Attachment and God in Medieval England: Focusing on the Figure 9004500154, 9789004500150

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Attachment and God in Medieval England

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Religion and Psychology Editor-in-Chief Ralph W. Hood, Jr. (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, USA) Associate Editors Mohammad Khodayarifard (University of Tehran, Iran) Tomas Lindgren (Umeå Universitet, Sweden) Tatjana Schnell (Universität Innsbruck, Austria) Katarzyna Skrzypińska (University of Gdańsk, Poland) W. Paul Williamson (Henderson State University, Arkadelphia, USA)

Volumes published in this Brill Research Perspective are listed at brill.com/rpsys

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Attachment and God in Medieval England Focusing on the Figure By

Juliana Dresvina

leiden | boston

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Library Congress Control Number: 2021915922

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2772-2619 isbn 978-90-04-50015-0 (paperback) isbn 978-90-04-50016-7 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Juliana Dresvina. Published by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau Verlag and V&R Unipress. Koninklijke Brill nv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

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Contents Abbreviations vi Abstract 1 Keywords 1 Introduction 1 1 Attachment Theory and Its Application to Historical Material 4 1.1 Theoretical Context 4 1.1.1 Attachment Theory Overview 4 1.1.2 Metacultural Nature of Attachment 6 1.1.3 Attachment, Religiosity, and Anxiety: God as Attachment Figure 8 1.2 Historical Context 14 1.2.1 Principles of aai Discourse Analysis and the Historic Sources for Their Application 14 1.2.2 Medieval Childrearing Practices: Safety Not Guaranteed 17 1.2.3 Pervasiveness of the Scriptural Discourse: Religious ‘Pryming’ 24 2 Case Studies from Medieval England 29 2.1 Letters and Epistles 29 2.1.1 Early English Letters: Separation Anxiety and the Boundaries of the Early Medieval Emotional Etiquette 30 2.1.2 Coping with Separation and Loss: Men Writing to Women 35 2.1.3 The Friends of God: Anselm and Attachment in Clerical Correspondence 40 2.1.4 Romantic Attachment, Anxiety, and the Help of God (or Not) 48 2.1.5 Coda: From the Sublime to the Ridiculous 53 2.2 ‘Self-Narratives’ and Life-Writing 54 2.2.1 Gerald of Wales: ‘The Deeds He Himself Has Done’ 55 2.2.2 Religiosity for Reorganising: The Case of Margery Kempe 65 2.2.3 Julian of Norwich’s Universal Attachment Figure 72 Conclusions 80 Bibliography 83 Primary Sources 83 Secondary Literature 84

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Abbreviations aai bmk dmm drsg lc lfmb lt plp st TOI

Adult Attachment Interview The Book of Margery Kempe Dynamic-Maturational Model Gerald of Wales, De Rebus a Se Gestis Goscelin of St Bertin, Liber Confortatorius Lay Folks Mass Book ‘The Long Text’ (of Julian of Norwich’s Shewings) Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century ‘The Short Text’ (of Julian of Norwich’s Shewings) Gerald of Wales, The Topography of Ireland

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Attachment and God in Medieval England Focusing on the Figure

Juliana Dresvina

History Faculty, University of Oxford, UK [email protected]

Abstract This study applies attachment theory to examples of self-narratives (letters and proto-autobiographies) from medieval England, written in broad religious contexts. It examines whether God could appear as adequate attachment figure in times of high mortality and often inadequate childrearing practices, and whether the emphasis on God’s proximity benefited psychological reorganisation. The main method of enquiry is discourse analysis based on the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) coding.

Keywords Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) – Dynamic-Maturational Model (DMM) – attachment theory – medieval England – medieval life-writings – medieval selfnarratives – psychohistory – religiosity

…

To Yanik, who keeps teaching me about attachment

∵

Introduction

This book considers an application of attachment theory to pre-modern life-writing, exemplified by letters and proto-autobiographies originated in medieval Britain. Attachment theory, formulated by John Bowlby and tested by Mary Ainsworth in 1950s–70s, maintains that lasting emotional bonds  – attachments – between humans are essential for their survival. My main thesis

© Juliana Dresvina, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004500167_002

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is that attachment-wise medieval Western Christianity was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it was particularly appealing for people with anxious and disorganised attachment traits due to the unrealistic expectations and mixed messages contained in its core texts, which in turn had probably been created by people with anxious and disorganised attachment. On the other, the idea of the almighty, omniscient, and immortal God provided an adequate attachment figure in the times of high and unexpected mortality and often less than adequate childrearing practices. The emphasis on God’s love and proximity, characteristic of the affective piety of the later medieval period, appears to be particularly beneficial for psychological reorganisation. The main method of enquiry is discourse analysis based on the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) coding within the Dynamic-Maturational Model (DMM) of attachment theory, which I was trained for at the University of Roehampton. I do, however, attempt to approach my material first and foremost from Bowlby’s principles, using both current strands of attachment theory as two different lenses to consider my medieval sources. It is obviously impossible to use all of the coding techniques on historical material even if it implicitly addresses some of the questions of the semi-structural interview, since a written text allows no spontaneity or follow-up questions, nor it is possible to see displays of non-verbal affect. Yet the texts I examine, inadequate as they may seem to the twenty-first century psychologists, are the only available windows, fragmented and obscured, into the lives and mentalities of our ancestors, and some of these writings provide sufficient information to offer informed hypotheses on their attachment tendencies. This study is inevitably etiological rather than heuristic, and is the first example of an application of the attachment theory, which is itself a very young yet thriving discipline, to the past. Initially the Bowlby/Ainsworth model was conceived partly as an alternative to Freud’s, and my bringing it into the orbit of historians and literary scholars is an attempt to further diversify both fields. Given the overall objective criteria and methodology with which to analyse reflections of emotions and affective responses found in the past, this application can provide a path out of some of the circular discussions that have affected history of emotions. As many other theories, attachment is not a panacea and is best used as one of the lenses in considering the past sources; however, an awareness of attachment for the scholars of the past, and an awareness of the dominant attachment strategies of the past for the psychologists working in the field of attachment can enrich their understanding of the issues they focus on. In Peter Fonagy’s words, ‘the capacity to mentalize, that is, to understand ourselves and others in terms of mental states, which is largely

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acquired in the context of attachment relationships, may be more important than attachment per se’ (Fonagy et al. 2015, 580). A job of a historian, especially of a cultural and social one, is to make connections and thus is in many ways similar to that of a psychologist – even though many of my colleagues still treat psychology with caution and suspicion. More broadly, knowing history is as important to our psychological wellbeing as knowing basic principles of ‘hard science’: one of the main prerequisites for mental health is being able to make sense of events of our lives and of phenomena which surround us (Siegel 2011, 167–189), which is often impossible without knowing history, in both personal and general sense. The other aspect of mental health and ultimately happiness is the quality of our relationships, of the human connection which, given that we are social animals, was most probably true for the past as well. It is these connections and how they make sense that constitute the work of a historian of mentality, and attachment theory can be used as one of the tools for this exploration. This book’s title is a tribute to John Bowlby, the Darwin of attachment theory, who called one of the chapters of his seminal work Attachment and Loss (1969) ‘Focusing on a Figure’. It consists of two parts: the first is a discussion of attachment theory and its applicability to the study of mental states of the people of the past, especially their religiosity; the second offers a number of case studies deriving from medieval self-narratives originating from Britain – the period and the area I am acquainted with best. A lot more can and should be said on the topic within the confines of the material used, and even more work is required across cultures and periods to join the dots, but here I am restricted by the requirements of an extended essay. Where possible, I try to employ a broader European context to signpost avenues for further enquiry. I would like to thank a number of my friends, colleagues, and family, who helped at various stages of putting this book together: Clark Baim, Victoria Blud, Pehr Granqvist, Gabor Gyorkei, Paul Halsall, Antonina Kalinina, Godelinde Perk, Natasha Romanova, Ilya Sverdlov, and Katharine Sykes. The whole venture would have been impossible without the series editor Ralph Hood, who invited me to write on this topic and encouraged me every step of the way, as well as my dear medievalist friends Maria Artamonova and Daniel Gerrard, who ploughed through my rocky drafts to sow seeds of encouragement and common sense. Some sections of this book appeared as ‘Attachment Theory for Historians of Medieval Religion’ in Cognitive Sciences and Medieval Studies (University of Wales Press, 2020), and as ‘Darwin’s Cathedral, Bowlby’s Cloister’ in Irish Theological Quarterly (2020), and I am grateful to the respective publishers for their permission to reuse that material. Finally, I researched and

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wrote at least half of this libellus on my smartphone while minding my kids in a park, so an extra thank you is due to them for allowing mommy to stare at her screen sometimes and type frantically, muttering to herself in strange tongues. 1

Attachment Theory and Its Application to Historical Material

1.1 Theoretical Context 1.1.1 Attachment Theory Overview Attachment is an evolutionary mechanism of proximity-seeking observable in humans, non-human primates, and some other species, which helps the offspring to survive by attaching themselves to a stronger and more experienced attachment figure – a primary caregiver (usually a parent). Given that human offspring need the most care and take the longest to achieve even a limited degree of independence – the price we pay for our complex brain – attachment remains active in our psychological design from cradle to grave, beginning with parents or primary caregivers and children, and then applied, concentrically, to romantic partners, friends or any object that can be perceived as relatable, such as authorities, country, or God. Attachment is usually activated in a situation of a perceived threat (either an immediate threat due to danger, or a threat of involuntary separation) and of the resulting distress, when a person requires protection and comfort. Predictably, its activation is usually less intense as people mature, and less input is required from the attachment figure to help the person achieve a sense of felt security: for example, where a child needs a long cuddle, a brief phone call may suffice for an adult. Yet dramatic ‘life events’ such as divorce, serious illness, massive social change, or death of loved ones will still cause high activation of the attachment system, and proximity of an attachment figure is the most effective way for affect regulation (i.e. a person’s ability to modulate their emotional state in order to adapt to the demands of their environment) in such situations (Cassidy and Shaver 2016). Although the attachment mechanisms are universal, they are shaped by the lived experiences into two broadly conceived types, secure and insecure, the latter one often being prefixed as ‘anxious’. Securely attached children are ready to explore the world if they know they have a secure base, their primary caregiver(s), to turn to in times of need and achieve a psychological state of ‘felt security’; securely attached people tend to have mostly positive model of self and others. This is perceived as the most adaptive attachment style, which enables individuals to attune their responses to changing circumstances throughout the course of their life and make sense of, or integrate, their life experiences without having to distort the reality too much to fit their worldview

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and internal working models. The insecure attachment style is often divided into three subcategories: one, anxious-avoidant (A type in DMM), or dismissing in adults, which is mostly cognitively organised at the expense of affect (omitting or denying negative affect, or replacing it with false positive one); another, anxious-ambivalent/resistant (C type in DMM), or preoccupied in adults, which is predominantly affectively organised and demonstrates either omitted or false cognition; and the third, disorganised (AC type), displaying both cognition and affect but no integration, as opposed to the secure type (Cassidy and Shaver 2016; Crittenden and Landini 2011). The concept of disorganisation is understood somewhat differently in the two models of attachment theory: the DMM often sees disorganisation in connection with a complex psychological trauma and/or unresolved loss, while what is called disorganisation in the ABC+D model (Granqvist at al., 2017) is often coded as combinations of A and C strategies in DMM. Insecure models are characterised by broadly negative models of either self, or others, or both. Currently there are two parallel systems of classifying attachment available: one known as ABC+D, based on the work done by Mary Main and her colleagues in the late 1980s and 1990s, and the other as DMM, suggested and tested by Main’s former student Patricia Crittenden and her school in the 1990s and 2000s. The latter is in many ways a modification and development of the former, especially when it comes to adult attachment; it expands the classification of ABC+D, does not allow for ‘cannot classify’ conclusions, and divides insecure strategies A and C into sixteen sub-strategies (A1–8 and C1–8), with the information transformation and the risk of psychopathy increasing with the subscript number (i.e. from distorted cognition and omitted negative affect of A1–2 to delusional affect of A7–8; from distorted negative affect and omitted cognition of C1–2 to delusional cognition of C7–8). Such degree of granularity, with sixteen subcategories, also means that the DMM is harder to navigate and become reliable in. The classification among adults is not about good/bad, normal/abnormal attachment, but about the degree of integration of one’s life experiences, especially those connected with danger, and subsequent psychological comfort and stability derived from these synthesised meanings. In the DMM model especially, normative attachment strategies are those of B-types and the lower subscripts (1–4) of As and Cs, whereas the higher As and Cs (5–8) are often found among the clinical sample of the population. So in its basic meaning, attachment is an evolutionarily-determined process of seeking proximity to an identified attachment figure in situations of perceived distress or alarm, for the purpose of survival. The first to study attachment in humans from this perspective was British psychiatrist and psychologist John Bowlby; his ideas were later developed by American-Canadian

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developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth from the 1950s to the 1990s. Bowlby suggested that attachment behaviours such as proximity-seeking were adaptive responses to separation from a much stronger primary attachment figure that provides care and protection. Unlike many other organisms, who are able to sustain themselves independently within hours of birth, human children take longest to gain a degree of independence, so whose who were able to maintain proximity to an attachment figure via attachment behaviours would receive the necessary care and make it to maturity. Thus a motivational system gradually evolved through natural selection (in the behaviour of humans and many other advanced animals) to regulate proximity to an attachment figure. From the late 1980s, attachment research was extended to adults, predominantly to romantic partners. It was suggested that attachment-related affect-regulating strategies are active from cradle to grave, and that acquired attachment styles, like many other early social experiences, produce relatively lasting differences in relationship patterns in adulthood (Feenley 2016, 435–6). Thanks to neuroplasticity, it does not mean that in their later relationships people who displayed insecure attachment styles as children cannot modify their responses and demonstrate secure attachment patterns (or vice versa), but such scenarios would require some significant change of circumstances as well as consistent effort from the persons themselves. In other words, the attachment model formed in one’s childhood may predict but does not necessarily determine one’s attachment style as an adult. 1.1.2 Metacultural Nature of Attachment At this point, it is worth asking if attachment is innate, rather than a constructed, historical concept. So far attachment theory has predominantly been tested in Western society where it is usually expected that children will have a primary caregiver. Yet it was in Uganda in 1954–5 that Mary Ainsworth came up with her tripartite attachment system while observing infant-mother dyads, later replicating the results of her experiments in Baltimore (Ainsworth 1967; Ainsworth and Wittig 1969). Bowlby (1982) also emphasised the universality of attachment, as it can also be observed in non-human primates and other species (although not all the ideas stemming from the studies of other species are relevant to the studies of humans). It is therefore possible to apply attachment theory to human societies that are distant from Western culture both geographically and historically. Indeed, since the beginning of attachment research, the validity of the theory has been demonstrated by multiple studies taking in a wide range of areas and diverse groups, and there is no reason to believe that in the past such attachment categories were drastically different (the best testimony to the portability and tenacity of the theory is perhaps Cassidy and

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Shaver’s Handbook of Attachment, a hefty volume which gets updated and reissued every few years). This universality, however, does not make attachment theory insensitive to cross-cultural differences – it only maintains that ‘attachment bonds will be established in any known culture, regardless childrearing arrangements and family constellations’ (van IJzendoorn and Sagi-Schwartz 2008, 881). This is because attachment theory focuses on how individuals adapt to danger through self-protective strategies: danger is perceived differently in different cultures and circumstances, yet the certain identifiable range of adaptive behaviours is observable in all of them. Given the youth of attachment studies as a discipline, most of the data available on attachment distribution comes from the West, and especially from North America. The numbers usually suggest that between 60 and 70 per cent of people are securely attached, with roughly equal distribution between the remaining ‘insecure’ subcategories (the summary of the first ten thousand AAIs quotes ‘23% dismissing, 58% secure, 19% preoccupied attachment representations, and 18% additionally coded for unresolved loss or other trauma’, Bakermans-Kranenburg and van IJzendoorn 2009, 223). While attachment theory describes a global adaptive behaviour, and can accommodate culture-specific influences, at this stage the studies of non-Western attachment are, unfortunately, few and far between. So far, small-sample studies in various parts of the globe suggest that the norm is consistent throughout the world, with the range of between 56 and 72 per cent of securely attached children recorded for most of the studies (van IJzendoorn and Sagi-Schwartz 2008, 889). Interestingly, intra-cultural variation is rather large compared with cross-cultural variation: for example, some Japanese samples show a higher rate of anxious attachment and a lower rate of avoidant attachment compared to global norms, while other Japanese samples demonstrate a lower rate of both (Agishtein and Brumbaugh 2013). It is therefore very probable that the attachment style distribution in the population of the past, especially the distant past, was very different from the modern picture, but that the actual styles – secure (B), dismissive (A), preoccupied (C), and disorganised (AC) – remained the same. If attachment theory is indeed portable across cultures, it may well be portable across time and across types of attachment figures. Indeed, since its inception in the middle of the twentieth century, attachment theory has rapidly become one of the most heavily researched and widely used conceptual frameworks in modern psychology (Mikulincer and Shaver 2018, 4). From describing types of interpersonal relationships between parents or primary caregivers and children, it has extended concentrically to romantic partners, friends or any object that can be perceived as stronger, wiser, personal, and

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relatable. Applying attachment theory to the study of the past is a step in the same direction. One of the main tools of attachment theory, Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), gauges how a person cognitively and affectively processes the events of their life, especially those connected with danger and subsequent protection and comfort, since information processing (the way we interpret life events) underlies all behaviour. While we cannot subject the people of the past to a study involving spontaneous reactions in a semi-structured interaction, or map the AAI questions about attachment figures, dangerous episodes, loss, and reflections on one’s early experiences directly onto surviving examples of pre-modern discourse, we can still apply its main interpretive technique – discourse analysis – to a variety of pre-modern examples of life-writing. In my case, coaching in pre-modern literary history and rhetoric provides awareness of the expectations of the genre, and filters the information presented in the sources. At the same time, psychological training in AAI administering and coding allows me to identify the elements of discourse analysis necessary for hypothesising about pre-modern speakers’ attachment strategy. Such elements include cognitive or affective organisation, use of flat or animated images in memories, self-reliance, reductionist blaming thought (reducing a person to a problem), triangulation (siding with one person to belittle another), and whether the discourse reflects the person’s own perspective or that of others (see section 1.2.1 below). The universality of attachment theory should make it valid for any period in the development of human society, with the inevitable temporal and cultural variations. The examination of the forms and types of protective strategies that people of the past favoured in response to situations of danger and distress, as well as, to a lesser extent, procreation and sexual impulses, will contribute to our understanding of our history as a species, not least because these are the key elements for adaptation and survival which define the main vector of the current development in attachment theory’s practical application by clinicians, social services, and in forensics (Crittenden and Landini 2011, 328–9, 373). Making sense of the significant events of one’s life is essential for human functionality, and attachment theory often takes the ‘strengths’ approach to maladaptive behaviour, emphasising its functionality rather than seeing it as a deficit – ‘if it protects you, it is a right strategy’. It may well be that what the clinicians and social workers of today would classify as a dysfunction was a normative developmental trajectory and a product of social conditioning in some periods of the human past. 1.1.3 Attachment, Religiosity, and Anxiety: God as Attachment Figure Attachment distributions vary not only internationally, but by other cultural variables that shape interpersonal behaviours, particularly religion. The Juliana Dresvina - 978-90-04-50016-7 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 05:28:36PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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relationship between religiosity and attachment began as a subject of academic enquiry in the 1990 when Kirkpatrick and Shaver proposed that the relationship with God can be viewed as another attachment bond (Kirkpatrick and Shaver 1992). Since then, there has appeared a robust body of research on the topic, most recently summarised by Pehr Granqvist, one of the leading experts in the study of the connections between attachment and religiosity (Granqvist 2020). Building on the conclusions of Bowlby and Ainsworth, Granqvist lines up the constituents of an attachment relationship, defined as an affectional bond between two individuals, in which the attached party seeks proximity (physical, through attachment surrogates such as emotionally charged objects, or internalised) to her/his attachment figure to obtain felt security and experiences separation anxiety if faced or threatened with involuntary separation (by crying, protesting, or searching for the attachment figure); permanent loss of an attachment figure causes grief and sets off a mourning process, with the protest-despair-detachment trajectory. The attachment figure is perceived by the attached person as stronger and wiser than the self (although less so in a romantic attachment situation) and is used as a safe haven in distress and a secure base in exploration. His conclusion is, once again, that within the framework of attachment theory, God qualifies as a noncorporeal attachment figure (Granqvist 2020, 44–45). However, not all faiths are equal in this regard. Monotheistic religions, and Christianity in particular, provide a more convenient framework for attachment enactment since the personal and anthropomorphic features of the deity facilitate attachment formation. The research on variation in attachment style even within various Christian denominations is still limited, and within other religions virtually non-existent, but we can already see how there may be a strong correlation between the relationship with God and general adult attachment, suggesting that adherents of religions with a more punitive view of God (e.g. Orthodox Christian or some Protestant denominations) may be less securely attached. Additionally, Christian denominations tend to vary in their doctrine of inherent human sinfulness and the ease with which its adepts can commit grave sins – as well as the nature of such sins. Both of these characteristics (the degree of innate human sinfulness and the range of mortal sins) have been associated with mistrust in others, and could reasonably be associated with higher attachment avoidance. Furthermore, divine expectation of perfection, spelled out in the doctrine, has been linked to general anxiety, and may also relate to higher attachment anxiety in particular. Research on parenting practices in religious communities also suggests that ‘there may be denominational differences in childhood disciplinary measures and in positive parenting, two factors that are thought to influence the development of attachment’ (Agishtein and Brumbaugh Juliana Dresvina - 978-90-04-50016-7 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 05:28:36PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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2013). Given the portability of attachment theory, similar observations can be anticipated when looking at religiosity of the past, as we will see in the following sections. Since attachment is an innate, rather than a constructed concept, it is indeed logical to seek its reflection in the past. Higher degrees of daily danger, culturally normalised punishments and child separation, as well as fewer opportunities for immediate protection and comfort from attachment figures must have increased the number of insecurely attached individuals in the Middle Ages to over half of the population, instead of the modern roughly 60% secure and 40% insecure in the West. As insecure attachment is firmly linked to higher anxiety, these historical circumstances in turn shaped appropriate cultural responses, normalising anxiety and weaving it into the cultural fabric together with the much-needed means for soothing, for example, as seen in the past religiosity, especially the affective piety of the late Middle Ages. As Pehr Granqvist puts it, ‘an anxious … attachment may find expression in a deeply emotional, all-consuming, “clingy” relationship to God (religious hyperactivation/maximization)’ (Granqvist 2020, 139). If, as attachment theory suggests, we are hardwired by evolution to seek proximity even in an environment where attachment figures are in short supply, then, in one theologian’s words, ‘the idea of God is the idea of an absolutely adequate attachment figure’ (Kaufman 1981, 67). Lee Kirkpatrick naturally extends this idea to a broader circle of the Blessed Virgin Mary, various other saints, guardian angels, or other supernatural beings (Kirkpatrick 2005, 52). Indeed, if anxiety is a combination of high arousal and uncertainty (Barrett 2017, 212), then from the point of view of attachment the chronic activation of attachment systems due to uncertainty concerning the attachment figure’s availability is part and parcel of anxiety. At a very basic level, the figure of the ever-existing God did not only promote values that were beneficial for society’s survival, such as charity and cooperation, but also provided people with an idea of stability in an unstable environment, thus contributing to general mental and emotional well-being. Theoretically, ‘an attachment figure who is simultaneously omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent – all very impressive qualities that are likely to make other attachment figures green with envy – can provide the most secure of secure bases’, and there is, indeed, multiple evidence of the idea of God functioning as a secure base, often for securely attached individuals (Granqvist 2020, 59). However, there is another, perhaps larger body of cross-cultural evidence suggesting that there are higher numbers of people who are likely to convert or turn to religion in need of comfort and protection (i.e. secure base), for example after a breakup of a romantic relationship, among those

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displaying traits of insecure attachment (Granqvist 2020, 142–3). One of the possible interpretations of these contemporary findings may be that for people who assess themselves as unworthy of love and care (i.e., who possess a negative model of self) from other humans and who are high in anxiety (i.e., whose attachment systems are hyperactivated), turning to God may be possible because of God’s unique characteristics as compared with human relationship partners. Turning to God is comparatively free of risk because a noncorporeal figure’s responsiveness can always be imagined as benevolent and need never be experienced as disconfirmed. Also, in many religious belief systems, God’s love is unconditional, so one need not be “worthy” of love to receive it […]. Alternatively, God’s love may be available through particular courses of action (e.g., good deeds, prayer), which can allow an otherwise “unworthy” person to “earn” God’s love and forgiveness when it is most needed. Granqvist 2020, 169

This conclusion may work for the more recent, significantly more ‘vegetarian’ theology, but does not always sit comfortably with the pre-modern views of the supreme deity, who was often perceived as the opposite of ‘comparatively free of risk’ and ‘benevolent’. To be more precise, the medieval view of God’s benevolence may well have been filtered through many period- and culture-specific internalised ideas, e.g. the idea of ‘good parenting’. As outlined below in 1.2.2, child-beating and culturally-normalised early separation was everyday pre-modern reality, and we know from recent psychological studies that in cultures with harsh and rejecting parenting practices, the representation of God or gods tends to be wrathful and punitive, both of which factors influence the development of attachment styles towards anxiety and insecurity (Granqvist 2020, 139–140; Agishtein and Brumbaugh 2013). But even such a God, frightening and unpredictable as He sometimes appears, would help believers regulate distress when no other adequate attachment figures were available due to either parental insensitivity, loss, or lack/ impossibility of human romantic attachment. At this point it is fair to hypothesise that medieval Christianity tended to encourage negative models of self and a positive (although inconsistently so) model of God, which would fit well with the overall insecure attachment worldview. Additional rationale for this hypothesis comes from the importance of material objects in the late-medieval and early-modern Catholicism, such as rosaries, books of hours, portable crucifixes, religious paintings, statues,

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etc. (Ryan 2019). There is now some compelling experimental evidence that adults with high attachment anxiety ‘are disproportionately likely to use material objects, such as their smartphones, to regulate separation- and rejection-related threats’ and ‘endow their treasured material objects with substitute attachment functions’ (Granqvist 2020, 160). Although a smartphone filled with information specific to the individual is different to a less easily customizable religious artefact, such as a book of hours or a rosary, both can be relied on for affect regulation. Furthermore, the latter items have the advantage of representing aspects of faith, unlike smartphones and other non-religious material objects. One of the main reasons for anxiety now and in the past was death. As many psychologists working within the Terror Management Theory believe, death is people’s most profound source of concern, driven by our self-preservation instinct. Fear of death often goes hand in hand with religiosity, and although a number of studies demonstrate that death anxiety tends to motivate religious belief (as per the ‘no atheists in foxholes’ adage), there is evidence suggesting that such effect may depend on people’s social and cultural conditioning: the danger and risk of death increase afterlife belief in those who are already inclined toward such beliefs (which would certainly be the case in medieval Europe) (Jong and Halberstadt 2016, 139–40). Besides, it is yet unclear what positive associations between religiosity and anxiety, reported in a number of cross-sectional studies, really mean  – does religion cause people to become more anxious, or does anxiety push people to become more religious? As another popular saying has it, God comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comforted, but in some circumstances God may well afflict the afflicted, particularly those already prone to depression or anxiety. While the jury is still out on whether religious beliefs and observances can definitely eliminate or at least alleviate thanatophobia, there is a body of evidence suggesting that religious involvement may ‘exacerbate anxiety in certain individuals, and anxious individuals may sometimes distort or manipulate religion to serve neurotic ends’ (Koenig 2009, 128–9). Indeed, the Bible can be a profoundly problematic and confusing book, conveying conflicting messages, and a lot of ink was spilt – in the Middle Ages in particular, hence here I limit myself to the Western Christian tradition – to make sense of it, especially when viewed as a timeless collection of God’s truths and not a heterogeneous compilation. Just trying to reconcile its conflicting messages can cause anxiety; add to it the vast complex of liturgical and patristic material (Augustine alone can drive one mad), and one is in for volumes and centuries of mental equilibristics – and mental issues. The core tenet of Christianity, that God loved humankind so much that He sent to a

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horrible and undeserved death His only son, the innocent, whose suffering the faithful are called to imitate and enjoy (John 3:16, 1 Pet. 2:21, 4:12–13), is a paradox, which not every human mind is capable of integrating successfully, without falling either side of it or finding oneself in a bind. Furthermore, apart from endorsing such phenomena as slavery and misogyny, the Scriptures abound in utterances which potentially encourage self-hate and self-harm: the skoptsy, a Russian sect of religious castrati, apparently active from the late Middle Ages until its official ban in 1929, is an extreme but by no means a unique example. From the perspective of cultural psychiatry, the expectations outlined in Judaism or Christianity are impossible to fulfil consistently by the human beings who are intrinsically imperfect; not only their actions but even thoughts and fantasies may be sinful. To control the behaviour of its adepts both religions partially rely on a guilty conscience, often experienced as something external and separate to the believer. Undesirable, sinful acts are condemned by the conscience and result in ‘anxiety, guilt, and lowered self-esteem’ in general. More specifically, ‘dythymic persons experience their guilt by feelings of inferiority, depression, and worthlessness, while obsessive-compulsive persons experience their guilt by attempting to deny and to magically counteract it through their symptomatic rituals that, like a religious service, must be performed flawlessly. People whose consciences are unbearably harsh may develop a psychotic depression with suicidality and come to regard themselves as truly great sinners who are condemned to hell’ (Favazza 2009, 36). Nevertheless, many recent studies suggest that the benefits of religion are routinely underemphasised, and conclude that religious practice and belief ‘may assist individuals suffering with anxiety’ and that religious therapies ‘appear to improve anxiety disorder symptoms to a degree that is equal to or greater than traditional secular therapies’ (Stewart et al. 2019). A number of clinical studies looking into the General Anxiety Disorder treatment have indeed found that, for example, subjects with high religiosity reported significantly fewer phobia symptoms, and, although it is harder to tell if OCD impacts religiosity or vice versa, it is clear that observing religious rituals help alleviating anxiety (but missing them may increase it) (Koenig, 2009, 133, 135). A recent review of thirty-two studies exploring the influence of religion upon anxiety reported that twenty-six of them noted that ‘a positive relationship with God reduced anxiety’, three ‘showed that a negative relationship with God produced worsening anxiety’, while a further three found ‘no relationship effects on anxiety’ (Stewart et al. 2019). It is significant that these conclusions are formulated in relational terms, that is in terms of attachment. This suggests that a perceived relationship with a divine entity may help in coping with

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attachment anxiety/ insecurity – a hypothesis about to be tested on medieval material. Historical Context Principles of AAI Discourse Analysis and the Historic Sources for Their Application Since my main tool for examining medieval texts pertaining to attachment is discourse analysis, it is necessary to elaborate on its basic principles. There are a number of constructs used in discourse analysis while coding and classifying AAIs. As I was trained in the DMM paradigm, I rely on its categories of discourse analysis discussed in detail in Crittenden and Landini 2011, 70–111, which I am about to summarise. I do however try to bestride the differences between the two branches of attachment theory and first approach my case material from the normative constituents of attachment theory, outlined by Bowlby. Sometimes, where the sources allow, I admittedly attempt to gather some diagnostic evidence associated with individual differences in attachment quality, to allow for secure vs insecure considerations or even play with some DMM-informed sub-categories. The first thing to consider is the history of life events and experiences, the most important of which is the person’s reaction to danger and subsequent psychological organising around it. Danger can include wars, disasters, serious illness, unavailability of primary caregivers, long and early separation, violence and abuse, intentional threats, and so on. Not all dangerous events lead to development of insecure attachment strategies – if comfort and protection were available, the effects of dangerous events could have been minimised; however, the greater exposure to danger generally results in higher deviation from the secure attachment. Other events which are likely to adversely affect attachment security are: – rejection (often associated with type A strategies); – involvement (when parents or caregivers compete with children for a role of a child, requiring care, attention, and comfort; draw the child in a relationship against the other parent/carer, i.e. triangulation; or treat the child as a substitute romantic partner i.e. spousification – all these cause anxiety, emotional confusion, and the blurring of boundaries, which are likely to result in a C strategy); – role reversal (when the child is forced to function as a parent to his/her childlike parents while the parents retain their role in hierarchy, leading the child to form a compulsive caregiving strategy); – neglect (potential for A strategy, but physical neglect due to poverty is less harmful than when carers fail to identify the child’s need of protection and care); 1.2 1.2.1

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– excessively high performance demand (also contributes to developing an A strategy); – deception (deliberately misleading children; promising reward to elicit desirable behaviour but punishing instead; making a child comfortable and then attacking, physically or psychologically  – all these often result, especially combined with danger, in high-numbered C strategies and later psychopathologies), – sex (references to sex are significant when they intrude into discussions of unrelated topics and become a theme; fixation on sex or sexualizing non-sexual topics are linked to anxiety and higher-numbered insecure strategies like A5 or C6). The second category to note for AAI discourse analysis is memory systems. Procedural memory is less straightforward to assess in a written text because this system includes nonverbal affect and speech dysfluence (pauses, stammering, slips in grammar etc.). However, many of its components are still traceable in medieval sources, such as whose perspective the speaker is using (those with a B-type strategy, while telling a story from their perspective, include the perspective of others; A-types favour others’ perspective, while C type are usually firmly in their own), or the relationship with the audience (balanced discourse in the speakers using a B strategy, distancing in the A, or involving of the C). A-strategy speakers of DMM’s even subscripts (A2, 4, and 6) tend to comply with or even try to anticipate the needs, demands, and judgments of their interlocutor, while the odd subscripts (A 1, 3, and 5) cut off or withhold the information they do not want to discuss. C-type discourse tends to confuse temporal order, places or people, and seeks to solicit agreement and support from the speaker’s audience, or even complicity with it; in some extreme cases, failure (real or perceived) of their interlocutors to comply and ally themselves with the speaker who is using a C strategy can lead to aggression. Imaged memory assesses the quality of images used in the discourse. Balanced speakers usually employ lively, contextually appropriate imagery, while A-types either avoid images, or provide them as unconnected to the self and attachment figures, e.g. images of places instead of people. Users of C strategies often employ many overwhelming images, which sometimes appear decontextualised. Semantic memory pertains to the general knowledge about how the world functions and in AAIs is often expressed in discussions of causation and self-responsibility. B-speakers employ if/then contingencies and can tell the difference between temporal order, causation, and responsibility. Speakers with A strategies often produce unqualified semantic statements, general and without immediate relevance to self, and can confuse temporal order with causation and responsibility (e.g. ‘an attachment figure caused a problem [God allowed the plague], but he/she cannot be responsible [because Juliana Dresvina - 978-90-04-50016-7 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 05:28:36PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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God is good], so if I behaved differently [never ever sinned in anything] I could prevent it, so I am responsible for the problem’). C strategy speakers, on the contrary, often avoid semantic statements or make them conflicting, osculating in their assessment, and find others more responsible than themselves, employ reductionist blaming thought (equating a person with a problem), seek revenge, or want to be rescued. Connotative language, although not strictly speaking a memory system, often gets included as it represents a verbalised form of the imaged memory. Speakers using a type B strategy are able to combine intellectual, cognitive discourse, aimed at conveying actions and providing analysis with evocative, affective narration to generate feelings in their audience, while type A favour the former and type C the latter. In the same way, in episodic memory balanced speakers combine cognitive (temporal order, beginning and end of an event, causes and effects) with affective information (images, statements of feelings). An A-strategy discourse tends to cut episodes off to avoid referring to unpleasant outcomes or negative information about attachment figures, or tell them from others’ perspective, while a C-strategy speakers are usually happy to share emotionally rousing episodes but are more concerned with cutting straight to the affective climax rather than analysing what happened and why. Finally, reflective integration is the process of bringing together the data from all memory systems to note discrepancies, correct the information which was transformed, and generate new interpretations of the past experiences while reflecting on one’s thinking (metacognition). Integration is typical of B strategy discourse; both A and C-strategy speakers usually fail to notice the incongruity in the information they present, or chose it ignore it not to disrupt their strategy. An A-type discourse tends to replace integration with platitudes, while C employs borrowed conclusions and psychobabble which describes rather than explains. Based on this understanding, AAI coders identify certain discourse markers, or characteristics, which suggest that there is a transformation of the information related in the life-narrative and/or discrepancies between memory systems (i.e. ‘parent was always good’ in semantic memory but an example of the parent’s abusive behaviour in the episodic memory). Their examples for type B discourse can be: awareness of inconsistency; reflective functioning; awareness of change in thinking over time; awareness of others’ perspective; shared and reciprocal responsibility; acceptance of imperfection; awareness of complex causation or mixed feelings; appropriate affect; fresh and integrated images; complete episodes; credible evidence; metacognition. Examples of markers for type A discourse are: idealizing/exonerating attachment figures; normalizing or minimizing negative treatment or affect; dismissing of self; distancing; cutting off or blocking information; making hypothetical Juliana Dresvina - 978-90-04-50016-7 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 05:28:36PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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statements, unsupported by episodes; gratuitous denial of negative attributions; false positive affect; self-blame and self-responsibility; others’ perspective; misattribution of intent; omitted, displaced or unconnected images; artificial language; omitted integration; platitudes, failed or inconclusive metacognitions. Examples of markers for type C discourse include: passive semantic thought (i.e. no conclusion); evaluative oscillations; confusion, losing track of topic, confusion of self and attachment figure; run-on-sentences; involving speech; intrusion of irrelevant information; complaints and blame of other; denial of responsibility; mock/gotcha humour; parrying; intense images (of anger, fear, desire for comfort etc.); evocative language; misattribution of causality; derogation and dismissal; reductionist blaming thought; triangulation; false cognition; pseudo-reflections. In the rest of the book, these principles of discourse analysis will be applied to a number of sources originating from medieval Britain to see how they reflect attachment strategies and use religion to frame, support, or change them. The sources fall into two main categories: examples of liturgical and para-liturgical discourse which were likely to have been internalised through regular, often daily, use: popular prayers, quotations from the Scriptures, liturgical verses, selected psalms. A lot of this material is conveniently collected in the late Middle English Prymer (Littlehales 1891–1892, hereafter referred to as Prymer). Such collections were not entirely uniform but often contained the ABC, calendar, key prayers, the ten commandments, and main psalms (Acker 2003, Martin 1981). The other is a number of attachment strategy expressions preserved in letters of historic individuals from England across the Middle Ages as well as in examples of life-writings, such as Julian of Norwich’s Shewings, Margery Kempe’s spiritual (auto)biography, and Gerald of Wales’ De Rebus a Se Gestis. Of course one cannot expect to see a similar degree of subjectivity present in many modern writings in those genres, and one may instead be confronted with their stereotypes, topoi, adherence to a contemporary cultural idiom in both self-modelling and in scribal filtration. That is what Sarah McNamer called ‘the problem of literariness’, yet she accepts that ‘literary texts have always served – some kinds and genres more overtly than others, and in some cultures more overtly than in others – as affective scripts, capable of generating complex emotional effects in those who engage with them’ (McNamer 2015, 1436). For our purposes, even if they do not directly respond to attachment, one can still find reflections of it in the contexts dealing with presentation and expression of interpersonal relationships. 1.2.2 Medieval Childrearing Practices: Safety Not Guaranteed Before diving into the specific texts, it is necessary to consider, in line with the history of life events and experiences category, what it was like to be a child Juliana Dresvina - 978-90-04-50016-7 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 05:28:36PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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in the Middle Ages, because information about childhood is usually underrepresented in pre-modern sources. These are often fragmentary and come from upper- and mercantile classes, becoming more abundant towards the late medieval period. Surveying medieval childrearing practices in order to hypothesise the attachment styles they likely encouraged is generally not for the fainthearted. Every historic period preserves horror stories about the treatment of children, often related with habitual nonchalance. Being alive before vaccination and anaesthetics was no fun, and even less so for children; medieval childhood has ‘danger’ written all over it. Even if one is sceptical of early forays into psychohistory and sees some of the conclusions of Lloyd DeMause (its leading theorist) as over-claims, his volume The History of Childhood  – subtitled The Untold Story of Child Abuse (DeMause 1991) in the second edition – is a powerful read. More recently, the opening titles of the ‘Childhood of the Past’ monograph series tellingly feature Childhood and Violence in the Western Tradition (Brockliss and Montgomery 2010) and The Dark Side of Childhood in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Mustakallio and Laes 2011). To start with, expositio, or child exposure or abandonment, was a familiar practice in Antiquity, and one that never waned throughout the Middle Ages, despite some historians’ claims for the ‘civilising’ effect of Christianity. Pre-modern literature, from the legend of Romulus and Remus to numerous heroes of romance, portray a number of ‘happy endings’ in which abandoned children are rescued, reclaimed, or achieve greatness. These, however, are little more than wishful thinking. To quote a recent study, ‘[m]ost exposed infants died before they were rescued and most who were rescued were enslaved and never reclaimed, just as children in foundling hospitals usually died of starvation and neglect, despite a complex wet-nursing system’ (Evans Grubbs in Mustakallio and Laes 2011, 32). Margery Kempe, a self-made devout English woman of the fifteenth century, reports that her own confessor suspected her of bearing and abandoning a child while on her first overseas pilgrimage; I will return in detail to Margery’s experiences in the latter part of this book. Gossip and slander aside, one wonders if someone who knew Margery so well had particular reasons (social or personal) to think that an emphatically Christian, married member of his town’s elite could have done such a thing and whether, more generally, this indicates that the practice of child abandonment was still thought of as a ‘standard option’ in fifteenth-century England (BMK I: 43). Contrary to Philippe Ariès’s much-cited and long-criticised claim that ‘in medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist’ (Ariès 1962, 125), the cate­ gory of childhood was certainly part of the people’s awareness, although less clear-cut than the modern one and very much a response to socio-economic pres­ sures and one which varied over time or region. Thus from a legal perspective a

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man in his twenties who was still serving his apprenticeship could be called a boy, due to his subordinate status, while the need to legitimise a dynastic alliance or secure a property transfer might mean a child was married off before even reaching puberty (a good overview of the recent scholarship on medieval childhood is by Pigg in Classen 2015, 149–58). The seven ages of man, well known from Jacques’s soliloquy in As You Like It (Act 2, Scene VII) and numerous late-medieval and Renaissance sources, defined infancy (infantia) as the first seven years of one’s life, with childhood (pueritia), exemplified by the schoolboy, continuing from age seven to age fourteen, the start of adolescentia. In the Middle Ages, childhood was often a time of separation from the primary figures of attachment even if the parents were alive, with children being sent away to be educated (including boarding schools) or to become servants, or offered as child oblates to a monastery. The oblation practice was relatively widespread in the early medieval period and became less so as the Middle Ages wore on. It was sanctified by the popular stories of the Virgin Mary having been given up to be raised in the Temple at the age of three and implied, at least on the Continent, a total separation: parents were not allowed to visit their offspring if he or she fell ill, or to bury their child who died in the monastery, although the English sources suggest that the rules were relaxed at least on some occasions (Crawford 1999, 137). The necessity of such restrictions may point to at least some parents attempting to visit their children for whatever reasons after entrusting them to God. More standard separation from the primary caregivers occurred when a child was married off to secure an inheritance or forge a dynastic alliance. The Chaucer/de la Pole marital patterns are a testimony to this. In 1414 Alice Chaucer, not older than eleven, was already married to Sir John Phelip, some twenty-five years her senior, while in 1324 her great-grand father, John Chaucer (Geoffrey Chaucer’s father), then aged twelve, was abducted by his aunt with a prospect of marrying him to her daughter to secure family properties. Geoffrey himself apparently was around twelve when he met his future wife Philippa, two of three years his junior, as they both lived away from their natal families at the court of Elizabeth de Burgh, countess of Ulster (Archer 2011, Gray 2012). Orphaned heirs and heiresses frequently experienced erratic patterns of both wardship and matrimonial arrangements. Alice Chaucer’s husband Willian de la Pole acquired wardship of Margaret Beaufort in 1444 when Margaret was only one year old, and in 1450 married her, aged seven, to their only son, John de la Pole, aged eight. In 1453 Henry VI insisted on the marriage contract to be dissolved and granted Margaret’s wardship to his half-brothers Edmund and Jasper Tudor, the former marrying her in 1455 around her twelfth birthday, securing his interest in her vast estates. Famously, he did not live

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to enjoy his booty as he died from plague on 1 November 1456, leaving the thirteen-year-old Margaret ‘six months pregnant, isolated and vulnerable in a lawless region of Wales’. In giving birth to the future Henry VII she must have suffered permanent injuries and never had any more children. In March 1457, less than two months after Margaret’s giving birth, her (ex)brother-in-law, Jasper Tudor, married her off for the third time at the age of nearly fourteen. On becoming King, Edward IV awarded his staunch supporter William, Lord Herbert, the wardship of Margaret’s son, separating the three-year-old Henry Tudor from his mother for several years. She was allowed to visit Henry in 1467, and could briefly reunite with her son in 1471 when Henry VI returned to the throne. It was not until Henry Tudor became king in 1485 that she was able to see him again (Jones and Underwood 2004). Another Tudor child, Elizabeth Grey, suo jure Baroness Lisle, also had her wardship sold twice: first, after the death of her stepfather, to Henry VIII’s favourite Charles Brandon in 1512, who swiftly betrothed her, aged eight, as his future third wife; when a better match, Mary Tudor, became available, he broke the engagement (but kept Elizabeth’s title) and sold the wardship to Katherine, countess of Devon, for £4,000, who then married her ward off to another young heir, sixteen-year-old Henry Courtenay, Marquess of Exeter, in 1515. Elizabeth died in 1519 aged about fourteen (Cooper 2008). The earliest canonical age of marriage was normally fourteen (for boys) and twelve (for girls), although as we see in reality, child marriages were widespread among the royalty and higher aristocracy. Fourteen was also the standard age for beginning an apprenticeship, although it could start as early as ten (Hanawalt 1993, 113, 171). Such separation was sometimes dictated by economic need, but was also commonly perceived as good parental practice, especially when the families were concerned with upward social mobility, since children were believed to acquire skills and learn discipline better by living with comparative strangers for the period between the ages of seven and fourteen years old. Such practice is already found in early English sources applied to boys, noble and otherwise (Crawford 1999, 147). Given that even the parents apparently lived by the adage ‘he who spares the rod, spoils the child’, in these new households children were often subjected to abuse by beating, malnutrition, overwork, neglect and sexual assault, much of which remained unreported, unrecorded, and unpunished. As evidence suggests, children, especially girls, were not safe from rape and mutilation by visitors and intruders even at home in their community (Kissane 2018), and the risk increased with the child being taken out of their familiar environment. There was neither expectation nor guarantee that even a new-born child would spend any significant time with its mother. For poor families the

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evidence is virtually non-existent (Gottlieb 1993, 141), but in the households with at least some disposable income wet-nurses were popular, and in the case of aristocracy and royals almost mandatory, to ensure prompt return of the mother’s fertility (Fildes 1988, 34–36). Nurses were not necessarily resident in the houses where they were employed (especially in Italy, where urban children were often sent away to a balia) but in the absence of formula milk well-off parents were unwilling to use the milk of beasts to suckle their infants, lest they resemble the source when grown up. A chaotic pattern of wet-nursing is well depicted in the case of Florentine twins born in 1385: ‘Manno’ was kept by his mother two weeks, then sent out to a wet-nurse who kept him for two months (until she became pregnant), returned to his mother for eleven days until a second nurse was found with whom he stayed for sixteen months (until she became pregnant). ‘Gherardo’ stayed with his mother for about five weeks, then went in direct succession to three wet-nurses (the first two became pregnant) for periods of six, nine and three months. Ross 1991, 188

It is not clear how widespread this practice was outside late-medieval Italian towns, nor do we know for sure what happened to the twins as they grew up. French and English evidence from the early modern period demonstrates continuing popularity of wet-nurses, with babies in their care having a 50%+ chance of returning home alive after having been weaned, while the chances of foundlings and orphans dwindled into single digits (Gottlieb 1993, 146–7). One wonders if the distorted early attachment was at least partially responsible for the ruthless politics and imbalanced emotions observable among the European upper classes of that time. Today we know that such erratic patterns of foster care play a key role in the development of attachment patterns of advanced insecurity, frequently resulting in clinical cases (Quiroga and Hamilton-Giachritsis 2016). Psychologist Nick Duffell has written persuasively on the connection between the lack of empathy, poor modern leadership, and early separation by means of boarding schools (Duffell 2000, 2014; Duffell and Basset 2016). Socially aspiring parents or guardians would often send children away already in Antiquity and the practice persisted in Europe for many centuries – and is still popular in the UK. The woes of such institutions, the sadistic attitudes of many teachers and the bullying of the peers, are vividly recorded in modern literature, both fiction and non-fiction, from C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy to the Harry Potter series. For the English elite education away from home became a

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norm in the central Middle Ages. Thomas Becket went to be schooled at Merton Priory aged ten, while his future royal friend and later bitter enemy, Henry II, began his education away from home at seven. It is not clear whether he had a substitute ‘whipping boy’, like Edward VI did later, or took the beating himself. Already at the end of the fourth century AD Augustine of Hippo vividly recalls the violent, humiliating and often pointless punishments he was subjected to at his boarding school in Madaura (modern M’Daourouch), some 30 km from his hometown, aged ten or eleven. No wonder he never really mastered Greek, taught to him through ‘terror and torture’ (Confessions I: 23). An exercise in English-to-Latin translation from Winchester College, probably from the 1490s, imagines a life at a boarding school from the perspective of a child: ‘… all that was to me a pleasure when I was a child, from three year[s] old to 10 (for now I go upon the twelfth year) while I was under my father and mother’s keeping, be turned now to torments and pain […] For now at five of the clock by the moonlight I must go to my book […] and if our master hap[pen] to awake us, he brings a rod ’stead of a candle’, and later elliptically refers to poor school diet (Orme 2006, 184). Humorous and somewhat sympathetic, this text, composed by a schoolmaster, confirms the inevitability of the rod in the educational environment, and even the recent attempt to bring nuance into the history of punishment in medieval education demonstrated that beating was considered natural and inseparable from teaching (Parsons 2018). Separation of children from their parents and siblings is also evident in cases of London wardship. After the death of a parent (normally the father), depending on economic priorities there was absolutely no guarantee that the mother would be given guardianship of her children. While in the seventh-century Old English law codes the assumption was that mothers would retain her children, in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century London only between 40 and 50 per cent of cases were judged in favour of the mother alone or the mother and her new husband (given the lucrative marriage market). These figures are relatively low because ‘by city law, wardship of minors “ought not to be in the hands of a kinsman to whom the inheritance could descend”’ (Hanawalt 1993, 93). It was not unusual for the children to be taken away from the mother and sent to live with the executors of the dead father’s will or with his guild brothers, while the mother and her new husband would get custody of another small child. Despite the financial incentive to look after such wards, the number of children who died during wardship was 32 per cent (Hanawalt 1993, 103, 223). Comparable numbers may have died while away at boarding schools. In Winchester College in 1431, twenty out of seventy pupils died, while a number of others left on account of infirmity; in other years for which records survive, death rate was around ten–fifteen percent (Orme 2001, 114–16). Epidemics,

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other diseases and accidents are certainly the main suspects in the cases of children dying while at school and in service, but separation from attachment figures may have contributed to the cases of pupils’ deaths and infirmities. We know that Bowlby’s thinking about attachment crystallised when he became puzzled by the fact that in post-war UN-run orphanages with good nutrition, hygiene and healthcare, the death rates were significantly higher than among the children given to random poor families, who were often raised in much less materially advantageous conditions, yet with stable attachment figures instead of constantly changing nurses (first formulated in 1951 as a report for the WHO on the homeless and refugee children and then published in a book form as Bowlby and Fry 1953). Along with wardship sales, there are numerous examples of contract sales, when the child servant or apprentice changed hands several times in a short period (Hanawalt 1993, 187, 201, 211). Apart from high mortality rates, instable patterns of caregiving could partly account for high statistics of crime and violence of the Middle Ages – see Bowlby’s classic work on child thieves, many of whom experienced prolonged periods of total separation before the age of five (Bowlby 1944). Unruly behaviour of adolescents was well known to medieval commentators (Parsons 2018a), and such tendencies could well be exacerbated when the gownies, the University students, many of whom had experienced early separation at boarding schools, met with the townies, the apprentices, resulting in violence and bloodshed, such as the clashes in thirteenth–fourteenth century Oxford, culminating in St Scholastica’s Day riot of 1355 (Ashton and Catto 1984, 146–7). It appears, however, that by the end of the Middle Ages early separation practices were considered barbaric at least by some: an anonymous assistant to a Venetian ambassador, writing at the very end of the fifteenth century, famously observes: The want of affection in the English is strongly manifested towards their children; for after having kept them at home till they arrive at the age of 7 or 9 years at the utmost, they put them out, both males and females, to hard service in the houses of other people, binding them generally for another 7 or 9 years. And these are called apprentices, and during that time they perform all the most menial offices; and few are born who are exempted from this fate, for every one, however rich he may be, sends away his children into the houses of others, whilst he, in return, receives those of strangers into his own. And on inquiring their reason for this severity, they answered that they did it in order that their children might learn better manners. But I, for my part, believe that they do it because

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they like to enjoy all their comforts themselves, and that they are better served by strangers than they would be by their own children. […] That if the English sent their children away from home to learn virtue and good manners, and took them back again when their apprenticeship was over, they might, perhaps, be excused; but they never return, for the girls are settled by their patrons, and the boys make the best marriages they can, and, assisted by their patrons, not by their fathers, they also open a house and strive diligently by this means to make some fortune for themselves. Sneyd 1847, 24–5

He continues by commenting disapprovingly on the ease with which English widows remarry, taking control, with their new husbands, of the part of the inheritance belonging to their sent-away children and never repaying it in full. He concludes by stating that once the children come of age, they repeat the same process with the new generation. Thus, the pattern of insecure attachment reproduces itself, sanctified by tradition. 1.2.3 Pervasiveness of the Scriptural Discourse: Religious ‘Pryming’ Another, even stronger tradition woven into the fabric of medieval England, was religiosity. Its expression was largely encouraged within the Christian framework, although the degree, depth and earnestness of medieval religiosity remains a subject for debate and continuing adjustment (Weltecke 2014). After the IV Lateran Council of 1215 everyone was expected to attend the liturgy at least once a year, according to Canon 21: all who reached the age of reason was bound to confess his or her sins at least once a year to their parish priest (or another one by his dispensation), and to receive the Eucharist at least at Easter, under the threat of excommunication and refusal of Christian burial. That way almost everyone would attend church at least twice a year (for confession and for communion), but most probably more frequently: marriage services would have been attended by many members of the local community, as well as the key events of the year, such as Ash Wednesday (beginning of Lent), Advent, or Christmas Mass. That way, the basics of religious discourse were familiar even to the illiterate (or increasingly quasi- or semiliterate) majority of the population, who mostly relied on aural instruction, vetted by the Church. At the same time the basic literacy in England, especially in the later Middle Ages, was also inextricably entwined with the Christian doctrine. The English medieval ABC always begins not with an A but with a cross and usually finishes not with a Z but with ‘amen’. The first texts a young reader encountered were most likely Our Father and Hail Mary, followed by (in a different order

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and setup) the Creed, Ten Commandments, the brief expositions on the seven deadly sins, seven virtues, seven works of mercy, the Beatitudes, leading up to the psalms, either selected or the whole contents of the Psalter. The Psalter became one of the most popular books in the later medieval period, either on its own or integrated into the Books of Hours, which sometimes also contained ABCs and are often referred to as Primers if the majority of the material they contain is in the vernacular, although a simplified Latin version can also be called so, e.g. the booklet commissioned for the five-year-old Claude of France in c. 1505 (now Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS 159). Many people grew so familiar with the psalms that in the Books of Hours they are often indicated only by their incipits, while for the professed monastics, such as many of those discussed below, psalms were an integral part of their devotional, emotional, and mental fabric (Scott-Stokes 2006, 8), so much so that in the eleventh century Peter Damian felt compelled to confirm to Agnes of Poitiers that it was all right to think about psalms during a bowel movement (Ferrante 2015, 179). These texts were assembled to teach social norms and positive values, but they also conveyed a lot of affects and behaviours, culturally expected and acceptable in the attachment figure – attached, God – man relationship. The Lord’s Prayer already delineates this relationship by firmly positioning God as the ultimate true Father, occupying a remote yet vantage position, who made all that is and who alone is in control of both material and immaterial comforts (daily bread, forgiveness of trespasses) and the supplier of protection (against the temptation or the devil). His protection and comfort however need to be requested on a daily (or hourly) basis and are by no means guaranteed. As one of the Epistles puts it, ‘For whom the Lord loveth, he chastiseth; and he scourgeth every son whom he receiveth’ (Hebrews 12:6, with many parallels elsewhere in the Scriptures; all quotations are from Douay-Rheims Bible, unless stated otherwise). As the protection is thus not guaranteed and the punishment is always possible – and is always deserved since no-one is good but God alone (Mark 10:18),  – a believer is likely to be in a state of heightened anxiety, which leads to overdependence on an attachment figure as a source of protection and a perception of oneself as helpless and defenceless. This helplessness is expressed in many examples of daily devotions, such as assorted Biblical statements: ‘For without me you can do nothing’, John 15:5; the negative self-image in the opening verses of Psalm 51: ‘… to thee only have I sinned, and have done evil before thee: that thou mayst be justified in thy words and mayst overcome when thou art judged. For behold I was conceived in iniquities; and in sins did my mother conceive me’ and, more generally, the sentiments of the seven penitential psalms, along with the most depressing view of the human nature laid out in

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Romans 7:14–24 and the comfortless state of the world in Ecclesiastes 4:1–3. Many of these entered the standard liturgical texts: ‘Remember, Man, that thou art but dust and unto dust thou shalt return’ (Ash Wednesday liturgy, from Genesis 3:19), as well as the multiple misereres. One of the shortest psalms, 143, is a desperate plea for God’s help (‘my goost is anguisched up on me, my herte is trowbled in me’, as the Middle English Prymer puts it) but, again, no safety is guaranteed (Prymer, 57). Another short psalm, 62(63), appears to be more optimistic, as verses 8–9 read ‘Because thou hast been my helper. And I will rejoice under the covert of thy wings: My soul hath stuck close to thee: thy right hand hath received me’, but only if we forget that this is a hope expressed by an exile in a lifeless desert. The Middle English religious lyrics abound in pessimistic memento mori examples, in which the speaker is left alone in the face of the inevitable death, with no escape, no comfort, and no mention of the resurrection – except perhaps a reminder that Christ died a more horrible death (a succinct summary of this view appears, with no God in sight, in the Harley Lyrics as a death riddle: ‘Erthe toc [took] of erthe erthe wyth who/ Erthe other erthe to the erthe droh [drew]/ Erthe leyde erthe in erthene throh/ Tho hevede [then had] erthe of erthe erthe ynoh’, British Library MS 2253, 59v). A more emotionally comfortable reader would perhaps focus on the examples of supportive Scriptural statements, such as various versions of ‘the Lord is my strength/rock/fortress’, Ex. 15:2, Ps 18:2, 27:1, 118:14 etc. but these, too, can be read from a perspective of helplessness. One of the most memorable images of God’s foreknowledge and care is found in Psalm 139:13–16: ‘For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast protected me from my mother’s womb’ etc., but it still ends in the acknowledgement of one’s worthlessness per se as the ‘substance in the lower parts of the earth’, with every single one of the person’s imperfections recorded in God’s book. The continuing praise of God’s thinking innumerable precious thoughts about the person and being with the speaker at his awakening, present in most of the modern translations of verses 17–19, come out obscured and garbled in both the Vulgate and the Wycliffite version, with ‘thy thoughts’ rendered as ‘thy friends’, making the verses sound more distanced and less emotional. The New Testament, too, modifies the messages of love and acceptance by the reminders that these only happen through and by virtue of Christ (1 John 3:1, Romans 5:8), and that people share in those through hardships and suffering. Christ’s words in Matthew 10:29–31 (‘Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: better are you than many sparrows’) can be read as comforting by a securely-attached believer, while an anxious one is likely to worry about

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some of the sparrows who seemingly get a better deal, as well as the exactness of God, who in his hair-splitting foreknowledge sees and remembers every thought and deed and therefore there is no way to escape condemnation. All in all, love and fear in the Bible are usually not far from each other, as Psalm 147:11 reminds: ‘The Lord taketh pleasure in them that fear him: and in them that hope in his mercy’. Thus in many ways traditional Christianity is especially appealing to people with insecure attachment style: there, the main attachment figure is notionally ever-present (‘I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world’, says Jesus in Matthew 28:20; compare also Matthew 18:20 ‘where there are two or three gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them’, and 18:19 ‘if two of you shall consent upon earth, concerning any thing whatsoever they shall ask, it shall be done to them by my Father who is in heaven’), but in practice unavailable, or available in such a way that the devotee cannot sense this availability or see how their prayers are answered (which is perceived as his or her own fault), or else living in constant stress of needing to perform to an impossible standard, accusing oneself of being of little faith (Matthew 14:31). The belief in a figure who is simultaneously protective and frightening, mirrors a child’s feelings about a ‘disorganised’ caregiver, because rather than being a solution to fear, such a caregiver is actually part of its source, resulting in an irresolvable dilemma for the person seeking proximity. A disorganised style of attachment is strongly linked to dissociative mental states, such as episodes of the loss or dissolution of self, out-of-body experiences – what in other paradigm is known as mystical episodes. A reasonably healthy human psyche is usually capable of dealing with a paradox, while a less stable one could be thrown off balance. High attachment anxiety also causes intensified negative emotional response to painful events, keeping them alive in the working memory and causing chronic activation of the attachment system; thus ‘psychological pain related to the unavailability of attachment figures is exacerbated’ (Granqvist 2006, 112–14). Here scholars of Christianity can readily recognise the familiar longing for Christ and the constant memories of his suffering that inform affective piety, which makes multiple appearances in the Katherine and Wooing Groups (Lazikani 2015). Julian of Norwich reports the beginning of her Shewings as follows: ‘Then came suddenly to my mind that I should desire the second wound of our Lord’s gracious gift, that my body might be fulfilled with mind and feeling of His blessed passion, for I would that His pains were my pains, with compassion, and, afterward, longing to God’ (LT: 3; here and elsewhere the translations/modernizations of Middle English texts are mine). Meanwhile, Margery Kempe for many years displayed signs of extreme distress every time

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she was reminded of Christ’s Passion through hearing preachers, being read the Scriptures or devotional literature, viewing religious imagery or even seeing a handsome man or a male child (BMK I: 35). Another interesting aspect of insecure attachment is that, whereas a securely attached individual responds to a partner’s unavailability or perceived negative behaviour by expressing functional anger, an anxiously attached person redirects this anger towards themselves, resulting in shame, self-disgust and depression (Mikulincer and Shaver 2005, 151). Even Jesus cites on the cross Psalm 22, which begins ‘O God my God, look upon me: why hast thou forsaken me? Far from my salvation are the words of my sins. O my God, I shall cry by day, and thou wilt not hear: and by night, and it shall not be reputed as folly in me’, and continues with the familiar self-abashing statement: ‘But I am a worm, and no man’. As one cannot be angry with God for being unavailable, these affects can only be expressed as culturally normalised self-harm, such as extreme asceticism, flagellation, excessive fasting, drinking pus, or danger-seeking behaviour such as Margery Kempe’s compulsive solo traveling (Glazebrook, Townsend Sayal 2015; on the potential role of extreme asceticism in broadly understood mystical experiences, see Kroll and Bachrach 2005 and Bell 1985). It is, however, culturally acceptable to lament the absence of a human attachment figure as the second-best option after God, as seen in many examples of correspondence between early medieval ecclesiastics, some of which are discussed in the next section. Not to paint too gloomy a picture, it must be noted that those who did not have an opportunity to dig deep into the complex theology or internalise the Scriptures, had a better chance of acquiring a more positive view of God, at least in late-medieval England. For a significant portion of laity liturgical participation was far less involving than that of the clergy and, judging by the stereotypical images of neighbours chatting during a Mass (‘jangling women’), familiar from vernacular devotional guides and misericords, or Margery Kempe’s failed attempt to get herself a date after a church service, not everyone heeded to what was happening in the chancel (BMK 1:4). To those who did, the language barrier of the Latin liturgy and the conflicting vectors of the event – uniting rhetoric yet separating theatrics as the main action took place behind the church screen and the laity received no blood but only body of Christ, if at all – may well have been superseded by the overall positive and fairly consistent message of the simple rhyming vernacular prayers to accompany the order of the Mass in Lay Folks Mass Book (Duffy 2005, 91–130; LFMB 1879). After the elevation of the Host, the focal point of the service, the devotee is invited to pray thus:

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Lord, as thou canst and as Thou will Have mercy on me that has done ill, For whatsoever Thou will me do, I hold me paid to stand thereto, Thy mercy, Jesu, would I have: If out of fear I durst it crave, Sweet Jesu, make me save And give me wit and wisdom right To love Thee, Lord, with all my might. LFMB 1879, 40

The closing prayer of the Middle English Prymer, a rare medieval passage added to its otherwise biblical contents, evokes Jesus and Mary to be ‘in alle tymes’ the devotee’s ‘sekere keperes’ (secure keepers) before God (Prymer, 114). In all cases this mental and emotional security derives from the speakers’ perceived connection with their Heavenly Father and with Christ. The overall comforting tone of these prayers, emphasising the salvific role of Jesus and the permanent ties between the community of the living and the dead provide a significantly less sophisticated yet more emotionally stable framework for the relationship between God and his people than the overwhelming monastic devotions. 2

Case Studies from Medieval England

2.1 Letters and Epistles Before we approach the material constituting my case studies, a brief comment on medieval letters is required. Instead of a means to convey ephemeral information, which in the past was often entrusted to an oral messenger, in post-Roman Western Europe letter-writing became a special concern of rhetorical theory and formed a genre, based on Classical and early Christian examples, and for a long time stayed mostly within political and ecclesiastical domain. Collections of practical letter formulae as well as the finest specimens were compiled and kept as style manuals to be copied and imitated (Clanchy 2013, 92). By the end of the twelfth century, rhetoricians developed a five-part recommended epistolary format, adapted from Ciceronian orations: salutation, captatio benevolentiae (securing of good will), narrative, petition (presentation of requests), and conclusion (Perelman 1991, 107), which, with some omissions and modifications, was already found in much earlier letters.

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Another point to remember is that due to pre-modern reading and writing habits, medieval letters from Western Christendom were often a significantly less private affair than the majority of us imagine. Much medieval correspondence was a product of a communal effort, or at least that of two people – the person dictating the letter and the scribe; dictation was widespread, so much so that the art of medieval letter-writing was called ars dictaminis. On the receiving end, private and silent reading was less common than recitations within small groups, and it was customary for those like Margery Kempe, whose functional literacy was limited, to rely on being read to. None of this means that no personal information or intimate affect could be included in medieval epistles – I believe they were, and sometimes without the author’s direct intent; this is just another acknowledgement of the importance of the context when looking at cultural and literary products of a different epoch. Unless a large corpus of correspondence of one person or a close-knit group survives and also happens to contain varied autobiographical information, there is usually not enough material in pre-modern letters to collect a broad variety of discourse markers, usually available in a modern AAI, in order to suggest an informed hypothesis concerning author’s attachment style. What is possible however is to sample some letters dealing with separation and other attachment-activation events (illness, danger, loss) and examine the ways in which their authors express, channel, make sense of, and moderate their attachment anxiety within the socio-cultural framework available to them. 2.1.1

Early English Letters: Separation Anxiety and the Boundaries of the Early Medieval Emotional Etiquette In this section I would like to take a look at two letters from two English nuns residing on the Continent in the eighth century as a part of the missionary activities of Bishop Boniface and his followers. His network consisted of a significant number of professed women who, due to their cloistered status and the societal limitations of their gender, may well have found the separation from their home land, their kin, and their loved ones more painful than men, and expressed this pain more acutely in their correspondence. It is true that there are many examples of men’s letters in the corpus that are also overemotional: both Boniface and Lul(l) repeatedly refer to their anxiety, stress, and suffering. However, realistically they had more means to regulate at least the separation anxiety and the sense of isolation by being able to travel and by surrounding themselves with loyal followers – something their female colleagues had more limited opportunity to do. It is tempting to dismiss these heightened expressions of emotions as mere topoi. Although these letters were composed well before the ars dictaminis became formalised as a branch of medieval rhetoric in the late eleventh Juliana Dresvina - 978-90-04-50016-7 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 05:28:36PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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century, they do display a number of similar features and recognisable rhetorical devices. As a number of scholars suggest, the epistolary collection of the Boniface circle ‘was put together, possibly by Lul, not simply to preserve the contents of the letters, but also for formal reasons, as a guide to letter writing’ (Watt 2020, 71). Christine Fell too notes that nun Berhtgyth’s letters, ‘passionate as they are’, display imbedded literary skills, such as the influence of Aldhelm’s Carmen Rhythmicum, and concludes by stating that whoever ‘put these letters together for posterity is hardly likely to have preserved them solely for the note of personal anguish. Their value must have been in their formalisation of that emotion’. Yet she never claims that Berhtgyth’s grief and loneliness were pretend or artificially constructed – simply that they were ‘within both the literary and the emotional etiquette of her background’ (Fell 1990, 41). Even if these expat English nuns are expressing their separation anxiety and anguish in a formalised style, there must be a good cultural reason for such affect expressions to become acceptable for the ‘emotional etiquette’ of their day. Much as I stand for spontaneity in my own affect verbalisation, I often feel that Shakespeare or Brodsky have already expressed it for me better than I can ever do. If one views topoi as memes, the cultural equivalent of genes, that is elements of a culture passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means, then a successful replication requires a self-reinforcing positive feedback effect, which would give some memes an advantage against others in the meme-pool (see Blackmore 1999). In other words, it is hard to fathom that the actual feelings expressed in these epistles did not chime in with their readers and became a cultural idiom while being entirely alien to the majority of those who consumed and reproduced them. Dictated at some point between 716 and 718 and addressed to Boniface, nun Ecgburg’s letter is an example of hyperactivated attachment discourse. Her attachment anxiety is framed around thoughts about the death of her favourite brother Oshere (‘one whom I loved beyond all others’), and no prospect of an earthly reunion with her sister Wethburga, an anchoress in Rome. The actual trigger, however, seems to be her more recent separation from Boniface himself (she says ‘having but just gained sight of you, I am deprived of your bodily presence’) (Ferrante 2014, hereafter cited as Epistolae, letter 359). Boniface, whom she calls by his English name Winfred (perhaps putting, consciously or not, their national affinity above spiritual bonds), appears to have a long history with Ecgburg, as implied by her addressing him as ‘beloved, once my brother, you are now both father and brother [to me] in the Lord of Lords’ and the reference to his friendship with her late brother. Ecgburg’s letter is packed with familial imagery, and she actually uses anxia in a self-describing simile (‘I long for the sight of you’, she says, more than ‘the anxious mother watches by the shore for her son’ [curvo litore anxia filium Juliana Dresvina - 978-90-04-50016-7 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 05:28:36PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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mater expectat]) and then several lines later in ‘dum anxie requirit cor meum’ [literally ‘while my heart anxiously longs’] in her passionate plea for comfort, thoughts, prayers, and, failing a visit, a physical reminder of him: ‘I beg you earnestly to send me some little remembrance, perhaps a holy relic or at least a few written words, that so I may always have you with me’ as an attachment surrogate. Boniface, not God, is Ecgburg’s primary attachment figure, even if this attachment is framed in terms of religious affinity; he is certainly viewed by her as stronger and wiser (even as she compared herself to a mother of an adult son), as she anticipates that ‘on the resurrection day, when the twelve Apostles shall sit upon their twelve seats, [Boniface] shall sit there also, and … wear a crown of gold before the judgment seat of the King Eternal’. Although one cannot fully apply the methodology used to determine a person’s attachment style through modern AAI, a trained coder would notice, along with Ecgburg’s consistently complaining tone, a few more discourse markers that strongly suggest C-type (preoccupied) attachment style: rich, memorable imagery and highly evocative language (even if rhetorically calculated, e.g. ‘Gladly would I have died if it had so pleased God … or if slow-coming death had not deceived me’), clinginess (‘I ever clasp your neck in a sisterly embrace’, ‘I long for the sight of you’), involving discourse (her pleas were effective enough to encourage her scribe to join in her catalogue of miseries in a plaintive postscript), and a certain triangulation when it comes to her sister. Indeed, she spends close to half of her letter to Boniface lamenting her sister’s abrupt departure and complaining that Wethburga is now much better off while Ecgburg is left on her own, abandoned and craving death: ‘It was not bitter death but a still more bitter and unexpected separation that divided us one from the other, leaving her, as I think, the happier and me the unhappy one to go on, like something cast aside, in my earthly service, while she, whom, as you know, I loved so tenderly, is reported to be in a Roman cell as a recluse’. Later she effectively says that while the two of them are going to enjoy the everlasting glory, she will be cast out as unworthy, just as she is now, because ‘God has made me unworthy to join with such companions’ (as we read ‘God has made me unworthy …’, one can almost hear her mutter, ‘You bastards’). Much as we sympathise with Ecgburg’s eloquently conveyed plight, one cannot miss an air of grumpiness and a certain manipulative quality of her letter. This frustration and anger, disguised as a culturally acceptable lament, is even more noticeable in the three brief epistles, each a paragraph long, recorded as a part of the Boniface correspondence and ascribed to the pen of Berhtgyth, another English nun in Germany (Maude 2017). As she was writing to her brother Balthard in the end of the eighth century, it took her significantly fewer words or rhetorical flourishes to get to the point. In the first

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letter she asks him, in a series of crisp rhetorical questions, why the heck he has failed to visit her so far in a foreign country, causing her immense grief, appealing to her preferential treatment of him (‘Do you not know for certain that I place no other of all those living ahead of your love?’), wondering if his ignoring her is a revenge for her failing to do him a certain unnamed favour, reminding him that they are still bound with the ‘bonds of love and kinship if nothing else persuades you or changes your mind’, and swiftly moving to suggest the answer to the never-materialised visit: that he is an insensitive churl and simply cares nothing about her (‘Already I feel certain that you have no care for me in my insignificance’). As the angry card clearly did not work, the second letter shifts to the description of her sorry state, as she paints herself ‘weary of my life’ without his brotherly love, ‘for I am alone, left behind and without help of kin’. She then complains that ‘my father and my mother abandoned me, but the Lord has taken me up’ (which does not however sound very comforting). Having reminded him of her singular love for him, Berhtgyth invokes death for the second time, begging her ‘most beloved brother’ to come visit her or let her visit him ‘so that I might see you before I die’, finally saluting him in Christ as his only sister. The rest of the text is a catalogue of her prayers for his (and her) physical and spiritual wellbeing in rhyming verse. This epistle is more skilful in activating attachment, explicitly mentioning abandonment and death, i.e. evoking the situations of danger and loss, while not displaying any direct anger. Predictably, guilt-tripping worked much better than blaming, and the third letter makes it evident that Balthard at least cared enough to send a verbal message and some gifts. She does not waste words to make a big deal of it but rather uses this opportunity to further press him to come to her, developing the familiar argument from the previous letter: ‘When I see and hear other women going to travel to their friends, then I recall that I was abandoned by my parents in my youth and I remain here alone’. Although she acknowledges the comfort she receives from God, it is clearly insufficient and Berhtgyth insists that even a one-day visit from her brother would alleviate her sadness and pain. She concludes by suggesting that if his visit is impossible or inconvenient, she would herself go back to England, ‘where the bodies of our parents rest’ to ‘finish this temporary life there, and arrive where the perfect home’ is. One could not help wondering if that is exactly what she wants, and if all the talk about her loneliness without him as actually an attempt to get his formal permission, as her closest male relative, for her to go home to England. It is true that ‘of all the letters in the Boniface collection, Berthgyth’s are the ones that can be most read as individual testimonies’ (Watt 2020, 86). However, looking at hers and Ecgburg’s writings from the perspective of attachment

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anxiety brings out significant differences between the two. Berhtgyth’s discourse indeed appears very much as a ‘formalization’ of personal anguish, as suggested by Fell; Ecgburg’s, although highly rhetorical, is more consistent with the signs of attachment anxiety and the disorganised and somewhat pessimistic priming of the religious context within which she is functioning. If Ecgburg displays signs of viewing Boniface as an attachment figure, Berhtgyth’s discourse does not indicate the same for either God or her brother. Balthard is not perceived as stronger or wiser – if anything, he needs to be chided for being neglectful of his sister; her discourse does not qualify him as her romantic attachment either, and his message and his gift do little to regulate her affect. Both women employ some degree of emotional manipulation, but if Ecgburg uses it to reduce her attachment hyperactivation through a vocal request for a contact with her attachment figure, Berhtgyth’s aim seems to be is more practical: she simply wants to be allowed to return home. All in all, for early medieval people kinship, familial or spiritual, appear to be more important attachment-wise than the divine (whose purpose is to provide a framework for new, stable connections, extending into the afterlife). In a world where existence is impossible outside a community, real people are relatable, while God is someone remote and formal as a king and a judge (with whom the relationship is that of hierarchy and authority, not emotional attachment), as seen in Ecgburg’s idea of the last judgment. God also needs to be alerted to the individual cases of the living by their deceased attachment figures of exemplary Christian behaviour, as Alcuin suggests in his letter to Itherius, his friend and predecessor as the abbot of St Martin’s, Tours (Goetz 1999, 127). But even close friends, once they enter the divine orbit, are expected to become more detached and aloof, as Boniface imagined by Ecgburg. The absolute necessity to relate to a human being, especially in the times of distress, is expressed by Eangyth, an abbess of an unknown monastery, in a letter to Boniface (Epistolae 358). Having listed their poverty, anxieties concerning their calling, and loss of friends and compatriots (‘God has taken them from us in various ways’), she stresses the vital importance of having ‘a faithful friend, such a one in whom we can confide better than in ourselves, who will consider our pain and sorrow and want, will sympathize with us, console and sustain us by his eloquence, and uplift us by his most wholesome discourse’. This role is allocated to Boniface, a human, her brother in God, since early medieval spiritual relationship was as binding as a blood kinship (Jussen 2000). None of these letters anticipate an intimate, protective, comforting role of the deity: for a relatable God one has to wait until the affective turn of the central Middle Ages (McNamer 2010).

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2.1.2 Coping with Separation and Loss: Men Writing to Women Unfortunately, no responses from either Boniface or Balthard to their female correspondents have been preserved, and we do not know their emotional perspective. But it is more unusual for letters from women to survive, as the material from the eleventh to the fourteenth century demonstrates. Extant epistles dealing with separation, grief, sorrow, and anxiety often paint a picture of a one-way street, with men vested in religious authority and graced with the freedom of movement writing to their cell-confined spiritual wards, nuns or anchoresses, treatise-like letters of varying degree of intimacy on how to conduct their spiritual lives, such as the works of Goscelin of St Bertin, Aelred of Rievaulx, the anonymous author of Ancrene Riwle, and Richard Rolle. Although embedded in the tradition initiated by Jerome’s correspondence, many of these epistles would have originated in conversations with their female addressees, transmitted orally or in writing, of which we now have no direct traces (Aelred begins his De Institutione Inclusarum ‘For many years now, my sister, you have been asking me for a rule to guide you in the life you have embraced for the same of Christ’) (Knowles 1971, 43). A somewhat exceptional situation appears in the preservation of royal letters, for example the exchanges between Matilda (Edith), wife of Henry I (1080– 1118), and Anselm of Canterbury. She begs him passionately to come and visit her (‘Come, I beg, father, appease my groans, dry my tears, lessen my pains, put an end to my sorrow’), thanks him abundantly for his letters, bemoans his long absences and even tells Anslem (nearly fifty years her senior) off for not eating enough in a rather motherly fashion (Epistolae 392–4, 395–6). Matilda’s letters, although often filled with Scriptural references and potentially copy-edited by the court scribes, are full of affect and action even if stripped off the verbal flourishes and topoi. Here, however, the balance of power is in favour of the queen, with Anselm being Matilda’s spiritual adviser yet very much dependent on her husband; it is unsurprising then that she is free to express her concern about his health and distress about their separation, especially in his exile, in very forceful terms, relying on her comfortable standing with her husband, while Anselm’s replies are emotionally reserved as he expected his letters to be made known to the irate king (Huneycutt 2004). (Or perhaps he was still somewhat sulky about Matilda leaving Wilton nunnery to marry Henry I against Anselm’s initial wishes – as seen from the example of his only nephew, also Anselm, who, despite being an only child, was encouraged to pursue a monastic career, he clearly thought the path of celibacy was the best for everyone.) As we shall see later, it was certainly not because Anselm was incapable of expressing deep, sometimes obsessive affection.

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In early 1080s, three centuries after Ecgburg and Berhtgyth, a Flemish immigrant in England, Goscelin of St Bertin, depicts a reversed situation, with himself as a spiritual brother/father addressing Eva of Wilton, whom he casts as his spiritual sister/daughter. His writing is in many ways an attempt to overcome their separation, ‘with anxious letters and long laments’ (Otter 2004, hereafter LC, 21), after Eva left the monastery in Wilton for France to become an anchoress – similar to Ecgburg’s sister. The resulting text, Liber Confortatorius, is a lengthy idiosyncratic letter, emotionally and sexually confused even by the standards of the high-medieval monastic tradition of memorising and entirely internalising the Scriptures (including the Song of Songs) and then making oneself into one – or several – of its living metaphors (Carruthers 1998). This is perhaps as good an example of a clingy, preoccupied, coercive, insecurely attached medieval man as we could ever hope for. The consolation in Goscelin’s title is not directed at Eva, as one would expect, but at himself, and, as a speaker displaying elements of a C-type (preoccupied) attachment strategy, he is firmly grounded in his own perspective. He tries to activate Eva’s attachment by stating that it is he who needs to be rescued: ‘How can I, the sick one, help the healthy one, I, the troubled [or ‘insecure’ – JD] one, assist the secure one? But I have the building materials of comfort in you, which I do not find in myself’ (LC: 33–4). From the very beginning, the discourse is of intense love and desire for a complete merge: ‘O my soul, dearer to me than the light, your Goscelin is with you, in the inseparable presence of the soul … salutes you in Christ with an everlasting greeting’; ‘we cannot ever be separated again in all eternity’ are just a couple of many examples (LC: 21). As he moans that ‘you have relinquished me and banished me from your sight’, he envisages Eva during their closeness at Wilton and wishes ‘with the languishing desire of a wounded love’ to infuse her ‘breast with Christ’, only to describe how his writing process at that point was interrupted with his sobbing, rushing to the altar of St Laurence (the patron saint of her church in Angers) to feel more connected with her, and reciting Psalms 50 and 101 for comfort (LC: 22). He proceeds by recalling  – again, in intense and saturated imagery – himself falling deeper and deeper in love with her at her consecration (‘the Lord’s wedding’), probably in the Wilton church, remembering the development of their relationship, comparing her to the Virgin Mary, the mother of God, and to Eve, Mother of all living (LC: 23–26). To let Goscelin speak for himself: My parchments and tablets frequently brought Christ to you; and chaste letters from you were not slow in coming. I frequently visited to talk to you, pushed by both my own and your loving impatience. Your own heart,

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full of the Lord’s arrows, knows full well what I suffered, with sighs, disappointments, feverish anticipation, empty days and nights, with the inaccessible love of my most desired soul, when I sometimes came running for the holy conversation that could save me, but left frustrated. In our mutual conversations, you, although most eloquent, silently drank in the pious admonishments. Whatever I counselled, I found accepted, not in your replies but in your deeds. LC: 25

He goes on in his breathless litany without even questioning how Eva must have felt in the face of such an intense, all-consuming relationship. As Goscelin’s epistle spreads a considerable length, 114 folios in the surviving manuscript (he himself confesses he does not want to stop), there is plenty more for post-Freudian readers to feast their eyes on, but discussing all examples would take up too much space. In the absence of Eva’s perspective it is hard to tell how much of these recollections are his projections and wishful interpretations of her words and actions, but perhaps she had good reasons to ‘banish him from her sight’ and leave England abruptly. Elsewhere he confesses how he always envied Eadgyth, Eva’s best friend in Wilton, ‘who not only loved you more intimately, but, since she shared your place and sex, was able to warm herself in your presence’ (LC: 47). Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, piecing together the evidence of their early relationship, suggests that he himself described Eva as ‘a girl who once resisted being a target of Goscelin’s attention’ for a good reason (O’Keeffe 2006, 257). Eva may not have been just a little girl when first entrusted to his spiritual and education care, but a young woman (O’Keeffe 2006), yet his nostalgic memories of their time together, supercharged with spiritual eroticism, make an uncomfortable read. Monika Otter resists interpreting their relationship as coercive love or even sexual abuse (LC: 10), but even if Goscelin’s half-acknowledged desire was never consummated, the fact that grooming, manipulation, and emotional abuse of a much younger woman in a vulnerable position by a man superior to her in power, authority, and resources happened a long time ago and was culturally acceptable does not make it less painful for the abused. There is, of course, a certain joy in knowing that one’s suffering is pleasing to God, and some medieval Christians actively sought out humiliating experiences to earn extra brownie points for the afterlife (e.g. BMK I: 13), but this rationale was equally used by abusers to justify their acts (Dresvina 2022). After all, the struggle of an anchoress was usually expected to be with herself and her own desires and passions, not with those of her (ex)tutor and (ex)spiritual director.

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For Goscelin, God is certainly an attachment figure, and his discourse is infused with the divine presence as he dives into the rich rhetorical tradition of the Scripture and devotional literature for comfort or edification. As Liber Confortatorius travels from ‘a personal letter and an account of a deep, desperate, only half-sublimated love’ (LC: 1) to a melange of spiritual advice, edifying tales, pious gossip, paramystical meditations and back, God becomes not just the aim per se, but a legitimate space and an acceptable vehicle for Goscelin’s obsession with Eva and his anxious desire to be united with her forever. Just as in medieval ‘secular’ literature, the Arthur–Lancelot communion is frequently mediated through the more acceptable locus of Guinevere, Goscelin often fantasises of being one with Eva in God, whose sponsa she becomes. Goscelin’s anxiety about her potential deviation from the strict adherence to this role (‘Once you resented being called a nun; now do not disdain to be called a recluse’, LC: 130) is not simply because her obedience guarantees her salvation – it guarantees their eternal union. To Goscelin with his likely even-numbered C type strategy, obsessive and desperately desirous of comfort, being attached to God is the same as being attached to Eva, and vice versa. It is perhaps what he was thinking of while describing an example of conjoined twins, ‘a double man’ with one soul, ‘fused from the waist down’, ‘who lived in beautiful harmony’ and who will rise again on the Doomsday (LC: 139; a similar image is also used in the roughly contemporary Vita Ædwardi Regis, to describe Edward the Confessor and his wife Edith). We do not know what Eva thought about his letter in general and of being conjoined with Goscelin from the waist down in particular, or whether she even read it, but someone evidently cared enough to have it copied, as it survives in a single mid-twelfth-century manuscript (British Library, MS Sloane 3103)  – from the time when another epistle-cum-ascetic manual, Aelred of Rievaulx’s De Institutione, was composed in a form of a letter to his sister. In contrast to Goscelin’s composition, it is very impersonal, as Aelred was clearly aiming for a broad audience – although admittedly some information about the general history of emotions can be teased out of it (Bourke 2016). Alongside Ancrene Riwle, it became a popular spiritual treatise and was translated in the vernacular. It is in their general tradition that Richard Rolle composed, at some point in late 1348/49, the letter in Middle English to the anchoress Margaret Kirkby, known as The Form of Living – the only one of his four surviving letters of spiritual instruction which has a named addressee (Allen 1989, 34, 41 and 152–3). Given that Margaret was enclosed (i.e. made anchoress) on 12 December 1348, the letter would have been composed around that date, although he does seem to utilise earlier pieces in it.

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Judging by his Office, drafted some thirty years after his death in 1349 and intended for his future canonisation (Perry 1921), Rolle, alongside Margery Kempe, was as close to a salos (holy fool) as it gets on English soil. There is a fine line, if there is one at all, between being unworldly, saintly, and socially awkward. Being a self-proclaimed hermit with no official confirmation of this rather fluid status and living in a constant financial and social insecurity clearly suited his temperament  – or, perhaps, the insecurity of his attachment, although the affective quality of his writings does not conform to the dismissing/avoidant attachment style. He certainly had his fans when alive and a robust posthumous cult, but seemed to have fallen out with almost everyone he stayed with for an extended period of time. Towards the end of his life his social skills may have somewhat improved: he moved closer to his ancestral home and was probably reconciled with his family, while Margaret the anchoress, to whom he addressed The Form of Living (‘suam dilectam discipulam’, ‘to his beloved disciple’), took a special place in his heart (Windeatt 1994, 41). Although The Form of Living, like Ancrene Wisse and De Institutione Inclu­ sarum, was written with a broader readership in mind and indeed became widely copied (over forty manuscripts of it survive), in it Rolle betrays a little bit more of his attitude towards attachment than Aelred, especially if it is read together with the draft Office. He advocates eventual full detachment from anyone and anything but God, who is the only ‘sekir’ subject and object of true love (‘Love is a burning yearning in God, with a wonderful delight and security [sykernes]’) (Form of Living Ch. 10, my modernisation of Windeatt 1994), and who is thus a safer attachment  – which makes sense coming from the person who at the age of nineteen left his university and his family slamming the door on both. Rolle’s way of perfect living ultimately requires dissolution and engulfment in the fire of divine love rather than a human sort of exchange since human affection is unreliable (ch. 10) whereas divine love is ‘stable, whether thou be in ease or in anguish’ (ch. 8). All these statements are fairly standard for their genre and period, but what is more remarkable is the way Rolle advocates moderation and spends a considerable part of the chapter 2 explaining that excessive ascetic practices leading to self-harm are nothing but demonic temptation, contrary to the widespread contemporary thinking which glorified such practices (Easterling 2015, 207–8). One wonders if he spoke from his own experience. It may be the quality of the Middle English, which was still only developing into a complex literary language, but there is something warm, chatty and even humorous in the way he advises Margaret not to grow too complacent and crave worldly comforts while at the same time to be aware of the other extreme of impossible

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self-mortification, inserting an anecdote in a lively dialogue about an anchoress who, with the help of her confessor, exposed the devil masquerading as the angel of light. This story, mirroring their own relationship, was probably remembered by Margaret throughout her long anchoritic career as a way to remedy their separation and keep in contact with Richard after he was dead. The same connection is implied in the Office which relates how Margaret suffered from epileptic fits; during one particularly violent seizure, when she lost the power of speech, Richard held her in his arms saying ‘Even if you had been the devil, I would have held you’ (‘quod si fuisses diabolus ego te tenuissem’) (Perry 1921, 21–22), promising afterwards that she would never suffer another such attack as long as he lived. Her final fit was said to have happened at the moment of Rolle’s death, after which she was completely cured for the rest of her life, dying some fifty years later. It has been surmised that Margaret was instrumental in promoting Richard’s cult and popularising his writings (Hughes 1988, 84–85, 332) – not something that Eva had evidently been prepared to do for Goscelin. The Friends of God: Anselm and Attachment in Clerical Correspondence Spiritual kinship, understood as friendship in God, was cultivated in medieval religious communities in the West. The concept of amicitia was heavily influenced by Cicero’s ideas, taught in many European schools: ‘friendship is nothing else than an accord in all things, human and divine, conjoined with mutual goodwill and affection’ (De amicitia vi: 20). Medieval monks practiced amici­ tia as one of the ways to love God (McGuire 1988, 231–95), and by the twelfth century it spread to secular clergy and administrators, who were less reliant on kinship due to their celibate status and had to build friendship networks. Apart from advancing their careers, enabling them to perform their duties, and nurturing their intellect, these networks provided many of them with attachment figures. A lot of these networks were predominantly or exclusively male, or prioritised male communication. The famous Pauline statement in Gal. 3:28 that in Christ there is neither male nor female produced a theological discourse which defined those who took the vow of chastity as sexless or genderless. However, the biological and cultural reality meant (with many caveats) that the Middle Ages witnessed significant sexual segregation, especially in religious and educational spheres, so single-sex attachments were frequent, especially in all-male communities. This does not necessarily mean sexual attraction, enacted or latent: the clerical world was certainly homosocial, if not homosexual. The intellectual nature of the type of attachment expressed 2.1.3

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in amicitia comes from the shared experience of a medieval classroom which replaced medieval boys’ maternal home from an early age. C. S. Lewis, an intellectual, classicist, Christian apologist, medievalist, and a product of the British single-sex public school education, known for his male friends such as J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, defines friendship as the least natural of loves, which alone ‘seems to raise you to the levels of gods of angels’ and ‘exhibits a glorious “nearness by resemblance” to Heaven’ (Lewis 2012 [1960], 71, 74) – a male friendship, that is. In Lewis’s vast correspondence, as well as in that of his medieval scholarly counterparts – Boniface, Alcuin, Aelred (many of whose epistles are unfortunately lost), Thomas Becket, John of Salisbury, Robert Grosseteste – letters to women constitute only a small percent of the surviving corpus. Not only that, but letters from men to men enjoy a more elaborately emotive, intimate, sometimes physical language, perhaps due to this safer audience, trained in the metaphoric reading of the texts like The Song of Songs and thus offering less chance for misinterpretation. The most memorable example of such discourse is perhaps Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033–1109), one of the best-known, influential and original medieval theologians, whose highly emotional letters to male friends ‘amounted to a revolution in expressions of human emotions’ (Vaughn 2010, 58). It is impossible to do justice to Anselm’s multifaceted personality in one brief section, especially after the two masterful biographies by Richard Southern (Southern 1963 and 1990), so I will limit myself to outlining key points suggesting Anselm’s main attachment traits. Although Anselm never wrote down his own life story, we are lucky to have an account of his life by Eadmer, his constant companion and secretary following Anselm’s election as the archbishop of Canterbury in 1094 (later in life, Eadmer as hagiographer became a rival to Goscelin of St Bertin; William of Malmesbury, who knew Eadmer, subsequently joked in his Gesta Pontificum, ch. 65, that Anselm would not dare turn from side to side in his bed without Eadmer’s approval). Eadmer significantly reshaped his work after Anselm’s death to fit the genre of hagiography in anticipation of his late patron’s canonization; its core, however, originates from their many conversations and likely preserves, although mediated, Anselm’s own perspective. More importantly, about 450 of Anselm’s letters survive as a varied corpus assembled under his supervision during his later years as archbishop. They support many of Eadmer’s statements concerning Anselm and paint the picture of a considerate, passionate, affectionate person with a network of life-long friendships, more alive and relatable than most medieval occupants of high religious offices. In these letters Anselm demonstrates a mostly balanced discourse which combine affect and cognition (his are ‘the earliest works after the patristic age to

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combine original philosophical arguments of lasting value with the record of a profound personal experience’, Southern 2009), even given his extreme eloquence and affective way of writing. Like many high-medieval intellectuals, Anselm was a product of the Con­ tinental Latinate culture. He was born and raised in Aosta (Northern Italy), in a noble family of declining fortune – his mother Ermenberga came from a junior branch of the Counts of Savoy family. His father Gundulf may have been of somewhat lower status and is depicted by Eadmer as reckless and worldly, in opposition to his prudent and pious wife. Anselm recalled acute misery and brutality of his early education as he was sent, at a very young age, to one of his uncles, a canon of Aosta, who effectively imprisoned the boy in his house to make him study without distractions – a strategy which seriously affected the child, who, once he was allowed to come back home, shut down and avoided social interactions. Ermenberga, alarmed, instructed the household servants to allow the boy any whim, and he eventually got better. After that, his education was entrusted to the cathedral school, which he must have attended on a daily basis while living with his parents. Not yet fifteen, Anselm attempted to join a monastery but was turned down in the absence of his father’s consent; the disappointment caused him to fall ill, and it was probably the support of his mother that helped him to bounce back once again. Anselm’s attachment to his mother ‘was one of the formative influences in his life’, and the loss of her in his later teens, perhaps following the birth of his only surviving sibling, sister Richeza, came as a painful blow, especially as his relationship with his father deteriorated. This hostility eventually caused Anselm to leave home, with little preparation and with only one attendant, about 1056, and to cross the Alps into France, nearly dying of cold and starvation (Niskanen 2019, xviii– xix, Southern 1990, 7–11). After several years of wandering, presumably sustained by his mother’s relatives in Burgundy and France, he joined his fellow countryman Lanfranc, a renowned scholar, at the abbey of Bec in Normandy. Despite his dislike of his father, who also entered a monastery around the time of Anselm’s departure from Aosta, he did not cut ties with his immediate family altogether: he provided for and kept in regular contact with Richeza, and was actively involved in the ecclesiastical career of his nephew Anselm the Junior from the latter’s young age. But it was Bec that provided Anselm with his most stable attachments: first Lanfranc, who became his paternal figure and whom he eventually followed to England after Lanfranc was made Archbishop of Canterbury, and then a number of fellow monks such as Doms Gundulf and Gilbert Crispin, who became his life-long friends and later occupied important posts within the Anglo-Norman ecclesiastical hierarchy.

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It is to them that Anslem addresses his most emotionally intense letters, especially early in his monastic career. Writing to Gundulf in the early 1070s, soon after the death of his then-closest friend, Osbern (whom he refers to ‘my beloved’, ‘dulcissim[us] me[us]’), he professes: ‘I have seen you to be such that I love you in the way you know. I hear you to be such that I long for you in the way God knows. Wherever you may wander, therefore, my love follows you, and wherever I may stay, my desire embraces you.’ He then applies the psalmist’s words about Jerusalem (Ps. 136(137):6) to his friend: ‘Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I have not pointed out Gundulf among my prime friends.’ Anselm immediately makes sure he dismisses his father, his friend’s namesake, to emphasise ‘his’ Gundulf’s closeness; at this stage he refers to John Cassian’s idea of friendship as indissoluble companionship, not bound by consanguinity: ‘I do not speak here about Gundulf the layman, my father, but Gundulf the monk, our brother’. It is not clear why Anselm refers to his father as a layman – did he not believe the sincerity of his late-life conversion and vows? He continues with a series of rhetorical questions: ‘For how could I forget you? How could he who has been imprinted on my heart like a seal on wax be removed from my memory? Furthermore, why […] do you complain so sorrowfully that you never see my letters and demand so affectionately (tanto amore quaeris) that you should often receive them although you always have my consciousness with you?’ He finishes the section by confessing his sureness in their common worldview and shared emotions: ‘Even when you are silent, I know you love me, and when I do not say a word, you know I love you. You know as well as I that I have no doubts about you and I am your witness that you are sure of me. Since we are together now fully aware of our consciousness of each other, this only remains: that we inform each other of the matters concerning us, so that we may together either rejoice or worry for each other’ (Niskanen 2019, i.4, 17–9). Cassianian rhetoric apart, this is a striking display of secure attachment, especially in the face of a recent loss: unlike Ecgburg or Goscelin, he is not demanding immediate displays of comfort and affection, nor implicitly blames his own sadness on his friend. Anselm returns to this sentiment in his later letters to Gundulf: ‘what will my letter tell you that you do not already know, O you my other soul?’, asks he (Niskanen 2019, i.14, 45–7). These were not mere words: later, as Gundulf became the bishop of Rochester, he was the only English hierarch to support Anselm consistently in his conflicts with King William II and Henry I. Even their deaths were only several months apart. A similar bond existed between Anselm and Gilbert Crispin, his student and aide at Bec, and later the Abbot of Westminster. Their separation caused Anselm much pain after Gilbert moved to England with Lanfranc. On receiving

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presents from Gilbert, Anselm writes: ‘Sweet are the gifts from you, my sweetest friend (amice dulcissime), and yet they can in no way comfort my heart in its longing for your loving self, from whom it is separated. Even if you sent me all fragrant perfumes, all glittering metals, all precious stones, all varieties of woven beauty, my heart would refuse – nay, it would be unable – to be healed of its wound, which it can do only if by receiving its other half, torn away. The anguish that these thoughts inflict on my heart is proof, the tears dimming my eyes, running down my face and falling on the fingers that write this letter are proof.’ However, Anselm characteristically turns this forced separation into a tool for self-knowledge: ‘And yet, you knew my love for you as well as I do – but I did not know it in full. He who separated (scidit – lit. cut, forcefully separated, tore asunder) us from each other has shown me how much I love you. […] For, when I had not experienced your absence, I did not know how sweet it was to be with you and how bitter without you.’ He then acknowledges his jealousy: ‘But, thanks to that selfsame separation of ours, you enjoy the company of the man whom you love no less but surely more [i.e. Lanfranc] whereas I have been given nobody in your stead after you were taken away from me. While you rejoice in your consolation, all I have is a wound in my soul.’ Yet Anselm quickly curbs his complaints and instead attempts to see the situation from other people’s perspective while inviting them to see it from his own: ‘My words to you may well offend the men who are now blessed with your company. But if they rejoice in holding on to what they desired, why would they disapprove of the grief of a man who was deprived of his true love? If they are able to put themselves in my position, they will excuse me. At least you should understand in some way how compassionately, how consolingly they would do it and how my pain would ease, a pain which no one wishes to soothe (consolari) who could and no one can soothe who would.’ Finally, Anselm expresses his wish for everyone’s comfort and benefit as a prayer to God: ‘May He who can do whatever He wills comfort me so that He makes nobody sad, and may He make nobody sad so that He preserves everyone’s love for you unimpaired. Amen.’ (Niskanen 2019, i.75, 217–9). Indeed, Anselm was remarkably good at making and keeping friends and evidently possessed a significant emotional intelligence, a quality rare in his day and age. One of many episodes to highlight these qualities of Anselm is a story of Osbern, a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury. When Anselm still served as the prior of Bec, his predecessor, paternal figure and father superior Lanfranc was made Archbishop of Canterbury and entrusted by William the Conqueror with enforcing the Norman ways of worship and supressing the rebelliousness of the English monks. The leader of the rebels, Osbern, was shipped to Bec in hope of being disciplined by Anselm. Lanfranc’s plan, however, backfired

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spectacularly. Instead of disciplining the exile, Anselm spent long hours trying to see things from Osbern’s point of view, learned about unfair the treatment of the Anglo-Saxon saints by the archbishop, eloquently and humorously pleaded Osbern’s case with Lanfranc and eventually sent the rebel back to Christ Church, Canterbury with a glowing testimonial (‘his conduct in our midst has been such that he deserves loving affection rather than any sort of severity from everyone who sincerely loves the resolve of goodwill’), making himself a hero among the English monks and Osbern his life-long supporter (letters i.31, i.49 and i.57 in Niskanen 2019). Anselm even persuaded Lanfranc to change his mind about some of the aspects of the pre-conquest liturgical practice while retaining an affectionate relationship with both the old and the new friend. Friendship was the backbone not only of Anselm’s church diplomacy but also of his theological compositions: all but one of Anselm’s written works ‘may be regarded as organized selections made by himself from long-continued discussions and expositions with monastic friends’ (Southern 2009). Affection and empathy, however, were in short supply in the world of realpolitik that Anselm got sucked into after reluctantly accepting the role of Archbishop of Canterbury; he evidently enjoyed his exiles as they provided some much-needed leisure to visit his old friends and make new ones – and, more importantly, to think, pray and write. This ability for empathy, for seeing things from other people’s perspective while keeping one’s own in focus, are the trademarks of secure attachment, together with the combination of affect and cognition, so evident in Anselm’s writings which display both the strict logic of early scholasticism and the beginnings of affective piety. In other words, Anselm was equally fond of tears and scholarly discussions: indeed, he ‘developed his highly personal method of meditative enquiry, to which he gave the programmatic name “faith seeking understanding”’ (Southern 2009). It was Anselm’s ability to integrate other people’s points of view into his own outlook rather than simply consistently defending his own (like Bernard of Clairvaux did) that made him one of the greatest thinkers of his time and beyond. This ability for integration also suggests secure attachment: both Anselm and Bernard received the rhetorical training in personae, yet only in Anselm did it flourish into empathy and diplomacy. However, this was most probably an earned security, resulting from his reorganising efforts in the relative comfort and calm of the Bec years. It is hard to tell what Anselm’s initial attachment strategy was, but given his rather rocky early history it may well have been insecure: he did experience some early and evidently frightening separation (of being locked up in a relative’s house for education – with all the harsh punishments which traditionally went with it)

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as well as the ostensible tension between his mother and his father and the need to take sides. He may have idealised his devout mother and vilified this worldly father, although such triangulation is already found in Augustine’s Confessions and was subsequently made almost stereotypical in hagiography, so we do not know how much it was amplified or toned down by Eadmer when he interpreted Anselm’s own memories and attitudes. Eadmer himself had been at Christ Church as an oblate since the age of at least six or seven, so we can only imagine how much this experience coloured his vision of a family. Yet we have seen Anselm in his early letter to his father’s namesake clearly the making point that the affection for Gundulf the monk of Bec was not to be mistaken for his parent. Although a diagnostic approach to such a remote material can only be a speculation, allow me a brief insertion of a DMM lens to consider these tendencies further. Anselm’s triangulation with his mother as well as his psychosomatic reaction to rejection after his first attempt to become a monk is suggestive of hyperactivation of attachment, or the C-type attachment strategy, yet his obedience and self-reliance, as well as true humility despite his later learning (nowhere does he display the megalomaniac traits of Gerald of Wales or Abelard) point to de-activation of attachment, or avoidant attachment (A type). It is therefore probable that by his late teens he leaned towards a disorganised strategy, A with his father and C with his mother. The way he left home indirectly suggests the same: recent research into homeless and runaway adolescents demonstrates that they usually have ‘inadequate caregiver protective relationships and impaired attachment security’, and that ‘a positive relationship with fathers was significantly more protective than the relationship with the mother against the externalizing problem behaviors’ (Stein et al. 2009, 39, 41). Anselm, as we know, ran away with little preparation some years after he lost his mother and after his tensions with his father became unbearable. Traces of the intense anxiety concerning one’s acceptance crop up in Anselm’s early writings: one of his meditations, probably the earliest recorded one, begins ‘My life terrifies me’, although admittedly this same sentiment is only found once more, in an uncharacteristically terrified and depressed prayer to St Nicholas, mentioned in his letter to Abbot Baldric of Bec in 1090. It begins ‘Sinful little man, in such great need, you have grieved God very much’ and continues with ‘my sins are without bounds or limits, my prayer will not be heard’ (Ward and Southern 1973, 185). God cannot, will not hear Anselm because of his grave sins, so a powerful intercessor like St Nicholas is his only hope. The search for redemption is at the heart of Anselm’s theological thinking, as epitomised by his most famous treatise, Cur Deus Homo. In it he suggests that God the Father allowed the death of His Son to repay Himself a debt of Juliana Dresvina - 978-90-04-50016-7 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 05:28:36PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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honour instead of humans: ‘God’s intervention in the universe was necessary to prevent the frustration of the divine plan of the universe through human sin; and since the corruption had a human source, it was necessary for the second person in the Trinity to become man’ (Southern 2009). It took another three hundred years and a woman to suggest a more charitable view of the original sin and redemption. However, in the overwhelming majority of his prayers and meditations Anselm displays affectionate, personal relationships with Christ, Mary, and saints, abundantly using the same highly evocative language as in the letters to his friends. In his prayer to St John the Evangelist, he meditates on the saint’s friendship with Christ, Anselm’s own friendship with John, and the community of believers who avoid sin as the friends of God. He goes as far, in his famous prayer to St Paul, as to call the apostle a sweet and tender nurse and a mother of the faithful sons of the church, which leads him to speak of Christ as a mother to both Paul and himself: ‘And you, Jesus, are you not also a mother? Are you not the mother who, like a hen, gathers her chickens under her wings? [Matthew 23:37] Truly, Lord, you, too, are a mother. For what others laboured and gave birth to, they received from you. You had died in labour prior to them, and by dying you gave birth to them and to those who they gave birth’ (here the translation is mine as I disagree with Ward’s rendering of the last three sentences, ‘Vere, domine, et tu mater. Nam et quod alii parturierunt et pepererunt, a te acceperunt. Tu prius illos et quod pepererunt parturiendo mortuus es et moriendo peperisti’). Anselm finishes his prayer by expressing hope for comfort and ultimate protection – the protection against death: Christ, my mother, you gather your chickens under your wings; this dead chicken of yours puts himself under those wings. For by your gentleness the badly frightened are comforted, by your sweet smell the despairing are revived, your warmth gives life to the dead, your touch justifies sinners. Mother, know again your dead son, both by the sign of your cross and the voice of his confession. Warm your chicken, give life to your dead man, justify your sinner. Let your terrified one be consoled by you; despairing of himself, let him be comforted by you; and in your whole and unceasing grace let him be refashioned by you. Ward and Southern 1973, 152–6

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Apart from creatively developing the existing theological topos of the maternity of God, perfected later by Julian of Norwich, can he be recalling the comfort and affection of his own mother, who died giving birth to his sister? Anselm’s relentless search for meaning resulted in him psychologically reorganising his early experiences, negotiated via Christian devotion and propped by a supportive monastic community of Bec, which allowed him to develop a more stable, secure attachment strategy in his maturity. By the end of his life Anselm even reconciled himself with his father, including Gundulf into the obit book of Christ Church, Canterbury to be commemorated by monks in their prayers in perpetuity, together with ‘Ermenburga mater domini Ancelmi Archiepiscopi’ (Robson 1996). 2.1.4 Romantic Attachment, Anxiety, and the Help of God (or Not) The examples discussed so far prioritised spiritual kinship, even if the correspondents were related through blood. They illustrate the variety of adult attachments in pre-modern Europe, where friendship or superior-subordinate relationship was a widespread primary attachment unlike today, when a romantic partner is a typical primary attachment figure in adulthood (Zeifman and Hazan 2016). Yet romantic attachment certainly existed in the pre-modern period, with the reservation that fewer marriages were conducted with affection being the primary driving force, as the general trajectory in the West was gradual acceptance of love as the basis for marriage (Gottlieb 1993, 52–3). As the fifteenth century progressed and functional literacy spread, more corpora of family letters survive, giving us a better chance to peek into the everyday life. However, with ars dictaminis having been in place for a few centuries, there is no sudden outburst of affect: the letters of the Pastons, the Stonors, the Celys are often formulaic and business-like – after all, paper was still expensive and not so easy to obtain, and letters were expected to convey the most important practical information (Beadle 2004, 290–4). They do contain scattered references to God or saints, but they are mostly impersonal or clichéd, even in the epistles of the individuals who are known to be quite devout, like Margaret Paston or Thomas Betson (of the Stonors collection). God is usually mentioned more often in references to danger (i.e. in a situation of attachment activation), for instance, a threat of a viral disease like pox or plague. There are, however, several examples where God is regularly appealed to, not as an immediate attachment figure but as a lord, judge, and paterfamilias, in situations sparking serious attachment anxiety. One such instance is a letter sent in 1469 by Richard Calle (probably in his early thirties) to Margery Paston, who was about ten years younger. Calle was the bailiff of the vast and troubled Paston estates in Norfolk, and Margery

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the elder daughter of his employers, John and Margaret Paston. Intelligent, immensely capable and loyal, Calle became indispensable to the Pastons but, as they made it their rule to marry above themselves, was hardly a desirable match for Margery. At some point in spring 1469 Richard and Margery entered a clandestine marriage, which scandalised the family and the neighbours; Calle was dismissed and left Norfolk, while Margery was put under a house arrest. With her father dead and her elder brother busy in London, the matter of forcing her to renounce the marriage vows fell to her second brother, John Paston III, and especially her mother Margaret Paston and paternal grandmother Agnes Paston, the matriarchs of the family. Given that Agnes was known to have badly beaten up her own daughter Elizabeth, especially when she refused to marry the match her mother chose (Elizabeth Clere to John Paston I, in Davis 2004, hereafter PLP, II: 32), Margery’s wellbeing and safety was a matter of acute concern for Richard. It is at that time he sends her a striking letter, an undated and unsigned autograph, with a lot of emendations and cancellations. It is less formulaic, and even the letter-writing conventions and vocabulary he employs are manipulated to convey his affect. Margery probably never saw it: at the end he asks her not to show it to anyone and burn it after she reads it – he had good reasons to be worried that the paper would end up in the hands of her family, describing how in the recent past her mother was repeatedly sending people to his servant claiming they come from Margery and demanding ‘a letter or a token which I should have sent you’ (PLP II: 499). Since the letter survived, it, too, may have been intercepted. Calle’s writing has an air of immediacy, and its spontaneous nature is evident in the emotional see-saw, now conveying his love and acute anxiety about not being able to contact her (‘me seems it is a [thousand] years ago since that I spoke with you; I would have rather left all the goods of the world if I [only] may be with you’), now imagining the disastrous scenario of Margery withdrawing the vows of matrimony under pressure (if she did so, he writes, ‘you neither did it according to the conscience nor to the pleasure of God, unless you did it for fear and to please for the time being those who were around you at that time’). Although he does acknowledge that Margery was subjected to a hell of a treatment by her furious mother and irate grandmother (‘I understand, lady, you have had as much sorrow for me as any gentlewoman has had in the world; I wish to God all that sorrow you have had rested upon me so that you can be discharged of it’), the leitmotif of the letter is ‘be true, tell the truth that we indeed bound ourselves with the holy matrimony and cannot thus be separated’. Calle is clearly struggling to make sense of the situation as he cannot gain any contact with Margery and all his messages are either undelivered or disappear into the void; he is deeply

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alarmed by the news (presumably conveyed by Margaret Paston’s messengers) that Margery renounced him, which part of him is starting to believe as the evidence to the contrary is absent. Worse still, he confesses he fails to understand how he deserved such a cruel treatment after years of faithful service, especially from Margaret whom he had previously informed of the marriage (‘God knows she knew it first from me and none other’) and whom he had considered his attachment figure as well: ‘I did not know what her mastership means, for, by my troth, there is no gentlewoman alive that my heart tenders more than it does to her, nor is loath to displease, saving only your person, which of very right I ought to tender and love best’. Calle’s despair culminates at the end of the letter: ‘Mistress, I am afraid to write to you, for I understand that you have shown my letters that I have sent you before this time; but I pray you let no creature see this letter. As soon as you have read it let it be burned … You had no writing from me these two years, nor will I not send you no more; therefore I remit all this matter to your wisdom’ (PLP II: 500). Calle, although not University educated but still highly literate and fluent in both English and French, unravels in this last sentence, displaying affective dysfluency, as he accidentally swaps the subject and the object – he was obviously trying to say ‘I had no writing from you these two years’ – and then slips into the triple negative in ‘nor will I not send you no more’, which is acceptable but certainly not encouraged in polished Middle English prose. One does get an impression that his normally articulate style is clouded with affect; he has exhausted his resources, and the ball is in Margery’s court now. Finally, he pulls himself together enough to acknowledge the subversion of the closing epistolary convention, sandwiched between two abbreviated formulae: ‘This letter was written with as great pain as ever wrote I [any]thing in my life, for in good faith I have been right sick and yet am not verily well at ease, God amend it etc.’. There is, however, another player to this drama: God, who is mentioned consistently every couple of lines, sometimes every line, and certainly as often as Margery herself, which by the standards of the corpus is extremely high. His presence in Richard’s letter is tangible, as, although Calle does not address Him directly, he sees His role as that of the ultimate master, witness, and the judge of the situation. Fifteenth-century English society was extremely legalistic, and the Pastons, who spent decades in various lawsuits and nearly half of whose men were trained in law, were acutely aware of the importance of powerful patronage deriving from a close connection between the supplicant and his lord. Apart from Margery’s steadfastness (of which Richard by then had no evidence), his only hope was God’s comfort, protection, interference or, if their case failed, potential punishment. The image of God is thus brought in as a substitute attachment figure to regulate negative affect. As Calle repeatedly Juliana Dresvina - 978-90-04-50016-7 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 05:28:36PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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stresses, they did nothing wrong before God, and by virtue of their mutual vows Margery is ‘before God my true wife’, hence those who are trying to break up the marriage cause ‘a great displeasure to God’ as well as damnation to their own souls (‘that peril that we should be in I beseech God it may lie upon them and not upon us’), although he is careful to insist that he does not wish that to any of her relatives, praying to God instead to guide them to a right decision. But even constant appeals to God do not balance out Richard’s emotional see-saw: despite somewhat optimistically stating at the beginning that suffer as they do now ‘in the long way God will in his righteousness help his servants and mean truly and want to live according to his laws’, he finishes by the exasperated ‘God amend it etc.’, as if he had as little hope in God’s help as he had in Margery’s loyalty. Luckily for Richard, his desperately proclaimed faith in both (the bailiff doth protest too much, methinks) was not deceived. Whether or not she was lured into the marriage by Calle, who thus hoped to improve his financial and social standing as John III and Margaret suggested in their letters, Margery was clearly more attached to Richard than to her blood family. When thoroughly grilled by the Bishop of Norwich in September 1469, she was not intimidated but stuck to her guns, insisting that their marriage contract was binding, with Calle confirming the same under separate interrogations. Her mother, who had high hopes for this hearing and who clearly expected that the Bishop would make Margery recant, does not hide her fury as she writes to her elder son: ‘we have lost in her just a brethele [a wretch] … and if he [Calle] were dead at this hour, she would never be in my heart again’. ‘For wit you well,’ she adds, ‘she shall full sorely repent her lewdness hereafter, and I pray God that she might [do] so’ (Margaret Paston to John Paston II, 10/11 September 1469, PLP I: 343). After the hearing Margery was not allowed home, cut off from the family, and, perhaps to her relief, forced to board with the Bishop. Whether or not Margery ever regretted her youthful commitment, she and Richard had at least twenty years and three surviving children together. Calle did not stay unemployed for long, as his now reluctant in-laws realised that he was unwithoutable and reinstated him as general manager of their estates. And before her death, some thirteen years later, Margaret accepted the union enough to leave a bequest to her daughter’s children in her will. Richard remained employed by and closely associated with the Pastons even after Margery’s death; his letters, never since written in a state of acute anxiety and attachment activation, feature no more references to God past closing formulae. Eight years later, in February of 1477, Margery’s brother John Paston III received a seemingly similar distressed letter from his own love interest, eighteen-year-old Margery Brews, a daughter of Paston’s wealthy neighbours. Juliana Dresvina - 978-90-04-50016-7 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 05:28:36PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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She, too, requests that ‘no earthly creature’ sees ‘this bill’ (written by a family scribe apart from her shaky signature), appeals to God at least thrice, and reports poor physical and mental health at the prospect of separation from John (PLP I: 662–3). She even encloses, as appropriate for love letters, two little verses – one describing her silent suffering, and the other expressing hope for the better. This became the most famous of the Paston writings, cited by the media every February as the first surviving Valentine letter. Put in context, however, it is a rather far cry from Calle’s emotional address. By 1477 John Paston III had spent over a decade on the matrimonial market with no apparent success, as the Pastons’ expectations were high, yet John III was not even the eldest son, although technically in charge of the family estates and with the hope of inheriting them one day as his elder brother was still unmarried. So when Sir Thomas Brews’s daughter became available, he was all ready to jump to the occasion. It quickly turned out, however, that the would-be bride was worth less than the Pastons had originally expected, and Margaret was considering the possibility of the engagement falling through. Margery Brews, no doubt pushed by her mother, had to act quickly. Sweet and sincere as her letter to John III sounds, this sweetness is well-calculated. Her references to God are formulaic, and, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, the ‘suffering’ couplet is a distorted quote from John Lydgate’s Life of St Margaret, probably from memory, and not of her own making, as some scholars suggested (Dresvina 2016, 113). She puts her central message rather clearly; having implied that her mother cannot get more dowry money out of her father, she says: ‘But if you love me (as I trust verily you do), you will not leave me because of it. For, if you had not half the livelode [property, income] that you have, and I had to work as hard as any woman alive might do, I would not forsake you’ – a safe claim to make in a clause which a Latin grammarian would recognise as casus irrealis, as John III was loaded even by the Brews’s comfortable standards. Given his mother’s stiff morals as well as her formidable grip on the household (a couple of year earlier Margaret did not hesitate to sack her third son Edmund’s trusted servant for bringing a tart – of a human variety – to one of the Paston’s properties, even though the hapless valet claimed he had not had a chance to enjoy the trophy, see PLP I: 635–6), thirty-three-year-old John was so desperate for this match to finally be made that the sincerity of Margery’s attachment anxiety did not really matter to him. His attachment to Margaret Paston, however, is evident from the letter he sent her as she was about to embark on a secret mission of negotiating Margery’s dowry with the girl’s mother, Dame Elizabeth Brews, which he anxiously concludes: ‘And, mother, for God’s sake, take care that you make sure you take no cold on the way to Norwich, for it is the most perilous March that ever was seen by any man living’ (PLP I: 605–6). ‘For he’, as Tom Lehrer would have said, ‘LOVED his mother’. Juliana Dresvina - 978-90-04-50016-7 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 05:28:36PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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2.1.5 Coda: From the Sublime to the Ridiculous It should be stressed at this concluding point that God does not have to be an attachment figure, and we should not be under the impression that a relationship with God is a must for a medieval devotee, especially a professed one, as preached by Rolle, Goscelin or Aelred, nor is God necessarily evoked in a situation of anxiety, separation, or stress: the case of a Norfolk abbot writing to his love-interest, a Cambridgeshire nun, in Anglo-French verse (with some Latin and Middle English) in the first half of the fourteenth century suggests otherwise. Questions of its genuine nature aside (Putter 2015), it displays no separation anxiety and no guilt about the romantic attachment between two people who professed celibacy: in fact, the first letter begins, rather uncelibately, ‘M[arguerete], ma especiele, /Vus estes bone e bele,/ Gardez qe vus seez lele/Aval la mámele’ (‘Margarete, my special one, you are good and beautiful. Make sure you are true from the breast down’) (Meyer 1901, 434). The hopeful and confident abbot does not need God in his optimistic view of his relationship prospects with Margaret  – as he makes clear in his second letter, the only thing he is afraid of is human gossip: ‘sachez, ne fusent maveyses langes, jeo fuse mesmes a vus venuz’ (‘know if it weren’t for the evil tongues I would have come to you in person’). Tellingly, the devout formula requesting prayers is cut short as irrelevant: ‘priez pur moy, etc’ (‘pray for me and so on’) (Meyer 1909, 436, 438). Margaret’s nunnery appears to have been a daughter-house of the amorous abbot’s monastery, as he finishes his second letter with an admonition: ‘E veez qe vus seez obedient/ al abbé e a covent/ e noméement al abbé./ Loke nou that hit so be’, ‘And see that you keep obedience to abbot and convent – and especially the abbot. Look now that it will be so’). However, his hopes for the genuine reciprocity from a woman who was dependent on him got shattered by Margaret failing to come to him at Lynn on his request and command (‘jeo vus priay [et] en obedience comanday qe vus vensisez par may de Lynne’). Admittedly, she later did send him a letter to explain herself, but the abbot was having nun of it. The missed date made the frustrated sexlesiastic lash out in a mini-sermon (entirely in prose as opposed to the first two epistles in verse, as love letters require) claiming that by standing him up she broke the vows of ‘vostre obedience e vostre profession’ without noticing the evident irony of the situation. In this letter God features thrice not as a relatable entity but as the speaker’s more powerful avatar: ‘To God, let him have you in his care and amend your state, especially in these holy times! And do not dwell in despair, for surely if you will, you can easily make amends towards God and towards me in this way: through confession, through contrition and through atonement. Remember this saying which you know well, because in this way must every man make amends towards God and towards the world’ (‘A Dieu, Juliana Dresvina - 978-90-04-50016-7 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 05:28:36PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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qe vus eit en sa garde e amende vostre estât, nomement en ceo seint tens; e ne seez pas en despeir, qe certes, si vus volez, vus poez de leger fere les amendes vers Dieu e vers moy en ceste manere par confession, par contrición, et par satisfaction. Ceste proverbe recordez que vus la bien sachiez, qe, certes, en ceste manere deit chekun hone sey amender vers Dieu et vers le siècle’, Meyer 1909, 439). Given the context of the previous two missives, one wonders what sort of ‘penance tiele com vus avez deservye’ (‘the penance that you deserve’) and ‘les amendes’ ‘par satisfaction’ he was anticipating. 2.2 ‘Self-Narratives’ and Life-Writing Just as in the case of pre-modern letters that always appear as having passed through multiple social, cultural, and rhetorical filters, medieval ‘autobiographies’, or examples of life-writings and self-narratives more broadly, are products of their day and age and should not be approached with the modern expectations of the genre. Instead of subjectivity, many of them are likely to emphasise exemplarity (‘a demonstration of the generalized meaning of a particular life in its illustration of broad human or transcendental truths’, Fleming 2014, 35) and the confessional mode which frames the narrative of one’s life as an extended penitential prayer and an illustration of God’s glory, wisdom, and benevolence. Following the great example of Augustine, the Monodies by Guibert of Nogent (c. 1055–1124), and Historia Calamitatum by Peter Abelard (c. 1079–1142) display these traits. Even where the influence is not evident, conversion is another central event for medieval ‘autobiography’. Once again, this goes back to Augustine, as well as early hagiography – holy biography – and ultimately to St Paul. The Book of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich’s Shewings are both examples of a conversion as the impulse to write. Furthermore, applying methods of psychology to historic texts is neither simple nor straightforward, especially when it comes to medieval material. Following the models and topoi of the auctoritas was the way an educated medieval author was expected to write. However, there is no reason to treat any medieval texts solely as a rhetorical exercise: being examples of longer narrative spans, they correspond closer to AAI sections and provide more material for discourse analysis than letters. It is true that both Augustine and Guibert of Nogent, the darlings of psychohistory, produced highly calculated and polished versions of their life-story: as a recent scholar of Guibert warns, he ‘did not simply spill his soul onto parchment and unwittingly throw open windows onto his psyche’ (Rubenstein 2002, 13). Yet even if it was all constructed out of theoretical teachings of theology and psychology of their days along with quotations from the Scriptures and earlier writers, it is what they did with these theories and quotations which leaves us with an impression of what sort of

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persons they were. In the pre-Freudian era people often left their subconscious hang out for everyone to see, telling their readers rather more than they had intended. If Augustine’s invectives against sexual urges or Guibert’s frequent references to faeces and genitals in the context of punishment and mutilation can be interpreted as rhetorical devices of moral theologians, why can’t they be seen as reflections of a trauma or a neurosis? It is true that certain traits could be read as topoi rather than biographical facts, e.g. the juxtaposition of a pious good mother with a worldly insensitive father in Augustine, Anselm, and Guibert, with all these authors following the ‘emasculated’ clerical career instead of the macho knighthood. Yet it is not inconceivable that their fathers followed the culturally engrained gender roles and were indeed insensitive or unsympathetic to their sons’ chosen career or to their mothers, whose piety was a way of coping with a lack of agency, spousal rape, and the dangers of multiple pregnancies and births. The Later Middle Ages witnessed a growing need for self-narratives and the expanding boundaries of the ‘genre’: we find features of (quasi)autobiography, or ‘autographies’, not necessarily spiritual, in the poetic works of many Middle English poets: Thomas Hoccleve, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, William Langland, John Gower, and Osbern Bokenham (Spearing 2012). A number of prison writings with a strong autobiographic component, developing the tradition of St Paul and Boethius, emerged at the same time (Summers 2004). Finally, self-narratives were not always penned in the first person or in one’s own hand, especially in the case of women: for example, the Life of a twelfth-century English recluse Christina of Markyate is likely to have been ‘written with input from its redoutable subject’ (Windeatt 2016, 16). The same applies to the Book of Margery Kempe, who had to dictate her life experiences to a succession of literate men. In her book, she is referred to as ‘this creature’, yet none of the men managed to edit out her idiosyncratic voice, producing a genre-defying text, ‘mimetic of how Kempe’s own way of life could never fit comfortably with established roles and lifestyles’ (Windeatt 2016, 22). A similar thing can be said about the genre of another third-person narrative, Gerald of Wales’s De Rebus a se Gestis (On the Deeds That He Himself Has Done, hereafter DRSG), usually translated as Autobiography. 2.2.1 Gerald of Wales: ‘The Deeds He Himself Has Done’ Written between 1208 and 1216 (Bartlett 2006, 178) in three books (the latter part of Book 3 is now lost), De Rebus a se Gestis by Gerald de Barri, known as Gerald of Wales (Latin: Giraldus Cambrensis) fits neither the confessional nor the hagiographic mode, and there is no conversion in it. Unlike Augustine, Gerald had no interest in agonising about his inner conflicts, motives, or emotions: he was

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writing Gesta, that is a third-person history of what he did, how it felt, and how people reacted to it, from childhood to his present day. Although this led some scholars to dismiss DRSG as an autobiography ‘because he is less concerned in attempting to understand his nature or to make us comprehend his mode of acting’ (Lehmann 1953, 50), this work of his, and to a degree everything else in the vast literary legacy Gerald produced, leaves a modern reader with a taste of a consistent and colourful personality, which does not always agree with the self-image Gerald was trying to construct in his writings. Discussing medieval Western autobiographies, John Fleming recently commented about Peter Abelard: ‘He presents himself as the victim of inexplicable calumnies and unreasonable professional resentments and antipathies, but he does so in a fashion that suggests his obliviousness to his own insufferable cockiness’ (Fleming 2014, 40). The same can be applied to Gerald, who must have heard of Abelard during his early studies in Paris. Pompous, moany and at times downright grumpy, both men were brilliant scholars who displayed consistent signs of C-type (preoccupied) attachment strategies, demonstrating similar signs of megalomania, standing firmly in their own perspective, and often using their talents to sneer at others and externally project their own inadequacies. Unlike Abelard, Gerald was lucky to never have been cast low enough to at least try and internalise the virtue of humility: ‘Though he shared the penitential culture of the asceticism of his age, Gerald had few doubts concerning either the superior nature of his own qualities or the political justice of his lifelong ecclesiastical cause’ (Fleming 2014, 41). His eagerly embraced misogyny and pronounced disgust for sex saved Gerald from the fate worse than death. Born in castle Manorbier c. 1146, Gerald was the youngest son of a member of the Norman military aristocracy and a granddaughter of a Welsh king (his maternal grandmother was princess Nest ferch Rhys, nicknamed ‘Helen of Wales’, who started her career as a mistress to Henry I – a connection Gerald was well aware and proud of, as status trumps sex). The divided Anglo-Norman vs Welsh allegiances of his family mirrored the complex world around him, divided and full of conflict, and he spent years trying and testing his identity. Gerald’s three older brothers were trained to follow their father’s military profession but, being the youngest, he had almost no chance of anything but an ecclesiastic career. In the opening chapter of DRSG he relates how, while his brothers built sand castles, he built sand cathedrals: when the other three [brothers], preluding the pursuits of manhood in their childish play, were tracing or building, in sand or dust, now towns, now palaces, he himself, in like prophetic play, was ever busy with all his

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might in designing churches or building monasteries. And his father, who often saw him thus engaged, after much pondering, not unmixed with wonder, being moved by this omen, resolved with wise forethought to set him to study letters and the liberal arts, and would oft in approving jest call him ‘his Bishop’. DRSG: 35

While it is tempting to read this episode as cute, one wonders who Gerald was trying to convince: his audience would have known perfectly well it was not prophecy but necessity that caused his parents to push him in the direction of the Church. He proceeded immediately to describe how, when he was a small child, during a terrifying enemy attack on the castle amidst the commotion and men rushing to their arms he ‘burst into tears and, seeking some place of safety, begged that he might be carried to the church, thus with marvellous foreknowledge proclaiming that the peace of the church and the sanctuary of God’s house should be the strongest and most secure place of refuge’ (35–6). In a situation of danger he does not mention running to either of his parents and receiving comfort and protection; in fact, they are barely referred to outside his recitation of his illustrious pedigree. Here Gerald internalises his family’s view of him and draws false conclusions: instead of ‘I was pushed in that direction by my family and was not given a choice’ he says ‘I was destined to become a great ecclesiastic from birth’; instead of ‘I was not feeling safe in my own home’ he claims to have possessed a ‘marvellous foreknowledge’ of his illustrious future. It is profoundly sad that as a child he felt ‘greater safety for himself in a lonely church exposed to all the winds and to the strokes of chance than in a town filled with men-at-arms and strongly fortified with walls and towers’ (DRSG: 36). With all his subsequent display of invulnerability, self-reliance, and braggadocio, he must have been chronically insecure. Gerald was extremely proud of his education. At home, he claims to have been allowed to participate in adult conversations (‘as often as he heard disputes concerning the law of the land and the law of the Church, the boy would put himself forward with all his might as the advocate and champion of the Church’, DRSG: 36), which would have been unusual if not unlikely. His early education was supervised by his maternal uncle David Fitzgerald, bishop of St David’s, and his clerks. Initially they found his knowledge of Latin short of their standards, which Gerald characteristically for a C-type blames on someone else: ‘in his childhood he was not a little impeded by the companionship of his brothers, who on holidays would play together and praise the knightly tasks of their chosen profession, and so his progress in learning was far slower than it should have been’ (DRSG: 36). Later he dismissively called his brother Philip Juliana Dresvina - 978-90-04-50016-7 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 05:28:36PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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‘laicus ergo illiteratus’ (‘lay hence illiterate’, which does not necessarily imply that he was completely illiterate – it could mean that Philip was not properly schooled in Latin). The main methods of these pedagogues were chiding, correction, and mockery (all of which the adult Gerald mastered to perfection), as the clerks shouted degrees of comparison of the adjectives ‘thick’ and ‘stupid’ in the boy’s face. Gerald claimed that these methods worked on him, for ‘he began to make progress, spurred by conscience rather than the rod’ (which can be read as a gratuitous denial of the negative but is more likely to be a display of invulnerability and self-reliance) ‘from very shame rather than through any fear or because of the instruction received from any of his masters. For after this he took to his studies with such vehemence that in a brief space he far outstripped his schoolmates and equals in age’ (36–7). Whether or not his masters were indeed useless, we cannot know, but we do know from Gerald’s other stories that he spent some time being taught at St Peter’s Abbey, Gloucester (where he was apparently remembered for his looks, as a visiting abbot ‘after gazing at me for a while on my coming thither, said, “Think you that such youthful beauty could ever die?”  – words which, brief as they were, none the less moved me deeply’, DRSG: 78). After this preparation, which probably took place between his seventh and fourteenth years, he sailed off to Paris for the first time. There he studied the liberal arts, ‘winning especially fame in the art of rhetoric’ (DRSG: 37); later in life he was to return to Paris twice more and even teach there briefly. Or course Gerald reports he was top of his class: ‘he was so wholly devoted to his studies, and so free from all levity and frivolity both in word and deed that, as often as the teachers of the Arts desired to produce a pattern of excellence from among their best scholars, with one accord they named Giraldus in preference to all the rest’ (ibid.). It is not clear how long he spent there but he was definitely in Paris in the summer of 1165 as he vividly recalls the celebration of the news of the future King Philip Augustus’ birth. He noted that the overwhelming joy made some people think ‘that the city was threatened by a great conflagration’ (DRSG: 38), remembering having been abruptly woken up by the cries of the women, and one wonders if Gerald himself experienced a flashback of that night raid on Manorbier of his childhood. Returning to England, not later than 1174, a brilliant and dashing young man, even if he said so himself, Gerald quickly rose to become the archdeacon of Brecon through his episcopal uncle’s protection and by his exposing the immorality of the previous occupant of that position, who happened to have a concubine. What looked like the first step on a stairway to heaven turned out to be the last, yet status-obsessed Gerald proudly called himself ‘the Archdeacon’ for the rest of his life.

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Whether or not he was really as prodigious as he portrays himself, Gerald did indeed excel in rhetoric. His writings, especially polemical ones, demonstrate excess, his surviving works running the whopping eight volumes of the Rolls Series. Such verbosity was partly typical for scholastic discourse, but one cannot help feeling that his citing of authorities often spills into showing off his education. It is true that his Latin is quite extraordinary, demonstrating a broad range of devices and vocabulary and making Gerald one of the authors who came closest to the Classical examples in their command of Latin, if one disregards his penchant for linguistic equilibristic. He has an anecdote for every occasion and never misses an opportunity for a pun: about the clergy resisting the recent rule of celibacy he writes characteristically: ‘Non ergo libris intendunt sed liberis, non foliis sed filiis, non librorum lectioni sed liberorum dilectioni’ (‘so they care for their babes rather than their books, their families rather than their folios, their baby-rearing rather than their book-reading’) (Brewer et al., 1861–91, III, 326). Yet seen through Grice’s maxims of quantity, relevance, quality, and manner, Gerald’s discourse certainly sins against the former two and occasionally against the latter. It is not just clerical sex Gerald seemed to have issue with, but apparently any sex. The images that accompany copies of his first and most famous work, The Topography of Ireland (TOI, 1186–7), a result of being drawn either by himself or under his direction (Brown 2005, 52), heavily favour gruesome and deviant subjects. The white mare ‘sex, stew, and bath’ kingship ritual, the rape of a woman in the mill of St Fechin with the offender’s sinning member struck with hell fire, the self-castrating beavers who bite off their testicles to avoid being caught by musk-hungry hunters, the woman of Connaught embracing a goat and Johanna of Paris a lion, the ox-man of Wicklow murdered by the locals, the bearded woman of Limerick were just a few sex-and-gore topics his medieval audience could feast their eyes on. With such sensational material in stock, no wonder that his public readings of the TOI at Oxford were a great (if, again, self-reported) success. Another reason for its popularity was the Topography’s imperialist message. Who else but Gerald, who saw everything from his own perspective, which could be also extended to his group (kin, nation, church) whenever it was convenient to him, was better suited to write an apology of a conquest? He had a vested interest in encouraging the Anglo-Norman thrust for conquering Ireland as his brothers and other relatives were among the first English settlers there and heavily benefited from the conquest. Building on the Classical legacy and to an extent on the works of William of Malmesbury, Gerald reinvented ethnography very much for the purposes of justifying the English dominion

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in the British Isles, and one can argue that he also helped invent racism: The Topography of Ireland could have been written by a colonial official in Africa in 1850. To our present purposes, it demonstrates the same mental process as finding faults in people to take their jobs, simply enacted at a national scale. An Empire is not an easy thing to justify if kings are appointed by God, like church officials. When Gerald reports that in a remote part of Ulster the inauguration of a new king required the pretendent to copulate with a white mare, who was then killed, only for the king-to-be to have a bath in its broth and eat its parts, ‘these unrighteous rites being duly accomplished, his royal authority and dominion are ratified’ (TOI: 25), he attacks the office as illegitimate and the man as unworthy – not so different to berating everyone in the church to try to take their jobs. At the same time the Topography and to a lesser extent his later ethnographic work on Wales often avoid drawing conclusions after reporting implausible episodes past indignant moralising, or else they are examples of false cognition, genuine or pretended. When it comes to his taller tales, everything is rumours and stories he heard from sailors. He finishes the story of Caesara, a granddaughter of Noah, arriving to Ireland before the Flood, by saying: ‘For myself, I compile history: it is not my business to impugn it’, which is certainly an odd view of his job as a historian. A graduate of Paris, Gerald was used to looking at the world through dialectic, and parts II and III of the Description of Wales resemble a dialectical discussion, yet he was not brave enough to make a final decision. All this suggests calculated plausible deniability; Gerald did not have to stand by anything, as though he was not quite secure about what he says. As one of Gerald’s biographers noted, ‘His memory was often at fault, but it never lacked colour’ (Powicke 1935, 115), and he was indeed quite sloppy with chronology, especially when remembering events later in life, and mixed up times, places, and persons (Bartlett 2006, 178). What the study of dialectic did to him was to turn Gerald, already argumentative by nature, pugnacious, point-scoring, and fault-finding. To rephrase Max Beerbohm, he was a modest, good-humoured boy; it was Paris that made him insufferable. Always in conflict with someone, the perpetual Archdeacon employed his humour as a weapon, to make jokes at other people’s expense: even his own uncle whom Gerald owed his first and, as it turned out, his last ecclesiastical promotion, received a few dismissive comments. Scathing criticism is Gerald’s forte: on his return from France in 1180 he stopped at Canterbury and enjoyed the hospitality of the monks, yet he scoffs at their elaborate meals and ridicules their habit of gesticulating to each other in the refectory so as not to break the rule of silence: to his taste, they behave not like monks but like monkeys (DRSG: 71–2). His works are generously peppered with numerous

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anecdotes of his own cutting, contemptuous comebacks. Some of these stories now read as ridiculous, such as Gerald’s famous clash with Adam, Bishop of St Asaph’s, over the consecration of a church of contested jurisdiction in Kerry, of which he ‘manfully kept possession’ by rushing there first, finding the hidden church key, meeting the arriving bishop (his senior colleague from Paris whom he however presents as a fellow student) with a glorious procession – bells ringing, incense burning and clerics chanting – followed by Gerald and Adam shouting and attempting to excommunicate each other. Gerald apparently recited his excommunication ‘in a still louder voice’, so the Bishop wisely retreated (DRSG: 49–56). Some of his anecdotes, however, remain genuinely funny, like the story of a possessed man called Meilyr who was harassed by demons who could not stand the truth but were attracted by lies, so he was usually kept demon-free by the monks keeping the Gospel of St John on his lap; when, however, the holy book was replaced with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, the fiends descended on the man en masse, stayed longer than usual, and were particularly demanding (Journey Through Wales, ch. 5). Gerald would not miss an opportunity to remind his audience that he is a better writer than that sensationalist upstart (who’s jealous?). However, when sources other than Gerald’s own reports survive, it is clear that he would at least occasionally get a taste of his own medicine. When in 1199 he was refused St David’s bishopric for the second time, Gerald wrote a long, moany, passive-aggressive, and typically florid letter to Archbishop Hubert Walter, arguing that he had never done anything wrong and therefore did not deserve such a treatment, ‘unless indeed I am to be blamed for my vehement zeal in the study of sacred learning’ (DRSG: 135). To which the Archbishop replied, by means of a terse letter in the Ciceronian meagre style, referring to Gerald’s expressed intention to dedicate himself to the study of the Scriptures, ‘I commend you, concluding from this that you have learned that it is safer to sit and hear the word of God with Mary than to serve with Martha’ (DRSG: 137). Gerald, who for the most of his life was a human doing rather a human being, did not take the veiled advice to shut up and take a seat kindly. He would not miss a chance to get at least some of his own back, recalling with glee Hubert’s inadequate knowledge of Latin ridiculed in public: It happened once that when King Richard used the following Latin formula, “Volumus quod istud fiat coram nobis” [“We will that this happened in our presence”], the Archbishop, who was present with many other great personages, desiring to correct the King, said “coram nos, Domine, coram nos”. And when he heard this the King looked round at Hugh, Bishop of Coventry, a learned and eloquent man, who at once

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replied, “Stick to your own grammar, my Lord, for it is much better”, and his words were followed by loud laughter from all who were present. DRSG: 282–3

It is not the only time when Gerald openly gloats: an air of Schadenfreude surrounds his account of the miserable death of Henry II, the king he was initially so hopeful about (Bartlett 2006, 77). This change of heart also highlights the series of U-turns caused by disappointments in Gerald’s life: first a church administrator and a wannabe bishop; then a University lecturer; afterwards a royal chaplain and a courtier; a scholar; a wannabe archbishop; finally a writer – and always a squabbler. At the end of his life Gerald mulled over his (second) failed attempt to secure the bishopric of St David’s and turn it into an archbishopric only to justify his actions: throughout his career he obstinately stuck to his strategy and when it failed, he simply changed direction and setting and tried to make it work. His ethno-cultural allegiances, instead of being aligned, were usually ‘polarised in accordance with the circumstances – a Welshman when it suited the Anglo-Norman court and an Englishman, on occasion, to his Welsh kin and other Celtic observers’ (Brown 2005, 53). The young Gerald was being as Anglo-Norman as possible to get ahead; the old, bitter Gerald whose career has not worked out says sod it and becomes Welsh, welcoming a potential takeover of Britain by the French crown in 1216, after he got disillusioned in prince John whom he used to love but grew to detest after their joint trip to Ireland: John was every bit as self-centred and scathingly sarcastic as Gerald himself. Gerald’s discourse, recorded in his numerous compositions, points to an insecure attachment of the preoccupied (C) type, with an obsessive component. While acknowledging that his words do not necessarily feature in the attachment context, Gerald is too tempting a case to miss for the application of the DMM lens. Like many C-types, he is a good storyteller, a master of defensive humour, sarcasm, mockery and gotcha, who takes pleasure in his opponents’ mistakes and misfortunes; his imagery is colourful, memorable, and at times disturbing, including the use of deviant sexual images. He is highly confrontational and finds it difficult to see things from others’ perspective, which perhaps cost him his career; he employs evocative language and displays affect, fact distortion and manipulation to his advantage, along with poor temporal order and false cognition. Gerald does not seem to have had any stable friends, always falling out with people around him, and to have fluctuated in terms of his national identity. With a significant stretch and a dozen caveats, one may even suggest a DMM C5 attachment strategy: ‘punitively angry and obsessed with revenge’ (Crittenden and Landini 2011, 206–9).

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People with a C5 strategy do not trust comfort and fear it more than threat, and that is evident in Gerald’s view of God, whom he was notionally chosen to serve from birth. Gerald did not follow a monastic path in this service, displaying contempt more frequently than contemplation, always resenting it when monks occupied administrative ecclesiastic positions. His relationship with God, as Gerald chose to record it, reflects no intense piety like Anselm’s but is rather used to prop up his sense of righteousness, and his entitlement. His devotion to God is not hypocritical but vigorous and active, channelled into his relentless efforts to reform and correct the Welsh church; in Wales he also successfully preached the Crusade and took the cross himself (of which vow he was later absolved). These activities fit well with his pugnacious temper, his ‘I am right and I am going to talk down anyone who says otherwise’ stance. In the beginning of the TOI he talks about God as the creator sitting on His throne, his judgment incomprehensible, and how men should not try to know His mysteries. This is God the King whose love results in uplifting the right and punishing the wrong  – and also creating all sorts of marvels. This not the awesome yet relatable God of Anselm. Gerald’s saints’ lives serve a similar external purpose: in them Gerald rewrote pre-existing versions in a more scholastic style for the use in public functions and more learned settings (Bartlett 1983). He seemed to have had a special interest in Thomas Becket, martyred in his lifetime, which probably began in Paris where the murdered archbishop’s veneration was strong from the start: above all, Gerald must have sympathised with Becket’s proud and confrontational disposition. Gerald recorded several of his visions, all of them of varying degrees of anxious, nightmarish quality – unlike the mostly positive visions of Julian or Margery. One ‘begotten it may be by what was left of my waking thoughts’ was an angry clash with Prince John whom Gerald saw trying to found a misshapen church; ‘And when I had argued with him (though all in vain), urging him to enlarge the presbytery and give it a worthier shape, the anxiety with which I strove to persuade him awoke me and banished sleep’ (DRSG: 89). Later Gerald used this dream to reject two Irish bishoprics, offered to him by John. The second is his dream of Henry II’s funeral, which he supposedly saw ‘a little before the King’s death’. In it, a multitude of crows and daws wreaked havoc in a church during the royal funeral, breaking and extinguishing the lights and scaring the attendants, to which, as Gerald reports, Archbishop Baldwin (conveniently dead at the time of Gerald’s writing) related his vision of the same funeral in a church covered in excrements that turned out to be Henry’s; the conclusion is, again, moral and political, explaining that the visions reflected that Henry ‘polluted the Church of God in his lands with filth and foulness by robbing it of

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its privileges’ (DRSG: 89). Although he does not make a direct prophetic claim, Gerald evidently prided himself on his divinely-inspired prescience. The third of Gerald’s nightmares was so important to him that he told it twice, in The Conquest of Ireland (II: 29) and in the Instruction for a Ruler (III: 16), and the only one dated precisely, to 10 May 1189. In that, the scariest one by far, vividly and passionately described, he sees the resurrected and ascended Christ on His throne in the highest heaven being brutally pulled down and slaughtered by hordes of advancing enemies. As He is killed, there is an outcry ‘Woch, woch [alas], Father and Son, woch, woch, the holy ghost!’ He woke up in horror ‘of mind and body’, started crossing himself, thinking he was losing his mind, and only managed to regain his sense of security by the break of dawn. Gerald interpreted this terrifying dream as a divine commentary on the failing effort of the Crusade, but from the perspective of attachment theory I read it as an unreflected eruption of Gerald’s personal insecurity and suppressed anxiety. He saw the king of glory, the eternal, resurrected God who had supposedly won the final victory over death killed in front of his eyes once and for all – and not just Jesus but the whole Trinity, bewailed in the final invocation. What it means for a Christian believer is the end of everything: there is no more hope, no more help, no comfort or protection. Repeatedly making the sign of the cross did not seem to help much in regulating his affect: Gerald spent the night, sleepless and alone, until the sun rose and he gradually felt better – on this occasion, there was no one to carry him, crying, to the Manorbier church. No wonder this dream haunted him, by his own admission, for many years. F. M. Powicke may have exaggerated when he wrote that ‘Gerald lived every day an existence of dramatic egotism’ (Powicke 1935, 114), but only slightly. Gerald’s main concern was his office, his status, and his fame. Perhaps his only surviving work free of sarcasm and cutting criticism is his letter to Archbishop Stephen Langton, begging him not to resign; Gerald, however, did not know Langton well, and his epistle is an address not to a close friend but to a potential patron. Yet he is capable of affection: his description of Manorbier, his birthplace, from A Journey Through Wales, is brimming with images of orchards, vineyards, hazel trees, clear water running through the valley, the well-appointed castle by the majestic sea, rising in the most beautiful, as well as the most powerful district of Wales. But when it comes to people, his affection is reserved to no one, except perhaps ‘a young man and remarkable for beauty of face and form, a boon of nature’ (DRSG: 77) – according to another insufferable egoist, ‘To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance’. The last surviving work composed by Gerald seems to be his Retractationes, a very short treatise which, perhaps in imitation of Augustine, lists a number of opinions voiced in his previous writings which he wished to modify. As another

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of Gerald’s biographers generously observes, ‘The element of self-criticism is rather slight, but it should not be altogether forgotten’ (Richter 1973, 389). Yet the Retractiones begin, typically, with Gerald comparing himself to Cicero, St Jerome and Boethius – so if he erred, he erred in good company – and finish with thinly veiled self-exoneration. To the end, no one seemed to have had a higher opinion of Gerald than Gerald himself. 2.2.2 Religiosity for Reorganising: The Case of Margery Kempe The first book that can be styled – with many caveats – the first English vernacular autobiography, known now simply as The Book of Margery Kempe (BMK), shares a number of features with Gerald’s works, including poor temporal order, vivid and occasionally disturbing imagery, exuberant displays of affect and the third-person narrative; socially, however, it is a product of a very different milieu – unlike ‘the Archdeacon’, ‘this creature’ is a (notionally) illiterate lay English mercantile woman rather than a Latinate aristocrat and a (failed) career ecclesiastic. Margery’s ‘memoirs’ were dictated by her over the course of many years to several scribes and must have been finalised in the late 1430s, when Margery was already in her early sixties. It is an interesting case for testing the significance of attachment style in the choice and expression of the religious practices that helped her maintain basic psychological functionality. Although diagnosing medieval mental health complaints is usually both impossible and unhelpful, sometimes the information is just about sufficient to suspect either a normative or a clinical background. Judging by her text and its historic context, Margery’s problems spread across organic, psychological and social spectrums, usually flowing into each other. Organic problems, even though Margery did not always view them as such, include convulsions (‘wonderfully turning and wresting her body on every side’, BMK I: 28) and the emotional seesaw that characterises the early part of the Book, with Margery cycling through manic exhilaration at her perception of the ‘fire of love’ before being brought low by bouts of demonic temptation or acute panic. The best example of this transition is described in BMK I: 4, in which Margery travels from dreading ‘no devil in hell’ and being on top of her devotional practices, to a complete collapse brought on by believing that ‘God had forsaken her’ only one year (or half a page) later. Alongside these extremes of emotion, Margery goes through multiple pregnancies and births – at least one of which was traumatic enough to warrant special mention in a book that is not concerned with Margery’s own childbearing, and in an age when difficult births were common. Hallucinations of demonic visions (BMK I: 1), or perceiving sweet smells or celestial melodies (I: 35–36) could also have had an organic cause. Among psychological

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difficulties, Margery displays a constant need for reassurance, fear of death and damnation, fear of abandonment (she is a very social creature, even by medieval standards), a fixation with males (especially handsome young ones), some difficulty judging time, and frequent inability to accurately anticipate or judge other people’s reactions to her words or actions. Her social difficulties, meanwhile, include repeated spousal rape, frustrated expectations regarding her status, authority and agency, and the need to negotiate a rapidly changing social climate. Margery’s dramatic conversion began with a bout of illness caused by her first experience of childbirth and her inability to confess a sin which long bothered her; during this sickness she tried to kill herself or at least became suicidal and, when restrained, bit her own hand so hard that she scarred it for life. Yet when Christ appeared by her bedside, his question, ‘Daughter, why hast thou forsaken me, and I forsook never the?’ (BMK I: 1) displays first and foremost not comfort and compassion, but rebuke and blame. In Margery’s world, the cause of her problems was not that Christ was absent throughout her pain, distress and demonic temptation – it was her own fault, and her troubles were a consequence of her abandoning him in the first place through her presumably less-than-perfect life (about which we have been told nothing at this stage of the BMK). Scholars have previously tried to diagnose Margery Kempe with a range of mental conditions, but most of them accept that, retrospectively, such diagnostics can only be applied fairly loosely. So far, none seem to have observed that reading Margery’s account is often reminiscent of going through the narrative of a person with a DID (dissociative identity disorder) who has been through years of therapy (Sinason 2002; 2012). According to modern research, DID develops out of early abuse, abandonment or severe illness, and is characterised by disorganised attachment, impaired social sensitivity, emotional imbalance and multiple inner voices or personalities, combined with very vivid and developed ‘pretend world’ over which the person often has only a limited degree of control. Once again, these observations are presented here not to issue Margery with a modern diagnosis but, rather, to try and use what we know about DID and its therapy to suggest the sources of both Margery’s difficulties and her defences and coping mechanisms. Many scholars have been puzzled by the fact that Margery did not say anything about her fourteen children outside of her reference to her adult son, when he became useful to her during the writing of the Book. Even by medieval standards – or by the standards of the specific literary genre in which texts like hers are written, which offer a very skewed representation of the lives they describe – her near-complete blackout concerning her children is disturbing.

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We can, of course, argue that Margery was modelling herself on Elizabeth of Hungary or similar saints, or compare this with Julian removing the references to her mother in the ST, so as not to distract the reader from her revelations when she came to write the LT. Yet these arguments do not seem sufficient. All Margery’s frequent early references to marital debt and her pregnancies lead to nothing. At one point, Jesus implies in his speech to her that both her husband and at least some of her children are alive, so it was not the case that all the children simply died in infancy (BMK I: 86). Margery is more eager to fantasise about swaddling the infant Christ or to express her over-the-top affection for random male babies she sees in the street than she is to see her own granddaughter, whose birth excites her originally, but whom we do not even know if Margery bothered to visit when she travelled to Germany (BMK II: 2–4). One can suspect that this emotional dissociation was caused by pain of childbirth and potentially the loss of at least some of her children, but looking at her text from the perspective of attachment theory rather suggests that Margery was displaying sure signs of disorganised attachment. Such attachment style is often inter-generational (Granqvist 2006, 115), and one wonders whether Margery’s son and daughter-in-law’s decision to leave their only child, an underage daughter, with friends in Germany (as it happened, for over two years, BMK II: 2), is a reflection not only of more widespread parental practices, but of damaged attachment. It is also curious that Margery proudly mentioned her father to other people but in her Book never reports talking to him directly, even though we know from other sources that he lived in Lynn into his old age and died about the time Margery left on her first pilgrimage, or perhaps later. Nor did Margery ever refer to Robert Brunham, who may have been either her brother or uncle and who was also very prominent in Lynn politics – mayor in 1406 and 1408, alderman c. 1413 – an association that we might expect to hear more of, given Margery’s obsession with status. More astonishingly, she never talked about her mother, who lived an even longer life virtually next door to Margery (Myers 1999, 382). It is tempting to wonder if these people had anything to do with her early trauma, but it may also be a sign of triangulated relationship, typical of a C-type attachment strategy, where one parent is idealised and the other is vilified or ignored. What kind of trauma could Margery have experienced in her early life? As we have seen, some medieval childrearing practices hardly encouraged a healthy psychological development, but even by these standards Margery seems to have turned out quite unstable. One wonders if the sin she cannot bring herself to confess in the first chapters of the book had anything to do with it. One of Margery’s major concerns throughout most of the Book is her sexuality, and although she says she never slept with anyone but her husband, it does not

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exclude the possibility of sexual trauma or abuse. Episodes such as a particularly graphic temptation, replete with images of numerous men flashing their genitalia at her and the Devil urging her to offer herself in public to all these men (I: 59), Margery’s constant expectation of rape (spelled out in I: 47 directly, and hinted at in many other places), her uncontrollable sexual craving for a fellow parishioner who makes a pass at her and later rejects her in a humiliating way when Margery offers herself to him (I: 4) – suggest an unresolved trauma in a preoccupied form. The lack of resolution for most of the early stages of the text is evident in the seeming contradiction between Margery’s constant fear of rape and putting herself in the situations where rape would have been a possibility (such as travelling unaccompanied). Therapeutic literature demonstrates that most sufferers of sexual abuse, especially early in life, develop multiple voices as a result of precisely this sort of early trauma – something we see in Margery’s para-mystical experiences (Bentovim 2002). The worst part of such abuse for the sufferer is the inability to talk about it with those closest to them; it is that inability (and not the sin itself) which causes Margery’s first mental collapse, when her priest cuts short her long-delayed painful confession in the first chapter of her Book. The disintegration of the social world of Margery’s childhood and youth may have played a key role in her reimagining of her life story. Margery idealised her father, or rather his status, claiming that she married down, and she continued to refer to her father’s status after his death. As Michael Myers demonstrates, at the time of Margery’s marriage, around 1393, John Kempe looked a perfectly worthy match that would secure and assure the future high social status of John Burnham’s daughter (Myers 1999, 380). However, amid rapidly changing socio-economic circumstances, Margery seems to ignore or be ignorant of her husband’s struggle to succeed. ‘In a process of transference’, Myers argues, ‘Margery attributed the loss of her mundane self-image and the accompanying comfort, status, and prestige not to economic and political transitions but to a “bad” marriage’ (Myers 1999, 388). The early chapters of the book depict a conflicting image of Margery’s husband: an insensitive, financially inept, sex-driven bore, but also a loyal and obedient companion. This incompatibility of discourse strategies is a feature of individuals displaying either a preoccupied (C) or disorganised (D, or AC in DMM) attachment (Granqvist 2009, 115), although it can also be Margery’s son trying to tone down his mother’s unflattering portrayal of his father, if it is indeed true that he was her first scribe. By 1410, Margery’s mundane social reality – the web of mercantile relationships that provided shared experiences and values for two or three generations – was no longer there, having been ‘replaced by an entrepreneurial elite whose

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realities differed markedly from that of Margery’s youth and early marriage’ (Myers 1999, 391). Myers argues that this new social reality is what Margery rebelled against: ‘The early frames of reference and their values continued to influence and mould her persona even as she assumed her spiritual identity, but their reality was becoming increasingly marginal shortly after her marriage to John Kempe. Nor did Margery fail in her kinship and social relations, nor they her, instead as the kinship and social relations of her youth became marginal she replaced them with new webs of meaningful relationships’ (Myers 1999, 394). And these meaningful relationships were as much ‘imaginary’ as they were real. Margery’s attempts to return to a stable and promising past may be seen in her modelling of the figure of Jesus. He is certainly the focus of her attachment, but his main role is not of the ideal spiritual lover, despite his famous Song-of-Songs-inspired suggestion that Margery take him to bed with her. Corinne Saunders and Charles Fernyhough observe that his voice is deeply practical: the Lord offers advice on where Margery should go, to whom she should speak and what she should say (particularly when it is confrontational), how she should treat her husband, what ascetic practices she should adopt and when, how she should dress, and whether she should write the book. He assures her of her well-being, safety, and health, and those of the people around her, and provides explanations for natural events, for the responses of people to her, and for her own physical states – illness, pain, the affects of vision. Saunders and Fernyhough 2017

This sounds more like an idealised parent rather than an ideal lover. Never is Margery called ‘friend’ or ‘darling’ by her divine spouse – only ‘daughter’. At a very basic level, his voice really responds to ‘the lowest part of our needs’, as Julian of Norwich puts it: health, safety, love, support. It provides explanatory models, it takes responsibility for her life. In a very uncertain world where she has most of the responsibility and does most of the adulting – her husband seems quite a passive party – Margery’s initial collapse may be a response to the extreme frustration at her many responsibilities and very few rights (some academic partners and parents will surely sympathise with her). Delegating these cares and responsibilities must have been liberating. Even Kempe’s mystical marriage to God the Father, arranged by Jesus (whose hierarchical status within patriarchy is lower), takes place in Rome in 1414 soon after the death of Margery’s own father in Lynn (BMK I:  35). One idolised ‘status parent’ is replaced by another of an infinitely higher status.

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But is Margery’s Lord like Julian’s ‘God our mother’? Not at all. Margery seems to make him in the image and the likeness of her idea of (parental) authority. Margery’s God, like a primary caregiver of a child with disorganised attachment, is often inconsistent: after assuring her multiple times that he will never forsake her and that she is saved and all her sins are forgiven, he will punish her for the lack of faith or obedience through withdrawal of his grace and company, or says he will test her love by making her suffer nearly to death (BMK I: 14, 22, 32, 56, 59, 64, 84). After saying how pleased he is with everything she does and the way she loves him, he suddenly reminds her of her wickedness, sending her on a guilt-trip thinking that she can never repay his love even if she were killed a thousand times a day (BMK I: 77 and then the conflicting message in I: 85 and 86). Is this how she was punished as a child – by being ignored and isolated? Was she confused by conflicting messages about her significance and her nothingness? All these ideas about a primary caregiver are, again, consistent with modern understanding of insecure (preoccupied or disorganised) attachment. A modern-day psychologist working within the remit of attachment theory, even without any background knowledge of medieval devotional practices, is likely to find Margery’s narrative strangely familiar after reading a number of higher-subscript AAIs (for example, a combination of the delusional idealization of A7 and the feigned helplessness of C4 in DMM terms), just as a medieval historian, trained in the cultural idiom of the fifteenth-century England, sees her as a unique product of many generally recognisable cultural traits. Yet the tale of Margery’s intuitive attempts to counterbalance and amend her insecure attachment traits with the help of religion has a happy ending. As the Book progresses, the overall tone of Margery’s narrative becomes increasingly positive, reassuring, confidence-building. This seems to be partially facilitated through her therapeutic relationships with confessors and spiritual advisors, but also, more broadly, through self-expansion, by trying to achieve her ideal self through para-social as well as social interactions. Psychological research suggests that interactions with ‘fictional’ characters may offer some advantages, partly because of ‘reduced risk of rejection, creating a safer context in which to form relationships’ (Shedlosky-Shoemaker et al. 2014, 556). Of course, from Margery’s perspective Jesus, Mary, and saints were not fictional characters: in theory, the saints were always accessible, and God was supposed to be everywhere, but in reality one required a fair degree of imaginative power to have a meaningful exchange with these entities, and the fact that they did not speak directly to the vast majority of people resulted in Margery’s privileged access being regularly questioned. The advantages of ‘absent interaction’ might explain why Margery does not talk about her

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immediate social circle (she habitually falls out with the people she spends more time with on a daily basis) and focuses on the relationships with the ‘fictional’ characters, such as Jesus and special saints – just as some people now often prefer ‘friends’ on Facebook or followers on Twitter. For sure, some of them still argue with us, but the virtual reality of social networks allows for significantly better filtration (hiding Margery on Facebook or blocking her on Twitter would have been a much easier job for the Archbishop of York in the twenty-first century). Given, however, that the Margery of the Book has more friends than foes (such as Margaret Florentyne, various people in Rome who supported her, Richard the hunchback who accompanied her from Bristol, the Lynn priest who read to her and defended her when a friar tried to humiliate her), and even seemingly manages to establish reasonably amiable relationships with her husband and her son in the end, her consistent self-expansion through (perhaps imaginary) relationships with spiritual entities like Jesus and Mary seems to have yielded some psychological and social fruit. Margery is terrified of Archbishop Arundel in 1413, worried about Archbishop Bowet in 1417, and is seemingly nonchalant about Archbishop Chichele in 1418, who finally grants her the requested letter to confirm her religious orthodoxy and seal of approval without giving her any trouble. Now she can finally belong and accept that she is all right. Years of almost compulsive confessing to various people and relating them her life ‘from her childhood as new as it would come to her mind’ (BMK I: 17) allowed her to form attachments and have sessions of pseudo-therapy with male figures of religious authority, as well as gradually construct a coherent life-story. Being eventually able to write it into her own Book must have had a healing effect: creating a coherent narrative and making sense of one’s past is a key element of mental wellbeing and earned security, and is particularly important for those displaying traits of disorganised attachment (Granqvist 2006, 115). In attachment terms, if initially Margery displays many signs of the preoccupied attachment style, such as bad temporal order, complaining tone, exalting one parent and ignoring the other, lack of other people’s perspective and significant dysfluency, towards the end she may have started what the DMM model calls ‘reorganising towards an earned B’ – that is, gradually developing a more balanced personality achieved later in life through mental integration and metacognition. Admittedly, this B-type attachment was still a long way away last time we hear from Margery, and the more balanced narrative of Book II may well be due to the different and more skilled scribe who edited out the inconsistencies. In it, however, she appears more confident and less fearful, and displays less dangerous behaviour, making peace with her confessor upon her return from an unauthorised pilgrimage round Northern Europe ‘so

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that she had as good love of him and of other friends after, as she had before’ (BMK II: 10). 2.2.3 Julian of Norwich’s Universal Attachment Figure In 1413, in the beginning of her career as a holy woman, Margery, aged forty, came to Norwich to seek further spiritual advice from local spiritual celebrities, one of whom, an anchoress ‘Dame Jelyan’, ‘was an expert in such things and could give a good counsel’ (BMK I: 18). With her Margery spent ‘many days’ in ‘holy conversations’ about ‘the love of our Lord Jesus Christ’. Although these early counselling sessions did not stop Margery later from relentlessly seeking approval of her experiences from other people, they must have contributed to her subsequent psychological reorganisation. Despite Margery reporting their concord, Julian, by then already seventy and for two or more decades an anchoress, did not evidently deem Margery safe enough to mention either the visions she herself received in May 1373 during a grave illness, or the book she wrote as a result of them. It is hard to imagine that Margery, always hungry for the latest devotional works, would have filtered out that important information, even in her self-preoccupied state. That book, known as the Revelations of Divine Love or the Shewings of Julian of Norwich, survives in two versions, written in Middle English, often referred to as the Short Text (ST, believed to be the earlier one) and the Long Text (LT). Although not an autobiography even by the loose pre-modern standards of the genre, it nevertheless contains some biographical information and demonstrates considerable attempt at self-analysis through theology in order to make sense of the unusual – both traumatic and healing – events of her life (for more on Julian’s text as a kind of autobiography see Abbott 1999 and Warren 2007). Much of her analysis results in an elaborated picture of God being our true father and mother, images of care, comfort and love, and the rejection of the idea that God can be wrathful and punishing, all of which bear direct relevance to attachment. For a mystical treatise in the vogue of late-medieval affective piety, Julian’s text is very cognitively organised. Unlike Margery and Gerald, Julian is extremely precise with dates: she specifies the year (1373) and the date (13 May; 8 May in other versions – a misreading of the x in xiii for v or vice versa) of her divine revelation, and that she was at that point thirty and a half years old (LT: 2); later she says that she has spent ‘twenty years after the time of the shewing save three months’ (LT: 51) thinking about its meaning. She makes extensive use of numbered lists, and even if her list is interrupted in one chapter, she finishes it later, e.g. the list of the three ways to understand the shewing of the Passion begins in LT: 20 and is continued in LT: 22 and 23. Unlike the highly affective

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and evocative rhetoric of her vernacular mystic colleagues, such as Rolle, she remains quite reserved even when describing the emotionally charged event of Christ’s prolonged suffering on the Cross. When it comes to a potential mystical eruption and the use of highly evocative language, Julian quietly admits defeat, in the hope that her audience is divinely inspired to experience the same things that she did rather than trying to elucidate it further: ‘I trust in our God almighty that he shall of his goodness and for our love make you to take it more ghostly and more sweetly than I can or may tell it’ (LT: 9). Even in her deep illness and altered state of mind Julian retains her intellect, analysing and questioning what she sees. She then records it in an orderly fashion, with clear chronology. Along with the intellectual, albeit mostly accessible vocabulary and the ability to hold information in mind for a long time before cross-referencing or returning to it chapters later, Julian’s discourse demonstrates a certain self-distancing as she appears to be somewhat uncomfortable with speaking about herself, at least her post-revelation self, her family, and even her earthly friends. The reference to her mother standing by her bed with other people and closing her eyes thinking Julian had died, present in the ST: 10, disappears from the corresponding passage in LT: 17. Her friend of special concern loses her feminine pronoun in the LT (ST: 16: ‘I desired [to know] of a certain person that I loved how it should be with her’ vs LT: 35 ‘I desired to know a certain creature that I loved, if it should continue in good living’), the wish gently yet firmly rebuked by God who insists on the general, universal, absolute nature of the revelation. All these features of her narrative suggest an avoidant, A-type attachment strategy worldview. If Julian’s initial attachment was indeed avoidant, there is also a body of evidence indicating that at the time of writing she was reorganising towards a more secure strategy. Earlier in life she seems to have prioritised others’ perspectives as she confesses that in her youth she wanted to suffer and undergo a grave illness in order to understand Christ’s sufferings better, as well as the grief of those close to him (LT: 2). Later on she recalls her realisation, on observing Christ’s agony on the Cross, that she loved God more than herself, not feeling her own pain but only His (LT: 17). Julian’s ability to see things from others’ point of view is evident in the Short Text, when she defends her right to write as a woman against the explicit Pauline ban on female preaching: ‘But for I am a woman, should I therefore believe that I should not tell you [of] the goodness of God, since that I saw in that same time that it is his will that it be known?’ (ST: 6). In DMM terms, here she also reveals the antagonistic potential of an odd-numbered A strategy, not of a complicit even A. This passage does not feature in the LT; if we accept the LT was completed some fifteen years later than the ST, this may mean that Julian managed to reorganise and integrate her

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experiences and become more comfortable with speaking about them without feeling the need to make a somewhat aggressive apology. At the same time in many other passages she remains firmly in her own perspective and owns what she saw and felt even if it seemingly goes against the commonly understood teaching of the church: for example, in LT: 33 she specifically says that in her visions she saw neither Purgatory nor Hell, even though the Church teaches – and she believes – in their existence. Despite being quite logocentric, Julian is still perfectly capable of producing rich and memorable imagery, which is not usually a feature of an exclusively A-strategy discourse and further suggests reorganisation. Julian’s images are quite balanced, rooted in the culture of her day, familiar to her contemporaries, and never unhinged. Even the frightening attack of the devil described in LT: 66 is a recognisable depiction of a sleep paralysis (Dresvina 2019). Another episode where one might expect some disturbing imagery is Christ’s profuse bleeding on the Cross, but even there Julian remains distinctly cognitive, producing a series of memorable yet careful and logical similes: she says that the blood coming from under the crown of thorns was ‘like the drops of water that fall of the eves of a house after a great shower of rain, that fall so thick that no man may number them with no bodily wit. And for the roundness, they were like the scale of herring’ (LT: 22). Such balanced imagery points towards a more secure attachment strategies, which also corresponds with Julian’s overall positive view of God, although she is realistic about such negative sides of the human existence as sin, death, and suffering. She finds it hard to reconcile her understanding that nothing in the world happens by chance but ‘by the foreseeing wisdom of God’ and that ‘all things that are done are well done, for our lord God does all’ (LT: 11). This leads her to wonder ‘What is sin?’, but it is not until chapter 27 that she receives a reassuring answer: ‘Sin is behovable, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’, a few lines later specified as ‘It is true that sin is cause of all this pain, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’. Being cognitively organised, she remains uneasy about this explanation, at least for a while. The extension of the idea of the needful sin and another testimony to Julian’s positive internal working model is her interpretation of the Fall in LT: 51 through the parable of the Lord and the Servant. In it she responds to Anselm’s example from Cur Deus Homo, chapter 24, in which he asks if a servant, charged with a task by a lord, is commanded not to throw himself into a specific ditch from which he would not be able to get out, and yet he ‘throws himself into the ditch before pointed out, so as to be utterly unable to accomplish the work assigned; think you that his inability will at all excuse him for not doing his

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appointed work?’ Anselm’s answer is ‘By no means, but will rather increase his crime’. That is not, however, how Julian sees it. She produces her own, more positive version of Christian soteriology, in which humankind is not blamed by God as the fall results from Adam’s excessive zeal to please his Lord: I saw two persons in bodily likeness, that is to say, a lord and a servant […]. The lord sits solemnly in rest and in peace; the servant stands by, before his lord, reverently, ready to do his lord’s will. The lord looks upon his servant full lovely, and sweetly and meekly he sends him to a certain place to do his will. The servant, not only he goes, but suddenly he starts and runs in great haste for love to do his lord’s will, and anon he falls in a ditch (slade) and takes full great sore. And then he groans and moans and wails and writhes, but he neither may rise nor help himself by no manner way. LT 51

Julian insists, in direct polemic with Anselm, that no matter how hard she tried, she could not find any fault in the servant, any reason for the lord to blame him: ‘for only his good will and his great desire was the cause of his falling’. More astonishingly to her, she sees how the lord looks at his servant ‘full tenderly’ both with compassion and pity, but also in anticipation of the high reward he is going to give to the servant – the reward of being shown love in return through the second person of the Trinity becoming human. The Lord’s looking at Adam the everyman ‘with pity, not with blame’ paves the way for Julian’s most radical theological discussion of Christ being our mother. The concept of God as mother is found in Bernard of Clairvaux, William of St Thierry, Anselm, Aelred, and Ancrene Wisse (for more see Bynum 1982 and McInerney 1996, 167–9). For them, however, the motherhood of God is more of a metaphor which picks and chooses positively charged female characteristics such as nourishing and giving life without acknowledging, like Julian does, the messier, realistic attributes such as the loss of fluid and more specifically the issue of water and blood, the prolonged pain, directly linking the Passion to labour. In Julian’s world God, and more precisely Jesus, is the only Real Mother, the larger-than-life maternal Platonic ideal. Earthly mothers fail, the divine mother never does: ‘And though our earthly mother may suffer her child to perish, our heavenly mother, Jesus, may not suffer us that are his children to perish’ (LT: 61). Apparently not to divert our focus from this true mother, Julian removes references to her natural mother at her deathbed from the LT. Mary remains as the secondary universal maternal figure, yet only by virtue of giving birth to

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Christ: ‘our Lady is our mother in whom we are all enclosed and of her borne in Christ, for she that is mother of our Saviour is mother of all that shall be saved in our Saviour. And our Saviour is our very mother …’ (LT: 57). Julian mentions no Nativity but reads the Crucifixion as the ultimate act of birth. She elaborates her statement of Christ being our very mother with the striking image of Jesus being permanently pregnant with humanity: ‘… in Him we are endlessly borne, and we will never come out of him’. This is the place of ultimate protection: earlier in LT: 24 Julian sees the wound in Christ’s side, a familiar object of late-medieval devotion, as ‘a fair and delectable place, and large enough for all mankind that shall be saved and rest in peace and in love’. She immediately connects the wound with the birth image: ‘And therewith be brought to mind his dearworthy blood and his precious water which he let poured out for love’. The enwrapping wound is equated to the birthing womb, which is a logical continuation of its late-medieval vulva-like iconography (Figure 1). This divine birth is devoid of suffering and death for the child: ‘We know that all our mothers borne us to pain and to dying. And what is that but our very Mother Jesus? He, all love, borne us to joy and to endless living’ (LT: 60). Christ’s motherhood is further developed through the image of perpetual lactation: ‘The mother may give her child suck her milk, but our precious mother Jesus, He may feed us with Himself, and does full courteously and full tenderly with the blessed sacrament’ (LT: 60). Maternal milk and the blood of Christ would have had a close connection for Julian’s audience as according to late-antique and medieval medical theory breast milk was modified blood (Bynum 1982, 132).

Figure 1

Bohun Psalter and Hours, English, 1370–80, Bodleian Library MS. Auct. D. 4. 4, fol. 236v (detail) © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, CC-BY-NC 4.0 Juliana Dresvina - 978-90-04-50016-7 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 05:28:36PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Julian is often seen as a ‘mature’ mystic after Wolfgang Riehle’s classic study of Middle English Mystics (Riehle 1981, 30, 96) but these rather extreme images of motherhood, comforting as they are, also indicate an unwillingness of ever being separated from the mother and the extreme desire for comfort and protection. All that Julian says about motherhood – while being thirty to fifty years old – is written squarely from the perspective of a child, and the important ‘child of God’ trope of religious writings must have given additional strength to her own sentiment. In LT: 61 she encourages her audience to be like children and use God the Mother as a safe haven in distress: … oftentimes when our fallenness and our wretchedness is shown us, we are so sore afraid and so greatly ashamed of ourselves, that we hardly know where we may put ourselves. But then our courteous mother does not want that we flee away, for Him there is nothing loather. But He wants then that we use the condition of a child, for when it is diseased or afraid, it runs hastily to the mother for help with all the might. So wants He that we do as a meek child, saying thus: ‘My kind Mother, my gracious Mother, my dearworthy Mother, have mercy on me. I have made myself foul and unlike to thee, and I neither may nor can amend it but with [thine] indiscreet help and grace’. And if we then feel ourselves not swiftly eased, let us be sure (sekir) that He used the condition of a wise mother. For if He see that it is more profit to us to mourn and to weep, He suffers it, with compassion and pity, into the best time, for love. Although the urge to run and see the attachment figure in distress is expected in children with secure attachment, the idealisation or exoneration of a caregiver when comfort is lacking is more typical of an avoidant (A) strategy; such theologically normative form of idealisation, however, is common in both pre-modern and modern Christian theology. Julian’s advice is consistent with the current research demonstrating that for reasonably securely attached older children and adults in a situation of attachment activation (stress, illness) the memory of an attachment figure can be sufficient to regulate negative affect (Granqvist 2020, 83). But what of the Father? The concept of medieval fatherhood so far has been an elephant in the room of medieval masculinity studies: it has received little scholarly attention except for Rachel Moss’s recent monograph of fatherhood in late-medieval English letters and metrical romances (Moss 2013). Similarly, in Julian’s text ‘God the Father’ as a normative and self-explanatory concept generated less discussion and about half of the mentions compared to God the Mother. In her distribution of the trinitarian labour, God the Father is Juliana Dresvina - 978-90-04-50016-7 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 05:28:36PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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all-mighty, Christ the mother is all-wisdom, and the Holy Ghost the Lord is all-goodness (LT: 58). Further, He is the giver of the special reward to his Son (LT: 22, 55), and also the maker: ‘the almighty truth of the Trinity is our father, for He made us’ (LT: 54). This corresponds rather neatly with the three functions which constitute traditional manhood: ‘impregnating women, protecting dependents, and serving as provider to one’s family’ (Bullough 1992, 34). Although Julian does insist on the love of God the Father, it is a special kind of love, consistent with the patriarchal norms of the medieval feudal society. This love is inseparable from fear: For there is no dread that fully pleases God in us but reverent dread, that is full soft, for the more it is had, the less is it felt for sweetness of love. Love and dread are brethren, and they are rooted in us by the goodness of our maker; and they shall never be taken from us, without end. We have from nature [the ability] to love, and we have from grace [the ability] to love; and we have from nature [the ability] to dread, and we have from grace [the ability] to dread. It belongs to the lordship and to the fatherhood to be dreaded, as it belongs to the goodness to be loved. And it belongs to us that are His servants and His children to dread Him for [His] lordship and fatherhood, as it belongs to us to love Him for goodness. LT: 74

Julian’s discourse of fatherhood suggests power, authority, distancing, and hierarchy. This is why she has to emphasise that she saw no wrath in God, the quality traditionally associated with a father figure. Her cultural and perhaps personal priming precludes Julian from semantically connecting ‘father’ with such concepts as ‘loving’ and ‘nurturing’, which are split off and allocated to the second person of the Trinity. The twenty years Julian the anchoress spent trying to reconcile the conflicting messages of the Church with the revelation of love she received may have followed the years of Julian the child trying to make sense of the conflicting behaviours of her father and her mother. However, the attractive masculine side of God is not absent from Julian’s theology altogether. Somewhat overlooked behind the towering concepts of ‘All shall be well’, ‘Love was His meaning’, and ‘God our Mother’ lies the idea of Jesus as the ideal romantic partner. This concept is not unique to Julian: it is present in the late-medieval cultural landscape and is laboured in highly sexualised language by a number of medieval devotional writers – compared to them, and even to Margery, Julian’s version is quite reserved and therefore not immediately memorable. Yet her anthropomorphic God is certainly depicted as the most physically attractive man: beautiful, dignified, powerful

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yet ‘homely’ (friendly) and, above all, courteous to his beloved, the human soul: ‘He that is highest and mightiest, noblest and worthiest, is lowest and meekest, homeliest and courteousest’; ‘His blessed face, which is the beauty (fairehede) of Heaven, flower of earth’, He is shown as a ‘fair person and of large stature, highest bishop, solemnest king, worshipfullest Lord’ (LT: 7, 10, 67). He is awesome but not threatening: all the words used to describe him is secure-base-related (cf. Granqvist 2020, 60). Unlike a medieval knight, Jesus does not have to prove himself to his lady because he has already died for her, but even so, he still says to Julian that if he could die more, he would (LT: 22, 24). Julian’s longing for God, emphasised repeatedly throughout the Shewings, is a recognisable cultural idiom of lovesickness in romances. A true lover cannot bear being parted with the beloved, and Julian warns that this involuntary separation – even if it only is perceived as such – causes us permanent grief and suffering on earth: ‘For notwithstanding that our Lord God dwells in us and is here with us, and all He enthrals us and encloses us for tender love that He may never leave us, and is more near to us than tongue can tell or heart can think, yet may we never cease from mourning or weeping or seeking or longing till when look him clearly in his blessed face’ (LT: 72). Julian managed to distil the essence of God’s advantage as an attachment figure: he is both the ideal parent, and the ideal romantic partner, in all eternity. The idea of having such an ideal figure in their lives must have appealed to many of Julian’s contemporaries, who lived through several devastating waves of plague, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, of the traumatic change of dynasty at the turn of the century and the subsequent waves of political and religious persecution. The thoughts about this figure occupy much of Julian’s time as an anchoress spent in devout meditations and contemplations, which in the modern parlance can be seen as comforting pious fantasies, a religious version of a teenage girl daydreaming about a romance with a celebrity or a fictional character – a strategy so often enacted by Margery Kempe. Julian’s pre-revelation choice of character to associate herself with was Mary Magdalene (LT: 2), and in the illustration to a manuscript of the Passion of Christ made for Julian’s neighbour, Miles Stapleton (great-grandfather to Margery Brews, see section 2.1.4) in 1405, Mary’s garment breaks the frame of the image and connects Christ’s friends with the viewer, thus incorporating the devotee into the holy family (Figure 2). Julian’s construction of God as the ultimate attachment figure helped her create a safe and comfortable mental space within the already (relatively) safe space of an anchorhold, and resulted in a narrative of enduring therapeutic value, as in demand in Margery Kempe’s days as it is now (Thorne 2012).

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Figure 2



Michael de Massa, Treatise of the Passion of the Lord, 1405, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 758, fol. 1r © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, CC-BY-NC 4.0

Conclusions

An Adult Attachment Interviewer coder’s job is akin to that of a medieval literary historian – it requires training in discourse analysis, drawing information from multiple sources and noticing discrepancies, and the ability to estimate how much the information presented in the narrative is omitted, distorted or otherwise modified; it assesses the importance of chronology and temporal order, and reads things in context. The focal point of the interview is a series of questions about the primary attachment figures, which in today’s Western world are expected to be the mother and the father. If Adult Attachment Interviews were conducted in medieval Europe, these questions would have included God as well. This short study has hopefully shown that attachment theory can be applied  – with limitations  – to historic material, and that its application to medieval life-writings in particular suggests that the view of God as relatable helped people reorganise their often-traumatic life experiences. Contextual adjustments will certainly have to be made, but I agree with Pehr Granqvist’s argument that a major strength of the attachment approach to religion in Juliana Dresvina - 978-90-04-50016-7 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 05:28:36PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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particular, ironically, is precisely that attachment theory was not originally coined to understand religiosity, but rather ‘to make sense of a very basic but fundamental aspect of mammalian and primate functioning, namely our strong proclivity to form affectional relational bonds’. As he continues, this is, ‘incidentally, or so it may seem – also at the core of religion and spirituality’ (Granqvist 2020, 44). I realise that arguing that an important segment of medieval literature can be successfully understood through a theory, which is also applicable to most mammals and other animals, goes against the grain of postmodernism. I hasten to emphasise that the application of the attachment theory to historic material does not take the fact that much of our physical and mental surrounding is socially constructed out of the equation – it simply adds the acknowledgement of biological lived experience back in. Medieval Christianity was a mixed blessing: a relationship with the divine could aid reorganisation but was also a source of anxiety and disorientation, as the cases of Julian, Anselm, and to an extent Margery and Rolle demonstrate: it depended on the lens through which this relationship was seen. The version of Christianity promoted by spiritual writers of pre-modern West and culminating in the late-medieval phenomenon of affective piety often demonstrates a C-type discourse: it has a strong affective component, sometimes at the expense of cognition, as many mystics, including Rolle, recommend; it uses lively, often overbearing and synesthetic imagery; it encourages chronic hyperactivation of attachment systems through savouring the details of Christ’s (and saints’) suffering, reminding oneself of one’s death, normalising God/Christ as the primary attachment figure, whose judgment is righteous yet incomprehensible and unknowable for the limited abilities of the embodied human mind. The devotees are expected to signal to God their distress of separation through seeking, praying, sighing, weeping, and wait patiently to be saved and comforted. Yet as said earlier, insecure attachment is not ‘bad’ – if it protects, it is a good strategy. Conversations with my clinical colleagues suggest that ‘natural’ Bs, being comfortable, may not be alert enough to survive in a crisis and that a limited research on traumatised population in the countries which had been through wars or natural disasters indicates a higher ratio of people displaying insecure attachment strategies. Insecure attachment styles develop for a reason, and although they do not encourage happiness and comfort, they help staying alive. It does not mean that those insecure strategies necessarily always worked: the DMM school of attachment assessment also suggests that depression is a sign of a failing attachment strategy (Crittenden and Landini 2011, 109, 260, 307), and many medieval religious guides, especially for monastics and anchorites, dealt with depression (under its medieval terms), recognising it as a serious problem (Daly 2007). It is interesting that the medieval equivalent of depression seems to be typical in those who followed hermitic practices, that Juliana Dresvina - 978-90-04-50016-7 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 05:28:36PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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is distanced themselves from the world, and thus were potentially displaying A strategies: this is consistent with the current observation that people with an A-type attachment style are more prone to depression than those with a C type. But even if the insecure attachment strategy failed in some people, the tenacity of this type of religiosity suggests that there was a strong demand for it – not just social and cultural but also psychological. In the autobiography section I hypothesised the whole spectrum of attachment strategies: a C in Gerald, an R (AC to B, or, less likely, to an idealising A) in Margery, and an R (A to B) in Julian. In the letters, there was enough material to suggest reorganisation (R) or an earned B, probably from AC, for Anselm. Goscelin’s strategy was possibly a C, as he was clearly preoccupied with his relationship with Eva, and we do not know about whether he did manage to reorganise it in the end. The dominance of Rs and Cs is somewhat predictable not only because the C-type discourse was encouraged by medieval religious rhetoric, but also since Cs and Rs are more likely to produce self-narratives, given the self-perspective of the former and making sense of their lives of the latter. All reorganising individuals mentioned in this book were doing so with the help of their relationship with God. Gerald, whose writings demonstrated little evidence of that relationship, showed almost no reorganising traits, which is plausible, as Cs are usually more resistant to therapy and psychological reorganisation. Broadly conceived mystical episodes seem to help with integration, as they encourage people to think about their lives and make sense of what happened, as seen in the writings of Julian and Margery. It is not clear whether Anselm had such experiences since he did not record them explicitly, but his meditations do have a strong mystical flavour: indeed, he was called a ‘rational mystic’ by Gregory Schufreider. On the contrary, Gerald’s ‘prophetic’ dreams were neither relational nor interpreted by him as such. Equally, God did not seem to provide enough comfort for the English nuns on the Continent, perhaps because hierarchical thinking dominated the nature of the early medieval relationship with the divine. In a more secular setting, demonstrated by the Paston letters, such hierarchy did allow some comfort but the main attachment thrust was still aimed at human figures. At the same time, although the two reorganised examples are not a representative sample, it appears that Anselm and Julian not only used the religious framework of their day to reorganise their insecure attachment styles, but they also managed to push the boundaries of Christianity with their writing towards reflecting greater attachment security – even though in Julian’s case it took several centuries. One can go as far as suggest that the development of mainstream religiosity was/is a dynamic maturational process in itself, gradually reorganising towards a more secure outlook attachment-wise. Juliana Dresvina - 978-90-04-50016-7 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 05:28:36PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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This book is just the first and inevitably wobbly step in the direction of the application of attachment theory principles for the study of the past. Its most important takeaway is perhaps that the theory does work outside of the modern setting and allows us a further glimpse into the personalities, worldviews, and reasons to write of the people who lived in Britain hundreds of years before us. Life-writings across geographies and periods are waiting to be examined through this lens, and so do works of fiction which captured the spirit of their day and influenced worldviews of whose who internalised them through reading and rereading. Even the popular character-driven films and TV shows, especially those which offer a longitudinal perspective, like TV series, can be approached in such a way, and there are currently steps being taken in that direction within the DMM community. Such studies will check whether there is an intuitively realistic representation of attachment styles in popular culture and if so, which styles are considered particularly relatable by the audience, offering further insights into the dominant attachment strategies of the population. But in both psychology and history in order to understand the ‘now’, we need to know the ‘then’, and getting a better idea of attachment patterns of the past paves a path towards further refinement of the attachment theory in the future, while also providing valuable insights into the mental workings of our ancestors, unavailable through other means. Bibliography

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