Women, Men, and Spiritual Power

Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators

John Coakley

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780231508612
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

In Women, Men, and Spiritual Power, John Coakley explores male-authored narratives of the lives of Catherine of Siena, Hildegard of Bingen, Angela of Foligno, and six other female prophets or mystics of the late Middle Ages. His readings reveal the complex personal and literary relationships between these women and the clerics who wrote about them. Coakley's work also undermines simplistic characterizations of male control over women, offering an important contribution to medieval religious history.

Coakley shows that these male-female relationships were marked by a fundamental tension between power and fascination: the priests and monks were supposed to hold authority over the women entrusted to their care, but they often switched roles, as the men became captivated with the women's spiritual gifts. In narratives of such women, the male authors reflect directly on the relationship between the women's powers and their own. Coakley argues that they viewed these relationships as gendered partnerships that brought together female mystical power and male ecclesiastical authority without placing one above the other.

Women, Men, and Spiritual Power chronicles a wide-ranging experiment in the balance of formal and informal powers, in which it was assumed to be thoroughly imaginable for both sorts of authority, in their distinctly gendered terms, to coexist and build on each other. The men's writings reflect an extended moment in western Christianity when clerics had enough confidence in their authority to actually question its limits. After about 1400, however, clerics underwent a crisis of confidence, and such a questioning of institutional power was no longer considered safe. Instead of seeing women as partners, their revelatory powers began to be viewed as evidence of witchcraft.

CHAPTER 1

The Powers of Holy Women

THE SUBSEQUENT CHAPTERS OF this book will discuss certain female saints who were thought in their time to possess certain supernatural powers. The particular powers of these women were typical of late-medieval female saints as they appear in a large body of works of hagiography that extends well beyond the relatively small group of texts that will constitute our nine cases. The present chapter examines the powers of women as presented in some of that broader literature in order to suggest the terms of a question or problem that will be basic to all of our cases, namely, the relationship between the women’s powers and the powers of ecclesiastical men.

Late-medieval works of hagiography about women are indeed full of stories about their powers: the women prophesy, they warn, they advise, and sometimes they expound upon ideas, all from a direct knowledge or consciousness of things divine. The authors of those hagiographical works were, for the most part, clerics. When we read their writing, we find ourselves thinking not only about the women’s powers but also about the powers of the clerics themselves, namely, to preach and teach, to administer sacraments, and in general to rule the church: for they see the women’s lives in the light of their own concerns, which are shaped by their own calling. The two sets of powers are based on putatively different authorities: an authority derived from outside the structures of the church in the first instance, and one derived from within those structures in the second. The question of the relation between these two authorities is a basic question that has been raised perennially in Christian tradition, a function of Christian attempts at an understanding not only of the church but of the work of the Holy Spirit.¹ In the later Middle Ages the question was an especially pressing one, and for clerics it gave the powers of female saints a special significance.

FEMALE SANCTITY IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES

A few comments are in order first about sanctity in general, and female sanctity in particular, in the period from the twelfth century through the end of the Middle Ages. By “sanctity” here I mean not only the “ideal” of virtue embodied by given saints—in Hippolyte Delehaye’s phrase, “the harmonious ensemble of Christian virtues practiced to a degree that a rare elite is in a position to attain”—but also more broadly the terms in which they were perceived by their audiences, that is, by those who considered them saints.² Sanctity in this sense was not limited to people officially canonized. This was indeed the period in which the papacy took control of canonization processes and, in effect, strictly limited the number new people who could officially be called “saint.”³ But this development did not limit the number of those venerated as saints, which on the contrary grew at a faster rate than before; this was indicative of what André Vauchez has called a “modernizing” of sanctity, a new interest in contemporary saints. The saints of the ancient church, though their cults certainly continued, no longer dominated either clerical or lay devotion as they had in the earlier medieval centuries.⁴ The majority of the newly venerated were never canonized and therefore were technically not “saints” but rather “blessed (beati).” But in practical terms, veneration was veneration, and in this sense there was little real distinction between them.⁵

Another characteristic of sanctity in the high and later Middle Ages was a greater variety in the religious roles and social backgrounds of the saints. In the Mediterranean areas (but not in the north until the fifteenth century) an increasing proportion of saints came from the bourgeoisie (though generally among the well-to-do in any case) rather than the ruling classes.⁶ There were also saints from the new orders of the mendicant friars, as distinct from the older monastic orders, and more saints from the ranks of the laity.⁷ From the middle of the thirteenth century, it was the friars in particular who made a specialty of the promotion of new saints, both from their own ranks and from among the lay penitent movements of the time, with which they had close ties.⁸ The new importance of mendicant and lay saints reflects the religious revival of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that broadened the base of religious concern in society, characterized by what Herbert Grundmann called a “new consciousness” of the Christian faith as something personally compelling and directly accessible, which “sought to realize Christianity as a religious way of life immediately binding upon every individual Christian, a commitment more essential to the salvation of his soul than his position in the hierarchical ordo of the Church or his belief in the doctrines of the Fathers of the Church and its theologians.”⁹

This broadening of the base of sanctity had special significance for female sanctity. Among earlier medieval female saints in the West, who had had a great vogue especially in Merovingian Gaul and Anglo-Saxon England, queens and abbesses had dominated.¹⁰ In the later Middle Ages, female saints—who appear to have accounted for a larger proportion of new saints in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries than in the centuries just before and after¹¹—were no longer so exclusively from convents or royal families. The idea of a Christian perfection available beyond the restricted world of the cloister had wide appeal among women, and many embraced voluntary poverty and the vita apostolica. These women often formed communities without rules, which then had entered complex relationships with the male religious orders, in some cases becoming cloistered, in other cases not, but eventually coming under the supervision of the male religious orders.¹² Among lay saints, such women were prominent. In the early thirteenth century in the Low Countries, for example, certain Beguines, as well as certain Cistercian nuns influenced by Beguine spirituality, acquired saintly reputations and, even though their cults of devotion do not seem to have been large, inspired a remarkable body of hagiography.¹³ In the Italian cities, beginning later in the thirteenth century, many cults arose around lay penitent women with substantial local support, enjoying the formidable promotion of the mendicant orders.¹⁴ The mendicants were indeed more likely to promote lay women than lay men, and in their hagiography they showed more interest in women’s interior life of devotion than in that of men.¹⁵ And it was women who become the most famous lay saints of the period.¹⁶ Dozens of contemporary vitae of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian penitent women survive, most of which were composed by mendicant friars.¹⁷

The trends in sanctity in the period also implied changing notions of what should be remembered about the lives of saints and thus new fashions in hagiography. In the earlier medieval centuries, saints appeared to their admirers preeminently as the loci or media of a divine power that was expressed in miracles and great deeds of charity or asceticism. Newer saints still functioned in this way in hagiographical accounts, but they also appeared increasingly as people with a privileged subjective experience of the divine.¹⁸ An illustration may be helpful. The fourth-century hermit and bishop Martin of Tours, one of the most famous saints of the early Middle Ages, and the thirteenth-century friar Francis of Assisi, the most famous of the new saints of the later Middle Ages, were both commemorated in influential works of hagiography written shortly after their deaths: the vita of Martin by Sulpicius Severus, and several vitae of Francis, the earliest of which was by the friar Thomas of Celano. Setting aside the obvious differences of the particulars and contexts of the saints’ lives, we cannot but see a strong similarity in the saintly ideals in these works: in each saint, an active life of great public consequence is deeply rooted in ascetic monastic virtues.¹⁹ But there is a crucial difference in the hagiographers’ approach to this ideal: whereas Sulpicius presents Martin from the outset as for all intents and purposes someone fully formed and concentrates on his marvelous deeds, Thomas instead traces the process of Francis’s dawning awareness of his faith and calling, in the context of a saintly career that only gradually found its shape. In this sense Thomas shows a new interest in the saint’s humanity and subjectivity.²⁰ It is not that the newer saints lacked supernatural powers; Thomas duly reported his saint’s healings and exorcisms just as earlier medieval hagiographers would have done. But these acquired a different cast in context of a more careful charting of the saint’s embrace of the gospel.²¹ Not incidentally the preeminent miracle of Francis’s life was the appearance of Christ’s wounds on his body, an index of his own spirituality in its supposed conformity to Christ’s poverty and sufferings. External bodily signs of a saint’s inner life were to be, if anything, even more conspicuous when the saints were women.²²

In the case of female saints of the later Middle Ages, as compared to men this hagiographical representation of subjective experience displayed distinctive themes. Descriptions of the physical aspects of women’s devotional practice are particularly striking. Apparently to a greater extent than male saints, they tended to practice an extreme asceticism that sometimes included a complete abstinence from food, and they were much more likely both to acquire the stigmata on their bodies as evidence of their identification with Christ and his Passion and, especially in the context of receiving the Eucharist, to experience “raptures” or trances that alienated them from their own senses and rendered their bodies stiff and numb.²³ This emphasis on the body in the women’s religious expression, as Caroline Bynum has shown, was full of theological significance. Texts about female saints in this period present their physical identification with Christ’s humanity and Passion as a function not just of their own humanity but also, and more specifically, of their femaleness, which was assumed to predispose their bodies to be, like his, loci of nurture and suffering.²⁴ Such identification gave women, in comparison to men, a privileged position as intimates of Christ, beneficiaries of his mystical presence and recipients of divine revelations, even as it in turn presupposed women as inferior, as the weaker sex, whose bodies were soft, porous, and vulnerable and thus, ominously, more susceptible to demonic influence as well.²⁵ We see the Christ-centeredness and its physical manifestation most clearly in texts from the thirteenth century on-ward;²⁶ in the texts about two twelfth-century figures to be discussed in chapters 2 and 3 below, Elisabeth of Schönau and Hildegard of Bingen, ecstasies and Passion-centered devotion do not yet figure strongly. But the association of women with visions is nonetheless evident in those texts. So is the association of humility with divine favor and accordingly of weakness with exaltation—an old Christian paradox with roots in the New Testament which takes, in all of our texts, a gendered form.

THE POWERS OF WOMEN

What exactly were the powers of these women—the powers associated with female sanctity? For many of the hagiographers, it was precisely the women’s closeness to Christ, paradoxically linked with their supposed physical weakness and inferiority to men, that generated these powers. In any event, the powers appear mostly as a function of the women’s internal personal contact with the divine or the other world. Stories of their miracles in the world external to themselves, such as exorcisms, physical healings, and other interventions into nature, are not entirely lacking in this literature, but these are relatively few in number, especially by earlier medieval hagiographical standards.²⁷ It is also true that the women typically displayed external signs of sanctity on their bodies, such as the stigmata, and that typically for them the personal experience of God was something “embodied,” inseparable from its physical manifestations, and thus never purely internal. But it was now mainly by the fruit of their private prayers and extraordinary consciousness of the divine that women performed their services for other people. For such purposes, the most significant and extraordinary events of their lives occurred within themselves rather than in the world outside them.

An example will illustrate the powers of such a woman and how they might figure in a work of hagiography: the vita of the Cistercian nun Lutgard of Aywières by the Dominican friar Thomas of Cantimpré (1200/01–ca. 1270), one of the major works of the mid-thirteenth-century flowering of hagiography in the southern Low Countries. Lutgard was a woman from the town of Tongres, and in her youth she escaped an attempted rape by an aspiring suitor and became a Benedictine nun in a convent at St. Trond. In Thomas’s telling, the external events and circumstances of her life were not particularly remarkable either before or after her transfer at the age of twenty-four to the Cistercian convent of Aywières, where she was satisfied to be isolated from her convent sisters by her inability to speak French and, during her last eleven years, by blindness. But miracles all the while witnessed to her remarkable inner life. Already in her years at St. Trond, as Thomas reports, signs began to attend her: her body levitated, light appeared around her while she prayed, oil dripped miraculously from her fingers, and at her consecration someone had a vision of her being crowned with a “golden crown.”²⁸ Then in the Aywières years, as the signs continued to appear regularly, she began also making contacts with God on behalf of others, and these become Thomas’s chief interest as his work progresses. He tells stories of her prayers and vicarious sufferings for persons in purgatory who appeared to her in visions to ask her help, including Pope Innocent III, and many stories of her effective prayers for the living, including both other nuns and lay people whom she liberated from temptations.²⁹ She takes on the task of interceding for a disgraced knight who eventually becomes a monk; and other men come to contrition for their sins just at the sight of her.³⁰ She obtains the grace of consolation for a layman who has confessed his sins but without a sense of relief, and she gives an abbot assurance of his own salvation.³¹ Her private prayers also exorcise demons from people known to her.³² And she receives a variety of revelations apart from intercessions per se: for instance, a revelation of an interpretation of a Psalm, later found to be also in the Glossa Ordinaria of Scripture and thus consistent with learned opinion, and another regarding the identity of a set of saint’s relics.³³ Or again, she receives a revelation that a Franciscan apostate, the brother of a certain nun, would return to his order, another that the duchess of Brabant would die soon and had better prepare herself, another telling her the sins of a recluse who had been too embarrassed to confess them, another that a feared Tartar invasion would not take place.³⁴ She appears here above all as figure of access to the divine and a point of contact with the other world.

Though the women’s power as exercised for others was not always a matter of words—Lutgard and many other holy women were said to have effected conversion in others simply by being looked at, and similar effects were attributed to the sight of women’s stigmata and raptures—language was their usual medium.³⁵ And in many, even most, of the stories that show them helping others through speech, they articulate revelations, that is, messages from God or Christ or from saints or from souls in the other world; these messages have come to them in the form of visions, dreams, or supernatural locutions, or even what to a modern eye may lo...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “You Draw Us After You”
• Chapter 1. The Powers of Holy Women
• Chapter 2. Revelation and Authority in Ekbert and Elisabeth of Schönau
• Chapter 3. A Shared Endeavor? Guibert of Gembloux on Hildegard of Bingen
• Chapter 4. James of Vitry and the Other World of Mary of Oignies
• Chapter 5. Self and Saint: Peter of Dacia on Christine of Stommeln
• Chapter 6. Hagiography and Theology in the Memorial of Angela of Foligno
• Chapter 7. The Limits of Religious Authority: Margaret of Cortona and Giunta Bevegnati
• Chapter 8. Hagiography in Process: Henry of Nördlingen and Margaret Ebner
• Chapter 9. Managing Holiness: Raymond of Capua and Catherine of Siena
• Chapter 10. Revelation and Authority Revisited: John Marienwerder on Dorothy of Montau
• Chapter 11. Authority and Female Sanctity: Conclusions
• Notes
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Index