Conclusion:
There is a need, for scholarship, to separate the study of medieval women, from the modern day political issues that confront women. For me, this would mean that the study of medieval women could be carried in the same fashion as one would study medieval peasants, and merchants. In many respects the study of peasants and merchants could serve as a useful model for those who study women. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the study of peasants and merchants was hopelessly intertwined with the present day issues of Socialism, Capitalism and the rights of workers. Since then the field has matured. While the issues of Capitalism and the rights of workers have not gone away, it is possible to write about such issues in various historical contexts while completely divorcing what one writes from having anything to do with the modern incarnations of these issues. Medieval merchants and peasants were not proto-capitalists and proto-labor movements; they were their own entity and must be studying on their own terms.
Similarly, while I do not expect the issues of women’s empowerment and women’s spirituality to disappear, one should be able to write about medieval female visionaries in a way that is not a commentary on women’s empowerment and women’s spirituality in modern times. The women we have dealt with here were not some nascent women’s movement, waiting for the dawn of modernity to come out into the open. They existed within the context of late medieval Catholic theology; the issues they dealt with and their thought structures came from that world. To understood them we must remove ourselves from the equation and humbly and enter their world on their terms.
I would see the whole question whether or not female spirituality was a form of empowerment for women in the Middle Ages as a trap. The very wording of the question bespeaks of modern concerns. Today most historians would find the question of whether or not merchants in the Middle Ages demonstrated true class consciousness to be quant, silly and ultimately meaningless. It creates a false dichotomy in which one must choose between equating medieval merchants with moderns or creating straw-men out of them. The only intellectually honest response is to say that medieval merchants had a class consciousness, but not in the way that moderns would use the term; this effectively makes the term, and hence the whole question, meaningless. I would hope to see the day when the question of whether women were empowered or really created their own form of spirituality during the Middle Ages will be treated with the same scorn. To ask this question is to create a false dichotomy between saying that medieval women were like moderns or turning medieval women into straw-men for the prejudices of moderns. All one can say in response to such a question is that the whole issue of empowerment meant something very different for people in the Middle Ages, rendering the original question meaningless.
The question that should guide research is how does female spirituality fit into the larger narrative of the evolution of Christian thought in the later Middle Ages. The goal being to integrate medieval women into medieval intellectual history. One should not be able to get away with the traditional narrative of medieval religious history, going from Francis of Assisi and Bonaventure to Albert the Great and Thomas Thomas Aquinas to William of Ockham without talking about Hildegard of Bingen, Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena. This has nothing to do with empowering women. This is a matter of our narrative of the Middle Ages being incomplete without them.
Showing posts with label Catherine of Siena. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Catherine of Siena. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Monday, April 7, 2008
Female Spirituality in the Late Middle Ages and the Search for a Feminine Christianity (Part VI)
John W. Coakley: Women, Men and Spiritual Power.
John Coakley in Women, Men and Spiritual Power, like Bell and Elliott, analyzes medieval female spirituality from a male centric point of view. Unlike Bell and Elliott, though, Coakley has a more positive view of the women involved; they are more than mere puppets hanging of their clergymen. In this sense Coakley serves as a useful bridge to Bynum’s position. Coakley focuses on how male clergymen looked at the female mystics in their charge and integrated them into their spiritual worldview. As with Voaden, Coakley sees the subjugated state of women in the later Middle Ages as ironically serving to empower them:
Yet the very exclusion of women from the realm of priestly authority ironically endowed them with a new significance outside it. For there were desirable aspects of Christian experience that the institutional authority could not guarantee to clerics and indeed often seemed to block them from: the deeply affective elements of faith, the Spirit that blows where it will, the immediate presence of God. These became the particular province of holy women. Precisely as the clerics claimed ecclesiastical authority over the women who by definition lacked it themselves, they tended to invest those women with the potential to symbolize, and to provide for them, even if only vicariously, what remained beyond that authority – what the men themselves wanted but found to lie beyond their grasp.[1]
Women, Men and Spiritual Power unfolds as a series of case studies of such relationships between female mystics and their male collaborators.
The first relationship that Coakley deals with is that of Elisabeth of Schonau (1129-1164) and her brother Ekbert (c. 1120-1184). Ekbert was careful to show his control over Elisabeth. He inserted himself into his writing. It is he who decides what should be revealed to others. Ekbert was concerned with theological matters and used Elisabeth as a research assistant of sorts to help him get answers from above. For example at one point he asks her if the Church father Origen was in Hell or not. Throughout the account of Elisabeth’s visions we find that the angels tell her to ask the learned doctors to explain to her what her visions mean. Elisabeth thus becomes a mere cipher, with which men of the Church could communicate with heaven.
Hildegard of Bingen and Guibert of Gembloux (c. 1125-1213) had a very different sort of relationship. Guibert was different than Ekbert in that Guibert did not put himself forth as the gatekeeper for Hildegard. Guibert only came into contact with Hildegard at the end of her life. For the most part she managed to operate outside the model of female visionary male confessor champion. Guibert serves merely to record Hildegard’s actions and is of no real consequence.
Coakley sees James of Vitry’s (1170-1240) vita of Mary of Oignies as the “first thoroughgoing attempt by the confidant of a holy woman to explore the idea of her charismatic authority as something discrete from his own priestly authority.”[2] While Elliott viewed James’ portrayal of Mary of Oignies in terms of being a supporter of priests with her Eucharistic devotions, Coakley sees James as granting Mary a level of power parallel to that of a priest. She did not deal with doctrine rather she was given knowledge about specific individuals. This allowed her to aid priests by letting them know about the states of the souls of the people in their care. Elliott sees this role of aider to priests, cynically, as pawns of the priesthood. Coakley sees this as a sign of independent power.
The relationship between the Beguine Christine of Stommeln and the Dominican friar Peter of Dacia strongly paralleled that of James of Vitry and Mary Oignies. In Peter of Dacia we see a further development of the theme of separate authority:
He regards Christine’s supposed access to God as the object of a deep desire of his own that his theological studies have left unfulfilled. He considers himself to benefit from her experience vicariously through the devotion she elicited in him, which however also represents a sort of consolation prize, which has accepted in lieu of that greater object of his own desire. He presents Christine as possessing a greater grace than he has himself, a foretaste of glory that has eluded him but might have been his; and thus he explicitly roots his fascination with her in a sense of his own spiritual deficit.[3]
Peter seems to have interpreted Christine’s vision through the medium of bridal mysticism; he portrays her as experiencing the joyous rapture of being swept up in Christ. This theme does not appear in Christine’s own writing. Christine focused more on the suffering she underwent at the hands of demons. The demons would interrupt her prayers, tempt her to commit suicide, to deny Christ and turn the host into snake and toads. Ultimately the picture we get of Christine, from her own writings, is much darker and from the perspective of orthodox theology, more problematic from how Peter described her.
The Memorial of Angela of Foligno by an anonymous Franciscan friar can be read as having two voices, Angela’s and the Franciscan’s. The Franciscan portrays Angela in the traditional trops, writing of her devotion to the passion, the Eucharist and her prophetic visions. When we come to Angela’s voice we find that she does address theological matters in her work. One is struck by the directness of her encounter with the very being of God. Angela interprets her own visions, which blurs the line between her authority as a visionary and the priestly authority.
She speaks ultimately from a sphere of authority that is her own as a charismatic visionary. As for the friar, he proclaims the experiences of Angela the visionary saint to be beyond his comprehension, while at the same time articulating the substance of these experiences to the reader in words whose inadequacy becomes permissible on the basis of what Angela the theologian says about the essential inexpressibility of the experiences.[4]
The relationship between Catherine of Siena and Raymond of Capua (1330-99) offers an excellent example of the final stage of evolution in the relationship between clergymen and female visionaries. Raymond consciously put himself forward as Catherine’s defender against those who doubted her prophecies or who questioned her refusal to eat. He is a witness to her life but is also an active partner in her labors. As Coakley sees it:
… Raymond shows himself acutely aware of the distinction between the institutional powers of clerics and the informal powers of holy women, and he explores the relationship between the two through the medium of his own personal experience, like those other writers but, ostensibly anyway, in a manner more precise and calculated than anything discussed so far.[5]
Coakley, like Elliott, sees a downturn in the Church’s acceptance of female visionaries in the latter part of the fourteenth century. The fact that Raymond had gone as far as he did to defend Catherine’s sanctity demonstrates a growing skepticism on the part of the Church hierarchy. If the Church was beginning to show a greater level of interest in such women it was not in a way that boded well for them.
For Coakley, female visionaries and their priests held separate realms of power. While the priests had to place the informal authority these women claimed to posses within the context of their own authority, derived from the church structure, “the approach that was to prevail, rather, was one that treated the official authority of the man and the extraordinary charismatic authority of the woman as discrete entities: each appeared effective in its own right without trumping, or being trumped by, the other.”[6]
While Coakley does not see these male-authored texts as being particularly useful for the understanding of how these women understood themselves, he does view these texts as offering a form of female empowerment. For Coakley:
… that idea [of female spiritual power] is not a mere solipsism or fantasy, nor is it merely a tool to subordinate the women to the men. It is rather an attempt to take seriously – to articulate the significance of and in this sense to imagine – what were, in their devotees’ view anyway, the real powers of the women. The men accomplished this by thinking in terms of partnerships that, to be sure, did not undermine clerical authority yet that also acknowledged and explored the limits of the authority.[7]
The male authors focus on what they lack. Women are seen as the other.
To speak, therefore, of an idea of female sanctity in the male-authored literature … is to speak not simply of the women’s virtues but also of an economy of powers in which both the women and their male collaborators have a part. The texts propose a picture of cooperation or partnership between monks or clerics on one hand and holy women on the other, and thus a productive interaction between the institutional and informal powers that were their respective domains.[8]
Despite the fact that there is little that is new in this book, Coakley does an excellent job of bringing together a wide range of issues to form one coherent whole. I find Coakley’s work to be superior to Voaden’s in that Coakley deals with more people and that offers a broader context with which to understand them, not just discretio spirituum. He presents the relationships that he deals with as being varied and complex. He does attempt to force his case studies into a particular model. Rather he allows them to speak for themselves.
[1] Coakley, Women, Men and Spiritual Power pg. 2-3.
[2] Ibid pg. 214.
[3] Ibid pg. 90.
[4] Ibid pg. 129.
[5] Ibid pg. 171.
[6] Ibid pg. 214.
[7] Ibid pg. 221.
[8] Ibid pg. 227.
John Coakley in Women, Men and Spiritual Power, like Bell and Elliott, analyzes medieval female spirituality from a male centric point of view. Unlike Bell and Elliott, though, Coakley has a more positive view of the women involved; they are more than mere puppets hanging of their clergymen. In this sense Coakley serves as a useful bridge to Bynum’s position. Coakley focuses on how male clergymen looked at the female mystics in their charge and integrated them into their spiritual worldview. As with Voaden, Coakley sees the subjugated state of women in the later Middle Ages as ironically serving to empower them:
Yet the very exclusion of women from the realm of priestly authority ironically endowed them with a new significance outside it. For there were desirable aspects of Christian experience that the institutional authority could not guarantee to clerics and indeed often seemed to block them from: the deeply affective elements of faith, the Spirit that blows where it will, the immediate presence of God. These became the particular province of holy women. Precisely as the clerics claimed ecclesiastical authority over the women who by definition lacked it themselves, they tended to invest those women with the potential to symbolize, and to provide for them, even if only vicariously, what remained beyond that authority – what the men themselves wanted but found to lie beyond their grasp.[1]
Women, Men and Spiritual Power unfolds as a series of case studies of such relationships between female mystics and their male collaborators.
The first relationship that Coakley deals with is that of Elisabeth of Schonau (1129-1164) and her brother Ekbert (c. 1120-1184). Ekbert was careful to show his control over Elisabeth. He inserted himself into his writing. It is he who decides what should be revealed to others. Ekbert was concerned with theological matters and used Elisabeth as a research assistant of sorts to help him get answers from above. For example at one point he asks her if the Church father Origen was in Hell or not. Throughout the account of Elisabeth’s visions we find that the angels tell her to ask the learned doctors to explain to her what her visions mean. Elisabeth thus becomes a mere cipher, with which men of the Church could communicate with heaven.
Hildegard of Bingen and Guibert of Gembloux (c. 1125-1213) had a very different sort of relationship. Guibert was different than Ekbert in that Guibert did not put himself forth as the gatekeeper for Hildegard. Guibert only came into contact with Hildegard at the end of her life. For the most part she managed to operate outside the model of female visionary male confessor champion. Guibert serves merely to record Hildegard’s actions and is of no real consequence.
Coakley sees James of Vitry’s (1170-1240) vita of Mary of Oignies as the “first thoroughgoing attempt by the confidant of a holy woman to explore the idea of her charismatic authority as something discrete from his own priestly authority.”[2] While Elliott viewed James’ portrayal of Mary of Oignies in terms of being a supporter of priests with her Eucharistic devotions, Coakley sees James as granting Mary a level of power parallel to that of a priest. She did not deal with doctrine rather she was given knowledge about specific individuals. This allowed her to aid priests by letting them know about the states of the souls of the people in their care. Elliott sees this role of aider to priests, cynically, as pawns of the priesthood. Coakley sees this as a sign of independent power.
The relationship between the Beguine Christine of Stommeln and the Dominican friar Peter of Dacia strongly paralleled that of James of Vitry and Mary Oignies. In Peter of Dacia we see a further development of the theme of separate authority:
He regards Christine’s supposed access to God as the object of a deep desire of his own that his theological studies have left unfulfilled. He considers himself to benefit from her experience vicariously through the devotion she elicited in him, which however also represents a sort of consolation prize, which has accepted in lieu of that greater object of his own desire. He presents Christine as possessing a greater grace than he has himself, a foretaste of glory that has eluded him but might have been his; and thus he explicitly roots his fascination with her in a sense of his own spiritual deficit.[3]
Peter seems to have interpreted Christine’s vision through the medium of bridal mysticism; he portrays her as experiencing the joyous rapture of being swept up in Christ. This theme does not appear in Christine’s own writing. Christine focused more on the suffering she underwent at the hands of demons. The demons would interrupt her prayers, tempt her to commit suicide, to deny Christ and turn the host into snake and toads. Ultimately the picture we get of Christine, from her own writings, is much darker and from the perspective of orthodox theology, more problematic from how Peter described her.
The Memorial of Angela of Foligno by an anonymous Franciscan friar can be read as having two voices, Angela’s and the Franciscan’s. The Franciscan portrays Angela in the traditional trops, writing of her devotion to the passion, the Eucharist and her prophetic visions. When we come to Angela’s voice we find that she does address theological matters in her work. One is struck by the directness of her encounter with the very being of God. Angela interprets her own visions, which blurs the line between her authority as a visionary and the priestly authority.
She speaks ultimately from a sphere of authority that is her own as a charismatic visionary. As for the friar, he proclaims the experiences of Angela the visionary saint to be beyond his comprehension, while at the same time articulating the substance of these experiences to the reader in words whose inadequacy becomes permissible on the basis of what Angela the theologian says about the essential inexpressibility of the experiences.[4]
The relationship between Catherine of Siena and Raymond of Capua (1330-99) offers an excellent example of the final stage of evolution in the relationship between clergymen and female visionaries. Raymond consciously put himself forward as Catherine’s defender against those who doubted her prophecies or who questioned her refusal to eat. He is a witness to her life but is also an active partner in her labors. As Coakley sees it:
… Raymond shows himself acutely aware of the distinction between the institutional powers of clerics and the informal powers of holy women, and he explores the relationship between the two through the medium of his own personal experience, like those other writers but, ostensibly anyway, in a manner more precise and calculated than anything discussed so far.[5]
Coakley, like Elliott, sees a downturn in the Church’s acceptance of female visionaries in the latter part of the fourteenth century. The fact that Raymond had gone as far as he did to defend Catherine’s sanctity demonstrates a growing skepticism on the part of the Church hierarchy. If the Church was beginning to show a greater level of interest in such women it was not in a way that boded well for them.
For Coakley, female visionaries and their priests held separate realms of power. While the priests had to place the informal authority these women claimed to posses within the context of their own authority, derived from the church structure, “the approach that was to prevail, rather, was one that treated the official authority of the man and the extraordinary charismatic authority of the woman as discrete entities: each appeared effective in its own right without trumping, or being trumped by, the other.”[6]
While Coakley does not see these male-authored texts as being particularly useful for the understanding of how these women understood themselves, he does view these texts as offering a form of female empowerment. For Coakley:
… that idea [of female spiritual power] is not a mere solipsism or fantasy, nor is it merely a tool to subordinate the women to the men. It is rather an attempt to take seriously – to articulate the significance of and in this sense to imagine – what were, in their devotees’ view anyway, the real powers of the women. The men accomplished this by thinking in terms of partnerships that, to be sure, did not undermine clerical authority yet that also acknowledged and explored the limits of the authority.[7]
The male authors focus on what they lack. Women are seen as the other.
To speak, therefore, of an idea of female sanctity in the male-authored literature … is to speak not simply of the women’s virtues but also of an economy of powers in which both the women and their male collaborators have a part. The texts propose a picture of cooperation or partnership between monks or clerics on one hand and holy women on the other, and thus a productive interaction between the institutional and informal powers that were their respective domains.[8]
Despite the fact that there is little that is new in this book, Coakley does an excellent job of bringing together a wide range of issues to form one coherent whole. I find Coakley’s work to be superior to Voaden’s in that Coakley deals with more people and that offers a broader context with which to understand them, not just discretio spirituum. He presents the relationships that he deals with as being varied and complex. He does attempt to force his case studies into a particular model. Rather he allows them to speak for themselves.
[1] Coakley, Women, Men and Spiritual Power pg. 2-3.
[2] Ibid pg. 214.
[3] Ibid pg. 90.
[4] Ibid pg. 129.
[5] Ibid pg. 171.
[6] Ibid pg. 214.
[7] Ibid pg. 221.
[8] Ibid pg. 227.
Friday, April 4, 2008
Female Spirituality in the Late Middle Ages and the Search for a Feminine Christianity (Part III)
Caroline Walker Bynum: Holy Feast and Holy Fast.
In contrast to Bell’s psychoanalytical explanation for the attitude toward food displayed by certain medieval women, Bynum attempts to approach the issue from the perspective of the medieval world view. Clearly the women who starved themselves did not see themselves as merely trying to gain more control over their lives in the face of a patriarchal existence; they saw themselves as good Christians, acting in accordance with Christian theology or at least their understanding of Christian theology. This then becomes an opportunity for Bynum to reconstruct the theology of women in the late Middle Ages; one built around food, fasting and the Eucharist.
Unlike Bell, who views asceticism as being separate from food, Bynum views food and fasting as being intrinsically linked to each other, rejecting the dichotomy between eating and fasting; they are all part of one continual narrative, Christ suffering in order to bring about the salvation of the world. Of course men, during this time period, also identified themselves with Christ’s humanity and enacted his suffering. Women, though, approached the issue differently from men in that women viewed this through the particular lens of their experience as women. Women, unlike men, give birth to children and nurse them. Their bodies bring forth life and sustain it; their very bodies are food. Women in the later Middle Ages saw the narrative of Christ’s birth and death in this light. The human Christ came out of the body of Mary. He is the food which the faithful literally eat. The priest bringing forth the Eucharist could be a woman bringing forth a child. Christ bleeding from the lance in his side could be a woman giving forth milk from her breast.
Since women represent the flesh, women could represent the human side of Christ particularly since Christ’s physical side came from Mary. By doing this women could turn the traditional “misogynistic” paradigm on its head. Women might be carnal, sinful and irrational, but these very attributes could give them a special relationship to God, unattainable even by priests. If women are carnal then so much the better for identifying with Christ’s humanity. If they are sinful then so much the better for identifying with Christ’s redemption. If they are irrational than so much the better for transcending the bounds of reason and comprehending God.
The other side of the image of Christ as the food that nourishes the world is his suffering on the Cross. According to Christian theology, Christ gave his very flesh to bring nourishment to the world. Women imitated this by giving over their bodies. Bynum argues that, while men also fasted, it is in the vitae of female saints that food becomes a central motif. You see women who become saints because of their fasts or because they live off of the Eucharist. With men fasting is incidental. Francis of Assisi fasted, but his fasting is seen in terms of his embodiment of the poor and naked Christ. For women the issue was food. Saints such as Christina the Astonishing and Lutgard, because of their fasting, exuded oil, in one case from her breasts and in the other case from her fingertips.[1] Catherine of Siena nourished herself by drinking the puss from the body of a sick woman.[2] Bynum makes a big deal out of the fact that the main manifestation of women abstaining from food was their living solely off of the Eucharist. This is crucial to her attack on Bell. Bell does not deal with the issue of the Eucharist. For Bynum the whole issue of fasting is linked to Eucharist devotion and makes no sense without it.
While Bynum criticizes Bell for reading the problem of anorexia nervosa back onto medieval women, she believes that the fasting of medieval women may shed light on how to handle anorexia nervosa. As Bynum sees it, the problem with modern psychological views of anorexia nervosa is that:
… they do not take seriously the symbols used in women’s experience or the ideologies formulated about it, they have cut the phenomenon of refusal to eat off from its context of food-related behavior. Moreover, they have neglected female attitudes toward suffering and generativity. Yet one suspects such attitudes to be part of the context in which modern girls, as well as medieval ones, view both bodies and food.[3]
While Bynum states quite emphatically that she does not wish to return to the Middle Ages or bring back medieval notions of piety, she believes the medieval world as possessed a far richer understanding of symbols:
Medieval people saw food and body as sources of life, repositories of sensation. Thus food and body signified generativity and suffering. Food, which must be destroyed in order to give life, and body, which must be torn in order to give birth, became synonymous; in identifying themselves with both, women managed to give meaning to a physical, human existence in which suffering was unavoidable. …
In contrast, modern people see food and body as resources to be controlled. Thus food and body signify that which threatens human mastery. They signify the untamed, the rebellious, the excessive, the proliferating. … Breasts are not, to modern people, symbols of food. The onset of puberty is not an occasion for rejoicing by an adolescent girl or her parents. Menstruation is less a prelude to creativity and affectivity than a frightening sign of vulnerability. Body and food are thus symbols of the failure of our efforts to control our selves.[4]
Underlying Bynum’s work is a desire to save the Middle Ages, or at least the female part of it, from being dismissed by moderns as a dark pit of patriarchy, misogyny and sexism. In dealing with medieval patriarchy one can all too easily be led into the simplistic assumption that men had power and were viewed as the superior ones while women lacked power and were viewed as inferior. Traditional scholarship has assumed that women in the Middle-Ages, having accepted the misogyny of the patriarchal society around them, hated their bodies and punished them through fasting and self mutilation. In contrast to prevailing views, Bynum argues that women were not aping clerical power; rather they were creating an alternative role for themselves. Inspiration served as a counterweight to clerical ordination. The focus on the suffering of Christ countered Christ the High Priest.
Women’s adoration of the Eucharist could be used as a form of female power. Take the example of Lidwina, who, so her vita claims, could tell that her priest was offering her unconsecrated communion.[5] What we have here is a model for women to be able to challenge the male priesthood from within the paradigm of Christian theology itself.
Bynum’s attempt to rehabilitate medieval women and give them their own voices is dependent on the assumption that these women really were creating their own religious vision and not simply internalizing the views of male theologians. Bynum seeks to accomplish this by arguing that this trend toward fasting found amongst women went against the general trend within the church toward moderation. I find this description of the later Middle Ages to be too simplistic. Furthermore her need to claim that the female spirituality she deals with was something feminine does not allow her to fully explore the context in which this spirituality occurred. While this is a fascinating work, which I find to be completely convincing in its overall argument, I believe that this book would have been even stronger if Bynum had made a serious attempt to integrate the theology of her holy women into general late medieval views on the humanity of Christ. This female spirituality could be seen as another dimension of the veneration of Christ’s humanity, one that cannot be ignored by scholarship.
[1] See Bynum, Holy Feast Holy Fast pg. 122-23.
[2] Ibid pg. 171-72.
[3] Ibid pg. 207.
[4] Ibid pg. 300.
[5] Ibid 127-28.
In contrast to Bell’s psychoanalytical explanation for the attitude toward food displayed by certain medieval women, Bynum attempts to approach the issue from the perspective of the medieval world view. Clearly the women who starved themselves did not see themselves as merely trying to gain more control over their lives in the face of a patriarchal existence; they saw themselves as good Christians, acting in accordance with Christian theology or at least their understanding of Christian theology. This then becomes an opportunity for Bynum to reconstruct the theology of women in the late Middle Ages; one built around food, fasting and the Eucharist.
Unlike Bell, who views asceticism as being separate from food, Bynum views food and fasting as being intrinsically linked to each other, rejecting the dichotomy between eating and fasting; they are all part of one continual narrative, Christ suffering in order to bring about the salvation of the world. Of course men, during this time period, also identified themselves with Christ’s humanity and enacted his suffering. Women, though, approached the issue differently from men in that women viewed this through the particular lens of their experience as women. Women, unlike men, give birth to children and nurse them. Their bodies bring forth life and sustain it; their very bodies are food. Women in the later Middle Ages saw the narrative of Christ’s birth and death in this light. The human Christ came out of the body of Mary. He is the food which the faithful literally eat. The priest bringing forth the Eucharist could be a woman bringing forth a child. Christ bleeding from the lance in his side could be a woman giving forth milk from her breast.
Since women represent the flesh, women could represent the human side of Christ particularly since Christ’s physical side came from Mary. By doing this women could turn the traditional “misogynistic” paradigm on its head. Women might be carnal, sinful and irrational, but these very attributes could give them a special relationship to God, unattainable even by priests. If women are carnal then so much the better for identifying with Christ’s humanity. If they are sinful then so much the better for identifying with Christ’s redemption. If they are irrational than so much the better for transcending the bounds of reason and comprehending God.
The other side of the image of Christ as the food that nourishes the world is his suffering on the Cross. According to Christian theology, Christ gave his very flesh to bring nourishment to the world. Women imitated this by giving over their bodies. Bynum argues that, while men also fasted, it is in the vitae of female saints that food becomes a central motif. You see women who become saints because of their fasts or because they live off of the Eucharist. With men fasting is incidental. Francis of Assisi fasted, but his fasting is seen in terms of his embodiment of the poor and naked Christ. For women the issue was food. Saints such as Christina the Astonishing and Lutgard, because of their fasting, exuded oil, in one case from her breasts and in the other case from her fingertips.[1] Catherine of Siena nourished herself by drinking the puss from the body of a sick woman.[2] Bynum makes a big deal out of the fact that the main manifestation of women abstaining from food was their living solely off of the Eucharist. This is crucial to her attack on Bell. Bell does not deal with the issue of the Eucharist. For Bynum the whole issue of fasting is linked to Eucharist devotion and makes no sense without it.
While Bynum criticizes Bell for reading the problem of anorexia nervosa back onto medieval women, she believes that the fasting of medieval women may shed light on how to handle anorexia nervosa. As Bynum sees it, the problem with modern psychological views of anorexia nervosa is that:
… they do not take seriously the symbols used in women’s experience or the ideologies formulated about it, they have cut the phenomenon of refusal to eat off from its context of food-related behavior. Moreover, they have neglected female attitudes toward suffering and generativity. Yet one suspects such attitudes to be part of the context in which modern girls, as well as medieval ones, view both bodies and food.[3]
While Bynum states quite emphatically that she does not wish to return to the Middle Ages or bring back medieval notions of piety, she believes the medieval world as possessed a far richer understanding of symbols:
Medieval people saw food and body as sources of life, repositories of sensation. Thus food and body signified generativity and suffering. Food, which must be destroyed in order to give life, and body, which must be torn in order to give birth, became synonymous; in identifying themselves with both, women managed to give meaning to a physical, human existence in which suffering was unavoidable. …
In contrast, modern people see food and body as resources to be controlled. Thus food and body signify that which threatens human mastery. They signify the untamed, the rebellious, the excessive, the proliferating. … Breasts are not, to modern people, symbols of food. The onset of puberty is not an occasion for rejoicing by an adolescent girl or her parents. Menstruation is less a prelude to creativity and affectivity than a frightening sign of vulnerability. Body and food are thus symbols of the failure of our efforts to control our selves.[4]
Underlying Bynum’s work is a desire to save the Middle Ages, or at least the female part of it, from being dismissed by moderns as a dark pit of patriarchy, misogyny and sexism. In dealing with medieval patriarchy one can all too easily be led into the simplistic assumption that men had power and were viewed as the superior ones while women lacked power and were viewed as inferior. Traditional scholarship has assumed that women in the Middle-Ages, having accepted the misogyny of the patriarchal society around them, hated their bodies and punished them through fasting and self mutilation. In contrast to prevailing views, Bynum argues that women were not aping clerical power; rather they were creating an alternative role for themselves. Inspiration served as a counterweight to clerical ordination. The focus on the suffering of Christ countered Christ the High Priest.
Women’s adoration of the Eucharist could be used as a form of female power. Take the example of Lidwina, who, so her vita claims, could tell that her priest was offering her unconsecrated communion.[5] What we have here is a model for women to be able to challenge the male priesthood from within the paradigm of Christian theology itself.
Bynum’s attempt to rehabilitate medieval women and give them their own voices is dependent on the assumption that these women really were creating their own religious vision and not simply internalizing the views of male theologians. Bynum seeks to accomplish this by arguing that this trend toward fasting found amongst women went against the general trend within the church toward moderation. I find this description of the later Middle Ages to be too simplistic. Furthermore her need to claim that the female spirituality she deals with was something feminine does not allow her to fully explore the context in which this spirituality occurred. While this is a fascinating work, which I find to be completely convincing in its overall argument, I believe that this book would have been even stronger if Bynum had made a serious attempt to integrate the theology of her holy women into general late medieval views on the humanity of Christ. This female spirituality could be seen as another dimension of the veneration of Christ’s humanity, one that cannot be ignored by scholarship.
[1] See Bynum, Holy Feast Holy Fast pg. 122-23.
[2] Ibid pg. 171-72.
[3] Ibid pg. 207.
[4] Ibid pg. 300.
[5] Ibid 127-28.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Female Spirituality in the Late Middle Ages and the Search for a Feminine Christianity (Part II)
Rudolph Bell: Holy Anorexia
In Holy Anorexia Rudolph Bell offers a psychoanalytical analysis of the phenomenon of extreme fasting in the vita of Christian holy women. This work is based on the case studies of 170 women recognized as saints, blessed, venerables or servants of God who lived from 1200 to the present in Italy. More than half of them displayed what Bell would classify as anorexia. Bell makes the highly provocative comparison between medieval women fasting, holy anorexia, and the relatively modern phenomenon of anorexia nervosa.[1] Anorexia nervosa is a psychological disorder disproportionally affecting upper class teenage and young adult white women. Its chief symptoms are that the affected person takes an extreme interest in dieting and losing weight. This results in the person abhorring food and refusing to eat. When forced to eat the person will simply regurgitate what they ate. If not treated, the person is likely to starve to death.
While Bell makes use of Freud, who understood anorexia nervosa as a food/sex oral fixation, Bell’s understanding of anorexia is based primarily on the work of Hilde Bruch. According to Bruch, anorexia nervosa gives women autonomy and a sense of identity. The act of engaging in anorexic behavior can be seen as a dialectic between the desire for control and the meekness in which the girl was raised. The girl has a desire for control but feels guilty about it. The result is that she acts out her desire for control through the construction of meekness and obedience:
Now she will excel, in an intensely personal contest of her choice, over her feelings and drives. She will be an individual, not a daughter or a pupil. She does not seek to goad her parents into opposing her and resorts to silence, deception, secretiveness, and outright lying to avoid having them enter her contest, her world. Good girl that she is, she goes willingly to the doctor, very calmly explains that nothing is wrong, and dutifully agrees to do just as he says. She refuses rewards for eating heartily and willingly accepts punishments for leaving too much on her plate. In the bathroom she practices sticking her fingers down her throat and regurgitating quietly, so that no one will be disturbed.[2]
Bell wishes to draw certain parallels to female ascetics. He portrays Catherine of Siena as a young virginal anorectic whose behavior eventually killed her. Veronica Giuliani is the recovered anorectic and Angela of Foligno is the anorectic who married and had children:
In both instances [holy anorexia and anorexia nervosa] anorexia begins as the girl fastens onto a highly valued societal goal (bodily health, thinness, self-control in the twentieth century/spiritual health, fasting, and self-denial in medieval Christendom). Her peers, and especially her parents, pursue this goal with only marginal success, more often than not honoring it only in the breach. She, by contrast, emerges from a frightened, insecure, psychic world superficially veiled by her outwardly pleasant disposition to become a champion in the race for (bodily/spiritual) perfection. Her newly won self-esteem and confidence initially receive the approbation of those she depends upon – parents, teachers, counselors – causing her to deepen her self-denial pattern until it takes over as the only source of her sense of self. Anorexia becomes her identity, and ultimately the self-starvation pattern continues beyond her conscious control.[3]
For Bell the moral, in the cases of both medieval holy anorexics and modern suffers of anorexia nervosa, is that ultimately these women are not in control of their lives. The very act of fasting is itself a submission to the demands of the outside world. For modern anorexics that outside world is that of a secular middle class. For medieval women that outside world was the Christian patriarchy of the Church.
One could argue that several of the people that Bell refers to were older than the usual age for anorexics. For example, Angela of Foligno was nearly forty when she began her career as a visionary. Also Bell seems to automatically assume that whenever any of these women died young it was because of anorexia. It was quite common for people, during the Middle Ages, to die young. There were lots of ways for this to happen without the recourse to anorexia. My real problem with Bell is that his work is built on the assumption that it is possible to understand extreme asceticism amongst European women in the later Middle Ages outside of the context of late medieval Catholicism. If these women really were no different than modern day anorexics then the fact that they, or the men who wrote their vitas, chose to formulate their situation within the context of late medieval Catholic theology is of incidental interest at best. In this sense Bell’s work is highly ahistorical.
Despite the basic flaws inherent within the very premise of the book, Bell manages to produce a credible work of scholarship. This is a line of scholarship that probably had to be pursued, if for no other reason then so it could be put to rest. I do not believe that anyone could have framed this issue in a better way than how Bell did it.
[1] The first recording case is from late the seventeenth century.
[2] Bell, Holy Anorexia pg. 18.
[3] Ibid pg. 20.
In Holy Anorexia Rudolph Bell offers a psychoanalytical analysis of the phenomenon of extreme fasting in the vita of Christian holy women. This work is based on the case studies of 170 women recognized as saints, blessed, venerables or servants of God who lived from 1200 to the present in Italy. More than half of them displayed what Bell would classify as anorexia. Bell makes the highly provocative comparison between medieval women fasting, holy anorexia, and the relatively modern phenomenon of anorexia nervosa.[1] Anorexia nervosa is a psychological disorder disproportionally affecting upper class teenage and young adult white women. Its chief symptoms are that the affected person takes an extreme interest in dieting and losing weight. This results in the person abhorring food and refusing to eat. When forced to eat the person will simply regurgitate what they ate. If not treated, the person is likely to starve to death.
While Bell makes use of Freud, who understood anorexia nervosa as a food/sex oral fixation, Bell’s understanding of anorexia is based primarily on the work of Hilde Bruch. According to Bruch, anorexia nervosa gives women autonomy and a sense of identity. The act of engaging in anorexic behavior can be seen as a dialectic between the desire for control and the meekness in which the girl was raised. The girl has a desire for control but feels guilty about it. The result is that she acts out her desire for control through the construction of meekness and obedience:
Now she will excel, in an intensely personal contest of her choice, over her feelings and drives. She will be an individual, not a daughter or a pupil. She does not seek to goad her parents into opposing her and resorts to silence, deception, secretiveness, and outright lying to avoid having them enter her contest, her world. Good girl that she is, she goes willingly to the doctor, very calmly explains that nothing is wrong, and dutifully agrees to do just as he says. She refuses rewards for eating heartily and willingly accepts punishments for leaving too much on her plate. In the bathroom she practices sticking her fingers down her throat and regurgitating quietly, so that no one will be disturbed.[2]
Bell wishes to draw certain parallels to female ascetics. He portrays Catherine of Siena as a young virginal anorectic whose behavior eventually killed her. Veronica Giuliani is the recovered anorectic and Angela of Foligno is the anorectic who married and had children:
In both instances [holy anorexia and anorexia nervosa] anorexia begins as the girl fastens onto a highly valued societal goal (bodily health, thinness, self-control in the twentieth century/spiritual health, fasting, and self-denial in medieval Christendom). Her peers, and especially her parents, pursue this goal with only marginal success, more often than not honoring it only in the breach. She, by contrast, emerges from a frightened, insecure, psychic world superficially veiled by her outwardly pleasant disposition to become a champion in the race for (bodily/spiritual) perfection. Her newly won self-esteem and confidence initially receive the approbation of those she depends upon – parents, teachers, counselors – causing her to deepen her self-denial pattern until it takes over as the only source of her sense of self. Anorexia becomes her identity, and ultimately the self-starvation pattern continues beyond her conscious control.[3]
For Bell the moral, in the cases of both medieval holy anorexics and modern suffers of anorexia nervosa, is that ultimately these women are not in control of their lives. The very act of fasting is itself a submission to the demands of the outside world. For modern anorexics that outside world is that of a secular middle class. For medieval women that outside world was the Christian patriarchy of the Church.
One could argue that several of the people that Bell refers to were older than the usual age for anorexics. For example, Angela of Foligno was nearly forty when she began her career as a visionary. Also Bell seems to automatically assume that whenever any of these women died young it was because of anorexia. It was quite common for people, during the Middle Ages, to die young. There were lots of ways for this to happen without the recourse to anorexia. My real problem with Bell is that his work is built on the assumption that it is possible to understand extreme asceticism amongst European women in the later Middle Ages outside of the context of late medieval Catholicism. If these women really were no different than modern day anorexics then the fact that they, or the men who wrote their vitas, chose to formulate their situation within the context of late medieval Catholic theology is of incidental interest at best. In this sense Bell’s work is highly ahistorical.
Despite the basic flaws inherent within the very premise of the book, Bell manages to produce a credible work of scholarship. This is a line of scholarship that probably had to be pursued, if for no other reason then so it could be put to rest. I do not believe that anyone could have framed this issue in a better way than how Bell did it.
[1] The first recording case is from late the seventeenth century.
[2] Bell, Holy Anorexia pg. 18.
[3] Ibid pg. 20.
Female Spirituality in the Late Middle Ages and the Search for a Feminine Christianity (Part I)
(This is a paper that I wrote for a course I took this past quarter. Since the issues that I deal with in this paper are things that I deal with here on Izgad I have decided to put this paper up as a series of posts.)
Christianity is generally looked upon as a patriarchal religion. Christians believe that God came down in the form of a man, Jesus of Nazareth, and died to save mankind from Original Sin, which was brought about by a woman, Eve. While women appear in various Gospel stories and it would seem that Jesus possessed female followers, Jesus’ apostles were all men. It was to men that Jesus gave the authority to preach his word and to cast out demons.[1] The primary books of Christianity, the New Testament and the writings of the Church fathers, were written by men. The Church excluded women from its leadership.[2] Paul forbade women to preach, saying that: “The women should be silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak; but they should be subject, even as the law also says. But if they desire to learn anything, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is a shame for a woman to speak in the church.”[3] Not only were women shut out of the Church hierarchy, they were also viewed as sources of sin. Women, as the bearers of the legacy of Eve and Original Sin,[4] were viewed as more earthly, less rational and, if left unchecked, likely to corrupt men.
That being said women, throughout the history of Christianity, left their mark on the Church. Women played a leading role in spreading the Christian faith. Christian women were venerated as saints and martyrs.[5] During the latter Middle Ages we see numerous examples of female religious leaders, and movements. Women such as Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), Bridget of Sweden (1303-1373) and Catherine of Siena (1347-80) took on highly public roles, daring to criticize the Church hierarchy. The source for this power lay in the belief that women possessed a special relationship with Christ, manifesting itself in prophetic visions, their personal identification with the Passion and their adoration of the Eucharist. This raises the question as to the extent these things can be viewed as part of a female Christianity. Were the female spiritual movements of the later Middle Ages an expression of a unique feminine understanding of Christianity or were these movements simply reflections of the male Church hierarchy.
In this paper I will be looking at five books that deal with this issue from different perspectives. Rudolph Bell’s Holy Anorexia and Dyan Elliott’s Proving Woman take a male centric view on these movements, seeing them as reflecting male ideas. In contrast to this, I offer Caroline Bynum’s Holy Feast, Holy Fast, who analyzes these movements from a more female centric point of view and argues that these movements came out of a distinctively feminine view of the world. Finally I offer Rosalyn Voaden’s God’s Words, Women’s Voices and John W. Coakley’s Women, Men and Spiritual Power, who view these movements as part of an ongoing dialogue of the female visionaries and the clergymen who followed them.
[1] See Luke 9:1-2. Also see Matthew 28:19 and Mark 16:15.
[2] The discovery of non-canonical gospels and Gnostic literature has shown us that the early Church was far more open to women than previously thought. These texts did not play any role in medieval thought. As this paper is concerned with the Middle Ages, it is the patriarchal tradition in Christianity that we most deal with.
[3] I Corinthians 14:34-35 (Recovery Version)
[4] See I Timothy 2:14
[5] See Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg’s Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society CA. 500-1100.
Christianity is generally looked upon as a patriarchal religion. Christians believe that God came down in the form of a man, Jesus of Nazareth, and died to save mankind from Original Sin, which was brought about by a woman, Eve. While women appear in various Gospel stories and it would seem that Jesus possessed female followers, Jesus’ apostles were all men. It was to men that Jesus gave the authority to preach his word and to cast out demons.[1] The primary books of Christianity, the New Testament and the writings of the Church fathers, were written by men. The Church excluded women from its leadership.[2] Paul forbade women to preach, saying that: “The women should be silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak; but they should be subject, even as the law also says. But if they desire to learn anything, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is a shame for a woman to speak in the church.”[3] Not only were women shut out of the Church hierarchy, they were also viewed as sources of sin. Women, as the bearers of the legacy of Eve and Original Sin,[4] were viewed as more earthly, less rational and, if left unchecked, likely to corrupt men.
That being said women, throughout the history of Christianity, left their mark on the Church. Women played a leading role in spreading the Christian faith. Christian women were venerated as saints and martyrs.[5] During the latter Middle Ages we see numerous examples of female religious leaders, and movements. Women such as Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), Bridget of Sweden (1303-1373) and Catherine of Siena (1347-80) took on highly public roles, daring to criticize the Church hierarchy. The source for this power lay in the belief that women possessed a special relationship with Christ, manifesting itself in prophetic visions, their personal identification with the Passion and their adoration of the Eucharist. This raises the question as to the extent these things can be viewed as part of a female Christianity. Were the female spiritual movements of the later Middle Ages an expression of a unique feminine understanding of Christianity or were these movements simply reflections of the male Church hierarchy.
In this paper I will be looking at five books that deal with this issue from different perspectives. Rudolph Bell’s Holy Anorexia and Dyan Elliott’s Proving Woman take a male centric view on these movements, seeing them as reflecting male ideas. In contrast to this, I offer Caroline Bynum’s Holy Feast, Holy Fast, who analyzes these movements from a more female centric point of view and argues that these movements came out of a distinctively feminine view of the world. Finally I offer Rosalyn Voaden’s God’s Words, Women’s Voices and John W. Coakley’s Women, Men and Spiritual Power, who view these movements as part of an ongoing dialogue of the female visionaries and the clergymen who followed them.
[1] See Luke 9:1-2. Also see Matthew 28:19 and Mark 16:15.
[2] The discovery of non-canonical gospels and Gnostic literature has shown us that the early Church was far more open to women than previously thought. These texts did not play any role in medieval thought. As this paper is concerned with the Middle Ages, it is the patriarchal tradition in Christianity that we most deal with.
[3] I Corinthians 14:34-35 (Recovery Version)
[4] See I Timothy 2:14
[5] See Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg’s Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society CA. 500-1100.
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