirituality can be apprehended by the intellect.61 In a sense, a pilgrimage text functions as a relic towards which the reader-pilgrim goes on pilgrimage: only through reading the poem, does the reader complete the journey.62

Cryptic and Riddling Rhetoric Pilgrimage is linked to memory: everything the poet is moving through is past, but she or he tells it as though it lies in the present.63 Pilgrimage as a memorial practice explains why pilgrimage poems are often unfinished or deliberately draw the reader in – their essential purpose demands that the reader finishes them.64 One final way Hugeberc encourages our memorial activity is through the tantalizing reference to a cryptogram concealing her name. Only in 1931 was this unique manuscript’s peculiarity deciphered.65 Petroff points out the moments in the text showing evidence of Hugeberc’s knowledge of heroic poetry,66 citing language reminiscent of Old English verse. This cryptogram of Hugeberc’s name links her to a fellow pre-Conquest writer, the poet Cynewulf, who interweaves cryptograms in his four named poems.67 Using runes in a mixed-up order, he asks to reader to figure them out; once the reader has reassembled the letters into a legible form, that literary pilgrim can pray actively for the poet. Indeed, putting together runes is like putting together the separated relics of a saint’s body. Two of Cynewulf’s poems explicitly cite pilgrimage and journey before the runic passage concluding each poem. Elene concerns the pilgrimage of Constantine’s mother to Jerusalem to find Christ’s cross and nails, while The Fates of the Apostles focuses on the many journeys – ending fatally but triumphantly – for Christ’s apostles. Juliana introduces the runic passage by Cynewulf reflecting on how his soul will journey away from his body (Juliana, lines 699–700 [‘Min sceal of lice / saƿul on siðfæt’]; also lines 712–15); a similar sentiment concludes The Fates of the Apostles (Fates, lines 109–12). The poet acknowledges the journey – ‘on lade’ (Fates, line 92) – once he leaves his body. In Christ’s Ascension, Christ’s life is seen as a journey in leaps (‘hlyp’, lines 720ff.). After the passage with the runes spelling out his name, Cynewulf ponders on how, while on earth, the soul and body journey together: ‘somed siþian’ (Christ’s Ascension, line 819). The association between the reader cobbling together runes and the act of journeying

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imposes an active duty of pilgrimage on the writer and reader of that text. In joining the poet-pilgrim-runic master/mistress, the reader participates in the soul’s pilgrimage by actively memorialising the journey not only of Willibald, Elene, the Apostles, Christ and the poet’s soul, but also her own pilgrimage, fated, like theirs, to transpire. While it is unlikely Hugeberc knew Cynewulf’s verse which appears extant in much later manuscripts from the eleventh century, it could be he knew of hers. While Hugeberc wrote in the late eighth century, Cynewulf’s verse has been deemed to date from ‘the earlier part of the ninth century’.68 It is tantalising to imagine Cynewulf, so famous for his runic signature, adopting a cryptogram from an earlier female poet likewise fascinating by journey, travel and pilgrimage. Just as the runic signature forces to the reader to ponder the role of the writer, Hugeberc’s insistence on metatextuality – such as with the pumice stone from the Hell of Theodoric – provokes considerations of a literary work’s material conditions of production, such as ‘facts’ like pumice stones, and what they mean to the author. A pilgrimage work is not only a didactic and spiritual travelogue, but also an aesthetic and ethical encounter among pilgrimage text, author and audience. The exquisite details of what might first be read as literally flowery discourse in fact guide the pilgrimreader to more firmly adhere to the pilgrim-writer’s beliefs. In presenting the pilgrimage memory – Willibald’s memory memorialised by Hugeberc – with aesthetically pleasing flourishes, Hugeberc’s reader can better accompany Willibald on his journey, making the Holy Land a milieu de mémoire, a living place not just for the actual pilgrim, but additionally for the pilgrim reader through the pilgrim author. The modern reader makes meaning by understanding how Hugeberc’s narrative structure fosters a living work, one meant to be responsively read well over a millennium after its initial creation.

Notes 1

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Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 299. Petroff, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, p. 6. Petroff, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, p. 87. Patricia Ranft, Women in Western Intellectual Culture, 600–1500 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 1. John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow (eds), Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 5. Leigh Ann Craig points out that even in the case of forced pilgrimages, ‘it was possible for [the woman pilgrim] to help shape both the events of her journey and the shared interpretations of those events’; Leigh Ann Craig, Wandering Women and Holy Matrons: Women as Pilgrims in the Later Middle Ages (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), p. 176. See Christopher Roman, ‘Margery Kempe and Italy: Sacred Space and the Community in Her Soul’, in Jean François Kosta-Théfaine (ed.), Travels and Travelogues in the Middle Ages (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 2009), p. 159. For a thoroughgoing treatment of how Walsingham was geared to female pilgrims and the situation of female pilgrims generally see Susan Signe Morrison, Women Pilgrims in Late Medieval England: Private Piety as Public Performance (London: Routledge, 2000), especially Chapter  1. Other works by Morrison dealing with pilgrimage and memory include ‘Parish Churches on Pilgrimage Routes: Images, History, Memory’, in Dee Dyas (ed.), The Story of the Church in England, CD-Rom (Christianity & Culture at St John’s College, Nottingham and

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the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, 2010); ‘Waste Space: Pilgrim Badges, Ophelia, and Walsingham Remembered’, in Gary Waller and Dominic Janes (eds), Walsingham in Literature and Culture from the Middle Ages to Modernity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 49–66; and ‘Marie de France’s Saint Patrick’s Purgatory as Dynamic Diptych’, Le Cygne: Journal of the International Marie de France Society, 3rd series, 6 (2019), pp. 49–65. Kathleen Ashley and Marilyn Deegan, Being a Pilgrim: Art and Ritual on the Medieval Routes to Santiago (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Lund Humphries, 2009), p. 216. For more about Felix Fabri’s pilgrimage and its context, see Kathryne Beebe’s Pilgrim & Preacher: The Audiences and Observant Spirituality of Friar Felix Fabri (1437/8–1502) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 18. Craig, Wandering Women and Holy Matrons, p. 87. Suzanne Yeager, Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 4. Yeager, Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative, p. 23. See Robert S. Nelson, ‘Tourists, Terrorists, and Metaphysical Theater’, in Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin (eds), Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 74; and Jonathan Bordo, ‘Time’, in Monuments and Memory, p. 104 and ‘The Keeping Place (Arising from an Incident on the Land)’, in Monuments and Memory, p. 174. Pierre Nora’s work can be found in his Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, 3 vols, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988–96). Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, p.  10. Indeed, by ‘emphasizing the putative documentary function of Holocaust narrative over its valuable interpretive achievement, the critic might even be leaving this narrative vulnerable to undeserved – and ultimately irrelevant – criticism regarding historical points of fact in the event of conflicting “testimonies”’ (p. 18). Shayne Aaron Legassie, The Medieval Invention of Travel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), p. 100. Or, as is sometimes argued, Heiden[s]heim; Ranft, Women in Western Intellectual Culture, p. 6. See Pauline Head, ‘Who is the Nun from Heidenheim? A Study of Hugeburc’s Vita Willibaldi’, Medium Aevum, 71 (2002), 29–46. Dietz argues that her name is Huneberc and refers to her as such throughout; Maribel Dietz, Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims: Ascetic Travel in the Mediterranean World, A.D. 300–800 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005). Thomas F. X. Noble and Thomas Head, Soldiers of Christ: Saints and Saints’ Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), pp. 141–2. Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. ix. Petroff, Body and Soul, p. ix. Petroff, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, p. 52. Petroff, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, p. 52. Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 34–5. Noble and Head, Soldiers of Christ, pp. 144–5, my emphasis. All citations noted parenthetically in the main body are from Huneberc of Hildesheim: The Hodoeporicon of St. Willibald, trans. Charles H. Talbot, found in Noble and Head, pp. 141–64. Carolyn Dinshaw has pointed out the linkage between artistic creation, dissemination and ploughing. Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 14. The parable of the sower, whose words fall on deaf ears or good soil, is a subtext of Hugeberc’s writing. Dietz explores how his travelling is a ‘form of perfecting his monastic life’ (Dietz, Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims, p. 205).

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Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), pp. 124–5. While Paul viewed the Church as Christ’s bride, the Virgin herself was identified with the Church, the bride of Christ. ‘Hugeburc creates a superimposition of past and present which speaks vividly of the significance of the pilgrimage experience . . . In choosing to write of a pilgrim’s travels, and in structuring her narrative such that present places repeatedly open up windows to the past, Hugeburc suggests the nature of sacred time. Successive or sequential events – Gabriel’s annunciation to Mary, then, almost 800 years later, St Willibald’s visit to Galilee – approach simultaneity . . .’; Head, ‘Who is the Nun’, pp. 40–1. ‘It was Ambrose who first coalesced the Virgin, the Church, and each Christian soul as the smitten Shulamite of the Song of Songs. “From that womb of Mary was brought into the world the heap of wheat surrounded by lilies [the faithful]: while the kiss the beloved receives is the kiss of the Holy Spirit at the Annunciation.”’ But the Song of Songs also became applied in the early Church to the love of Christ and the consecrated virgin or nun (Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, p. 126). Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 93–117. Bynum, Jesus as Mother, pp. 110–34. Barbara Zimbalist, ‘Gender, Genre and Collaboration in the Life of Ida of Nivelles’, in this volume, p. 164, referring to how Ida’s Vita works for her community. See also Denise K. Filios, ‘A Woman Mystic in Pre-Islamic North Africa: Al-Kāhina in the Futūḥ Miṣr’, in this volume, p. 191. As Petroff asserts for Hrotsvit von Gandersheim; Petroff, Body and Soul, p. 84. Compare with Ida as in Zimbalist, ‘Gender, Genre and Collaboration’, p. 160. Head, ‘Who is the Nun’, p. 30. Hugeburc is ‘[c]harged with preserving her family memory’. Ora Limor, ‘Pilgrims and Authors: Adomnan’s De locis sanctis and Hugeburc’s Hodoeporicon Sancti Willibaldi’, Revue Bénédictine, 114 (2004), 268. See also Elisabeth van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe 900–1200 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). Elisabeth van Houts, ‘Women and the writing of history in the early Middle Ages: the case of Abbess Matilda of Essen and Aethelweard’, Early Medieval Europe, 1/1 (1992), p. 54. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 8. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 189. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 156. Books functioned as a kind of memorial cue; like the ultimate archivist, the memory stores, sorts and retrieves through mental and visual images; Carruthers, The Book of Memory, pp. 16–17. See Eric Jager, ‘The Book of the Heart: Reading and Writing the Medieval Subject’, Speculum, 71 (1996), 1–26. See also Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt concerning Julian of Norwich and the power of the visual in memory, ‘Seeing Jesus: Julian of Norwich and the Text of Christ’s Body’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 27/2 (1997), especially 192–3. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, pp. 59, 61. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 28. See also Donald R. Howard, ‘The Canterbury Tales: Memory and Form’, ELH 38 (1971), 321–2. Miri Rubin talks about this aspect of memory in connection with the Eucharist; Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 21. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 42; also pp. 147, 249. Petroff, Body and Soul, p. 6. Petroff, Body and Soul, p. 8. See Petroff, Body and Soul, p. 32. Noble and Head, Soldiers of Christ, p. 154 n. 14.

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Limor, ‘Pilgrims and Authors’, p. 254; also Dietz, Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims, p. 210. Filios, ‘A Woman Mystic in Pre-Islamic North Africa’, p. 190. Zimbalist, ‘Gender, Genre and Collaboration’, p. 149. Zimbalist, ‘Gender, Genre and Collaboration’, p. 149. Limor, ‘Pilgrims and Authors’, p. 258. It also might be read as what Petroff calls ‘unmasking’, ‘when women either act independently of male authority or present themselves as authority figures’; Petroff, Body and Soul, p. 45. Craig, Wandering Women and Holy Matrons, pp. 3–4. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 31. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 40. See Carruthers, The Book of Memory, pp. 164, 246–7 and 327 n. 30. As Carruthers observes, ‘The presence of an audience would appear to be crucial to the making of the ethical action . . . [I]t is remarkable that instances of moral judgment in medieval literature seem so often to require both a literary text and an audience to complete them, whether the audience is in the work itself or is created by a direct address to readers . . . The function of this audience, however, is . . . to supply a memory’; Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 181. ‘The public report of the travel experience and the creation of its written version in effect complete the journey . . . In terms of Victor Turner’s definitions, this is the last stage in his pilgrimage model . . . reintegration into society, in a new status, after completion of the trip’; Limor, ‘Pilgrims and Authors’, p. 256. As Carruthers suggests, ‘Public memory is a needed ethical resource, for its contents complete the edifice of each individual’s memory’ (Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 185). Carruthers argues against using the terms ‘self’ or ‘individual’ when referring to those who wrote in the Middle Ages, but ‘subject-who-remembers’; Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 182. ‘[T]he listeners became partners to his journey’; Limor, ‘Pilgrims and Authors’, p. 259. Petroff, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, p. 87; Noble and Head, Soldiers of Christ, p. 141. Petroff, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, p. 88. See Head, ‘Who is the Nun’, pp. 29–30 for a discussion of the cryptogram being in the tradition of Boniface. Sidney A. J. Bradley (trans. and ed.), Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd/ Everyman, 1982), p. 217.

Works Cited Ashley, Kathleen and Marilyn Deegan, Being a Pilgrim: Art and Ritual on the Medieval Routes to Santiago (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Lund Humphries, 2009). Bauerschmidt, Frederick Christian, ‘Seeing Jesus: Julian of Norwich and the Text of Christ’s Body’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 27/2 (1997), pp. 189–214. Beebe, Kathryne, Pilgrim & Preacher: The Audiences and Observant Spirituality of Friar Felix Fabri (1437/8–1502) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Bordo, Jonathan, ‘The Keeping Place (Arising from an Incident on the Land)’, in Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin (eds), Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 157–82. Bordo, Jonathan, ‘Time,’ in Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin (eds), Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 103–6. Bradley, Sidney A. J. (trans. and ed.), Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London: J. M. Dent & Sons/ Everyman, 1982).

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Bynum, Caroline Walker, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Bynum, Caroline Walker, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Carruthers, Mary, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Craig, Leigh Ann, Wandering Women and Holy Matrons: Women as Pilgrims in the Later Middle Ages (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009). Dietz, Maribel, Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims: Ascetic Travel in the Mediterranean World, A.D. 300–800 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005). Dinshaw, Carolyn, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). Dronke, Peter, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Eade, John and Michael J. Sallnow (eds), Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). Filios, Denise K., ‘A Woman Mystic in Pre-Islamic North Africa: Al-Kāhina in the Futūḥ Miṣr’, in Nahir I. Otaño Gracia and Daniel Armenti (eds), Women’s Lives: Self-Representation, Reception and Appropriation in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Petroff (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2022), pp. 188–204. Head, Pauline, ‘Who is the Nun from Heidenheim? A Study of Hugeburc’s Vita Willibaldi’, Medium Aevum, 71 (2002), pp. 29–46. Howard, Donald R., ‘The Canterbury Tales: Memory and Form’, ELH, 38 (1971), pp. 319–28. Jager, Eric, ‘The Book of the Heart: Reading and Writing the Medieval Subject’, Speculum, 71 (1996), 1–26. Kosta-Théfaine, Jean François (ed.), Travels and Travelogues in the Middle Ages (New York: AMS Press, 2009). Legassie, Shayne Aaron. The Medieval Invention of Travel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). Limor, Ora, ‘Pilgrims and Authors: Adomnan’s De locis sanctis and Hugeburc’s Hodoeporicon Sancti Willibaldi’, Revue Bénédictine, 114 (2004), 253–75. Morrison, Susan Signe, ‘Marie de France’s Saint Patrick’s Purgatory as Dynamic Diptych,’ Le Cygne: Journal of the International Marie de France Society, 3rd series, 6 (2019), 49–65. Morrison, Susan Signe, ‘Parish Churches on Pilgrimage Routes: Images, History, Memory’, in Dee Dyas (ed.), The Story of the Church in England, CD-Rom (Christianity & Culture at St John’s College, Nottingham and the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, 2010). Morrison, Susan Signe, ‘Waste Space: Pilgrim Badges, Ophelia, and Walsingham Remembered’, in Gary Waller and Dominic Janes (eds), Walsingham in Literature and Culture from the Middle Ages to Modernity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 49–66. Morrison, Susan Signe, Women Pilgrims in Late Medieval England: Private Piety as Public Performance (London: Routledge, 2000).

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Nelson, Robert S. ‘Tourists, Terrorists, and Metaphysical Theater at Hagia Sophia’, in Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin (eds), Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 59–81. Nelson, Robert S. and Margaret Olin (eds), Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Noble, Thomas F. X. and Thomas Head (eds), Soldiers of Christ: Saints and Saints’ Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). Nora, Pierre, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, 3 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988–96). Petroff, Elizabeth A., Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Petroff, Elizabeth A., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Ranft, Patricia, Women in Western Intellectual Culture, 600–1500 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Roman, Christopher, ‘Margery Kempe and Italy: Sacred Space and the Community in Her Soul’, in Jean François Kosta-Théfaine (ed.), Travels and Travelogues in the Middle Ages (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 2009), pp. 157–88. Rubin, Miri, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Talbot, Charles H. (trans.), Huneberc of Hildesheim: The Hodoeporicon of St. Willibald, in Thomas F. X. Noble and Thomas Head (eds), Soldiers of Christ: Saints and Saints’ Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), pp. 141–64. van Houts, Elisabeth, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe 900–1200 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). van Houts, Elisabeth, ‘Women and the writing of history in the early Middle Ages: The case of Abbess Matilda of Essen and Aethelweard’, Early Medieval Europe, 1/1 (1992), 53–68. Warner, Marina, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Vintage Books, 1983). Yeager, Suzanne, Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Young, James E., Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). Zimbalist, Barbara, ‘Gender, Genre and Collaboration in the Life of Ida of Nivelles’, in Nahir I. Otaño Gracia and Daniel Armenti (eds), Women’s Lives: Self-Representation, Reception and Appropriation in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Petroff (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2022), pp. 157–72.

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7 Gender, Genre and Collaboration in the Life of Ida of Nivelles BARBARA ZIMBALIST

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ike many holy women from the medieval Low Countries, Ida of Nivelles (1199– 1231) experienced visions of Christ throughout the course of her life. Sometimes he appeared to her as a handsome youth, sometimes as a distinguished older man, and sometimes as a baby, brought to visit her by the Virgin Mary. Each of these visionary encounters plays a significant narrative role in the construction of her Vita: Christ appears to Ida in moments of need, doubt or confusion, and instructs her in future devotional conduct and spiritual progress. Their conversations always offer an explicitly pedagogical gloss or devotional explanation for whatever difficulty Ida is currently experiencing. For example, one day as Ida stands in mass contemplating the Eucharist, Christ appears in the form of a young boy to explain the nature of the mass for her: in a gracious whisper he told her: “Oh, sweet friend, I have been showing you my humanity such as it underlies the form of the bread. This have I done, not from any doubt about your faith or your readiness to believe, but from my own wish to let you know with what love, what concern, what zeal I regard yourself.1

This explanation not only ensures Ida’s orthodox understanding of the sacrament, as Christ appears physically in order to literalise the symbolic nature of the Eucharistic bread, but also confirms her spiritual status as Christ’s beloved and confirms her exemplary status for readers.2 As a statement of orthodox doctrine carefully contained within an approved liturgical frame, this vision initially appears conventional. Christ clearly explains, primarily through visual means, that the Eucharistic bread is his body, and reassures Ida both of his enduring love for her and her spiritual merit. Yet as their conversation within the vision progresses, this apparently orthodox representation of Eucharistic truth and female exemplarity departs from generic conventions and expectations. When Ida thinks in response that she would like to know more about the nature of God: the sweet boy replied to her thought saying: ‘Do not ask such things of me, daughter, since no mortal can, in this life, come to know what I am like in my divinity. For the present, peace to you, oh friend of peace; have peace in me; for when I make all

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things new and gather you to myself, then can you come to know the glory of my divinity face to face.3 Christ’s speech gestures beyond basic Eucharistic understanding towards greater spiritual and theological truths that cannot be fully understood during mortal life, but which will be experienced after death or in the eschaton – what Patricia Dailey has described as the ‘future moment that promises redemption’ characterising medieval women’s mysticism.4 On the textual level this conversation functions as reassurance for Ida as well as her readers, legitimising her visions and conversations as divinely approved modes of spiritual development appropriate for women. Ida’s conversations with Christ dramatically demonstrate her Vita’s unusual generic identity and investments. Rather than focus on physical suffering as in conventional virgin martyr lives, her Vita focuses on visionary experiences and conversations as evidence of female sanctity.5 Even more unusually, it emphasises the rhetorical, verbal nature of Ida’s interactions with Christ as the primary mode of her exemplary spirituality and devotion. In this way, Ida’s Vita departs markedly from conventional critical views of high medieval women’s spirituality and hagiography, which in the wake of Caroline Walker Bynum’s ground-breaking work has tended to emphasise affective piety and embodied devotional experience.6 Rather than representing Ida engaged in traditional practices of corporeal asceticism or emotional contemplation as a mode of imitatio Christi, Ida’s Vita presents us with a woman in conversation with Christ. This departure from generic expectations reveals unexpected ideas about female sanctity, exemplarity and authorship in the High Middle Ages. I argue that as a hagiographic subject whose experiences were visionary and verbal rather than affective, Ida was both the subject of her Vita and a collaborator in its production. The rest of this essay reads Ida’s conversations with Christ and her community members as the location of her collaborative authorship and shows how her Vita reveals a critically overlooked model of women’s textual production in the High Middle Ages. Within studies of hagiography in particular, generic and critical focus on male, clerical, Latinate and textual aspects of women’s Vitae, rather than on their female, visionary, vernacular and oral components, has perpetuated a critical neglect of the textual traces of women’s collaborative authorship. By reassessing Ida as a collaborative participant in hagiographic authorship, we gain a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of women’s authorship and exemplarity within high medieval hagiography and challenge larger critical narratives of gender and genre as stable categories of inquiry. In this way, we respond to Elizabeth Petroff’s still provocative suggestion that by considering medieval women’s visionary texts of all kinds, ‘we come away with a very different understanding of the Middle Ages, one in which creative fulfilment might be found in the religious as well as the secular world and one in which women were the active agents in the transformation of their society.’7

Collaborative Authorship and Generic Convention Ida’s collaborative participation in the production of her Vita emerges most clearly in the many episodes depicting her visionary experiences and conversations, which the Vita integrates within a narrative frame structured by traditional generic conventions.

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The basic pattern of the text adheres closely to hagiographic precedent established by other high medieval Vitae from the Low Countries, and particularly from the diocese of Liège: the holy woman exhibits sanctity and religious vocation from a young age, joins a convent (preferably a Cistercian foundation) after initial religious experiences among Beguines or other lay or semi-lay communities and eventually occupies a position as a spiritual counsellor, guide or leader within her community until her holy death, after which she may appear to her sisters in visions, particularly in response to prayers.8 In accordance with these generic expectations, Ida began her religious career in the company of Beguines in her home town of Nivelles after a childhood marked by piety and self-sacrifice, and then joined the Cistercian house of La Ramée, a new establishment founded in Kerkom and overseen by the larger Cistercian Abbey of Villers-en-Brabant, in 1214.9 The Vita tells us that she joined the convent at sixteen and advanced to the novitiate at eighteen, spending the rest of her life in the Cistercian order before dying in 1231 at the age of thirty-two following a protracted and fervently desired illness.10 This pattern of a holy childhood, preference for chastity and an enclosed monastic life and early death can be found in countless other Vitae from the High Middle Ages. Yet while the basic narrative contours of the Vita conform to traditional hagiographic precedents, the presentation of Ida within these different stages of spiritual experience is much more unusual. Not only does the text consistently present her as an active participant in visionary experience, but her holiness and exemplarity are almost uniformly presented through conversation with Christ and her community members. This emphasis on conversation restructures the traditional hagiographic pattern of a holy woman’s life, reorienting readers’ attention to speech – with the divine and with humans, in visions and daily life, during life and after death – as evidence of holiness and as a model for virtuous, spiritually efficacious behaviour. This generic reconfiguration prioritises not the ascetic practices of physically affective piety, but instead emphasises speech and visionary experience as praiseworthy and imitable hallmarks of female sanctity – a marked departure from both medieval understandings of hagiographic text and authorship, as well as modern critical understandings of hagiographic reading.11 Despite these highly unusual narrative qualities, however, Ida’s Vita has received very little critical attention. This neglect is the result of the text’s representation of Ida as a participant in a process of collaborative authorship that in itself departs from critical expectations in two specific ways. First, Ida has not been recognised as a participant in the production of her text. Her Vita has traditionally been referred to as the literary product of the male hagiographer Goswin of Bossut (c.1200–c.1260, although even these dates are vague), a Cistercian monk and cantor at the Abbey of Villers-en-Brabant and the author of two other Vitae of male monastic figures, the lay brother Arnulf of Villers and the Monk Abundus of Villers.12 Secondly, Ida, her Vita, and her relationship to Goswin fit uneasily within the critical vocabulary through which high medieval collaborative authorship is usually analysed and discussed. John Coakley has described the literary partnerships that emerged from the shared spirituality of male–female partnerships as ‘spiritual collaborators’, and more recently Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski has referred to these partnerships as ‘holy couples’.13 These collaborative authorial pairs, such as Marie d’Oignies and Jacques de Vitry, or Lutgard of Aywières and Thomas of Cantimpré, took the form of a conscious literary partnership between the female hagiographic subject and the male clerical scribe. Within a relationship of spiritual guidance and mentoring,

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the male partner performed the textual work of literary production through scribal activity, while the female partner provided the lived visionary or mystical experiences that functioned as textual material through oral narration – either through confession or in conversation with her male confessor/mentor. The texts produced by these partnerships, as Rosalynn Voaden has shown, thus represent a complex balance of power and authority in which the male authors or amanuenses relied upon their mystically inclined female friends for inspiration and subject matter, while the female mystic or visionary depended upon her male amanuensis/collaborator/sponsor for practical religious needs such as confession and protection from suspicion of heresy.14 Ida and Goswin have not been included in this literary-spiritual category for the very simple reason that they probably did not know each other during life. Goswin claims in the preface that he wrote Ida’s Vita in response to ‘an order from my abbot, obliging me to set out the Life in a fairly simple style’ and that his compositional method was to write ‘things I have heard from persons worthy of truth, things they had seen with their own eyes, heard with their own ears’.15 This description of acquiring narrative material, combined with the Vita’s lack of any depiction of direct interaction between scribe and subject, suggests that Goswin relied on the memories and experiences of others in Ida’s immediate community rather than on his own. Ida and Goswin thus did not experience the intimate, lived spiritual partnership that for so many of their contemporary holy couples (or so the critical narrative goes) led naturally to a type of literary collaboration that has become increasingly visible within the scholarship on high medieval hagiography. For this reason, Goswin alone is usually cited as the author of the Vita while Ida has been considered primarily as an example of conventionally gendered spirituality. I suggest, however, that Ida and Goswin’s textual relationship functions as a type of collaborative authorship regardless of immediate, lived interaction. Ida’s Vita is a product of authorial collaboration that incorporates not only the holy woman but also her community in the production of the text through a fusion of generic content (a conventionally holy life) with a widely accepted model of generic production (collaborative partnerships). By reading the Vita as a product of collaborative authorship blending oral and written narrative, we can see a history and awareness of conversation as a mode of participation in collaborative authorship that incorporates the oral and written narratives of a community over time in the production of female sanctity. Since Goswin does not depict himself conversing with Ida in the Vita, it is difficult to ascertain the nature of his relationship to her, and therefore the nature of his authorial and narrative contributions to a text claiming to depict Ida’s personal visionary experiences and her relationships with others in the community. How accurately or authoritatively can such a narrative portray its subject’s visionary encounters with Christ, let alone her conversations with him? And how does such narrative distance inflect the reader’s ability to react to the hagiographic text as a model of virtuous behaviour? A narrative anxiety about these issues peers through Goswin’s paratextual explanations and justifications of authorial method. His claim that his text records narrative accounts of those who had personally known Ida – ‘things they had seen with their own eyes, heard with their own ears’ – insists upon the eyewitness nature of his narrative material, thus locating his text within living memory of Ida and her life as an authoritative strategy. This emphasis on eyewitness narrative material reflects the changing trends in high medieval hagiography post-Lateran IV, which celebrated more temporally and

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physically local figures in response to the rise in lay piety and localised saints’ cults. During the High Middle Ages, historically and culturally distant figures whose sanctity resulted mainly from a long tradition of oral veneration were increasingly supplanted in popular devotion by more temporally and geographically local figures, what Pierre Delooz terms ‘constructed saints’, both by lay persons and clerics intent on sanctifying them through official channels.16 And as André Vauchez has shown, more Vitae were produced within living memory of the holy subject as sanctification and beatification began to require more rigorous official review, with the result that eyewitness accounts of miracles and paramystical phenomena became a requirement during the papal inquests that formed part of the canonisation procedures for any new saint.17 Goswin’s claims of eyewitness narrative material draw on these larger generic shifts to emphasising the close temporal relationship between hagiographer and subject. While he may not have known Ida personally, they knew the same people, and were thus members of the same community – the community for whom the text was written.18 This confluence of intended audience and narrative eyewitnesses was a characteristic of Cistercian hagiography and spirituality, and particularly of the wider textual community associated with Villers.19 Both Goswin and Ida shared a spirituality attuned to mystical and visionary experiences with this community, whose eyewitness contributions to the text became a mode of textual authorisation and participation in collaborative authorship in the evolving generic parameters of high medieval hagiography. The collaboratively authored, communally produced text of Ida’s life emerges in the narrative focus on Ida’s speech and multilingualism: although a native of the francophone diocese of Liège, Ida joined a Dutch-speaking convent and eventually mastered Dutch after a long learning process. The Vita describes several different stages of linguistic acquisition, revealing a narrative investment in representing language and speech as indications of spiritual power and agency appropriate for a woman and the primary mode of Ida’s spiritual agency. Explicitly linking religious vocation with verbal reputation and prowess, early episodes recount how ‘While Ida was still a babe in arms . . . women neighbours jokingly told the mother of their hunch that her daughter would turn out religious. They also nicknamed her “Dutch maid”, and for a long time to come, many kept on calling her “Dutch Ida”.’20 This prophetic childhood anecdote illustrates a communal association of linguistic ability or propensity with religious identity and vocation – a natural association within the multilingual religious environment of high medieval Liège. Why her mother’s friends felt it was an appropriate association for the infant Ida, however, remains entirely unexplained, other than as a necessary narrative precedent for the subsequent claim that ‘later events would, as we shall see, show her becoming a religious and eventually learning the Dutch tongue’.21 Ida’s identity as a multilingual speaker, then, was perceived as an important component of her holy identity, and the narrative emphasis calling attention to that quality encourages the reader to view subsequent episodes of her speech as evidence of this early association. Furthermore, this narrative episode is the product of oral, communal, collaborative authorship. Obviously neither Goswin nor Ida could have contributed this anecdote (which presumably occurred before Ida’s ability to remember and before Goswin’s birth) to the narrative. While the origin of this anonymous narrative remains invisible within the text, it nevertheless reveals the communal nature of the collaborative authorship behind Goswin’s narrative project, as well as behind the larger construction of Ida’s sanctity.

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The early chapters of the Vita likewise incorporate communal narrative to establish linguistic ability and comprehension as significant markers of spiritual development. As a native French speaker, Ida’s decision to join a primarily Dutch-speaking community of nuns was unusual enough for the Vita to take note of it, explaining that when she first joined the monastery, ‘Sister Ida used to hear the sisters speaking words quite foreign and unfamiliar to her, since almost all of them spoke Dutch, and she did not understand their tongue’ (p. 34). Despite the fact that during her initial tenure at La Ramée (presumably the time of her novitiate during which she was still learning Dutch) Ida was unable to effectively communicate with her sisters, speech is still presented as one of the most important modes of spirituality in her life. She is able to recognise spiritually efficacious speech in Dutch, even though she may not understand it: Yet despite her ignorance of it, there was one religious gentleman who used to preach the word of God in that tongue, and whenever she listened to him, the Holy Spirit breathed into her soul and tears flowed from her eyes, tears too copious for her to hold back, her heart being in the grip of so agreeable a savior.22 This extremely ambiguous passage does not clarify whether Ida was miraculously able to understand Dutch through the influence of the Holy Spirit or whether she simply responded affectively to a Dutch sermon through the influence of the Holy Spirit. Either interpretation draws from the discourse of miraculous xenoglossia, which as Christine Cooper-Rompato has shown was often incorporated in women’s Vitae as evidence of divine favour.23 Ida’s lack of linguistic ability and her linguistic knowledge alike thus demonstrate her powerful and privileged spiritual status, emphasising speech as the primary mode of exemplarity in the hagiographic text. Ida’s ability to discern spiritually powerful speech, even in another language, and respond to it with emotion deemed appropriate for a woman, may initially appear entirely consistent with conventional views of women’s affective piety. The passage emphasises her inability to understand intellectually alongside her heightened ability to respond affectively, suggesting the traditional narrative emphasis on women’s affectivity over intellectual or verbally inflected spirituality. Yet the structure of the passage immediately complicates such a conventional reading. The narrative notes that since she was unable to speak with her sisters in Dutch, she speaks with God instead: ‘Not understanding what her sisters were saying, Ida frequently conversed with herself and God alone, remarkably combining meditative prayer and prayerful meditation.’24 This portrayal of Ida’s inability to communicate in Dutch simultaneously reveals her participation in the construction of the narrative: only she could have known about her interior conversations with God, and she would have had to narrate them to someone – Goswin or a community member – in order for them to be included in the narrative of her life. In describing linguistic limitation, then, the narrative reveals collaborative authorship. Furthermore, rather than limit Ida’s linguistic prowess within the confines of gendered affectivity, the Vita presents her affective, emotional reactions as just the first stage in a longer process of spiritual development. The absence of linguistic comprehension within her community inspires divine conversation that ultimately leads to increased spiritual agency. While her early linguistic ignorance fostered contemplative activity that garnered spiritual merit, it also demonstrates her hard-earned authoritative role as a speaker within the community once

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‘she gradually mastered the Dutch language and became able to speak suitably to her sisters and to people of that tongue’.25 This narrative focus on Ida’s speech, and particularly on her conversations with Christ to which we will turn next, allows the Vita to demonstrate not only Ida’s exemplary sanctity as a primarily verbal construct that departs from generic precedent, but also the collaborative process of authorship through which she, Goswin and their community constructed her exemplary sanctity.

Conversations with Christ Ida’s conversations with Christ occur during visionary experiences throughout the course of her life and take several different narrative forms in the Vita. Christ speaks to her about her own spiritual concerns as well as those of her community members; late in the narrative, he even speaks to some of her community members about Ida. These conversations confirm Ida’s status as an exemplary figure and collaborative author. In claiming that Ida’s exemplarity offers new models of exemplarity, I rely on Catherine Sanok’s discussion of exemplarity as a ‘regulatory fiction’ which constructs the audience it aims to instruct.26 Ida’s Vita, written in collaboration with and for the textual consumption of a female monastic community, clearly presents her as an effective exemplar of female piety. The Vita’s emphasis on Ida as a speaker whose words display enormous agency and power contributes to the text’s generic innovation, privileges women’s verbal and visionary experiences over affective piety and confirms oral narrative as a mode of participation in collaborative authorship that expands women’s spiritual authority beyond the written text to the lived, spoken community. Ida’s visionary conversations with Christ often function as spiritual instruction in response to her own doubts, fears or doctrinal curiosity. These visionary episodes present Ida as an exemplary figure for any reader who might share these spiritual questions. They also establish both her spiritual and earthly authority through divine confirmation. After Ida has joined the convent at La Ramée, for example, she has a vision of Christ that dramatically demonstrates her spiritual merit and guarantees her spiritually authoritative status within the community. The vision initially appears conventionally focused on Christ’s physicality: he appears as a man clothed in white, exuding a white fluid from his mouth that Ida compares to manna. He tells her: My dearest, you have been longing vehemently to learn as much as is allowable of the unspeakable knowledge of my divinity and to relish its sweetness. I in turn shall most willingly fulfil that burning desire of your soul: I shall instil and let drip bountifully in to your heart this tastiest of honeycombs, which is that of my divinity.27 After this speech, he drops some of the fluid from his mouth into Ida’s, and she describes the spiritual effect of this symbolic corporeal act: ‘Immediately my soul was inwardly lit up with an awareness of the blessed Trinity, so great, so sweet, so divine, that the level of acquaintanceship granted me that day has remained in me ever since.’28 Although this vision describes a physical encounter between Christ and Ida, within the vision Christ’s speech takes on an important explicative role. Without his verbal gloss on this admittedly rather strange episode, its inclusion in the narrative of Ida’s life would remain opaque,

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suggesting that Christ’s spoken explanations provide more answers to spiritual questions than Ida’s imagistic contemplation. Furthermore, even though the text describes a physical exchange between Christ and Ida, that exchange is not primarily affective, nor is it based in corporeal suffering or asceticism, because it is only the first step in an ultimately metaphysical process of spiritual development. Ida describes her soul as ‘lit up with an awareness’ of spiritual truths after this exchange, indicating that the vision intends to privilege intellectual and spiritual enlightenment over any sort of actual physical contact (which due to its identity as a visionary experience is ultimately symbolic rather than corporeal). Finally, the episode concludes by explaining how the spiritual awareness effected by this exchange not only enlightens Ida personally, it grants her ‘the ability to look into the status of many persons’.29 This spiritual authority places Ida in an unusually authoritative position for a high medieval woman, able to spiritually mentor others in her community. The Vita demonstrates and confirms this divinely sanctioned authority through Ida’s additional conversations with Christ and her dissemination of those conversations to her community, both as a mode of collaborative authorship and spiritual mentorship. Ida’s personal conversations with Christ establish her verbal exemplarity while simultaneously revealing the larger process of the text’s authorial collaboration. First, Ida would have had to narrate her visions verbally in order for them to become part of the narrative of her Vita. The text’s rhetorical presentation of these conversations demonstrates that her oral narration functioned as one of the ways in which she spiritually mentored her community members and shows how her verbal narration of divinely received knowledge had become part of her reputation and holy identity. For example, later in the Vita she did her best to explain how it had been revealed to her that the essence of the Father was in the Son, that of the Son in the Father and that of the Holy Spirit in them both. She added that the blessed Trinity had deigned to converse with her in the gentle whisperings of a bridegroom to his bride, and that she too had spoken to the blessed Trinity with all the sweet friendliness of a bride to her groom.30 The indirect rhetoric and third-person description here further suggest that this particular episode was the narrative contribution of a community member – perhaps a sister who remembered learning about the Trinity from conversations with Ida, who was passing along spiritual instruction learned in conversation with Christ. Phrases such as ‘she added that the blessed Trinity had deigned to converse with her’ not only portray Ida in conversation with Christ, but also as describing herself to others as engaged in that conversation. This narrative and rhetorical presentation indicates Ida’s awareness that these conversations authorised her verbal instruction and her desire to act as a spiritual guide for others through speech at the same time that they demonstrate communal, collaborative authorship. Later conversations between Ida and Christ actually depict Ida acting as a spiritual mentor and guide, confirming her role as a conscious and successful spiritual advocate for her community through speech. Once, Ida has been praying ‘on behalf of a beloved sister of hers, who had told her of being burdened with some uneasiness of mind. The Lord answered: “Why ask that, daughter? If what you mean is her sins, these are already

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forgiven.”’31 Ida, however, requests that Christ give her more than an assurance of forgiveness: ‘Ida replied, “Lord, that is not enough: but if I have found grace in your eyes . . . show me a reliable sign that she will be saved.”’32 Ida’s insistence that Christ tell her something she can relay to her community reveals a powerful spiritual agency through speech. She negotiates with Christ for an answer suited to her community member, and his reply confirms her spiritual authority as well as her resulting role as spiritual guide for others: Then came the Lord’s sweet, warm, gentle reply: ‘Let me show you the place I shall give her at the end without end, a place of unutterable glory and joy. Yes, and tell her on my account to trouble her conscience no more! Rather, let her carry on in all peace and goodwill that conversatio which is now hers!’ . . . Ida rejoiced to hear this.33 Christ’s response to Ida’s specific inquiry takes the form of an intimate message intended for a particular person, demonstrating knowledge about the nun’s interior state that presumably only he would know. In requesting and then relaying this message, Ida shapes the hagiographic narrative just as other eyewitnesses have earlier in the vita. She presents her own speaking persona within the earthly community as divinely legitimised, even as she reveals her participation in the creation of the larger narrative of her spiritual authority through speech and visionary experience. This model of community formation through shared narrative collaboration presents women’s speech and literary activity as a mode of spirituality distinct from prior generic conventions and gendered expectations, instead drawing on the shifting discourses of high medieval hagiographic authorship and authority. The Vita both reflects and develops thirteenth-century developments in hagiography by integrating Ida’s verbal exemplarity within contemporary doctrinal concerns such as purgatory.34 Purgatorial intercession, particularly through corporeal suffering, has often been read as an example of the affective piety associated with high medieval women.35 Ida’s Vita, however, differs from mainstream understandings of women’s participation in the purgatorial economy by privileging verbal, rather than corporeal, modes of purgatorial intercession and Eucharistic devotion on the part of the hagiographic subject – and by extension, on the part of her community. She relates how after she had ‘desired a certain woman’s salvation and had poured out many a prayer for her to the Lord’, she experiences a vision of purgatory, in which she sees the standard horrifying purgatorial torments, with the object of her intercession standing at the entrance of purgatory.36 Her vision then relates Ida’s attempts to lead the woman away from the terrors of purgatory, across a narrow bridge, in response to Christ, who appears on the other side of the bridge and ‘sweetly beckoned to her, saying, “Cross over, my friend; cross the river and come to me!”’37 Though Ida tries to lead her friend over the bridge the woman balks, eliciting Christ’s irritation: The Lord looked indulgently upon the woman and said to her: ‘Suffer it, sweet daughter, that a saving suffrage be thus invested on your behalf. And do not lose sight of all that I myself have suffered to redeem you from the everlasting torments of hell.’ Thereupon Ida made two more attempts to drag her along, and she did gain some three or four paces of headway, but the woman still disdained to follow her lead. Beholding

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this, the Lord resorted to threats of what would happen if she did not budge and allow herself to be helped.38 Despite this mixture of divine encouragement and scolding, eventually only Ida crosses the bridge to join Christ, who in a rather petulant response, ‘bade his beloved Ida abandon the wretch to her own will and weary herself over her no more’.39 Christ’s speech throughout the episode confirms Ida’s intercessory prayers as effective, singling her out her ‘saving suffrage’ for praise and divinely endorsing her spoken spiritual guidance. In fact, the vision ends with Ida spending a joyful day of festivity with Christ, at the end of which she asks him about many of her friends that she sees in purgatory and ‘received the Lord’s reassuring word that they would indeed come through to the kingdom of supreme bliss’.40 The entire vision divinely endorses Ida’s speech, and literalises the spiritually effective nature of her prayers. Indeed, just as Ida’s vision depicts her trying to lead her sister out of purgatory with the approval of Christ, so her intercessory prayers and spoken spiritual guidance lead her community members towards God. By reconfiguring purgatorial intercession as verbal rather than corporeal, Ida and her Vita offer expanded access to spiritually efficacious speech for female community members and readers. At the same time, her exemplary speech authorises women’s engagement with the divine and their community. The Vita further emphasises Ida’s unusual verbal exemplarity by explicitly privileging her speech over corporeal suffering or conventional affective piety. The Vita confirms this preference for speech as a mode of narrative and spiritual guidance by presenting multiple episodes of Ida’s consoling and helpful speech that provide verbal models for her fellow nuns as well as for her readers. These episodes almost entirely lack any suggestion of physical suffering or corporeal affectivity, even when they function as intercessory intervention for others. When a fellow nun experiences almost unbearable temptation to blasphemy, for example, Ida goes to her and puts one hand over her mouth for an entire day and night, ‘lest at the slightest withdrawal she again become prone to blaspheme’.41 Ida’s physical intervention in the situation serves only to prohibit illicit speech; and the Vita relates that while Ida covered her sister’s mouth, she was performing the much more important activity of ‘praying with continual tears that the Lord deign to look on the poor sister’s affliction and come to her aid in peril’.42 Surprisingly, however, her prayers are not initially effective, and only after she ‘requested the merciful Lord to free the nun from that most evil temptation and not hesitate to lay it on herself instead’ did ‘the Lord ben[d] his ear to her pleadings’.43 As a result, Ida suffers three days of temptation to blaspheme; yet ‘for ever after, thanks to God’s mercy and Ida’s intercession, [the nun] enjoyed both peace and tranquillity of heart.’44 Throughout this episode, Ida’s speech functions both as a model others can imitate (prayer on behalf of a community member) as well as confirmation of her exemplarity. She successfully resists the temptation to blasphemous speech her fellow nun found so difficult to resist. In this way, the text foregrounds Ida’s speech as a mode of spiritual guidance within her community.45 Significantly, this presentation of speech as a mode of guidance prioritises speech over physical asceticism, as Ida models prayers for her fellow community members as the most effective mode of spiritual activity women might practice. The Vita further authorises Ida’s exemplary speech by immediately linking it with visionary experience. In a fascinating continuation, even though Ida’s verbal intercession

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has already saved her fellow nun from the temptation to blasphemy, the Vita includes Ida’s additional speech to the nun meant to ‘see the sister more cheerily consoled by way of a gratifying revelation’.46 She relates a vision in which a man appeared to her during mass holding ‘a wafer of bread, like a host but warped slightly upwards, and inscribed on the host was a name, your own name!’47 After narrating this encouraging vision, Ida explains that while she initially thought that the warped host signified her sister’s thoughts of despair, she was corrected by the man holding it, who explained that the name on the host indicated that ‘your name was written also in the book of life, and that you were to be lifted on high with the Lord in endless immortal glory’.48 This visionary narration functions as spiritual guidance for the nun, who ‘on hearing this revelation spelt out for her . . . so progressed as to regain entirely her recently lost hope of salvation and a great alacrity of heart besides’.49 By this point in the text, Ida’s exemplary verbal identity has become the primary mode through which she interacts with her community members, collaborates in the construction of her reputation and text, and functions as a model for women in the High Middle Ages. This is a distinct departure from traditional hagiographical models in which the holy subject’s actions – usually virtue in the face of bodily persecution – provide the model for imitation.50 Instead, it is the holy woman’s identity as instructive speaker that is emphasised and recognised by the community. Finally, the Vita authorises Ida’s verbal exemplarity and authority by portraying her community members engaged in successful imitation of her speech and conversations. Later in the Vita, other members of her community experience visionary conversations with Christ in imitation of Ida, dramatically demonstrating the power of her exemplarity within her contemporary community as a model of female devotion. In this way, Ida’s conversations with Christ not only establish her sanctity and exemplarity but establish a larger community of visionary experience and verbally based spiritual experience appropriate for female participation. This community formation emerges most clearly in narrative episodes during which fellow sisters speak with Christ about Ida. For example, one night one of Ida’s sisters prays intensely for Ida during a time of sickness, and Christ reassures her that it is not yet time for Ida to die; and that because ‘I am under compulsion from so many prayers . . . I am granting her a truce and letting her live on for many a day to come . . . I do this most of all because so many people will still be gaining manifold consolation from Ida’s colloquies and from her conversatio.’51 The sister’s narration of Christ’s speech reveals her recognition and acceptance of Ida’s divinely blessed status. It also offers an explanation of the function of a woman’s verbal intercession in Christ’s own voice: he describes himself as ‘under compulsion from so many prayers’ that he will let Ida continue to live within her community, even though he would be happy to bring her to her home in heaven. Christ himself confirms the prayers of Ida’s community members as powerful, just as Ida’s prayers are powerful – though, he implies, it takes many combined prayers to equal the power of just one of Ida’s prayers. Furthermore, Christ explains that he will leave Ida in the world because she is a good example to others in the community, specifically through her ‘colloquies’ – her public speech. Christ has legitimised not only Ida’s sanctity, but her future instructional speech. As we have seen, that speech plays a specific role – the ‘edification of the faithful’ – within the community depicted by the text as well as the broader reading community. Such speech strengthens the bonds of community and further reconfigures high medieval hagiography as a template of women’s spiritually effective speech and visionary experience.

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Conclusions: Continuing the Conversation As we have seen, narrating her visionary conversations with Christ to others in her community allowed Ida to act as an authorial collaborator and exemplary spiritual guide for others in her community. Yet the Vita develops this exemplary role beyond the narrative depiction of visionary experience. The verbal exemplarity Ida cultivated – and which others in her community imitated as a mode of spiritual practice – extended to her speech more generally. Her relationships with others in her community are eventually characterised almost entirely as episodes of spoken guidance. Her relationship with her abbess, for example, consists of ‘lengthy colloquies about the salvation of souls and heavenly topics’; and her verbal identity ultimately becomes the single most important component of her holy reputation, as ‘many, both righteous and sinners, used to hasten to her for consolation . . . for she was a painstaking consoler, ready to give all a hearing on every topic, to respond helpfully and to comfort with a charity appropriate to each one’s troubles.’52 These descriptions, as in every other episode examined here, figure Ida as intimately involved in the production of both sanctity and text through speech, modelling a female exemplarity more immediately accessible and imitable than the accounts of corporeal suffering, miracles or marvellous endurance provided by popular virgin martyr narratives. As a result, Vitae such as Ida’s created a new hagiographic subgenre that offered models of divinely authorised devotional activity through speech. This new hagiography united readers into a distinctly gendered textual community, providing late medieval women and their younger contemporaries new avenues for devotional, literary and spiritual engagement through powerful new models of verbal exemplarity. By reformulating hagiography as the written record of a contemporary woman’s verbal guidance for her communities, both lived and textual, rather than as a record of physical passion and martyrdom, high medieval hagiography functioned as a literary discourse in which women participated and, by extension, appropriated positions of lived and textual authority.53 This reconfiguration of generic norms allows us to see women’s participation in the changing currents of high medieval hagiography – and consequently the production of sanctity – that established newly accessible precedents for female exemplarity as a verbal construct. In the case of Ida of Nivelles, the gendered expectations for religious women and the generic conventions of hagiography – both medieval and modern – have colluded in obscuring her participation in the production of her Vita, and have resulted in an incomplete understanding of her spirituality, literacy and hagiographic agency. It is precisely the need to continually interrogate such critical narratives, as Elizabeth Petroff challenged us to do, that results in new perspectives on texts that have been critically neglected owing to a perceived failure to conform to critical expectations. Yet that failure, when considered as the result of visionary and verbal spirituality, can be reassessed as a reconfiguration of generic norms privileging new modes of authorship, authority and exemplarity for women in the High Middle Ages. Ida’s Vita demonstrates how hagiography from the Low Countries not only challenged generic expectations; it generated new critical narratives about female spirituality, gendered authority and collaborative authorship in high medieval literary culture.

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All quotations from Ida’s Vita from Martinus Cawley OCSO (trans.), Send Me God: The Lives of Ida the Compassionate of Nivelles, Nun of La Ramée, Arnulf, Lay Brother of Villers, and Abundus, Monk of Villers, by Goswin of Bossut (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), here p. 64. The Latin Vita Idae Nivellensis was first edited and printed by Chrisostomo Henriquez in Quinque prudentes virgines (Antwerp, 1630), though this edition departs significantly from the manuscripts. Selections of the Vita were published by the Bollandists as Catalogus codicum hagiographicorum Bibliothecae regiae Bruxellensis, vol. II (Brussels, 1889), pp. 222–6. For an overview of the development of Eucharistic piety see Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), and Ann Astell, Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). Cawley, Send Me God, p. 64. Patricia Dailey, Promised Bodies: Time, Language, and Corporeality in Medieval Women’s Mystical Texts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 14. For an overview of the hagiographic conventions of virgin martyr lives and medieval women’s hagiography more generally see Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives and Women’s Literary Culture, c.1150–c.1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food for Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, ‘Introduction’, in Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 21 For an overview of the spirituality manifested in the hagiographic literature associated with the Low Countries (and particularly with Villers), see Barbara Newman, Preface, in Send Me God, pp. xxxvi–xxxvii; for discussion of Liégeois hagiography focused on Cistercian spirituality, see Simone Roisin, ISJ, L’hagiographie cistercienne dans le diocèse de Liège au XIIIe siècle (Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’Université, 1947). More recently, Anne Lester has analysed the relationship between lay spirituality and Cistercian women’s spirituality in France: Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women’s Movement and its Reform in Thirteenth-Century Champagne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012). Ida’s early life is described very briefly in the Vita’s first three chapters. For discussion of the evidence of Ida’s birth and death dates see Roger DeGanck, ‘Chronological Data in the Lives of Ida of Nivelles and Beatrice of Nazareth’, Ons Geestelijk Erf, 57 (1983), 14–29. Ida’s death in the monastery conforms to high medieval patterns of the holy subject’s death after the patient suffering of illness and affliction as a replacement for the martyr’s death which was the convention in patristic and early medieval hagiography. This self-awareness of its own innovation and difference marks Ida’s Vita as highly unusual for the twelfth century. As Mathew Keufler has recently pointed out, studies of high medieval hagiography in particular have proceeded along self-contradictory lines; while critics ‘admit to considerable variety and even originality in hagiographical texts, they assert that the conventions of the genre could not really be abandoned, since they were integral to the author’s purpose in making the individual recognizable as a saint. For this reason, the truly unique elements had to be manipulated into standard shapes.’ Mathew Keufler, The Making and Unmaking of a Saint: Hagiography and Memory in the Cult of Gerald of Aurillac (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), p. 6. For an overview of Goswin’s life, monastic career and hagiographic authorship see Cawley, Send Me God, pp. 6–8. John Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims: A Medieval Woman Between Demons and Saints (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

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Rosalynn Voaden, God’s Words, Women’s Voices (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1999). Cawley, Send Me God, p. 29. Delooz argues that ‘All saints are more or less constructed in that . . . they are remodeled in the collective representation which is made of them. It often happens, even, that they are so remodeled that nothing of the real original is left, and, ultimately, some saints are solely constructed saints simply because nothing is known about them historically: everything, including their existence, is a product of collective representation’ (p. 195); Pierre Delooz, ‘Towards a Sociological Study of Canonized Sainthood’, in Stephen Wilson (ed.), Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore, and History, trans. Jane Hodgkin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 189–216. Vauchez has argued that the twelfth century particularly saw shifts in the nature and formulation of sanctity after Lateran IV, and that hagiographic literary production both reflected and fuelled those changes. André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). As Barbara Newman reminds us, ‘when Goswin presents detailed accounts of the inner experience of Ida (whom he had never met) . . . the spirituality we are encountering is chiefly the writer’s own, building on the reports of others and his own empathetic knowledge of his contemporaries’. Newman, Preface, in Cawley, Send Me God, p. xxxvii. As Brian McGuire explains, by the thirteenth century the Cistercians were ‘more versatile in their approach to the spiritual life, more willing to reach outside themselves to make contact with other expressions of religious experience . . . behind the phrases and clichés of hagiography . . . we see a rich register of human experience being harnessed in the service of divine love’; Brian McGuire, ‘The Cistercians and Friendship: An Opening to Women’, in Lillian T. Shank and John A. Nichols (eds), Hidden Springs: Cistercian Monastic Women (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, Inc., 1995), p. 194. Cawley, Send Me God, p. 31. Cawley, Send Me God, p. 31. Cawley, Send Me God, p. 34. Cooper-Rompato points out that this episode ‘suggests that she experiences something akin to a miracle of vernacular xenoglossia, for she appears moved by the Holy Spirit to understand his discourse; on the other hand, this experience could also be interpreted as a gift of divinely infused spiritual understanding of his Words’; Christine Cooper-Rompato, The Gift of Tongues: Women’s Xenoglossia in the Later Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), p. 53. Cawley, Send Me God, p. 34. Cawley, Send Me God, p. 53. Catherine Sanok, Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints’ Lives in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Cawley, Send me God, p. 65. Cawley, Send me God, p. 65. Cawley, Send me God, p. 66. Cawley, Send me God, p. 77. Cawley, Send me God, p. 38. Cawley, Send me God, p. 38. Cawley, Send me God, p. 38. For an overview of the development of purgatory as a theological concept emerging during the High Middle Ages, see part 2 of Jacques Le Goff’s The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). For specific discussion of the purgatorial mindset among twelfth- and thirteenth-century women, see Chapters 6 and 7 of Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast: she notes that for these women, ‘the notion of substituting one’s own suffering through illness and starvation for the guilt and destitution of others is not “symptom” – it is theology’ (p. 206); and, later, she goes on to note the gendered inflection of that intercessory suffering in high medieval religious culture: ‘By

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their Eucharistic visions, their charity, their food miracles, and their fasting, medieval women bypassed certain forms of clerical control that stood between them and God. They also forged for themselves roles as healers, teachers, and savers of their fellow Christians that were in explicit contrast to the characteristic forms of male leadership’ (p. 227). I depart from Bynum in my focus on the spoken and verbal as the primary mode through which women such as Ida participated in spiritual life and even ‘bypassed male control’. Cawley, Send me God, p. 44. Cawley, Send me God, p. 44. Cawley, Send me God, p. 44. Cawley, Send me God, p. 44. Cawley, Send me God, p. 45. Cawley, Send me God, p. 41. Cawley, Send me God, p. 41. Cawley, Send me God, pp. 41–2. Cawley, Send me God, p. 42. As Sanok explains, this type of immediately accessible, imitable exemplarity reveals an understanding of ‘the continuity of communities and the social institutions that define them. The ability to imitate the saint in an immediate, rather than figural, mode suggests that the social context for the behaviour remains constant in some important respect: it presents contemporary society as continuous with, or at least structurally analogous to . . . the world of the narrative’ (p. 14). Cawley, Send Me God, p. 42. Cawley, Send me God, p. 42. Cawley, Send me God, p. 42. Cawley, Send me God, p. 42. See Jennifer Garrison on hagiography as an indicator of distance and disparity between the hagiographic subject and the reader: ‘Mediated Piety: Eucharistic Theology and Lay Devotion in Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne’, Speculum, 85/4 (2011), 894–922. Cawley, Send Me God, p. 47. Cawley, Send me God, pp. 56, 84. Michael Goodich has argued that twelfth- and thirteenth-century hagiography focused on female saints generally modelled their subjects on St Katherine of Alexandria because of her conversion activities. While Goodich is interested specifically in Vitae he reads as invested in anti-Cathar and anti-Albigensian polemic, it is noteworthy that he sees a direct connection between female participation in the attempts to convert others and sanctity; Michael Goodich, ‘The Contours of Female Piety in Late Medieval Hagiography’, Church History, 50 (1981), 20–32.

Works Cited Astell, Ann, Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate, The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims: A Medieval Woman Between Demons and Saints (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Bynum, Caroline Walker, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food for Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). Cawley, Martinus, OCSO (ed. and trans.), Send Me God: The Lives of Ida the Compassionate of Nivelles, Nun of La Ramée, Arnulf, Lay Brother of Villers, and Abundus, Monk of Villers, by Goswin of Bossut (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003). Coakley, John, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

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Cooper-Rompato, Christine, The Gift of Tongues: Women’s Xenoglossia in the Later Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010). Dailey, Patricia, Promised Bodies: Time, Language, and Corporeality in Medieval Women’s Mystical Texts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). DeGanck, Roger, ‘Chronological Data in the Lives of Ida of Nivelles and Beatrice of Nazareth’, Ons Geestelijk Erf, 57 (1983), 14–29. Delooz, Pierre, ‘Towards a Sociological Study of Canonized Sainthood’, in Stephen Wilson (ed.), Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore, and History, trans. Jane Hodgkin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 189–216. Garrison, Jennifer, ‘Mediated Piety: Eucharistic Theology and Lay Devotion in Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne’, Speculum, 85/4 (2011), 894–922. Goodich, Michael, ‘The Contours of Female Piety in Late Medieval Hagiography’, Church History, 50 (1981), 20–32. Keufler, Mathew, The Making and Unmaking of a Saint: Hagiography and Memory in the Cult of Gerald of Aurillac (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). Le Goff, Jacques, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Lester, Anne, Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women’s Movement and its Reform in Thirteenth-Century Champagne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012). McGuire, Brian, ‘The Cistercians and Friendship: An Opening to Women’, in Lillian T. Shank and John A. Nichols (eds), Hidden Springs: Cistercian Monastic Women, vol. 1 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, Inc., 1995), pp. 171–200. Newman, Barbara, Preface, in Martinus Cawley, OCSO (ed. and trans.), Send Me God: The Lives of Ida the Compassionate of Nivelles, Nun of La Ramée, Arnulf, Lay Brother of Villers, and Abundus, Monk of Villers, by Goswin of Bossut (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), pp. xxix–xlix. Petroff, Elizabeth A., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Roisin, Simone, ISJ, L’hagiographie cistercienne dans le diocèse de Liège au XIIIe siècle, (Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’Université, 1947). Rubin, Miri, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Sanok, Catherine, Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints’ Lives in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Vauchez, André, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Voaden, Rosalynn, God’s Words, Women’s Voices (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1999). Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, Saints’ Lives and Women’s Literary Culture, c.1150–c.1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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8 History Meets Literary Imagination: The Making of a Twelfth-Century Woman Warrior LAN DONG

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historical figure active in the twelfth century, Liang Hongyu1 left a very brief record in the dynastic history Songshi (‘History of the Song’)2 – a few dozen words, in which she is identified as wife of Han Shizhong (1089–1151), a military official of the Song court. Addressing her as Lady Liang, the historiographer does not record her given name or provide any biographical details of her.3 Commonly considered ‘the bulkiest of all dynastic histories’, the Songshi was hastily compiled in only two and a half years from 1343 to 1345.4 Its rather lengthy biography of Han contains many details about his life, including brief information about his wife Liang and his sons and focusing particularly on his achievements as a military commander loyal to the imperial court. The entry fleetingly documents three accounts of Liang’s life, all of which are associated with her husband.5 After all, the brief mention of her is included in Han’s biography. In 1129, Liang rushed out of the besieged city of Pingjiang to call for help; she rode all day and night until she arrived at Xiu Prefecture where Han Shizhong and his army were camped. Later she was granted the honorary title of Lady Anguo for her courage and the critical role she played in saving Pingjiang.6 The following year, Han led his troops to defend the declining Song court against the invading Jurchen army. In an intense and crucial battle ‘fought for ten rounds, Lady Liang herself got hold of the sticks to beat the war drum. The Jurchen troops were not able to cross the Yangzi River.’7 When Han established a military district in Chu Prefecture a few years later in 1136, ‘Lady Liang took part in building cottages out of thatches herself’ and worked hard in civil services side by side with her husband and his soldiers.8 Their efforts were crucial for setting an example for the troops to be self-sustained during peacetime while they recuperated and built up a reserve of provisions for future battles. Brief as her record in the Songshi is, her character and story have been a favourite subject for literary works and theatre performances for centuries; her name and life have left traces in other historical and semi-historical documents, some of which survive to this day. Using Liang as a case study and examining historical and semi-historical documents side by side with literary renditions will not only help readers to gain a comprehensive understanding of the

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complex relationship between history and literary imagination, but they also will make it possible for readers to address the roles of women in the military in twelfth-century China. To that end, this essay investigates the character and story of Liang from a twofold perspective: as a historical figure and as a literary character. The historical and literary sources this essay examines cover a rather long timespan: beginning in the twelfth century, around Liang’s lifetime as a historical figure, to the nineteenth century. While dynastic histories such as the Songshi were commonly courtsanctioned and arguably considered official and comprehensive, there are many unofficial collections documenting historical events and biographies of notable figures: some of them focus on dates, events and people, while others contain embellishments and commentaries to various degrees. Three such collections discussed below include records of Liang; they were compiled between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, about a century earlier than the Songshi, and were closer to her lifetime: Song Mingchen Yanxinglu Wuji (‘Words and Deeds of Notable Song Officials in Five Volumes’), Mingchen Beizhuan Wanyanji (‘Wanyan Collection of Tomb Inscriptions of Notable Officials’) and Jianyan Yilai Xinian Yaolu (‘Chronicles since the Jianyan Reign’). It seems that there is a gap in terms of historical documents about Liang between the compilation of the Songshi in the fourteenth century and the eighteenth century, when her name appeared in local annals. These annals tend to be semi-historical archives, and more often than not include a mixture of history, anecdotes, geography, festivities and cultural practices related to a particular county or area. Within this gap, literary sources about her (particularly in the form of notes, essays and plays) flourished from the thirteenth century, as the discussion below will demonstrate. In her study on medieval women’s visionary practice and mysticism, Elizabeth Petroff has pointed out: ‘to become a woman saint, one had to transgress somewhere, if only in order to become visible’ in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.9 If Italian women saints became visible through acquiring literacy and speaking and teaching publicly,10 Liang became a model for morality via military campaign. It is the social context that helps to downplay the transgressive aspect of her story, thus making her character visible yet non-threatening to the foundation of the patriarchal structure at the time. As a number of studies have suggested, in the context of social disorder the woman warrior can serve as ‘a moral mirror for the degenerating menfolk’ and suggest ‘a strong condemnation of the depths of depravity into which society has sunk’.11 If the historiographer merely documents three notable accounts of Liang’s life in the Songshi, later intellectuals and storytellers transformed her character into an exemplary loyalist to the imperial court. To that end, many literary narratives invent and embellish a variety of details regarding her life and achievements: from her noble birth and fall to destitution to her fateful encounter with Han Shizhong before his military career took off, from her command of military expeditions, devising strategic plans and aiding her husband to the recapture of important military posts, and from avenging the imperial honour to establishing military towns for troops to recuperate and recover. As Victoria Cass’s study on warriors, grannies and geishas indicates, extraordinary women characters often are found in times of trouble: ‘the ends of dynasties produced bands of loyalists.’12 These figures, more often than not, serve as moral compasses for the society at a time when the declining imperial court loses control on multiple fronts, especially in terms of military dominance and political sovereignty. In this regard, Liang is no exception. Different as the literary

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renditions might be, almost all of them portray her as a beacon of light in times of chaos and indicate the extent to which the account draws from the traditional bounds of the social system, particularly highlighting her role as a wife and tying her military experience to that of her husband. Even though women’s participation in military affairs remains obscure in official histories, stories about women in the frontline flourish in Chinese literature and theatre performances. Over its long history, China has seen many women commanders, soldiers and practitioners whose stories are documented and celebrated in writing, dating back to pre-dynastic time and followed by numerous tales of mystics, warriors and courtesans in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties. Literary works and theatre performances have a long tradition of featuring stories of individual characters (historical or literary) such as Mulan, Qin Liangyu (1574–1648) and Mu Guiying, as well as groups (supporting or against the imperial rule) involved in military training and combat, such as the female detachment led by Princess Ping Yang during the Tang dynasty (618–960) and the Red Lantern Brigade and female battalions of the Taiping forces during the Qing dynasty. In this context, Liang’s idealisation during the process of becoming a legend in literary imaginations is by no means an isolated case; rather, it grows out of a heroic lineage in which women are applauded for taking up armor, usually in an age of crisis, and joining their male contemporaries for righteous causes.13 Active during the chaotic time period when the Song court was under constant attacks by the Jurchen forces, Liang is celebrated as an accomplished military leader and strategist in many stories. Prose and poetry, as well as theatre performances imagining her participation in combat, which can be considered a transgression for women at the time, tend to portray her as a role model of loyalty and virtues for men and women alike. To begin addressing the question about transgression versus virtue, we must take into consideration the political background against which figures such as Liang lived and written accounts about her were composed. Despite the fact that historical accounts, imperial court sanctioned or locally based, are rather sketchy and generally highlight her role associated with her husband, various literary and theatrical renditions of her life and military service since the Middle Ages provide a unique view for readers to understand medieval culture in China in general and the discourse of women’s involvement in the military in particular. As Susan Mann and Yu-yin Cheng have pointed out, ‘despite the Confucian principles of separation that marginalised women in official historical and philosophical records, a vast body of Chinese historical texts lend themselves readily to gender analysis.’14 The discussion below examines how Liang’s life and character are transformed into a symbol of loyalty, wisdom, courage and reverence in historical documents as well as notes, essays, plays and other peripheral writing.15 The latter are commonly not given much attention in medieval scholarship. Patricia Ebrey has noted that historians have gained ‘a more nuanced understanding of how women’s experiences have been tied to the development of Chinese history’ during the past few decades, and thus have been able to provide a relatively sophisticated analysis of women’s roles beyond the common emphasis on the institutionalised disadvantages that hinder women.16 Situated within such scholarly endeavors, this essay discusses the ways in which writings about Liang in historical documents and peripheral literature provide a unique perspective for readers to understand medieval women’s experience and culture.

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Lady Liang: A Historical Figure Similarly to the Songshi, some other historical records of Han Shizhong also include traces of Liang’s life. For instance, in Song Mingchen Yanxinglu Wuji, a collection about officials in the Song compiled by Zhu Xi (1130–1200) and Li Youwu, Han Shizhong’s biography mentions two accounts of Liang. The first one confirms Liang’s significant role in relieving the siege in Pingjiang and states that besides the honorary title, Liang also was rewarded with a stipend, which set a precedent for granting financial rewards to wives of heroic court officials.17 The second account praises Liang for taking the lead in making cottages out of thatch and helping to build the Chu Prefecture into a strategically important and commercially thriving military town that provided a line of defence for the declining Song court.18 Another example appears in Du Dagui’s Mingchen Beizhuan Wanyanji, a compilation of short essays inscribed on tombstones. These inscriptions typically leave a record of major events in the officials’ lives. The entry on Han Shizhong in this collection identifies Liang as one of Han’s four wives and includes similar accounts of her being granted the honorary title of Lady, beating the war drums at the front line and assisting her husband in building a successful military town.19 The Foreword to the collection by one Zhao Tiehan emphasises the credibility of the essays, stating that these essays were composed shortly after the events and therefore were more reliable than the records included in the Songshi, which was compiled some eighty years after the Song dynasty’s (960–1279) demise.20 Li Xinchuan’s (1167–1244) Jianyan Yilai Xinian Yaolu (referred to as Chronicles hereafter) includes four records of Liang, three of which are similar to those included in the Songshi, but contains a few more details. In 1129, heeding the request from Empress Dowager Meng (1073–1131), Liang rushed out of Pingjiang to call for help. She rode all day and night to Xiu Prefecture where Han Shizhong’s army was stationed, thus quelling the rebels, ending the siege and rescuing the young emperor. She was given the honorary title of Lady Anguo to recognise her courage and loyalty. 21 In 1130, at the battle in Zhenjiang, Liang beat the war drums on a rafter.22 In 1135, Liang wove thatch into cottages herself, setting an example for the troops when Han established a military town in Chu Prefecture.23 The fourth event documented in Li’s Chronicles regards Liang’s death, which is probably the earliest historical trace of her passing. After Liang passed away in 1135, the court issued an imperial order, granting five hundred scrolls of silk and five hundred taels of silver.24 The 200 volumes of the Chronicles collect historical events as well as anecdotes during Emperor Gaozong’s reign (1107–87; r. 1127–62) and is known for its broad coverage and detailed documentation. The last account of Liang’s death is of particular significance, not only because this is probably the only existing historical record indicating her passing and posthumously granted honours but also because it is unusual for a woman’s death to make it into historical documents at the time unless she is part of the royal family or is celebrated for committing suicide to protect her chastity. While these records provide similar basic elements of Liang’s life and military achievements as the Songshi, they diverge from the official history in at least two ways: her unprecedented monetary reward and honour and the imperial order issued to commemorate her death. The depiction of Liang’s death changes radically in later documents. Once her character began to gain more colour and details in literature, she undergoes

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yet another transformation as her life draws to an end, as this essay will discuss in more detail below. Liang also has left passing records in local histories, although these short pieces are dated several centuries after her lifetime. According to Zhong Shihe’s study on Liang’s home town, some county annals of Shanyang (nowadays Huai’an in Jiangsu Province) from the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) include very brief documents of Liang. Shanyang Xianzhi (‘Shanyang County Annals’), compiled during the Qianlong reign (1736–95), Chongxiu Shanyang Xianzhi (‘Revised Shanyang County Annals’), compiled during the Tongzhi reign (1862–74) and Huai’an Fuzhi (‘Huai’an Prefecture Annals’) compiled during the Guangxu reign (1875–1908) all include entries for her in the ‘Biographies of Notable Women’ sections.25 The first two annals identify her as Han Shizhong’s wife who was a courtesan during the turmoil of war. The third merely lists her as Han’s wife.26 What these local chronicles share in common is the location of her home town, which might explain the existence of the Temple of Liang Hongyu in Huai’an, built to commemorate her life and achievements. All of these historical and semi-historical documents, together with interpretations, elaborations and embellishments in essays, notes, literary works and theatre performances, offer a unique opportunity for readers to examine Liang’s extraordinary experience as well as women’s life outside the family compound in twelfth-century China.

Liang Hongyu: A Literary Character Many Chinese sources, particularly modern and contemporary articles introducing Liang’s character and fascinating story to general readers, remember her as the only woman general who had the degrading origin of being a courtesan (伎) or a prostitute (妓) and address her by the given name Hongyu. None of these elements bears any trace in the dynastic history Songshi. It is not likely for Liang to have been a general in terms of military rank since women were ineligible to hold official posts during the Song dynasties (Northern Song 960–1127; Southern Song 1127–1279). Her experience in a courtesan house has no trace in historical documents, but is found in short essays, notes and anecdotes in the pre-modern period. They, to various degrees, contain elements of the military romance. As C. T. Hsia’s study of Chinese literary genres has suggested, a Chinese military romance commonly provides a good deal of biographical information on the principal hero: ‘his pre-military career, his friends and enemies, and his trials as a loyal servant of the throne’, in addition to his campaigns.27 Hsia’s study examines Yuan (1271–1368) and Ming (1368–1644) fiction that is essential to the understanding of the evolution of the genre, and heavily references stories about the Tang (618–960) and Song dynasties.28 According to Hsia, military romance has the general tendency ‘to elaborate upon legendary material’: The legendary hero is usually idealized: he is braver and more virtuous than his historic counterpart and he comes upon stranger adventures and suffers worse tribulations at the hands of blacker villains. But to a reader of fiction, it matters little whether a given legend agrees or disagrees with the hero’s official biography; what matters is that, thanks to the rich mytho-realistic episodes provided by the legend, the hero may

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emerge as a real person in a real setting even though his character may in the process become simplified.29 One of the earliest written records of Liang that has survived to this day is found in Luo Dajing’s Helin Yulu, a collection of poetry, notes, anecdotes and short pieces from the Song dynasty. It predates the Songshi by almost a century. Among other things, Luo included an entry on Liang, titled ‘Wife of Prince of Qi’, which begins: The wife of Han, [who was posthumously given the title of] Prince of Qi, was once a prostitute in Jingkou. On the first day of a lunar month, she went just before dawn into the prefecture compound to wait for assignments in the official festivities. Suddenly she saw a tiger slumbering next to a pillar and snoring loudly. Frightened, she ran out. She did not dare to say anything but waited until more people arrived. She went back to the spot, and what she saw this time was a soldier. Waking him up with a kick, she asked for his name. It was Han Shizhong. She told her mother secretly of her marvelous encounter, saying that this soldier was no ordinary person. Then she invited him home, prepared a feast and the night ended in rapture. As they became more and more deeply involved, she helped him with money. A betrothal ensued.30 Luo’s text employs dramatic elements to enrich Liang’s story. This account, describing the couple’s ‘marvellous encounter’, provides the source and inspiration for later development and elaboration in military romance; it also affords Liang unusual agency, which sets the tone for their marriage to be an equal partnership for other versions of their story to follow and expand on. Not only does she initiate the courtship, but she also has the ability to recognise and assist a hero at his humble beginning long before he rises to fame and glory, which is a common and recurring theme in Chinese military romance. Pei-Yi Wu has pointed out: ‘[a] perceptive or clairvoyant woman, usually a beauty, recognizing a great man in his humble and obscure youth and casting in her lot with him is [an] ingredient typical of Chinese romantic tales.’31 A number of stories developed in later times follow suit and romanticise Liang’s life and her union with Han. Luo’s account of Liang is not far removed from such military romance traditions. It probably elaborates upon historical and literary material to introduce a hero (Han) as well as a heroine (Liang), both at their humble beginning. Given the fact that traces of Liang are sketchy and details about her pre-marital life are virtually non-existent in historical documents, elaboration and embellishment based on, and in turn creating, literary martial are almost inevitable when writers reimagine her story in peripheral literature. Luo’s account also reflects an area in which writing about women flourished in China’s Middle Ages. ‘In only two domains of Chinese historical writing are women prominent and ubiquitous. One of these domains is fiction and drama; the other is the genre referred to as “random jottings” or “notes” (biji or suibi).’32 Luo’s entry belongs to the second domain, which is of importance not only because it produces abundant materials about women but also because those materials cover women well beyond notable figures in elite and literati classes and celebrated chaste widows. The hypothesis that Liang’s humble origin may have assisted in highlighting her extraordinary achievements later on is borne out by the ambiguity of her social status. Her vocation as a courtesan or prostitute before her marriage to Han, historically grounded or not, is an element historiographers of the imperial court would evade for obvious reasons, yet it is worth noting. On the one

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hand, it provides a component that potentially intrigues the reader, thus offering space for elaboration and embellishment in literary works and theatre performances. On the other hand, such an origin provides Liang unusual freedom outside the social structure that clearly defines the roles of men and women at the time. Ebrey has explained: The Sung has attracted scholars because it was a time when women’s situations apparently took a turn for the worse. It is associated with the spread of footbinding and strong condemnation of remarriage by widows. Because male dominance in Chinese history has so often been explained as a matter of ideology, scholars have looked to the revival of Confucianism in the Sung to explain these changes.33 Neo-Confucianism became the state-sponsored philosophy and ideology that dominated politics all the way through its last emperor in the Song.34 Zhu Xi’s theory lixue allowed women in Chinese society to be ‘restrained’ in a systematic manner: a woman was to be dominated by her father before marriage, by her husband after marriage, and then by her son if widowed, thus causing the status of Chinese women to decline.35 Chen Dongyuan, for instance, squarely attributes the deterioration of women’s lives during the Song to neo-Confucian scholars such as Cheng Yi (1033–1107) and Zhu Xi and their ideas that value first and foremost women’s chastity. In his book Zhongguo Funü Shenghuoshi (‘History of Chinese Women’s Lives’), Chen argues that the emphasis on women’s chastity advocated by Cheng and Zhu led to the decline of women’s status, thus making the Song dynasty ‘changing times in women’s lives’ for the worse.36 Liang’s pre-marital time spent in a courtesan house makes her an outcast of society, which ironically enables her not to be completely governed by its rules. Her profession also implies another unusual aspect of her life as a woman in the Song – her financial independence, which is indicated in Luo Dajing’s ‘Wife of Prince of Qi’: as Han and Liang ‘became more and more deeply involved, she helped [Han] with money’ before his military career took off.37 In ‘Wife of Prince of Qi’, Luo cites another incident after Han and Liang’s union to reveal the unusual traits of Liang. Han’s troops once cornered the Jurchen army at a shallow lake named Huangtian. They almost captured the Jurchen commander Wanyan Wuzhu (d. 1148) until the marooned enemy soldiers secretly dug a channel to reach an unprotected part of the Yangzi river and escaped the encirclement. Lady Liang submitted a petition to the imperial court, requesting punishment for Han’s negligence of duty that had led to losing the crucial opportunity to completely defeat the enemy troops. Given the fact that an indictment of a husband would implicate his wife at the time, Liang’s self-sacrifice and loyalty are extraordinary. Luo’s writing paints this occurrence in rosy colours and draws the conclusion that Lady Liang ‘was so wise, heroic and mighty that the entire imperial court was touched’.38 Luo Dajing’s collection has significant influence on notes and literary variations of Liang’s story later on. For example, Guo Yi’s (1305–64) Xuelüzhai Biji (‘Notes of Xuelü’), a collection of notes and anecdotes, briefly mentions the wife of Han being a courtesan in Jingkou and her petition to the court requesting punishment for Han for missing the opportunity to capture Wanyan Wuzhu, and refers to Luo’s entry directly.39 Pan Yongyin’s (fl. 1669) account of Liang included in Songbai Leichao (‘Song Anecdotes and Trifles’), although not directly crediting Luo, is very similar to ‘Wife of Prince of Qi’.40 In addition to notes and anecdotes by scholars, literary elaborations also suggest

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inspiration from Luo’s work. Most notable are two plays from the Ming dynasty that incorporate earlier materials and expand the romance and military experiences of Liang and Han: Shuanglie Ji and Qilin Ji. Both emphasise Liang’s uncompromised chastity despite her time spent in a courtesan house. Specific plot elements also highlight the fact that Liang is not only courageous but also well versed in military strategy, thus making her suitable to assist her husband as well as to command troops and contribute to strategic planning on and off the battlefield. Zhang Siwei’s (fl. 1567) Shuanglie Ji is the earliest surviving variation of Liang and Han’s story in drama. It is probably the earliest source that identifies her given name Hongyu, which literally means ‘red jade’. The play focuses on the couple’s love story and family life, beginning with Liang’s origin as a courtesan and ending with the couple resigning from official duties and retiring to a peaceful life. It expands elements from the Songshi, Luo’s ‘Wife of Prince of Qi’ and other sources, and dramatises particular scenes, including: the couple’s marvellous encounter and marriage, Liang riding out from a besieged city to call for rescue troops, her beating war drums during the intense battle at Lake Huangtian, and the couple’s successful administration of the military town of Chu Prefecture. Sometimes attributed to Chen Yujiao (1544–1611), Qilin Ji has a questionable authorship. This play adapted and modified Shuanglie Ji. While keeping the love story of Han and Liang as the main thematic arch, it highlights the perceptive political awareness and military strategies in Liang’s character. The beginning of the play emphasises Liang’s noble birth and her family’s fall during the chaos of war. It also creates the plot in which she was sold into a brothel as a child. Despite her environment, she adheres to her chastity as she comes of age. The implication is twofold: on the one hand, she works for entertainment without compromising her virtues; on the other hand, she is never viewed as an amazon-type woman warrior. Both make her a suitable wife who, according to multiple stories, later produces at least one son for her husband. In this sense, being skilled in martial arts and military strategy is a boon in addition to her womanhood (see Figure 1). In many of the stories, Liang plays an important role not only as an instrumental assistant to her husband but also as a military strategist and leader. Rich in detail and full of drama, the accounts of her life and adventure would eclipse those of her husband in fiction, drama and performance. When Barbara Bennett Peterson includes Liang in her list of notable women of China, she particularly comments on her talent as a military leader: ‘All along the way, Liang Hongyu’s quick mind, versatile tactics and calmness in danger complemented his success.’41 Even though the Songshi attributed no more than a few dozen words to document her participation in combat, literary works and theatre performances in later periods portray her drumbeating during a battle as the climax of the Song army’s defensive war and describe her character and story with colorful details. For instance, the Qing novel Shuo Yue Quanzhuan (‘Complete Stories of the Yue Family’) depicts Liang’s drumbeat as the strategic key in guiding the Song troops’ formations and moves on the battlefield, thus playing a crucial role in their victory.42 Liang is not only the mastermind of the strategic plan for the battle, but she also takes part in leading the troops. The novel particularly refers to the Songshi and its record of Liang’s drumbeating. A similar expansion and dramatisation is found in Cai Dongfan’s (1877–1945) Songshi Yanyi (‘Romance of the Song’).43 It is worth noting that writers’, performers’ and general readers’ fascination with Liang’s character and story has a long-lasting tradition in China and the broader

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Figure 1 Wu Youru’s (fl. nineteenth century) drawing portrays the battle scene in which Lady Liang beats the drum on a ship. Different from cross-dressed women in the military, she participates in battles as a woman and is usually portrayed as a beauty. From Wu Youru, Wu Youru Huabao (Shanghai: Biyuan huishe, c.1909), no. pag.

Chinese-speaking communities overseas, extending from the Middle Ages to contemporary times. Gu Zhongyi’s four-act play Liang Hongyu that was produced by the Shanghai Drama Society in 1940 and published in 1941, Tan Zhengbi’s historical novel Liang Hongyu, Ouyang Yuqian’s nine-act play Liang Hongyu, Qian Shiming’s story Liang Hongyu Canfu, Kang Xinmin’s story Liang Hongyu Jigu Zhan Jinshan, and C. C. Low’s bilingual illustrated children’s book Liang Hongyu as part of a series of ‘pictorial stories of the great Chinese national heroine’ are merely examples of the rich repertoire of reinventing Liang’s stories in various genres and forms. During the process of Liang’s becoming a legend, writers represent her body as an object of reverence to help highlight her virtues that overshadow her transgression and the unusual empowerment of a woman in twelfth-century China. Perhaps one of the most compelling reasons for the need to underscore her body stems from the urge to implicitly connect Liang to the other virtuous women who left marks in historical documents because of their reverence and preservation of purity at all costs, in most cases committing suicide to avoid contamination of the body. The body as a trope has a sustained prevalence in Liang’s stories, not only in her origin as a courtesan but also in her death that has produced drastically different accounts. Like their male counterparts, ‘female warriors were dedicated to the variety of martial arts skills, which included an

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impressive repertory of death’.44 In this regard, Liang is no exception. One version tells how Liang, together with Han Shizhong, retired to the West Lake after their successful military career. Han passed away in peace in 1151; broken-hearted, Liang followed in 1153. They were buried together in modern Suzhou, Jiangsu Province.45 Another version concludes with the couple retiring from official duties and living the rest of their lives in seclusion with an unknown ending.46 Yet another story imagines a conspiracy plot, in which Liang was poisoned by a Jurchen-backed spy, thus portraying her as a prominent obstacle preventing the Jurchen regime from overthrowing the Song court and taking control of China.47 Li Xinchuan’s record about her death and the honours granted posthumously in the Chronicles, albeit brief and matter-of-fact, further confirms her loyalty being recognised and rewarded by the imperial court. In comparison, two anonymous and undated biographies of Liang – Yangguo Furen Zhuan (‘Biography of Lady Yangguo’) (referred to as Biography hereafter) and Yinglie Furen Ciji (‘Dedication to the Temple of Lady Yinglie’) (referred to as Dedication hereafter) – present her life and military career with glory and excitement commonly seen in fiction and theatre performances rather than history.48 In particular, her death is portrayed with dramatic flair. According to these biographies, after her heroic death in combat, her body was first dismembered by Jurchen soldiers for the purpose of claiming rewards from their commanders and then reassembled and returned to the Song troops for a proper burial out of reverence. Collecting various events regarding Liang’s life from history, notes and anecdotes, Biography addresses her by her honorary title, Lady Yangguo, and introduces her as one of Han Shizhong’s wives. It recounts Liang’s marvellous encounter with a sleeping tiger, through which she, a military courtesan, recognised Han’s potential. She later bought her freedom with her own funds to marry him. She first earned the title of Lady Huguo for completing the rescue mission at Pingjiang; then she helped boost morale with drum beats during the battles at Zhenjiang against Jurchen troops, earning another title, Lady Yangguo; last but not least, she played a crucial role in the establishment and maintenance of the military town in Chu Prefecture. Commanding her own division, known as the ‘women’s detachment’, Liang won many battles and acquired such fame that the Jurchens were fearful upon hearing her name. What is particularly worth noting is Biography’s dramatic narrative of her death. When she was ambushed at the Huai river and was outnumbered hundredfold in 1135, she fought courageously until her last breath without even considering retreat or surrender. The biographer describes her epic fall on the battlefield as such: [Liang] tried to break out of the encirclement to no avail and was injured multiple times. When her intestines fell out of her abdomen, [she] just wrapped herself with a handkerchief; blood seeped through her heavy armour. [She] looked around [at her soldiers] and said: ‘Today, I get to pay my debt of gratitude to the Emperor.’ [She] then rushed to launch another assault. The enemy troops shot countless arrows [at her]; [she] eventually exhausted herself, fell off her horse and died. The Jurchens trampled one another, fighting for her remains; several of them claimed a piece of her corpse. The Jurchens displayed her corpse in the marketplace for three days. [Their commander] Wuzhu heard about it and was touched by her loyalty and courage. [He] collected her remains and returned them to [Han Shizhong who was posthumously given the title of] Prince Zhongwu. Zhongwu grieved greatly. Upon hearing the news,

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the imperial court offered condolences and issued an order granting five hundred scrolls of silk and five hundred taels of silver.49 The biographer ends the piece with a sigh: ‘Zhongwu and Yangguo were gifts from Heaven to assist the revival of the Song. Yet they failed on the verge of victory. What a pity!’50 The part regarding her posthumous honour and reward from the imperial court bears resemblance to the record included in Li Xinchuan’s Chronicles. Her death is portrayed with such spectacle in Biography that her body becomes a contested cultural space. It is a site associated with achievements (in terms of her ultimate loyalty and bravery as well as the bounty issued by Jurchen commanders) and reverence (before and after her death). Dedication includes multiple accounts about Liang’s marriage and military career similar to Biography. The details about her heroic death and its dramatic aftermath are even more elaborated in this source. The biographer describes how Liang managed to kill more than ten enemy soldiers even after suffering from severe injuries, and fought until her last breath. After her fall on the battlefield, ‘Jurchen soldiers trampled one another, rushing to cut off her head and mutilate her corpse. Afterwards, the soldier who got her head received a promotion of two ranks; the ones who got one of her arms or legs were promoted one rank.’51 Their commander Wuzhu later ordered her remains be returned to Han Shizhong. While reassembling her body and upon close inspection, they found dozens of injuries on her body. Seven of them were fatal and in the front of her body, which suggests her charging to fight the enemy troops until her last breath. The imperial court granted her the posthumous title of Yinglie Lady Yangguo and erected a temple in her honour. The biographer laments at the end that Liang was able to turn the tide when the dynasty was collapsing, thus leaving such a legacy that her name would become immortal.52 Beverly Bossler’s study suggests Song authors extol men and women’s heroism in strikingly different ways. ‘The men whose loyalty is praised are in all cases officials who died defending their districts from attack by the Jin. Some – though not all – received official state recognition by having shrines erected as their graves, but all are celebrated for their loyalty to the state.’53 In contrast, women, who could not be officials in this period, are praised for refusing to submit to rape by enemy soldiers. ‘Just as male loyal officials died resisting invasion of territory, loyal women died resisting invasion of their bodies: the bodily integrity of women becomes a graphic metaphor for the territorial integrity of the state.’54 Liang’s body, through its mutilation and reassembling, occupies an unusual space between such gender divides at the time. In this sense, her body provides a contested cultural space where history meets literary imagination, thus generating an idealised woman warrior without challenging the patriarchal foundation of the social system at the time. Such a careful balance is by no means a new invention in the nineteenth century. Indeed, it appeared in the early documents about Liang, especially in peripheral literature. As a woman warrior and strategist, Liang apparently ‘is threatening to patriarchal power, with its implicit preference for meek and mild women’. However, [She is] primarily instrumental in ensuring its continued existence because the deeds she performs are undeniably consolidating of the existing Confucian social and moral order. The disruptive potential encapsulated within her form makes her an enthralling

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fictional and dramatic figure and this, combined with her consolidating function, ensures her repeated appearance in fiction and drama at both elite and popular levels.55 In her historical survey of Chinese women in military services, Lily Xiao Hong Lee has proposed two conditions that have enabled Chinese women to achieve immortality: a specific family background, that has allowed daughters, sisters or wives to excel in the male world; and social upheaval, that has relaxed the usual constraints imposed on women.56 Her study lists Liang as an example whose success is closely tied to her training in martial arts as a daughter by her officer father and to her marriage and assistance to her military general husband.57 On the one hand, her achievements are transgressions from the gender norms that define and divide male and female domains and behaviour; on the other hand, the underlying cause for her transgression supplies a justification for her breaking away from the social restraints imposed on women at the time. Like other women warriors in Chinese literature, Liang is not segregated from men; rather, she transcends gender boundaries and defies ‘the conventional expectations of a physically weak and subjugated woman confined within her father’s or husband’s household’; however, her character is still contained and well defined within the periphery of Confucian ideas of womanhood based on ‘three obediences and four virtues’.58 After all, she follows her husband to war. In the age of chaos, she is a loyal woman who simultaneously embodies ‘loyalty to a spouse, loyalty to the regime, and even loyalty to Chinese culture itself’.59 After numerous metamorphoses in various genres, the character Lady Liang has had an unprecedented life and flourished under unusual circumstances. Her marriage to Han Shizhong has led to a partnership in a joint effort. However, she is still carefully defined by her kinship and marital role. As Petroff’s study has indicated, language plays a crucial role in presenting, mediating and even denying the transgression of Italian women saints of the Middle Ages who were transgressors, rule-breakers and flouters of boundaries. Such ‘rhetoric of transgression’ helps shape these women’s deeds into virtuous and compelling acts.60 The same ‘rhetoric of transgression’ enables Liang to become a woman warrior whose story is simultaneously extraordinary and acceptable in China across a long time period.

Notes 1

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5 6 7 8 9

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In this essay, Chinese names are cited according to Chinese tradition, i.e., family name before given name. Unless otherwise noted, all English translations included in this essay are mine. Tuo Tuo (1313–55) et al., Songshi, reprinted edition (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1977), vol. 364, pp. 11359–65. Pei-Yi Wu, ‘Yang Miaozhen: A Woman Warrior in Thirteenth-Century China’, Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China, 4/2 (2002), p. 155. Tuo Tuo et al., Songshi, pp. 11359–65. Tuo Tuo et al., Songshi, p. 11359. Tuo Tuo et al., Songshi, p. 11361. Tuo Tuo et al., Songshi, p. 11365. Elizabeth A. Petroff, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 166. Petroff, Body and Soul, p. 176.

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Louise Edwards, ‘Women Warriors and Amazons of the Mid-Qing Texts Jinghua Yuan and Honglou Meng’, Modern Asian Studies, 29/2 (1995), p. 103. Victoria Cass, Dangerous Women: Warriors, Grannies and Geishas of the Ming (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), p. 81. For studies on the heroic lineage of warrior women in pre-modern China, see Edwards, ‘Women Warriors and Amazons’, pp. 225–55; Sufen S. Lai, ‘From Cross-Dressing Daughter to Lady Knight-Errant: The Origin and Evolution of Chinese Women Warriors’, in Sherry J. Mou (ed.), Presence and Presentation: Women in the Chinese Literati Tradition (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), pp. 77–107; Cass, Dangerous Women; and Lan Dong, Mulan’s Legend and Legacy in China and the United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011). Susan Mann and Yu-Yin Cheng (eds), Under Confucian Eyes: Writing on Gender in Chinese History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 2. These literary texts, similarly to the official history commissioned by the imperial court, are almost exclusively authored by men. Patricia B. Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 4–5. Zhu Xi and Li Youwu, Song Mingchen Yanxinglu Wuji, 1868, reprinted edn (Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1967), p. 1197. Zhu Xi and Li Youwu, Song Mingchen Yanxinglu Wuji, p. 1208. Du Dagui (fl. c.12th–13th centuries), Mingchen Beizhuan Wanyanji, 1194, reprinted edn (Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1969), p. 222. Du Dagui, Mingchen Beizhuan Wanyanji, p. 2. Li Xinchuan, Jianyan Yilai Jinian Yaolu, in Siku Quanshu, reprinted edn (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1992), vol. 21, no. 325, p. 348. Li Xinchuan, Jianyan Yilai Jinian Yaolu, vol. 32, no. 325, p. 478. Li Xinchuan, Jianyan Yilai Jinian Yaolu, vol. 87, no. 326, p. 225. Li Xinchuan, Jianyan Yilai Jinian Yaolu, vol. 87, no. 326, p. 305. Zhong Shihe, ‘Liang Hongyu Jiguan Kao’, Oldha.net (12 April 2020), http://www.oldha.net/242/. Shanyang Xianzhi (1749), vol. 22, no pag.; Congxiu Shanyang Xianzhi (1873), vol. 16, no pag.; Huai’an Fuzhi (1884), vol. 35, no pag. All quoted in Zhong Shihe, ‘Liang Hongyu Jiguan Kao’, no pag. C. T. Hsia, ‘The Military Romance’, in Cyril Birch (ed.), Studies in Chinese Literary Genres, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p. 339. Hsia, ‘The Military Romance’, p. 340. Hsia, ‘The Military Romance’, pp. 344–5. Luo Dajing (c.1196–c.1242), Helin Yulu, reprinted edn (Beijing: zhonghua shuju, 1983), p. 266. English translation is from Wu, ‘Yang Miaozhen’, p. 162. Wu, ‘Yang Miaozhen’, p. 162. Mann and Cheng, Under Confucian Eyes, p. 4. Ebrey, The Inner Quarters, p. 5. Peterson, ‘Liang Hongyu’, p. 272. Peterson, ‘Liang Hongyu’, p. 272. Chen Dongyuan, Zhongguo Funü Shenghuoshi (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1928), p. 139. Wu, ‘Yang Miaozhen’, p. 162. Luo Dajing, Helin Yulu, p. 266. Guo Yi (1305–64), Xuelüzhai Biji, reprinted edn (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1994), p. 79. Pan Yongyin (ed.), Songbai Leichao, Guoxue123.com, 2006, http://www.guoxue123.com/ zhibu/0201/03sblc/03.htm. Barbara B. Peterson, ‘Liang Hongyu’, in Barbara B. Peterson et al. (eds), Notable Women of China: Shang Dynasty to the Early Twentieth Century (Armonk, NY, and London: M. E. Sharpe, 2000), p. 271. Qian Cai (fl. 1729) et  al., Shuo Yue Quanzhuan, reprinted edn (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1980), pp. 380–7.

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Cai Dongfan, Songshi Yanyi (Beijing: Beijing guiji chubanshe, 1996). Cass, Dangerous Women, p. 81. Zhong Shihe, ‘Liang Hongyu Jiguan Kao’, no. pag. Zhang Siwei (fl. 1567), Shuang Lie Ji Pingzhu, reprinted edn (Jilin: Renmin chubanshe, 2001). Zhang Xiu, ‘Songchao Zhuming Kang Jin Nüyingxiong Liang Hongyu Yunan’, Sohu.com (3 November 2017), https://www.sohu.com/a/202094837_612628. Both sources are considered in the public domain and are available online: Yanguo Furen Zhuan, undated, 360doc.com, http://www.360doc.com/content/12/1213/15/349878_253802780.shtml; Yinglie Furen Ciji, undated, wyw.5156edu.com, http://wyw.5156edu.com/html/z8619m9454j4527. html. ‘Yanguo Furen Zhuan’, undated, no. pag. ‘Yanguo Furen Zhuan’, undated, no. pag. Yinglie Furen Ciji, undated, no. pag. Yinglie Furen Ciji, undated, no. pag. Beverly Bossler, ‘Gender and Empire: A View from Yuan China’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 34/1 (2004), 202. Bossler, ‘Gender and Empire’, p. 202. Edwards, ‘Women Warriors and Amazons’, p. 231. L. X. H. Lee, The Virtue of Yin: Studies on Chinese Women (Broadway, Sydney: Wild Peony; Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), pp. 1–3. Lee, The Virtue of Yin, p. 2. Lai, ‘From Cross-Dressing Daughter to Lady Knight-Errant’, p. 78. Bossler, ‘Gender and Empire’, p. 203. Petroff, Body and Soul, pp. 161–2.

Works Cited Bossler, Beverly, ‘Gender and Empire: A View from Yuan China’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 34/1 (2004), 197–223. Cai Dongfan, Songshi Yanyi (Beijing: Beijing guiji chubanshe, 1996). Cass, Victoria, Dangerous Women: Warriors, Grannies and Geishas of the Ming (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). Chen Dongyuan, Zhongguo Funü Shenghuoshi (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1928). Chen Yujiao, Qilin Ji, reprinted edn (Shanghai: guben xiqu congkan biankan weiyuanhui, 1955). Dong, Lan, Mulan’s Legend and Legacy in China and the United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011). Du Dagui, Mingchen Beizhuan Wanyanji (1194), reprinted edn (Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1969). Ebrey, Patricia B., The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Edwards, Louise, ‘Women Warriors and Amazons of the Mid-Qing Texts Jinghua yuan and Honglou meng’, Modern Asian Studies, 29/2 (1995), 225–55. Gu Zhongyi, Liang Hongyu (Shanghai: Kaiming shudian, 1941). Hsia, C. T., ‘The Military Romance’, in Cyril Birch (ed.), Studies in Chinese Literary Genres (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 339–90. Kang Xinmin, Liang Hongyu Jigu Zhan Jinshan (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1988).

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Lai, Sufen S., ‘From Cross-Dressing Daughter to Lady Knight-Errant: The Origin and Evolution of Chinese Women Warriors’, in Sherry J. Mou (ed.), Presence and Presentation: Women in the Chinese Literati Tradition (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), pp. 77–107. Lee, Lily X. H., The Virtue of Yin: Studies on Chinese Women (Broadway, Sydney: Wild Peony; Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994). Li Xinchuan, Jianyan Yilai Jinian Yaolu, in Siku Quanshu, reprinted edn (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1992). Low, C. C. (ed.), Liang Hongyu (Singapore: Canfonian Pte., 1991). Lu, Yanguang and Zhuozhi Cai, 100 Celebrated Chinese Women, trans. Kate Foster (Singapore: Asiapac Book, 1995). Luo Dajing, Helin Yulu, reprinted edn (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983). Mann, Susan and Yu-yin Cheng (eds), Under Confucian Eyes: Writing on Gender in Chinese History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Ouyang Yuqian, Liang Hongyu (Shanghai: Shanghai zazhi gongsi, 1938). Pan Yongyin (ed.), Song Bai Lei Chao, Guoxue123.com, 2006, http://www.guoxue123. com/zhibu/0201/03sblc/03.htm. Peterson, Barbara B., ‘Liang Hongyu’, in Barbara B. Peterson, He Hong Fei, Han Tie, Wang Jiyu and Zhang Guangyu (eds), Notable Women of China: Shang Dynasty to the Early Twentieth Century (Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 2000), pp. 269–75. Petroff, Elizabeth A., Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Qian Cai et al., Shuo Yue Quanzhuan, reprinted edn (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1980). Qian Shiming, Liang Hongyu Canfu (Fuzhou: Haixia wenyi chubanshe, 1986). Tan Zhengbi, Liang Hongyu, (Shanghai: Beixin shuju, 1947). Tuo Tuo et al., Songshi, reprinted edn (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1977). Wu, Pei-Yi, ‘Yang Miaozhen: A Woman Warrior in Thirteenth-Century China’, Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China, 4/2 (2002), 137–69. Wu Youru, Wu Youru Huabao (Shanghai: Biyuan huishe, c.1909) Yanguo Furen Zhuan, undated, 360doc.com, http://www.360doc.com/ content/12/1213/15/349878_253802780.shtml. Yinglie Furen Ciji, undated, wyw.5156edu.com, http://wyw.5156edu.com/html/ z8619m9454j4527.html. Zhang Siwei, Shuang Lie Ji Pingzhu, reprinted edn (Jilin: renmin chubanshe, 2001). Zhang Xiu, ‘Songchao Zhuming Kang Jin Nüyingxiong Liang Hongyu Yunan’, Sohu. com (3 November 2017), https://www.sohu.com/a/202094837_612628. Zhong Shihe, ‘Liang Hongyu Jiguan Kao’, Oldha.net (12 April 2020), http://www.oldha. net/242/. Zhu Xi and Li Youwu, Song Mingchen Yanxing Lu Wuji (1868), reprinted edn (Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1967).

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9 A Woman Mystic in Pre-Islamic North Africa: Al-Kāhina in the Futūḥ Miṣr DENISE K. FILIOS

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l-Kāhina (died c.82 ah/702 ce),1 ‘the female seer’,2 is, to say the least, an unconventional female mystic. Primarily remembered as a Berber queen and war leader who temporarily halted the Islamic conquest of North Africa, her mysticism may be her least notable attribute. Far more scholarly attention has been paid to her ethnic and religious identity, her gender and maternity, and her military and political roles, as well as her importance in colonial and post-colonial historiography as a figure of memory and icon of Amazigh identity.3 Nonetheless, her mysticism is an important source of her power and authority, inseparable from her other overlapping roles as leader, wise woman, military strategist and mother. Her visions literally give her a voice in the earliest substantial account of her, found in the Futūḥ Miṣr (‘The Conquest of Egypt’) by Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam (c.182–257 ah/798–871 ce). He cites her dramatic prophecies of imminent doom, making her one of the few pre-Islamic local rulers whose words are recorded in his triumphant history of the Arab Muslim conquest of the West.4 While Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam tries to depict her as yet another local elite woman appropriately subjugated and silenced by the Islamic conquerors, the authority she holds thanks to her mystical communications with the divine empowers her to contest the role he imposes upon her. In his text, al-Kāhina emerges as an exemplary female leader whose efficacious speech and actively resistant piety question the pretence that the Islamic invaders were primarily motivated by religion.5 The predominantly hostile stance Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam assumes towards al-Kāhina impedes our ability to understand her mystical experiences and the nature of her contact with the divine as well as the precise identity of the divinity with whom she communicates. However, his hostility is infused with admiration and respect for this wise and brave Berber queen who facilitates the integration of the local subjected people into the Islamic empire. She achieves this feat by partially Berberising her adopted Arab son Khālid b. Yazīd, ensuring the survival and even prosperity of Berbers under Muslim rule and underlining the similarities between the Arab invaders and the local Berber peoples. Al-Kāhina’s resistant piety and strategic acting on the knowledge of future events that she receives through her mystical experiences are fundamental both to the ambivalent stance Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam adopts toward her and to her function as a transitional figure, enabling both rupture and continuity with the pre-Islamic past.

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Despite the biased textual context in which her voice is transmitted, we can partially reconstruct al-Kāhina’s mystical experiences by reading against the grain. In my analysis, I supplement Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s representation of her mysticism with anthropological, religious and linguistic theory, an approach that enables me to explicate her mystical activity within her community and to analyse the distortions in Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s account of her mysticism. I then compare her treatment with those of similar characters in the Futūḥ Miṣr, mostly other local female rulers who also function as transitional figures. Interestingly, Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s depiction of al-Kāhina shows her embodying many of the same qualities as ‘Uqba b. Nāfi‘ (died 63 ah/683 ce), the heroic yet flawed Islamic conqueror of Ifrīqīya (modern Tunisia and Algeria) and the Maghreb (Morocco). The similarity of these two opposed figures illustrates the complex significance of al-Kāhina. The polyphonic and intertextual nature of early Islamic historiography allows us to hear her voice and therefore appreciate the profound challenge al-Kāhina the mystic poses to the myth of the divinely-guided, civilising mission of the Muslim conquest.6

Al-Kāhina’s Depiction in the Futūḥ Miṣr As is the case with medieval European women mystics, al-Kāhina’s mysticism, gender and ethnicity are profoundly intertwined with and conditioned by her socio-historical context. Many Christian women mystics acquired authority and power by having visions judged to be orthodox by their male confessors and other religious authorities, and with that approval ‘became free to act and to criticise in ways that were not open to ordinary women’.7 Their visions gave them an authoritative voice which they expressed in their own writing or orally transmitted to others who recorded them as testaments to these women’s orthodox and truthful visionary activity. These texts served as devotional reading to promote belief and sometimes inspired and guided other mystics, male and female.8 The textual situation in which al-Kāhina’s mystical experiences are transmitted is completely different. While her visions are depicted as truthful, the primary purpose of Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s Futūḥ Miṣr is to collect and transmit historical narratives that circulated within his scholarly circle, that of the Mālikī school of Islamic jurisprudence based in Fusṭāṭ, Egypt. The story of al-Kāhina is just one episode in his extended account of the Muslim conquest of North Africa, and her story exhibits many mythical elements that reflect its nature as a historical narrative preserved and transmitted orally within an Arab or Arabised community that used it to justify the Islamic conquest. Scholars disagree as to the historical reliability of Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s text, and some question the historicity of al-Kāhina herself. Her story as told by Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam serves a particular narrative purpose, to explain how and why the Berbers were subjugated and integrated into the Muslim conquest army.9 Al-Kāhina’s mysticism is one attribute among many that make her an extraordinary woman of power who heroically and successfully resisted the Muslim subjugation of Ifrīqīya, delaying their advance by some ten years due to her strategic planning and military might. The extent to which her political power stems from her mysticism is impossible to determine from Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s account, as he does not explain how and why she assumed rule of the diverse Berber peoples that form her subjects. The information he transmits about al-Kāhina is partial, narrated from a third-person Arab Muslim

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authoritative (semi-)omniscient perspective which primarily sees her as an enemy, albeit an admirable and heroic one. The very word used to identify her, al-Kāhina, is Arabic and therefore reflects the perspective of those who defeated and killed her. Her words as transmitted by Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam are also in Arabic, although she must have addressed her people in the local spoken language, presumably a Berber dialect.10 Nonetheless, Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam depicts her as uttering words of power, both in her speeches to her followers and in her negotiating dialogues with Arab characters, especially her adopted son, Khālid b. Yazīd. The spoken word is her principal method of exercising power, in addition to her military strategies which Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam does not relate in any detail. In highlighting her verbal power, Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam might acknowledge the historical importance of Berber orality as an instrument of power and resistance to conquest and acculturation, given the twin policies of Islamisation and Arabisation during the late Umayyad caliphate; he might imply that al-Kāhina was illiterate, given that Berber was not a written language at the time of the Muslim conquest; he might simply use his typical narrative strategies that privilege the spoken word, as he cites the speech of all his principal characters, reflecting the primacy of orality in Islamic culture then as now.11 In fact, her speaking words of power makes al-Kāhina similar to the other great military commanders in Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s history. Her words are remarkable mostly due to the prophetic announcements through which she communicates the knowledge she receives mystically, as well as the fact that they issue from a woman’s body, a Berber body, one that defies the usual limitations imposed on such gendered ethnic bodies, thanks to her authority as a mystic. Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s version of the al-Kāhina story starts in the midst of his account of the Muslim conquest of the West.12 During the final campaign of ‘Uqba b. Nāfi‘, a Berber war leader named Ibn al-Kāhina (Son of al-Kāhina) attacks and slaughters the invaders, including ‘Uqba (d. 63 ah/683 ce), and occupies the area around ‘Uqba’s city of Qayrawān (Kairouan in modern Tunisia), so the remaining Muslim forces withdraw to Egypt. The conquest is suspended during the Second Islamic Civil War (60–72 ah/680– 92 ce), during which time the Berbers re-establish control of Ifrīqīya under al-Kāhina’s rule.13 When the conquest resumes under Ḥassān b. Nu‘mān in 73 ah/693 ce, al-Kāhina defeats him in fierce battle, killing many soldiers and taking eighty captives. Ḥassān escapes and withdraws to Barqa (in modern Libya). Al-Kāhina treats the captives kindly and releases all but one, Khālid b. Yazīd, whom she adopts as her son and takes into her home. After a while, Ḥassān sends a messenger to Khālid asking him to report on al-Kāhina’s forces. Khālid conceals a letter in a loaf of bread that he gives to the messenger. In a prophetic pronouncement, al-Kāhina reveals her awareness of the hidden letter, but she allows the messenger to return to Ḥassān with the bread. Khālid later sends a second message, concealed in the messenger’s saddlebow, and again al-Kāhina reveals that she knows of this message but allows the messenger to leave. Soon Ḥassān prepares to attack al-Kāhina, and in a third prophetic pronouncement she warns her people that the Arab army is approaching. She then turns to Khālid, tells him she adopted him so that he could represent her in negotiations with the invaders, and tells him to secure positions for her other two sons in the conquest army. He brings them to Ḥassān, who accepts al-Kāhina’s demands and places her eldest son in command of a Berber division. Ḥassān then attacks al-Kāhina’s forces, who are exterminated, and the site of al-Kāhina’s death is renamed Bi‘r al-Kāhina (al-Kāhina’s well).14

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As Abdelmajid Hannoum notes, Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s version of the al-Kāhina story draws on two interrelated Arabic historiographic myths, that of the civilising mission of Islam which justified the Muslim conquest of the West, and that of the Eastern origin of the Berbers, a myth that claimed Arabs and North African Berbers were related but depicted the latter as degenerate owing to their long residence in the West, a separation which also enabled the Arabs to receive the Prophetic message first.15 These myths served to facilitate Berber integration and assimilation into Arab Muslim culture by insisting on the two peoples’ shared origins while protecting Arab privilege. In addition, they created a space from which to contest the myth that the Muslim conquest was a divinely-inspired religious mission to disseminate the Prophetic message and not merely a human politi­ cal campaign to expand the Muslim empire and impose Arab rule on subjected peoples. Al-Kāhina’s unrelenting resistance to the Arab Muslim conquest, strengthened by her mystical knowledge of her inevitable defeat, challenges the conquerors’ claim to be motivated not by human interests but by divine mandate. Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam does not identify al-Kāhina’s religion, an omission worth analysing, given the truth value of her visions. In his text there is only one small clue as to her religion, found in her third prophetic utterance: ‘Not so, by my god (wa-ilāhy)’,16 an interjection that markedly deviates from the standard Arabic interjection wa-ḷḷāhi, ‘by God’, referring to the one true God worshipped by Muslims, Christians and Jews.17 This brief phrase wa-ilāhy implies that al-Kāhina is a pagan who worships a god other than God. Al-Kāhina’s religious identity has been subjected to a good deal of scholarly scrutiny. Ibn Khaldūn (d. 808 ah/1406 ce) identified her as a member of a Judaised Berber tribe, a claim rejected by Haim Z. Hirschberg and Norman Roth, while Benjamin Hendrickx argued she was probably Christianised and a Byzantine ally.18 What exactly constituted ‘Christian’, ‘Jewish’, ‘Muslim’ and ‘pagan’ identity in the early medieval Mediterranean basin is a complex issue, one far beyond the scope of this study.19 Far more relevant is the extent to which al-Kāhina’s gender and ethnic identity affect her religious identity in Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s text. His depiction of her can be read as highlighting several aspects of Berber traditional religion, such as her association with water and more broadly with fertility, traits she has in common with Tanit, the ancient African goddess worshipped by Phoenicians in Carthage, whose triangle symbol proliferates in medieval and modern Berber art.20 Her persona as mother to her people, whom she calls ‘my children’ (ya baniyya),21 ties her political and military roles to matriarchal rule, as does Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s use of a matronymic to identify her son, Ibn al-Kāhina.22 Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam makes no mention of a husband, past or present, only of her two sons whose paternity he does not discuss; unlike in some later accounts, these two sons both seem to be Berber.23 I will discuss below her adoption of the Arab soldier Khālid b. Yazīd; here I will merely point out that the adoption illustrates al-Kāhina’s control of her fertility and her family unit, integrating an outsider through an elective kinship tie, illustrating again the fact that motherhood is a key trait in Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s depiction of her and a means through which she exercises political power. To recap, al-Kāhina’s identity traits that Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam specifies most clearly are her Berber ethnicity, her gender, her role as queen of the Berbers (malika al-Barbar)24 which includes her military leadership, her being a mother, and, of course, her being a seer or priestess, ‘al-Kāhina’, emphasising her gift of divination or mysticism. Central to this entire portrait is her Berber identity, dependence on orality, and possible illiteracy,

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a trait she shares with many medieval Christian women mystics.25 A concrete sign of the difference between conquest-era Arabs and Berbers was the lack of a sacred text written in Berber, in contrast with the Arabic Holy Qur’ān. The determinate nature of her Berber identity, combined with her unspecified religious identity, would resonate with Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s audience, triggering an entire range of associations. While al-Kāhina’s identity traits do not necessarily mean that she must be pagan, they certainly serve to construct her as an exotic and potentially inscrutable Other, whose resistance to the Muslim conquest also makes her an enemy of the invaders and perhaps more generally of Islam. The vagueness as to her religious identity supports Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s strategy of depicting al-Kāhina as a figure of the pre-Islamic Berber past transcended through Islamisation and integration into the Arab Muslim polity. He attempts to relegate her to the past, so that her memory symbolises that which third-/ninth-century Berber Muslims have left behind. Al-Kāhina is able to contest Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s depiction of her thanks to her authority as a mystic who receives reliable messages from the divine.

Al-Kāhina’s Mysticism: Contesting Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s Depiction The very reliability of al-Kāhina’s visions means that they must come from the true God, pointing to her similarities with Islamic mystical practitioners. Prophecy is an important element of Islamic mysticism; many Friends of God and Ṣūfī acquired fame as prophets, including the well-guided caliph ‘Umar (died 23 ah/644 ce) whose piety and exemplary behaviour were exceptional, even among the Companions of the Prophet. Rābi‘a al-‘Adawiyya (c.95–185 ah/717–801 ce) is an exemplary Muslim woman mystic whose prophecies, wise sayings and miracles made her an important religious authority and teacher. Unlike al-Kāhina, Rābi‘a chose to be celibate so as to dedicate her life to religion; nonetheless, many Muslim mystics, men as well as women, including political and religious leaders such as ‘Umar, lived active lives of service to their community, married and had children. As Annemarie Schimmel has shown, many Muslim women mystics were mothers whose children, especially their sons, also became mystics: ‘most of the Islamic women saints were married and usually had a family.’26 Ṣūfī practice, like many medieval Christian mystical practices, prescribes prayer, asceticism, purgation, renunciation and repentance as steps in the path towards union with the divine. The ultimate renunciation is the willing acceptance of death as submission to divine will and the path to unification with God.27 While Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam provides no information about al-Kāhina’s ascetic practices, her willing acceptance of death in battle can be read as a spiritual act uniting her with God. That affirmative reading defies Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s implication that her death was the divinely ordained defeat of an enemy of Islam. The truthful nature of her mystical experiences challenges the political uses that Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam tries to make of al-Kāhina’s story. Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s depiction of al-Kāhina also impedes our understanding of her mysticism. The only access we have to al-Kāhina’s mystical experiences is through the language Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam uses to express that experience, that is, her pronouncements of the knowledge she has received mystically. I will analyse all of Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s direct citations of al-Kāhina’s speech to illustrate how her ambiguous language challenges his ideological use of her. Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam cites al-Kāhina’s

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prophetic statements three times, all in the context of Khālid’s communications with Ḥassān and the approach of the Arab forces. Those pronouncements reveal what is concealed in the present that create certain conditions in the future, although her knowledge seems to encompass both present and future. Her pronouncements are strategic, functioning to warn her people of their impending doom without revealing the full extent of her knowledge of future events; they are also obscured by her use of coded, ambiguous language, rhetorical strategies that mystify her pronouncements even as the central message of her people’s imminent death is clear. The sequence of these three pronouncements establishes a pattern that is predictable and culminates shortly before the moment of crisis: the inevitable death of al-Kāhina and her people, inevitable because destined, but also because they consciously choose death over life as subjected peoples within the Islamic empire. Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s wording does not enable us to determine the precise form of al-Kāhina’s communications with the divine. The context suggests they are mostly visual as she reveals what is hidden in plain sight, the two written messages Khālid conceals in a loaf of bread and in a saddlebow, and the approach of the army, indicated by the cloud of dust raised by their horses. She verbalises those messages, presumably in colloquial Berber, even as Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam cites them in Arabic. Al-Kāhina’s speeches highlight impending doom: ‘O my children [ya baniyya], your death [halākakum, your total loss, ruin, destruction; perdition, eternal damnation] is in that which people eat [bread],’ and ‘O my children, your death is in something that grew in the dead ground [ya baniyya, halākakum fy shai’ min nabāta al-ard mayyit]’28 (the wooden saddlebow). These statements are enigmatic, riddle-like, deploying metaphor to heighten the irony that ‘death’, namely the hidden missives Khālid sends Ḥassān, is paired with ‘life’ in the form of bread and wood, statements that also portray the impending crisis as ambivalent, both death and life, rupture and continuity. Most interestingly, al-Kāhina does not intercept these communications but allows the messenger who moves between Ḥassān and Khālid to leave her settlement. What may look like passive inaction belies the strategic nature of al-Kāhina’s pronouncements. She acts like a vigilant mother, advising her children, a group that includes Khālid, her adopted Arab son, to enable them to prepare to face death bravely and with full consciousness of the inevitable outcome of their battle with the Arab Muslim army. The displaced confrontation between al-Kāhina and Ḥassān, enacted as a linguistic conflict between male-authored written Arabic and Berber spoken word performances, mediated through Khālid and the unnamed messenger, is transmitted to us from the perspective of an Arabic speaking third-person narrator who identifies with the Muslim forces yet also acknowledges the heroism of the divinely inspired al-Kāhina. While the performative aspect of al-Kāhina’s speech acts is obvious, Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam does not describe her demeanour until her third pronouncement: ‘Al-Kāhina came forth with her loosened hair streaming [nāshra, disordered, spread out] and cried, “Look, my children! What do you see in the sky?” “We see something like a reddish cloud.” “Not so, by my god, it is the dust of the Arab horsemen!”’29 Al-Kāhina’s striking appearance indexes the moment of crisis and the depth of her fear and horror, as well as, potentially, the painful nature of this mystical experience, which seems to be her last. Here she engages in dialogue with her ‘children’ who cannot accurately read the signs of their approaching extermination. The variation in the third pronouncement is formulaic, underlining its finality, yet also serves to distinguish between her collective and

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childlike interlocutors and the authoritative wise woman who informs and guides them. The dialogue with her people is truncated, as their reaction to her words is not narrated; rather, this brief exchange is the preamble to al-Kāhina’s more complete dialogue with Khālid, to negotiate on behalf of her two Berber sons. Al-Kāhina’s distressed appearance at the first sign of the Arab army’s approach is strategic and not simply a reflection of her inner experience as a mystic; her tragic demeanour is a power play, communicating both to her ‘children’ and Khālid the import of the next few moments, which will determine everyone’s fate. The fact that al-Kāhina acts at this moment points to the contingency of the future; while her visions reflect divine will, in early Islamic historiography, God requires human actors to realise his will, and by doing so, become instruments of God. In this case, both al-Kāhina and the Arab invaders must act to achieve a certain outcome. While the Muslim victory may be inevitable, that does not deprive al-Kāhina and her people of their agency. Al-Kāhina uses her knowledge of the future both to prepare her people for death (should they choose to follow her into battle against the invaders) and to negotiate with the future rulers of Ifrīqīya on behalf of her sons. Al-Kāhina’s words to Khālid reveal the extent of her knowledge and control of the situation. It is here, perhaps even more than in her three prophetic announcements, that her true power manifests itself, in her foresight, strategic behaviour and lengthy preparations for this moment. ‘“It was in preparation for such a day as this that I made you my son. My death is now at hand, and I charge you to take good care of these two brothers of yours.”’30 These words underline the importance of the kinship tie she created between Khālid and her two sons when she adopted him (tabannat-hu, she adopted him as her son).31 Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam omits details such as Khālid’s age (he is probably a grown man given that he is a soldier in the invasion army) and the means that al-Kāhina used to adopt him. She may have done so through a colactation ceremony of some sort involving the bodily presence of al-Kāhina and her milk, whether literally her own breast milk or animal milk, drunk by Khālid, a symbolic act of suckling that established a uterine kinship tie with her own sons.32 Notably, the colonial-period colactation ceremonies described by Marie-Luce Gélard were presided over by men, whereas Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam uses the third-person feminine singular form, tabannat, calling attention to al-Kāhina’s subjectivity in her adoption of Khālid and gendering that act as feminine. Khālid’s agency is expressed in the third-person singular masculine aqama ma‘hā, he stayed/dwelt/lived with her, indicating his active consent to becoming her son and joining her family unit. While the ceremony used was probably Berber, colactation was also practised by Arab tribes, and so was a shared elective kinship practice, facilitating al-Kāhina’s attempt to create a multi-ethnic family in order to bridge the gap between Berbers and Arabs.33 As her brief speech reveals, al-Kāhina, fully aware of the future, brought Khālid into her family in order to employ him to serve her own interests precisely at this juncture. Another detail omitted from Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s account is the language that al-Kāhina and Khālid speak with each other. While Arabs and Berbers may have a common though long-distant origin and shared kinship practices, their languages are not mutually intelligible; the very term ‘Berber’ indicates that, from an Arab point of view, the Berbers babble or speak gibberish.34 Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam mentions neither the Arabisation of the local peoples during the brief Muslim occupation that ended with ‘Uqba’s death, nor the Berberisation of Khālid during his residence with al-Kāhina.

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Nonetheless, transculturation is yet another factor that explains why al-Kāhina adopted Khālid: to give this elite Arab first-hand knowledge of Berber culture and individual Berbers within her extended family unit, that of her followers, who came from various tribes. That knowledge enables Khālid now to speak on behalf of al-Kāhina to the head of the invaders, Ḥassān, in the conquerors’ language, Arabic, the same language in which Khālid wrote his reports on al-Kāhina’s forces. While Ḥassān’s use of Khālid as a spy seemed to require that he betray his adoptive family, in fact al-Kāhina needed him to communicate with Ḥassān in order to establish his role as intermediary between the two commanders, so that she could use him as her messenger at this moment. What may have looked like Khālid’s excessive loyalty to his Arab commander, a substitute father figure who offsets the powerful maternal figure of al-Kāhina, turns out to be much more complicated than simple triangulation or homosocial ethnic bonds privileged over uterine kinship ties with his adopted Berber family. Positioned between his Arab commander and his Berber mother, Khālid expresses doubt as to the chances of his successfully persuading Ḥassān to comply with al-Kāhina’s request to integrate her sons into the conquest army. When Khālid replies that he fears her sons will be killed, she replies, ‘They will survive, and one of them will stand in a higher place among the Arabs than he occupies now.’35 Al-Kāhina’s knowledge of the future enables her to coerce Khālid and through him, Ḥassān, as the picture she portrays of a Muslim victory incentivises them to accept her proposal on behalf of her sons, whom they allow into the invasion forces. Ḥassān even appoints her elder son commander of a Berber contingent in his army, just as al-Kāhina predicted. As Hannoum observes, it is not clear if this eldest son is the same Ibn al-Kāhina who attacked and killed ‘Uqba b. Nāfi‘ and forced the Muslim commanders to abandon Qayrawān some ten years before these events.36 If so, then this negotiated pact acknowledges the reality that often the Muslim conquerors met resistance only to later establish their dominion through a negotiated pact that allowed the local rulers rights within the new regime, usually including retention of their property and often their authority over the local inhabitants.37 Notably, ethnicity guides Ḥassān’s accommodation of al-Kāhina’s son, placing him in command of Berber troops already integrated into the conquest army, effectively allowing him to retain the authority he already exercised as the son of a warrior queen. This is not, however, the end of al-Kāhina’s story. Despite having negotiated a settlement with Ḥassān on behalf of her sons, she and her followers continue to resist the invaders. Ḥassān leads his forces in battle against al-Kāhina and her people, who die heroically, as she predicted. It is not clear if that invasion force includes her own sons. What is more important is al-Kāhina’s choice and that of her followers to die in battle rather than to live as subjugated people under Arab Muslim rule. The site of al-Kāhina’s death, Bi’r al-Kāhina, ‘al-Kāhina’s well’, is inscribed on the landscape, preserving the memory of her heroic death. This sequence of events raises the question as to who controls the outcome, the Muslim invaders who do finally manage to conquer Ifrīqīya, or al-Kāhina, the local mystical queen, mother and war leader whose bravery and clear- sightedness enable her to ensure both that she and her people die heroically, persisting in their resistance to the invaders with full awareness of the inevitable outcome, and also that her sons integrate into the new regime as respected military commanders, perpetuating her legacy.38 These mixed results illustrate the interplay between rupture and continuity that pervades the entire episode of al-Kāhina, portraying her as a key

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transitional figure that mediates between the pre-Islamic past and Islamic present. It also points to the ambivalent significance of her death: to what extent is Bi’r al-Kāhina a monument to the Muslim victory and to what extent does it commemorate the extraordinary heroism and bravery of the Berber peoples in the face of the Arab Muslim conquest? Of course, the significance of al-Kāhina’s death depends upon the identity and affiliations of the person who contemplates it.

Al-Kāhina Compared: Four Local Women Rulers and a Mystical Muslim Conqueror Despite his predominantly hostile stance towards al-Kāhina, a distinct advantage of Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s text is its encyclopaedic nature, as he includes many historical actors whose examples help contextualise his treatment of al-Kāhina. Her similarities with five characters in particular are worthy of analysis, four of whom are female, one of whom is male and an important Muslim conqueror to boot. Of the female characters, the one most similar to al-Kāhina is Dalūka bint Zabbā’, a 160-year-old woman who assumed rule of the ancient Egyptians who survived God’s extermination of Pharaoh and his troops, effectively eliminating the Egyptian ruling class. As Petra M. Sijpesteijn shows, Dalūka is an important transitional figure who mediates between the ancient Pharaonic Egypt that rejected God’s prophet Mūsā/Moses and the Coptic Egypt that was eventually occupied by another Islamic prophet, Ḏū al-Qarnayn/Alexander the Great. Not only does Dalūka build great defensive walls, the ruins of which were still visible in Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s day, but she engineers a breeding strategy, marrying the surviving noble women to their manumitted slaves to produce a new hybrid people, the Copts, who constituted the greatest proportion of the Egyptian population in the third/ninth century. Dalūka rules for twenty years, until a Copt male ruler is able to assume control of this new Egypt.39 The similarities between Dalūka and al-Kāhina are striking: both are older, post-menopausal wise women who assume the rule of their people at a moment of crisis and engineer their transition into a new era, that of post-Pharaonic Egypt or Islamic Ifrīqīya. Both assume maternal roles in their ruling practices, producing hybrid children, Dalūka’s Copts and al-Kāhina’s Berberised Arab son Khālid and Islamised Berber sons. Most importantly, their progeny are able to be Islamised and integrated into the Arab Muslim polity as a consequence of the Muslim conquest. Finally, both women leave monuments to themselves in the landscape, objects and place names that testify to their key role as transitional women rulers who eventually cede to male rulers. As temporary female rulers, they do not create a matriarchy but instead act to preserve and, in the case of Dalūka, to restore the patriarchy put in crisis by Pharaoh’s defiance of divine will. Al-Kāhina is also strikingly similar to three other local women rulers whose stories Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam recounts. All three are daughters of pre-Islamic local rulers who resist the Muslim invaders. The first one is also located in Ifrīqīya, the unnamed daughter of Jurjīr (the defeated Byzantine governor Gregory who had established a semi-independent reign in North Africa). Taken captive in the battle in which her father lost his life, Jurjīr’s daughter is given to a noble Arab as part of his share of the spoils of war. He recites a mocking poem to her, depicting her future as a slave serving his noble Arab wife, and Jurjīr’s daughter throws herself from the camel on which she is mounted, killing herself

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rather than live as a slave.40 Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam does not say that her Muslim owner raped her. However, immediately after telling her story, Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam introduces a word play that links iftaḥa, to open, to conquer, with ifra‘a, to deflower,41 likening the conquest of Ifrīqīya, a territory with a notably feminine name, to rape, glorifying masculine violence against non-Arab Muslims, especially local elite women. Jurjīr’s daughter wilfully chooses death over life as a subjugated woman and sexual slave, and by doing so models heroic female resistance, an example that al-Kāhina imitates in her wilful embrace of death over life as a subjugated subject. The other two local female rulers also function as transitional figures who mediate between the pre-Islamic ruling class and the Muslim conquerors. The story of King Roderic’s rape of Count Julian’s daughter is widely known; Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam provides the earliest surviving account of this story.42 In his version, Yulīyān [Julian] sends his unnamed daughter to reside in Ṭulayṭula [Toledo] at the court of Luḏrīq [Rodric], where Luḏrīq impregnates her (fa-aḥbala-hā).43 In order to avenge himself, Yulīyān allies with the Muslim commander Ṭāriq b. Ziyād and helps him invade Hispania. Luḏrīq’s rape of Yulīyān’s daughter is an inappropriate use of sexual violence against an in-group woman, in contrast with what is seen as the appropriate rape of out-group women such as Jurjīr’s daughter. Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam uses the story of Yulīyān’s daughter to explain why the Muslims crossed the Strait and invaded Hispania, constructing that act as a just regime change that expanded Islam and liberated a population subjected to a tyrannical ruler. Al-Kāhina avoids rape by choosing death over defeat, and her advanced age might protect her from sexual assault, unlike the nubile daughters of Jurjīr and Yulīyān; the fact that she is named for her individual qualities as a mystic, rather than being remembered as a ruler’s daughter, certainly puts her into a different category than the two younger nameless women. Her making Khālid her son rather than her sex partner also enables al-Kāhina to assume power over him as a mother figure. Consensual sexual relations across religious and ethnic lines are depicted negatively in Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s account of the fourth local female ruler, Luḏrīq’s unnamed daughter, who marries ‘Abd al-‘Azīz, the son of Mūsā b. Nuṣayr, the conqueror of Iberia. Mūsā appointed his son governor of al-Andalus before returning to Damascus, and his marriage to Luḏrīq’s daughter is presented as one of convenience, as she brought him great wealth and helped legitimise his rule by providing continuity with the previous regime. However, according to Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam, she encouraged her Arab Muslim husband to adopt Visigothic court protocol by requiring his subjects to bow before him when entering the throne room. ‘Abd al-‘Azīz had the door leading into the throne room lowered so that anyone entering must bow as they passed through it. When his wife saw this, she commented that now, ‘You have the power of a king [qawiyya mulkuk].’44 However, soon the rumour spread that he had secretly converted to Christianity out of love for his wife, and two prominent Arabs assassinated him. In this case, while Luḏrīq’s daughter clearly functioned as a transitional figure mediating between the Visigothic and the Arab Muslim regimes, she was viewed with suspicion for exerting too much influence over her uxorious husband, whose accommodations inverted appropriate religious, ethnic and gender hierarchies, and threatened the superiority of the conquerors over the conquered.45 Al-Kāhina’s overt exercise of power over Khālid, her adopted Arab son, who voluntarily lives with her and must adopt some Berber practices due to his close contact with

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her, may have sparked similar concerns in Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s audience. Those fears may have been allayed by Khālid’s loyalty to Ḥassān, al-Kāhina’s insistence that her two other sons join the conquest army, and her death, which removes the powerful woman warrior from the political scene, so that she can no longer contest patriarchal rule, be it Berber or Arab. That al-Kāhina dies violently in battle against the Muslim conquest force increases the similarities between her violent end and that of Jurjīr’s daughter, a captive who committed suicide to escape sexual slavery, a fate imposed upon her owing to her gender. The four examples of local female rulers discussed here suggest that, for Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam, the normal fate of nubile subject women is integration into conqueror society through marriage or slavery. The very few older female rulers mentioned in his text play a maternal role to hybrid sons whom they prepare to assume a leadership role within the new dominant order. These women, Dalūka and al-Kāhina, may be worthy of memory precisely because their objective as rulers is to facilitate their people’s transition into a new era. Notably, none of the four local female rulers discussed above are mystics. The ruler who possesses mystical power most similar to that of al-Kāhina is a Muslim conqueror, ‘Uqba b. Nāfi‘, the invader killed by Ibn al-Kāhina. Admittedly, ‘Uqba does not seem to have knowledge of the future, which is the most notable aspect of al-Kāhina’s mysticism. He is, however, a miracle worker who finds sweet water in the desert and magically drives snakes and other wild beasts away from the site upon which he builds the fortress city of Qayrawān, making him a fertility figure. Al-Kāhina is also associated with water; the two places where Ḥassān engages her in battle are near water, the first beside a river called Nahr al-Balā’, the second at Bi’r al-Kāhina, al-Kāhina’s well. Moreover, Ibn al-Kāhina challenges ‘Uqba’s fertility by filling in the water holes he had dug along his campaign route to the Atlantic Ocean; ‘Uqba’s inability to locate sweet water on his return route toward Qayrawān foreshadows his impending death. In fact, both ‘Uqba and al-Kāhina are figures of death as well as fertility figures. ‘Uqba cruelly tortures local Berber kings who had submitted to him as well as rival Muslim officers, aberrant behaviour that sparks Berber resistance to him and ultimately causes his death.46 Al-Kāhina figuratively assumes the mask of death in her prophetic pronouncements of doom to her ‘children’, a persona that fuses her roles as fertile mother and agent of death. Both ‘Uqba and al-Kāhina die heroically in battle along with their troops, ‘Uqba as a martyr since his enemies are non-Muslims. The fact that al-Kāhina is killed by Muslims does not mean that she is not a martyr, since she dies bravely resisting a foreign occupying force motivated at least as much by human political interests as by religious fervour. The complex significance of al-Kāhina’s death lies precisely in the nature of the invaders’ motivation.

Al-Kāhina, the Muslim Mystic As a reliable mystic, a prophetess who receives truthful information through contact with the divine, al-Kāhina must be in contact with the one true God, who favours her by communicating authoritative knowledge to her. This means that, whatever her religious identity, she is always already Muslim, as is evident in her desire to integrate her sons into the Muslim army, positions that require them to convert to Islam. Moreover, her

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voluntary acceptance of and submission to divine will is the very definition of Islam (‘submission’).47 While Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam is vague as to al-Kāhina’s religion, crucially, her opposition to the invaders is political, not religious. Her continued, unrelenting resistance, despite her knowledge of divine will and the inevitability of her death, expresses her political will and awareness that, while destined to triumph, the Muslim invaders do not act with the sole intention of realising divine will. ‘Uqba’s unnecessary, un-Islamic, arrogantly cruel treatment of Berber kings who had negotiated peace treaties with him points to the problem of Arab pride and sense of ethnic superiority that licensed their abusive treatment of subjected peoples.48 Arab discrimination against Berber Muslims contradicted the Islamic principle of the equality of all Muslims, resulting in unjust treatment of non-Arab Muslims. The Berber rebellions that began in 122 ah/740 ce used Islam to justify their resistance to Arab rule and effectively enabled them to regain independence from the Umayyad and ‘Abbasīd caliphates. Local Berbers supported Arab dissenters who claimed descent from Muḥammad; the two groups intermarried, creating hybrid Berber Arab descendants of the Prophet who drew on Shī‘a principles to resist Arab Sunnī rule.49 The current use of al-Kāhina as a symbol of Amazigh identity, to resist Algerian assertions of Arab national identity in post-colonial North Africa, mirrors the problematic ethnic relations that prevailed at the time of the Muslim conquest of Ifrīqīya and the Maghreb.50 The story of how al-Kāhina acts on her mystical knowledge to both resist and accommodate the conquerors, negotiating an agreement with them that integrates her sons into the Islamic hierarchy and then dying in battle, is fundamentally ambiguous. Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam uses his account to assert the inferiority of pagan Berbers led by a prophetic woman warrior who ultimately fails to halt the Islamic expansion. His story attempts to violently impose religious, ethnic and gender norms on conquered territories, symbolised by al-Kāhina’s dead body, a relic of the past. However, if his account is read against the grain, we can appreciate the heroic strength of this wise woman mystic who successfully leads her people against the invaders, enabling them to negotiate a treaty that accommodates both the local inhabitants and the invaders, before embracing a martyr’s death in battle. From this point of view, al-Kāhina is a great woman whose memory is preserved by the North African landscape. Al-Kāhina’s voice is the key that unlocks this resistant reading. Every time Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam cites her, she is speaking the truthful knowledge she acquired mystically and acting on that knowledge to shape events in order to obtain the best possible outcome for her people. Like so many medieval women mystics, al-Kāhina’s visions gave her a voice and the power to intercede in the world around her. By citing her voice in his history, Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam perpetuates the memory of al-Kāhina as a figure of resistance. The fact that al-Kāhina is able to renegotiate her role in his text points to the power that resides in her voice, her words, her acts and her mysticism, the qualities that make her an exemplary medieval woman visionary.

Notes 1

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ah, or Anno Hegirae, is the Islamic dating system that begins with the Hijra or the migration of Muḥammad and his followers from Mecca to Yathrib, renamed Medina in 622 ce, the event that initiated the establishment of the first Islamic community. The Islamic lunar year contains

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354 days and so does not correspond with the Gregorian solar year. I use ah in order to mark the Islamic nature of the sources analysed here, as well as ce, to make the dates more comprehensible for a Western audience. Al-Kāhina is not a personal name but the term used to refer to her in Arabic historiography. Often translated to English as ‘the sorceress’ or ‘the priestess’, I prefer the equivalence suggested by Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, The Berber Identity Movement and the Challenge to North African States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), p.  23, which emphasises her mysticism. Ibn Khaldūn is the earliest source that provides a personal name for her, Dihya; Abdelmajid Hannoum, Colonial Histories, Post-Colonial Memories: The Legend of the Kāhina, a North African Heroine (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001), pp. 18–19. ‘Amazigh’ is the term preferred by the Amazigh identity movement; it is an indigenous word, in contrast with ‘Berber’, a word imposed by Arab Muslim conquerors, based on Greek and Latin words for barbarians. Nonetheless ‘Berber’ is often used in scholarly discussions of the Amazighen. See Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress, The Berbers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 5–7, and Maddy-Weitzman, Berber Identity, pp. 2–4. For an overview of additional medieval versions of al-Kāhina’s story, see Hannoum, Colonial Histories, pp. 2–23, and Norman Roth, ‘The Kāhina: Legendary Material in the Accounts of the Jewish Berber Queen’, The Maghreb Review, 7 (1982), 122–5. While most scholarly and popular attention has been paid to Ibn Khaldūn’s eighth-/fourteenth-century version, Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s earlier account is productively selective, omitting such details as al-Kāhina’s religious identity, which makes it more suggestive. See Barbara Zimbalist, ‘Gender, Genre and Collaboration in the Life of Ida of Nivelles’, in this volume for a similar analysis of how the many citations of her speech enable Ida of Nivelles to co-author her Vita. Early Islamic historiography is composed of fragmentary notices (stories, anecdotes) or akhbār attributed to recognised authorities; often the chain of transmitters (isnād) from the original source to the present author is included, and the notices are highly oral. This orality is increased by the verbatim citation of characters’ words and dialogues, so that any one story includes many voices within it. A good introduction to Islamic historiography is Chase F. Robinson, Islamic Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Hannoum discusses the idea that the Muslim conquest was a divinely guided civilising mission (Colonial Histories, pp. 1–9). Elizabeth Petroff, ‘Medieval Women Visionaries: Seven Stages to Power’, Frontiers, 3 (1978), 35. Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff (ed.), Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 3–53; Petroff, ‘Women and Mysticism in the Medieval World’, in her Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 3–24, and ‘Male Confessors and Female Penitents: Possibilities for Dialogue’, Body and Soul, pp. 139–60. I discuss Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s socio-historical context in Denise K. Filios, ‘A Good Story Well Told: Memory, Identity, and the Conquest of Iberia’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, 6 (2014), 129–30 and 133–5. The reliability of early Islamic historiography is subject to intense scholarly debate; for an overview of this debate, see Fred M. Donner, ‘Modern Approaches to Early Islamic History’, in Chase F. Robinson (ed.), The New Cambridge History of Islam, 1: The Formation of the Islamic World, Sixth to Eleventh Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 625–47. The mythical elements of the al-Kāhina legend are discussed by Hannoum, Colonial Histories, pp. 1–23; Roth, ‘The Kāhina’; Brett and Fentress, Berbers, pp. 84–5; and Maddy-Weitzman, Berber Identity, pp. 23–4. Benjamin Hendrickx, ‘Al-Kāhina: The Last Ally of the Roman-Byzantines in the Maghreb against the Muslim Arab Conquest?’, Journal of Early Christian History, 3/2 (2013), 47–61, considers her historical impact. See also Noureddine Sabri, La Kahéna: Un mythe à l’image du Maghreb (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011), pp. 21–32. Traditionally al-Kāhina is associated with the Aurès Mountains in north-eastern Algeria and so would have spoken the dialect of that region. On conquest-era Berber language, see Brett and Fentress, Berbers, pp. 1–7, and Maddy-Weitzman, Berber Identity, pp. 17–24; for Berber–Arabic

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linguistic relations in North Africa, see Fatima Sadiqi, ‘Berber Women’s Oral Knowledge’, in Fatima Sadiqi (ed.), Women and Knowledge in the Mediterranean (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 108–23. On Umayyad-era linguistic policy, see Chase F. Robinson, ‘Abd al-Malik (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005), pp. 106–27; Brett and Fentress, Berbers, pp. 120–35, discuss the Arabisation of North Africa. On orality in Islam, see Ahmed E. Souaiaia, Function of Orality in Islamic Law and Practices: Verbalizing Meaning (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006). In this summary, I rationalise and supplement Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s version with dates and contextualised information to make it more comprehensible. Muslim treatment of the North African indigenous peoples at the time of the conquest made them conscious of their shared interests and cultures and led them to band together against the invaders, forming a cohesive group of Berber/Amazigh. Brett and Fentress, Berbers, pp. 81–3. The story of al-Kāhina is found in Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam, The History of the Conquest of Egypt, North Africa and Spain, Known as the Futūḥ Miṣr of Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam, ed. Charles C. Torrey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922), p.  200, line  14–p.  201, line  14. This section is available in English translation in Charles C. Torrey, ‘The Mohammedan Conquest of Egypt and North Africa in the Years 643 to 705 A.D.’, in Biblical and Semitic Studies: Critical and Historical Essays by the Members of the Semitic and Biblical Faculty of Yale University (New York: Scribner, 1901), pp. 325–7. As I discuss below, it is not clear if al-Kāhina’s sons participated in the attack on their mother’s forces. Hannoum, Colonial Histories, pp. 2–9. Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam, History, p. 201, line 8; trans. Torrey, ‘Mohammedan Conquest’, p. 326 (slightly modified), emphasis mine. A good, accessible introduction to Islamic doctrine and history is Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History (London: Orion, 2000). Despite Armstrong’s tendency to use ‘Allah’ when discussing the Islamic God, nonetheless the three monotheistic religions worship the same God. Haim Z. Hirschberg, ‘The Problem of the Judaized Berbers’, The Journal of African History, 4 (1963), 313–39; Roth, ‘The Kāhina’; and Hendrickx, ‘Al-Kāhina’. According to Brett and Fentress, Berbers, pp. 81–3, most conquest-era Berbers were pagan, but many who lived within the former Roman Empire were Christian. Scholars of early medieval religion generally agree that membership in a religious community was determined by practices and group affiliation rather than by beliefs, so that conversion was a process of acculturation more than of doctrinal education, and the boundaries between religions were porous and often blurred. See John Jeffries Martin, ‘Crossing Religious Boundaries in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 41/3 (2011), 459–62. Cynthia Becker, ‘Matriarchal Nomads and Freedom Fighters: Transnational Amazigh Consciousness and Moroccan, Algerian, and Nigerian Artists’, Critical Interventions, 3 (2009), 73; Sadiqi, ‘Berber Women’s Oral Knowledge’, pp. 111. Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam, History, p. 201, lines 1, 5 and 8. On matriarchal or matrilineal structures in Berber society, see Becker, ‘Matriarchal Nomads’; Brett and Fentress, Berbers, pp. 208–17; and Marie-Luce Gélard, ‘Representations of Kinship: Agnatic Ideology and Uterine Values in a Berber-Speaking Tribe (Southeast Morocco)’, Anthropos, 99 (2004), 565–72. A few Arabs preferred matronymics over the customary patronymic, usually for strategic reasons; see Denise K. Filios, ‘Playing the Goth Card in Tenth-Century Córdoba: Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s Family Traditions’, La corónica, 43 (2015), 57–84. The eighth-/fourteenth-century historian Ibn ‘Iḏarī is the first writer to claim that al-Kāḥina’s two sons were born to two different fathers, one a Byzantine, the other a Berber, so that her three sons (including her adopted Arab son) represented the three ethnic groups struggling for hegemony in North Africa. Roth, ‘The Kāhina’, 123. Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam, History, p. 200, line 14. Al-Kāhina shares these traits with many medieval Christian women mystics; Petroff, ‘Medieval Women Visionaries’, p. 34. See also Sadiqi, ‘Berber Women’s Oral Knowledge’, pp. 113–14.

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Similarities between al-Kāhina and Joan of Arc have caused the former to be labelled ‘an African Joan of Arc’: both female mystics became military leaders resisting invasion and were ultimately killed by the invaders. See Hannoum’s critique of a colonial-period French account, Une Jeanne d’Arc Africaine, as justifying the French conquest of Algeria; Colonial Histories, pp. 47–9; see also Sabri, La Kahéna, pp. 63–97. Annemarie Schimmel, ‘Women in Mystical Islam’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 5 (1982), 150. Margaret Smith, Muslim Women Mystics. The Life and Work of Rābi‘a and other Women Mystics in Islam (Oxford: One World, 2001), especially pp. 98–109; John Renard, Friends of God: Islamic Images of Piety, Commitment, and Servanthood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), especially pp. 67–89; and Schimmel, ‘Women in Mystical Islam’. Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam, History, p. 201, lines 2 and 5; trans. Torrey, ‘Mohammedan Conquest’, p. 326 (slightly modified). The apocalyptic import of halākakum implies her people will suffer eternal damnation; this connotation reflects Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam’s Arab Muslim view of al-Kāhina’s resistance. Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam, History, p. 201, line 8; trans. Torrey, ‘Mohammedan Conquest’, p. 326 (slightly modified). Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam, History, p. 201, lines 8–9; trans. Torrey, ‘Mohammedan Conquest’, p. 326 (slightly modified). Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam, History, p. 200, line 20, my translation. Another detail omitted by Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam is al-Kāhina’s age, but her being the mother of a son who was a mature warrior and had killed ‘Uqba some ten years before her confrontation with Ḥassān means she must be post-menopausal. According to some later writers, she was immensely old when she died, as much as 120 years, the age of Moses when he died, according to Jewish tradition; Roth, ‘The Kāhina’, 124. Gélard, ‘Representations of Kinship’; Roth, ‘The Kāhina’, 124, discusses Ibn ‘Iḏarī’s description of the colactation ceremony used by al-Kāhina. See note 10 above. Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam, History, p. 201, lines 10–11; trans. Torrey, ‘Mohammedan Conquest’, p. 327 (slightly modified). Hannoum, Colonial History, p. 6. Early Islamic historiography often downplays the number of pacts the invaders established with local peoples, since such agreements limited the conquerors’ ability to take possession of land; lands taken through violent conquest fully belonged to the conquerors. Eduardo Manzano Moreno, Conquistadores, emires y califas. Los Omeyas y la formación de al-Andalus (Barcelona: Crítica, 2006), pp. 35–42. Al-Kāhina’s heroic behaviour mirrors that of other mothers in African traditional narratives and epics; Joseph Mbele, ‘Women in the African Epic’, Research in African Literatures, 37/2 (Summer 2006), 61–7. See also Mohamed Talbi, ‘Un nouveau fragment de l’histoire de l’Occident musulman (62–196/682–812). L’épopée d’al-Kāhina’, Cahiers de Tunisie, 19 (1971), 19–52. Petra M. Sijpesteijn, ‘Building an Egyptian Identity’, in Asad Q. Ahmed, Behnam Sadeghi and Michael Bonner (eds), Islamic Scholarly Tradition: Studies in History, Law and Thought in Honor of Professor Michael Alan Cook (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 85–105; Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam, History, p. 27, line 11–p. 28, line 8. On al-Kāhina’s age, see note 32 above. Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam, History, p. 184, line 9–p. 185, line 4. Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam, History, p. 185, lines 5–6. A good overview of this legend is Patricia E. Grieve, The Eve of Spain: Myths of Origins in the History of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam, History, p. 205, line 13. Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam, History, p. 211, line 22–p. 212, line 7. Janina M. Safran, ‘Identity and Differentiation in Ninth-Century al-Andalus,’ Speculum, 76 (2001), 573–98.

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47 48

49 50

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‘Uqba is informed several times of prophecies that he will die in battle; Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam, History, pp. 194–9. Armstrong, Islam, p. 5. As Brett and Fentress note, ‘Uqba’s behaviour ‘epitomized the Arabs’ vision of themselves as a chosen people and of the rest of humanity as folk to be conquered and subjected’ (Berbers, p. 82). Brett and Fentress, Berbers, pp. 87–116; Maddy-Weitzman, Berber Identity, pp. 21–32. Hannoum, Colonial Histories, pp. 111–83; Sabri, La Kahéna, pp. 155–256; Maddy-Weitzman, Berber Identity, pp. 195–7.

Works Cited Armstrong, Karen, Islam: A Short History (London: Orion, 2000). Becker, Cynthia, ‘Matriarchal Nomads and Freedom Fighters: Transnational Amazigh Consciousness and Moroccan, Algerian, and Nigerian Artists’, Critical Interventions, 3 (2009), 70–101. Brett, Michael and Elizabeth Fentress, The Berbers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Donner, Fred M., ‘Modern Approaches to Early Islamic History’, in Chase F. Robinson (ed.), The New Cambridge History of Islam, 1: The Formation of the Islamic World, Sixth to Eleventh Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 625–47. Filios, Denise K., ‘A Good Story Well Told: Memory, Identity, and the Conquest of Iberia’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, 6 (2014), 124–47. Filios, Denise K., ‘Playing the Goth Card in Tenth-Century Córdoba: Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s Family Traditions’, La corónica, 43 (2015), 57–84. Gélard, Marie-Luce, ‘Representations of Kinship: Agnatic Ideology and Uterine Values in a Berber-Speaking Tribe (Southeast Morocco)’, Anthropos, 99 (2004), 565–72. Grieve, Patricia E., The Eve of Spain: Myths of Origins in the History of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). Hannoum, Abdelmajid, Colonial Histories, Post-Colonial Memories: The Legend of the Kāhina, a North African Heroine (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001). Hendrickx, Benjamin, ‘Al-Kāhina: The Last Ally of the Roman-Byzantines in the Maghreb against the Muslim Arab Conquest?’, Journal of Early Christian History, 3/2 (2013), 47–61. Hirschberg, Haim Z. (J. W.), ‘The Problem of the Judaized Berbers’, The Journal of African History, 4 (1963), 313–39. Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam, The History of the Conquest of Egypt, North Africa and Spain, Known as the Futūḥ Miṣr of Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam, ed. Charles C. Torrey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922). Maddy-Weitzman, Bruce, The Berber Identity Movement and the Challenge to North African States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). Manzano Moreno, Eduardo, Conquistadores, emires y califas. Los Omeyas y la formación de al-Andalus (Barcelona: Crítica, 2006). Martin, John Jeffries, ‘Crossing Religious Boundaries in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 41/3 (2011), 459–62. Mbele, Joseph, ‘Women in the African Epic’, Research in African Literatures, 37/2 (Summer 2006), 61–7.

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Petroff, Elizabeth A., ‘Male Confessors and Female Penitents: Possibilities for Dialogue’, in Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 139–60. Petroff, Elizabeth A., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Petroff, Elizabeth A., ‘Medieval Women Visionaries: Seven Stages to Power’, Frontiers, 3 (1978), 34–45. Petroff, Elizabeth A., ‘Women and Mysticism in the Medieval World’, in Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 3–24. Renard, John, Friends of God: Islamic Images of Piety, Commitment, and Servanthood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). Robinson, Chase F., ‘Abd al-Malik (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005). Robinson, Chase F., Islamic Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Roth, Norman, ‘The Kāhina: Legendary Material in the Accounts of the Jewish Berber Queen’, The Maghreb Review, 7 (1982), 122–5. Sabri, Noureddine, La Kahéna: Un mythe à l’image du Maghreb (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011). Sadiqi, Fatima, ‘Berber Women’s Oral Knowledge’, in Fatima Sadiqi (ed.), Women and Knowledge in the Mediterranean (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 108–23. Safran, Janina M, ‘Identity and Differentiation in Ninth-Century al-Andalus’, Speculum, 76 (2001), 573–98. Schimmel, Annemarie, ‘Women in Mystical Islam’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 5 (1982), 145–51. Sijpesteijn, Petra M., ‘Building an Egyptian Identity’, in Asad Q. Ahmed, Behnam Sadeghi and Michael Bonner (eds), Islamic Scholarly Tradition: Studies in History, Law and Thought in Honor of Professor Michael Alan Cook (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 85–105. Smith, Margaret, Muslim Women Mystics. The Life and Work of Rābi‘a and Other Women Mystics in Islam (Oxford: One World, 2001). Souaiaia, Ahmed E., The Function of Orality in Islamic Law and Practices: Verbalizing Meaning (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006). Talbi, Mohamed, ‘Un nouveau fragment de l’histoire de l’Occident musulman (62– 196/682–812). L’épopée d’al-Kāhina’, Cahiers de Tunisie, 19 (1971), 19–52. Torrey, Charles C., ‘The Mohammedan Conquest of Egypt and North Africa in the Years 643 to 705 A.D.’, Biblical and Semitic Studies: Critical and Historical Essays by the Members of the Semitic and Biblical Faculty of Yale University (New York: Scribner, 1901), pp. 279–330.

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IV Appropriation

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10 When Romance and Hagiography Meet: Inventing Saintly Women in The South English Legendary MERIEM PAGÈS

I

n the lives of Saint Thomas Becket roughly contemporary with his death, his mother is described as a noblewoman named Matilda of Caen.1 Yet, The South English Legendary, a hagiographical collection composed in the thirteenth century, identifies Thomas’s mother as non-Christian.2 According to this narrative, Gilbert, Thomas’s father, is captured by a non-Christian prince while on his way to the Holy Land. In prison, he meets the prince’s daughter, who falls in love with him and follows him back to London after his escape. Upon being reunited, Gilbert and the princess marry, and the couple conceive the saint on their wedding night. The inclusion of Thomas’s mother in this version of the saint’s life provides an interesting example of the overlap of romance and hagiography. The text employs a stock character from late medieval romance, the Saracen woman who betrays faith and kin for her Christian lover, that frequently subverts conventional power dynamics. In the Becket legend as in other medieval works featuring the Saracen princess motif, the female Other is shown to possess great value, and the Christian hero must share, if not cede, the spotlight to her. The Becket legend utilises romance tropes to underscore Thomas’s exceptional status, providing the saint with an origin story that likens him, to a degree, to Christ. In doing so, however, the account privileges the Other and exposes the complicated relationship between romance and hagiography. The South English Legendary first came to be designated as such by Carl Horstmann when he edited the text’s earliest surviving manuscript in 1887.3 Since then, several scholars – starting with Thomas R. Liszka – have called for a slight modification to this title, arguing that the label The South English Legendaries better reflects the existence of multiple versions of the work and testifies to its flexibility and adaptability.4 In the case of the depiction of Thomas Becket’s mother, such textual variation produces some interesting nuances. Before investigating Thomas’s fictional mother, I will, therefore, begin with a brief discussion of some of the most important manuscripts of The South English Legendary. The collection known as The South English Legendary (SEL from this point) first appeared towards the end of the thirteenth century and remained highly popular in England until the fifteenth century, with the preservation of over sixty full manuscripts

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attesting to widespread interest in it.5 The SEL offers a variety ‘of readings for the feasts of the Church’, combining both sanctorale, that is saints’ lives, and temporale, movable feasts.6 In those manuscripts in which the temporale section is not missing, the sanctorale usually follow the movable feasts.7 Due perhaps to its possible production for a lay audience, the collection is ‘arranged not according to the church calendar, which begins with Advent, but according to the secular calendar, beginning 1 January’.8 Although the SEL is based in part on the famous Legenda aurea, the English liturgical tradition probably played a far more important role than its more famous counterpart in shaping it.9 The text is thoroughly English: composed in southern England, it derives from earlier English religious writings and is intended for a regional English audience. There exist two primary editions of The South English Legendary based on different manuscripts of this complex work. In his Early South-English Legendary or Lives of Saints, Carl Horstmann uses the earliest known SEL manuscript, Bodleian Library MS Laud Miscellaneous 108.10 Dating to about 1280, the Laud manuscript (L) lacks clarity and organization.11 For this reason, Charlotte D’Evelyn and Anna J. Mill chose to use two other manuscripts: Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 145 (C) and British Library MS Harley 2277 (H) for their own three-volume South English Legendary (1956–9).12 One of these two manuscripts, British Library MS Harley 2277 – though also problematic in several ways – positions the different pieces that constitute the SEL more appropriately despite postdating the Laud manuscript by only about twenty years.13 In both editions, Gilbert Becket is a Londoner who leaves his native England to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. While travelling, he is captured and imprisoned by a nonChristian prince, identified as either heathen or Saracen depending on the manuscript. His new master takes a liking to Gilbert, inviting him to dine with him every night. Such repeated encounters with Gilbert lead the prince’s daughter to seek him out, and she promises that she will convert to Christianity if he marries her. Surprisingly, Gilbert reacts by escaping and heading back to London. Upon discovering that the object of her desire has fled, the princess embarks on her own journey to London. Because she knows no English, she can only utter the word ‘London’, and her expedition necessitates human and divine intervention to reach a successful conclusion. Her situation hardly improves in London, where people stare at her as a ‘marvel’ capable only of making strange noises they do not understand. She is finally rescued by Gilbert, who hears of the commotion and intercedes on her behalf with six English bishops meeting at St Paul’s Cathedral. The nameless princess is quickly baptised before marrying her beloved, and, on their wedding night, the couple conceives Saint Thomas. Gilbert then wants to return to the Holy Land to complete his pilgrimage but feels he must remain in England to support his wife, who still cannot speak English. Now Christian, the princess enjoins her husband to pursue his dream, assuring him that all will be well in his absence. Indeed, by the time Gilbert returns, three and a half years later, his wife and Thomas are both doing well. The princess has, by this point, fully assimilated into English society and become the kind of maternal presence recognisable as a stock figure of hagiographical narratives.14 By her behaviour and character development, Thomas Becket’s mother resembles Saracen princesses found in contemporary romances and chansons de geste. Many of the scholars who have studied the figure of the Saracen princess have seen the motif as romanticising the conquest of Muslim territory. In The Matter of Araby in Medieval England, for example, Dorothee Metlitzki argues that the Saracen princess ‘served to

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embody erotic longings and aristocratic eccentricities which could not be given expression in the conventional heroines of Christian romance’.15 Likewise, Sharon Kinoshita claims that Guibourc’s conversion in the Prise d’Orange, the initial instalment of the cycle of Guillaume d’Orange, exemplifies the eroticisation of conquest that pervades the chansons and romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.16 As with Liang Hongyu, the Chinese female military leader discussed by Lan Dong in ‘Liang Hongyu: Writing a Medieval Military Legend’, the Saracen princess only transgresses social and gender boundaries so as to reinforce male – in this case Christian – hegemony. In her dual role as transgressor of traditional gender bounds and advocate of Latin Christian supremacy, Thomas’s mother must abandon everything she knows to follow Gilbert Becket. Once her conversion and subsequent marriage have been effected, it is also expected that she will assimilate into the Christian community, proving that her romantic love for a man has led her to love of the true divine. Where the narrative about Thomas’s mother departs from conventional treatments of the Saracen princess motif lies in two significant areas. First, Gilbert’s lover is curiously lacking in aggression as she embarks upon her journey to England. Whereas many iterations of the Saracen princess motif prove their new allegiance by, at the very least, abetting in the killing of their relatives – the Saracen princess Floripas of The Sowdone of Babylon is perhaps the most egregious example of such criminal behaviour – Thomas’s mother simply leaves her family. Any risk she encounters is to herself and not to others. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the princess leaves all of her possessions behind, and therefore has no material dowry to bestow upon Gilbert at their wedding. While other literary non-Christian princesses typically remain on their own lands, Gilbert’s union leads to no territorial acquisition or massive conversion to Christianity. The significance of Thomas’s mother lies in her body and journey alone. If Thomas’s mother diverges from more traditional non-Christian princesses of romances and chansons de geste, her depiction also varies across manuscripts. In D’Evelyn and Mill’s edition, based on the later manuscripts C and H, only Gilbert Becket merits a reference at the beginning of the narrative, and his bride-to-be – here referred to explicitly as Saracen – is not introduced until Gilbert has gone to the Holy Land and become her father’s slave. In contrast, Horstmann’s edition of the Laud manuscript emphasises the importance of Thomas’s pagan mother from the very start of the account: Wolle ye nouthe i-heore this englische tale : that is here i-write Of seint Thomas of Caunterburi : al-hou he was bi-yite? Of londone is fader was : A bordeys hende and fre, Gilbert Bekat was is name : the bok tellez me. Ake is Moder was of hethenesse. : nov sone ye mouwen i-heore Al-hou heo cam into engelonde : are heo i-cristned were.17 According to this version, the ‘heathen’ princess shares the spotlight with her husband, and it is suggested that she plays a part just as essential – if not more so – than her Christian husband in conceiving their saintly son. Once introduced into the narrative, Thomas Becket’s mother is defined by her love for Gilbert Becket in C and H. In fact, she is at first simply ‘a maide that lovede this Gilberd’.18 D’Evelyn and Mill’s version of the character is thus very much a romantic

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figure, one driven, like most Saracen princesses, by romantic love for a Christian man to conversion and love of God. Such is not the case in Horstmann’s edition based on the earlier L. In the Laud manuscript, the woman who pursues Gilbert Becket appears much more suspicious. When she meets Gilbert, she peppers him with questions about his religion. But her love for her father’s Christian prisoner does not become visible until much later in the narrative. Here, the pagan princess keeps her counsel to herself, and Gilbert’s fear that she will betray him seems understandable. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Thomas’s mother remains nameless in C and H while she acquires the name Alisaundre upon conversion in L.19 Thomas Becket’s mother clearly possesses a stronger role in the Laud manuscript. Not only is she presented as an equal partner to Gilbert from the account’s first few lines, thereby granting her the same significance in conceiving the future saint as her husband, but she is also assigned a specific identity when given a name. In the words of Robert Mills, the princess’s new name in L ‘enables her finally to assume a place within the Christian community . . . the choice of name itself is potentially significant in linking the daughter with an identifiable location: baptism gives her a clear place in the world.’20 That the princess questions Gilbert rather than showering him with love during their initial encounters in the Laud manuscript also seems meaningful: this version of Thomas’s mother shows prudence and caution, assessing who Gilbert is and informing herself about his native culture, religion and society prior to making her intentions known. L’s princess is thoughtful, rational, and perhaps more realistic than that found in C and H. In the latter manuscripts, the non-Christian woman is portrayed as subservient to Gilbert and ruled first by emotion and later by God’s will. Different as these two versions of the narrative might be, both editions – and the manuscripts on which they are based – emphasise the extent to which the account draws from outside the traditional bounds of hagiography. In fact, one could argue that Thomas’s mother possesses ties to three different genres, each linked to a different stage of her journey to England and motherhood. At the beginning of the account, Thomas’s future mother acts very much the part of the Saracen princess of romance and chanson de geste.21 She woos and pursues Gilbert while he remains entirely at the mercy of her father (and, therefore, herself), a standard staple of texts featuring Saracen princesses from the twelfth-century Old French La prise d’Orange to much later works, such as the fifteenth-century Middle English romance The Sowdone of Babylone. Like the Christian objects of desire of the Saracen women of these two works and myriad others, Gilbert not only appears passive and vulnerable early on in the passage, but he also reacts to the princess’s overtures with fear and suspicion rather than pleasure.22 Through the figure of Thomas’s mother, the short preface to Thomas Becket’s life in the SEL thus bears important connections to the genres of romance and chansons de geste. The depiction of the nameless princess changes radically in the second part of the narrative, when Gilbert escapes and she follows him to London. The versions of the account in L, C and H strongly suggest that her determination should not be regarded as an expression of her free will; instead God’s will inspires and drives her to seek London and Gilbert despite her ignorance and fears.23 As Robert Mills shows, this shift is especially potent in the Laud manuscript, in which the heathen princess is transformed from an independent agent into a vehicle of God’s will in a matter of a few lines.24 At this point, Becket’s mother has come to embody some of the traits more typically associated

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with hagiography. Like Custance in The Man of Law’s Tale, for example, she forgoes her own agency and free will in order to allow God to act through her. Once in England, the non-Christian princess of the SEL narrative undergoes yet another transformation as she steps into the genre of mirabilia and becomes a ‘marvel’ to the Londoners she encounters. Because she can do nothing more than make strange, unintelligible noises, she has to endure the looks and derision of young and old alike. The language used to describe her at this critical juncture depicts her as somehow less than fully human: She is ‘ase a best’ and ‘wonderful’ in the Laud version and ‘as a best that ne couthe no wisdom / As he[o] were of another world’, ‘a such mothis best’ and a ‘wonder’ in C and H.25 According to Mills, this alienation – if not downright dehumanisation – is erased immediately upon baptism.26 Yet, L, C and H all show that Gilbert’s bride remains vulnerable even after her conversion. She still cannot speak English, leading Gilbert to express hesitation at the idea of returning to the Holy Land for a second pilgrimage. If the foreign-born princess still cannot function in English society on her own, she nevertheless manifests a new kind of agency as a Christian noblewoman and the mother of a future saint. In the Laud manuscript, the acquisition of the name ‘Alisaundre’ marks her final transformation from a beast-like ‘wonder of the world’ into a Christian lady. While Becket’s Saracen mother remains nameless in C and H, we are made privy to an exchange between Gilbert and herself, one in which she enjoins her husband to go on pilgrimage and not to worry about her.27 Having gained a voice if not a name, the non-Christian princess reveals her humanity and her potential for assimilation into Latin Christian society. The next time we encounter her, she has not only learned how to speak and read English but also how to behave like a good Christian mother to her saintly son. Why does the author feel the need to utilise the patently literary motif of the Saracen princess to tell the story of Thomas’s parents? To begin to address this question, we must first consider the political background against which the narrative was composed. At the time of Thomas Becket’s death, his ties to the Norman elite ruling England posed no obstacle to his identification as an English saint. When the Laud manuscript was produced a little over a century later, the socio-political climate of the island had changed considerably. While the Plantagenets still held sway over England, English men and women had begun to dissociate themselves more clearly from continental culture. The use of English as a language was key to this transformation: English slowly came to attain dominance over French at the turn of the fourteenth century. The rise of English as the recognised primary language of England concerns our understanding of the SEL because it reveals both a marked linguistic preference for English and definite ‘anti-Norman sentiments’.28 Such an observation leads Mills to conclude that ‘St. Thomas Becket’s French-speaking heritage is subjected to a double erasure: not only is his father introduced as thoroughly rooted in England . . . but his mother is originally . . . the daughter of a powerful emir.’29 Mills’s words suggest that the princess’s identity is not as important as her non-identity: it matters far less that Thomas’s mother be non-Christian than that she not be Norman. For a distant Other to replace a more familiar one is not unique to the narrative about Thomas Becket’s parentage in the SEL. As Siobhain Bly Calkin has argued in Saracens and the Making of English Identity: The Auchinleck Manuscript, the author of Sir Bevis of Hampton uses Josian, Bevis’s Armenian beloved, in much the same way. In the case of Bevis, Josian also serves as a positive foil to the work’s predominant European female character, Bevis’s evil Scottish mother. To Calkin, Josian is a more likely heroine because

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her presence in the text raises none of the political tensions and anxieties incumbent upon English–Scottish relations at the time.30 Likewise, Thomas’s mother conveniently becomes non-Christian in the decades preceding the Hundred Years War, a time when the differences between English and French identities became increasingly pronounced. Let us now turn to the purpose of Thomas’s conception narrative and the audience at which it may have been directed. If the SEL was produced by members of the secular clergy, the use of a literary motif associated with romances and chansons de geste in the collection becomes less problematic.31 Were we to speculate further that secular clergy were more likely to write for lay audiences than their non-secular counterparts, then Thomas’s non-Christian mother may play an important role in the narrative.32 By recalling Saracen princesses of romance and chansons de geste, Gilbert’s foreign bride might have functioned as a ploy to draw lay auditors into the story of Thomas’s life. The hypothesis that the literary motif of the Saracen princess in general and Thomas Becket’s mother in particular may have assisted in conveying a certain religious message is borne out by the evidence of a sermon delivered by Thomas Brinton, Bishop of Rochester between 1373 and 1389.33 On the occasion of the feast of Thomas Becket in 1375 or 1377, Brinton gave a sermon chastising the clergy of England for giving Jews no incentive to convert to Christianity.34 Prior to showing his disapproval of his clergy, Brinton first refers to Thomas’s mother, using her as both an introduction to and an illustration of his message about the potential for conversion of non-Christians.35 Of course, Thomas Brinton gave his sermon nearly a hundred years after the production of the Laud manuscript. Nevertheless, such evidence proves that the story of Gilbert Becket and his Eastern princess incited enthusiasm in at least some circles. Such lasting interest in Thomas’s non-Christian mother bears witness to the power of the saint’s conception narrative. The arduousness of the princess’s journey to England points to the miraculous nature of his birth and likens him, to a degree, to Christ himself. It is especially significant that this foremost of English saints should be given such a Christ-like origin story at a time when England had begun distancing itself from France. Unlike most other saints who had to find their own path to the divine, the author(s) of the SEL seems to suggest, God himself had a hand in engineering the English Thomas. The account describing the encounter and union of Thomas Becket’s parents emphasises the princess’s foreign identity at the same time that it highlights her essential role in the conception of England’s ‘national’ saint. In fact, it marks Thomas’s mother as exceptional precisely because of her foreign – and non-Christian – nature. That Thomas’s mother leaves her father and community to follow Gilbert Becket to London renders Thomas’s story more accessible to an audience accustomed to romance and marvel literature. Furthermore, the substitution of an Eastern princess for Thomas’s historical Norman mother points to a larger attempt to define an independent English identity, a process that often involved resorting to exotic settings and characters.36 The construction that is Thomas’s mother also leads us to some interesting conclusions about the place of women in medieval European saintly narratives. As Elizabeth Petroff has argued about medieval Italian women, transgression constitutes an essential step in acquiring visibility and – in the context of medieval European hagiography – sanctity, an argument tailored to the multiple stories about Liang Hongyu in Lan Dong’s essay.37 However, Thomas’s mother is given the power to transgress typical gender boundaries not only because the hetero-normative male Christian narrative necessitates it, but also

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because it matters what kind of woman gives birth to Saint Thomas. The emphasis on Thomas’s mother stresses that the text is not entirely patriarchal. On the one hand, the departure of Thomas’s mother from the pagan or Saracen world asserts the superiority of Latin Christendom. On the other, it also provides Thomas with a miraculous conception narrative derived not from his father, but from his mother. At the same time that the narrative about Thomas Becket’s parentage subjugates the non-Christian Other morally, it also empowers the woman whose defection from her native culture and religion grants the English Thomas predominance over other saints. In this essay, I have discussed three different, yet intersecting features of the account of Becket’s conception in The South English Legendary: (1) the function of the Other; (2) the place of women; and (3) the overlapping of hagiography and romance. The use of a romance motif in the Becket legend ultimately lends greater weight to the figure of Thomas’s mother. Like a new Mary, Thomas’s mother hails from the East and submits entirely to God’s will. She must become a pagan or Saracen in the legend so as to emphasise Thomas’s prominence amongst other saints, but also – and paradoxically – to transform him into a character of romance. The result is a highly religious piece privileging both the feminine and the Other. In light of the current debate about race in medieval Europe, it is worth asking if the favour conferred upon the non-Christian mother in the Becket legend reflects a historical reality or if it is, in fact, the narrative’s most fantastical element.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

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Robert Mills, ‘The Early South English Legendary and Difference: Race, Place, Language, and Belief’, in Kimberly K. Bell and Julie Nelson Couch (eds), The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108: The Shaping of English Vernacular Narrative (Leiden: Brill, 2011), p. 209. Several manuscripts of The South English Legendary have been preserved, some of which refer to Thomas’s legendary mother as Saracen while others simply identify her as pagan. One late manuscript, MS Rawl. Poet. 225, even identifies her as Jewish. I will use the term used in the text itself in my discussion of three early manuscripts. I will not refer to fictional characters created by medieval European authors as Muslim but as pagan or Saracen. Such characters allow us into the medieval European imaginary, and they portray not historical medieval Muslims, but a construct fabricated by their European counterparts. Thomas R. Liszka, ‘The South English Legendaries’, in Thomas R. Liszka and Lorna E. M. Walker (eds), The North Sea World in the Middle Ages: Studies in the Cultural History of North-Western Europe (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), pp. 243 and 245; Carl Horstmann (ed.), The Early South-English Legendary; or, Lives of Saints. I. Ms. Laud 108, in the Bodleian Library, Early English Text Society, o.s., 87 (London: Oxford University Press, 1887). Liszka, ‘The South English Legendaries’, p. 261. Heather Blurton and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ‘Rethinking the South English Legendaries’, in Heather Blurton and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (eds), Rethinking the South English Legendaries (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2011), p. 3. Liszka, ‘The South English Legendaries’, p. 244. Liszka, ‘The South English Legendaries’, p. 244. As Liszka shows, the separation of temporale from sanctorale is hardly this clear-cut in most manuscripts. For example, material that does not belong in the temporale section is often inserted within it regardless. Liszka, ‘The South English Legendaries’, p. 244. For more on the authorship, reception and social context of thirteenth-century English vernacular works, see John Frankis, ‘The Social Context of

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Vernacular Writing in Thirteenth-Century England: The Evidence of the Manuscripts’, in Blurton and Wogan-Browne (eds), Rethinking the South English Legendaries, pp. 66–83. Sherry Reames, ‘The South English Legendary and Its Major Latin Models’, in Blurton and Wogan-Browne (eds), Rethinking the South English Legendaries, pp. 84–5. Liszka, ‘The South English Legendaries’, p. 243. Liszka, ‘The South English Legendaries’, pp. 243 and 245. Liszka, ‘The South English Legendaries’, p. 243; Charlotte D’Evelyn and Anna J. Mill (eds), The South English Legendary, Early English Text Society, o.s., 236 (London: Oxford University Press, 1956–9). Liszka, ‘The South English Legendaries’, p. 243. Robert Mills, ‘Conversion, Translation and Becket’s “Heathen” Mother’, in Blurton and Wogan-Browne (eds), Rethinking the South English Legendaries, p. 390. Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 185. Sharon Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), pp. 72–3. The Early South-English Legendary, lines 1–6. The South English Legendary, line 21. The Early South-English Legendary, line 141. Mills, ‘Conversion, Translation and Becket’s “Heathen” Mother’, p. 389. Sarah Kay convincingly argues that Saracen princesses belong in chansons de geste just as much as they do in romances. Sarah Kay, The Chansons de geste in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 30–48. Here, it is important to note that the divergences in the treatment of Thomas’s mother in L, C and H highlighted above simply stress different aspects of the Saracen princess motif: while L focuses on her agency and militancy, C and H draw the audience’s attention to her passion for the Christian hero. The Early South-English Legendary, lines 54–6 and The South English Legendary, line 70. Mills, ‘Conversion, Translation and Becket’s “Heathen” Mother’, p. 387. The Early South-English Legendary, lines 65 and 68, and The South English Legendary, lines 76–8 and 80. Mills, ‘Conversion, Translation and Becket’s “Heathen” Mother’, p. 389. The South English Legendary, lines 132–42. Mills, ‘The Early South English Legendary and Difference’, p. 208. Mills, ‘The Early South English Legendary and Difference’, p. 209. Siobhain Bly Calkin, Saracens and the Making of English Identity: The Auchinleck Manuscript (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 94–5. Frankis, ‘The Social Context of Vernacular Writing’, p. 78. The inclusion of King Horn and Havelok the Dane in the Laud manuscript seems to reinforce the theory that The South English Legendary was intended at least in part for lay auditors. Henry Ansgar Kelly, ‘Jews and Saracens in Chaucer’s England: A Review of the Evidence’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 27 (2005), 160. Kelly, ‘Jews and Saracens in Chaucer’s England’, 161. On the contrary, Jews were discouraged from converting to Christianity since they had to relinquish at least half of all their possessions to the Crown upon conversion; Kelly, ‘Jews and Saracens in Chaucer’s England’, 138. Kelly, ‘Jews and Saracens in Chaucer’s England’, 161. Bevis of Hampton exemplifies this phenomenon. See Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake and Eve Salisbury (eds), Bevis of Hampton, in Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake and Eve Salisbury (eds), Four Romances of England (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999), pp. 187–340. Elizabeth A. Petroff, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 166.

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Works Cited Blurton, Heather and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ‘Rethinking the South English Legendaries’, in Heather Blurton and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (eds), Rethinking the South English Legendaries (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 3–19. Calkin, Siobhain Bly, Saracens and the Making of English Identity: The Auchinleck Manuscript (New York and London: Routledge, 2005). D’Evelyn, Charlotte and Anna J. Mill (eds), The South English Legendary, Early English Text Society, o.s., 236 (London: Oxford University Press, 1956–9). Frankis, John, ‘The Social Context of Vernacular Writing in Thirteenth-Century England: The Evidence of the Manuscripts’, in Heather Blurton and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (eds), Rethinking the South English Legendaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 66–83. Görlach, Manfred, The Textual Tradition of The South English Legendary (Leeds: University of Leeds School of English, 1974). Herzman, Ronald B., Graham Drake and Eve Salisbury (eds), Bevis of Hampton, in Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake and Eve Salisbury (eds), Four Romances of England (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999), pp. 187–340. Horstmann, Carl (ed.), The Early South-English Legendary, Early English Text Society, o.s., 87 (London: Oxford University Press, 1887). Kay, Sarah, The Chansons de geste in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Kelly, Henry Ansgar, ‘Jews and Saracens in Chaucer’s England: A Review of the Evidence’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 27 (2005), 129–69. Kinoshita, Sharon, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Liszka, Thomas R., ‘The South English Legendaries’, in Thomas R. Liszka and Lorna E. M. Walker (eds), The North Sea World in the Middle Ages: Studies in the Cultural History of North-Western Europe (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), pp. 243–80. Metlitzki, Dorothee, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). Mills, Robert, ‘Conversion, Translation and Becket’s “Heathen” Mother’, in Heather Blurton and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (eds), Rethinking the South English Legendaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 381–402. Mills, Robert, ‘The Early South English Legendary and Difference: Race, Place, Language and Belief’, in Kimberly K. Bell and Julie Nelson Couch (eds), The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108: The Shaping of English Vernacular Narrative (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 197–221. Petroff, Elizabeth A., Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Reames, Sherry, ‘The South English Legendary and Its Major Latin Models’, in Heather Blurton and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (eds), Rethinking the South English Legendaries (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 84–105.

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11 Selfless Acts of Salvation as Self-Glorification: Saving the Prostitute in Hrotsvith’s Plays MADALINA MEIROSU

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arly Christian hagiography was fond of defining virginity in contrast to a sinful Other. Typically, the sinful Others were pagans who tried to convince the virgin Christian martyrs to recant their beliefs and abandon their spiritual and bodily virginity. In the later Middle Ages, when their martyrdom was no longer a live option, Christian virgins were rarely challenged to suffer for their beliefs. In this new context, denied the glory traditionally associated with suffering virginity, Christian virgins were forced to seek out new challenges. One of the opportunities for glory available to virgins during this period was the conversion of prostitutes. Stories of these redemptions served as inspiration for medieval writers such as Hrotsvith von Gandersheim, whose work centres on these themes. Hugo Kuhn has identified virginity as the main concern in six of Hrotsvith’s seven plays, and this reading has found support in critical circles from respected scholars such as Peter Dronke and Bert Nagel.1 Elizabeth Petroff’s analysis of the trope of virginity in Hrotsvith’s works reveals that ‘of the fourteen narratives . . . four deal explicitly with the martyrdom of virgins.’2 Another four stories deal with repentance and salvation. According to Peter Dronke, ‘central to [this latter] series of plays, as to that of legends, is the treatment of two women and two men, each of whom sinks to the depths by renouncing God, and rises again at last, through repentance, to win heavenly bliss.’3 The ‘virginity martyrdom’ narratives are Agnes, Pelagius, Dulcitius and Sapientia; the ‘redemption’ narratives, to use Dronke’s term, are Theophilus, Basilius, Abraham and Paphnutius. However, the two redemption plays that feature male virgins are, in a subtle way, also about martyred virgins. In the absence of the old trials, male virgins sought out wayward prostitutes in order to subject themselves to new ordeals worthy of the martyred virgins of old. In this chapter, I explore some of the meanings of virginity in Hrotsvith’s dramas about the redemption of prostitutes. I suggest that, appearances notwithstanding, salvation from prostitution is not Hrotsvith’s main concern. Rather, the prostitutes serve as a foil for the self-definition of the heroic male virgins who redeem the fallen women. The male virgin uses eloquence to convince the prostitute to repent, shows heroism by confronting and overcoming sexual temptation and brings salvation both to the prostitute and to the men who were caught up in her circle of sin. Thus, in Hrotsvith’s stories of

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female prostitutes’ redemption, the focus is on the virgin male saviour rather than on the penitent, promiscuous sinner. Ultimately, the motif of the redemption of the prostitute is merely a vehicle for glorifying male virginity. By virtue of being cast into this role, the female prostitutes perform the same function during and after their redemption that they did before their repentance: they continue to satisfy the desires of men, though now they are performing pleasure in a different way. Following a brief analysis of cultural valences of prostitution and virginity in medieval Europe, this chapter looks at two of Hrotsvith’s plays that feature the salvation of prostitutes in order to analyse the mechanisms by which heroic male virginity is constructed.4 The concept of medieval Western European prostitution is different from what a modern reader might expect. While the word ‘prostitution’ is often used in everyday life as an umbrella term for various ways of obtaining financial gain from the selling of one’s body, one should be wary of treating ‘prostitution’ as a monolithic concept. Ruth Karras stresses that one must remember, when speaking about prostitution within the medieval context, that ‘to write the history of prostitution is to impose a modern category on the past. If we look to the past for commercialised sex, we will find it, but that does not mean each society understood or treated these practices in the same way.’5 The medieval understanding of prostitution ‘acknowledged the financial element involved but considered promiscuity rather than monetary exchange the key.’6 This emphasis on promiscuity leads historians to focus less on financial and legal concerns as they pertain to medieval prostitutes and more on the moral dimension of promiscuity within the medieval Christian Church and culture. Nevertheless, despite this emphasis on promiscuity in recent scholarship, it is important to bear in mind that in the medieval period ‘there was no single attitude towards prostitution either as a cultural or as a commercial phenomenon.’7 Given this complexity, it is dangerous, if not impossible, to generalise about the perception of prostitution in Hrotsvith’s time period. Just as there were many attitudes towards prostitution in medieval Europe, so the trade itself assumed many different shapes. For example, Karras presents prostitution as a possible alternative to marriage for destitute women in the Middle Ages. She adduces the legend of St Nicholas to show that the saint, by performing the miracle of attaining a dowry for poor girls, demonstrates ‘an awareness of the financial constraints that forced women into prostitution’.8 Carolyne Larrington mentions in passing that prostitution was a means (primarily for married women) ‘to round up the amount of money in the house’.9 In many cases, prostitution as paid sexual intercourse seems to have been a consequence of poverty, and since it was the case in medieval society that ‘financial need could make the sin more understandable’,10 the women who resorted to prostitution did not have to carry the full load of social stigma usually associated with the trade. Indeed, a carnal sin committed in the support of one’s family, provided it excluded lustful enjoyment, had an aura of penance about it, of bodily self-flagellation or self-sacrifice, as opposed to a connotation of lustful carnal sin committed out of the weakness of one’s flesh. Some theologians reluctantly accepted prostitution as a necessary evil, given the depravity of human beings. For Augustine, prostitution functioned as the sewage system of society; without such a sewage system, ‘capricious lusts’ would overwhelm human communities.11 In the thirteenth century, in a discussion of prostitution, Thomas Aquinas says much the same thing, though his language is more vivid: were prostitution eliminated, ‘the whole palace would smell like excrement.’12 But behind these grudging concessions

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by practical-minded Church leaders, the Church’s position on prostitution was univocal and firm: whatever the mitigating circumstances that gave rise to it, prostitution was sin, pure and simple. This is why the two repentant sinners in Hrotsvith’s plays, though they have ‘fallen’ into prostitution for very different reasons, bear the full brunt of stigma in a religious context. Their guilt is the salient thing from a religious point of view. The medieval Church’s allergy to sexual enjoyment was correlated with the Church’s celebration of chastity and virginity, as ‘the idealization of chastity was transformed into a loathing of the body and a severe condemnation of sexual acts.’13 Even enjoying sexual marital relations was considered a mortal sin by the early Church Fathers, ‘and many, including Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century, believed that it was almost impossible to be pure after marital copulation.’14 Carnal pleasure was an invention of the Devil in the eyes of the Church, ‘the direct result of Man’s fall from Grace and a mortal sin’.15 Since carnal pleasure was the direct result of ‘Man’s fall’, and ‘Man’s fall’ was caused by Eve, the first woman, carnal pleasure was deemed the consequence of woman’s sinfulness. Though both men and women experienced sensations like hunger, thirst and the desire to sleep, which were inherently corruptive because they distracted the faithful from the spiritual realm, and though both genders were punished for manifesting sexual desire and behaviour, St Ambrose and St Jerome believed that ‘it was women who were the more susceptible and therefore represented a great threat to men.’16 Karras suggests that, because the majority of religious writers were heterosexual men, and because women, as the object of their desire, were the source of physical temptation and moral struggle, women came to be blamed for the trials of the flesh.17 Held responsible both for their own carnal sins and those committed by their male counterparts, women were constructed as primitive and lustful within a patriarchal male tradition, with the most frequent scapegoats being prostitutes. Whether accepted, considered necessary or merely tolerated, prostitutes were thought to set a bad example for ‘good’ married women and for young girls, enticing other women into the trade with the allure of their autonomy and financial self-sufficiency. In view of this concern, patriarchy considered it necessary to take measures to prevent women from abandoning their pre-assigned roles. The Christian Church used the trope of the ‘repentant whore’ in order to show that salvation was available even for the greatest of sinners, if only she repented. The ‘repentant whore’ story was useful both for ‘good’ married women and for ‘lost’ prostitutes or promiscuous women. It taught chaste women that, deep down, the lustful and sometimes rich prostitute longs to repent and dreams of being forgiven – that she is desperate to give up her luxurious and hedonistic life, if only the right man would come along to show her the way to salvation. Additionally, the trope taught ‘promiscuous’ women that they could be saved (and thus gave hope to victims of rape, to amateur prostitutes and to women who allowed themselves to feel pleasure in their marital relations, as well as to women who earned their living solely by selling their bodies for money), on the condition that they repent and pay dearly for their sins. Mary Magdalene is the prototype of this female image. The trajectories of other female saints, such as Mary of Egypt, Pelagia and Thais (to name only a few), follow a similar pattern of renouncing carnal lifestyles that consist of giving their bodies to men for lust or money or both. Revelling in the sheer pleasure of her promiscuity, Mary of Egypt is reported to have refused money for her sexual favours, whereas Pelagia and Thais became very prosperous in their trade.

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The trope of the ‘repentant whore’ is not limited to stories of prostitutes who become saints, for stories were also written about nuns who, tempted by sin, sold their bodies for pleasure, before repenting and returning to the Church. This is the pattern of the story of Mary and Abraham in Hrotsvith’s Abraham.18 There seems to have been great concern over women’s chastity within religious orders, as well as debate about the best way to protect women both from rape and their own libidinous nature. In an age when many prostitutes were strangers to the cities in which they worked, travelling nuns caused their ‘fathers’ much consternation, for it was thought that life on the road made nuns more vulnerable to their lustful nature, especially those nuns who had not chosen the monastic life for themselves or who did not enjoy life in the nunnery. In a letter from 747, Saint Boniface warned Cuthbert, archbishop of Canterbury, ‘that many of the English nuns allowed to go on pilgrimage to Rome could be found in cities in Lombardy and Gaul turned prostitutes’.19 And nuns were not only in jeopardy on the road: they were also not far from carnal temptation in their nunneries, whether in the form of lecherous male counterparts keen to seduce them, or via the ‘seductive’ effect of their sheer sexual presence on monks and male spiritual advisers. Nickie Roberts observes that because ‘the religious establishment chose the Female Sinner as dumping-ground for the whole society’s projected sexual guilt and hypocrisy’, the division between ‘good’ women and ‘bad’ women was institutionalised. Both of the opposing camps, however, were inferior to the camp of men, who made a common front against them.20 This cultural attitude toward women, where females were held responsible both for their own sexual failings and for men’s carnal sins, is on display in Hrotsvith’s plays Paphnutius and Abraham. And yet, with her emphasis on the prostitutes’ suffering and contrition, as opposed to a fixation on their lust and wickedness, Hrotsvith’s versions of these familiar stories are kinder to the female sinners. There is a similar ambivalence in the way Hrotsvith treats the gender of virginity. Curiously, maleness both has significance and does not have significance in the context of virginity. The maleness of virginity does not have significance because for Hrotsvith virginity transcends gender. But the maleness of virginity is also important because, as I show later in the chapter, masculine hegemonic attitudes shape the virgin’s interactions with the female sinner. With respect to the transcendence of gender, the virginity narratives create the image of a genderless virgin prototype, according to Petroff: ‘St Jerome’s observation that through virginity a woman becomes like a man has little place in Hrotsvith’s thinking, for in her legends and plays she does not view gender as implying moral hierarchy.’21 As a woman addressing the theme of virginity, Hrotsvith does not proceed from the traditional assumption that men are the epitome of morality while women, owing to their complicity with Eve, are inherently weak and dominated by the flesh. Though constrained in her source material to Vitae written by men, her writing dramatises a more balanced approach to the traditional divisions between women and men, flesh and spirit, sinners and spiritual beings. Her models of virginity are both male and female, as are her models of lost souls in the ‘redemption cycle’. Virginity is not a passive quality, but rather an active choice that ‘brings about an inner transformation, resulting in extraordinary strength, perseverance and eloquence. The virgin is stunning in appearance and persuasive in speech.’22 Virgins, both male and female, use their eloquence to convert nonbelievers and defend ‘their choice of a freer and more exalted life’.23

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Interestingly, these qualities seem to parallel the qualities attributed to courtesans in pre-Christian Rome. These Roman courtesans were educated and eloquent, as well as envied by married women because they had chosen a freer and more satisfying life. Hrotsvith may have been aware of the status of Roman courtesans owing to her familiarity with Latin literature. Did she consciously draw a parallel between the freedom and voice of the courtesans and the freedom and voice of her virgin heroes, given the fact that the Ottonian court, which ruled the country at the time of Hrotsvith and influenced its cultural life, was experiencing a Roman cultural revival? Whatever the reason, the parallel is interesting, but not perfect. Virginity is heroic for Hrotsvith, whereas the Roman courtesans were never associated with heroism, at least not with a straight face. Virginity is heroic partly because the temptation of the flesh is so strong as to make resistance to the assaults of desire a heroic act. But in legends of virgin martyrdom heroism is also found in the resistance both to pleasure and to pain. Hrotsvith’s plays Agnes and Pelagius feature virgins who are subjected to several stages of torture typical of virginal martyrdom scenarios. Madeline Caviness identifies representations of confinement, corporal punishment, rape or attempted rape and murder as stages ‘indicative of the victim’s progressive loss of control over her own body – first over its habitual surroundings, including clothing, next over its dermic boundaries, then over its orifices, and ultimately over its vital organs’.24 As part of this increasing vulnerability, the virgin martyr also suffers the attack of the lustful pagan gaze on her Christian body. However, it seems that the pagan gaze cannot ultimately violate the virgin Christian body, for according to Emma Campbell and Robert Mills, ‘the crucial question here is not whether the female body is subject to a gaze that objectifies and denudes it of agency, but, instead, the more basic question is whether the female body is seen at all.’25 Indeed, virgins are generally protected by divine intervention from the penetrating gaze; moreover, stripped of their biological identity, the genderless, highly spiritualised virgins morph into an eloquent Voice. The trial and execution of genderless virgins in the martyrdom stories conclude with mass conversions to Christianity. Those who witness the heroic virgins are converted by the latter’s eloquence, rather than by the example of the virgins’ strength in enduring the terrible tortures inflicted on their martyred bodies. The prostitutes in the redemption stories present a dramatic foil to the virgins in the martyrdom stories: both exercise power over the fate of others, but whereas virgins lead pagans to God by inspiring them to convert, prostitutes lead men to hell through their sinfulness. Mass conversions to Christianity are achieved by means of virginal, eloquent Voices, whereas the mass perdition of men is achieved by means of female Bodies. While virgins are genderless, prostitutes are female. By giving up their virginity, prostitutes not only become feminine; they also become penetrable bodies, objects of desire, mere merchandise, the Devil’s tool to entrap souls. Though there may be hope for redemption, the repentant prostitute’s virginity is irreparably lost. They undergo a quasi-martyrdom, modelled on the process described by Caviness, but they are deprived of their Voice throughout. According to Dronke, redemption (through virginity) is the central theme of Hrotsvith’s plays Abraham and Paphnutius. Moreover, he argues that while the ultimate victory of virtue is a triumph of God . . . Hrotsvitha also sees it ‘especially’ (praesertim) as a feminist triumph. Weak women show their power, strong men

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go under. Mary and Thais show their strength by renouncing their lives as courtesans (lives in which, Hrotsvitha makes clear, they both enjoyed themselves immensely).26 While I agree that the main theme is ‘redemption’, I take issue with the characterisation of their conversion as a ‘feminist triumph’. Even if it were possible to speak of feminism in the tenth century, Mary’s and Thais’ conversions are far from an assertion of women’s rights to economic, sexual, political or religious equality with men. Indeed, while these women demonstrate strength in their life-altering decision to walk away from a life of financial comfort, their decision is also an act of submission to the will of two eloquent men rather than an autonomous act of self-assertion.27 Seen through a Western feminist lens, their feminism seems wanting, or at least compromised, though it is of course dangerous to apply twentieth-century feminist concepts to medieval writings without further qualification. However, I am interested in a slightly different question. I would like to determine whether these women are in fact the heroes of Hrotsvith’s plays and if their deeds are best understood as self-determined actions or as submissive reactions to men’s initiative. Mary and Thais are prompted to exchange an active and luxurious lifestyle, handsomely financed by the pleasuring of men, for a life that is chosen for them, a life featuring physical pain, the passive acceptance of penances, and the spiritual ‘pleasuring’ of their respective saviours and the Church. Whatever independence or self-determination they may once have had, they lose in the name of salvation and grace. When they eventually consent to abandon their lavish homes in the city in order to repent in a secluded space, they bend their will to that of their ‘saviours’. In Hrotsvith’s play Paphnutius, Paphnutius’ penitence programme for the prostitute Thais follows the patterns of Christian virgin martyrdom in pagan times, though Hrotsvith does deviate from the traditional model in her decision not to emphasise, or even present, Thais’ tortured body. And though Caviness contends that young girls do not passively submit to mistreatment in Hrotsvith’s writings, it is clear that the prostitutes do submit to the strenuous requirements of their male saviours.28 Paphnutius gradually strips Thais of her social and cultural layers as he takes control of her body, mind and spirit in the name of salvation. He first takes Thais into confinement, thus depriving her of her habitual surroundings and social environment. She is deprived of her old clothes, which are cultural layers of signification; this leaves her vulnerable and potentially renders her now unprotected dermic boundaries penetrable. He next assumes control of her orifices, not by rape, but by forcing her to live with her own excreted matter, thereby nullifying her excretive functions (or from another point of view, he gives her a new body – the cell – and renders it unable to eliminate excrements): THAIS: Good Father, what could be more repugnant than to have to attend to all the needs of the body in this one little room . . . It will soon be uninhabitable. PAPHNUTIUS: Fear the cruel punishments of the soul, and cease to dread transitory evils. THAIS: My weakness makes me shudder. PAPHNUTIUS: The sweetness of your guilty pleasures was far more bitter and foul. THAIS: I know it is just. What grieves me most is that I shall not have one clean sweet spot in which to call upon the sweet name of God. PAPHNUTIUS: Have a care, Thais, or your confidence may become presumption. Should polluted lips utter so easily the name of the unpolluted Godhead?29

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Here he takes control of the words she is allowed to utter, and by doing so assumes control (metaphorically speaking) of another orifice, her mouth. The very act that promises to lead to her ‘salvation’ – speaking the name of God – is forbidden to her. Paphnutius also takes control over her vital organs by rationing the quantity of food she receives. In all these ways he mortifies her sinful body in the name of salvation. In a new staging of the trope of virgin martyrdom, his virginity is the catalyst of her quasimartyrdom, which she willingly accepts. Now the mortification, which is supervised by the virgin, is displaced onto the prostitute. The new twist on virgin martyrdom uses bodily mortification not to stave off carnal pleasure; rather, in the hands of a heroic virgin it is made to cleanse a body already polluted by carnal pleasure. (With respect to the punishment itself, it is paradoxical that, despite the fact that grace [forgiveness] is referred to as a ‘gift’ both in Hrotsvith and in legends of St Thais that circulated in medieval times, Thais and Mary will pay dearly to be able to receive this gift: it will cost them their earthly lives to access eternal life. It would seem that their debt is paid to outraged society, as this is represented by their ‘virginal’ saviours, rather than to God, since God’s gift is ‘free’, as intimated by both Paphnutius and Abraham.) Thais and Paphnutius strengthen their bond with God through the encounter with each other. Rescued by her virgin saviour from a life in which she gave her body for pleasure and money, Thais surrenders her body to Paphnutius for the sake of salvation. For his part, Paphnutius receives instant gratification in the testing of his virginity while deriving satisfaction from the confirmation of his power over his own flesh. Here one begins to discern yet another permutation of traditional Christian virgin martyrdom. For hand in hand with the suffering imposed upon the prostitute is the suffering endured by the virgin during the process of conversion. For example, Paphnutius’ power over the female body he saves is mitigated by Hrotsvith’s portrayal of him as fretting over his protégée, which suggests that he too is suffering, perhaps even partaking in her physical punishment. But the nostalgic re-enactment of Christian virgin martyrdom is most evident in the self-mortification to which the virgin willingly submits. The old torture inflicted on martyred virgin bodies is incarnated anew in the painful struggle to resist sexual temptation when face-to-face with fallen women who prove sexually irresistible to other men. The unrelenting temptation is the cross the heroic virgin must bear when saving prostitutes; this is the new form that virgin martyrdom takes in an era when Christian virgins are no longer tortured for their spiritual commitments. Abraham and Paphnutius, the ‘saviours’ of prostitutes, are religious men who possess the qualities of heroic virginity: strength, perseverance, heroism and eloquence. Their eloquence convinces the two female sinners to give up their luxurious comfort for small cells where they must pay for their carnal sins, the most severe of which was leading men into temptation. Paphnutius understands that the words coming from his mouth brought about Thais’ repentance: ‘Yet such is the power of Christ, that at His word, of which my poor mouth was the instrument, she has fled from her surroundings which were her damnation. Obedient as a child she has followed me. She has abandoned lust and ease and idle luxury.’30 Clearly, contra Dronke, Hrotsvith’s Thais is not a powerful feminist character who goes against the grain, but rather a childlike repentant and obedient servant. Mary is a child as well – like a ‘lamb’ who will obey her master: ‘In nullo umquam tui renitor votis sed que iubes obtemperanter amplector’ (‘I do not wish to oppose you in anything, what you command I will do obediently’).31 Both Thais and Mary accept the

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accusation of sinfulness, consent to be taken away, and willingly pursue penance because they believe themselves to be beyond redemption. By doing this, they are restored to an obedient, and therefore acceptable, femininity. True, Thais is not completely passive: she burns her clothes, an act that serves as a symbolic echo of the way her carnal passion had torched the souls of the men she had seduced; there is also some degree of agency behind her passivity when she agrees to abandon her courtesan lifestyle and to embrace the penance assigned her by Paphnutius. She is, however, a helpless child in need of a saviour, a child who cries: ‘Who will pity me – who will save me?’32 The saviour, of course, is Paphnutius, the righteous virgin whose eloquence transforms her. In contrast to this effective eloquence, which is vividly illustrated in Hrotsvith’s plays, Thais and Mary barely have a voice. After their decision to return to the Church, their voices are muted. Submitting to Abraham’s commands, Mary cries and prays all the time. Her voice becomes the instrument of salvation for somebody else: ‘Elaborat pro viribus ut quibus causa fuit perditions fiat exemplum conversionis’ (‘She prays for the men whose cause for perdition she had been, that she should be their example for conversion’).33 Likewise Thais’ voice is stifled: no longer able to converse with her former lover, she is sealed in her little room for three years where she is only permitted to repeat one sentence – ‘Qui me plasmasti miserere mei’ (‘You who have made me, have mercy on me’)34 – while being forbidden, as shown above, to speak the name of God. Christopher St John’s translation (1923) involves an unfortunate slip of the pen by introducing God into the formula that Thais is allowed to speak: ‘O God Who made me, pity me!’ and thus softens the harshness of Thais’ penitence, a penitence that involves not only physical and psychological distress, but also the spiritual anguish of not being allowed to address her creator directly.35 In short, both Mary’s and Thais’ individual voices disappear as soon as they subject themselves to the will of their virginal saviours and embark on the path of repentance. In Harlots of the Desert, Benedicta Ward uses medieval Vitae to tell a story about Thais that resembles the one told by Hrotsvith. As in Hrotsvith’s drama, Ward’s Thais is a helpless penitent convinced by Paphnutius that, because she is guilty for ‘causing the loss of so many souls’, she will be condemned ‘to render an account not only of your own sins but of theirs as well’.36 Ward also offers a colourful account of the effects of Thais on men. Hrotsvith’s Paphnutius is equally preoccupied by Thais’ irresistible attraction for men: ‘She seems to allure all men through her marvelous beauty, and drag them down with her.’37 The very order of medieval society is threatened by this carnal disruption because ‘it is not only the fools and wastrels who squander their substance with her. Citizens of high standing and virtue lay precious things at her feet, and enrich her to their own undoing.’38 And not only are the spiritual and financial welfares of male citizens threatened, but their physical integrity is at stake as well since ‘heads are broken, faces bruised, noses smashed’ as men fight over her.39 Thais’ irresistible beauty, emphasised by both Hrotsvith and Ward, sets the stage for Paphnutius’ exaltation. His exploit is heroic because he will have to resist the woman no man can resist. He thereby has a chance to save many souls at one stroke, not only one woman’s soul, but also the souls of the men she might corrupt in the future. As for Abraham, both Hrotsvith and Ward present him as a heroic virgin in his own right, though it must be said that he is even more daring in the legend translated by Ward than in Hrotsvith’s play. The anonymous medieval version that Ward works with has him initiating sexual foreplay, ‘fondling’ and

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kissing Mary and finally waiting for her on the bed. Abraham heightens the intensity of his temptation in order to resist it all the more heroically. This small difference aside, Hrotsvith’s and Ward’s versions of the stories of Mary and Thais speak with one voice on the essential point: the story of the redemption of a lost woman is ultimately the story of a virgin man’s heroic action. The heroism of Paphnutius and Abraham is also on display when they venture into brothels. Because they have exposed themselves to carnal temptation and emerged from the encounter unscathed, they feel that they have confronted and triumphed over Satan. Their ability to enter the brothel and come away ‘unscathed’ evokes the way virgin saints of old were burnt at the stake only to emerge from the flames unharmed. And because their concern ranges beyond the spiritual health of the prostitutes in their care to include the souls of the prostitutes’ potential victims, their conduct is more deeply reminiscent of virgin martyrdom. For just as the public martyrdom of virgins had led to mass conversions to Christianity among the onlookers who witnessed it, so the actions of Abraham and Paphnutius save the mass of male souls who otherwise would have fallen prey to enticements of carnal pleasure. In these ways too, what appear to be redemption stories function as heroic virginity stories. The focus is on the eloquent men who save not only promiscuous women but also a host of souls in need of protection. It is worth noting a curious anomaly to this pattern in the story of Abraham and Mary. As he labours to convert her, Abraham’s courage and eloquence are supplemented by the power of Mary’s memory, giving her some agency in her reconversion. Mary had originally been raised in an ascetic environment before being seduced by a stranger, which led her to believe she had forfeited her salvation. This is what prompted her self-exile into prostitution. In a Proustian moment, she smells the scent of ascetic living on Abraham’s skin, a scent that transports her back in time to a moment when she was not a sinner. Nagel highlights the power of human memory in personal redemption: ‘Erinnerung erweist sich hier als seine vitale positive Kraft, die den Menschen in seinem tiefsten Inneren seiner selbst versichert, ihn zurückruft, ja auch in der Verlorenheit noch festhält und so vor dem völligen Selbstverlust bewahrt’ (‘In this case, memory proves to be a positive vital energy that secures humans in their deepest inner self, that calls them back, indeed holds them together even in times of sinfulness, and thus saves them from fully losing their own self’).40 Memory is the adhesive that holds the self together; involuntary memory can remember – can reconstitute to some extent – a long-lost virginal self. The element of memory as a catalyst for recovering a lost self is an isolated instance that deviates from the usual conversion or reconversion scenario where virgin men bring sinners to righteousness through their words and heroic resistance to temptation. Interestingly, the power of memory and Mary’s role in her own conversion is more prominent in Ward’s portrayal of Mary. Hrotsvith’s Mary is more sexually assertive and businesslike in her encounter with Abraham, whereas in Ward’s version Mary is more sexually passive and the moment of remembering more persuasive and dramatic. Ward’s Mary is not motivated by sexual desire or avarice; what moves this Mary is the desire to be whole and integral, triggered by smell. It would seem that Hrotsvith, writing some ten centuries earlier than Ward, was less free as a female author in her historical moment to emphasise female agency as an alternative to established patriarchal patterns. A similar downplaying of women’s power can be seen in the other two redemption stories in Hrotsvith’s oeuvre, where, in contrast to the dynamic of male saviours and their

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female prostitute protégées, we find fallen men and their female ‘saviours’. Unlike the male saviours Paphnutius and Abraham, the female saviours in Theophilus and Basilius are denied full authority in the salvation of repentant sinners and instead serve as an intermediary between the sinner and a final authority. Likewise, these male sinners differ in significant ways from the female sinners presented in this chapter. Hrotsvith’s character Theophilus, from the eponymous legend in her Book of Legends, is a very eloquent sinner; he does not hesitate to advocate for himself in front of the Virgin Mary and to remind her that though his sin (signing a pact with the Devil) may be great, other great sinners such as Peter have renounced Christ and yet been forgiven. There is a sense of entitlement in his words, spoken with an eloquent Voice, which is in stark contrast with the meekness of the repenting Holy Harlots: Talibus ac tantis, aliis multisque figuris Admonitus, similem me sperabam pietatem A Christo citius per te conquirere posse.41 (Thus, encouraged by these examples and many others, I hoped that I might speedily receive pity From Christ through your help.) (my translation) The Virgin Mary, ‘inventrix virginitatis’ (‘the one who invented virginity’ or ‘spring of virginity’), intercedes for him before Christ and God, and he is forgiven – his contract with the Devil is publicly burned and he dies in peace. But the Virgin Mary’s forgiveness in and of itself is insufficient; her main function is to serve as an intermediary to the higher powers.42 When men commit mortal sins, women (including the Virgin Mary) serve them not as saviours but are mere intermediaries between the sinner and the ‘real power’ that can save them. These solicitous women thus function as channels for transmitting power between a man possessed of power (Christ or Basilius) and a man lacking in power (Theophilus and the sinning husband in Basilius, respectively). Male virginal saviours, on the other hand, directly save sexually transgressive women who are mired in mortal sin. Within the medieval Christian context, women’s power for salvation is that of passive transmission, not of active creation. What power they are fully conceded is sexual in nature. This is a dangerous power, for female promiscuity and lust can lead a man to hell, placing his salvation in peril. But the power of female sexuality can also be tamed when the prostitute is brought into contact with a heroic virgin, which provides an opportunity for these special beings to heroically resist the allurements of female flesh. Whether sinning or saving or being saved, the image of women is used to glorify superior male beings. Though virginity at first glance seems genderless in Hrotsvith’s stories, nevertheless the gendered representation of virgin saviours and the sinners they rescue remains significant – and this does not appear to be accidental. For it is possible to detect an element of subversion at work in her characterisation of repentant women who have no access to redemption during their earthly lives, whereas repentant men are able to experience salvation here below. In her stories, the path to salvation for women is fraught with unrelenting suffering. Their hardships are not softened or offset by scenes enacting the attainment of salvation or the reception of full forgiveness, scenes that might sweeten

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the suffering of these female penitents. Even Mary Magdalene, who might be considered the first Christian prostitute, was forgiven her sins and comforted in a way that is denied to Hrotsvith’s female prostitutes. This strange discrepancy – between female and male repentance and between the female repentance dramatised in the Scriptures and the female repentance shown in Hrotsvith’s dramas – may speak to a general point that Hrotsvith cannot help making. Perhaps Hrotsvith’s experience as a woman in a maledominated culture, and particularly a male-dominated Church, is reflected in these stories where women make extreme sacrifices, where they are not allowed to speak, and where they are not permitted direct access to God while on earth. Her male characters, on the other hand, are allowed to speak in their own voice and are allowed a direct interface with the divine while on earth. Men are advantaged in the dramas in a manner parallel to the advantages they enjoyed in medieval Christianity. The very discrepancies and disadvantages that Hrotsvith experienced as a woman navigating a male-dominated world are on display in her dramas, where women are limited to supporting roles for men’s own needs: through prostitution women serve men’s carnal needs, and through repentance they satisfy the needs of the heroic male virgin to confirm his ability to resist the desires of his flesh while qualifying himself for salvation through his good works. Wailes wants to rename Abraham and Paphnutius with the names of their female penitents, since these women seem to be the focal point of the stories. But this is to miss the point: the central penitential figures of Mary and Thais are relegated to secondary roles in their own stories. The titles are right as they are, for they reflect the way that Hrotsvith saw the injustice of the world in which she lived.

Notes 1

2

3

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See Hugo Kuhn, ‘Hrotsviths von Gandersheim Dichterisches Programm’, Dichtung und Welt im Mittelalter, 2nd edn (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche, 1969), pp. 91–104; Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); and Bert Nagel, Hrotsvit von Gandersheim (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1965). Stephen Wailes has contested the consensus view, suggesting that ‘the conflict of flesh and spirit’, rather than the theme of virginity per se, is the crux of Hrotsvith’s work. See Stephen Wailes, ‘Beyond Virginity: Flesh and Spirit in the Plays of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim’, Speculum, 76/1 (2001), 3. Wailes points out that the medieval world inherited its emphasis on the conflict between flesh and spirit from ‘Paul’s statement in Galatians: “caro enim concupiscit adversus spiritum / spiritus autem adversus carnem / haec enim invicem adversantur” (5.17; “For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh; for these are opposed to each other”).’ It should be mentioned that this medieval, Latin-based understanding does not do justice to the meaning of the original Greek. A complex word, sarx in Paul sometimes has the meaning of ‘bodily flesh’, but in the main it refers to the (non-bodily) principle of sinfulness in human beings. This is why Paul goes on to give a litany of vices in Galatians 5:19–21, the majority of which sound more like what modern readers understand to be ‘spiritual’ vices than ‘carnal’ vices: ‘Now the works of the flesh are plain: immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissensions, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like.’ Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, 2nd Catholic edn (National Council of the Churches of Christ, 2006). Elizabeth A. Petroff, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 81 (emphasis added). Dronke, Women Writers, p. 60.

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7 8 9

10 11

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15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23

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The plots of both plays are easily summarized. In Paphnutius, the eponymous virgin leaves the desert disguised as a lover in order to find a famous and wealthy prostitute named Thais in Alexandria. His eloquence convinces her to abandon her lifestyle and undergo penance by confining herself to a small cell for three years, after which a vision reveals to Paphnutius that Thais has earned her forgiveness. She dies shortly after being released from her cell. In Abraham, the chaste and religious Mary, who had spent her earlier life as a solitary, returns to the world to become a ‘harlot’. Her uncle, the holy Abraham, disguised as a lover and fearful of carnal temptation in the presence of his niece, comes to reclaim her for monastic life. She leaves worldly life behind and prays for the souls of the men she tempted into sin. The beginning ‘Argument’ suggests she will devote twenty years to fasting, praying, vigils and self-castigation. Ruth M. Karras, ‘Sex, Money, and Prostitution in Medieval English Culture’, in Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler, Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), p. 201. Ruth M. Karras, ‘Prostitution in Medieval Europe’, in Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (eds), Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (New York: Garland, 1996), p. 243. Karras, ‘Prostitution in Medieval Europe’, p. 243. Karras, ‘Sex, Money, and Prostitution’, p. 207. Carolyne Larrington, Women and Writing in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 89. Karras, ‘Sex, Money, and Prostitution’, p. 206. See Nickie Roberts, Whores in History: Prostitution in Western Society (London: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 61. It is not the purpose of this chapter to offer a comprehensive review of scholarship on medieval European prostitution. For a helpful resource on the distinctions among different categories of women who fall under the umbrella of medieval ‘prostitution’, see Cordelia Beattie, Medieval Single Women: The Politics of Social Classification in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007), and Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (eds), Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). Martha Howell points out that though research in German medieval prostitution did gain some momentum in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the interest in the subject did not yield significant scholarship after the Second World War. See Martha Howell, ‘A Documented Presence: Medieval Women in Germanic Historiography’, in Susan Mosher Stuard (ed.), Women in Medieval History and Historiography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), pp. 101–31. Quoted in Andrew McCall, The Medieval Underworld (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979), p. 245; see also Roberts, Whores in History, p. 61. Elizabeth Fisher, Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1979), quoted in Roberts, Whores in History, p. 57. Jean-Louis Flandrin, ‘Sex in Married Life in the Early Middle Ages: The Church’s Teaching and Behavioural Reality’, in Philippe Ariès and André Béjin (eds), Western Sexuality: Practice and Precept in Past and Present Times, trans. Anthony Forster (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), p. 115. McCall, Medieval Underworld, p. 179. Gail Hawkes, Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), p. 51. Karras, ‘Sex, Money, and Prostitution”, pp. 201–2. See note 4 above. The story of Mary and Abraham can also be found, with some variations, in Benedicta Ward’s English translation of a Latin translation of a Greek text by an anonymous author whose original text circulated in the Middle Ages. See Benedicta Ward, Harlots of the Desert: A Study of Repentance in Early Monastic Sources (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1987). McCall, Medieval Underworld, 179. Roberts, Whores in History, p. 64. Petroff, Body and Soul, p. 84. Petroff, Body and Soul, p. 84. Petroff, Body and Soul, p. 87.

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25

26 27

28 29

30 31

32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42

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Madeline H. Caviness, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p. 85. Emma Campbell and Robert Mills, Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 98. Dronke, Women Writers, p. 71. Incidentally, it is not clear to me what Dronke has in mind when he writes that the ‘strong men go under’. Caviness, Visualizing Women, p. 93. Hrotsvitha, The Plays of Roswitha, trans. Christopher St. John (New York: B. Blom, 1966), p. 156. Hrotsvitha, Plays, p. 116. Hrotsvit, Opera Omnia, ed. Walter Berschin (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2001), p.  213 (my translation). Hrotsvitha, Plays, p. 119. Hrotsvit, Opera, p. 216 (my translation). Hrotsvit, Opera, p. 238 (my translation). This is a strange request from her ‘saviour’, given his assertion that God had forgiven her; again, the aim of the acts of contrition and repentance was to redeem her in the eyes of society. Ward, Harlots, p. 83. Hrotsvitha, Plays, p. 102. Hrotsvitha, Plays, p. 102. Hrotsvitha, Plays, p. 103. Nagel, Hrotsvit, p. 58 (my translation). Hrotsvit, Opera, p. 172. A similar pattern is found in Basilius, where an unnamed wife helps an unnamed former servant (now her husband) out of his contract with the Devil. Her forgiveness is not sufficient for his salvation. At best she can only initiate the action that leads to his redemption. But in order to initiate this action, she must leave aside her femininity and become genderless: ‘Illaque, mollitiem iam deponens muliebrem / Et sumens vires prudenti corde viriles’ (Hrotsvit, Opera, p. 202). She seeks out Basilius, a powerful Church authority, to obtain help. Following the advice of Basilius, her husband lives in a cave for forty days. There he confronts his demons in isolation, though he is not completely alone: Basilius, worried about the husband’s ability to withstand the hardship of seclusion and penance, checks in on him. (This is a very different – and easier – scenario from the penance performed by the women: Thais lives alone is a small cell, confined with her excrement, for three years, while Mary prays and cries alone for five years.) Basilius, whose eloquence and purity cast the demons out when the reformed sinner tries to return to the Church, is the real heroic figure of the legend.

Works Cited Ariès, Philippe and André Béjin, Western Sexuality: Practice and Precept in Past and Present Times (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). Beattie, Cordelia, Medieval Single Women: The Politics of Social Classification in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). Bennett, Judith M. and Amy M. Froide (eds), Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250– 1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). Bible (Revised Standard Version), 2nd Catholic edn (National Council of the Churches of Christ, 2006). Bullough, Vern L. and James A. Brundage, Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (New York: Garland, 1996).

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Campbell, Emma and Robert Mills, Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Caviness, Madeline H., Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). Dronke, Peter, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Fisher, Elizabeth, Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1979). Flandrin, Jean-Louis, ‘Sex in Married Life in the Early Middle Ages: The Church’s Teaching and Behavioural Reality’, in Philippe Ariès and André Béjin (eds), Western Sexuality: Practice and Precept in Past and Present Times, trans. Anthony Forster (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), pp. 114–29. Gonsalva, M. Wiegand, ‘The Non-Dramatic Works of Hrosvitha; Text, Translation, and Commentary’ (Ph.D. dissertation, St Louis University, St Louis, 1936). Hawkes, Gail, Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004). Howell, Martha, ‘A Documented Presence: Medieval Women in Germanic Historiography’, in Susan Mosher Stuard (ed.), Women in Medieval History and Historiography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), pp. 101–31. Hrotsvit, Opera Omnia, ed. Walter Berschin (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2001). Hrotsvitha, The Plays of Roswitha, trans. Christopher St John (New York: B. Blom, 1966). Karras, Ruth Mazo, ‘Prostitution in Medieval Europe’, in Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (eds), Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 243–60. Karras, Ruth Mazo, ‘Sex, Money, and Prostitution in Medieval English Culture’, in Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler (eds), Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), pp. 201–16. Kuhn, Hugo, ‘Hrotsviths von Gandersheim Dichterisches Programm’, Dichtung und Welt im Mittelalter, 2nd edn (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche, 1969), pp. 91–104. Larrington, Carolyne, Women and Writing in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1995). McCall, Andrew, The Medieval Underworld (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979). Nagel, Bert, Hrotsvit von Gandersheim (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1965). Petroff, Elizabeth A., Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Roberts, Nickie, Whores in History: Prostitution in Western Society (London: HarperCollins, 1992). Wailes, Stephen, ‘Beyond Virginity: Flesh and Spirit in the Plays of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim’, Speculum, 76/1 (2001), 1–27. Ward, Benedicta, Harlots of the Desert: A Study of Repentance in Early Monastic Sources (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1987).

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12 Liturgy and the Performance of the Mystical Self CLAIRE TAYLOR JONES

A

few years ago, I gave an informal talk about the late medieval manuscript culture of the Dominican convent of St Catherine in Nuremberg. This convent has received a good deal of well-deserved scholarly attention in the past few decades because of its important role in the production and dissemination of religious manuscripts following its reform in the fifteenth century.1 This reform was enabled by the generous gift of a patrician widow, Kunigund Schreiber, who wished to enter an Observant convent upon her husband’s death and turned his considerable fortune over to St Catherine’s on the condition that they embrace the Observant reform.2 Only with this money were the nuns able to complete the building projects necessary for strict enclosure. ‘She paid to have herself walled up?’ exclaimed one of the auditors, aghast. Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff contributed to the project of recuperation that occupied feminist medievalists at the end of the twentieth century. At the time, medieval women’s voices had either been taken away from them by historians of the previous century who did not believe women were capable of cultural creativity, or they languished unheard in dusty archives.3 Much of the initial work to be done was simple exposure – bringing women’s texts to light and making them available for modern scholarly study, as in Petroff’s expansive edition of women’s visionary literature.4 While much work remains to be done in rescuing women’s voices from oblivion, this movement was successful insofar as few still doubt that women’s texts are waiting in the archives to be found and that they are worth reading. Nevertheless, given the nature of this work of recovery and the politics of the feminist movement that spurred it, particular kinds of women tend to be elevated and celebrated over others. Since the feminist movement more broadly aimed (and still aims) at the establishment of gender equality (even as certain currents challenge the gender binary), feminist medievalists looked for historical evidence that women had always been just as intelligent, powerful and creative as men and found mountains of such evidence in religious contexts. Against all odds, ‘women did emerge as leaders in medieval society’,5 and we modern scholars raised the leaders and other women who resisted patriarchal norms on our scholarly pedestals.6 Heretics, abbesses, reformers, prophetesses, ascetics – the more problematic during the Middle Ages the better. The reasons for this selective recognition lie less with medieval women and more with ourselves. The women we have valued are those in whom we seem to recognise

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reflections of our own priorities and struggles. The beguines, the heretics and, to a certain extent, the reformers strike a chord because, and here I quote Petroff at length, women’s mysticism is connected to freedom. Most of the women mentioned in this discussion were extraregular in some way. Although convent life offered a structure in which piety might develop into mysticism, that structure could often seem too rigid. The freer approach of the beguines, with the possibility for alternating times in community and times of reclusion, seems to be much more congenial for discovering an individual voice as a writer . . . In all the works by medieval women studied here, we see what is missing in the literature of the rest of the medieval world – a female subject, living autonomously in a world she defines, speaking a language she invents and controls.7 The medieval women we valued were reflections of our own ideal selves: strong-willed, autonomous, individual, free. Evaluating medieval women in this way may, however, be doing them a disservice, since we fail to understand them on their own terms. Modern scholars have struggled to reconcile, for example, the image of Hildegard as a liberatory feminist genius with her elitism and conservatism, even though the way we frame these social concerns and their intersectionality would have been utterly foreign to her.8 Similar values are reflected in the quotation above. The restrictions of a cloistered life were ‘too rigid’ for many women and could stifle the creativity that would flourish in the ‘free’ space of the beguinage. And this space of religious, social, and economic ‘freedom’ is the sole locus of autonomous female subjects in the Middle Ages. Writing about contemporary Muslim women in Egypt, Saba Mahmood criticises precisely this tendency among feminist Western scholars. In Politics of Piety she argues that feminist scholars have naturalised the autonomous Enlightenment subject in their analyses of gender relations in non-Western cultures, assuming its universal validity as a category of human experience and action. Looking for evidence of female agency in patriarchal tribal cultures, feminist anthropologists located this agency at sites of resistance or reclusion. Women’s agency could be found either in subtle subversions of the patriarchal norms – perhaps like the vernacularisation of theology – or in restricted women’s spaces – perhaps like the convent or beguinage. The female subject was missing in the rest of the cultural expressions of these societies. Mahmood argues that such interpretations fail to describe the relations of power within these foreign cultures adequately because they assume ‘the universality of the desire – central for liberal and progressive thought, and presupposed by the concept of resistance it authorizes – to be free from relations of subordination and, for women, from structures of male domination’.9 In order to grasp the structures of power within which pious women (choose to) operate, we must be able to locate and describe female agency that does not articulate itself through resistance. The female subject also exists outside the ‘world she defines’ and even if she speaks something other than the ‘language she invents and controls’. We must simply find the correct theoretical tools to describe her. So what about the medieval women who chose the cloister? How do we describe a mysticism that is not ‘connected to freedom’? How can we respect the medieval women who actively chose the rigidly structured life of enclosure – without justifying it as a small zone of feminine power or the only way to get an education? We honour Petroff

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and the first generation of feminist medievalists not only by continuing their work of restoring exceptional women to deserved prominence but also by trying to understand the world medieval religious women occupied on its own terms and to respect the women who do not meet our standards of autonomous subjecthood because of their complicity in the relations of power and male domination. This work has already begun in my own field, for example in the several studies that have been done on women in the Observant reform movement that I mentioned in my opening. Several scholars have turned a sympathetic eye on the women who chose strict enclosure, trying to respect their own stated motives and to avoid essentialising them by acknowledging that every convent and every reform ran a unique course.10 In the rest of this essay I will offer another contribution to this project through a nod to Elizabeth Petroff’s other scholarly legacy – that is, by bringing theory to the conversation. Agreeing with Mahmood that agency assumes different forms, strategies and modes of expression in different historical and social circumstances, I cannot offer her description of pious female agency in the Egyptian mosque movement as a way of understanding medieval monastic women. Nor, I would argue, can there be a single description of medieval female, or even medieval monastic female, subjecthood. Indeed, I conceive the practices of religious life as active strategies of (self-)subjectivation that are manipulable within certain bounds and to certain ends. I will suggest a baseline theoretical description of the kind of subject that might have been produced by the most important of monastic practices, the liturgy. Such an approach will have to be refined by close analyses of specific rituals, in specific communities, in specific historical contexts. Yet this outline will, I hope, make it easier for us to understand why a medieval woman might have chosen the rigid life of monastic practice not merely as flight or retreat from the male-dominated world but in active pursuit of a certain form of subjecthood. I admit explicitly in advance that there is nothing inherently gendered about the theories I outline below. I would argue that they may be deployed in service of a gendered reading, but that an understanding of the gender dynamics at work in medieval monastic contexts must arise in each instance out of close contextualised and intersectional analysis. In particular, the suggestion that monasticism may have seen a ‘third gender’11 deserves serious consideration, but with the understanding that the structures of gendered power were probably different in different centuries, different orders, different regions, different social classes etc. Furthermore, liturgical subjectivation even within a single convent was not a static constant but rather a ritual cycle that taught different affective relations over the course of the church year. The Christian subject of Christmas is different from that of Lent. The theoretical model of the liturgical self that I offer below is a first analytical step that could apply equally to men or women and will need to be modulated according to specific context. Two theoretical strands come together in my description of liturgical subjectivation. I will begin with two theorists whose writings also inform Mahmood’s work.12 Michel Foucault’s late lectures on technologies of the self describe how individuals transform themselves by means of certain ascetic and meditative operations in order to attain a valued state (wisdom, purity etc.). Together with Talal Asad’s description of entrained virtue in medieval monasticism, Foucault’s work can illuminate how embodied ritual and vocalised text may together shape particular structures of self in relation to the

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world and the divine. The second approach derives from phenomenology, specifically Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of gesture and embodied meaning, and Don Ihde’s examination of the experience of listening. These meditations on voice and hearing provide initial ways of understanding bodily experiences of the other both as sensory reception of another’s speech and in the embodied activity of vocal communication. A phenomenological description of the embodied intersubjectivity experienced in communal song is essential for describing mystical experience within liturgical worship. These theoretical approaches to performative textuality and embodied voice offer a way to describe medieval women’s mysticism as bodily in a way that goes beyond asceticism, and literary in a way not limited to apophaticism, since embodiment and textuality were linked in the daily practice of the liturgy. Michel Foucault retrospectively characterised his life’s work as a series of investigations into the relationship between the subject and the truth, particularly insofar as the subject is expected to tell the truth. Although writings on the prison system, the insane asylum and sexual perversion provided the focus for much of his work, late in life he turned away from compulsory institutions of discipline and took an interest in voluntary ones.13 He explained the reorientation of his thought as resulting from a realisation that the ‘techniques of domination’ on which he had focused went hand in hand with what he called ‘techniques’ or ‘technologies of the self’. Foucault identifies four main types of ‘technology of knowledge’, which he defines as systems by which human beings develop an understanding of themselves. His four types are technologies of production, which govern our relationship to and our ways of manipulating objects; technologies of sign systems, which enable communication and the production of meaning; technologies of power or domination, which police an individual’s behaviour; and finally, technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.14 Both technologies of domination and technologies of the self aim at the development and management of certain modes of behaviour and conduct. Foucault notes that certain institutions combine these forms of control and assigns the term ‘governmentality’ to the intersection of technologies of domination with those of the self.15 Christian monasticism, which governs its subjects both by a monastic Rule and by the injunction to meditation and self-purification, is a prime example of governmentality. Talal Asad’s analysis of monastic practice elucidates how governmentality works. Opposing earlier formulations of ritual as a system of symbolic communication or indoctrination of power structures, Asad writes that ritual is concerned primarily with the intentional construction of a particular disposition (habitus) through the manipulation and training of the body. According to Asad, ritual is a practice of the body performed with the intent to shape the attitude of the soul, an external technique for the creation of an inner disposition. Drawing on Hugh of St Victor’s De sacramentis christianae fidei, Asad claims this function for Christian ritual: ‘The sacraments are not the representation of cultural metaphors; they are parts of a Christian program for creating in its performers,

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by means of regulated practice, the “mental and moral dispositions” appropriate to Christians.’16 The structures and attitudes valued by the Christian community are not merely communicated symbolically via liturgical ritual. Liturgy rather trains its practicants in the embodied performance of appropriate virtues and dispositions. Asad explicitly ties this insight back to medieval regular life. Citing Hugh of St Victor’s treatise for novices, Asad shows that the daily practices of monastic discipline are not merely symbolic expressions of a minority culture but intentional and focused training. Hugh admonishes the novices that disordered movements of the body convey the disorder of the soul. Monastic discipline acts in the reverse, attempting to create order in the soul by regulating external behaviour. Although the Divine Office occupies a privileged position, this principle extends to all aspects of monastic life: dress, speech, gesture, even table manners.17 Every aspect of a monk’s behaviour either contributes to instilling Christian virtue or entrains the habits of sin. The novice must learn to self-evaluate and examine the degree to which his inner disposition corresponds to the ideals of the Rule he performs. This conjunction of outer and inner regulation constitutes governmentality. Such an approach to religious lifestyle as dispositional training was not unique to Hugh. In his Book of Duties, the Dominican friar Johannes Meyer describes the kinds of physical behaviours that the novice mistress must inculcate in her charges. Like Hugh, Meyer includes not only ritual gestures for devotion and worship but also appropriate habits of sitting, walking, standing, gesture and even facial expression to be observed at all times. The goal of this instruction is that novices should learn to prefer being with the sisters in community to being with outsiders at the grille, to like being in the dormitory or oratory or other parts of the monastery where silence is kept rather than visiting places where people talk, to favor places where the whole community assembles more than places apart from the common life . . . In sum, they should prefer places devoted to such things as the divine office, mass, chapter and the like, which are best and most profitable for religious life and virtue, not places dedicated to bodily consolation like the infirmary and the refectory.18 Successful convent training produces women who not only follow this code of conduct implicitly and habitually but also desire to behave virtuously and religiously. Governmentality is the operation whereby external and internal regulations coincide to shape a subject that behaves in a certain way because she wills and desires in a certain way. The rituals and embodied performances constitutive of monastic life are therefore not merely an expression of an already innate devotion. These practices represent a form of bodily training that instils physical and spiritual habits simultaneously. Where Asad is interested in physical regimens, Foucault focuses attention on discursive practices (what he calls veridiction) at the expense of other embodied forms of ritual performance. In the late lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault examines the spiritual exercises of ancient philosophy, specifically the Stoics, whose practices of self-formation he sees as having been carried over into Christian monasticism.19 The pivotal elements of monastic self-formation (according to Foucault) are obedience and confession, which originate in the Stoic relationship between master and mentee but are distorted by the introduction of self-renunciation as the end goal.20 In both obedience

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and confession the subject gives himself and the truth about himself to the master in an act of self-renunciation that will presumably allow him access to some greater transcendent Truth. Foucault acknowledges that within Christianity this truth is twofold. What Foucault calls the truth obligation of the self (the confession of sin) is linked to the truth obligation of dogma (the confession of faith). He nevertheless attempts to dissociate these two forms of truth. He explains that, the regimes of faith and confession in Christianity are very different, since what is involved in the case of faith is adherence to an inviolable and revealed truth in which the role of the individual, and therefore of the truth act, the point of subjectivation is essentially in accepting this content and in agreeing to demonstrate that one accepts it . . . whereas in the other case, in confession, it is not at all a matter of adhering to a content of truth, but of exploring individual secrets.21 Christians have two obligations to truth, both of which bear the name of confession – one is the admission of sin and one the profession of faith. This double definition of confession has a strong tradition in Christianity, the most obvious example being Augustine’s Confessions, which combines a narrative of his life with exegesis of Scripture. Yet because he is interested in the production of true discourse about the self, Foucault explicitly leaves the question of revealed text and the subject’s relationship to it aside.22 Even with the perhaps rather hackneyed example of Augustine, it is evident that Foucault commits a critical error in trying to disentangle the two forms of confession. His narrow interest in confession as the admission of sin and his failure to examine critically the idea that faith entails the wholesale acceptance of dogmatic content cause him to overlook the single most important element of monastic self-formation – the one in which monastics spent the majority of their lives and the one in which the two forms of confession coincide most closely, that is, the liturgy. This oversight is all the more surprising, since the role of liturgical psalmody in monastic self-formation receives a striking statement in the writings of Foucault’s monastic test case: John Cassian. As Cassian’s desert fathers explain, the purpose of liturgical prayer is to bring the truth of the self into harmonious unity with the truth of faith. The fifth-century work known as the Conlationes or Conferences was extremely influential for later monasticism, not least due to its enshrinement as recommended reading in the Rule of Benedict. Amidst sweeping discussions of virtue and religious life, Cassian offers a beautiful meditation on Scriptural understanding and perfect prayer in the dialogues of the ninth and tenth conferences. These issues prove inseparable for the interlocutors because of the monastic practice of liturgical psalmody – one ought to understand the words one prays, but how does one attain that understanding? Abba Isaac concludes the tenth conference by explaining that once one has achieved the perfection of virtue one will read the psalms in such a way that one understands the text proleptically in anticipation of its meaning rather than after interpretation. For divine Scripture is clearer and its inmost organs, so to speak, are revealed to us when our experience not only perceives but even anticipates its thought, and the meanings of the words are disclosed to us not by exegesis but by proof. When we have the same disposition in our heart with which each psalm was sung or written

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down, then we shall become like its author, grasping its significance beforehand rather than afterward.23 True understanding of Scripture does not, in fact, involve logical exegesis or the application of a hermeneutic method in order to derive knowledge from the text. The meaning of the words is obvious, because they speak to, or better, of the singer’s experience. The psalm sung expresses the disposition of the singer so precisely that it is as if the words were a direct and spontaneous articulation of the singer’s own affect.24 In the perfection of monastic life, the two forms of confession merge in the liturgical recitation of Scripture, which the monastic ideally will simultaneously proclaim as the revealed truth of faith and claim as the truth of her self. Foucault acknowledges the double meaning of the word ‘confession’ in arguing that the Christian self is organised according to two truth obligations, that of faith and that of the self, but he leaves the picture incomplete. He focuses only on the practices that produce new discourse about the self, i.e. confession. He thereby ignores other monastic discursive practices that utilised prescribed and formulaic texts, which monastics themselves nevertheless recognised as ‘discourse about the self’. This choice thus excludes the most pervasive aspect of monastic life, namely liturgical performance. In failing to recognise the monastic deployment of scriptural text as discourse about the self, Foucault also misses that the truth of the faith and the truth of the self might radically coincide.25 Indeed, achieving this harmony was the goal of informed liturgical recitation. We still gain from Foucault’s thought the idea that discursive practices, that is, the production of certain forms of speech, may be strategically employed in order to create a certain kind of self who is inclined to certain performances and habits, and open to certain forms of experience. Like other forms of training, asceticism, punishment, discipline and ritual, speech practices shape our dispositions. Liturgical performance, even more so than confession of sin, represents a form of governmentality that builds subjects whose expression of faith and expression of self are the same and whose souls coincide with the content of revealed Scripture. Placing Foucault in conversation with Asad reveals that it is not only the liturgical text that shapes the subject but the embodied performance of song, procession and ritual. The theory of governmentality and technologies of the self establishes that one may entrain a disposition of Christian virtue through the confluence of external Rule and self-regulation. The practice of religious discipline and embodied recitation of scriptural text form a subject whose truth is that of the Scripture recited. This ultimate goal of selfperfection is represented beautifully in a visionary account from the Dominican convent of Gotteszell. After her death, a certain Heilwig appeared to another sister wearing sashes with the texts of liturgical chants emblazoned on them. These texts, drawn from the liturgical office for a martyr, are her reward for the sorrow she suffered during her life. Through her virtuous discipline, Heilwig assumed the chants she sang on behalf of early martyrs as her own truth in the afterlife.26 The truth of Heilwig’s life and the truth of scriptural song coincide. Despite Foucault’s focus on discourse, his approach fails to explain why vocal performance should be a privileged mode of this transformative practice. Why, for example, did donning the habit not inspire the same mystical engagement as liturgical song? To answer this question, I turn to phenomenology for Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s and Don

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Ihde’s meditations on communication, expression and intersubjectivity. The investigation into the privilege of vocal performance must, perhaps strangely, begin by revoking the special status of language among modes of expression. Merleau-Ponty claims that expression is not a matter of producing sense content but rather of performing a stance towards the world, lived through the body. He acknowledges the articulation of words and the role of sound in language, and grants that thought is in fact coextensive with speech. Nevertheless, he rejects grammar as the structure of the subject’s relationship to the world. Thought is structured by speech, but neither represents the fullness of subjective experience. Merleau-Ponty denies the special status of language among other forms of expression by pointing out that it is both performed and experienced through the body just as much as sign language or facial expression.27 In order to understand the role of embodiment in communication, Merleau-Ponty suggests that we try to think of expression in terms of the aesthetic experiences in which embodied and non-linguistic communication is more evident.28 All communication, even speech, is embodied and therefore affective, both in the sense that it is emotional and in the sense of embedded potentiality that affect theory has recently bestowed upon the word.29 Such an approach foregrounds the fact that all expression communicates both a referent and the speaker’s affective relation to it. It is quite obvious, from pointing or grimaces for example, that the body is the medium of communication and that the content of the message pertains to the body’s lived relation to the object in question.30 However, speech relies on the body no less than other forms of communication, and Merleau-Ponty places speech under the category of gesture, making ‘gesture’ a universal term for all expression in order to emphasise the bodiliness of communication. Since every act of communication evokes a bodily or affective attitude towards the referent experienced by the speaker, successful communication depends on the listener’s ability to assume the speaker’s mode of engagement with the object in question and, more generally, her mode of inhabiting the world. For Merleau-Ponty, the subject’s presence in the world is performed; its relationship to the world is a mode of dynamic activity that is enacted through the body and conditioned by expression: ‘All perception, all action which presupposes it, and in short every human use of the body is already primordial expression.’31 Even simple perception is influenced by a mode of being-inthe-world that simultaneously preconditions a person’s experience and allows her to project structures of understanding into the world in turn. Furthermore, the gesture of a body manifests its mode of being-in-the-world, and by virtue of being a performance this gesture is always for another. The fundamental embeddedness of the body in the world creates the condition of possibility for intersubjectivity but also entails that intersubjective communication be mediated through the material world and through the body. What is communicated in expression is not objective conceptual meaning content but an alternative mode of being-in-the-world. For all that we may see the object to which the other refers, we cannot understand her until we know how she behaves with regard to that object. Understanding the other is thus not a question of communication of concepts but an ability to adopt the other’s mode of being-in-the-world. Expression is the communication of affective content (taken again in the double sense) by which I demonstrate to the other my relationship to the world, or alternatively, in which I adopt that mode of being-in-the-world in which I see the other engaged.

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For Merleau-Ponty, intersubjectivity involves the recognition of the other as a selfconstituting ego, an alter ego, only insofar as this entails engagement with the other’s lived world. The location of intersubjective experience lies thus not within the mind but in the material world which lies between and is shaped by two bodies.32 This engagement is much more profound than a simple acknowledgement that ‘another myself’ has her own way of being-in-the-world. In the act of understanding, the subject assumes the other’s significative intention, which is constituted by gestures (including language) and enacted in the body’s activity in the world. The subject’s own ‘thought’ occurs in her body and the mode of being-in-the-world that this body enacts. Consequently, in order to understand the other’s ‘thought’, she must embody it, as well. Medieval narratives exemplify this through the common image of the cryptoChristian, i.e.  a Jewish, Muslim or pagan figure whose behaviour (their way of being-in-the-world) situates them within the Christian universe and makes their conversion simply a matter of time and acknowledgment. In Nikolaus von Jeroschin’s Kronike von Pruzinlant, the high-profile conversions of pagan Lithuanian warriors are prepared by battlefield displays of respect for icons of the Virgin Mary.33 A Middle English miracle story of Jewish conversion begins with a Jewish child who habitually plays with Christian children just as if he were one of them.34 In Wolfram von Eschenbach’s grail narrative, Parzival’s half-brother Feirifiz is a consummate warrior and a chivalric courtier, like a host of ‘Saracen’ knights from medieval romance.35 For medieval narrative, understanding the Christian universe is less a matter of theological debate than of embodied performance of the Christian way of being-in-the-world, which creates the preconditions for formal acknowledgement in conversion and baptism. To bring this back to Foucault and Asad, the technology of the self or the selftransformation undertaken in liturgy exploits what Merleau-Ponty describes as the process of all communication. Expression always relies on the embodied performance of a particular mode of being-in-the-world, and understanding is always fulfilled in the embodiment of someone else’s performed relation to the world. Monastic practice consists in the direction of bodily performance towards cultivating a particular desired relation to the world or mode of being-in. By combining the performance of scriptural text with music and bodily movements, liturgy cultivates a particular monastic mode of being-in-the-world. Furthermore, this project of self-formation is pursued in a communal environment filled with other selves who attempt to perform and inhabit the same mode of being-in-the-world. The experience of song and singing is integral to liturgical performance and any theory of the liturgical subject must account for its role. Merleau-Ponty provides us with a way to describe the liturgy as an intersubjective space without recourse to the hierarchical mentor/mentee relationship privileged by Foucault. This mode of intersubjectivity is enacted through the embodied performances discussed by Asad and allows us to theorise vocal production (speech) as one aspect of this experience, among other ritual practices and gestures. Although this point of departure is necessary in order to escape the understanding of vocal expression as mere logical (dogmatic) content, the experience of voice does provide important advantages over other modes of gesture through its phenomenological character as an internal experience of resonance. In his book Listening and Voice, Don Ihde refines Merleau-Ponty’s general model of intersubjectivity in an analysis that brings out the specific properties of listening and the auditory medium as the sphere of intersubjectivity.

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Following Merleau-Ponty, Ihde describes the experiencing entity as neither the subject nor the body but rather the ‘subject-body’, which is conditioned by material perception and manifested in its reactions to the world. Whereas Merleau-Ponty describes the expression of gesture as occurring generally in the lived body without further specification, Ihde’s detailed phenomenological meditation on the specific experience of listening leads him to describe the location of the intersubjective encounter as ‘inside’ the head. Ihde makes the similarity between hearing oneself and hearing another one of the constitutive conditions of communication. Ihde writes, ‘I hear what he is saying, and in this listening we are both presented with the penetrating presence of voiced language which is “between” and “in” both of us.’36 In addition to hearing the other inside our heads, we experience our own speech both in thinking silently and in speaking aloud as occurring ‘in our heads’ as well.37 To refine this point, Ihde adduces the example of hearing an audio recording of one’s own voice. To our surprise, we always sound much higher to ourselves than we imagine we sound while actually engaged in speaking. The reason for this is that the space of our throat, lungs, and sinuses lends an internal resonance which is not activated when hearing a noise that originates outside our own bodies.38 This discovery first indicates that the experience of one’s own voice is indeed phenomenologically distinct from that of hearing another. However, this conclusion is reached through the realisation that the sense of hearing does not rely exclusively on the ear drums, but that the entire body is engaged in the perception of vibrations. Hearing is thus in truth a modality of the sense of touch, but it occurs within the body rather than on the surface of the skin. Hearing the noises of the world and producing noise with one’s own voice both activate the resonant capacities of the body, albeit in different ways. The resonant body has provided a (more or less metaphorical) model of subjectivity for both Jean-Luc Nancy and Brian Massumi. Although he is less explicitly concerned with a rigorous phenomenological description of hearing, Nancy’s discussion of voice in Listening uses the concept of bodily resonance to describe a version of subjectivity and subject–object relation that moves away from the problems of the Cartesian selfconstituting subject.39 Nancy uses the metaphor of an echo chamber to describe the subject, associating the empty spaces of the echo chamber with the empty spaces in the body that receive and/or produce sound. He explains that the subject is not a thing but an activity, consisting in reverberation, and that the ‘walls’ of this chamber are not the subject itself but are necessary for its existence. The space opened up by the subject’s activity is not constituted by the subject’s rejection or refusal of the objects in the world from which it differentiates itself in order to attain self-identity. The subject is instead constituted in the vibration of the ‘space’ that contains it, a vibration which may be set off by contact with objects. Brian Massumi also evokes the metaphor of an echo in order to describe what ‘may well be the conditions of emergence of a subject’.40 For him, resonation describes the self-relation at the heart of sensation, the feeling that one has a feeling.41 The seemingly immaterial but dynamic reflexivity of the echo illustrates the event that is the subject, which bounces back to itself off the ‘walls’ of ‘sensory surfaces’. The echo is not in or on the walls but continually active in the empty space between them.42 Nancy and Massumi both treat the resonant body abstractly as a metaphor for the activity of the subject. Even when assigning the body a place within the metaphorical

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structure, as Massumi does describing the ‘walls’ of the echo chamber, the body stands in for sensation or perception. Their theories nevertheless combine remarkably well with the observation that sound is both received and produced by the empty spaces in the body and the membranes which surround them. The ear drum and the chest cavity receive vibrations from the environment and the diaphragm, lungs, vocal chords, throat, sinuses, even the shape of the mouth, contribute to the sound produced.43 The reverberating subject of Nancy and Massumi is not actually that far off from Ihde’s listening subject-body. Ihde’s reflection on the experience of the sound one’s own body produces is (necessarily) limited to a comparison with hearing an audio recording of oneself. However, in an otherwise dry essay on vocal technique, the early music singer Audrey Ekdahl Davidson recounts arguing with the surgeons over reconstructive surgery after a car accident. Her sinuses were crushed and the spaces within her head had changed shape, her voice felt as if it was no longer her own.44 This professional singer’s tragic accident is a particularly devastating case, but many will relate to the more banal experience of the vocal changes that occur when one has a cold. The empty spaces of reverberation within our bodies shape our experience of ourselves and changing the spaces in our bodies that produce sound result in an alienating feeling of not being oneself. When hearing another, the speech situation and what Ihde calls the ‘polyphony’ of sense perception give rise to a twofold experience of the other, stemming from the radically different characteristics of the fields of hearing and vision. On the one hand, in conversation with a physically present other, one commonly experiences her as a unit in the visual field, thus possessing what Ihde calls an outline-body. The outline-body is characterised by its easy separability from the subject-body’s sense of unity and is therefore experienced in the mode of an object. On the other hand, the other is experienced through her speech, which is felt inside the head and chest. While our experience of all objects in the world is charged with attention to the auditory field, Ihde presents the relationship to the other person in particular as determined by the embodied quality of auditory experience and capable of destabilising the impassable self-unity of the subject. The reason why this disconcerting intersubjective relationship is possible is precisely that the sense of hearing does not operate simply by the ears immediately converting noise to intuitable sensory information (understood as words or birdsong or car engines). As mentioned above, hearing also inextricably involves the sense of touch in the form of vibrations perceived not only through the ear drums but in the entire body. This claim allows Ihde to universalise his model of intersubjectivity, since even in cases of deafness the body perceives vibrations.45 Both when we speak and when we hear another speak, we feel these vibrations in our bodies. If we are unable to spatialise the other in the visual field, the perception of the vibrations gives rise to a strange impression of hyper-presence, of the other in our bodies. This phenomenon is the reason for the privilege of the voice among other forms of expression and communication. The perceiving body not only assumes the other’s mode of being-in-the-world (as for Merleau-Ponty) but also experiences the expression of the other as a very literal physical invasion. The other’s voice is inside our body, closer than touch. For Ihde the pinnacle of the subject-body’s interaction with the world is in moments of involvement where consciousness is so fully immersed in the body’s material engagement that the boundary between subject and object is blurred. Ihde singles out music as a force which makes the subject-body more evident or observable. While listening to

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music, ‘it is my subject-body, my experiencing body, which is engaged, and no longer is it a case of a deistic distance of “mind” to “body.” The call to dance is such that involvement and participation become the mode of being-in the musical situation.’46 The call to participation in which the activity of the other becomes your own recalls Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of communication through expression, in which the subject assumes the other’s mode of being-in-the-world. In the call to dance, however, this process does not function merely on the level of interpretive categories but also influences the actual activity of the body. The rhythmic vibrations permeating the environment draw the body to participate in an impulse towards movement that seems to arise from within. I argue, however, that the act of singing is far more complex than that of dance. Neither Ihde nor Merleau-Ponty addresses the experience of singing in unison, which unites all the modes of intersubjective experience in their works: linguistic expression, vocal production, auditory perception and bodily engagement. In addition to the body’s rhythmic participation in the music, the singing voice produces vibrations more intense than those of regular speech. These vibrations furthermore must be fitted harmoniously to the perceived vibrations produced by other singers. Choral performance requires intense concentration to sing in tune as well as to achieve vocal blend, a phenomenon in which multiple singers match the quality of their tone so that no single voice ‘sticks out’. This activity thus entails not only attention to the resonant presence of the other within one’s own body but is also an attempt to harmonise – literally – one’s own bodily activity with the foreign sound inside it. The sung Scripture of the liturgy (perhaps as well as all lyric) operates differently from other modes of speech expression. While communication for Merleau-Ponty normally entails the assumption of the mode of being-in-the-world experienced by the other before me, in liturgical song all performers attempt to embody the mode of being-in-the-world delivered by the transcendent Other of the scriptural text. The ‘invasion’ of the subject in comprehension is all the more complete when the text expressed is, for all parties, a citation of a transcendent third becoming immanent to their bodies and world through the performance itself. Ihde’s ‘call to dance’ is experienced in liturgical performance as an invitation to host the resounding Word of God within a body that exceeds its own materiality through its resonance with the singing community. This attempt to host God’s Word within the singing body figured for some religious women as a form of prophecy or of imitatio Mariae. Just as Mary had received Christ into her womb by attending to divine speech, so could one achieve mystical union by inviting the divine word of Scripture into one’s own resonating body through liturgical song. While singing Matins responsories, Christina of Hane had a vision of the Christ child sitting on top of the liturgical book and singing into her mouth.47 Hildegard of Bingen, in her famous letter to the prelates of Mainz, argues that forbidding liturgical celebration is counterproductive or even the work of Satan, because the prophets had composed the psalms and hymns of the liturgy in order to restore divine order to the world. Furthermore, ‘just as the body of Jesus Christ was born of the purity of the Virgin Mary through the operation of the Holy Spirit so too the canticle of praise, reflecting celestial harmony, is rooted in the Church through the Holy Spirit.’48 I have argued elsewhere that the Exercitia spiritualia attributed to Gertrude of Helfta teach the contemplative how to immolate her own identity in and through recitation of the

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Psalms.49 Whether a vehicle for individual union or the instrument of universal restoration, performance of liturgical song blurs the bounds of the self in order to embody and transmit the Word of God. The togetherness of monastic subject-bodies is thus experienced in an activity none of these philosophers describes. The effort to sing with others, to sing in unison or even simply in tune, or to do what choir directors today call ‘blending’ demands, more than any other form of vocal production, attention to the other’s voice within one’s own body. Singing with others requires a total attunement of the activity of one’s own body with that of the bodies around one. The vibrations produced in the empty spaces within one’s own body must coincide, resonate and harmonise with the vibrations occurring in the environment. What better way to achieve mystical experience than by transforming one’s lived body into a resonant part of a world brimming with divinity? The annihilation of the self and union with the divine identified as central to much of medieval mysticism must no longer remain the province of philosophical speculation, or the result of ascetic punishment, although it certainly took these forms as well. The theories I have outlined in this essay teach us how performance of the liturgy produced a mystical subject. Liturgical practice was not (merely) the expression of an already pious person but, in concert with a range of monastic disciplines, it also actively formed and reformed its practicants. It oriented liturgical performers on the one hand towards the divine through recitation of Scripture, and on the other towards the material world and fellow humans in communal song. Liturgy could thus produce a subject-body united to the divine in its statement of Scripture as true discourse on the self, and dissolved into the material world through cultivation of the resonant body. While it remains true that subjection to monastic rule and liturgical ritual made the women who chose that life complicit in patriarchal power, we must also sympathetically recognise what they believed they stood to gain within enclosure. In liturgy they performed, re-forming themselves into, the mystical self.

Notes 1

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This convent library’s catalogues and surviving manuscripts provided the backbone of Werner Williams-Krapp’s influential arguments about the ‘explosion’ of fifteenth-century vernacular religious literature. Efforts to nuance or debunk his thesis have often worked from the same material. See Werner Williams-Krapp, ‘Ordensreform und Literatur im 15.  Jahrhundert’, Jahrbuch der Oswald von Wolkenstein Gesellschaft, 4 (1986), 41–51; Klaus Graf, ‘Ordensreform und Literatur in Augsburg während des 15.  Jahrhunderts’, in Johannes Janota and Werner Williams-Krapp (eds), Literarisches Leben in Augsburg während des 15. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995), pp.  100–59; Burkhard Hasebrink, ‘Tischlesung und Bildungskultur im Nürnberger Katharinenkloster: Ein Beitrag zu ihrer Rekonstruktion’, in Martin Kintzinger, Sönke Lorenz and Michael Walter (eds), Schule und Schüler im Mittelalter. Beiträge zur europäischen Bildungsgeschichte des 9. bis 15. Jahrhunderts (Cologne: Böhlau, 1996), pp. 187–216; Werner Williams-Krapp, ‘Die Bedeutung der reformierten Klöster des Predigerordens für das literarische Leben in Nürnberg im 15.  Jahrhundert’, in Falk Eisermann, Eva Schlotheuber and Volker Honemann (eds), Studien und Texte zur literarischen und materiellen Kultur der Frauenklöster im späten Mittelalter (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 311–29; Antje Willing, Literatur und Ordensreform im 15. Jahrhundert: Deutsche Abendmahlsschriften im Nürnberger Katharinenkloster (Münster: Waxmann, 2004). For the library catalogues, see Antje Willing, Die Bibliothek des Klosters

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St. Katharina zu Nürnberg: Synoptische Darstellung der Bücherverzeichnisse (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012). Johannes Meyer, Women’s History in the Age of Reformation: Johannes Meyer’s Chronicle of the Dominican Observance, trans. Claire Taylor Jones (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2019), p. 180. For a recent overview of medieval feminist historiography, see Judith Bennett and Ruth M. Karras, ‘Women, Gender, and Medieval Historians’, in Judith Bennett and Ruth M. Karras (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 1–17. Also inspiring is Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Elizabeth A. Petroff (ed.), Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Elizabeth A. Petroff, ‘Women and Mysticism in the Medieval World’, in Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 7. Although this work is itself history to scholars of my generation, I use ‘we’ humbly to acknowledge my indebtedness to the theories, strategies and discourses developed by Petroff’s generation. Petroff, ‘Women and Mysticism’, pp. 20–1. See, for example, Tilo Altenburg, Soziale Ordnungsvorstellungen bei Hildegard von Bingen (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 2007); Sabina Flanagan, ‘“For God Distinguishes the People of Earth as in Heaven”: Hildegard of Bingen’s Social Ideas’, The Journal of Religious History, 22/1 (1998), 14–34; Alfred Haverkamp, ‘Tenxwind von Andernach und Hildegard von Bingen: Zwei “Weltanschauungen” in der Mitte des 12. Jahrhunderts’, in Lutz Fenske, Werner Rösener and Thomas Zotz (eds), Institutionen, Kultur und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1984), pp. 515–48. For a broader critique of modern romanticisations of Hildegard, see Jennifer Bain, Hildegard of Bingen and Musical Reception: The Modern Revival of a Medieval Composer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 10. Stefanie Neidhardt frames her analysis through the productive tension between autonomy and obedience, and Sylvie Duval has closely analysed nuns’ social origins and the ties they maintained with their families outside the convent. Stefanie M. Neidhardt, Autonomie im Gehorsam: Die dominikanische Observanz in Selbstzeugnissen geistlicher Frauen des Spätmittelalters (Berlin: Lit, 2017); Sylvie Duval, Comme des anges sur terre: Les moniales dominicaines et les débuts de la réforme observante, 1385–1461 (Rome: École française de Rome, 2015). See also Anne Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles: Women Writing about Women and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); Barbara Steinke, Paradiesgarten oder Gefängnis? Das Nürnberger Katharinenkloster zwischen Klosterreform und Reformation (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006); Heike Uffmann, Wie in einem Rosengarten: monastische Reformen des späten Mittelalters in den Vorstellungen von Klosterfrauen (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2008); Simone Mengis, Schreibende Frauen um 1500. Scriptorium und Bibliothek des Dominikanerinnenklosters St. Katharina St. Gallen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013); Claire Taylor Jones, Ruling the Spirit: Women, Liturgy, and Dominican Reform in Late Medieval Germany (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). Jacqueline Murray, ‘One Flesh, Two Sexes, Three Genders?’, in Lisa Bitel and Felice Lifshitz (eds), Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 34–51. For a more thorough discussion of the shortcomings of and responses to Foucault, see Mahmood, Politics of Piety, Chapter 1, in particular pp. 27–30. ‘I have also dealt with the more practical understanding formed in those institutions like hospitals, asylums and prisons, where certain subjects became objects of knowledge and at the same time objects of domination. And now, I wish to study those forms of understanding which the subject creates about himself’; Michel Foucault, ‘About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth’, Political Theory, 21/2 (1993), p. 203.

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Michel Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self’, in Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (eds), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 18; Foucault, ‘About the Beginning’, p. 203. Foucault, ‘Technologies’, p. 19. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 78. Asad, Genealogies, p. 138. See also Mahmood on the meaning of the hijab in Mahmood, Politics of Piety, Chapter 5, especially pp. 155–61. Johannes Meyer, Das Amptbuch, ed. and trans. Sarah Glenn DeMaris (Rome: Angelicum University Press, 2015), p. 452. In this, Foucault followed Pierre Hadot, who developed the theme more thoroughly. See, for example, Pierre Hadot, ‘Exercices spirituels antiques et “philosophie chrétienne”’, in Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, 2nd edn (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1987), pp. 59–74. Foucault delivered the lectures in question from 1979 to 1984. Since his interest in early monasticism steadily waned, I have worked in particular with the 1979–80 series, published in English as Michel Foucault, On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979–1980, ed. Michel Senellart and trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Foucault, ‘Technologies’, pp. 43–8; Foucault, Government of the Living, pp. 266–74. Foucault, Government of the Living, p. 84. Foucault, Government of the Living, p. 83. John Cassian, The Conferences, trans. Boniface Ramsey (New York: Newman Press, 1997), p. 384. For a discussion of affect and prayer in Cassian’s Conferences, see Amy Hollywood, ‘Song, Experience, and the Book in Benedictine Monasticism’, in Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 65–9. Foucault does not, in fact, miss this entirely but suggests that the coincidence of the two regimes of truth occurs first in Protestantism. See Foucault, Government of the Living, p. 85. For a more expansive analysis of this episode and its context, see Jones, Ruling the Spirit, pp. 80–1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 182–92. ‘If it still seems to us that language is more transparent than music, this is because we remain for the most part within constituted language’; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 194. In the pithiest formulation, affect is ‘a body’s capacity to affect and to be affected’; Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 2. See also Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of how painting portrays ‘the emblem of a way of inhabiting the world’. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 54. Merleau-Ponty also comments that emotional displays are just as culturally determined as linguistic utterances; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 195. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, p. 67. ‘As if a different mind than my own suddenly came to dwell in my body, or rather as if my mind were drawn out there and emigrated into the scene it was in the process of setting for itself. I am snapped up by a second myself outside me; I perceive an other’; Merleau-Ponty, Signs, p. 94. Nicolaus von Jeroschin, The Chronicle of Prussia by Nicolaus von Jeroschin: A History of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia, 1190–1331, trans. Mary Fischer (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 198 and 210. For a phenomenological reading of these episodes, see Claire Taylor Jones, ‘Icon as Alter Ego? Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation and Icons of Mary in Chronicles of the Teutonic Order’, in Philippe P. Haensler, Kristina Mendicino and Rochelle Tobias (eds), Phenomenology to the Letter: Husserl and Literature (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), pp. 201–26.

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For Geraldine Heng’s lengthy and nuanced reading of this tale, see Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 91–6. See Heng, Invention of Race, pp. 207–10; and Jerold Frakes, Vernacular and Latin Literary Discourses of the Muslim Other in Medieval Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 34–5. Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, 2nd edn (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), p. 151. See also Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 76–80. Ihde, Listening, p. 136. Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 14. For more on this also in the context of the Middle Ages, see Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone Books, 2007). As far as I can judge, this theory of subjectivity as the echoes in an empty space is the only inherently gendered concept I describe in this essay. Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva address this concept under the name khora and use the language of motherhood and womb. See Julia Kristeva, ‘The Subject in Process’, in Patrick ffrench and Roland-François Lack (eds), The Tel Quel Reader (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 133–78; Jacques Derrida, On the Name, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). For a beautiful meditation on this, see Roland Barthes’s essays on music, in which he says, for example, ‘the singing voice is not the breath but indeed that materiality of the body emerging from the throat’; Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, 2nd edn, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 255. Audrey Ekdahl Davidson, ‘Vocal Production and Early Music’, in Aspects of Early Music and Performance (New York: AMS Press, 2008), p. 202. Ihde, Listening, pp. 44–5 and 135–6. Ihde, Listening, p. 156. For an excellent discussion of the role of musical performance in visionary literature, see Racha Kirakosian, ‘Musical Heaven and Heavenly Music: At the Crossroads of Liturgical Music and Mystical Texts’, Viator, 48/1 (2017), 121–44. Hildegard of Bingen, The Personal Correspondence of Hildegard of Bingen, ed. and trans. Joseph L. Baird (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 160. Claire Taylor Jones, ‘Hostia jubilationis: Psalm Citation, Eucharistic Prayer, and Mystical Union in Gertrude of Helfta’s Exercitia spiritualia’, Speculum, 89/4 (2014), 1005–39.

Works Cited Altenburg, Tilo, Soziale Ordnungsvorstellungen bei Hildegard von Bingen (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 2007). Asad, Talal, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Bain, Jennifer, Hildegard of Bingen and Musical Reception: The Modern Revival of a Medieval Composer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Barthes, Roland, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard, 2nd edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

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Bennett, Judith, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Bennett, Judith and Ruth M. Karras, ‘Women, Gender, and Medieval Historians’, in Judith Bennett and Ruth M. Karras (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 1–17. Cassian, John, The Conferences, trans. Boniface Ramsey (New York: Newman Press, 1997). Davidson, Audrey Ekdahl, ‘Vocal Production and Early Music’, in Aspects of Early Music and Performance (New York: AMS Press, 2008), pp. 187–211. Derrida, Jacques, On the Name, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). Derrida, Jacques, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Duval, Sylvie, Comme des anges sur terre: Les moniales dominicaines et les débuts de la réforme observante, 1385–1461 (Rome: École française de Rome, 2015). Flanagan, Sabina, ‘“For God Distinguishes the People of Earth as in Heaven”: Hildegard of Bingen’s Social Ideas’, The Journal of Religious History, 22/1 (1998), 14–34. Foucault, Michel, ‘About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth’, Political Theory, 21/2 (1993), 198–227. Foucault, Michel, On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979–1980, ed. Michel Senellart and trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Foucault, Michel, ‘Technologies of the Self’, in Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (eds), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), pp. 16–49. Frakes, Jerold, Vernacular and Latin Literary Discourses of the Muslim Other in Medieval Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Graf, Klaus, ‘Ordensreform und Literatur in Augsburg während des 15. Jahrhunderts’, in Johannes Janota and Werner Williams-Krapp (eds), Literarisches Leben in Augsburg während des 15. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995), pp. 100–59. Gregg, Melissa and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Hadot, Pierre, ‘Exercices spirituels antiques et “philosophie chrétienne”’, in Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, 2nd  edn (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1987), pp. 59–74. Hasebrink, Burkhard, ‘Tischlesung und Bildungskultur im Nürnberger Katharinenkloster: Ein Beitrag zu ihrer Rekonstruktion’, in Martin Kintzinger, Sönke Lorenz and Michael Walter (eds), Schule und Schüler im Mittelalter: Beiträge zur europäischen Bildungsgeschichte des 9. bis 15. Jahrhunderts (Cologne: Böhlau, 1996), pp. 187–216. Haverkamp, Alfred, ‘Tenxwind von Andernach und Hildegard von Bingen: Zwei “Weltanschauungen” in der Mitte des 12.  Jahrhunderts’, in Lutz Fenske, Werner Rösener and Thomas Zotz (eds), Institutionen, Kultur und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1984), pp. 515–48. Heller-Roazen, Daniel, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone Books, 2007). Heng, Geraldine, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

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Hildegard of Bingen, The Personal Correspondence of Hildegard of Bingen, ed. and trans. Joseph L. Baird (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Hollywood, Amy, ‘Song, Experience, and the Book in Benedictine Monasticism’, in Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 59–79. Ihde, Don, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, 2nd edn (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007). Jones, Claire Taylor, ‘Hostia jubilationis: Psalm Citation, Eucharistic Prayer, and Mystical Union in Gertrude of Helfta’s Exercitia spiritualia’, Speculum, 89/4 (2014), 1005–39. Jones, Claire Taylor, ‘Icon as Alter Ego? Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation and Icons of Mary in Chronicles of the Teutonic Order’, in Philippe P. Haensler, Kristina Mendicino and Rochelle Tobias (eds), Phenomenology to the Letter: Husserl and Literature (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), pp. 201–26. Jones, Claire Taylor, Ruling the Spirit: Women, Liturgy, and Dominican Reform in Late Medieval Germany (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). Kirakosian, Racha, ‘Musical Heaven and Heavenly Music: At the Crossroads of Liturgical Music and Mystical Texts’, Viator, 48/1 (2017), 121–44. Kristeva, Julia, ‘The Subject in Process’, in Patrick ffrench and Roland-François Lack (eds), The Tel Quel Reader (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 133–78. Mahmood, Saba, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). Massumi, Brian, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). Mengis, Simone, Schreibende Frauen um 1500: Scriptorium und Bibliothek des Dominikanerinnenklosters St. Katharina St. Gallen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964). Meyer, Johannes, Das Amptbuch, ed. and trans. Sarah Glenn DeMaris (Rome: Angelicum University Press, 2015). Meyer, Johannes, Women’s History in the Age of Reformation: Johannes Meyer’s Chronicle of the Dominican Observance, trans. Claire Taylor Jones (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2019). Murray, Jacqueline, ‘One Flesh, Two Sexes, Three Genders?’, in Lisa Bitel and Felice Lifshitz (eds), Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 34–51. Nancy, Jean-Luc, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). Neidhardt, Stefanie M., Autonomie im Gehorsam: Die dominikanische Observanz in Selbstzeugnissen geistlicher Frauen des Spätmittelalters (Berlin: Lit, 2017). Nicolaus von Jeroschin, The Chronicle of Prussia by Nicolaus von Jeroschin: A History of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia, 1190–1331, trans. Mary Fischer (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010).

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Petroff, Elizabeth A., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Petroff, Elizabeth A., ‘Women and Mysticism in the Medieval World’, in Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 3–24. Seigworth, Gregory J. and Melissa Gregg, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 1–25. Steinke, Barbara, Paradiesgarten oder Gefängnis? Das Nürnberger Katharinenkloster zwischen Klosterreform und Reformation (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006). Uffmann, Heike, Wie in einem Rosengarten: Monastische Reformen des späten Mittelalters in den Vorstellungen von Klosterfrauen (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2008). Williams-Krapp, Werner, ‘Die Bedeutung der reformierten Klöster des Predigerordens für das literarische Leben in Nürnberg im 15. Jahrhundert’, in Falk Eisermann, Eva Schlotheuber and Volker Honemann (eds), Studien und Texte zur literarischen und materiellen Kultur der Frauenklöster im späten Mittelalter (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 311–29. Williams-Krapp, Werner, ‘Ordensreform und Literatur im 15. Jahrhundert’, Jahrbuch der Oswald von Wolkenstein Gesellschaft, 4 (1986), 41–51. Willing, Antje, Die Bibliothek des Klosters St. Katharina zu Nürnberg: Synoptische Darstellung der Bücherverzeichnisse (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012). Willing, Antje, Literatur und Ordensreform im 15. Jahrhundert: Deutsche Abendmahlsschriften im Nürnberger Katharinenkloster (Münster: Waxmann, 2004). Winston-Allen, Anne, Convent Chronicles: Women Writing about Women and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).

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Index

A

‘Abbasīd caliphate 199 ‘Abd al-‘Azīz 197 Adam 88 and Original Sin 83–4, 89 Africa 2, 201n13, 201n23, 202n38 Algeria 189, 199, 200–1n10, 201–2n25 colonial 188, 194 Carthage 191 Ifrīqīya 189–90, 194, 195, 196–7, 199 Maghreb 189, 199 Nahr al-Balā’, river 198 post-colonial 188, 199 Qayrawān (Kairouan) 190, 195, 198 Tunisia 189, 190 Alisaundre 210, 211 al-Kāhina, Dihya 7, 149, 188–99, 200n2, 200–1n10, 202n32 allegory 27, 92n1, 118–19, 145–6, 153n30 the Bridegroom 92, 164 Christ 118, 145–6 Church (Ecclesia) 20, 84–5, 145–6, 153n28 Knowledge (Sapientia) 20 Love (Caritas, Minne) 20, 22, 23, 24 Reason 24 Synagogue 84–5 Amazigh 188, 199, 200n3; see also Berbers Ambrose 146, 153n30, 218 Angela of Foligno 16, 17–18, 28, 31n59, 106, 110–11, 113–14, 118–19, 128n78, 128n82, 141 Liber de vere fidelium experientia (The Book of the Experience of the Truly Faithful) 25

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Anglo-Saxon 18–19, 35, 36, 141, 143, 150–1 term 9n9 appropriation 6, 7–8, 61, 71, 75, 80, 91, 107, 168 Arabs 188–92, 193–9, 200n3, 201n22, 203n48 Arabic language 189–92, 193–5, 200n9 Arnoldo, Fra 106, 110–11, 128n78 Asad, Talal 232–4, 236, 238 asceticism 17, 25, 28, 45, 95n24, 104, 141, 158, 159, 164, 166, 192, 224, 227n4, 230, 232–3, 236 auctoritas 6, 79–81, 82, 85, 93n4, 93n6, 94n16, 95n21; see also authority Augustine 98n63, 99n73, 111, 146, 217 City of God (De Civitate Dei) 99n77 Confessions 87, 235 authority 14, 20, 22, 34, 35, 38, 43, 49, 60, 63, 71, 105, 109, 113–14, 131n158, 144, 145, 149, 160–1, 165, 168, 188, 189–90, 195, 224–5, 230; see also auctoritas divine 4, 17, 49, 70, 80, 121, 191–2, 225, 235 interpersonal relationships 34, 57–8, 61, 62–3, 67, 70 political 57, 61, 188–9, 191, 199, 221 authorship 57–8, 59, 60, 68–9, 70, 80, 102, 106, 108, 113, 149, 158, 159, 161–2, 164, 165, 168, 169n12, 185n15, 194, 200n6, 224, 230, 235; see also writing

B

baptism 51n53, 145, 147, 149, 208, 210–11, 238

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250

Béatrice d’Ornacieux 106 Beatrijs van Nazareth (Beatrice of Nazareth) 30n40, 106, 128n78 Seven Degrees of Love 21 Beguines 17–18, 21–3, 28, 29n14, 30n20, 103, 126n27, 159, 231; see also tertiaries Benedictines 18, 23, 51n53, 86 Regula Benedicti (Rule of Benedict) 17, 81, 86–7, 96n39, 98n62, 98n65, 235 Beowulf 18 Berbers 188, 189–99, 200n3, 201n13, 201n21; see also Amazigh language 190, 193, 194, 200–1n10 Bernard of Clairvaux 16, 20, 81, 85–6, 89–90, 97n50, 97n54, 97n55, 109, 146 Bi‘r al-Kāhina (al-Kāhina’s well) 190, 195, 196, 198 blindness 59, 60, 69, 75n61, 84 body 3, 7, 46, 48–9, 87, 92–3n1, 103–4, 109, 113, 117, 119, 123, 129, 142, 145–6, 149–50, 157, 181–3, 190, 199, 209, 217–18, 220–2, 233–4, 237–42, 244n32, 245n43 Boniface 143, 154n67, 219 Bridget of Sweden (Birgitta) 51n53, 94n13, 103, 112, 113, 116, 118, 122–3, 130n132 Liber caelestis 108 Byzantium 19, 191, 196, 201n23

C

Caedmon 95n21 Castile see Spain Catherine of Genova 106, 117 Catherine of Siena (Caterina Benincasa, Catalina de Siena) 14, 15, 17–18, 26–8, 106, 108–11, 115–17, 127n48, 128n87, 129n92 The Dialogue 27, 115, 117, 128n72 Orations 128n87 Cattaneo Marabotto 106 celibacy 16–17, 95n21, 192 Chançon d’Alexis 19, 50n10 chansons de geste 208–10, 212, 214n21 chastity 159, 176, 178–80, 218–19, 227n4

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Index

Cheng Yi 179 Chen Yujiao 180 China 7, 173–5, 177–82, 184, 185n13 Huai River 182 Jingkou 178, 179 Lake Huangtian 179, 180 Ming dynasty 175, 177, 180 Pingjiang 173, 176, 182 Qing dynasty 175, 177, 180 Song dynasty 175, 176, 177, 179, 182, 183 Tang dynasty 175, 177 Yuan dynasty 177 Zhenjiang 182 Christ 4, 16–17, 19, 27, 36, 40–1, 42, 44, 45, 48, 49, 51n53, 52n66, 82–5, 88, 89, 90, 92, 115, 117–21, 123, 130n132, 145–8, 151, 153n30, 157–8, 160, 163–8, 207, 212, 222, 225, 241 body of 3, 157, 241 as child 104, 123, 131n153, 241 as mother 146 mystical marriage with 26, 84–5, 118, 131n147, 153n28 Passion of 27, 104, 110, 119, 123, 131n147 Christianity 2, 3, 15–16, 20, 27, 36, 80, 82–4, 89–90, 98n63, 99n73, 99n77, 106, 118, 124n5, 143, 145, 153n30, 165, 170n34, 189, 191–2, 197, 208–13, 214n34, 216–18, 220, 224, 225–6, 232–6, 238; see also Church; Scripture Christina of Hane 241 Christina of Markyate (Theodora) 4–5, 9n9, 18–19, 35–41, 49, 50n10, 52n77, 106 Margaret (her sister) 36, 38–9 Vita 35, 41, 49, 52n77 Christine de Pizan 58–9, 60, 125n22 Church 16, 22, 24, 27, 34–5, 36, 39–40, 49, 62, 80, 82, 84–5, 90, 92, 94n13, 95n19, 95n21, 95n22, 104–5, 108–9, 112, 144, 153n28, 153n30, 208, 217–19, 221, 226, 241; see also allegory; Christianity Cistercians 57, 58, 86, 99n71 159–60, 169n8, 170n19

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Index

Clare of Assisi 16, 43 colonialism 2–3, 5, 62, 188, 194, 201–2n25 confession 16, 46, 105, 109, 160, 234–6 confessors 4–5, 25, 34–5, 41, 45–49, 66, 105–9, 111–13, 123, 126n25, 131n165, 147, 160, 189 Confucianism 175, 179, 183–4 Neo-Confucianism 179 Constanza de Castilla, Sor 73n15, 109–10, 119, 122 convents 16–17, 20, 22–3, 28, 30n40, 34, 50, 52n77, 58, 66–7, 75n41, 75n42, 93n4, 104–5, 109, 115, 118–19, 122, 159, 161, 230–2, 234 Bridgettines of Syon 123 Gotteszell 236 Helfta 22–3, 28, 107, 108 Las Huelgas 58 La Ramée 159, 162, 163 Nazareth 30n40 Saint Catherine in Nuremberg 230, 242n1 San Bernardo 105 conversion 37, 58, 141, 171, 201n19, 209–12, 214n34, 216, 220–4, 238 conversos 59–60, 73 courtesans 175, 177–80, 181–2, 220–1, 223 courtly love see love crusades 27, 29n19 First Crusade 18, 36 Cynewulf 150–1

D

Dalūka bint Zabbā 196, 198 Davidson, Audrey Ekdahl 240 deafness 6, 57, 58–9, 60, 65–7, 70, 72, 73n10, 75n61 devotion 19, 47, 95n24, 96n39, 98n62, 102–4, 106, 112, 114–15, 122–3, 124n5, 130n132, 141–2, 146, 157–8, 161, 165, 167–8, 189, 234; see also prayer Dionysius 15 Dominicans 17, 18, 23, 24, 26, 41, 107, 110, 142, 230, 234, 236 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes 67 dreams see visions

WL.indd 251

251

E

ecstasy 20, 40, 89, 97n55, 102–4, 109, 118, 119, 129n92 Eden 89, 115 education 16–15, 18, 20, 21–2, 29n14, 30n40, 58, 60, 64–5, 71, 80–1, 85, 96n39, 150, 189, 201, 220, 231, 234 lack of 14, 17, 18, 20, 27, 78–9, 82, 95n25 Egypt 90, 189–90, 196, 231–2 Elisabeth of Schönau 106 Elisabeth of Spalbeek 103, 119, 131n147 Elizabeth Barton 106 embodiment 2, 3–4, 7, 13, 46, 73n10, 92, 104, 123, 158, 184, 208–9, 210, 232–4, 236–8, 240–2 enclosure 16–19, 26, 29n17, 30n24, 40, 46, 50, 81, 95n24, 159, 221–3, 227n4, 228n42, 230–1 England 5, 18, 26, 35–6, 45, 48, 62, 143, 207, 208–12 Canterbury Cathedral 142 Hundred Years War 27 King Stephen 39 London 207, 208, 211–12 St Paul’s Cathedral 208 Walsingham 142, 151–2n8 eroticism 89, 103, 104, 121, 145, 209, 216, 218, 223–5 Eucharist 35, 104, 153n46, 157–8, 165, 167, 169n2, 170–1n35 Eve 20, 79, 83–4, 89, 90, 92, 96n41, 218, 219

F

fable 103, 116 fasting 16, 17, 38, 112, 170–1n35, 227n4 Felix Fabri 142, 152n10 feminism 5, 59–60, 124n7, 220–2, 230–2, 243n3 proto-feminism 58–60, 62–3, 72, 75n58, 93n2 fertility 144–7, 191, 198 Flanders 21, 103, 115, 127n56, 157, 169n8 Foucault, Michel 232–6, 238, 243n13, 244n19, 244n25 Francesc Eiximenis 121

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252

Franciscans 17, 18, 25, 36, 58, 106, 121, 129n107 Francis of Assisi 16, 25, 27, 119 Futūḥ Miṣr (The Conquest of Egypt) by Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam 7, 149, 188–9, 200n14

G

Gaozong, Emperor 176 gender 1, 3, 6, 14, 28, 60, 66, 69, 71, 75n58, 75n61, 80, 81, 95, 96n32, 104, 109, 113–14, 129n91, 141, 142, 144–5, 147, 149, 157–8, 160, 162, 165, 168, 170–1n35, 175, 183–4, 188, 189–91, 193, 194, 197–9, 209, 212–13, 218–20, 223, 225–6, 228n42, 230–2, 245n42 androgyny 82, 95, 220, 225, 228n42 divine 108, 113 feminisation 83–4, 145–6, 149, 223 masculinisation 144–5, 149 modesty topos 79–80, 81–3, 95n21, 95n25, 96n36, 129n97, 144, 146, 150 non-binary 114, 230, 232 Geoffrey of St Albans 5, 30n27, 35–41, 49, 50n5, 106 Germany 22, 81, 92n1, 93n4, 141, 143, 145, 227n11, 220 Gertrude of Hackeborn 23 Gertrude the Great, of Helfta 23, 105 Exercitia spiritualia 241 gesture see performance Gilbert, Thomas Becket’s father 207–12 Global North Atlantic 2 Gómez Manrique 57, 63–6, 68, 74n34 Goswin of Bossut 159–63, 169n12, 170n18

H

Hadewijch of Antwerp (of Brabant) 4, 17, 18, 21–3, 106, 123 Hadewijch II or Pseudo-Hadewijch 31n44 ‘Letters to a Young Beguine’ 21–2 hagiography 7, 35, 105–8, 112, 115, 119, 126n37, 147, 158–61, 162, 165, 167–8, 169n5, 169n8, 169n10, 169n11, 169n12, 170n17, 170n19, 171n50, 171n53, 207–8, 210–13, 216; see also writing sanctorale 208, 213n7

WL.indd 252

Index

Han Shizhong, Prince of Qi, Prince Zhongwu 173–4, 176–80, 182–4 Ḥassān b. Nu‘mān 190, 193, 195, 198, 202n32 hearing 17, 44–5, 47–9, 58–9, 64, 72, 82, 84, 88, 110, 116, 120, 123, 126n37, 128n71, 149, 160, 165, 167, 233, 239–40; see also deafness Helfta see convents Helin Yulu by Luo Dajing 178–80 Henry of Halle 23, 107 heresy 18, 24, 48–9, 91, 108, 160, 230–1 Hernando de Talavera 105, 122 Hildegard of Bingen 4, 6, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19–21, 28, 34, 35, 79–92, 92n1, 93n2, 93n3, 93n6, 94n8, 94n13, 95n21, 95n22, 95n27, 96n28, 96n39, 97n54, 97n57, 106, 112, 118, 231, 241 Causa et curae 88 Liber divinorum operum 81 Ordo Virtutum (Order of the Virtues) 92n1 Scivias 20, 79, 80, 81–4, 86, 88–90, 92n1, 95n25, 95n27, 96n28, 96n45, 118 Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum 88, 92n1, 93n4 Vita Hildegardis 92n1 Hrotsvith of Gandersheim (Hrotsvitha, Hrotsvit von Gandersheim) 7, 21, 153n35, 216–17, 219–24, 226, 226n1 Abraham 7, 21, 216, 219, 220–6, 227n4, 227n18, 228n42 Agnes 216, 220 Basilius 216, 225, 228n42 Paphnutius 7, 216, 218–19, 220–6, 227n4, 227n18, 228n42 Pelagius 216, 220 Sapientia 216 Theophilus 216, 225 Huai’an Fuzhi (Huai’an Prefecture Annals) 177 Hugeberc of Hildesheim (Huneberc) 6, 141, 143–51, 152n18, 152n26 The Hodoeporicon of Saint Willibald (Vita Willibaldi) 143 Hugh of St Victor 29n14, 233–4 De sacramentis chritianae fidei 233

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Index

Hugolino, Bishop see papacy, Gregory IX Hundred Years War 26–7, 212

I

Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam 7, 149, 188–94, 196–9, 200n4; see also Futūḥ Miṣr Ibn al-Kāhina 190–1, 194–5, 198, 199 Ibn Khaldūn 191, 200n2 Ida of Nivelles 6, 149, 157–68, 169n9, 169n10 Vita 6, 157–9, 160–8, 169n11, 200n5 Ihde, Don 233, 236–7, 238–41 imitation 103, 106, 109, 112, 114–15, 119, 128n82, 130n132, 167, 159, 167; see also performance imitatio Christi 118–21, 131n147, 145, 148, 158 imitatio Mariae 241 India 15, 29n12 Hindu mysticism 15 indigeneity 200n3, 201n13 Inquisition 24, 57, 58–9, 67 intercession 34, 38–39, 43, 165–7 intersubjectivity 86, 88, 233, 237–9, 240–1 Isabel de Villena 119 Islam 188, 190–2, 195–9, 199n1, 231, 238 conquest 188–92, 195–9, 198 empire 188, 193 historiography 188–9, 191, 194, 200n6, 202n37 Holy Qur’ān 83, 192 mysticism 192; see also Ṣūfī Shī‘a 199 Sunnī 199 Italy 26–7, 146, 212, 219; see also Rome

J

Jacques de Vitry 41–5, 49, 159 Bonum Universale 43 Life of B. Marie d’Oignies 41, 49 Jerome 82, 109, 111, 218–19 Jews 58, 64, 84, 98n65, 146, 191, 202n32, 212, 213n2, 214n34, 238 Jianyan Yilai Xinian Yaolu (Chronicles since the Jianyan Reign) by Li Xinchuan 174, 176, 182–3

WL.indd 253

253

Joan of Arc 201–2n25 Johannes Meyer 234 John the Baptist 131n153, 146 John Cassian 235, 244n24 John Chrysostom 98n63, 146 Juana de la Cruz, Sor 60, 103, 106–8, 110, 112, 114, 119, 120–3, 129n91, 131n158 Libro de Conorte (El Conhorte, Book of Consolation) 108, 122 Juana de Mendoza 57–72, 74n34, 75n61 family 57, 63–5 daughter of Pedro González Mendoza 74n26 Judith 59, 60, 67, 69–71, 75n61, 75–6n62 Juliana of Liège 106 Julian of Norwich 4, 16–18, 27–8, 30n24, 52, 107, 117–18, 125n22, 153n44 Showings 17 Jurchen 173, 175, 179, 182–3 Wanyan Wuzhu 179, 182 Jurjīr (Gregory) 196–7 Daughter 196–8

K

Katherine of Alexandria 171n53 Khālid b. Yazīd 188, 190–1, 193–8

L

Legenda aurea by Jacobus de Voragine 121, 208 Liang Hongyu, Lady Liang, Lady Anguo, Lady Yinglie, Lady Yangguo 6–7, 173–7, 178–84, 209, 212 acts 173–4, 176 body 181, 182–3 death 176–7, 182–3 eponymous works 181 Hongyu name 177, 180 Libro de las consolaciones de la vida humana by Pope Benedict XIII 59 Liège 41–2, 43, 44–5, 159, 161, 169n8 liturgy 7, 85–8, 92n1, 93n4, 94n8, 98n63, 99n73, 122, 126, 131, 157, 208, 232–6, 238, 241–2 liturgical subject 232, 238

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254

love 15–16, 22, 23, 24–5, 37–8, 40, 42–4, 45, 75n62, 89, 103, 109, 145–6, 180, 197, 207, 209–10; see also allegory courtly love 21–2 divine 4, 13–15, 16, 22, 23–5, 26, 38, 47, 61, 83–4, 110, 115, 118, 153n30, 157, 170n19, 209–10 Lucia of Narni 120 Lucrecia de León 106, 111, 118, 121, 127n50, 130n132, 131n165 Lutgard of Aywières (de Tongres) 21, 159

M

madness 46, 102, 108, 124n2, 127, 233 Mahādēvi 15, 29n12 Mahmood, Saba 231–2, 244n17 Mālikī school 189 Margareta Ebner 106 Marguerite d’Oingt 106, 117 Marguerite Porete 4, 18, 23–5, 28, 103, 105–7, 112, 114 Mirror of Simple Souls 23–4, 105 María de Ajofrín 60, 73n15, 106, 108–10, 115, 119 María de Ágreda, Sor 61, 103 María de Santo Domingo, Sor 6, 73n15, 103, 105, 109, 111, 112–14, 117, 119–21, 129n91, 129n92, 130n113 María de Toledo 109, 127n47 María Evangelista, Sor 108–9 Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi 120 Marie d’Oignies 4, 21, 34, 41–5, 49, 159; see also Jacques de Vitry; Thomas of Cantimpré marriage 16–17, 18, 25, 26, 28, 37, 45–7, 50, 57, 63, 66–7, 72, 75n42, 104, 126, 178–9, 180, 182–4, 192, 196, 197–8, 199, 207–9, 217–18, 220; see also mysticism martyrdom 42, 142, 158, 168, 169n5, 169n10, 198–9, 216, 220, 221–2, 224, 236 Margery Kempe 4, 35, 45–9, 51n52, 52n63, 52n65, 52n56, 103, 118, 123, 125n22, 127n47, 141–2 The Book of Margery Kempe 45–6, 49, 106

WL.indd 254

Index

Mary, character in Abraham, see Hrotsvith of Gandersheim Mary Magdalene 115, 119, 218, 226 Mary, mother of Christ, the Virgin 17, 19, 20, 45, 47, 67, 79, 83–5, 88–92, 96n41, 99n73, 110, 113–14, 115, 119, 121, 123, 142, 146, 148, 153n28, 153n29, 153n30, 157, 213, 225, 238, 241 maternity of Christ 28, 49, 89–90, 115, 118, 148, 153n30, 241 Mary of Egypt 218 Massumi, Brian 239–40 Master of Flemalle 115 Matilda of Caen 207 Mechthild of Hackeborn 23, 126n40 Mechthild of Magdeburg 4, 13–14, 16–18, 21–4, 28, 31n52, 34, 105, 107, 126n40, 131n158 Das Fließende Licht der Gottheit (The Flowing Light of the Divinity/ Godhead) 14, 107, 121 medieval studies 1–5, 7, 8, 15, 93n6, 144, 230–2 meditation 16–17, 19, 23, 26, 27–8, 35–6, 105, 118–19, 121, 129n107, 141, 143, 148, 162, 232–3 Meditationes vitae Christi (Meditations on the Life of Christ) 118, 121 Meister Eckhart 16, 21, 104 memory 45, 68, 88, 92, 102, 109, 113, 118, 120, 141–2, 143–8, 150–1, 15n8, 153n37, 153n42, 154n61, 154n63, 160–1, 188, 192, 195, 198–9, 224 Meng, Empress Dowager 176 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 86, 233, 236–7, 238–41, 244n28, 244n30, 244n32 milk 3, 145, 149, 194, 202n33 Mingchen Beizhuan Wanyanji (Wanyan Collection of Tomb Inscriptions of Notable Officials) by Du Dagui 174, 176 Mira Bai 15 mirabilia 208, 211–12 miracles 42–3, 97n55, 108, 113, 144, 146, 161–2, 170n23, 170–1n35, 192, 198, 217, 238; see also visions

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Index

misogyny 75n42, 81, 105 monasticism 7, 28, 35–6, 52n63, 58, 66, 81, 84–5, 94n8, 95n22, 96n39, 98n62, 98n65, 109, 120, 143, 146, 148, 152n27, 153n29, 159, 162–3, 169n10, 219, 227n4, 232–6, 238, 241–2, 244n19; see also convents; Regula Benedicti Saint Albans 5, 18–19, 35–7 Santa Clara in Burgos 58 Mu Guiying 175 Mulan 175 Mūsā b. Nuṣayr 197 music 6, 13, 20, 79–81, 85–92, 92n1, 93n4, 96n39, 97n51, 97n55, 98n63, 98n70, 99n71, 99n73, 102, 124n5, 131n158, 142, 233, 238, 240–2, 244n28, 245n43; see also performance centonisation 85–6 communal 86, 233, 240–1 Gregorian 85, 87 Muslims see Islam mysticism 1–8, 13–18, 21, 23, 25–6, 28, 34–5, 59, 61, 82, 84, 93n3, 94n13, 102–6, 108–12, 114, 116–19, 123, 124n1, 125n22, 126n25, 128n78, 130n118, 141, 148, 158, 160–1, 174, 188–92, 198–9, 200n2, 201n25, 231, 233, 241–2 behaviour 17, 25, 102, 112, 119–20, 123 communication with God 23, 34, 40, 45–8, 51n53, 110–11, 114–15, 120, 123, 128n78, 128n87, 157–9, 162–5, 167–8, 242 experience 4, 7, 14–17, 23, 28, 45, 52n63, 104–5, 115, 160, 188–9, 192–3, 233 instruction through 4, 14, 24, 34, 35, 36, 42, 48–9, 129n92, 150, 157, 192 joy (gaudium) 13, 24, 25, 40, 43–4, 84, 92, 89, 98n63, 165–6, 98n63 marriage 17, 25, 26, 104, 118, 130n133, 131n147, 242

N

nature 46, 113, 212, 219 divine 21, 23, 83, 157–8, 170n16 Nancy, Jean-Luc 239–40

WL.indd 255

255

Netherlands 18, 30n40 Nikolaus von Jeroschin, Kronike von Pruzinlant 238 Normans 5, 18, 30n27, 35–7, 211–12 conquest 5, 36

O

Observant reform movement 230, 232 orality 102–3, 105, 126n25, 130n118, 190–1, 200n6, 221–2, 236–40; see also performance

P

pagan 191–2, 199, 207, 209–13, 213n2, 216, 220, 221, 238 papacy 20, 26–7, 36, 39, 112, 161 Benedict XIII 59 Gregory I, the Great 36, 79, 94n9, 218 Gregory VII 95n19 Gregory IX 43–4 Gregory XI 27 Honorius III 44 Urban V 26–7, 31n62 Paris 15, 24, 29n14, 41 patriarchy 2–4, 6–8, 81, 82, 93n3, 93n6, 174, 183, 196, 198, 213, 218, 224, 230–1, 242 patronage 57, 59–72 Pedro de Luna see papacy, Benedict XIII Pelagia 218 penance 48, 217, 221, 223, 227n4, 228n42 penitence 4, 7, 17, 25, 34–5, 41, 45, 49, 217, 221, 223, 226, performance 6, 25, 26, 102, 103–4, 105, 106, 108, 113, 116–17, 122–3, 124n5, 129n91, 142, 233–4, 236–7, 238, 241 dance 113, 119–20, 123, 131n147, 131n153, 131n158, 132n171, 193, 241 gesture 25, 104, 120, 234, 237, 239 imitation 103, 106, 114, 112, 119, 130n132 orality 45, 102–3, 113, 117, 120, 233, 236–7 theatre 7, 20, 102, 113, 117–19, 122, 131n165, 132n168, 142, 174, 178–81, 182, 216, 219–21, 224–6 theory 102, 125n17

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256

Perpetua 59, 60 Peter Damiani 95n19 Petroff, Elizabeth Avilda 1–5, 72n*, 79, 93n6, 130n118, 141, 144, 158, 174, 184, 212, 216, 219, 230–2, 243n6 Body and Soul 2, 4, 22, 30n40, 144 Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature 2, 141 Phoenicians 191 Ping Yang, Princess 175 pilgrimage 6, 17, 19, 25, 45, 52n66, 141–3, 148–51, 151n6, 153n29, 154n62, 208, 211, 219 art and architecture 142, Holy Land 6, 52n66, 141, 143, 146–8, 151, 153n29, 207–9, 211 interior 142–3 pilgrims 141, 149, 151, 151–2n8, 152n10 prayer 15–17, 22, 28, 34, 37–8, 41–4, 48, 86–7, 94n8, 95n24, 102, 119, 150, 159, 162, 164, 166–7, 192, 223, 227n4, 228n42, 235, 244 prayer book 18, 19, 109 pregnancy 16, 47, 85, 115, 197, 241 Prise d’Orange 209, 210 prophecy 13, 16, 20, 27, 34, 37–8, 42–3, 45, 47–8, 51n53, 79–83, 85, 92n1, 94n11, 94n13, 95n18, 95n19, 95n21, 95n22, 95n25, 96n31, 96n33, 118, 126n25, 147, 161, 182, 188, 190–4, 198–9, 203n46, 230, 241 Alexander the Great, Ḏū al-Qarnayn 196 Ezekiel 82, 96n33 Jeremiah 82, 90, 96n33 Job 90, 94n9 Moses, Mūsā 15, 196, 202n32 Muhammed 83, 199 prostitution 7, 177–80, 182, 216–26, 227n11 ‘repentant whore’ 218–19 purgatory 42, 165, 166, 170n34, 170–1n35

Q

Qilin Ji 180 Qin Liangyu 175

WL.indd 256

Index

R

Rābi‘a al-‘Adawiyya 192 Red Lantern Brigade 175 relics 43, 143, 150, 199 repentance 93–4n1, 192, 216–19, 220–1, 223, 225–6, 228n35; see also penance rhetoric 69, 98n70, 102, 105, 107, 109, 112, 119, 122, 125n22, 144, 158, 164, 184, 193, 197, 223–5, 228n42 sermons 46, 90, 97n55, 103–5, 107, 109, 119–22, 162, 212 Richard of St Victor 15 Richard Rolle 104 Ritual 102–3, 119, 122, 142, 232–4, 236, 238, 242 romance 7, 110, 114, 177–8, 180, 207–13, 214n21, 238 military 177–8, 180 Rome 26, 27, 39–40, 44, 48, 142, 219–20

S

salvation 16, 21, 41, 43, 79, 84–5, 88–9, 110, 122, 143, 165, 167–8, 216–18, 221–6, 228n42 Saracens 7, 207–13, 238 princess motif 7, 207, 208–10, 211–12, 214n21, 214n22 term 213n2 school of St Victor 29n14 Scripture 20–1, 41, 79, 80–4, 88, 89–90, 94n8, 94n16, 96n39, 104, 109, 113, 114, 118–19, 146, 148, 226, 235–6, 241–2 Epistles 144 Exodus 97n55 Galatians 226n1 Gospels 13, 36, 83, 99n73, 118, 121, 145, 146 Psalms 86–7, 97n54, 98n63, 113, 135, 235–6, 241–2 Song of Songs 23, 84–6, 88–90, 92, 96n45, 97n51, 97n54, 97n55, 145–6, 153 Second Islamic Civil War 190 seduction 18, 23, 42, 98n63, 102, 219, 223–4

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Index

sermons see rhetoric sexuality 3, 16, 47, 62, 89, 92, 123, 145, 197, 216, 218–19, 221–2, 223–5, 233 and mysticism 3, 92, 123, 145 sexual violence 2, 18, 183, 196–8, 218, 219, 220 shamanism 15 Shanyang Xianzhi (Shanyang County Annals) 177 Chongxiu Shanyan Xianzhi (Revised Shanyang County Annals) 177 Shuanglie Ji by Zhang Siwei 180 Shuo Yue Quanzhuan (Complete Stories of the Yue Family) 180 silence 26, 104–5, 110, 115, 125n18, 129n112, 149, 188, 234 Sir Bevis of Hampton 211, 214n36 Songbai Leichao (Song Anecdotes and Trifles) 179 Song Mingchen Yanxinglu Wuji (Words and Deeds of Notable Song Officials in Five Volumes) by Zhu Xi 174, 176 Songshi (History of the Song) by Tuo Tuo et al. 173–4, 176, 178, 180 Songshi Yanyi (Romance of the Song) by Cai Dongfan 180 South English Legendary 7, 207–13, 213n2 manuscripts 208, 210–12, 213n2, 214n22, 214n32 Sowdone of Babylon 209, 210 Spain 57–9, 65–7, 89, 108, 197 Al-Andalus 197 Alfonso XI 63 Andalusia 118 Burgos 58 Castile 57, 118, 120, 122 Granada 65, 71 Isabella I 59, 61, 64, 71, 105 Juan II 64 León 118 Philip III 67 Toledo 197 Speculum devotorum 123 St Albans Psalter 19, 30n28 35, 50n10 stereotype tax 80, 83, 94n12

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257

subjectivity 4, 6, 7, 28, 90, 95n27, 111, 130n118, 147, 158–9, 161, 165, 171n50, 194, 197, 231–42, 243n13, 245n42 Ṣūfī 15, 192 suffering 27, 42, 51n52, 59, 68, 73n11, 103, 104, 113, 117–19, 158, 164, 165–6, 168, 169n10, 170n35, 216, 219, 221–3, 225–6, 236

T

Tantrika 15 Ṭāriq b. Ziyād 197, 213n7 temporale 208 Teresa de Ávila (de Jesús) 28, 73n15, 109, 113–15, 117 Teresa de Cartagena 5–6, 57–72, 73n3, 73n10, 114 Admiraçion operum Dey (Wonder at the Works of God) 6, 57–9, 64–8, 71, 114 Arboleda de los enfermos (The Grove of the Infirm) 6, 57–9, 64–7, 69 Pero López del Trigo 67–8, 73n3 tertiaries 17–18, 25–6, 104, 115, 121, 126; see also Beguines Thais see Hrotsvith of Gandersheim, Paphnutius Theodoric 145, 149, 151 Thomas Becket 7, 142, 207–13, 213n2 Thomas Aquinas 16, 111, 217–18 Thomas Brinton, Bishop of Rochester 212 Thomas of Cantimpré 41–5, 159 torture 198, 220–2 trance 102–4, 109, 117, 119, 120–1, 123, 131n147; see also prayer translation 24, 84, 99n80, 103, 105–7, 110–11, 121, 123, 128n72, 128n78, 128n87, 224 Trinity 43–4, 93n3, 99n73, 120–1, 123, 163–4 Tyre 149–50

U

‘Umar, caliph 192 Umayyad caliphate 190, 199, 201n11 Umiltà of Faenza 28

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258

‘Uqba b. Nāfi‘ 189–90, 194–5, 198–9, 202n32, 203n46, 203n48

V

vernacular language 6, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 45, 106–7, 110, 126n37, 126n40, 128n78, 161–3, 208, 211, 230, 242n1 violence 4, 16, 24, 25, 197, 220, 223; see also sexual violence Virgin see Mary, mother of Christ virginity 7, 26, 37, 39, 47, 52n63, 79, 83, 85, 88–90, 92, 93n4, 146, 158, 168, 169n5, 216–26, 226n1, 227n4 viriditas 79, 88–9, 91–2, 94n9 Visigoths 197 visions 4, 6, 13–15, 17–23, 25–8, 30n24, 31n62, 35, 37–40, 42–7, 49, 51n53, 79–85, 88, 93n7, 94n11, 95n19, 95n21, 96n32, 96n33, 103–4, 106–8, 112–22, 127n50, 130n132, 131n147, 141, 148, 157–61, 163–8, 170–1n35, 188–9, 191–2, 194, 199, 227n4, 236, 241; see also mysticism dream 37, 39, 44, 111, 116, 118, 127n50, 131n165 Volmar (Wolmar) 81, 96n28, 106

W

weeping 45–6, 49, 52n65, 105, 126n25, 162, 166, 223, 228n42 widows 26, 52n63, 146, 75n62, 178, 179, 230 William of Champeaux 29n14 Willibald 6, 141, 143, 145–51, 153n29 Wolbero 85, 97n51 Wolfram von Eschenbach 238 women body 3, 7, 13, 31n60, 46, 49, 102–4, 109, 112–13, 117, 119, 123, 129n91, 142, 146, 181–3, 190, 199, 209, 217–22, 233, 238 childbirth 46, 48, 50, 51n52 community 6, 22, 28, 57, 61–3, 65–7, 72, 72n1, 75n41, 81, 86, 105, 112, 122, 142, 158–68, 189, 209–10, 212, 231, 234

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Index

in the Middle Ages 1, 3–4, 6, 7, 15, 16–17, 28, 34, 60, 72, 104–5, 108, 110, 113, 115, 119, 158, 164, 167, 170n35, 175, 178–9, 181, 216–17, 227n11, 230–2 motherhood 7, 18, 26, 30n24, 45, 79, 104, 113, 142, 188, 190–5, 197–8, 202n32, 202n38, 207, 210–13, 245n42 voice 2, 4, 6, 8, 17, 20–1, 23–4, 28, 46, 49–50, 71–2, 90, 103, 105, 117, 119, 121, 126n37, 129–30n112, 188–9, 199, 211, 220, 223, 230–1, 240 warriors 173, 174–5, 180, 181–4, 185n13, 188, 190, 195, 197 writing 4–6, 8, 14, 18, 20, 24, 31n52, 35, 57–63, 65–6, 68–70, 75n61, 81–82, 99n73, 102–3, 104–13, 116–17, 125n22, 126n37, 130n118, 141–2, 144–5, 147, 149–50, 151, 152n26, 169n11, 170n45, 179, 188–9, 192, 219; see also rhetoric; hagiography appropriation 7–8, 61, 80, 192 autobiography 4, 18, 20, 22, 35, 45, 49, 95n27, 125n22 biography 2, 18, 19–20, 35, 37–8, 42, 43, 49, 105–7 144, 173–4, 176–7, 182–3 as devotional practice 104–5, 112, 114, 122, 146, 168 genre 158–60, 165, 168, 169n11, 178, 207–8, 210–11 implements 149

X

Xuelüzhai Biji (Notes of Xuelü) by Guo Yi 179

Y

Yangguo Furen Zhuan (Biography of Lady Yangguo) 182 Yangzi River 173, 179 Yinglie Furen Ciji (Dedication to the Temple of Lady Yinglie) 182–3 Yvette d’Huy 21

Z

Zhu Xi 179 lixue 179

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