Yesterday I came to the final part of my general exams, the oral section. Orals consists of being put in a room with all four professors on your committee and for two hours they get to ask you whatever they feel like. I would describe the experience of having orals with Dr. Matt Goldish, Dr. Daniel Frank, Dr. Robert Davis and Dr. Daniel Hobbins as being in the center of a free-wheeling conversation with four people who are way smarter than you, but are being very nice about it. Most of it was a blur to me. I passed so I guess I did a good job. Here is my attempt to present my orals based on what I can remember.
I started off with a brief introduction, where I gave a survey of my intellectual development as a historian up to this point. History has been a major part of my life since I was in second grade. The area of history that interested me has changed from time to time. In middle school I was a big Civil War buff. Later, in high school, I moved to World War II and the Russian Revolution. Going into college I was convinced that I wanted to do nineteenth century European political history. Then I came under the influence of Prof. Louis Feldman, the classics professor at Yeshiva University. I guess I turned to the medieval and early modern periods as a compromise between being a modernist and a classicist. This turn nicely dovetailed with another interest of mine from high school, the biblical commentary of Isaac Abarbanel. Abarbanel proved to be the main subject of most of the papers I wrote while I did my MA at Revel. When I came to Ohio State I intended to do a dissertation on Abarbanel, focused on a close textual reading of his work. Either I was going to work on the issue of his relationship to Kabbalah or his relationship to Maimonides. Dr. Goldish nixed both of these options, insisting that whatever I did, it should be more than just textual analysis and involve myself in examining the general context of whatever I wrote. In this regard Dr. Goldish has been a tremendous influence on me. For Dr. Goldish the major thematic in dealing with European Jewry is always how what we see with Jews is part of some larger trend that encompasses Christians as well. (His book, the Sabbatean Prophets, is a good example of this.) My fondest moments with him remain, sitting in his office talking about various Christian mystics and how they compare to what we find in Judaism. That should give you and idea of the sort of thinker he is.
The first to go was Dr. Hobbins. We started by talking about the issue of female mystics, which was one of the papers I wrote in the written exam. He noted that when I first came to him about preparing a reading list we talked about doing something about medieval universities. This topic disappeared and the reading list was taken over by Christian female mystics. He asked me if I thought that any consensus had been reached as to the nature of Christian female mysticism and if so what. I responded that the big issue that everyone seems to come up against is whose voice are we dealing with in the texts, the female visionary or her male priest. We next talked about discretio spirituum, particularly as it involved Dr. Hobbins’ dissertation topic, the early fifteenth century French theologian Jean Gerson. I supported Rosalynn Voaden’s contention that this whole process of discretion spirituum was a discourse that could be used to ones benefit depending on ones ability to play to the politics of the situation, not all that different from knowing how to handle Inquisition censorship in the early modern period. This brought Dr. Davis into the fray and we ended up talking about Richard Kagan, who he once studied with, and his work Lucrecia of Leon. In her case it was her blaming her priest and painting herself an innocent, ignorant girl and her priest saying that she duped him. Dr. Hobbins next went to the issue of the fourteenth century Scientific Revolution. Norman Cantor advocated that position; Hobbins was interested in knowing who else held this. I pointed to Charles Homer Haskins and the classic example of someone who put the Scientific Revolution into the Middle Ages. There is also the example of Amos Funkenstein, Dr. Goldish’s late mentor, who saw there being a direct continuity between the late Middle Ages and the early Enlightenment. Underlying all this was Dr. Hobbins’ interest in the late Middle Ages as not being an era of decline. (An issue that I had wisely taken a supportive stance on in the written part of the exam.) I ended up having to defend the notion that astrology presupposed a mechanized view of the universe in light of the fact that astrology did not all of a sudden enter Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. I explained that this is a latent sort of issue. There is that element to astrology, waiting for someone to bother to use it. The other thing is, and this I should have been more forceful on, is that it is precisely in the early modern period that astrology becomes a major issue.
Dr. Davis, for his turn, opened by asking me about the difference between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. We had some difficulty getting on the same page with this question. I assumed that he talking about periodization, something with little intrinsic meaning. We break times into given periods to suit our own convenience. The point that he was trying to make, which eventually came out, was that, yes, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries many of the things we are used to associating with the Middle Ages and many of the things we are used to associating with the Renaissance are going on at the same time so we have the Middle Ages and the Renaissance going on simultaneously. He then when on to the topic of Jacob Burckhardt and civic ritual, which I discussed in the written exam. Dr. Davis, noting with a smile that Burckhardt was a free gift since he was not on my reading list, wanted to know how, in light of the very structured nature of civic rituals in the Italian city states, one could see this as promoting individualism. This line of questioning put me in a difficult situation since I do not support Burckhardt. Dr. Davis then went to the issue of the introduction of Greek into Italy during the fifteenth century. He managed to trip me up a bit here since my knowledge of the whole process is a bit vague. We next got onto the topic of magic, particularly within the context of the scholarship of Keith Thomas, Francis Yates and Stuart Clark. Here I got jumped by Dr. Frank for blithely remarking that Jews were not all that different from Christians. He managed to really back me into a corner on this since our sources when it comes to Jewish magic are basically all point to rabbinic magicians and not to lay magicians and we do not have an internal Jewish literature on Jews engaging in black magic.
Dr. Frank and Dr. Goldish led the final round of discussions. I was expecting Dr. Frank to bring up Karaites since I spent a good chunk of this past quarter in his office studying about them. He did not bother. Instead he asked me about comparing the Jewish reaction to Islamic culture as opposed to Christian culture. One of the major issues is the fact that Jews in the Islamic world were fluent in Arabic while Jews in the Christian world were, by and large, not using Latin. This got me going on about my memories of Dr. Haym Soloveitchik’s class and him attacking Yitzchak Baer; “he turns himself over backwards to show how Rashi knew a word of Latin.” This led to a general discussion of Christian influences on Jews and I ended up talking about Baer’s argument that the Hasidai Ashkenaz were influenced by the Franciscans. Of course Dr. Soloveitchik hates this essay as well. (There is a funny story that I did not mention; those familiar with Dr. Soloveitchik might appreciate this. I asked Dr. Soloveitchik where Baer got the idea that Hasidai Ashkenaz were interested in animals just like the Franciscans were. He turned on me and said: “there is one person (Baer) who knows and he is upstairs. There is one reference in the entire Sefer Hasidim.”) Dr. Goldish next asked me about the issue of conversos, which I had written about and were there any other major historiographical issues besides for the one that I wrote about, whether they were actually practicing Judaism or not. I brought up Richard Popkin, Dr. Goldish’s other mentor, who argued that conversos played a major role in the rise of skepticism within European thought. I could not come up with anyone who actually disagree with Popkin so that was a dead end.
So that ended my orals. They sent me out of the room for a few minutes before Dr. Goldish invited me back in and congratulated me on becoming an ABD (All But Dissertation.)
Izgad is Aramaic for messenger or runner. We live in a world caught between secularism and religious fundamentalism. I am taking up my post, alongside many wiser souls, as a low ranking messenger boy in the fight to establish a third path. Along the way, I will be recommending a steady flow of good science fiction and fantasy in order to keep things entertaining. Welcome Aboard and Enjoy the Ride!
Showing posts with label Rosalynn Voaden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rosalynn Voaden. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
General Exams 1: Medieval
Today I took the first of my written exams for my generals; it was for my medieval minor. The test was a take-home, open book, and open notes. I had twenty-four hours to answer the questions given with a 2500-word limit. Dr. Daniel Hobbins gave me three questions from which I had to choose two of them.
The question that I chose not to answer was:
When R. I. Moore published The Formation of a Persecuting Society in 1987, he brought the study of marginalized groups (Jews, heretics, and lepers) to the center of attention in medieval studies. Choose any three books and discuss each author’s approach and strategies for dealing with a marginalized group in European history. You may also address whether or not the author is in any way responding to Moore.
I was seriously thinking of doing this question. What I would have done was turn the question into a discussion of why the bottom dropped out from underneath the Jews in Western Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In 1096 you had the Crusades and the massacre of Jews in the Rhineland, but this is mob violence. Jews are still protected, both by the Church and by the secular authorities. In the twelfth century, the Church begins to take an interest in Jewish money lending. 1144 we see the first ritual murder charges. Later in the century, we have the first expulsion of Jews, which was carried out by Philip Augustus in 1182. This was rescinded and only covered a small area, greater Paris more or less. Things get really bad during the thirteenth century. Jews come face to face with full-blown blood libels and desecration of the Host charges. They are subjected to an intense missionizing campaign and the assault on the Talmud that came in its wake; the Talmud was burnt in Paris in 1242. By the end of the century, Jews have been expelled from England and by the beginning of the fourteenth century, they will be out of France as well. There are large-scale massacres, possibly even worse than the Crusades, in Germany, effectively bringing an end to that community as well.
R. I Moore’s theory is that this turn of events was connected, one, to the general persecution of other marginal groups such as heretics and lepers and, two, that the source for this persecution was the rising clerical and merchant classes, which saw Jews as unwanted competition. In essence, Moore sees this new persecution as being intimately connected to the twelfth-century humanist and economic revolutions.
There are a number of other works of scholarship that come to mind to compare Moore to. Dominique Iogna-Prat’s Order & Exclusion: Cluny and Christiandom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000-1150) takes a very similar line to Moore. Focusing on the thought of Peter the Venerable, Iogna-Prat builds a case for a major shift amongst Christian thinkers toward viewing society as a whole as a Christian society; one that was active in a struggle with opposing forces, particularly Islam. Because of this the Church all of a sudden begins to take an interest in Jews and heretics within the borders of Christendom and begins to see them as a problem. Like Moore, Iogna-Prat sees the persecution of Jews as an extension of the move against heretics and other dissidents. Unlike Moore, Iogna-Prat directly connects this shift to the Church.
Jeremy Cohen, in his Friars and the Jews, argues that the key players in this shift were the newly formed mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans. These groups, so Cohen argues, turned away from the Augustinian witness doctrine which had traditionally protected Jews. With the witness doctrine no longer applying, Jews become sitting targets for persecution.
Guido Kisch is a third perspective. His Jews in Medieval Germany, written during the 1940s, deals with Jews from the perspective of their status in various German law codes. His essential argument is that the introduction of Roman law into Germany, during the twelfth century, marked a downturn for Jews, because it specifically singled them out. No longer were Jews simply residents of the cities that they lived in; now they were in a special legal category all of their own. (Warning to all those that may be tempted into reading Kisch. Jews in Medieval Germany makes for a very effective sleeping pill and is useful for hand-to-hand combat. Handle with care.)
In the end, I chose not to do this question as it was taking me down a highly interpretative angle and it would be a distinctively Jewish history response.
Here is the first question I did and my response:
The study of medieval religious history over the past generation has drawn much of its energy and inspiration from the study of religious women. Compare the approaches to the study of medieval women in works such as those of Bell, Bynum, Caciola, Coakley, Elliott, Schulenburg, and Voaden. You may address common themes and questions, areas of dispute or conflicting interpretations, and the strengths and/or limitations of these studies.
During the later 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. These figures have provided the gist of much of modern scholarship on medieval religious life. I wish to discuss several examples of this to show how different scholars have confronted this issue of a “women’s” Christianity.
In Holy Anorexia, Rudolph Bell offers a psychoanalytical analysis of the phenomenon of extreme fasting in the vita of Christian holy women. Bell makes the highly provocative comparison between medieval women fasting, holy anorexia, and the relatively modern phenomenon of anorexia nervosa. 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.
According to Bell both medieval holy anorexics and modern suffers of anorexia nervosa, are responding to a lack of control in their lives, particularly as women. 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.
In contrast to Bell’s psychoanalytical explanation for the attitude toward food displayed by certain medieval women, Caroline Bynum’s Holy Feast, Holy Fast, 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 that 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.
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.
Dyan Elliott criticizes Bynum’s positive narrative and, in its place, offers a narrative of a downward decline in woman’s spiritual activity from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. In the twelfth century, clerics seized on woman’s Eucharistic visions as proof of the Church’s teachings on Transubstantiation. Thus the female spirituality, which Bynum sees as a mark of the independent voices of women, was really something created by the male Church hierarchy in order to promote their own power at the expense of populist brands of Christianity, which were labeled “heresies.” Many of these “heretical” groups, such as the Guglielmites, granted women a larger role than in traditional Catholicism and allowed women to preach; women even appear as leaders in these groups.
Elliott makes her case by connecting various holy women to the Inquisition. Gregory IX (r. 1227-41) was the founder of the Inquisition. He was also a major sponsor of various holy women. He supported Mary of Oigenes (1177-1213) and the Beguine movement as well as Elisabeth of Hungary (1207-1231). Elisabeth of Hungary’s confessor was Conrad of Marburg (d. 1233), a close associate of Gregory IX. Conrad of Marburg, soon after Elisabeth’s death and after he successfully pushed for her canonization, became an inquisitor. Elliott argues that Conrad gained an aura of sanctity for himself because of his association with Elisabeth. This protected him from any opposition and allowed him to pursue heretics as he wished.
Elliot connects the very practices associated with female spirituality to the Inquisition. The practice of women torturing their bodies and the veneration of women as living relics was part of a shift away from martyrdom as the ideal to a new ideal that one should be dead to the world. The reason for this was that the Church was in a struggle against heresy and was actively executing heretics. As such the Church did not wish to allow these heretics to be turned into martyrs. Instead, the Church created a new ideal of living martyrdom and offered up women as useful manifestation of it.
In the long run, this process and mechanism for examining women, to see if they were under the influence of the Holy Spirit gave way, in the fifteenth century, to the creation of the process and mechanism for examining women to see if they were under the influence of the Devil. The same Inquisition culture that promoted the veneration of women, in the end, turned around and started hunting down women as witches.
Rosalynn Voaden sees prophecy as representing one of the very few areas in which women could be empowered even within a patriarchal system such as the Church. This empowerment depended on having access to the discourses found in the formal Church structure. Educated women could form useful alliances with members of the Church hierarchy and could translate their experiences in ways that men would understand.
The focus of Voaden’s work is on the concept of discretio spirituum. This was a methodology developed by clerics in the later Middle Ages to differentiate between people acting under the influence of the Holy Spirit and those acting under the influence of the devil. Voaden uses discretio spirituum to analyze the cases of two female visionaries, Bridget of Sweden and Margery Kempe and how they were received by the Church; Bridget of Sweden was successful at navigating the discourse of discretio spirituum, while Margery Kempe failed at it. Margery comes across, in her writing, as a very forceful and independent personality while Bridget of Sweden comes across as a blank cipher. Margery Kempe took a strongly independent role for herself; even though she attempted to gain the approval of the Church, she failed to hold on to a spiritual director. While she gained the respect of many ecclesiastical authorities, she constantly quarreled with her spiritual directors and hence could not hold on to one. Bridget of Sweden succeeded in maintaining the aid of Alfonso of Jaen, who went on to advocate for her canonization. Margery Kempe seems to have been fairly unlearned, particularly in matters related to discretio spirituum, while Bridget of Sweden was relatively well educated and, in particular, understood discretio spirituum. Margery Kempe’s visions tended to be more corporeal, while Bridget of Sweden’s visions were of an intellectual nature. Margery Kempe was a married woman, who had abandoned her husband for life as a wondering pilgrim. Furthermore she engaged in activities that seemed to veer rather closely to preaching. Bridget of Sweden, though she was originally married, became a nun after the death of her husband.
Despite the fact that Bridget of Sweden was portrayed by Alfonso of Jaen as a meek passive servant of the Church, her status as a visionary made a major power. Kings and popes alike heeded her advice. She involved herself in the Hundred Years Wars, supporting the English. She played a crucial role in bringing the papacy back to Rome from Avignon. She did live as a cloistered nun, but traveled about, working to create her own order of nuns, the Bridgettines.
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 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.
Coakley builds his case around a series of case studies of various female mystics and their male clerical 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.
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 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.
Coakley, like Elliott, sees a downturn in the Church’s acceptance of female visionaries in the later part of the fourteenth century. The fact that Raymond had go 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.
This answer of mine is essentially an abridged version of an essay that I wrote earlier in the year and posted on this blog. It is not cheating if you are cribbing off of yourself. I sent Dr. Hobbins an email asking him if I could just hand him the original paper. He said that it was fine to take from my paper but that I needed to give him a "new text." So I had to do some work on this answer.
Here is the second question and my response:
The standard historiographical model of the late Middle Ages sees this period as one of crisis and even decline. Many scholars of the past generation have attempted to modify this model or to discard it entirely. Describe the different approaches to the late Middle Ages in any general surveys (Cantor, Southern, Funkenstein) or monographs that you have read (e.g., Blumenfeld-Kosinksi, Elliott, Smoller, Coleman, Iogna-Prat, or any others). Are any general trends or shifts in attitude visible in these studies? Does the standard model still appear relatively intact?
The late Middle Ages often receives short shrift. The standard historiographical model of the late Middle Ages, from the end of the thirteenth century through the early fifteenth century sees this period as one of crisis and even decline. A good example of this, at a popular level, is Barbara Tuchman’s Distant Mirror. The problem with the late Middle Ages is that it suffers from being between the Scholastic “Twelfth Century Renaissance"” and the Renaissance of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries so it is likely to be overlooked even by traditional defenders of the Middle Ages. Also, the late Middle Ages saw a number of rather cataclysmic events on a number of fronts. There was the Black Death, which wiped out approximately one-third of the European population and would come back periodically every few decades over the next few centuries to wreak its havoc. The late Middle Ages saw the series of conflicts between England and France known to us as the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). From the perspective of the Church, this was a difficult period as well, with the Great Schism splitting the Church (1378-1415) into two and briefly three factions. I would like to offer some examples of attempts to rehabilitate the late Middle Ages both in terms of the “grand narrative” and in terms of specific case studies.
Norman Cantor viewed the late Middle Ages as the “Harvest of Medieval Thought,” opting to, in essence, go with a long Renaissance and in include the later Middle Ages as part of the Renaissance:
The crisis of the later Middle Ages did not distract the intellectuals and artists of Latin Christendom from theory and creativity. On the contrary, the gloom and doom of the times made them think all the more deeply about the nature of God, the universe, mankind, and society. In the midst of devastation from pandemics, war, climatic deterioration, and economic depression, they exhibited a passion for learning of all kinds – for linguistic and literary innovation, for philosophical and scientific inquiry, for massive productivity and creativity in the visual arts. No era in western civilization left a heritage of more masterpieces in literature and painting or seminal works of philosophy and theology. (Civilization of the Middle Ages pg. 529)
Cantor holds up the work of Duns Scotus and William of Occam as the preeminent examples of late medieval thought. Particularly with Occam, Cantor saw the Scientific Revolution really as starting in the fourteenth century with the shift toward emphasizing empirical observation and the breakaway from Aristotle. This had to wait until the sixteenth century for its full flowering due to the lack of societal support, there were no University chairs devoted to empirical science in the fourteenth century, and the undeveloped state of mathematics at the time.
In light of the inherent limitations in the way of scientific progress during the late Middle Ages Cantor focuses on mystical developments. This, for Cantor, is a legitimate form of progress and not a mere sinking into superstition because he sees late medieval mysticism as being rooted in a certain individualism in that we see an emphasis on the personal relationship of the lay individual to God, to Christ and to the Eucharist, essentially unmediated by the clergy. This becomes an important bridge into Renaissance humanism. Cantor’s approach to such figures as Thomas a Kempis and Nicholas of Cusa owes a lot to his teacher Richard Southern and how he approached Anselm. For Southern, Anselm marked a major shift in Christian thought. Anselm argued that Christ had to come down in human form and died on the Cross as a man in order to pay the price of humanity's sins. According to the traditional understanding Christ, by taking on a human guise, tricked the Devil into trying to take his soul. By doing this Satan broke his original agreement with God that gave him a claim over the souls of mankind and, as such, the agreement became null and void. In the traditional perspective, human beings are passive spectators in a contest between God and the Devil. Anselm made Christ’s humanity, his life as a human being and his human suffering on Calvary, of central theological importance. This set the stage for a flowering of humanist thinking that expressed itself in theology, in philosophy and even helped bring about the rise of the medieval romance.
Laura Ackerman Smoller’s History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The Christian Astrology of Pierre D’Ailly, 1450-1420 is an example of the rehabilitation of one particular late medieval thinker from being pushed aside simply as an unoriginal thinker and, as such, unworthy of scholarly interest. Smoller acknowledges that from the perspective of simply looking at D’Ailly’s parts he was not an original thinker. What interests Smoller about D’Ailly, though, is how D’Ailly brought together such widely different currents as theology, astrology, Apocalypticism and church politics, creating something uniquely his own.
D’Ailly was one of the leading French theologians in late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries and the teacher Jean Gerson, the dominant figure in fifteenth century Scholasticism. The event that dominated D’Ailly’s life and thought was the Great Schism. The main focus of D’Ailly’s thought was his attempt to place this schism within the context of Christian theology. During the early years of the schism, D’Ailly saw this event in terms of the Apocalypse and the coming of the Anti-Christ. The Church was breaking up; such a disaster must prefigure the End of Days. Later in life, as D’Ailly became one of the leading figures involved in the conciliatory movement, first at the Council of Pisa in 1409 and then at the Council of Constance from 1414-1417, to get all the papal claimants to abdicate and allow the Church to be brought back together in the leadership of a new pope. In order to justify this new turn, D’Ailly turned to astrology. According to his astrological calculations the Apocalypse would not occur until 1796, leaving plenty of time for Church reunification.
Smoller is following in the footsteps of the late Marjorie Reeves in her incorporation of prophecy into the narrative of the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the rise of naturalistic thinking. For Smoller, D’Ailly’s turn toward astrology and his attempt to work out a prophetic narrative of history has nothing to do with him being “superstitious.” D’Ailly is part and parcel of the shift toward a mechanized view of the world. D’Ailly saw history as being subjected to set laws with causes firmly rooted in the natural world; in this case the influence of the stars. This is not really all that far removed from the work of Kepler and Newton and their mechanized heavenly motions.
My final example of an attempt to rehabilitate the late Middle Ages as a time of legitimate cultural growth is Joyce Coleman’s book, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France. Coleman presents medieval literacy as being aural based. That people read aloud either to themselves or to others even when they could do otherwise because they preferred hearing texts. Coleman posits the existence of an aural reading culture thriving particularly during the late Middle Ages where people where actively interested in reading, if not by their own power than simply by taking part in hearing others read.
Running through the book and tying it all together is an analysis of Chaucer. Chaucer has traditionally served as an example of the rise of a silent reader. At various points in his famous Canterbury Tales, and his less well-known work such as Troilus and Criseyde, talks about reading and addresses himself to a reader. This has traditionally been interpreted as Chaucer's writing with the assumption that his work would be read by privately by an individual. The fact that Chaucer also talks about people listening to stories is brushed aside as Chaucer giving a nod to traditional forms of narrative. Coleman rejects this interpretation of Chaucer and offers her own analysis of Chaucer using her theory of aurality. According to her reading of Chaucer, when he talks about a reader he is referring to someone either reading his work aloud to a group or someone having his work read to him. This reading of Chaucer has the advantage over more traditional readings in that it takes into account his references to the telling over of his work and the reading of it.
For Coleman, Chaucer and the aural mode of reading that he represents is an important piece in the creation of the reading society. It is not that print was invented in the fifteenth century and all of a sudden people went from being medieval illiterates to Renaissance literates. The Middle Ages, of course, was a far more literate age than the stereotype would suggest and there was plenty of illiteracy during the Renaissance. What is crucial here, though, was that the printing revolution in the fifteenth century came in the wake of reading revolution that occurred during the late Middle Ages. This mass rise in popular reading, both for pleasure and for business, brought about the rise of print. As such the late Middle Ages must be viewed as an important cultural watershed in its own right.
The work of scholars such as Cantor, Smoller, and Coleman offer an alternative perspective of the late Middle Ages. No one is trying to push away such calamities as the Black Death, the Hundred Years War and the Great Schism, but that is not the entire story. There is another side to this story which also has to be told. Similarly, on an intellectual front, there is more to the late Middle Ages than the hardening of Scholasticism into hard dogma, killing all original thought. This was also the era of Occam, of Cusa and of a Kempis. Even scholastics such as D’Ailly, who, at first glance, might seem to have been nothing more than redactors of the scholastic tradition, upon examination, also come into their own as important thinkers in their own right.
In this case, I also cribbed a little off of my earlier work, something that I posted here. I did go quite a bit over my word limit. I assume no one will really mind. Well next on the schedule is my exam in early modern history with Dr. Robert Davis. It will be in the same general format as this exam. I do not expect the same luck as I had this time around. I am looking forward to it. For now, I guess I should be packing to go home for Thanksgiving. I can start panicking again once I get through the weekend.
The question that I chose not to answer was:
When R. I. Moore published The Formation of a Persecuting Society in 1987, he brought the study of marginalized groups (Jews, heretics, and lepers) to the center of attention in medieval studies. Choose any three books and discuss each author’s approach and strategies for dealing with a marginalized group in European history. You may also address whether or not the author is in any way responding to Moore.
I was seriously thinking of doing this question. What I would have done was turn the question into a discussion of why the bottom dropped out from underneath the Jews in Western Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In 1096 you had the Crusades and the massacre of Jews in the Rhineland, but this is mob violence. Jews are still protected, both by the Church and by the secular authorities. In the twelfth century, the Church begins to take an interest in Jewish money lending. 1144 we see the first ritual murder charges. Later in the century, we have the first expulsion of Jews, which was carried out by Philip Augustus in 1182. This was rescinded and only covered a small area, greater Paris more or less. Things get really bad during the thirteenth century. Jews come face to face with full-blown blood libels and desecration of the Host charges. They are subjected to an intense missionizing campaign and the assault on the Talmud that came in its wake; the Talmud was burnt in Paris in 1242. By the end of the century, Jews have been expelled from England and by the beginning of the fourteenth century, they will be out of France as well. There are large-scale massacres, possibly even worse than the Crusades, in Germany, effectively bringing an end to that community as well.
R. I Moore’s theory is that this turn of events was connected, one, to the general persecution of other marginal groups such as heretics and lepers and, two, that the source for this persecution was the rising clerical and merchant classes, which saw Jews as unwanted competition. In essence, Moore sees this new persecution as being intimately connected to the twelfth-century humanist and economic revolutions.
There are a number of other works of scholarship that come to mind to compare Moore to. Dominique Iogna-Prat’s Order & Exclusion: Cluny and Christiandom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000-1150) takes a very similar line to Moore. Focusing on the thought of Peter the Venerable, Iogna-Prat builds a case for a major shift amongst Christian thinkers toward viewing society as a whole as a Christian society; one that was active in a struggle with opposing forces, particularly Islam. Because of this the Church all of a sudden begins to take an interest in Jews and heretics within the borders of Christendom and begins to see them as a problem. Like Moore, Iogna-Prat sees the persecution of Jews as an extension of the move against heretics and other dissidents. Unlike Moore, Iogna-Prat directly connects this shift to the Church.
Jeremy Cohen, in his Friars and the Jews, argues that the key players in this shift were the newly formed mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans. These groups, so Cohen argues, turned away from the Augustinian witness doctrine which had traditionally protected Jews. With the witness doctrine no longer applying, Jews become sitting targets for persecution.
Guido Kisch is a third perspective. His Jews in Medieval Germany, written during the 1940s, deals with Jews from the perspective of their status in various German law codes. His essential argument is that the introduction of Roman law into Germany, during the twelfth century, marked a downturn for Jews, because it specifically singled them out. No longer were Jews simply residents of the cities that they lived in; now they were in a special legal category all of their own. (Warning to all those that may be tempted into reading Kisch. Jews in Medieval Germany makes for a very effective sleeping pill and is useful for hand-to-hand combat. Handle with care.)
In the end, I chose not to do this question as it was taking me down a highly interpretative angle and it would be a distinctively Jewish history response.
Here is the first question I did and my response:
The study of medieval religious history over the past generation has drawn much of its energy and inspiration from the study of religious women. Compare the approaches to the study of medieval women in works such as those of Bell, Bynum, Caciola, Coakley, Elliott, Schulenburg, and Voaden. You may address common themes and questions, areas of dispute or conflicting interpretations, and the strengths and/or limitations of these studies.
During the later 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. These figures have provided the gist of much of modern scholarship on medieval religious life. I wish to discuss several examples of this to show how different scholars have confronted this issue of a “women’s” Christianity.
In Holy Anorexia, Rudolph Bell offers a psychoanalytical analysis of the phenomenon of extreme fasting in the vita of Christian holy women. Bell makes the highly provocative comparison between medieval women fasting, holy anorexia, and the relatively modern phenomenon of anorexia nervosa. 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.
According to Bell both medieval holy anorexics and modern suffers of anorexia nervosa, are responding to a lack of control in their lives, particularly as women. 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.
In contrast to Bell’s psychoanalytical explanation for the attitude toward food displayed by certain medieval women, Caroline Bynum’s Holy Feast, Holy Fast, 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 that 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.
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.
Dyan Elliott criticizes Bynum’s positive narrative and, in its place, offers a narrative of a downward decline in woman’s spiritual activity from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. In the twelfth century, clerics seized on woman’s Eucharistic visions as proof of the Church’s teachings on Transubstantiation. Thus the female spirituality, which Bynum sees as a mark of the independent voices of women, was really something created by the male Church hierarchy in order to promote their own power at the expense of populist brands of Christianity, which were labeled “heresies.” Many of these “heretical” groups, such as the Guglielmites, granted women a larger role than in traditional Catholicism and allowed women to preach; women even appear as leaders in these groups.
Elliott makes her case by connecting various holy women to the Inquisition. Gregory IX (r. 1227-41) was the founder of the Inquisition. He was also a major sponsor of various holy women. He supported Mary of Oigenes (1177-1213) and the Beguine movement as well as Elisabeth of Hungary (1207-1231). Elisabeth of Hungary’s confessor was Conrad of Marburg (d. 1233), a close associate of Gregory IX. Conrad of Marburg, soon after Elisabeth’s death and after he successfully pushed for her canonization, became an inquisitor. Elliott argues that Conrad gained an aura of sanctity for himself because of his association with Elisabeth. This protected him from any opposition and allowed him to pursue heretics as he wished.
Elliot connects the very practices associated with female spirituality to the Inquisition. The practice of women torturing their bodies and the veneration of women as living relics was part of a shift away from martyrdom as the ideal to a new ideal that one should be dead to the world. The reason for this was that the Church was in a struggle against heresy and was actively executing heretics. As such the Church did not wish to allow these heretics to be turned into martyrs. Instead, the Church created a new ideal of living martyrdom and offered up women as useful manifestation of it.
In the long run, this process and mechanism for examining women, to see if they were under the influence of the Holy Spirit gave way, in the fifteenth century, to the creation of the process and mechanism for examining women to see if they were under the influence of the Devil. The same Inquisition culture that promoted the veneration of women, in the end, turned around and started hunting down women as witches.
Rosalynn Voaden sees prophecy as representing one of the very few areas in which women could be empowered even within a patriarchal system such as the Church. This empowerment depended on having access to the discourses found in the formal Church structure. Educated women could form useful alliances with members of the Church hierarchy and could translate their experiences in ways that men would understand.
The focus of Voaden’s work is on the concept of discretio spirituum. This was a methodology developed by clerics in the later Middle Ages to differentiate between people acting under the influence of the Holy Spirit and those acting under the influence of the devil. Voaden uses discretio spirituum to analyze the cases of two female visionaries, Bridget of Sweden and Margery Kempe and how they were received by the Church; Bridget of Sweden was successful at navigating the discourse of discretio spirituum, while Margery Kempe failed at it. Margery comes across, in her writing, as a very forceful and independent personality while Bridget of Sweden comes across as a blank cipher. Margery Kempe took a strongly independent role for herself; even though she attempted to gain the approval of the Church, she failed to hold on to a spiritual director. While she gained the respect of many ecclesiastical authorities, she constantly quarreled with her spiritual directors and hence could not hold on to one. Bridget of Sweden succeeded in maintaining the aid of Alfonso of Jaen, who went on to advocate for her canonization. Margery Kempe seems to have been fairly unlearned, particularly in matters related to discretio spirituum, while Bridget of Sweden was relatively well educated and, in particular, understood discretio spirituum. Margery Kempe’s visions tended to be more corporeal, while Bridget of Sweden’s visions were of an intellectual nature. Margery Kempe was a married woman, who had abandoned her husband for life as a wondering pilgrim. Furthermore she engaged in activities that seemed to veer rather closely to preaching. Bridget of Sweden, though she was originally married, became a nun after the death of her husband.
Despite the fact that Bridget of Sweden was portrayed by Alfonso of Jaen as a meek passive servant of the Church, her status as a visionary made a major power. Kings and popes alike heeded her advice. She involved herself in the Hundred Years Wars, supporting the English. She played a crucial role in bringing the papacy back to Rome from Avignon. She did live as a cloistered nun, but traveled about, working to create her own order of nuns, the Bridgettines.
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 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.
Coakley builds his case around a series of case studies of various female mystics and their male clerical 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.
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 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.
Coakley, like Elliott, sees a downturn in the Church’s acceptance of female visionaries in the later part of the fourteenth century. The fact that Raymond had go 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.
This answer of mine is essentially an abridged version of an essay that I wrote earlier in the year and posted on this blog. It is not cheating if you are cribbing off of yourself. I sent Dr. Hobbins an email asking him if I could just hand him the original paper. He said that it was fine to take from my paper but that I needed to give him a "new text." So I had to do some work on this answer.
Here is the second question and my response:
The standard historiographical model of the late Middle Ages sees this period as one of crisis and even decline. Many scholars of the past generation have attempted to modify this model or to discard it entirely. Describe the different approaches to the late Middle Ages in any general surveys (Cantor, Southern, Funkenstein) or monographs that you have read (e.g., Blumenfeld-Kosinksi, Elliott, Smoller, Coleman, Iogna-Prat, or any others). Are any general trends or shifts in attitude visible in these studies? Does the standard model still appear relatively intact?
The late Middle Ages often receives short shrift. The standard historiographical model of the late Middle Ages, from the end of the thirteenth century through the early fifteenth century sees this period as one of crisis and even decline. A good example of this, at a popular level, is Barbara Tuchman’s Distant Mirror. The problem with the late Middle Ages is that it suffers from being between the Scholastic “Twelfth Century Renaissance"” and the Renaissance of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries so it is likely to be overlooked even by traditional defenders of the Middle Ages. Also, the late Middle Ages saw a number of rather cataclysmic events on a number of fronts. There was the Black Death, which wiped out approximately one-third of the European population and would come back periodically every few decades over the next few centuries to wreak its havoc. The late Middle Ages saw the series of conflicts between England and France known to us as the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). From the perspective of the Church, this was a difficult period as well, with the Great Schism splitting the Church (1378-1415) into two and briefly three factions. I would like to offer some examples of attempts to rehabilitate the late Middle Ages both in terms of the “grand narrative” and in terms of specific case studies.
Norman Cantor viewed the late Middle Ages as the “Harvest of Medieval Thought,” opting to, in essence, go with a long Renaissance and in include the later Middle Ages as part of the Renaissance:
The crisis of the later Middle Ages did not distract the intellectuals and artists of Latin Christendom from theory and creativity. On the contrary, the gloom and doom of the times made them think all the more deeply about the nature of God, the universe, mankind, and society. In the midst of devastation from pandemics, war, climatic deterioration, and economic depression, they exhibited a passion for learning of all kinds – for linguistic and literary innovation, for philosophical and scientific inquiry, for massive productivity and creativity in the visual arts. No era in western civilization left a heritage of more masterpieces in literature and painting or seminal works of philosophy and theology. (Civilization of the Middle Ages pg. 529)
Cantor holds up the work of Duns Scotus and William of Occam as the preeminent examples of late medieval thought. Particularly with Occam, Cantor saw the Scientific Revolution really as starting in the fourteenth century with the shift toward emphasizing empirical observation and the breakaway from Aristotle. This had to wait until the sixteenth century for its full flowering due to the lack of societal support, there were no University chairs devoted to empirical science in the fourteenth century, and the undeveloped state of mathematics at the time.
In light of the inherent limitations in the way of scientific progress during the late Middle Ages Cantor focuses on mystical developments. This, for Cantor, is a legitimate form of progress and not a mere sinking into superstition because he sees late medieval mysticism as being rooted in a certain individualism in that we see an emphasis on the personal relationship of the lay individual to God, to Christ and to the Eucharist, essentially unmediated by the clergy. This becomes an important bridge into Renaissance humanism. Cantor’s approach to such figures as Thomas a Kempis and Nicholas of Cusa owes a lot to his teacher Richard Southern and how he approached Anselm. For Southern, Anselm marked a major shift in Christian thought. Anselm argued that Christ had to come down in human form and died on the Cross as a man in order to pay the price of humanity's sins. According to the traditional understanding Christ, by taking on a human guise, tricked the Devil into trying to take his soul. By doing this Satan broke his original agreement with God that gave him a claim over the souls of mankind and, as such, the agreement became null and void. In the traditional perspective, human beings are passive spectators in a contest between God and the Devil. Anselm made Christ’s humanity, his life as a human being and his human suffering on Calvary, of central theological importance. This set the stage for a flowering of humanist thinking that expressed itself in theology, in philosophy and even helped bring about the rise of the medieval romance.
Laura Ackerman Smoller’s History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The Christian Astrology of Pierre D’Ailly, 1450-1420 is an example of the rehabilitation of one particular late medieval thinker from being pushed aside simply as an unoriginal thinker and, as such, unworthy of scholarly interest. Smoller acknowledges that from the perspective of simply looking at D’Ailly’s parts he was not an original thinker. What interests Smoller about D’Ailly, though, is how D’Ailly brought together such widely different currents as theology, astrology, Apocalypticism and church politics, creating something uniquely his own.
D’Ailly was one of the leading French theologians in late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries and the teacher Jean Gerson, the dominant figure in fifteenth century Scholasticism. The event that dominated D’Ailly’s life and thought was the Great Schism. The main focus of D’Ailly’s thought was his attempt to place this schism within the context of Christian theology. During the early years of the schism, D’Ailly saw this event in terms of the Apocalypse and the coming of the Anti-Christ. The Church was breaking up; such a disaster must prefigure the End of Days. Later in life, as D’Ailly became one of the leading figures involved in the conciliatory movement, first at the Council of Pisa in 1409 and then at the Council of Constance from 1414-1417, to get all the papal claimants to abdicate and allow the Church to be brought back together in the leadership of a new pope. In order to justify this new turn, D’Ailly turned to astrology. According to his astrological calculations the Apocalypse would not occur until 1796, leaving plenty of time for Church reunification.
Smoller is following in the footsteps of the late Marjorie Reeves in her incorporation of prophecy into the narrative of the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the rise of naturalistic thinking. For Smoller, D’Ailly’s turn toward astrology and his attempt to work out a prophetic narrative of history has nothing to do with him being “superstitious.” D’Ailly is part and parcel of the shift toward a mechanized view of the world. D’Ailly saw history as being subjected to set laws with causes firmly rooted in the natural world; in this case the influence of the stars. This is not really all that far removed from the work of Kepler and Newton and their mechanized heavenly motions.
My final example of an attempt to rehabilitate the late Middle Ages as a time of legitimate cultural growth is Joyce Coleman’s book, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France. Coleman presents medieval literacy as being aural based. That people read aloud either to themselves or to others even when they could do otherwise because they preferred hearing texts. Coleman posits the existence of an aural reading culture thriving particularly during the late Middle Ages where people where actively interested in reading, if not by their own power than simply by taking part in hearing others read.
Running through the book and tying it all together is an analysis of Chaucer. Chaucer has traditionally served as an example of the rise of a silent reader. At various points in his famous Canterbury Tales, and his less well-known work such as Troilus and Criseyde, talks about reading and addresses himself to a reader. This has traditionally been interpreted as Chaucer's writing with the assumption that his work would be read by privately by an individual. The fact that Chaucer also talks about people listening to stories is brushed aside as Chaucer giving a nod to traditional forms of narrative. Coleman rejects this interpretation of Chaucer and offers her own analysis of Chaucer using her theory of aurality. According to her reading of Chaucer, when he talks about a reader he is referring to someone either reading his work aloud to a group or someone having his work read to him. This reading of Chaucer has the advantage over more traditional readings in that it takes into account his references to the telling over of his work and the reading of it.
For Coleman, Chaucer and the aural mode of reading that he represents is an important piece in the creation of the reading society. It is not that print was invented in the fifteenth century and all of a sudden people went from being medieval illiterates to Renaissance literates. The Middle Ages, of course, was a far more literate age than the stereotype would suggest and there was plenty of illiteracy during the Renaissance. What is crucial here, though, was that the printing revolution in the fifteenth century came in the wake of reading revolution that occurred during the late Middle Ages. This mass rise in popular reading, both for pleasure and for business, brought about the rise of print. As such the late Middle Ages must be viewed as an important cultural watershed in its own right.
The work of scholars such as Cantor, Smoller, and Coleman offer an alternative perspective of the late Middle Ages. No one is trying to push away such calamities as the Black Death, the Hundred Years War and the Great Schism, but that is not the entire story. There is another side to this story which also has to be told. Similarly, on an intellectual front, there is more to the late Middle Ages than the hardening of Scholasticism into hard dogma, killing all original thought. This was also the era of Occam, of Cusa and of a Kempis. Even scholastics such as D’Ailly, who, at first glance, might seem to have been nothing more than redactors of the scholastic tradition, upon examination, also come into their own as important thinkers in their own right.
In this case, I also cribbed a little off of my earlier work, something that I posted here. I did go quite a bit over my word limit. I assume no one will really mind. Well next on the schedule is my exam in early modern history with Dr. Robert Davis. It will be in the same general format as this exam. I do not expect the same luck as I had this time around. I am looking forward to it. For now, I guess I should be packing to go home for Thanksgiving. I can start panicking again once I get through the weekend.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Female Spirituality in the Late Middle Ages and the Search for a Feminine Christianity (Part V)
Voaden, Rosalynn. God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries.
Rosalynn Voaden sees prophecy as representing one of the very few areas in which women could be empowered even within a patriarchal system such as the Church. This empowerment depended on having access to the discourses found in the formal Church structure. Educated women could form useful alliances with members of the Church hierarchy and could translate their experiences in ways that men would understand. In the texts that Voaden deals with, she finds evidence that these female visionaries “co-operated with the prevailing ideology in general, and with certain representatives thereof, in the persons of spiritual directors and scribes, in particular, thus participating in their own empowerment.”[1]
The focus of Voaden’s work is on the concept of discretio spirituum. This was a methodology developed by clerics in the later Middle Ages to differentiate between people acting under the influence of the Holy Spirit and those acting under the influence of the devil. There were seven signs. One, that the person led a virtuous life under the guidance of a proper spiritual director. Two, the vision should inspire the soul with an overwhelming love for God and reverence for the Church. Three, that the visionary should feel a deep inward understanding of the truth. Four, that that only true things are revealed to the visionary. Five, that the vision bore good fruits. Six, that the visionary should be able to predict the hour of their death. Seven, that posthumous miracles be performed. According to Voaden:
… 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 behavior, demeanor and modes of expression. Familiarity with, and skill in, the discourse was a vital factor in the textual – and physical – survival of the visionary. Facility with discretio spirituum empowered medieval women visionaries and enabled them to fulfil[l] their divine mandate to communicate revelation.[2]
The majority of the book is devoted to a case study of two female visionaries, Bridget of Sweden and Margery Kempe and how they were received by the Church; Bridget of Sweden was successful at navigating the discourse of discretio spirituum, while Margery Kempe failed at it. Margery comes across, in her writing, as a very forceful and independent personality while Bridget of Sweden comes across as a blank cipher. As historians, we might find Margery Kempe’s work to be far more interesting and worthy of preservation than Bridget of Sweden’s work for precisely the same reasons why the Church did not approve of her and approved of Bridget of Sweden. Margery Kempe took a strongly independent role for herself; even though she attempted to gain the approval of the Church, she failed to hold on to a spiritual director. While she gained the respect of many ecclesiastical authorities, she constantly quarreled with her spiritual directors and hence could not hold on to one. Bridget of Sweden succeeded in maintaining the aid of Alfonso of Jaen, who went on to advocate for her canonization. Margery Kempe seems to have been fairly unlearned, particularly in matters related to discretio spirituum, while Bridget of Sweden was relatively well educated and, in particular, understood discretio spirituum. Margery Kempe’s visions tended to be more corporeal, while Bridget of Sweden’s visions were of an intellectual nature. Margery Kempe was a married woman, who had abandoned her husband for life as a wondering pilgrim. Furthermore she engaged in activities that seemed to veer rather closely to preaching. Bridget of Sweden, though she was originally married, became a nun after the death of her husband.
Despite the fact that Bridget of Sweden was portrayed by Alfonso of Jaen as a meek passive servant of the Church, her status as a visionary made a major power. Kings and popes alike heeded her advice. She involved herself in the Hundred Years Wars, supporting the English. She played a crucial role in bringing the papacy back to Rome from Avignon. She did live as a cloistered nun, but traveled about, working to create her own order of nuns, the Bridgettines.
Voaden offers a fascinating analysis of the specific cases of Margery Kempe and Bridget of Sweden. My problem with this work, though, is that Voaden does not offer a broader context for the material she deals with. This work does not discuss the situation of men; how did the Church apply discretio spirituum to men? This is crucial because if the Church handled men in the same manner then discretio spirituum ceases to be a women’s issue. At the end of the day I am not convinced that discretio spirituum was a coherent ideology that was ever put into practice by the Church. It is too vague. The two male theologians that Voaden deals with, Alfonso Jaen and Jean Gerson, are perfect examples of this. Alfonso Jaen wrote on discretio spirituum to promote the veneration of Bridget of Sweden. Jean Gerson wrote to argue against her canonization. Did their respective decisions have anything to do with Bridget’s success at handling the discourse of discretio spirituum? In the case of Jean Gerson it is clear that he opposed her in large part because she supported the English in the Hundred Years War.[3] In the end discretio spirituum would seem to have simply been a discourse to be used to justify whatever one was inclined to believe from the beginning. The most a female visionary could hope to do in order to navigate the discourse of discretio spirituum was to tie herself to the right clergymen and hope that he would come through for her.
[1] Voaden, God’s Words, Women’s Voices pg. 3.
[2] Ibid pg. 4.
[3] Jean Gerson would later go on to write a book defending Joan of Arc. This would suggest he was less motivated by misogyny or the technicalities of discretio spirituum than by politics. See Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman pg. 264-96.
Rosalynn Voaden sees prophecy as representing one of the very few areas in which women could be empowered even within a patriarchal system such as the Church. This empowerment depended on having access to the discourses found in the formal Church structure. Educated women could form useful alliances with members of the Church hierarchy and could translate their experiences in ways that men would understand. In the texts that Voaden deals with, she finds evidence that these female visionaries “co-operated with the prevailing ideology in general, and with certain representatives thereof, in the persons of spiritual directors and scribes, in particular, thus participating in their own empowerment.”[1]
The focus of Voaden’s work is on the concept of discretio spirituum. This was a methodology developed by clerics in the later Middle Ages to differentiate between people acting under the influence of the Holy Spirit and those acting under the influence of the devil. There were seven signs. One, that the person led a virtuous life under the guidance of a proper spiritual director. Two, the vision should inspire the soul with an overwhelming love for God and reverence for the Church. Three, that the visionary should feel a deep inward understanding of the truth. Four, that that only true things are revealed to the visionary. Five, that the vision bore good fruits. Six, that the visionary should be able to predict the hour of their death. Seven, that posthumous miracles be performed. According to Voaden:
… 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 behavior, demeanor and modes of expression. Familiarity with, and skill in, the discourse was a vital factor in the textual – and physical – survival of the visionary. Facility with discretio spirituum empowered medieval women visionaries and enabled them to fulfil[l] their divine mandate to communicate revelation.[2]
The majority of the book is devoted to a case study of two female visionaries, Bridget of Sweden and Margery Kempe and how they were received by the Church; Bridget of Sweden was successful at navigating the discourse of discretio spirituum, while Margery Kempe failed at it. Margery comes across, in her writing, as a very forceful and independent personality while Bridget of Sweden comes across as a blank cipher. As historians, we might find Margery Kempe’s work to be far more interesting and worthy of preservation than Bridget of Sweden’s work for precisely the same reasons why the Church did not approve of her and approved of Bridget of Sweden. Margery Kempe took a strongly independent role for herself; even though she attempted to gain the approval of the Church, she failed to hold on to a spiritual director. While she gained the respect of many ecclesiastical authorities, she constantly quarreled with her spiritual directors and hence could not hold on to one. Bridget of Sweden succeeded in maintaining the aid of Alfonso of Jaen, who went on to advocate for her canonization. Margery Kempe seems to have been fairly unlearned, particularly in matters related to discretio spirituum, while Bridget of Sweden was relatively well educated and, in particular, understood discretio spirituum. Margery Kempe’s visions tended to be more corporeal, while Bridget of Sweden’s visions were of an intellectual nature. Margery Kempe was a married woman, who had abandoned her husband for life as a wondering pilgrim. Furthermore she engaged in activities that seemed to veer rather closely to preaching. Bridget of Sweden, though she was originally married, became a nun after the death of her husband.
Despite the fact that Bridget of Sweden was portrayed by Alfonso of Jaen as a meek passive servant of the Church, her status as a visionary made a major power. Kings and popes alike heeded her advice. She involved herself in the Hundred Years Wars, supporting the English. She played a crucial role in bringing the papacy back to Rome from Avignon. She did live as a cloistered nun, but traveled about, working to create her own order of nuns, the Bridgettines.
Voaden offers a fascinating analysis of the specific cases of Margery Kempe and Bridget of Sweden. My problem with this work, though, is that Voaden does not offer a broader context for the material she deals with. This work does not discuss the situation of men; how did the Church apply discretio spirituum to men? This is crucial because if the Church handled men in the same manner then discretio spirituum ceases to be a women’s issue. At the end of the day I am not convinced that discretio spirituum was a coherent ideology that was ever put into practice by the Church. It is too vague. The two male theologians that Voaden deals with, Alfonso Jaen and Jean Gerson, are perfect examples of this. Alfonso Jaen wrote on discretio spirituum to promote the veneration of Bridget of Sweden. Jean Gerson wrote to argue against her canonization. Did their respective decisions have anything to do with Bridget’s success at handling the discourse of discretio spirituum? In the case of Jean Gerson it is clear that he opposed her in large part because she supported the English in the Hundred Years War.[3] In the end discretio spirituum would seem to have simply been a discourse to be used to justify whatever one was inclined to believe from the beginning. The most a female visionary could hope to do in order to navigate the discourse of discretio spirituum was to tie herself to the right clergymen and hope that he would come through for her.
[1] Voaden, God’s Words, Women’s Voices pg. 3.
[2] Ibid pg. 4.
[3] Jean Gerson would later go on to write a book defending Joan of Arc. This would suggest he was less motivated by misogyny or the technicalities of discretio spirituum than by politics. See Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman pg. 264-96.
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