The Oldest Vocation

Christian Motherhood in the Medieval West

Clarissa W. Atkinson

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501740909
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

According to an old story, a woman concealed her sex and ruled as pope for a few years in the ninth century. Pope Joan was not betrayed by a lover or discovered by an enemy; her downfall came when she went into labor during a papal procession through the streets of Rome. From the myth of Joan to the experiences of saints, nuns, and ordinary women, The Oldest Vocation brings to life both the richness and the troubling contradictions of Christian motherhood in medieval Europe.

After tracing the roots of medieval ideologies of motherhood in early Christianity, Clarissa W. Atkinson reconstructs the physiological assumptions underlying medieval notions about women's bodies and reproduction; inherited from Greek science and popularized through the practice of midwifery, these assumptions helped shape common beliefs about what mothers were. She then describes the development of "spiritual motherhood" both as a concept emerging out of monastic ideologies in the early Middle Ages and as a reality in the lives of certain remarkable women. Atkinson explores the theological dimensions of medieval motherhood by discussing the cult of the Virgin Mary in twelfth-century art, story, and religious expression. She also offers a fascinating new perspective on the women saints of the later Middle Ages, many of whom were mothers; their lives and cults forged new relationships between maternity and holiness. The Oldest Vocation concludes where most histories of motherhood begin—in early modern Europe, when the family was institutionalized as a center of religious and social organization.

Anyone interested in the status of motherhood, or in women's history, the cultural history of the Middle Ages, or the history of religion will want to read this book.

CHAPTER ONE

Christian Motherhood: “Who Is My Mother?”

According to a very old story, a woman pope ruled the Church of Rome for a few years in the middle of the ninth century. Her name was Joan, and as a young woman she lived in England, where she fell in love with a traveling student who was a monk. (Before there were universities, most students were monks, and the intellectually curious among them moved from library to library and from teacher to teacher, in search of books and instruction.) Monks were not allowed to marry, but Joan was brave as well as beautiful and brilliant, and she joined her lover in his studies and travels, wearing male clerical clothing for safety and concealment. The two wandered through Europe, acquiring vast learning, until the man died and Joan was left alone. She continued to study and to dress like a monk: Boccaccio, who told the story in the fourteenth century, said that she refused “to attach herself to anyone else or acknowledge that she was a woman.”¹ Eventually she found her way to Rome, where her outstanding virtue and learning were rewarded with election to the papal throne.

Joan reigned as pope for a time, with nobody the wiser. Boccaccio remarked: “This woman was not afraid to mount the Fisherman‘s throne, to deal with all the sacred mysteries and proffer them to others, something which the Christian religion does not allow to any woman.” Such audacity was soon punished. Boccaccio says that the devil tormented her with lust and “the Pope happened to become pregnant. Oh, what a shameful crime!”² Joan‘s celebrated wisdom did not help her to appreciate the implications of her condition, or even to recognize the beginning of labor. During a solemn procession through the streets of Rome, the pope gave birth and died in shameful agony.³

In the salacious iconography that surrounds this story, Joan frequently is depicted lying in the street in a crowd of horrified onlookers, a triple crown on her head and an infant emerging from beneath the papal robes. Lawrence Durrell, working with a modern Greek version of the legend, captured the chaotic, sacrilegious atmosphere of visual representations of Joan‘s travail:

Great was the consternation when a premature infant was produced from among the voluminous folds of the papal vestments. The attending archdeacons recoiled in horror while the great circle of worshippers pressed in even closer, screaming and crossing themselves. Women climbed on the backs of their menfolks for a better view, while those already mounted on horses and mules stood in the saddle until the deacons were forced to use their standards and crucifixes as clubs to hew a passage through the mob.⁴

The uses to which the story has been put are no more edifying than its iconography. It gave Boccaccio an opportunity to castigate bold women, but it has also been used to discredit the clergy, to make fun of pious hypocrites, and to denounce the papacy and the entire Roman Catholic Church.

The legend of Pope Joan begins with a love affair and ends with an out-of-wedlock birth, but it is not about love or sex, and Joan was not punished for sexual immorality. Boccaccio‘s comments and Durrell‘s description of the birth scene make it clear that the story is about disorder, and about the filth and chaos that ensue when objects and persons and events are out of place—a woman on the throne of Peter, a child in the belly of a pope, a birth in a public procession.⁵ The woman whose learning and virtue carried her to the heights was destroyed by motherhood. Joan was not betrayed by a lover or discovered by an enemy; she was brought down by her own body, which was inherently and catastrophically unfit for ecclesiastical dignity. The literary and artistic images that surround the birth of her child display a range of responses from hysterical laughter to horrified disgust. The notion of a female pope was scandalous; of a pregnant pope, ludicrous; of a pope giving birth, disastrous.

The earliest written sources for the legend of Joan come from the eleventh century, although its elaboration is the work of the Renaissance.⁶ The story is set in the ninth century, partly because of obscurities in the historical record but also because that era was consigned to the Dark Ages by Renaissance thinkers. To such critics, who assumed dismal scandals to be the norm in early medieval church and society, it seemed a plausible period for a female pope: the ninth century deserved nothing better.⁷

Whatever the likelihood of a woman pope in any century, the legend of Joan is a fine starting point for an investigation of certain interactions of the history of motherhood with the history of Christianity in the medieval West. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when the story was taking shape, devotion to the mother of Christ was blossoming in new artistic, liturgical, and theological expressions. At first sight, the legend of Joan and the cult of Mary have no common characteristics except that each sheds light on the imagination of medieval Christians, who produced images of “mother” and notions of motherhood that ranged from tender and sacred to vulgar and blasphemous. The boundaries of this work are drawn wide enough to include both of these expressions, and many others, within the general topic of the construction of motherhood in medieval Europe.

In the chapters that follow, which are separated chronologically but linked by common themes and questions, medieval motherhood is approached as a social-historical institution with attendant ideologies—systems of ideas that shape consciousness and validate social and religious systems.⁸ Medieval motherhood was constructed by persons whose primary ideology was Christianity: Christian stories and moral teaching shaped their imaginative boundaries, their sense of self and world, and their social, legal, and domestic arrangements. This was the case even for those who were illiterate and relatively “unchurched,” and to an extent also for those who were not Christians at all: Jewish communities within Europe, Muslims on the borders, and pagans in the remote interior countryside. Jews were profoundly affected by the dominant institutions and prevailing ideologies; Muslims came into commercial and intellectual and belligerent contact with Christians; and country people were gradually driven and persuaded into the fold by warriors, monks, and missionaries. From the vantage point of late twentieth-century pluralism, it is difficult to appreciate all the ways in which a religious system may dominate the public and private experience of persons within its sphere, unless we remember that “Christianity” included a near-monopoly of cultural expression, of education, and (at least indirectly) of political power.

In order to investigate medieval motherhood, then, we must look closely at Christianity in western Europe in the Middle Ages, a complex religious and cultural system with a unique set of stories, beliefs, and institutions inherited from the Mediterranean Christianity of the first centuries C.E. The interpretations of stories, formulations of beliefs, and institutions established in the first four hundred years were the building blocks of medieval Christianity, although every aspect was transformed in the new society of medieval Europe. Social historians frequently treat religious ideologies and institutions as epiphenomena, but Christianity was central to the formation of the social, political, intellectual, and psychological structures of the West, and medieval religious imagery and assumptions have not disappeared from our secular and pluralistic society. Modern people understand the legend of Pope Joan differently from those who encountered Boccaccio‘s version in the fourteenth century, but one need not be a medieval Christian to feel the story‘s power or appreciate its significance.

All religious systems develop norms for behavior and relationships, including family relationships, with explicit and implicit ideas and prescriptions concerning sexuality and parenthood, mothers and children. Interactions between the history of Christianity and the history of motherhood have been intense and complicated, perhaps in part because Christianity is a religion of embodiment—of Incarnation—whose god entered history as a human being, ate and drank with men and women on earth, was bom and died like them. Physicality or embodiment—birth and death—lay at the heart of the faith of those who accepted the bodily resurrection of fesus Christ. And physicality necessarily lies at the heart of constructions of motherhood in any society. Our wishes, fears, and fantasies about embodiment are inextricably linked to our experience of mothers and notions of maternity.

The history of motherhood also requires careful examination of the status and image of women in particular cultures. Although not all women are mothers, all mothers are women: gender arrangements play a crucial role in organizing the institution of motherhood and shaping its ideologies. Images of women in the Scriptures, the roles available to them in churches and communities, and the pronouncements on sex and gender of preachers and theologians had critical impact on the construction of medieval motherhood. The relationship of women to Christianity has never been simple, and it certainly was not simple in medieval times. The messages were loud and numerous, but not consistent. On the one hand, a woman might “be saved through bearing children, if she continues in faith and love and holiness, with modesty” (I Tim. 2:15); on the other, women were constantly reminded that death came into the world with Eve, “the mother of all living” (Gen. 3:20). Like modern stories, medieval stories are strikingly ambivalent about women‘s “nature,” and about motherhood. Twelfth-century tales of the Virgin‘s miracles present a mother who is powerful and good, dignified and merciful, while the legend of Pope Joan insists on the gross incompatibility of pregnancy and birth with beauty and holiness.

In any culture, the construction of motherhood carries the mixed messages of the experience of that culture with life and death, sex and gender. Such experience is not universal: the specific psychohistorical circumstances of each generation shape social arrangements and individual consciousness. Motherhood varies not only among families and individuals but according to time, place, race, class, and culture. Like the Christian church or the United States of America, it is a historical phenomenon subject to development and change.

Until quite recently, however, motherhood had no history; it was too thoroughly identified with the private sphere and with the “changeless” biological aspects of the human condition. Women‘s lives were organized and their capacities defined by their status as mothers, potential mothers, and non-mothers, but motherhood itself was not perceived as an institution shaped by culture and subject to history. Styles of child rearing and other elements of family life in nonindustrial societies outside the West were more accessible to cultural analysis, thanks to the anthropologists, but even there, historical development was ignored or lost in the ethnographic present. Furthermore, most anthropologists regarded fatherhood as a social construction, motherhood as “natural” (or biological). Not even practitioners of the new social history of the twentieth century thought to study motherhood as a specific institution related to the image and status of women and to the political, social, and religious variables of historical change.

Inspired by new questions about women and families, thinkers in the late twentieth century have begun to discover a variety of approaches to the vast, buried history of motherhood and its ramifications in society and culture.⁹ Searching for the roots and sources of our own family systems and ideologies, historians turned first to the recent past, and studies based on evidence from modern Europe and the United States have begun to appear in substantial numbers. Work in the field of family history has broadened the scope of women‘s history and vice versa; the interaction is extremely productive. We also enjoy the fruits of the brilliant school of the history of mentalités, whose works reflect appreciation of the historical aspects of such “timeless” phenomena as childhood, sexuality, and even death itself. In the meantime, scholars in the natural sciences and humanities are working with mothering and motherhood as critical principles in many fields; their work nourishes and is supported by historical studies.¹⁰

This book extends the historical study of motherhood into medieval Europe and examines its interactions with medieval Christianity. In the remainder of this introductory chapter, I look briefly at certain aspects of the legacy of early Christianity and at their implications for the construction of medieval motherhood. In some respects—for example, its subversion of the patriarchal household—Christianity was extraordinary among the religious systems of the ancient Near East. Furthermore, the experience of persecution and martyrdom in the early centuries shaped Christian communities in ways that affected the development of distinctive ideologies of motherhood and family life.

Chapter 2 addresses some of the physiological assumptions underlying learned and popular notions about mothers and motherhood in the Middle Ages. Ideas about women‘s bodies and reproduction, inherited from Greek science and learned through the practice of midwifery, were essential in the construction of beliefs about what mothers were. The third chapter focuses on the development of “spiritual motherhood” as a concept emerging out of monastic ideologies of the early Middle Ages and a reality in the lives of certain unusual women. Chapter 4 approaches medieval motherhood from a theological perspective: the cult of the Virgin and the Church‘s teachings about the mother of Christ are examined in relation to twelfth-century religion and romance. In the fifth chapter the religious and domestic experience of the female saints of the later Middle Ages, many of whom were wives and mothers, are studied against the background of social and religious change in that era. Chapter 6 carries the discussion up to the early modern era and the religious reformations of the sixteenth century, when family and household became centers of energy and organization in religion and society. The book is summarized and concluded in Chapter 7.

This work belongs to the history of ideas more than to social history, but wherever possible I have attempted to consider experience as well as ideology, and to look not only at what was preached about motherhood by “experts” but at the lives of women and children. When most of the written evidence pertains to the ideas of learned men or the experience of a few extraordinary women, the challenge always ...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Christian Motherhood: “Who Is My Mother?”
• 2. Physiological Motherhood: The Wandering Womb
• 3. Spiritual Motherhood: Extraordinary Women in the Early Middle Ages
• 4. Theological Motherhood: The Virgin Mother of God
• 5. “Mother of Love, Mother of Tears”: Holiness and Families in the Later Middle Ages
• 6. Motherhood Reformed: The Parson‘s Wife and Her Children
• 7. The Construction of Motherhood
• Works Cited
• Index